On Blogging

“When I began to make friends, writing was the vehicle. So that in the beginning, writing, like reading, was less a solitary pursuit than an attempt to connect with others. Jhumpa Lahiri

What is the function of blogging, the unspoken motive beyond the desire to inform, rant, or report in all the ways that blogging has given rise to? Laura Gurak suggests one reason, especially for young bloggers, in her study, “The Psychology of Blogging:”

“…the most popular topic among bloggers is “me.… the blur between private (“me”) and public …are truly the most interesting psychological features of blogging.”

In her paper Gurak claims that blogging, like writing therapy, is to a certain extent therapeutic for some individuals. Journaling has been both recommended and reported to be a way to reduce stress and express emotions. A recent report indicates that blogging may also have that effect for teenagers.

In this well-controlled field experiment, adolescents were assigned to one of six separate groups for a period of ten weeks. Two of the groups were asked to blog about their current emotional difficulties, one open to responses and one closed. Two other groups were asked blog about any subject, again one open to responses and one closed. Another group was asked to write freely in a diary, while the sixth group was a no-treatment control.

The results showed that adolescents who blogged about their current difficulties, regardless of the response condition, improved the most on all social-emotional measures and that these effects were maintained two months later in a follow-up assessment.

I suspect there are reasons other than lessening emotional stress why blogging might also be therapeutic. And in a way I continue to find the experience beneficial. Like a classroom assignment, it gives me something to think about and I confess sometimes simply sets the agenda for a few hours.

From the beginning I had always viewed blogging as an intellectual exercise where I had a chance to write something coherent about an issue that mattered to me. After writing it, I sometimes felt good about what I’d done.

I have no interest in Texting, Tweeting or Facebooking. The increasing popularity of theses forms of expression among young adults cannot be taken lightly. According to a recent Pew Internet research report, social networks are starting to replace blogging as the preferred means of communicating for teens and young adults (less than 30 years of age). In 2006 approximately 28% of teens and young adults were said to be bloggers, while a few years later in 2009 the number decreased by half to 14%.

I’ve not read any blogs written by this group but I do know the kind of writing and fragmentary comments on social media sites does little to sustain a habit serious commentary. I also have no idea if this way of communicating to other individuals has any lasting value. Any such account of the effects of social media must remain speculative for now and I’m not one who does much of that.

Note: In order to embark on a new project, Marks in the Margin will take a break from blogging on a regular basis for a while. Postings, if any, will be sparse and intermittent during this period.

Time Out

Marks in the Margin will be taking an indefinite break in order to devote myself to other projects waiting in the wings. I am most grateful to everyone who has read and commented on the blog during the past two years.

During that time I have come to think of blogging as much like a classroom. In the beginning there were only a few students but gradually the class grew larger and became more interesting, especially to me.

Like any new class, it became a learning experience for the teacher who learned far more about literature than he ever had before. And it was fun, as well as a bit of a test for me, an unschooled student of literature, to try to write a page or so each day about a book or article I had read or about an idea that for one reason or another was important to me.

I also came to know a few of my readers who, I hope, will continue to be my friends during the forthcoming hiatus. And I found other literary bloggers who I now regard as friends who gather together in this strange new place to talk about the books they’ve read and what the experience meant to them.

Throughout much of last year I was ensconced in Honolulu, where I had come for what I had hoped would be the rest of my life. At least, that was the plan, a plan soon discarded as the year went by. And I have wondered to what extent simply living in the benign climate of the tropics, where I felt so utterly relaxed, contributed to the outpouring of words that year.

I had worried that I would succumb to surf boarding and sun bathing. But like most of the worries I have, nothing came of it. Does it matter where a writer lives or what the weather is like there? The life that Dostoyevsky led in Russia gave him a subject matter that ultimately led to his masterpieces. But it did not guarantee he would write them.

