Tag Archives: gratitude

Blogroll Thanksgiving

literary lint, plague journal,

I still love reading blogs. At this point in internet history, that’s like grinding one’s own wheat, but still. They’re so reliably idiosyncratic. 

I first started reading blogs in the mid 2000s, back when lit-blogging was in its hey day. Most of those blogs are long gone, which is fine. Nothing gold can stay, etc. As blogs went out of fashion, that same impulse-to-post migrated to other modes. Every now and then someone writes an article saying “Blogs are back!” but these strike me like the occasional articles saying “Short stories are back!” It’s probably not going to pan out, and that’s okay. It’s still worthwhile even if it’s not a pillar in the media-social-entertainment-streaming mega church. 

“Knitting is back!”

I liked Medium when it came out. Its writing interface was so pleasantly smooth it felt like the Ferrari of web applications. But reading on Medium has only gotten worse. Sometimes I am allowed to read articles, but sometimes the machine wants me to sign in, and I lost those credentials long ago. Sometimes the articles are part of magazines-within-Medium, which is confusing because on Medium everything looks the same. Somehow Medium gave users a template via design deprivation, and the result is even more seamless and generic than all those old blogs that used the default, blue banner WordPress theme. (This is coming from a person who is using yet another WordPress theme, so I’m all for design decisions that call for the least amount of motion.) It all looks nice but it feels a part of the same big box store. This claustrophobia is only exacerbated by the articles, which read like self help. Seven things you need to do every morning to win your career and beat depression. It’s LinkedIn with better taste. 

A kind of blogging manifests itself on Twitter, but it’s disjointed and comes with all the problems of Twitter, previously whined about here. I feel like no one admits how tweet threads are a terrible reading experience. It’s the writing equivalent of temporary housing, put up after a natural disaster, and people go on living in them for decades. Twitter seems best for jokes thrown into the stream, but because the stream is endless and unknowable, it’s the worst place for jokes. Perhaps one day Twitter will simply be press releases and anger. 

I subscribe to some newsletters, the most blog-like blog substitute. It’s handy having them delivered to your in-box, but they feel like work. They’ve already posted again? For some reason, having posts line up like a To Do list in an RSS feed reader is a pleasant accumulation, but a list of unread emails is a job. I don’t know what this means. It probably says more about my ability to manage time and tasks than it does about delivery mechanisms. 

After all this time and all this reading, what even is blogging? I used to know. Like so many topics, I used to have strong feelings about it, and now I shrug and make a sandwich. It’s simply public writing. Anything more categorically detailed than that is up to the individual author. These blogs interest me for the same reason why any writing interests me. Part of it is the communicated information, the nutritional content. Part of it is the range of topics covered. But more often than not I just like the sound of that person’s voice.

So here are some blogs I like: 

Kottke. My First, My Last, My Everything. Consistently the best part of my internet. If there is ever an Academy Award-like award for internet writing, they should name it the Kottke. 

Scripting News. Dave Winer, developer, outliner, opinion haver. Your smarter uncle, who knows much more about the internet than you do and is not going to put up with your BS. An indefatigable blogger. 

MacWright. Written by Tom MacWright, a software developer in California. Much of the technical discussions go way over my head, but he has so many interesting projects, using the web, illustration, and music. An inspiration.

Maggie Haberman’s Twitter feed. Okay, I am breaking my own rules. Sometimes I feel like I am in a submerged house and the water outside my windows is the News of the World. At some point you’re going to open a door, a window, a doggie door, etc., and your house is going to flood with the News of the World, but you get to choose which windows to open and how fast you’re going to flood. The best way I’ve found is to open the Maggie Haberman mail slot. A lot of water is going to come in the house, but it’s reliable water, it’s run-through-the-treatment-plant water, it’s not going to give you dysentery, and it will take longer, relatively speaking, for your house to completely fill with the News of the World. 

Marginal Revolution. Don’t read the comments. Run by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, two academics. I immediately shut down whenever I see posts that include graphs, but otherwise an interesting view into how the other half lives, that half being the Economist Half. Remember it’s called the Dismal Science. From time to time I feel it necessary to aerate my own views with non-bananas opinion and info from different neighborhoods. Don’t read the comments. 

