I read this book review on nine recent books on blogs by Sarah Boxer, on the plane to Beijing a couple weeks ago, in the (gloriously newsprint) New York Review of Books. It puts blogs in their social, intellectual and historical context, explaining how they’re different from other forms of writing and their social impact. And it explains how blogs work with great clarity, assuming some of its readers may not know what a blog, or even a hyperlink, is. I kind of have a Venn diagram in my mind, of NYRB readers as one circle and blog readers as another–and am guessing the area of intersection may not be that big. So I figured it’d be worth alerting blog readers to.
It’s a good article, well worth the read. To whet your appetite, here’s the conclusion:
While putting together my anthology of blogs, I marveled many times at the large numbers of bloggers obsessed with masked superheroes. (Off the bat I can think of posts about Superman, Spiderman, and the Green Lantern.) Here, for instance, is a post about the movie Superman Returns that I found on a blog called Johnny i hardly knew you:
so i saw superman returns last night, btw [by the way]…. i am sitting there hungrily devouring every signpost of clark kent mythology before i knew i was doing it: the corn fields, the farm, the old truck, the labrador retriever farm dog, the breaking sun over the plains….
but there was something else. something that knocked me on my ass. and it was brandon routh [the actor who played Superman]. and it was the flying…. seriously. it was as if this film had taken the exact blueprint of my movements, and speed and mapped them out of my dreams. the gentleness and impossible speed, the suspension of gravity. the strength i took from the sun’s rays, how they entered my chest. the towering cloud formations, and gathering storms, lightning in the stratosphere and over horizons. everything….
i thought, what if we did have a hero like that? in this world. not a saviour, but a hero who could do those things…. we certainly don’t. but somewhere, at least i do, i need to know that i’ve taken to the air, and i inhabit that source of power and hope (because that’s what it is…) and i can see them mirrored in a superman’s eyes, in his look when he says to himself and the dog next to him, quietly and with no inflection except some sadness and open ended resignation, but only just… “well, i’m back.” (he doesn’t say that, but that’s the feeling) and the puppy is like, “dude. the ball.”
Finally, I think I get the superhero fixation. It’s the flying. It’s the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it’s like, “Dude, the ball.”
Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that.
There’s also a new article in NYRB on Wikipedia, which on first glance, seems pretty uncritical. (OK. I’ll go read the whole thing, after dinner.)
