Chabon on blogging

The author in less bloggy times.

OK, then, since Rhian likes it so much, here's a follow-up to that last post about engaging the world.  Michael Chabon did some pinch-hitting over at The Atlantic this week, and departed with some reflections upon the experience.

Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs. You find novelists going over and over the same ground in their novels [...] configuring and reconfiguring the same little set of preoccupations, haunted by missed opportunities. That may be because getting a novel written, or a bunch of novels, means that you are going to miss a lot of opportunities, and so missing them is something you have to be not only willing but also equipped by genes and temperament to do. Blogging, I think, is largely about seizing opportunities, about pouncing, about grabbing hold of hours, events, days and nights as they are happening, sizing them up and putting them into play with language, like a juggler catching and working into his flow whatever the audience has in its pockets. 

Then there's that whole business of the Comments.

The first thing that occurs to me, reading that, is that Chabon spent way too much time on that paragraph--you can tell he's new to writing for the internet.  The second is that, of course, he's quite right--if you assume blogging to be a particular kind of thing.  The thing he thinks it is, is, indeed, what it usually is.  But one thing I like about litblogging, as opposed to, say, tech blogging, is that it specifically doesn't depend upon timeliness and close attention.  It can be contemplative.  One can write about things published thirty years ago, that nobody is making any money on.  One can blog in reptile time, as he puts it.

The blog, like any technology, has many uses.  Zen sandbox is one of them.  Not that, say, responding to Anis Shivani posts is remotely zen--but engagement is a choice, level of engagement is a choice.  One can ask a litblog to fit into one's writing life, to support and nurture it.  Which I think this one has done for us.  Otherwise we wouldn't have kept it going for (!) four years.

The FTC Blogging Guidelines, clickthroughs, and AdSense

There's been a fair amount of talk these past couple of weeks about the FTC's new blogging guidelines, which recommend, among other things, that bloggers reveal their relationships with the products and companies they write about. For instance, if you're, say, a gadget blogger, do you buy the products yourself? Or do you get freebies from tech companies? Or just review copies which you then have to return? Bloggers, the guidelines suggest, ought to be revealing this information, in the interest of transparency.

The reaction has been complicated. Most bloggers initially seemed more or less on board, at least in principle. But some controversy has resulted from the gradual realization that the new rules don't apply to traditional news media. In other words, they're regulating the little guy first, and hardest.

You'd think most of this wouldn't apply to us, but you'd be wrong. In this interview with Ed Champion, FTC rep Richard Cleland says that review copies of books ought to be returned.

Seriously? Yes. From Ed's interview:

In the case of books, Cleland saw no problem with a blogger receiving a book, provided there wasn’t a linked advertisement to buy the book and that the blogger did not keep the book after he had finished reviewing it. Keeping the book would, from Cleland’s standpoint, count as “compensation” and require a disclosure.

But couldn’t the same thing be said of a newspaper critic?

Cleland insisted that when a publisher sends a book to a blogger, there is the expectation of a good review. I informed him that this was not always the case and observed that some bloggers often receive 20 to 50 books a week. In such cases, the publisher hopes for a review, good or bad. Cleland didn’t see it that way.

“If a blogger received enough books,” said Cleland, “he could open up a used bookstore.”

Cleland said that a disclosure was necessary when it came to an individual blogger, particularly one who is laboring for free. A paid reviewer was in the clear because money was transferred from an institution to the reviewer, and the reviewer was obligated to dispense with the product. I wondered if Cleland was aware of how many paid reviewers held onto their swag.

“I expect that when I read my local newspaper, I may expect that the reviewer got paid,” said Cleland. “His job is to be paid to do reviews. Your economic model is the advertising on the side.”

In other words, if you review books for free, and get nothing in return, then you still have to return the book. But if you're getting paid to review books, not only can you keep the money, you're not responsible for returning the book. The assumption that good reviews are expected from bloggers is, in my view, insane; I could lecture you for hours about all the crap books that get praised by crap reviewers in the nation's major newspapers (if there even is such a thing anymore), and much of what we say here consists of rigorous criticism. Hell, in the last post, I was even critical of one of my favorite writers in the world.

FWIW, I do not accept galleys from publicists. Rhian does, occasionally. 95% of the books we write about here, we buy ourselves, at an independent bookstore, no less. (Most fiction I buy, or nonfiction used as research for something I'm writing, is paid for by my Cornell research account, but other kinds of books are out-of-pocket.)

