“New Blogger” vs. “Legacy Blogger”

"Good news"? Or another death-knell?

My friend Mary Scriver is struggling with the changes Google Blogger hath wrought. We've had some back-and-forth on the matter. Google is making some terrible errors, I think. This is my latest email to her, commiserating with her plight.

Hi Mary - 

This is one of those times when I wish I could mask-up, hop in the car and come over. There are tweaks to "New Blogger" that might work for you, but they do take some searching for. 

In the main, however, I am also deeply unhappy with the direction Google is taking with this new template. Google engineer Avery Pennarun nails it on the head with this comment: "Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly everything." 

In this case the engineers reworking Google's Blogspot have convinced themselves, not unreasonably, that easier accessibility via "smart" phone is a necessity for the great majority of internet users and thus a necessity for Blogspot bloggers as well. This is not unintelligent thinking. But it does not do a rigorous enough job of analyzing what Google Blogspot does best RIGHT NOW, and thus what they need to retain and reinforce to remain a viable platform in a roiling market of internet users. 

Blogger/Blogspot is, as most blogging platforms, a predominantly word-based platform. People compose and post more text to Blogspot than they do anything else. Thus it does not compete directly with Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or really any of the other social media. Pictures and videos and soundfiles can all be posted on Blogspot, but mostly the people using Blogger are writers. Were I a member of Blogspot's think-tank I would highlight that and keep that the focus of Blogger. Other means of communication -- videos, pictures, soundfiles -- should be encouraged, particularly via properties that Google has acquired. Hey, make it a priority to provide ease of access to YouTube, YouTube Music, Google Photo, etc. Data-mining these media interdependencies ought to yield rich results. But always always always assure that composing and posting words is the highest priority -- because that is the current user's highest priority, and it won't change with a radically reimagined user template. 

Returning to the field of phone use, I'd say ease of phone display is a must. Ease of composing and posting via phone, not so much. Most phone users have accounts with YouTube and Google Photo etc. Make sure the cross-platform use here is super-easy. But keep the focus of word composition where it is properly done -- on the home or office computer/laptop. "Legacy Blogger" very much outperforms "New Blogger" on that front. 

Anyway, I have "Left Feedback" with Google and received nary an AI-generated peep of acknowledgment. I notice the hard deadline for those of us who prefer Legacy Blogger keeps getting kicked down the road. Initially it was July, no? Now it is the end of September (correction: September 1). Hopefully this signifies some reconsideration occurring among the fine engineers in charge of Google Blogger. 

Best, WP/dpr 

Writers At The Table, Approach With Caution

About a mile down the road from my house is Stone Orchard, the farm where Timothy Findley penned the bulk of his work. Findley was a significant star in the Can-Lit canopy from the 70s to the 90s, the first, brightest and possibly only age in which such a canopy could be said to exist. Being in the vanguard of the generation that came out of the closet, Findley had a unique perspective which he brought to bear on a remarkable breadth of social and personal nerve-centres. If you're curious, check out The Wars or Not Wanted On The Voyage.

Anyway, Stone Orchard was home to some lavish parties. So much of an artist's public and fiscal success relies not just on the quality of work, but also (and often primarily) on who knows who. Some artsy-types insinuate themselves deeply into a scene by throwing Gatsby-like dos. Not just artsy types, mind you: business types do this also. “Tiff” and his partner Bill Whitehead were in the business of art, and could be relied upon to host a fab shindig that invitees would never dream of turning down.

Margaret Atwood was a fixture, as were Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence. After that I imagine the party list usually read like a Canada Who's Who: Robertson Davies, Carol Shields, Northrop Frye, Peter Gzowski. Leaven the firmly established with a few gorgeous up-and-comers, and keep the linens fresh, sort of thing.

I've always been under the impression that these folks generally stayed on very good terms. They didn't review each other's work, but actively promoted it. If a reviewer got a bit uppity about someone's new novel, it wasn't uncommon for the gang to circle the wagons and open fire on the dismal nit who spoke out of turn.

Put that many writers in the same room, however, and you might as well be stuffing cats into a sack. There had to be some friction. Just take a gander at Evan Hughes' delicious portrayal of the most recent group of writers to take on and take over the American Lit-Scene. Mary Karr, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides and the now inescapable David Foster Wallace are as fine a group of friends and lovers as those who drank and quarreled in Gertrude Stein's Parisian flat, with rivalries and snipes that echo into today.

It all gets me wondering. The scene-makers that gathered at Stone Orchard may have been Canadian, but they were ambitious, sensitive and prickly nonetheless. The parties took place during the free-for-all 70s, and conspicuously closed in the early 90s, when AIDS finally crashed the scene. Surely things got a bit thorny inside Stone Orchard, no? Revealing a little of the rancor and bloodletting that comes naturally to competing egos might go some distance to keep that age of Canadian letters from receding so quickly into the darkness.

