In the history of literature, the genre of the letter has been a very important element. Epistolary exchange has shed light on the lives of most of the important artists and historical figures — and some less important figures that happened to have written well — in the history of the world.
This light has revealed profound emotional difficulty, the expression of love, high comedy, the pressures of the family, and the onerous effects of government intrusion on the creative spirit. In short, the letter, as a form, has shed clear and uncompromising light on just about everything.
Now we have blogs. When I first encountered this phenomenon, I was heartened. With the birth of the telephone and, much later, the television, good personal writing abruptly disappeared. It was easier to pick up the phone and call. It was more fulfilling to watch a game show than to write to your lover. So it came to be that most people gave up writing letters, and an entire literary genre almost ceased to exist.
The blog held out the possibility for a resurgence of the letterform through use of the Internet. Perhaps now people would write to one another again, and this is a consummation devoutly to be wished. The letter is so important to the history of human affairs that its disappearance was like the withering of a human limb, or worse, a human organ, one that spirits the blood and makes it flow. The blog would restore that organ, I hoped.
It has become very quickly apparent that the blog has not risen to the challenge.
In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, New York Times critic Sarah Boxer writes about blogs. She had been asked to put together an anthology of blog entries, and had initially shunned the idea. “It could not be done, I was sure. Books are tight. Blogs are reckless. Books are slow. Blogs are fast. Books ask you to stay between their covers. Blogs invite you to stray. Books fret over copyright and libel. Blogs grab whatever they want with impunity — news, gossip, pictures, videos. Making a book out of bloggy material, if it could be done at all, would kill it, wouldn't it?”
It is this kind of artful anarchy that is the norm in blogs. My wish for the return of thoughtful exchange and artful writing — in my opinion the truest and most beautiful form of anarchy there is — has not in general been fulfilled. This is due to something I had not foreseen at all, which is that although bloggers may want exchange of some kind (perhaps a recipe for goulash or the sharing of websites about Tom Cruise), it usually is not very thoughtful exchange and, above all, bloggers don’t care for artful writing at all.
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