Other stuff falls between the cracks, though. We sometimes post about our friends here, and if we do, we do so in the form of praise. Friends we're likely to criticize we don't post about. So...no lies, but not necessarily the full truth. Also, we have friends in publishing, who sometimes send us stuff they think we'll like. Some of these people may expect us to post on the blog about what they send, but often we do not. In the next week or so, I will be posting about just such a book--Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood. I like it--but I also like Matt, the editor who sent it to me. I'm here to tell you I'm not doing him a favor, but ultimately you'll have to take my word for it.

The real pisser here is, the only way for bloggers to actually earn money from their blogs is to run ads, and many of those ads would be in the form of clickthroughs to bookstores, or AdSense. But this apparently doesn't give us the same rights as, say, the Times Book Review, which is in fact no less insulated from cronyism, insider baseball, and mutual backscratching than we are. Indeed, apparently it makes us even more suspect. Even if the Times Book Review's editors are careful to avoid such unethical behavior, they are dependent upon their writers' voluntary disclosure of any conflicts of interest, and believe me, not everyone reports everything.

The FTC's guidelines arrive at a time when I have just recently been noticing how much traffic we get (more than I thought), and considering, after two years, partnering with Powell's for clickthroughs, or sticking some AdSense in the left column. (Rhian, FYI, is leery of this, even without the FTC's rules, and I admit that I am, too.) We have run this blog for nearly three years now without attempting to make a penny off of it, and we'll continue whether we end up running ads or not. But it irks me to think that we would be suspected of unethical behavior if we link readers to Powell's (regardless of whether we like the book in question or not), while there's nothing wrong with Knopf taking out a full-page, blurb-littered ad in the same freaking issue of the NYTBR that their latest literary blockbuster is being praised in.

So: damned if we do, damned if we don't. For the record, the last two books we reviewed, the Lorrie Moore and the Ishiguro, we bought at a store, and are keeping. When we review books here, we will tell you where they came from. And for my part, I still don't want to hear from publicists. No offense--I have one of my own, and she is great. But we write this blog because we like it, not for the swag. Which, nine times out of ten, if it actually existed, would end up propping up the dining room table or on in a box for the library sale.

EDIT: Markos has just posted a very similar diatribe, with more swears, over at Dailykos.com.

Blogger Summit

There may not be a new post this weekend, as we're conducting serious business here at W6HQ: an important summit meeting with Moonlight Ambulette. Our negotiations will have far-reaching effects on the literary blogosphere: Condalmo will be expected to post five times more often than usual, the Rake will be asked to change the name of his blog on a weekly basis from now on, and Ed Champion will be forced to become a restaurant critic. These are all Amy's ideas, of course, we just sat there nodding.

Somehow we found time to enjoy a terrific reading from Amy's new book at The Bookery. She was very funny, and passed around a helpful handout about how to get your novel published. (Hint: live around the corner from Paul Auster.) Thanks to my students for attending, and for the hippie who played the bongos down the hall the entire time: dude, you are awesome.

Blogging's Influence on Books

I was skimming through the ARC of Jennifer Lancaster's humorous weight-loss memoir, Such a Pretty Fat, and was rather taken aback at how... tedious it is. It's got lots of energy and a good premise (she's a fat person with no self-esteem problems) but sheesh, she goes on and on and on about herself and her terribly cute daily minutiae, to really an absurd degree. It's like having lunch with a pathologically self-absorbed person: after a bit all you can do is nod and say Uh-huh and keep glancing at your advancing-way-too-slowly watch -- but it goes on for 300 pages! I found myself wondering, Since when does a mildly amusing anecdote about your dog -- the kind that only barely qualifies for speaking aloud, when you have nothing better to talk about -- deserve to be written down for a mass audience?

Oh, yeah. Since blogging.

Such a Pretty Fat is basically a bunch of blog posts tied together with some contrived and unbelievable story lines (she keeps buying Barbie heads while high on Ambien) in order to turn it into something that resembles a book. But its heart is a blog. And though I'm not really interested in daily-life blogs (why, I wonder? The intimate lives of complete strangers should be interesting to me, but they're not), I'm sure Lancaster's is a fun one. She's very clever. She's probably terrifying to be around in person: one of those people who snarks so viciously about everyone around her you go queasy thinking about what she's saying about you when you're not there. A blog is the perfect medium for her.

