Continuous Public Conversations

Wendy Lesser has provided the following comment on my previous post about her introduction to her new Lesser Blog:

I've made a few postings elsewhere to explain what I thought I was doing, both in the removal of the offending remarks and in the design of the blog in the first place. Basically, I was trying to do something that did not involve a continuous public conversation in a public forum -- that had room for private response and discussion and disagreement, in a one-to-one way (via email, for instance), but that didn't involve a public-message-board aspect, with people ganging up on one side or another.

Obviously I misunderstood the medium, to some extent -- but can't such misunderstandings sometime lead to new versions of the medium itself? I was hoping that my blog (if it can be called a blog, which is apparently debatable) might lead to some considerations of the ideas expressed in the posting itself, but all the response focused on the tone of my initial note, which was merely meant to be introductory. Well, no, it was probably meant to be inflammatory as well, but that was obviously a bad idea if I wanted my ideas about Mark Morris to get any attention.

And now that it's gone, I do miss the phrase "blessedly impersonal," because that represented something I care about in the discussion of art. That is, it would be nice if ideas and opinions about the arts could have a tone that is not just that of a personal squabble (the way it so often seems in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, for instance ), but that draws on some other notion of evaluation. I guess I am trying to do something that is at once less personal and less public than the normal multi-voiced blog, because I think criticism of the sort I write is basically a one-to-one conversation, writer to reader (and, if he likes, reader to writer, in an answering letter or email, or even in the privacy of his own mind, which is how I do most of my answering to critics, dead or alive). . . .

I can't help but continue to perceive in Wendy Lesser's tone an unwillingness to sully herself with the term "blogger." If she wants to avoid "continuous public conversation in a public forum," I'm not sure why she would offer up her compromise blog whatchamacallit in the first place. If what she wants is "private response and discussion and disagreement, in a one-to-one way (via email, for instance). . .that [doesn't] involve a public-message-board aspect," then why not just encourage people to send her e-mails if they want to talk about her latest print essay? Or make more of her publication (The Threepenny Review) availabe online and create some kind of reader forum? Her third paragraph in particular ("criticism of the sort I write is basically a one-to-one converstation") suggests someone tied to the conventions of print publication, and if weblog discourse makes her so uncomfortable, no one, as far as I can tell, is insisting she abandon those conventions and so superciliously enter the blogosphere.

Although I again have to ask what weblogs she is reading that lead her to generalize about them in the way she does. Plenty of very good literary blogs do not offer "continuous public conversation" if by "continuous" is meant "daily." Some of my favorite blogs offer new posts only a few times a week, and TRE itself rarely features more than 3-4 posts in a given week. And exactly what is she implying in asserting her blog "might lead to some considerations of the ideas expressed in the posting itself"? Again I must ask what literary blogs she reads that cause her to believe most of them don't lead to this kind of rational discourse. Some posts at this blog, for instance, have resulted in comment threads that degenerated into bile and wild assertions, but the vast majority of posts provoking extended comments have led to considered and stimulating discussions. The same thing is true at many of the literary weblogs I read regularly.

Finally, what the hell is a "normal multi-voiced blog"?

At the risk of repeating myself from the initial post on this topic: If you think you're doing something "new" in the medium, Wendy, perhaps you should take the time to actually read the blogs that have defined the medium. I'd invite you to make your way through the blogroll I've provided to the right. You might learn something, and you probably won't even get that dirty.

Comments

[Dorothy W.]

Why does she continue to equate "personal" with "personal squabble"? That I don't get.

[sam]

Your response about Wendy Lesser makes me wonder what you guys do--what a bunch of small little guys you are--last week it was trashing Donald Hall--and before that--nattering--so many words to what purpose--what if you presented something quite right and original and not quite so bitchy--like your own poetry or fiction or essay that has some chance of publication.

[Dan Green]

Who are "you guys"?