I started this blog back in 2007, and several years later blew past the “1000 Posts” marker without even noticing. I thought that I’d make a note of No. 2000, but somehow missed that one too. Since my new format makes it easy to keep track of the number of posts, I’m determined not to let No. 3000 get past me without a fight.
I started “Literature R US” with the intention of making it about, well, “Literature”, most specifically my literature, because I had written quite a bit of it, with very little success. Back in the early oughties, I had published two dead-tree novels via Otto Penzler/Carroll & Graf (here and here), to sadly little acclaim or success, and, naturally, a bad track record is far worse than none at all. And so the rest was silence, no matter how long or how hard I typed.
I ran through all my accumulated work in a couple of years, adding bits and pieces of comment here and there, the earliest being a short, not very kind take on Norman Mailer, Norman Mailer, RIP. Despite these efforts, I was clearly not breaking the Internet. I had finished a new novel, thinking to run it online as well when a friend suggested I try self-publishing, something I approached with great trepidation, but eventually managed to get off the ground, with the result that I now had a blog with no ready stock of content. By this time (I guess) I had reached the point that making occasional comments on this and that had become enough of a habit with me that I continued doing so, sometimes turning out pretty substantial essays, like this one on William Faulkner.
I first got into writing for the Net in the late nineties for the estimable and still going strong Bright Lights Film Journal—all my stuff here. The original, dead-tree Journal was a quarterly, and BL’s more than estimable editor/publisher Gary Morris continued that tradition at first, but then recognized that a “blog” was much more netty. To speed things up, us contributors were given instructions in how to code our text to go into a blog, so that it wasn’t too hard to set up my own, using “Blogspot”, which I think was a Google thing.
A couple of years later I heard that Google, or whoever, wouldn’t be updating Blogspot any more. I talked to some young people, relatively, who assured me that all the cool kids were going to “Tumblr”, so I did the same. Once I got there I realized that Tumblr was deliberately designed not for boring, text-heavy posts like mine, but by then it was too late, so I tumbled along for a few more years. Then I heard that Tumblr was probably going to go out of business because it was abandoning porno, which was a shock to me, because I didn’t know Tumblr had porno. Anyway, I decided I’d better switch to something that I had more control over, sort of, ending up on “Blue Host”, via “WordPress”, both designed for people who know a whole lot more about what they’re doing than I do, plus I have to pay for it, but this way I know there’s no porno involved.
To say that things have been going down hill in the world since I started blogging is putting it mildly. There have been a number of serious bright spots—like gay marriage, for example—but, otherwise, the best thing you can say about the first 22 years of the 21st century is that they weren’t as bad as the first 22 years of the 20th century.1 And that is damned faint praise indeed. Even as I’m writing this, Vladimir Putin is putting a cherry on this shit sundae, thanks to our own previous stupidity. If I had it all to do over again, instead of “Literature R Us” I might have gone with “A Journal of the Plague Years”. Well, you can’t think of everything.
1. Or even the 19th, at least in Europe, seriously marred by the Napoleonic Wars.
