Man, I just love Ed Champion. He thinks too much though. The stuff he chews over in his post he should just plow over and do his edrants shtick -- that would be the best thing he could do for the litblogosphere right now. You know, I don't mind taking stock every so often, but I hope litbloggers don't become like the Science Fiction community that feels it has to make sure its definition of what Science Fiction is is dragged out and hashed over about twice a month. (Sorry, that's my own bone of contention.) But don't we just need less handwringing over the litblogosphere and just more blogging?
As for Ed's ostensible topic -- the LitBlog Co-op: well that particularly entity fell on its face right out of the gate, as Dan Green (http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2008/03/stock-taking.html) alludes to in his "friends, Romans, litbloggers, lend me your bandwidths" wrap-up over the LBC's festering (quite nonexquisite) corpse. I don't write this filled with schadenfreude, as I was quite excited about the LBC, pre-launch, when it seemed to promise to be something more than another publicity machine for entrenched writers and publishers. At the time I was immersing myself in underground lit (see Plimpton participatory journalism -- yeah, I'm comparing myself to the great Plimpton; so sue me -- such as Paper Lion, etc.) to learn about what goes on with out of the mainstream writers and publishers. Many of us in that world were excited by the possibility that there would be another outlet for alternative lit.
Well, the choice of a Kate Atkinson novel (at the time already widely reviewed in many outlets and with an Amazon ranking that clearly said this was not a book that was "underappreciated" in any way) appalled us and sadly was a huge mistake that lost the LBC many potential readers and commenters, the vast majority of whom never returned. (See its members pleas to come over and join "the conversation" and how the commenters continued to be almost exclusively LBC members.) And then there were the interviews with the writers' agents and (gushing) editors and the LBC gained a stink of publisher ass-kissing and "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" to the extent that you couldn't even breathe, let alone figure out if you were reading the members' considered and thoughtful opinion or just empty publisher hype that -- if Ed really wants to examine something damaging in depth -- is taking down litblogging as sure as the Internet is trying to turn our computers into little more than point of sale terminals.
Man, I just love Ed Champion. He thinks too much though. The stuff he chews over in his post he should just plow over and do his edrants shtick -- that would be the best thing he could do for the litblogosphere right now. You know, I don't mind taking stock every so often, but I hope litbloggers don't become like the Science Fiction community that feels it has to make sure its definition of what Science Fiction is is dragged out and hashed over about twice a month. (Sorry, that's my own bone of contention.) But don't we just need less handwringing over the litblogosphere and just more blogging?
ReplyDeleteAs for Ed's ostensible topic -- the LitBlog Co-op: well that particularly entity fell on its face right out of the gate, as Dan Green (http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2008/03/stock-taking.html) alludes to in his "friends, Romans, litbloggers, lend me your bandwidths" wrap-up over the LBC's festering (quite nonexquisite) corpse. I don't write this filled with schadenfreude, as I was quite excited about the LBC, pre-launch, when it seemed to promise to be something more than another publicity machine for entrenched writers and publishers. At the time I was immersing myself in underground lit (see Plimpton participatory journalism -- yeah, I'm comparing myself to the great Plimpton; so sue me -- such as Paper Lion, etc.) to learn about what goes on with out of the mainstream writers and publishers. Many of us in that world were excited by the possibility that there would be another outlet for alternative lit.
Well, the choice of a Kate Atkinson novel (at the time already widely reviewed in many outlets and with an Amazon ranking that clearly said this was not a book that was "underappreciated" in any way) appalled us and sadly was a huge mistake that lost the LBC many potential readers and commenters, the vast majority of whom never returned. (See its members pleas to come over and join "the conversation" and how the commenters continued to be almost exclusively LBC members.) And then there were the interviews with the writers' agents and (gushing) editors and the LBC gained a stink of publisher ass-kissing and "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" to the extent that you couldn't even breathe, let alone figure out if you were reading the members' considered and thoughtful opinion or just empty publisher hype that -- if Ed really wants to examine something damaging in depth -- is taking down litblogging as sure as the Internet is trying to turn our computers into little more than point of sale terminals.