Day Three

Does the question of style have any place in discussions about the value, purpose or place of the blog? Has it led to a new writing, even a new literary form? If one thinks about all these different forms - the oral, the narrative poem, the epistolary, the diary, the journal, the novel, the short story, the fragment, the prose poem, the monologue, the soliloquy, the essay, the news story, the press release, the feature - all of which, I think, incorporate the relationship between a subjective 'I', an authorial 'I', and a notional reader, the listener - the framing is crucial, and the tone in which somehting is expressed is critical in some way to how and what it is that is being done. These things - frame, style, form - are like a neon sign: they tell you in glaring short-hand what to expect, they help you make a choice.
So, a blog and its style. It's easy to say that it can be anything you like it to be. Like the one you're reading - except in this case, my blog, there is no 'you', the reader, because it's highly unlikely that anyone will stumble across this unless I do all the necessary marketing to make sure you do - so this one, my blog, is a mixture of chit chat, essay, diary, notebook and letter. Its closest relative is however, the chit chat: a kind of breezy chattering through the keyboard onto a screen.
Most blogs aimed at a readership are written, as far as my limited research indicates, in the style of a marketing newsletter. Even those written by individuals - writers, artists, politicians, journalists - who are not doing it as part of their job.
This does say something, i believe, important about online communication. About the collapse between the private and public. About Foucault's panoptic.
And takes me back to the important question - important to me that is because this is, after all, my blog - the central question about what happens to good serious literature. The great writing. Not the bulk of stuff which is published, and which, indeed, even wins prizes. Although, as if has often been argued, only a handful of really good books are published in any given decade (Coetzee, in my lifetime being one writer whose work is astonishing), what happens when the cultural conditions change to such an extent that the likelihood of really great literature continuing to be produced is small?
Which brings me back to the question about value, judgement. Editor. Filter. Champion. Critic.