The Language of Blogs

To Blog: A Transitive Verb?

It is unusual to use the verb 'to write' (or its French equivalent) as an intransitive, so unusual that Roland Barthes was being provocative and witty when he titled an essay, 'To Write:  An Intransitive Verb?' One writes something, a book or a letter or a poem. In contrast, the verb 'to blog' seems to be more often intransitive (I haven't actually done a corpus study). One can blog from somewhere (a fair or convention) or about something (politics or football), but one doesn't blog something, one just blogs, as an activity in itself.

When one does blog something, the implication is often that one is doing something different from most blogs, committing oneself to a finite project with a single focus. Julie Powell's The Julie/Julia Project, on which Nora Ephron's current movie is based, is probably the best-known example in the moment – all 536 recipes from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year.  One of my favourite blogs, 101 Cookbooks, apparently started in a similar way, as Heidi Swanson's attempt to explore the cookbooks she already had before buying any more - though she continued after she finished with her shelf of books.

In most of the examples of blogging something that I have come across, that something is a complex text.  But to say one is blogging that text, one is saying more than that it is one's subject matter;  one is implying that it will be transformed by the form of the blog, a personal response given in short date-stamped messages rather than an essay or a book.  If one blogs about the Bible, one could comment on anything and everything to do with the Bible, but if one says one is Blogging the Bible,  as David Plotz set himself to do in Slate, one is apparently committed to reading it (or rather, the part Christians refer to as The Old Testament) through from beginning to end and writing something about every book.  Plotz's project is different from the thousands of Biblical commentaries over two millennia, not only because he does not present himself as an expert or authority, but also because his responses unfold in real time.  He doesn't promise us an overall reading of the whole text;  he will just give us the experience, week by week.

I tried to see if there were other, similar projects out there by Googling 'Blogging the'.  That turned up several projects modelled on Plotz's, such as Ziauddin Sardar's Blogging the Qur'an.  Churches around the world have a go at Blogging the Psalms, but I find most are doing something rather different from Plotz, a series of more traditional meditations or reflections than a project moving through the Book of Psalms over time.  The Talmud Blog  is promising, because some might argue that the Talmud itself, with its commentaries on commentaries, has something blog-like, but blog is a noun rather than a verb here, and it turns out to be about 'Talmudic News, Reviews, Culture, Currents and Criticism', not a project of reading the text.  For readers in search of more secular meditation, there is John Whitfield's Blogging the Origin , in which a science writer tries to convey some of the experience of grappling with a classic but often unread text.  I'm a bit surprised that I can't find a blog in which someone works their way through Marx's Capital, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, or Joyce's Ulysses;  perhaps people feel they would be too vulnerable, exposing their naïve reading of such heavily annotated texts, or setting themselves us for a blog that stops awkwardly on page 82.

Perhaps the best example of blogging as a transitive verb, and the example that started me on this search, is Steve Coll's Blogging the Stimulus in the online version of The New Yorker (and once again I owe the tip to the podcast of On the Media).  Coll says he planned to do what journalists always do, skimming through the bill designed to boost the US economy after the financial crisis, looking for nuggets that might be the basis for an article.  But inspired by Plotz's Blogging the Bible , he made a project of reading every one of the 407 pages, taking 21 posts over five months to bring out many different aspects of the complex legislation. Though most would probably agree that the Stimulus Bill is rather less inspiring than the Bible, the blog is a wonderful exercise leading to many insights, with an appetite for detail worthy of I.F. Stone.

But in some ways, projects like Powell's, Plotz's and Coll's are atypical of blogging.Most blogs go outward, in all directions, taking in a range of links;  that is why they are best thought of in intransitive terms, as an activity having no particular object. Plotz and Coll stick to their one furrow. And their projects, by their nature, are finite; they are like HBO miniseries vs. the soap operas of most continuing blogs. It is perhaps relevant that both Plotz and Coll are professional journalists (as is Whitfield), writing for established media outlets, not novices sharing their ignorance with the world;  they are in some ways writing books in instalments (and indeed Plotz's text has come out as a book).  So it is probably fairer to say that they have used the blog genre to do something it is not usually used to do, but is certainly worth doing. I am on the lookout for more such projects. Google says there is no 'Blogging the Munros', by one of those people who makes a project of the 284 peaks in Scotland that are over 3000 feet tall. I would take it on, but I suppose that the title would imply one was going to climb them, not just write a post about each of them.

