See What the Boys in the Back Room Are Reading and Tell Them I'm Reading the Same

This is just an impression, but perhaps someday some bored academic can do a survey. I'm think there are plenty of "subgenre" writers who actually don't participate in their subgenre as readers but only as writers. They are singing in the shower, their voice is in the shower reverberating off the tiles as it were, but their mind is at the Met. But here's the difference: They would like you to come into their bathroom to hear and watch, though a reciprocal invitation would be treated as the most awful joke.

Perhaps, a more pertinent illustration would help. Back in the days when I was trying to get my poetry into the little magazines -- and the littler and the more obscure the better, since I understood the less competition the more likely my submission would be accepted -- I found it painful to read any of the poetry in these small obscure magazines. I was reading pretty much "famous" poetry. As a literary critic, I was pretty much functioning like one of a cow's subordinate stomachs. I wasn't sure I was capable of discriminating among varieties of grass. I was satisfied with cud.

I'm wandering off the point. The point is that I was writing one kind of poetry, and that poetry, when I succeeded in placing it, was embedded in a matrix containing the very same kind of poetry, none of which I could bear to peruse for more than a minute if I hadn't written it.

The point is that I very much love my little blog, but it doesn't make me want to read most other people's blogs. There. That's clear enough.

I go up to the little icon in the upper right corner of this page and I click blindly through a dozen of the millions of other blogs hosted by this exceedingly charitable site. I have yet to stumble upon one that I've bookmarked and returned to. Indeed, I've yet to find through any means a blog I liked that was a) NOT political; b) NOT informational, that is, not designed to collect and disseminate facts and insight about some place, thing or activity, the expressive qualities of that dissemination of quite secondary importance; c) NOT written by a personal friend -- I've yet to find a blog outside any of these three categories to which I have ever returned.

So, see: I am writing something of a kind that would have absolutely no appeal to me if I weren't writing it. As a reader of brief essays, I continue to depend on gate-keeping, on turning to magazines, newspapers or published collections when it comes to sampling patiently and thoughtfully the kind of stuff I am putting in my blog.

But that doesn't mean that over time I won't find such sites, and perhaps myself be found! (I love these little associational rants of mine that I begin with no idea where they will land. The healthy mind will always find a soft cushion on which to land.) Blogs are a new and profuse form, and I choose to assume that by blundering across the face of this great blogswamp I will in the fullness of time find some spots of dry land to which I will choose to return. Or perhaps friends will direct me. I will find blogs that are not political or useful or the work of friends, and I will come back to them on a regular basis.

Odd form this personal blogging, vain and simultaneously lonely. I am curious to see what will come out of it that will last. I'll bet something does.

Meanwhile bloggers! It's our shower we'll sing if we want to.

(Should I link to Janet Leigh or Lesley Gore? The web is generous so I link to both. Both links make subtle commentary on this post.)