By Dana Schultz

“Telling me a piece should make me ‘feel strange, like living in the late twentieth century’ doesn’t do a lot for me, mainly because the twentieth century didn’t make me feel strange.” – Jon Hansen, “I Want My 20^th Century Schizoid Art,” Feeling Very Strange.

A common goal of anthropologists is to “make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” The authors we admire most also achieve this goal. An effective author not only makes the unique circumstances of their story seem personal for their audience (a.k.a. familiar), the author then turns the audience’s assumptions to distance the reader into discomfort and/or awe (making the familiar strange). Likewise the best short story authors, and arguably best novelists as well, cause readers to infer details that cannot fit in the narrative. By allowing readers to imagine beyond what is given, the stories themselves become substantially more interactive and personal to the reader. It may come as no surprise that one of my favorite short story anthologies is called Feeling Very Strange, and that many of the stories contained in that anthology manage to make situations appear at once ordinary and extraordinary.

Last January, when my creative writing Professor first assigned Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, slipstream quickly joined the works of Oliver Sacks and world geography on my list of topics that I adore but understand little about. Over the years atlases and Oliver Sacks’ Anthropologist on Mars have given me an array of stories and facts, but that doesn’t mean I can contribute diagnoses to Lisa Sander’s column or even find my way out of a grocery store using orienteering. As you can tell, there’s a noticeable gap between my abstract and practical knowledge.

From the hazy, noncommittal editor’s note on slipstream’s definition to the diverse and soaring stories, Feeling Very Strange caused  the old familiar excitement to grab hold of me: the thrill that I was about to get into something way over my head. And once again that abstract-to-practical-knowledge gap appeared: I’m excited to talk about slipstream and lack the concrete terms to talk about it with.

But hey, I’m not alone! No one, not even Feeling Very Strange’s editors, James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, feel comfortable giving slipstream a definition. Feeling Very Strange’s editor’s note is titled “Slipstream: The Genre That Isn’t.” The ambivalence is framed as respectful to the anthology’s contributors, “For most of our contributors these stories are just stories. If they feel pressed to give them a label they may use ‘metafiction’ or ‘magic realism’ or ‘fabulation’… Definition does not matter to many of them, and that is a warning to us not to put too much faith in definitions (pg xi).” When you find that the slipstream’s explanation is not helpful even in the editor’s note, you know you have a problem. The editors claim slipstream is a feeling not a genre, similar to how horror can be felt in many genres. The feeling slipstream gives is cognitive dissonance, a sort of psychological discomfort the editors and Bruce Sterling agree are especially relevant for the 20^th and 21^st century. As a quick explanation, cognitive dissonance is when your mind can’t figure out which way is up or down, so you just pick a way and pretend the confusion does not exist. Psychologists claim that humans need to have consistency, so when ideas flip our expecations we do our best to reason it out or ignore the conflict.

Jonathan Lethem’s Light and the Sufferer belongs to the anthology Feeling Very Strange, and is a gold standard for snappy and discomforting short fiction. The story begins as an urban drama, all signs pointing to urban stereotypes and narrative realism. Then about ten pages in, aliens called Sufferers appear. Tension builds as readers reel, is this an apocalypse story? Will there be an intergalactic battle? But no, the Sufferer ultimately plays an ambivalent role: at once active and inactive, essential and inconsequential to the story. The Sufferer does not communicate with the characters, so characters interpret the Sufferer’s purpose based on experience. The Sufferer is a vigilante. A villain. A crack addict. Ultimately, it is the ambivalence of the Sufferer that makes the story compelling. How is that possible? Because the reader must interpret, which in turn makes the story personal.

In essence Lethem drives readers to ask themselves difficult fundamental questions (How do you conceptualize real people in relation to yourself? How do you answer a question that you can never know the definitive answer to?) through a supernatural metaphor (How do you conceptualize the Sufferer? How do you come to terms with your answer when you can never really know what the Sufferer is about?). But is the strategy that Lethem uses, blending realism with the supernatural, altogether new? Or even new in the slightest? In his Electric Literature blog article “Oh Slippery Slipstream: Who Is the Weirdest Genre of Them All?” Ryan Britt points out, “I hear that the first super-popular book in the western world features dudes who can turn into burning bushes. Historically, ‘weirdness’ has always been hip.”