 

 

Printed blogs

Last week the excellent On the Media (a radio programme and podcast from NPR station WNYC) had an item about The Printed Blog.  This is the reverse of print newspapers that start an on-line version and have their reporters blog;  instead, it is an experiment with taking blog reports, printing them, and distributing them like a newspaper.  Yeah, I thought it an odd idea too.  In my experience, prose that seems great when I see it on-line, freshly written, seems odd in print, either in a book or in a newspaper.  But Josh Karp, the publisher who was interviewed, had a case, saying it allowed for micro-editions that could sell ads specifically for one neighbourhood or another.  And he mentioned something that proponents of print often point out, the convenience and feel of paper.  For all my fascination with blogs, and the excellent writers emerging on them, I still read the weekly version of the Guardian, and among its many pleasures is the way it lies flat on the table.

The prehistory of blogs

With construction going on around the campus, some benches have been moved into Bowland quad. One of them is dedicated to Gordon Inkster, and when I came across it yesterday, it reminded me of his wonderful innovation, the campus e-mail newsletter Inkytext, which ran from 1993 to his death in 2001 (see the tributes here). Inkster was a lecturer in the French department, and having been on the staff at the university from very near its beginnings, he had been on just about every possible committee, and had been the licensee of one of the campus bars. I’m told that before I got here, he had a column in a short-lived alternative newspaper. But like Leoš Janáček and Mary Wesley, he found his true genre late in life. Inkytext was like an early blog in many ways: the constant updating, the possibility of readers’ comments, the snapping up and recontextualisation of other texts, and the strong sense of personality and style. He kept it going via laptop even when he was intensive care. But in another sense he was too early; he had to do all this using just an e-mail list, with no blogging software to make the postings and comments easy, and no way for newcomers to get to it except by e-mailing him to subscribe. (As the masthead shows, with its list of places it was read, lots of people did just that). It was, of course, primarily for the local community, and it served as a lifeline through a university financial crisis that had many people worried about their jobs. But there were also bits of commentary, reviews of restaurants and wine, translations of songs, witty word play. I guess that (as with the best blogs) the delight in reading it on the screen, interrupting work, with all its topical references and asides, would not translate into book form.

Like any canonical invention – the telegraph, the telephone, newspapers, cinema, e-mail – blogs emerged alongside various innovations doing similar things in different ways or different things in similar ways. Bloggers themselves were quick to come up with a canonical history, summarised by Rebecca Blood as early as 2000, that goes back to 1999 and Jorn Barger or Cameron Barrett or Pyra or other early users. But before that there were literary commonplace books that brought together bits of reading in one place, and scrapbooks of various sorts. There were the personal letters that provide most of the background to the study of the 19th century, and that have almost vanished today. There were elaborate web-pages that usually seemed to ossify after a brief hopeful start. And there were pioneering uses of e-mail and discussion lists like Inkytext. Just as one begins to see proto-cinema in late 19th century novel and painting, one sees protoblogs in late 19th century uses of existing technologies. Gordon Inkster certainly had the wit, curiousity, conviction, and endless contacts of a good blogger; what he didn’t have was the technology to make his work easy. And so he didn’t have lots of other people doing the same sort of thing at the same time, and he posted usually once a week, not twice or three times a day. I’ll be looking out for other protobloggers.

I can recommend a browse in the complete Inkytext archives, maintained by Barry Rowlingson of the Lancaster University Mathematics Department.

If you don’t know where to start, I’d suggest something like Inkytext 149, in which, after a discussion of the financial crisis, he turns his attention to translating Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, for contemporary political reasons that he explains.

Blogs at the Fringe

I see there are three plays at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe devoted to blogs. 

• Girl Blog from Iraq: Baghdad Burning is dramatized by Six Figures, a company from New York. 
• Blogging claims to be:  ‘an intimate and uplifting play bringing the immediacy of modern communication up against the age old twists and turns that are life's journey’.
• Bloggers - Real Internet Diaries says it is for ‘Over 18s only’ and promises ‘sexually explicit dialogue’ (at 1:10 in the afternoon?). 

Since the Fringe has 1,867 shows competing for attention, the appearance of several blog-based plays probably a pretty good indicator of what theatre companies think festival-goers might find current of intriguing.  I'd be interested in what happens to the rather delicate balance of anonymous words on a page when they are dramatised by an actor speaking on a stage.  I expect that next year there will be Instapundit:  The Musical.