Freddie deBoer. Bracingly well-written. These days the focus is mostly on his new book The Cult of Smart. 

Subtraction. Written by Khoi Vinh, who used to be the web design guy at New York Times and now works for Adobe. I think? I don’t know. What is this, LinkedIn? It doesn’t matter. He has interesting stuff to say about design and technology, though these days the posts are mostly about movies and domestic life in Brooklyn. 

BirdFeed. Written by Tom Cleary, a pianist/composer/professor. Illuminating discussions of jazz piano and music theory. He often writes songs that pedagogically parody other jazz standards, which is highly informative to me, a non-good piano player who likes to walk around pretending he’s some nascent Ahmad Jamal. 

Craig Mod. Another smart person with projects. Mostly I read him through his newsletter. He just wrote a book about walking the Japanese countryside and toast. He makes me want to go to Japan. 

Emily Gould Can’t Complain. Another indefatigable blogger, though her most recent form is via this newsletter. I’m a sucker for details of domestic life in Brooklyn. Please tell me about your bodegas, your parks, your stoops. I like it best when she reviews the movies she watches with her kids. 

Do the Math. By Ethan Iverson, formerly of the jazz trio the Bad Plus, now a solo musician with multiple projects. He’s been writing for years, interviews, music criticism, philosophical notes to his students, ruminations on crime fiction. I love all of it except for the book stuff. Crime fiction isn’t my bag. Really at this point in my life the main topics I am excited to read about are jazz piano and Brooklyn parenting. A piano in a brownstone with kids’ drawings scattered all over it would basically be my ideal social vector. I don’t think Iverson has children, but for a while there, earlier in our pandemic year, he was posting daily reinterpretations of TV theme songs while various stuffed creatures lounged around his piano. Pure sugar.

Easily Distracted. Written by Timothy Burke, history professor. An oldie that I still visit. Back in the day, I read him because I was an aspiring academic. Now I read him to feel the force of his prose. Academia and politics mostly. 

Gin and Tacos. I don’t even know who this guy is, and I don’t remember how I found him. Smart, well-written, humorous. Sometimes the river of garbage gives you another gem. 

James Fallows. Is it still a blog if it’s for the Atlantic? Who cares. I have broader issues with the Atlantic as a web publication, but I always enjoy Fallows. His notes are pithy and informed. His series on Trump as he was cruising toward the election way back a thousand years ago was a helpful historical documentation of wrongs perpetrated, norms destroyed, etc. Sometimes he posts photos of interesting-looking beers. There was also a parody Twitter account run by a “Fames Jallows” for a while that was (altogether appropriately? somewhat paradoxically?) also informed and adept and worthwhile. The internet is a weird system.

D.G. Myers, RIP

Uncategorized,

I did not know D.G. Myers personally, and except for a couple of twitter exchanges, I never communicated with him directly. I knew him only via his writing, which I read with steady attention for approximately the past six years. I can’t remember now what link pushed me in his direction, but after reading just a little bit of his literary criticism, I had the singular question that so much good writing throws off: who does this guy think he is?

I was in my first year as a “visiting writer,” teaching various creative writing courses to undergraduates, when I found his A Commonplace Blog, and I was immediately taken — his seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the novel, his generosity toward various writers I knew nothing about, his hostility toward political correctness and fashion, his sense of literary standards in a standard-less world. One of his ideas in particular has become lodged within my own life so much that I quote it to myself almost weekly. Here is the long version:

Literature is just the writing that arouses the impulse to preserve it and pass it on. (I call that the “canonical impulse.” Canons are inseparable from literature. To call something literature is to start a canon.) “When an inability to stay interested in Sappho lasted longer than the parchment she was copied on,” Hugh Kenner says, “the poems of Sappho were lost.” There are many reasons to keep something from being lost, however.

These many reasons cannot be contained by a list of genres, no matter how long it is extended; nor by distinguishing fiction from non-fiction (because there are whole literatures, of which Jewish literature is only one, to which this distinction is an utter stranger); nor by “privileged criteria” like sublimity or irony or artistry or “stylistic range” or “bravura performance” or anything else that can be humanly imagined (because exceptions to the rule will immediately suggest themselves).

