This Blog Is Part of the Problem
My writing it, your reading it--or it would be part of the problem, according to Virginia Woolf, if she were around. Prepping for class, I came across this passage by scholar Alex Zwerdling:
Nonetheless, if I report that Camille Dungy's lecture here at UNL about editing Black Nature was excellent, you are hereby advised to ignore me and go immerse yourself in the strenuous art of reading it for yourself.
Insinuated between writer and reader--it sounds far more sly and kinky than I generally feel when I'm typing up these little bulletins.[Woolf] hated any form of publicity . . . because it transformed the strenuous art of reading into the easily digestible pap of "interviews with the author," reviews of, lectures on--everything but the thing itself. She felt that serious reading was gradually becoming extinct, to be replaced by forms of communication designed by a new class of cultural middlemen who had insinuated themselves between writer and reader.
Nonetheless, if I report that Camille Dungy's lecture here at UNL about editing Black Nature was excellent, you are hereby advised to ignore me and go immerse yourself in the strenuous art of reading it for yourself.
Robert Nagle
said:
There is a difference between being goaded by the publisher to do interviews and making regular (and often spontaneous) remarks on a weblog. I've become familiar with many a writer this way. An argument could be made that blogging dilutes our critical sensibilities (it's so much easier just to link to something and make a snarky remark). On the other hand, sometimes the habit of linking-and-snarking does lead to fuller treatments of a subject down the road.
May 18, 2010 10:47 AM