the death of culture redux

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Ezra Pound: could that be a laptop he’s poring over?

Okay, it’s a foggy autumn morning. It’s not time for brunch yet. You’re sitting there in your trackies wondering what it’s all about Alfie, whiling away reading blogs, thinking, “what the hell is a blog, anyway, and why am I wasting my Sunday morning reading them?” You’re thinking, “ten years ago they didn’t even exist, we used to read book for chrissakes, written by real writers who had something to say! For feck’s sake!”

I know the feeling. But all is not lost, because – like print before it – blogging is something that people can and will do good things with, despite the scurvy millions who are debasing it as a form before it’s even had the chance to become one. And many of those “real” writers you are pining for, in your reverie about the old days, and books, would probably have had Blogger accounts quicker than you can say “think of a password.”

Almost exactly two years ago, on the Sunday morning of October 29 2006, I sat here at the Baroque iMac wondering who, among these writers we all mourn the reading of, would have been among those early bloggers? We all know why people start a blog. These impulses are part of human nature and existed even in the eighteenth century. Fewer people keep it going, and fewer still are really interesting to bear continued reading. This would have been equally true back then, as Mrs Wiggins’ maid-of-all-work would probably have had one where she wrote about William the baker’s son and the village turnip competition. But, as we are all only human, it stands to reason that the squire at the Hall – an eccentric chap who hardly ever wore a wig and kept getting visits from courtiers, musicologists and Frenchmen, and was reputed to have been in love with Mrs Wiggins’ auntie long ago in a wheat field – might have had one too, as a social experiment.

So back in the day I spent that Sunday morning compiling a little list of writers I think would have flocked to blogging as ducks to the Serpentine. It amused me for a while. Partick Kurp has just reminded me of it by posing the same question himself, on Anecdotal Evidence. His list is like mine in that it contains Charles Lamb. He says: “Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt, Thoreau, Ruskin, Karl Kraus and Mencken.”

Excellent! But would Thoreau have had to write in an internet cafe?

Kurp goes on:

“Another, less well known, is Peter Altenberg (1859-1919), the Viennese miniaturist championed by Kraus. In 2005, Archipelago Books published Telegrams of the Soul, a selection of his prose translated by Peter Wortsman. Clive James says Altenberg could craft “a world view in two sentences,” and his pieces are always brief, a mélange of essay, fiction, aphorism and feuilleton.”

That’s a marvellous description of blogging, by the way: essay, fiction, aphorism and feuilleton. Really, an excellent description for what I’ve always loved reading. As a child I learned my place int he world early, thinking back on it, with the realisation that I liked going to the “Belles Lettres” section in the bookshop. (They don’t have these any more, sadly: it’s all either memoir or memoir manqué these days.)

My previous post got some very funny comments – though I think my readers were maybe a tad optimistic about the ubiquity of the blogging impulse, especially among people who already have avenues for publication. I can’t really see Lowell having a blog, for example. Or maybe just in his manic phases, and his wife would have had to edit the posts when he went out.

Here’s mine from two years ago:

Charles Lamb YES
Byron YES
Defoe YES
Pound YES YES YES!
Eliot NO
Mary Wollstonecraft YES
Mary Shelley YES but it would have all been about Shelley
Joyce YES
Proust NO
Fanny Burney YES but under a false name
Johnson NO, & then someone would have persuaded him, but it would have been SHORTLIVED
Li Po YES (I’ve taken the word “Western” out of the title as I realised that)

So there you go! And when the conversation dries up over your Sunday roast, or your Spanish omelettes and bloody marys, you can thank me. And come back later and leave a note with your list.

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Filed under Living With Words, bagatelles, blogging things, the past