Everyone’s doing it, so is that a reason to join the fray?

I hate the word. It sounds like someone having a protracted vomiting session. Blog. Microsoft Word doesn’t even recognize it as a word, and has just squiggled a red line underneath it. There are a host of tangentially unpleasant words associated with the mere sound of it: block, black, log, bleuuh, beurck—these last two being onomatopoeic renderings of the vomiting session—logorrhea—in question.

And think about the other blogs you’ve read. Some are called blogs but actually deserve to be called opinion pieces, op-eds, essays; it’s the internet delivery which slots them into the blog category. But there are also a lot of really bloggy blogs: rants, endless confessional self-indulgent journals, narcissistic contributions to the cosmic noise. Of the “A thought occurred to me as I was on my way to get the milk bottle on the stoop” school. Well, who cares about your milk bottle, and besides, no one has milk bottles delivered anymore, this is the 21st century.

Everyone is just trying to get out there, and get noticed.

So why should I join the fray?

Recently I read an excellent blog of the essay variety on the Guardian(UK)’s BookBlog, by Jenny Diski, that household name, who reminds us struggling artists yet again that “Want to get rich quick? Don’t try writing.” I decided for the first time ever to add—sorry, post—a comment (if blogs are nauseating, the comments are…the cow’s cud?) (Bleuuh), because I enjoyed her article and I had a thought (on the way to collect the milk bottle).
“We all need our devoted readers, and it’s so hard to find them now, with all the media circus and the greed of the publishers obscuring the true literary profession.”—went my thought, or one of them.
“guardiangal” answered me with this comment :
“I think there is a way of reaching out to thousands of readers. I think it’s called a blog.”
Well, I don’t agree altogether; I wasn’t talking about cybernaut readers, I was talking about those dusty people over forty-five who walk around carrying heavy books like the nostalgia they have for a pre-internet, pre-cellphone, pre-global warming age. Readers of novels and thoughtful non-fiction. I don’t know how old guardian gal is, so maybe this is a generational thing, but although I resist the notion, it would seem blogging is a way to get attention from readers, a form of publicity or reasonably passive self-promotion. Maybe she just had casual screen-readers in mind (and of course the numbers are limitless); I was thinking of novel-in-hand readers, stopping by their local independent bookstore wistfully asking, “Don’t you have any new novels by Jenni Diski?” Or signing up on Amazon to be informed electronically of the latest novel by Jenny Diski.

Initially, therefore, I rejected guardiangal’s pat, glib exhortation. As if she were saying, Get with it grandma (I’m not, but could be), our generation doesn’t give a blackberry about publishers and novels.

But then, as the hours and days went by, I read her response more and more as a sign. From the cyber-universe; indeed, get with it grandma. If you can’t lick ‘em, clog the info highway a bit more.

And there’s gridlock out there; if you google “writers’ blogs”, you come up with an absolutely dizzying number of blogs (7,060,000) within blogs within blogs, and that is just in English, and just for writers, or aspiring writers, or frustrated writers, all of us seeking their thousands of readers. For any topic under the blackberry bush you will find relevant blogs. And all written in every style or level of language, from semi-illiterate to lyrical to academic. It’s dizzying. So how do you find the voices you want to listen to? Is it just your friends? Or do you hunt down bloggers who share your passionate interest in novels which are set in Dickensian London or some futuristic city after global warming gets us all?

Well, I finally concluded that I am just as qualified as anyone else out there to discourse on the state of the world, literature, and my milk bottle.

Welcome, oh ye readers in your thousands.