Goldberg: Blogworld

By Tod Goldberg

It's 2:30 in the morning and I'm sitting at my desk staring at my computer monitor. In front of me is a freshly brewed mug of coffee and a plate full of snacks. It's raining outside and I vaguely think for a moment about how nice it would be to hear the pitter patter of rain from the comfort of my bed, where, as luck would have it, a woman happens to be.

Fuck that. I gotta blog.

Or, well, I gotta guest-blog.

For the past week I've been the guest blogger on a literary blog called The Elegant Variation (elegvar.com). The proprietor of the site, writer Mark Sarvas, e-mailed me a few weeks ago and asked if I'd like to take the helm for a few days while he was in Paris. I'd never actually spoken to Mark at that point, though we'd communicated via e-mail several times, and over the course of the last year he'd linked to numerous columns I'd written (not always in agreement with the things I'd said, it should be noted), but it still seemed like a fun diversion for me. How hard could it be to entertain the Internet masses on a daily basis? I mean, I do write this column every week and literally dozens of people have enjoyed my novels. Yes, I told him, I would love to be Picard to your Kirk.

Cut to right now and I'm seriously rethinking this whole endeavor. Where do these blogger folks find the time? I'm not just talking about the process of writing and posting things, but there's the whole, you know, endless searching to see if someone else is talking about what you're planning to talk about before you talk about it, or if someone is talking about what you talked about after you talked about it, or, and this is the most cumbersome issue, if someone is talking about what you talked about and, in the process, says things about what you've talked about that makes you rethink what you've talked about, or makes you mad, or happy, or vindicated or, as was the case for me, learn that a person who is reading your posts and who otherwise found you so marginal previously that they actually actively campaigned against you has now, paradoxically, become a fan of you personally.

I troll the Internet for something worthy to talk about, straining to find content, reading newspapers from India in hopes of unearthing a nugget of unblogged-upon literary scuttlebutt. I've come up with such fascinating fare as a man who can write independent thoughts using both hands at the same time, which is incredible, or which would have likely been on "That's Incredible!" but now seems like some nice fodder between my assessment of Toni Bentley's book on getting her ass plowed and Anthony Kiedis' book about plowing ass, but that's about all I've got.

Is this how they do it? It seems unlikely. When I get up in the afternoon and my Haitian manservant brings me my stack of newspapers, websites and blogs to read through, along with my brown sugar Pop Tart, it all feels seamless and coherent, as if it's just an organic mishmash of knowledge distilled into a few happy media. What I'm doing, however, feels like work--uncompensated work--but one with a sort of unique, immediate validity to it. Yesterday, for instance, I posted a bit on some of my favorite books and promptly received several e-mails and comments about my choices, both pro and con, and entered into a dialogue with some folks to the point that I'd actually call it discourse. Writers, unlike actors or athletes, very rarely get to have a real-time response to their work--be it the sound of clapping or booing--and in that way it felt instantly gratifying to receive hate mail in such quick turnaround.

I suppose much of the allure of blogging is related to this very precept. It takes me about two years to write a novel and then maybe another six months for me to do rewrites and the like (I've just finished what I hope is the last rewrite of my new book and that's basically how it has shaken out) and then, after my agent sells it, another 12 to 18 months will elapse before Publishers Weekly tells me I suck. I just sold a short story to a magazine and won't see it in print for another six months and who knows if anyone will ever comment on it. I'm writing this column a week before you're reading it and, likely, the only words I'll hear about it will come from my wife. I'm working on a screenplay that will likely never be shot, will just be words on paper, its feedback perhaps being its lack of production.

I look at the clock. Shit. It's 3 a.m. and all I've got is a story about Eric Jerome Dickey rubbing up against a podium and a waiting public of, potentially, a few billion about to log on. I wonder what the people of letters in Burma have going on...