Bryce Zabel's FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH

The Reluctant Blogger Bites the Hand...

Lauren Kessler is an author, narrative journalist and director of the literary nonfiction graduate program at the University of Oregon. 

“My name is Lauren Kessler, and I am a blogger.”

“Hello, Lauren.” 

Had anyone told me a year ago that I’d be blogging, I would have cringed.  I am not a fan of blogs.  I find most to be self-indulgent drivel and fervently wish that the people who spend their time writing them didn’t have quite so much time.  I am sure there are important community service projects they could be doing.  Volunteering at the hospital.  Collecting soup can labels to fund music classes at their kid’s school.  Something.  

Yes, there are a few interesting political blogs, and a few interesting insider blogs, and occasionally a really smart person will start a really smart blog or an important and worthwhile idea will be blog-supported.  And then there are those obviously brilliant blogs that take note of my books.  But of the – gasp – approximately 113 million blogs out there, most are written by every day folks with less-than-fascinating lives about which they have less-than-noteworthy insights which they freely express in less-than-competent prose.  Hooray that people are writing!  Writing is good.  Hooray for citizen whatever.  It’s publishing the stuff I object to.  

I know the internet is infinitely expandable, but just because there’s space doesn’t mean it has to be occupied, does it?  Some of us out here in the west like wide open spaces.  Technorati, the site that tracks and rates blogs, claims that a new blog is created every 5.8 seconds. That means that in the time it took you to read this far, seven new blogs came into existence.  Wired magazine reports that 2.3 content updates are posted every second.  Is there really that much to say?  

The Book Is Dead. Not!

Rumors of Death...

This essay was originally published in Etude magazine.

The Book Is Dead.

That’s the title of the book I’m currently reading.  Of course the fact that this book was written and published, that I bought it and am reading it would seem a powerful argument against its main premise.

In fact, 172,000 books were published in the U.S. last year.  If you count vanity press and print-on-demand, a new book of fiction is right now being published every 30 minutes in America.  How can the book be dead?

There are several good answers to this.  First of all, most of those hundred thousand-plus books are essentially moribund, gathering dust on the acres of bookcases installed in megastores to lend them gravitas.  Actually, as a Viking publisher remarked a while ago, “everyone is reading the same 20 books.”  The miles of aisles at B&N and Borders are just, in the words of a B&N honcho, “wallpaper” – background decoration so that the place feels literary. The people coming in to buy one of those 20 anointed books want to browse for a while, sit in an armchair, sip a latte and feel ensconced in the world of books – of which eight out of ten flop in the marketplace. They die – mostly swiftly – moved from the front of the store “new” table to back shelf in three weeks, from shelf to return carton in two months and from there to $1.95 online sellers and Costco remainder bins.