Jim Harrison, Among Others

Like Pete Dexter, I too am a fan of Jim Harrison. However, it will be some time before I get around to reading the new novel. I still have his last three books in the pile beside my bed, and I am very slowly picking my way through his memoir, Off To The Side. Happily for me, Harrison rewards slow reading, which may not be the greatest asset to his book sales (although it hasn't slowed my tendency as a buyer). The other weekend I watched this documentary (trailer below) of Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison. Snyder occupies the centre of it, as he should — a lifetime (more or less) of relative self-discipline has left him verbally articulate to a degree that his more indulgent brethren (ahem) can only aspire to.

Also for your consideration: Tom Bissell's fine account of encountering Harrison, both on and off the page.

Everyone's A Comedian: Coming To Terms With The "New New Criticism"

When Jerry Seinfeld announced, shortly after the close of his monumental sitcom, that he was honing material for a new stand-up routine, few people were surprised. He was still a young guy with a lot of drive; clearly a Johnny Carson fade-away was not in the cards. But it had been nearly a decade since Seinfeld had pulled together new stand-up material, and he had some work to do.

Comedian, the documentary that follows his progress back to the concert hall, captures an early foray into the beer circuit. It’s a not-bad set, but Seinfeld is clearly still finding his legs. Following the set, he joins a table of stand-up veterans, and solicits their thoughts.

It’s like throwing a raw steak into a room full of pit-bulls. These guys are only too happy to tell him exactly why his material isn’t funny. In fact, not only is his material not funny, he’s not funny — not anymore. They take him apart, piece by piece, while Seinfeld sips his drink and gives the occasional physical indicator suggesting he might actually be listening.

Given a scene like that, it’s not surprising when a veteran comic downshifts and starts driving below the speed limit. They just naturally reach that point in life when they actually want to join The Sammy Maudlin Show: a couch with a rotating but limited cast of glad-handers and chortling sycophants.



Just how far removed is the world of the published writer to that of the stand-up comic? If this country’s self-designated national newspapers are any indication, not so far. As a comic in all seriousness, allow me to suggest, if I may, the National Post embodies the round table at the back of the bar, while the Globe more closely resembles Maudlin’s klieg-lit comfy couch. Exceptions allowed for, of course, but that’s basically the book review biz north of 49.

We can parse over the benefits and drawbacks of each model — the author pretty much loses either way, by my reckoning — but somewhere in this mess is the audience. Writers write to be read, and God help ‘em if they want to be read by reviewers and critics, ‘cos those jokers want to be read, too, often quite desperately. The best thing for any writer is to stand up and read directly to their public — their intended community. Most audiences are willing to meet a writer halfway; if, under those conditions, the prose falls flat, the writer has a pretty sharp idea what needs to be attended to. Everybody wins.

As for Mr. Alexis’ contention, my sense is his central worry is over a particular community that was probably never there to begin with — a great cloud of witnesses; intelligent interlocutors eager to greet the new golden child of letters: Salman Maudlin, perhaps. Sorry, bub, but if that's the "community" you're after, you're destined for either the couch or the table.

Everybody gets to riff off the written word these days: Marchand, Metcalfe, even me. Blame it on television. Blame it on the po-mo novel gazing that has hog-tied academia. Blame it on teh interwebz. Sure, it’s a bit of a rabble sometimes. But what are you going to do?

These days everyone’s a comedian.

Link love: Here, here and here is the National Post, doing what it does best. For further contrast here are my thoughts on a book I recently enjoyed; here is the Globe's suspiciously enthusiastic take, and here is the Post's enthusiastic take-down. Here ("John Who?") and here ("Alexis is being disingenuous") are two considerate responses to André Alexis. Now go watch Comedian, even if — especially if — you thought you were done with Jerry Seinfeld.

Harvey Pekar: October 8, 1939 – July 12, 2010

News of Harvey Pekar's recent death has not been easy for me to digest. Now that Pekar's seemingly incessant running commentary has in fact ceased, it feels like a significant amount of air has been let out of the white balloons floating over my own head.

Pekar was the first, best blogger. He sifted through anything and everything in his search for the poetry of human value. People say he “explored the mundane,” but that's wrong: he turned the mundane on its head until it was mundanity's exact antithesis. In this, his early attempts at stand-up served him very, very well. His shticks never began with, “What's the deal with airline food?”; they began with, “Ever since I was a kid it seemed I collected something.” The details continued in a matter-of-fact exposition that disarmed and entranced. Where the hell is he going with this? became Oh my God: that's me!