But as a book... I don't know. Obviously I'm a fan of blogging and think it's going to be vital to the future of literature (somehow or other), but I hope that future doesn't look like this, like a blog: less edited, less reflective, more self-centered, and with a lower bar for being funny and interesting. Since there's no paper to waste online, you might as well ramble on and on until you accidentally say something worthwhile. Hell, I've done it myself. But a book costs money and uses natural resources and one expects a little bit more.

Have I just contradicted JRL's pro-blog post of a couple nights ago? Oh, well. We contain multitudes.

Blogging Is Better

I have never had much of a conceptual attachment to blogging, even in the year and a half or so since Rhian suggested we start this blog. I've written a couple hundred blog posts since then, but I don't really think of myself as a blogger--rather, this just feels like more writing, and its public instantaneity more of a novel quirk than a defining feature.

But lately, I find myself getting more and more annoyed at the traditional media's relationship to blogging. Much of this comes from my reading of political blogs, many of which have been the only ready source of actual news since the Iraq war broke out in 2003. Today's piece in the Times about TV news' "military analyists" and their true role as Bush-administration propagandists was indeed appalling, but is not remotely surprising to those of us who have been following online the mainstream media's decline with despair over the past few years. Blogs have served a real, important purpose, not just for political partisans, but for anyone interested in up-to-the-moment investigative journalism. Which should be everyone.

Anyway, the traditional media line on political blogging is similar to its line on literary blogging: that is, bloggers are not legitimate writers. The reason? No gatekeepers. Anyone can write a blog; therefore, blogs are of no value.

Officially, I don't give a crap what these blowhards think. I'm not even a blogger, remember? But as someone who has spent some time among the gatekeepers, I have to say that some of them have no goddam idea what they're doing; most of them value profit over art, loyalty, and the courage of their convictions; and the gate-kept world (at least in the realm of fiction writing) is basically a slum festooned with ten-thousand-dollar jewel-encrusted toilets. This is the primary reason I am not especially concerned that book reviewing in newspapers is dying. Newspapers, by and large, are garbage, and a time will soon come when nobody will believe anything they print anymore.

Now people still do read newspapers. In a lot of places (Ithaca, New York, for instance) the paper is the only way to actually find out what's happening in town, however awful the majority of the content may be. Newpapers made themselves indispensible back in the day, and it will take some time for their primary functions to move into other media. Classified ads, of course, were the first traditional newpaper function to become 100% worthless, but book reviews are next.

I was part of a panel up at school that featured our visiting writer that week, Salman Rushdie. And someone in the crowd asked Rushdie if he worried about the dearth of serious book reviewing in newpapers. He said that he was, and that the internet had not picked up the slack--yet.

I was glad he added the "yet." He thought we might be ten years off. I am thinking less. In the gate-kept world, ten years is a reasonable estimate, but online, there aren't any gatekeepers preventing you from doing things. Change happens quickly. And literary blogs are growing in number and quality.

The thing is, it's pointless to say there are no gatekeepers in the blogging world. There's no gate. The metaphor doesn't work. Think, rather, of the internet as an infinite mountain range, and online literary discussion a single mountain. The best writing is at the top, and it gets increasingly bad as you approach the bottom. Everone knows who's good: there she is, sitting at the peak. If she isn't writing so well, she slips down, and somebody else takes the summit. When he starts to suck, someone's waiting to take his place. You see, on the internet, there is no equivalent of David Brooks or William Kristol: people who, because they are inside the gate, keep on getting to shoot their idiot mouths off in spite of being wrong, wrong, wrong about everything, over and over and over again. It's easy to keep people outside the gate, but it's hard to get rid of them once they're in. On the internet, you're only on top if you're awesome. And when you're not awesome, you're not on top. Effective immediately.

In other words, on the internet, you have to sing for your supper. You might not be able to depend on your favorite sites to always be good--but you CAN depend on SOMEBODY being good at any time. And because we're not beholden to the publishing industry (W6 does not accept galleys, does not take paid advertising, and does not have a click-through deal with Amazon), literary bloggers can write about literature as a continuum. We don't have to address the new thing. And if we do address the new thing, we can mix it up with the old and out of style. On literary blogs, literature is a huge, inclusive, evolving animal, where every book can have its little pocket of relevance, in perpetuity. We can talk about Flannery O'Connor and G. K. Chesterton with impunity, because we're not trying to sell anything. And we might be yelling into a vacuum, but we're yelling whatever the hell we want.