Would he have written about something else if he had fled wintery Moscow for the tropics? While I not even close to qualifying for Dostoyevsky’s league or have the slightest idea how to write novels, at least I did not altogether loose my stuff among the waving palms and flowering bougainvillea of Oahu. Indeed, as Jonah Lehrer comments in his recent blog, Mood and Cognition, "sometimes being relaxed “promotes a more freewheeling kind of information processing which leads to more creative insights.”

Just the other day a Facebook Friend sent me a request to join the fray at Sticky Books. The rules of the game go like this: List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you. They should be the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. And then I was supposed to tag 15 Friends who I thought might like to know my favorites. Tagging remains a mystery to me, but I very quickly came up with the following list arranged in no particular order.

Azar Nafisi Reading Lolita in Tehran
Brian Morton Starting Out in the Evening,
David Denby Great Books
Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls
Michael Cunningham The Hours
Elliot Perlman Seven Types of Ambiguity
Michael Ondaatje The English Patient
J. M. Coetzee Youth
Lawrence Durrell The Alexandrian Quartet
Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin American Prometheus
Pascal Mercier Night Train to Lisbon
Philip Roth Exit Ghost
Rachel Cusk Arlington Park
Ian McEwan Saturday
John Williams Stoner

I believe I have blogged about most of these books and in doing so I came to appreciate the extent to which reading and writing are inseparable. They always will be for me, but for now I am going to turn that undertaking in a slightly different direction.

Morning Line

I have this little routine that I go through each morning in reading the blogs and Web sites that interest me. The fact that I can do this still seems a bit of a miracle to me, one that I’ve never find tedious or the least bit repetitious. It’s like waking up each morning in the library.

I start with the Arts and Letters Daily that has three columns of short descriptions of new ideas, topics, issues, etc. First there is the Articles of Note, then New Books and the last Essays and Opinion pieces. In light of the brief sentence or two about each listing, I decide whether or not I want to click on the “more” link which in turn takes me to the full document itself, whereupon I can add it to my list of Unsorted Bookmarks to be read later in the day.

On Monday I always move from this tremendously rich page to The New Yorker’s Web site to find out what’s in the issue for the week. Then I move on to three sets of Blogs.

Blog 1 consists of Anecdotal Evidence by Patrick Kurp who writes with considerable insight and wisdom based on his exceptional knowledge of literary history. The Book Bench, the second is this group, is the New Yorker’s literary blog that presents a half dozen or more topics each day, and lastly the Commonplace Blog of David Meyers that presents one of the sanest and most thought provoking literary commentaries on the Web.

Blog 2 begins with Conversational Reading that has a good deal of literary news, especially about Latin American literature but far too many ads. Then I move on to the New York Times book blog, Paper Cuts, and then to the Guardian literary site that includes a good deal of news, special reports, and its own blog. Here you get the benefit of three extremely interesting Web pages that bring together a wide range of literary articles and videos.

Blog 3 consists of another three Web sites beginning with The Situationist that treats an enormous number of topics in the social sciences broadly conceived. I follow it with the Frontal Cortex written by Jonah Lehrer, the author of Proust was a Neuroscientist and How We Decide. The last of this batch is Letters from a Librarian, a site that I’ve recently discovered and has become one of my favorites, although lately its author doesn’t post comments very often. However, it is far and away the most aesthetically pleasing, as you will note at once if you visit it. It is also a extremely personal blog in which the author does what I think is so important in writing about literature, namely describing the way the experience affects them personally.

I do all this first thing in the morning and then later in the day, I return to those links I’ve saved in my Unsorted Bookmarks to read with more care. I am struck by what an extraordinary experience this is and what a wealth of information is offered up to me each day by these bloggers

None of this was possible a few years ago. Now it is and as far as I’m concerned this is a bit of a revolution in the transmission of thought and ideas and teaching.

