Good Letters 3 comments

By Santiago Ramos

Whatever doubts some writers have about the value of blogging—such as those stated here—can be assuaged by emphasizing the continuity between writing blog posts and writing essays.

I’ve always thought that the best way to conceive of a blog post is as an essay in embryo—as an initial sketch or impression of a thought that could be developed into something longer.

What the blog does is preserve the germ of the idea—or, to use a different metaphor, the blog post is the little tube of water that nourishes the rose along the path from the store to the vase at home. (Of course, I’m thinking here of cultural or literary blogs, not of newsy places like Politico.com.)

The continuity implies a world of letters outside of the internet, where texts are longer, and people read them with a different disposition, and with a different level of attention.

This isn’t a necessary continuity, but it’s a possible one, and I think it’s one that Good Letters has tried to cultivate throughout its existence. For one, it’s an edited blog; for another, it exists within the greater context of a journal and a community of writers and artists.

I’ve been thinking about blogging ever since I’ve had to decide to leave Good Letters, at least for a little while, as I enter my years in graduate school. This will be my last post.

It’s a break from the blog, but it’s not a break from the greater world of Good Letters. At least, that’s how I think of it.

But thinking won’t be enough—I want to keep reading the blog. There’s a trajectory in academic life which most people have gone through, to a greater or lesser extent, which goes something like this: as an undergrad, you write a paper linking, say, a medieval mystic’s ideas to the Jacobins of the French revolution; as a graduate student, you decide it’s wiser to focus just on the thought of the mystic, maybe on one particular debate he had with another medieval thinker; as a professor, you write a book on one text pertaining to that debate, which the mystic composed during his "middle period."

Academic work requires disciplined methodology, and focus on minute details. But if you do it for too long, you become susceptible to forgetting the value of write short and quick, judgments about art, film, books, events—even our own experience (like many of the first-person, creative nonfiction pieces on this site). The truth that, with regard to prose style, succinctness and compression are virtues is often lost on those who criticize the pithiness of “the blogs.”

When I read the following passage in Clive James’ essay on Walter Benjamin this past summer (in his book Cultural Amnesia, which I reviewed here), I came upon a passage that I thought should sum up the aspirations of those of us who write short pithy pieces for literary blogs. Talking about the fact that many Jewish scholars were forced to find careers in journalism due to the anti-Semitism of the academy in Europe before World War II, James writes:

They accepted journalism’s requirements of readability, and found ways of giving everything they had to the article rather than the treatise. The books they wrote had the general public in mind. In retrospect, the journalists can be seen to have enriched German-speaking culture by saving it from the stratospheric oxygen-starvation of the deliberately high-flown thesis. Their written and spoken conversations were informal seminars that turned the cafes into universities, even as the universities were hardening further into hieratic structures where nothing mattered except the prestige of position—a characteristic that made them fatally corruptible by political pressure. The journalists were well out of it, and the cleverest of them realized it: they took the opportunity to create a new language for civilization, a language that drew strength from the demotic in order to cherish the eternal.

Our situation is not, by any means, as dire as theirs. But we can still adopt the idea of drawing strength from the demotic in order to cherish the eternal. The advantage here is in Image’s mission, which has a wider, more imaginative sense for the “eternal” than perhaps James does in his own book—a notion of the eternal which inspires a desire to write about the ways in which we perceive it in experience and in the concrete particulars of the arts.

It’s enough to keep me reading Good Letters, even though, for now, I have to stop writing for it.