Literature is simply good writing — where “good” has, by definition, no fixed definition.

I often want to emblazon that last line in my office — perhaps scrawled onto the surface of my desk with a knife. What it did when I first read it, and what it does now, is relieve me from the narcissism of minor differences that so much contemporary American literature finds itself embroiled within. Is it realism or magical realism? Is this novel thoroughly postmodern enough? Is this “experimental”? Are fairy tales de-facto bad and non-adult? Does this novel contain just the right amount of autobiographical confessionalism? Does this novel attempt to contain all of contemporary American culture? Is this novel new and different according to these obscure criteria?

Furthermore, Myers definition of literature forces me to come up with my own definition of what “good” is — articulate it, defend it, proclaim it, try to manufacture it myself.

I resolved to read Myers book, The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, during my first summer break from teaching. It was a revelation. It made what I was doing — pretending to be a Writer, so that I could fund my own attempt to write — historically coherent within the broader institution of American higher ed. I had come to the book with a short, convenient notion of creative writing’s history: that it was begun after WWII and the GI Bill in order to deal with the flux of students, some of whom wanted to be poets and novelists, etc.

Myers wrote that there was an increase in creative writing as a consequence of the GI Bill but that the pedagogy had begun much earlier, at the beginning of the century at Harvard, and was a manifestation of the broader impulses of progressive education: the idea that every student had something to express and that part of education was providing the means and the context to express it. The book also taught me that poetry and fiction, sequestered at the high-art end of the hall, were above neither freshman composition nor literary scholarship. (I heard one senior professor refer to comp once as the “gutter of the profession.”) Freshman comp was the moat you had to swim through to get to the castle of courses that “counted toward the major,” and I had finally made that transition, or so I thought. But Myers showed that in the beginning the courses came out of the same philosophical impulse, and that the subsequent battles were over turf and prestige, and that I should be much less cavalier in my pose of artistic importance. All of us teaching creative writing were merely teaching comp’s kin.

Myers didn’t take away my gargantuan level of self-satisfaction at being a visiting writer, but he did build a lot of context under my feet, and he made me a better teacher. I began to tell every student who approached me about going to graduate school to read Myers’s book. It’s one of those brief, historically stuffed books that makes sense of an entire cultural phenomenon and relieves the amnesiatic MFA vs. NYC debates of most of their self-puffed importance.

If he had only written that one book, I would have reason enough to be grateful toward Myers, but I had the regular appearance of his prose to contend with as well. Lord knows I didn’t agree with all of his literary judgments (no patience for or inclination toward DFW), or agree with his politics (extremely conservative), or agree with his religious beliefs (Orthodox Judaism), or not think that at times he was just being cranky (which of course I am never), but the cumulative effect of reading his prose over several years was unambiguously inspiring. I began to read him the way I have come to read the essays of Cynthia Ozick — as a balm and a provocation. When I am feeling down, either about the literature I’m reading or the literature I am trying to write, I go to Ozick and now Myers to be reminded why I’m doing what I’m doing, and to see an eloquent encounter with literature in action.

Not only was Myers’s writing motivational and provocative in its discrete installments, he was also a model of how one might write today. As a professor who stood in opposition to almost all of the directions of contemporary academic scholarship, and as writer who had written for various publications but who was eventually fired from his blog and regular review slot at Commentary when he published “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage” after the 2012 presidential election, and as someone who in his last year did not have his teaching contract renewed at Ohio State, so that he became a teacher without a classroom — as all of the institutional contextual girders that supported his regular writing fell away — Myers still continued to write. He showed what one person with a library card, a Blogger account, and an internet connection can accomplish.

And what did he accomplish? Well, he became a permanent fixture in my literary sensibility, and he did the same for several other writers out there currently working. You don’t have to do much detective work to find a wide swath of contemporary writers and academics who read Myers avidly, who not necessarily agreed with him but recognized the excellence he embodied.

Myers wrote that “the sum and substance of what it means to respect the institution of literature” was manifested in the “moral obligation to write well.” What’s so burdensome about this obligation is that it must be born every time you set down a sentence. But Myers bore that burden as if it were a blessing.

He died last Friday after living with prostate cancer for several years. He was married and a father to four children.