I first tuned in during the late 80s at the comic book store, where I opened American Splendor and encountered this short chapter about record collecting (excerpted from Ron Mann's neat-o doc Comic Book Confidential). At the time I was gripped in a collecting frenzy of my own: comic books. When I read Pekar's confession, something turned for me, too. I bought the Pekar/crumb work, and left the men in tights alone. It's funny how your mind sometimes works.

As in the above example, Pekar's gentler observations ended with a “How 'bout that?” tone, but he was also keen on the not-so-gentle observations. If he was pissed off about something — and he was always pissed off about something — he let everybody know. If he was wrong, he wasn't just quick to admit it — he reveled in the fact, before moving on to the next outrage.

I was never a Pekar completist, nor would I recommend that route to the innocent bystander. But you can't go wrong with The Best of American Splendor (A). The movie (with Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis, who are both brilliant) is a knowing, quick-witted abuse of Pekar and his material, and a lovely experience because of it. Our Cancer Year (A) is a good read, not just for cancer survivors, but anyone who's married. And The Quitter (A) is just out-and-out superb.

I rather doubt The Beats (A) will be Pekar's final work to receive printed notice, but it is a coda of sorts. For once Pekar is talking about someone besides himself, giving deft summaries of people who were bums and heels, who produced a lot of questionable work but also not a few artifacts of lasting value. If there is a “theme” that runs through Pekar's typically unblinking appraisal of this scene, it is the surprising depth of friendship that held each of these faulty and frequently cruel beings in good stead. I'd say that is the worthy epitaph for Pekar himself: a guy who could rally other people into helping him illustrate and bring to larger narrative life his own inglorious, and thoroughly American, splendor.

Reclusive Artist Speaks!

J.D. Salinger, on the astonishing popularity of his slender ouevre:

I can't explain why [it] caught on the way it did, and I don't think I could ever duplicate it. A lot of things have to go right all at once.

Oh, wait. That's not Salinger; it's the reclusive Bill Watterson, summing up his thoughts on Calvin & Hobbes in his first interview in 15 years, here.

Salinger, et al.

I came late to the fiction of J.D. Salinger -- quite possibly too late. I'd seen his plain red paperbacks on just about everyone's bookshelf, and thought there was something pointedly biblical about its lack of ornament (much like the common cover to Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet). Since I was already over-familiar with the pseudo-piety behind this aesthetic, I was never curious as to its contents. If you want to appeal to me, resorting to the opposite extreme can only help. Dress it up! Do the jig!

Then I landed the job at the bookstore. From my very first day, we were beset with special orders for "the new J.D. Salinger book" -- Hapworth 16, 1924. It wasn't "new" at all, of course; just a reprint of an old New Yorker story anyone could scrounge up at the city library. Regardless, for months we were one of countless stores calling the Hap-less publishers, who had no updates to give us beyond, "It should be shipping soon." Finally we were told -- verbally, wearily -- that Hapworth was not to be. Four of us divvied up the customer call-backs, then got to work on the phones. I can't remember just how many calls we made (several hundred, certainly) but my ear and dialing finger were sore by day's end.

The entire folderol finally prompted me to purchase a copy of Catcher In The Rye, which was now sporting a plain white cover (a slight improvement, I thought). With visions of SCTV promoting "'Catcher In The Rye' Rye!" I made myself comfy and cracked open the book. This is the first I've admitted it, and I know I'll be disappointing more than a few good friends, but I was underwhelmed. It being the beginning of the 90s, most of the novels I was reading consisted of an almost-visible author peeling away irony after irony in an effort to discover or obscure the truth (example). When I finished Catcher, I wasn't at all sure if Salinger was aware of Caufield's own apparent phoniness. Since this wasn't a puzzle I cared to solve, I was happy to shelve the book as "read" and be done with it.

It's a first impression that's stuck, unfortunately. I hope to give the book another read-through in the next month or two, just to see if parenting adolescents has changed my receptivity to the material.

In the meantime there are two other authors who also passed away this week, who left a deeper first impression on me: Howard Zinn and George Leonard. Zinn needs no comment, really: having been raised a gutless pacifist, Zinn's collective histories were naturally blended into the educational mix (I was quite pleased to see Nicholson Baker recently pick up the standard).

Leonard, on the other hand, might be a bit off the beaten track. He wrote regularly for Esquire in the late 80s, where I first encountered him. His book Mastery (A) is something I still reach for from time to time -- one of the few self-help titles I've found actually helpful. And his enthusiasm for Aikido was infectious enough to get me enrolled for the better part of a year. As I grew older his style struck me as perhaps a little too West Coast Ecstatic to be finally persuasive (Tony Schwartz caught Leonard in a slightly more pensive mood (between wives, if I'm not mistaken) when he researched this book). But Leonard's writing was part of a stream that pushed me outward in my young adulthood, and I'll always be grateful for that.

Post-script: more on "doing the jig!"