August 08, 2005
Hate It or Love It, Dun
My favorite thing about Jim's comic strips is how the particular form of text (proper names included) can't be Googled.
As noted elsewhere a couple years back, when considered at a remove of 17 paces, the proximate metacause for the flourishing of poetry blogs is so that when poets of the Googling class Google themselves, we get that feeling (as foretold by Navin Johnson: The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity I need! My name in print! That really makes somebody! Things are going to start happening to me now.)
For me, this recognition puts difficult context to the rise of the "Works Received" list meme, and the even more gray-flavored "Books Read." I understand the studied neutrality, which keeps the name of the product in circulation without risking a dozen rounds of comment-boxing with someone who has more time and hostility than you...or worse, without chancing the cold shoulder at a party because your casual blog admiration of someone's book was read as faint praise.
On a more abstract level, there's no doubt that, to use Steve's language, it's useful to register, to make a record of this series of moments, this formation always in the midst of forming, which is different from the "history" gestated in the warm bath of boosterism, and etched in vitriol.
And yet. There's a sense of loss at sacrificing on the pyre of safety an integral pleasure: the way the blog is free from the sensible, peer-reviewed consensus of more-official verse culture. This was a substantial part of poetry-blogging's originary thrill. Well, everything's always growing up, even blogs.
What seems more potentially disturbing is a seeming. This post is certainly no demand that poetry blogs must openly, aggressively prefer or not prefer new books that float across their metadesks, but this particular preferring-not-to has a shadow upon it. It isn't Bartleby's passive refusal. It's active; it does something — something in addition to acceding to the Googlogic of valuation based on sheer mention, a logic of sensation and ubiquity.
If one isn't going to take the time or risk to love it or hate it, or to imagine ways of reading the book and letting the book register its world, why mention the book at all? Along with safe publicizing, these lists hazard the appearance of of producing and describing cultural capital, one's own — of registering the amount of information passing through one's very own node, and thus one's proximity to sources. We might like to imagine the blogosphere is rhizomatic, but the world isn't, even the world of small presses; it means something that Jack's "Works Received" list is longer than Jill's, Jill's longer than Jean's. One idea returned to the 'sphere per title mentioned seems like a fair innoculation against this apparition of doubt — hardly enough to tax the time or insight of even the humblest blogger. As for "Books Read" — cool. Wudjathink?
Posted by jane at August 8, 2005 10:37 PM | TrackBack