And when I cannot get on the Web, say when I’m traveling or my server is down, I find myself terribly distressed. Something important is missing from my daily routine and I will spend the better part of the day trying to find it. Yes, it is truly an addiction and yes, I do experience withdrawal symptoms in the absence of my morning literary fix. It is like working out each day, another one of my addictions. If I unable to get to the gym or head out for a morning jog, I just don’t feel quite right the rest of the day.

Literary Blogging II

David Myers at A Commonplace Blog begins his summing up of the literary blogging interviews (links to the last seven are posted below) by noting:

After nearly two weeks of reflection on book blogging by some of the best bloggers out there, what have we learned? That book blogging expands the range of book discussion. That it is a form of literary criticism, however implicitly. That it is more conversational but also more ephemeral than formal criticism. That it may be cynical, but is always rooted in a love for books. That it is still in its infancy. That the audience for it is small. That it is unpaid.

After reading the symposiasts who participated in The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time, I am encouraged by the wit, knowledge, and book sense on exhibition in a few well-tended parks of the literary blogscape. But I am also discouraged about the future of book blogging. I no longer believe, as I once did, that book blogs might revive a free-wheeling and raucous literary culture. The source of my discouragement is our symposiasts’ conception of blogging. Terry Teachout puts it best: blogging is “introspection made public.

I began blogging a little over a year ago. I am sure there were several reasons although who can ever be sure of one’s motives or their recollections of why they did something? I know I found increasing pleasure in reading and wanted to talk about it with someone or, at least, give expression to my thoughts. I thought blogging about what I was reading might be one way to start. It might also help me to clarify the ideas I was reading about and why I did or didn’t like the material. Everyone seemed to be doing it. I thought why not give it a try.

My initial plan was simply to post some of the notable passages from the books and periodicals I had read over the years. The passages were to be drawn from my Commonplace Book where they were kept throughout this time. I recall my first post was a sample of the forty-five passages I had saved from Ian McEwan’s Saturday.

My model was the “Commonplace Section” from each issue of the American Scholar. They consist of extracts from various authors who have written about a particular topic, listed on two pages of this publication without commentary or analysis. For example, recent topics have included Loafing, Change, Failure, Marriage, and in the most recent issue the timely theme of Debt.

It hasn’t really turned out that way at all. Instead, I have found so much to write about in the books I’ve been reading lately and the abundant material on the Web, that I’ve not really had a chance to post very many passages from my Commonplace Book.

My hope is to begin doing that selectively. I’ve read so many fine books over the years and saved page after page of passages from them, that there’s a great deal to discuss, although it does require a pretty good memory of the story and characters. I think the best approach would be to take some of the best passages and respond to them in the form of annotations. I will try to do that more frequently during the next year of blogging.

The Neglected Books Page

On The Seawall

Nota Bene Books

I’ve Been Reading Lately

House of Mirth

Anecdotal Evidence

A Commonplace Blog

Literary Blogging Part I

In a recent series of interviews organized by Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence
and David Myers of A Commonplace Blog fourteen literary bloggers were asked a series of questions about blogging. While you might want to put different questions to the bloggers, here are the nine that Kurp and Myers posed:

1. What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging?

2. Who do you look toward for inspiration and models?

3. How does book blogging differ from print counterparts such as book reviews?

4. How do you respond to this statement?: Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.

5. How has the experience of blogging changed the way you write?

6. What about the sometimes vicious nature of the beast?--the ad hominem attacks, and the widespread tendency to confuse harsh disagreement with such ad hominem attacks.

7. Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?

8. In a recent blog column, the technology writer Michael S. Malone suggests that a handful of bloggers have "earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not," because readers have learned to trust the more popular bloggers "to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better." Do you agree? Does this explain why no book blogger has earned a huge audience?

9. Are book bloggers wise or foolish to include political commentary?

The links to the first seven responses follow:

Elberry’s Ghost

American Fiction Notes

Laudator Temporis Acti

Turmsegler

Books, Inq.—The Epilogue

The Little Professor

About Last Night