Under "Guidelines," How To Write for BloggerCon says,
Essays should relate to the use of weblogs in education, law, business, medicine, libraries, politics, journalism, government, science, or other subject appropriate for people studying weblogs, such as faculty and students at a university. You do not have to attend BloggerCon in person to write for this site.
I think that list is interesting for what it leaves off. Namely, literature.
I have created a body of work, my stack, and invented a form to present it in, daily
typewriting. I post the books I write online, daily, as I write them, and respond
to reader comments in the work, after thinking about what the reader has to say.
The books are thus both (1) written in real time, and (2) interactive.
I
link to other news items, weblogs, online journals, and the like, and reproduce email
at the site with an address that will allow the reader to contact the sender electronically.
This is something new under the sun, technologically. This capability.
But I was doing it in principle, slower, with delays for publishing and mailing out
and hearing back from readers on what I wrote in self-published fliers, pamphlets,
and books, 25 years ago, with footnotes. (3) A link is just a footnote.
I was driven to do this by my inability to find a commercial publisher for my books,
the necessity to combine writing with working full-time, the possibilities for communicating
directly with the reader doing it opened up, the encouragement I got, once I started
doing it, from people who saw it, and liked it.
But is it literature? As
opposed, say, to anecdotes and ravings, griping, alibis?
That's not for me
to judge. Posterity selects what is and is not literature.
I will say my
intention was to do exactly what I have done. Create a body of work and invent a
form to present it in. Now that I have done it, the definition of literature must
be expanded to include it.
It exists. Deal with it.
It's a fait
accompli. It cannot be ignored, by sticking one's head in the sand, like an
ostrich. Trying to define it away.
I'm where the publishing establishment
forced me to be. Drove me, as I say. Like drought drives a fish upstream.
But now that I am here, I see vistas you can't see back there. Like an Easter Island
megalith, looking out to sea. Just because they can't see from their perspective
what I can see from mine doesn't mean that I don't see it. It means that they don't.
Pygmies that they are.
An example, The Art Brew School of Daily Typewriting
Writing, is available, at The Daily Bulletin.
Go and see for yourself. It isn't bragging if you do it, Dizzy Dean said.
When all is said and did and done I did it. Muhammad Ali said.
The last
book of the series is a casebook, for students and teachers.
But you don't
need a classroom, or an instructor. All you need is a computer.
You can use
the one in the public library, or at work, if the Homeland über alles Security
Czar hasn't flagged it as subversive yet.
Literature is subversive of the
Mammon-worshippers who determine who can, and cannot have a career in letters.
They
always leave the wrong person out.
I have written 238 books without selling
a word to New York or Hollywood.
Are they all garbage, or is something else
at work. Something we needed the Internet to overcome.
The weblog might have
been designed for literature.