I do not mourn the death of the newspaper review. I've enjoyed some good ones, and resented some bad ones, but on balance, it's time to move on. The only really good book writing is happening in independent magazines like the NYRB and LRB, and the New Yorker and Harper's...and right here, online.

So start a blog and make it a movement. Suck all you want, lounge around the bottom of the mountain. But one of these days you'll have your moment on top. And I hope that Salman Rushdie will be reading your posts sooner than he thinks.

This Week In Stinginess

A few bloggers got themselves worked into a fairly justifiable tizzy not long ago, when this article about book reviewing ran in the New York Times. The article is about the peril that literary culture finds itself in, but there's quite a humdinger of a quote right at the end, that has been much reprinted over the past couple of weeks:

Of course literary bloggers argue that they do provide a multiplicity of voices. But some authors distrust those voices. Mr. [Richard] Ford, who has never looked at a literary blog, said he wanted the judgment and filter that he believed a newspaper book editor could provide. “Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership,” Mr. Ford said, “in a way that some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute maybe doesn’t.”

It is unfortunate to see a writer as good as Richard Ford betray his insecurity in the face of the teeming literate masses. Of course he likes the literary establishment; the literary establishment likes him. But does he really think that decent criticism still needs to be vetted by the big boys to mean anything? Has Richard Ford actually read the newspaper book reviews lately? They are crap--and nobody is to blame but the establishment itself. The Times Book Review has long indulged in the bizarre tactic of only assigning intelligent reviewers to challenging books, then assigning swooning newbies to quasi-populist hackery; the result is that shitty books get great reviews and interesting books get nitpicked.

The fact is, the literary establishment has discovered it likes making money. Ford is one of the few writers who makes it money because he can actually write. But I can promise that, if his novels quit selling, his institutionally-backed admirers would quit admiring him right quick, and those of us who write online about literature for fun will keep on feeling the same way about him we used to, and who would he be grateful to then?

Anyway, the Ford flap isn't so terribly irksome, not in the face of the latest odious screed from Mark Helprin, which appeared in the Times over the weekend. It seems he would like copyrights to extend forever, thus allowing Disney to get rich off its stale creations for eternity. Here, though, is the money quote:

Were I tomorrow to write the great American novel (again?), 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren.

Can you see the mistake? No, no, not the parenthetical "again?", which is almost too pathetic to mention. The mistake is that the rights to his imaginary masterpiece would not be "stripped" from his heirs--in fact, his heirs would keep all their rights. They would just have to share them with everybody else.

Copyright law is odd in that it codifies the egalitarian idea that ideas themselves cannot be owned, at least not forever. An idea changes the moment it enters somebody's head. You may publish the book you wrote, but the book your readers read is never the same one; their interpretation of your prose is unique to them, the characters altered, the themes personalized. And when they go to write their own books, your book will inform their style, their approach, their execution. Students all over America are right now sketching copies of your painting out of Artforum. Amateur actors are mangling your play. The ambulating whistler is adding trills and arpeggios to your hit single.

Writers ought to be rewarded for their work, even Mark Helperin. But after a while, they have to let go, to let the world have what they wrote. Helprin's heirs could publish their own "definitive" editions of his books after he's gone, if they wanted; and more readers than not, if Helprin actually has readers after his death, would choose them over the other editions published under the public domain. The Helprin Touch can still feel special, even once his personal claim to the material has weakened. It's just that his heirs would have to actually come up with a worthwhile edition to make money. In other words they would have to, you know, earn it.

The alternative is a world in which ideas will forever belong to people like the people who now own Happy Birthday To You, a song the Hill Sisters simply ripped off in 1893, by changing a single note of an already popular tune. For this little appropriation, Warner Chappell owns your aging ass until 2030. Sorry, grandad!

As for Helprin, I suspect his bloated tales of triumphalist self-actualization will be about as popular after he's gone as the neocon horseshit he's been ghostwriting for the past decade or two. But what do I know, I'm just a guy writing on the internet.