blog.postmodernvillage.com

I was lucky enough to hear the commentary this morning by NPR’s Scott Simon on Morning Edition Saturday berating blogs as “bad literature.”

To borrow a phrase from fellow bloggers, “Well, duh!”

First of all, this has been a problem not merely since the beginning of the World Wide Web; the problem of the proliferation of bad literature is at least as old as moveable type. Books may have been expensive in the 15th Century, but kings and princes were rich: they could easily, and did, commission thousands of forgettable volumes of their or their favorite writers’ works. We don’t read them now simply because they were forgettable. Now used bookstores are full of wretchedly forgettable novels, screeds, volumes of questionable verse—many of which were the bestsellers of a few years ago. The advent of the Web simply makes this kind of schlock more easy to create and see.

But Simon misses the point entirely. We save our in-depth works for EastWesterly Review or Take2; literary journals are printed quarterly not simply because they are woefully underfunded but because it takes time to make critical judgements and to sort through submissions. Blogs are not about great literature. They are about quick, informal communications—more virtual salons than grand missives to history (with apologies to salon.com).

It is equally obvious that Simon has never spent any time teaching or taking lower-level creative writing workshops at any of our esteemed institutues of higher learning. If he had, he would realize that most people think they’re poets. Students take these classes usually because they think they will be fun, will meet an elective requirement, and will maybe prove to a few people how good our budding Dylan Thomases really are. If blogs keep more of these people out of those classes, it will save their poor instructors the grief of having to read the scattershot lines of these half-wits—not to mention the difficulty of having to tell a sensitive student how horribly his work truly “blows.”