In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon characters experience visions, see ghosts, and create potions all in a 20^th century world. Morrison doesn’t jump over into Harry Potter and make clear that magic exists. Rather, there is a sense of superstition that crosses over into the supernatural and then, like taking a double take and realizing the cyclops vanished, crosses back again. The reader does indeed experience cognitive dissonance, the ingredient Kessel and Kelly propose as the key literary effect of slipstream. A quick explanation, psychologists claim that humans need to have consistency, so when ideas upset our world concept we do our best to reason it out or ignore the conflict. Cognitive dissonance is when your expectations are inverted, and you’re mind needs to either push the conflict into the subconscious or come to a new synthesis to remove the dissonance. Was that vision Hagar talks to an actual ghost? Morrison doesn’t say. Without the author’s guidance, the reader is free to interpret to form their own synthesis. Morrison flat out overturns the reader’s expectations when she describes an utterly impossible scene after a hundred pages of more-or-less realism. Nailing our false sense of security into the coffin, the speaker emphasizes that the scene is not a dream. Here’s what happens: the protagonist witnesses his mother getting smothered alive by garden flowers. The flowers are literally attacking her, growing larger by the second and bending over her while she laughs at bats them back. The protagonist watches dumbstruck, and when he recounts the incident to a friend he claims it was a dream. But it wasn’t. Morrison made a clear effort to say so. And still the reader finds himself wanting to side with the dream thing. After all, what about those one hundred previous pages of realism? Morrison’s Song of Solomon contributed to Bruce Sterling’s coinage of slipstream in 1989: it’s literature that breaks the narrative realism barrier.

But who ever said literature needs to be narrative realism? Why then are Lord of the Rings and Watership Down on the classics shelf? Literature to me is writing that informs culture- writing that says something new through symbolism and character growth. Morrison’s Song of Solomon achieved that, and it did not need the label “slipstream” to do so. And honestly, I doubt that authors in the slipstream anthology need the label either. I checked the websites of two of my favorite writers, Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, both anthologized in Feeling Very Strange. On the “About the Author” page, a mention of slipstream was nowhere to be found. But I do have to say thank goodness Kelly and Kessel provided this anthology to put Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, and so many other talented and daring writers together. If slipstream achieved one thing it placed writers of a “common sentiment” together. In this light, we make progress by thinking of slipstream’s description more in terms of a thesaurus than a dictionary. Instead of a solid definition for slipstream, in the anthology you get a list of authors (the “similes” of this metaphor) to learn about in relation to each other. Look up Kelly Link in this hypothetical thesaurus, and you’ll get George Saunders, M. Rickert, and Michael Chabon to expand your reading arsenal with. Writers of a “common sentiment,” yet far from interchangeable. Thesauruses, after all, provide approximations of words, and those approximations are not always a close match. “Hands on” and “everyday” appear to both be similes for “practical,” but each applies only in certain contexts.

At first the idea of slipstream fascinated me. The noncommittal, barely tacit agreement purported by Kelly and Kessel that slipstream’s definition is supposed to be confusing made slipstream somehow attractive to me, as if being interested in it made me smart. But then I read Ryan Britt’s article, and I came to my senses. I still haven’t wrapped my head around the definition of slipstream. What’s so great about something unexplained? Wouldn’t it be better to forget definitions and just appreciate a good story for what it is, a good story? Ryan Britt suggests that slipstream might just be a marketing tool, a way to justify “slipping” more genre elements into the mainstream. And as for cognitive dissonance? Perhaps calling it slipstream is more of a way to solve a critic’s cognitive dissonance of what writing style they can call “good” or “bad”. Because the stories in Feeling Very Strange are good.

So it’s an even playing field, everyone’s confused about slipstream and has been confused ever since Bruce Sterling coined the term in 1989. Slipstream’s influence on writing is forming but not yet defined. We will explore this issue further in my next blog which will appear in a couple of weeks.
To be continued.

Sources

https://electricliterature.com/oh-slippery-slipstream-who-is-the-weirdest-genre-of-them-all-755bead4389c#.4l9q22m8v

http://www.wsj.com/articles/slipstream-fiction-goes-mainstream-1423072888

Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. Ed. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel (2006)

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

posted by R. T. Smith

The prospect of a Greek tragedy set in the nineteenth century American West appealed to me at first, even if the play in question were Sophokles’ unpopular Women of Trachis. I’m a fan of both westerns and what Flannery O’Connor (referring to her own work) called “large and startling figures,” which also populate the plays of Fifth Century B.C. Athens, and I could well imagine how the essential elements of the dramas (caveat lector: I’m a long way from an expert) might be preserved, even if the circumstances and means of expression were transformed, spun, subverted.

