Four years have passed since I entered the world of blogging and bloggers, the ubiquitous “challenges” still exist on websites, those feeble attempts at becoming “well-read” or “educated.” Or how I can impress others. Learning as competition, the hunger games. (I read 50 books, all of them classics, and I am so learned, so gifted. By the time I’m 80 I will have read most of the greatest classics of western civilization. This will make me sophisticated, learned, humane, kind and insightful. Sure!)
I associate to Ezra Pound who edited Eliot’s The Wasteland and who advised a young and aspiring poet that he must learn Sanskrit and Latin before he began his apprenticeship; yet it is this Pound who broadcast anti-Semitic diatribes for the Axis during World War II. And Eliot was an anti-Semite as well. So much for Sanskrit and Latin for turning you into a good human being. The naivete of bloggers is mind-blowing, of most human beings. In a recent review of This Mobius Strip of Ifs from a young and highly educated blogger in England with a website on beauty as well, two essays from the book were chosen to harp on, one highly critical of bloggers (I expected heat on that one) and the other on education, to lambaste me, for I had chosen not to be an adherent.
Clearly her ox had been gored, and she was blinded to the rest of the book that went far beyond blogging and issues of education. Her callowness and very youth contributed to her omissions. I can say that. I was young as well, but she has not as yet reached full maturity, if she ever will, for her education apparently has done a very good job at conditioning her. Her commitment is to academe, for she actually used the term “regime” in speaking of the educational system. How revealing a word that is! Equally revealing was her adherence to the status quo in England, and her review does reveal her native biases which she was open enough to comment upon (stiff-upper lip and all that rot).
She experienced my kind of American writing as too loose or open , too Whitmanesque, personal and real, in-your-face essays. She did Annie Hall on schools, lah-did-dah, and accused me of biting the hand that feeds me. I just love that accusation — dear plantation owner, thank you for only giving me 15 lashes.
In this way I can still continue to pick cotton. Ah, the slave Dathan who chastises Moses for leading the people of Israel from out of Egypt, arguing that what they left they knew better than what lay ahead. Moses walked the Jews in the desert for 40 years so that generation or mind-set would die out. Only a non-slave mind could enter Canaan.
Her review smarted and touched me in what I feel is part and parcel of my outlook, a willingness to be fair. She did not have to agree with my views, many reviewers have mentioned their disagreements with me on issues but have gone past that to review what they felt was essentially nourishing. The most startling sense I am getting from all these views is a serendipitous discovery. Many are saying that it is a profound self-help book, the very last thing I would ever set out to do. And I am beginning to be charmed by all that.
Writers debate endlessly over whether or not to respond to negative views. (I chose not to respond to that English blogger.) You write a well-thought out letter to the editor and the magazine has weeks to compose a rejoinder which often strips your letter of logic and nails your limbs to the wall. How can you argue with their battery of in-house writers. So I only respond when I am favored in a review or have a soupcon to add. The backlash from a negative comment on the part of a writer echoes through the halls of the internet. One blogger refused to review me because I had commented on what she had written about a previously reviewed book. I believe, if memory serves me right, I just had the audacity to disagree with one observation or another, but the review by itself stood.
What I have observed as I scour through directories and blogrolls on websites is something new: the Review Policy. Clearly bloggers have ushered in a new age, for they have become the source of reviews for the self-published authors. And they have become inundated with books and now screen them whereas only four short years ago they were more open to a wider array of books. Consequently when I open up the review policy page I see the acceptable genres they review which Is fine with me as it saves time. However, some of the review policy pages also supply a rating page, stars, numbers or some other merit system, which is vexing in its simplicity or know-nothingness. I’m from the old school. The review itself should have latently or inherently a “rating.” Stars are for the elementary mind, that says size-place is the best way to line up at the school door. What simpleton devised that, what teacher!
So with the amount of books being published we now have the review policy. The screw is turned. I, for one, am taken about the amount of reading some bloggers do to keep up and now some bloggers list the schedule for completion of reviews; some even close down because they cannot keep up with the influx of new authors asking for reviews. Some reviews are no more than a sentence or two which I find personally repugnant. I wrote 164 pages, don’t give me 75 words or less. And I struggle to worm myself in.
Additionally, some reviewers will not review self-published books. I can see that as I have read some of these and the editing can be atrocious; however, from my admitted narrow perspective I reasonably edit my books and repeatedly go over them for errors before I submit to be published. I am torn here. Not every writer who wants to be self-published is diligent about his or her work. However, one blogger said it best. She wrote that she can overcome that rash of poor editing if the content or intent is well expressed. So the content of my character, as Martin said, should be a guiding principle. There is a bias here about not accepting self-published books, but not an aberrant one. I suggest for every non self-published book the fair and honest blogger should try a self-published book — Thoreau was a wondrous exception and so was Whitman.
Additionally, I have observed that some bloggers give reviews that remind me of my own public school days, the ones in which you wrote a book report and titled it “My Book Report,” and gave a “Summary” of the plot and finally gave your “Opinion.” (There are reviews which are blocked out that way with boldface to show the segments of the review itself.) With that out of the way the teacher took the best of these and using colored paper as a back matting, tacked it to the rear closet doors that had cork composite on their facing.
Bloggers really do not, in many cases, know how to review and often they apparently do not want to learn although there are very good books out there on how to review on the Web (see Maya Calvani’s book). I must say that I ‘ve been offered the opportunity to review books and I did that for about two times before I experienced the fatigue of doing it well, getting it in on time, checking the grammar and syntax and all the rest. I began to see how burdensome it is to be a blogger if you really do a good job. Bloggers admit, here and there, to burn out.
In fantasy if I were a responsible blogger, I would limit myself to no more than a book a month, knowing that I would devote time to that. I would choose carefully what I reviewed based on who I am and quite possibly with non-marketing conversations with the author, to feel him out about his work. On the basis of all that I may in fantasy attract a better clientele, knowing that I do not rush through my reading but take it quite seriously. Of course, just a fantasy.
With all this competition to get a blogger to review my book, I have resolved, and that capacity to resolve is almost mercurial on a day to day basis, to get a review wherever the possibility exists: so my book has been sent to India, China, Bangalore, Assam, several to Canada (less postage), Australia, England, New Zealand, etc. I have come to terms that this book will take a year of my sending it out for reviews, as I am not into blog “touring,” something akin to a roadshow. I am averse to YouTube stuff, as I have a “fear” of the new technology. Quite frankly, I choose not to learn it as I find it intimidating and I rather stick my head up my ass for at least it is not unknown to me. In short, some of the marketing required to make the book known does unsettle me. I do the best I can, the rest are demands made upon me and I bristle at conditions.
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