On Joining Oulipo by Accident
Amidst general thoughts on making it 5 years as a blogger, Max Magee, the lead over at The Millions, has this to say:
Though some folks in the bookish corner of the blogosphere shy away from it, and others criticize their colleagues’ ad placement but stop the presses for flashy pledge drives, I am unashamedly proud of The Millions for marching onwards towards being a legitimate literature and arts publication. In a time when many are fearful of the diminishing commercial viability of literature and the arts, it is heartening to see that The Millions has grown from a hobby into a business, albeit one that is still nascent and that is, because of the small sums involved, still very much a labor of love. While I harbor no delusions that The Millions will become a heavyweight of the blog world, the opportunity is there to keep making it better, and I find that exciting.
Although I’m not sure what exactly separates a hobby from a business (making any money? making a profit? does money even have anything to do with it?) I’m generally in agreement with this.
It’s strange how prevalent remains the train of thought that runs something like "Bloggers are in it for love, as opposed to pure commercial/career advancement, so thus they should shun all attempts to make money from their blogs, use them to further writing careers, etc." It’s as though when you sign up with Tyepapd you have to take your holy orders as well and lock yourself up in a cloister. To me, this makes no sense for a number of reasons.
Primary among them is that the same people who often voice this blog-abnegation creedo seem to have no problem imbibing the work of (and sometimes contributing to) newspapers and magazines. In fact, I don’t really know of anyone pure enough that they entirely shun the enterprise of mainstream literary criticism. And yet, though they recognize the good criticism can still come out of for-profit enterprises, they seem to think that criticism on for-profit blogs is a betrayal of some sacred trust.
Really, anyone who truly believes in the blog-abnegation creedo should check out political blogs. This is where the real money is being made, and it’s rare to find a political blog that has suddenly become corrupted by the major money flowing through it. (If anything, all that money has allowed these bloggers to extend their reach and make their blogs far better enterprises.)
I don’t see a problem with people who, at root, have a deep love of literature, but who would also like to use that love to get a little cash/attention/respect/etc. In fact, most people I know wish they could get a little of each by doing what it is they say they love. As with anything, some individuals will go too far in trying to get paid, but that doesn’t mean that people can’t develop a balance between the two.
So basically, if Max sees his blog as a business and wants to expand it along those lines, good for him. Obviously, when one begins to take a business-minded approach to anything there are certain risks involved, but intelligent, well-meaning individuals have managed to circumvent those risks in the past, so I see no reason why Max can’t do the same.
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Since both you and Max appear too diffident to cite me by name, I’ll save you the trouble and chime in here. My particular post, which was by no means a slam of what you and Max are doing, merely pointed to the current emphasis away from community in the litblogosphere — a shift that is transforming this medium into something not altogether different from the newspapers we once complained about. Blogs as inflexible gatekeepers, as opposed to a “conversational” and interconnected medium. As such, if the litblogosphere is not careful, it may very well face the same problems of staleness and complacency that dominate some newspaper book review sections (I’m looking at you, Tanenhaus!) on a weekly basis. Community kept us all helping each other, working to innovate the medium and keeping things fresh and lively. And the honesty and encouragement within that network helped many to spawn their own projects. Which was a very good thing.
Now, this early excitement has been replaced by the “chore” of turning out a daily post, as opposed to the passion of books or the ambition of a project like the Quarterly Conversation. I count three spelling/grammatical errors in this post, Scott. I’ve long told you, both publicly and privately, that you’re a good writer and have interesting thoughts about books. But in this case, why didn’t you have somebody take a look at this post? Why don’t you take Conversational Reading more seriously?
You have every right, of course, to fill this blog up with intrusive advertisements. Just as I have every right to pursue a “flashy pledge drive” that did not intrude upon the content and that was very clear in its ethics. I agree with you that how one goes about making money at something they love is entirely their business. I only express reservations about how pronounced it appears within the content, and to what degree it causes one’s words or passions to be corrupted.
Community, by contrast, offered something to litblogs that was comparable to the SETI@Home project, where literature served as the program we all kept running on our respective computers for a common and united goal. Now that money has become a more salient part of the equation, I’m wondering if, in this self-interest, that the litblogosphere is now starting to resemble the fragmented snake in Ben Franklin’s woodcut.
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