The translation in question is Keyne Cheshire’s Murder at Jagged Rock (The Word Works, 2015), a rendition of the story of Herakles’ demise at the hands of his jealous wife, who actually intends to resurrect his passion for her with a garment charmed by the blood of the centaur Nessus, who wishes to have revenge on Herakles and, knowing his hydra-tainted transfusion is toxic, lies to the young Deianira and claims he’s doing her a favor. But before the fatal poncho episode, the story of Herk’s destruction of the town of Selgun (the translation’s full of word play like this) to grab the lovely Violet Fatts (no kidding) has to come out, followed by speculation, windy messengers, hand-wringing worry, righteous indignation and choral odes that aren’t quite yippie-yi-yo-ki-yay must unfold.

Meanwhile back at the ranch. I was disappointed by MaJR for several reasons, and it all began with the translator’s and editor’s prefaces. The form of the original configuration is pretty much retained, and the translation is pretty much line-by-line. But there’s also an unsettling literalness of vision in Cheshire’s project which is consigned to the category of “experiment” from Deanna’s opening speech. The tragedies of Sophokles’ era depend for their emotional impact upon a belief in the ritual of the goat song, or tragedy, which may have received its genre name from sacrifice or from the dedication of the theatrical mode to Dionysus, who tends to keep company with Pan, satyrs, other bucolic wine aficionados. It’s all a religious ritual, with appropriate ceremonial atmosphere (spectacle of dance, music, costume, scene), and since that element won’t translate effectively to a western vehicle, I think the attempt to follow the form is a mistake. Better to let the original text cast a strong and guiding shadow over a carefully told and vaguely similar story, wrought with bold originality. But that wouldn’t have actually been a “translation,” so I think the original miscalculation really limits the enterprise, or my eccentric appetite limits my willingness to suspend belief.

But a translation that’s an exercise in superimposing one culture over another is not necessarily a mistake. I think the other source of my objection, however, is more serious. Both editor and translator claim this version takes place in “the Wild West.” Trouble is, there’s no such place. There’s the Sedalia Trail and Abilene, Santa Fe and Denver, the Missouri Breaks and the Badlands. There’s even Medicine Bow (“When you call me that, smile!”) And there’s the 1840’s, 1870’s, 1890’s, or more to the point: just east of Durango in the fall of 1877. And the people who live in these places and these times speak – according to their class, ethnicity, education, age, profession, gender and so on – in specific and identifiable ways. When fictional or historical versions of them appear on the page, the degree to which they echo that speech plays an important role in both authenticity and a unity Aristotle doesn’t give much ink to.

In her editor’s introduction, Barbara Greenberg says that the characters of Murder at Jagged Rock speak “stylized cowboy lingo,” but anyone who’s read newspapers and letters from the nineteenth century has to be a little puzzled by this term. What we get on the page is, in fact, closer to what the script writers for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show would have contrived for ticket-buying eastern and European dudes, a language which ignores the entire notion of dialect – vocabulary, metaphors, syntax, inflection, rhythm – and substitutes for it grammatical errors, phonetic spellings of hickish pronunciation, the whole arsenal of homogenized errors meant to establish authentic ignorance, or draw a guffaw. The result here is closer to SNL than Roughing It or even an episode of Rawhide from the Sixties.

Why does this matter to me, given the Jamesian rule of the “given”? The story of Deianira’s apprehension and suffering and Herakles’s folly and destruction is serious, though not without room for some mischief. Any story unfolding through Cheshire’s vaudevillian “stylized cowboy lingo” is going to elicit less empathy (and catharsis) than amusement and irritation. The translation has been performed, and the translator writes “the crowd was soon swept up in the story.” I won’t question his word, but I suspect that the dramatic trappings of live theater, a home crowd and a string band made crucial contributions. And to give him credit, Cheshire admits that “the Wild West has its hokey side,” but Jagged Rock has far more hoke than grit, spit, sweat, dust, hash and real slang.

