A Thousand and One Blogs

It is, I think, a little bit surreal to get namechecked in the India Business-Standard. But there I am, along with some of my fellow usual suspects, in a rather quirky article by Nilanjana S. Roy on how litblogs filled a certain kind of void:

If you have a taste for literary blogs, you’re looking at a microcosm of a subculture, the flea on the underbelly if you like. But I began reading literary blogs over two years ago because of a growing dissatisfaction with the way mainstream media covered books.

Reviews shrank; serious critics shared space with blurb readers masquerading as reviewers; publishers were increasingly justified in creating a culture where authors were the celebrity du jour, because the hype worked; and some genres close to my heart (science fiction, science writing, graphic novels, fiction from subcultures, crime and detective fiction) never got any kind of meaningful attention.

As Roy became addicted to more and more blogs, dissatisfaction seemed to set in:

But two years in Net time is an aeon, and as bloggers begin to write for the same institutions they had trashed — The Washington Post, NYT — and some picked up book contracts, the underground feel of this strange literary movement started to disappear.

Some bloggers insist they will change the media machine from within, a promise that sounds familiar from a thousand failed revolutions. Some, and I’m of their company, are increasingly disenchanted with blogging itself: everyone links to the same stories, we have a party line of sorts on certain institutions and critics, there isn’t enough in the way of new, original work coming in from the underground.

Roy goes on to cite an example of a site she stumbled across through one of his favorite litblogs, which is why she’ll still keep reading, but it behooves me to address the earlier gripe: most of us blog for the love of it, in our spare time, when we’re able to. I suppose if I wanted to put my mind to it, I could figure out how to make money off the blog, but I’m not really sure I want to do that. It’s certainly been wonderful to get freelance paying gigs as a result, something I hope to keep up in the future, and so I’m not really convinced it’s a good idea to shun any such opportunities that may come my way.

Besides, the bloggers I know best are a bright, savvy, ferociously talented bunch, so why shouldn’t print magazines and newspapers and agents and editors make use of such voices? If that’s a blow against the Underground Principles of Bloggerdom, well, too bad. I’d rather opt for practicalities and realism.