Originally published on Blogger on September, ’08, when blogging was very much a thing. Many of those who commented had multiple blogs which are still alive and kicking.
Some see blogs as self-indulgent monologues. But to be pedantic—and who’s to stop me, this is my own self-indulgent monologue—a blog is not a literary form and can’t be classified. It’s an application of technology that opens up possibilities, just as a large block of marble is not a sculpture. When Michelangelo started to work on one, he could already see the exquisite form trapped inside, and would chip away to free the prisoner, making his vision real.
There’s no rule which says you can’t extract literature from a blog. There’s even an existing literary form: the letter, one of those things which people used to write in pen and ink, and place in an envelope, entrusting it to an integrated mail service encircling the globe. We can still do that, thank heaven, but there aren’t enough these days to be selected and compiled into those other venerable artefacts, hard-backed books. Email? Possibly. To me it’s the blog which has unique literary possibilities, much greater than private correspondence, for the blog is already a globally-broadcast letter. In fact I’d like to rechristen it as a glob.
Broadcast: to scatter (seed, etc.) abroad with the hand.
I’ll tell you why I write in the blog form. It’s because there is no fun to write without a reader, just as there’s no current in a wire without a circuit. I suppose it’s a vice but I don’t care: I crave the gratification of instant publication, the spontaneity of almost live performance. Editing is needed always, but since word-processing has made pen-and-ink obsolete, writers are in danger of editing their inspiration to death, so that what arrives at the publisher’s is a factory-pie on a supermarket shelf, compared with one freshly-made from scratch for a few invited guests at home.
All this is by way of expressing gratitude, dear reader, for your role as agent and Muse; for your comments or eloquent silence; for being companion and midwife to the birth of something new. It’s to tell you that what you read is a work-in-progress, whilst something more solid and old-fashioned is being shaped from the sketches you see here. A first volume, A Wayfarer’s Childhood, is in progress now, having reached 35,000 words as a memoir from birth to age 15. I intend to stop at age 18, so another three years’ worth will be published here first. The second volume may refer tangentially to intervening years but will mainly cover wayfaring activities from age 64 on, following Nietzsche’s dictum: “Sit as little as possible; credit no thought not born in the open air and while moving freely about”.
You may have noticed the copyright notice now appended here. When I previously entertained the idea of writing such books, I was pulled two ways. Blogging has been my main literary activity and I didn’t want to give it up; but if I didn’t there would be no energy left for “serious writing”. So the plan now is to continue drafting here, and never taking down the blog, even after its content has been edited and shaped into proper books. So you and I can carry on as before.
PS May 30th, 2018. Again and again, I clung to the idea of publication in book form, whatever that means these days. In the end, I gave up the idea, on the basis that WordPress may be as durable as anything else in this uncertain world. Any conversion to a different medium and format will be time-consuming, inflexible and riddled with compromise. I had thought to entrust my work to someone, whether agent, publisher, literary executor or close relative. Instead, I shall entrust it to the world. When I am gone, they’ll look.
Comments
Parlance
Vincent, thanks for calling by my blog. One of the reasons I started it was the thought of thus making contact with others around the world with a similar interest in language – so I was glad to hear from you. You said, ‘…writers are in danger of editing their inspiration to death, so that what arrives at the publisher’s is a factory-pie on a supermarket shelf…’I find that most interesting, because I’m most of the way through a professional writing qualification and I’m crippled by the imaginary editor who sits on my shoulder. So I decided to blog and have fun, instead of constantly polishing work that might never see the light of day.
Vincent
I’m glad you came, Parlance. And glad to see you have experienced the same thing. Such was the lack of polishing in my post that I possibly failed to be explicit enough about the contrast between old technologies (pen and ink transcribed laboriously to typewriter copy) and today’s edited-on-screen “manuscript”. In the old days the structure and composition of any literary piece had to be determined principally in the mind, perhaps with the aid of rough notes. So the ideas could ferment. Some festered and rotted; whilst others turned into wines of a great vintage. Blogging, I find, concentrates the mind, for nothing stands in the way of that instant publishing (wherein lies the fun); so we can feel the frisson of a deadline the more often and the more fruitfully. So the piece takes shape in the head with the aid of invisible processes, much as it must have done in the heroic days of quill pens.
parlance
I caught a bit of a radio show yesterday in which a poet was interviewed. I think he might have been Vietnamese, or maybe African, but I can’t remember clearly. When he was tortured he could endure it – until they destroyed all the poems he had written. At that moment he began to compose his poems without writing them down, so he needed to learn techniques to memorise his poems. One technique was to say them aloud. He said it got to the point where all the murderers and hard cases in his prison wouldn’t go to sleep until he had recited poems for them. It was inspirational.
Charles Bergeman
I am excited to hear about your plans for “proper Books” based on your writings here. I know of several writers that have posted early versions or excerpts of their upcoming novels on the web. Although not all of them were in blog form. Each solicited feedback and often used that feedback to alter the plots, or revise references in their books. I would not presume to have any meaningful or useful feedback in reference to your work. The best I can do is reflect my own experiences when my memory is triggered by the things you write about here. I look forward, with great anticipation, to the day when I can read the assembled version of your writings in book form.
DBA Lehane
It is both touching and somewhat odd that you should consider me, and my blog peers, as akin to both agents and midwifes (or, is it midwives?). I will go forth today with such a warm sensation burning deep in my belly. I do wonder though, what makes for a literary form? If it is not the material itself or the tool used, is it the artist who sits before all and creates ?But no, literature, as in art, is only defined in the eye of the receiver. So I write. I blog. And now I glob.
Vincent
Parlance your remarks about that imprisoned poet remind me of other prisoners—one might have been Terry Waite held as a hostage for so long—who composed their stories in their heads because they didn’t have the means to write anything. Homer’s Odyssey we are told started as an oral recitation a long time before it was ever written down.
Vincent
Charles, the triggering of your own memories in response to reading mine has been an inspiration to me, and I never write anything without trying to leave as it were empty spaces in the words where the reader can as it were write his own graffiti.
Vincent
Lehane, oddness is something you and I both cultivate as a kind of signature to our writings, in different ways of course. Yes, all art has its true dwelling in the eye of the beholder, rather than the artist. But—this is the magic of the blog—the possibility of to-and-fro interaction between artist and beholder raises it higher.
ghetufool
I am late for sure. but I don’t want to miss the opportunity to congratulate you Vincent. for sure, you have one reader eagerly awaiting your book in India. MayI pre-book an autographed one? just an audacious request of course, can be rejected as foolish.
a wayfarer’s notes 