But I’ve gotten to this point on thin ice, without citing examples of the troubling passages, which abound. In fact, the problem is compounded when a single speech by one character features language which has the force and dignity we associate with Sophokles, accompanied by the stylized palaver. In one choral ode the Girls of Jagged Rock say, with poignancy and antique gravity, “Broken, she sees only hell,” but on the next page offer, “We’s a-telling you,/ that ain’t the thing to do.”

It’s not impossible to swallow a slave or stranger saying, “You ain’t heard the truth of none of what you ought to./Now I – I’s got full knowledge of it all, I does!” However, when the wife (based on a queen in the original) of the hero says, “I won’t be pilin’ no more/ trouble top the pain she’s got already. Reckon/ she’s had enough,” it does stick in my craw.
The play contains some attempts at period diction, as when the chorus chants that “Aphrodite played the empire,” but even that seems off key to me.

If my objections seem unduly harsh, the source is my love for the music and poetry of the many strands of vernacular available for writers to explore. I also appreciate a writer’s willingness to do research in linguistic matters and to employ with some consistency and craft the levels of diction and range of trope he chooses. Not that I want Sut Lovingood’s speech, which is twisted as sweetgum grain and attempts to duplicate non-standard pronunciation, turns of phrase and butchered grammar until the reader stops laughing and cries for mercy. What I miss in MaJR is, rather, what Twain recommends, that the writer employ enough of the tongue of actual people to render on the page the impression of the dialect. A version of Women of Trachis that capitalized on an opportunity to convey ancient Greek sentiments in the argot of some genuine time and place in the West may have found in me an enthusiastic advocate. Jagged Rock, for all its admirable intentions, did not.

Anyone unfamiliar with Barry Moser’s art ought to summon him up on Google before reading this and just gawk at his wonderful prints and drawings of Dickinson, Poe, Quixote, Hawthorne, Faulkner, scenes Biblical and mythic, Alice, animals, birds. It’s an impressive body of work, would be even without his illustrations for great books by Dante, Melville, Carroll, which are formidable. He works in a mode reminiscent of Leonard Baskin but is alternately fierce and calm, elegant and grotesque in his own way. His balance of gravity and grace will long outlive both today’s commercial fine art of the NYC scene and the sly graphic play practiced by so many with the tools for perceiving and rendering, but not the heart and spirit for bringing light. No matter how closely he works with texts, “illustration” is too modest a word for his craft and the resulting work.

But We Were Brothers is not primarily about art, though the story of any artist’s life is bound to feature reminiscences of learning the craft and seeking graphic expression without video games or pyrotechnic movies in mind. This memoir, forthcoming from Algonquin in the fall, is one of the two satisfying volumes I’ve read this month from a genre that usually leaves me cold. Reluctant to indulge in the sentimental or the standard moonlight and magnolias of its place and time, We Were Brothers still warms me with a flame born of friction and fed on candor.

We Were Brothers does not attempt to explore Moser’s laudable career as a professional artist or to catalogue either an artsy tendency toward glamorous misbehavior or a hive of secrets about transgression and rescue. It’s not quite 200 pages long and tells just enough of the story of the boyhoods of the author and his bother Tommy, two nearly incompatible peas from the same pod. Southern (Chattanooga), not affluent, temperamental, these two misfits scrapped and snarled at each other for years, though the younger Barry usually wound up on the short end.

Who was Mother’s favorite? Who was Dad’s? Stepdad’s? Where did the money come from and go? Why a military school for two so unsuited for regimentation? And twisting through the entire introspective story is the question of black and white, how two of the same blood developed such radically opposed attitudes toward African-American strangers, a black playmate or, more importantly, their mother’s elegant and steely black friend and neighbor, Vernetta Gholston.

Black and white. Ink and paper. These became the primary colors of Moser’s palette, and his nearly-photographic drawings of family, places and planes punctuate the narrative, along with vivid sketches in words, which imprint on a reader’s memory and imagination. Just two examples. As a child in Will Haggard’s grocery, Vernetta weeps when she’s told that she can’t accompany her white playmates to the picture show. Then she runs to the flour barrel and thrusts her face in, emerging dusty white but unsuccessfully disguised. “Now can I go? Now can I go?” she pleads. That scene will stay with most readers, as will the unembellished account of a burning B-25 Mitchell streaking across the American sky, it’s crew bailing out as it lost altitude. The pilot’s chute failed to open, and he plummeted to the schoolyard, as the engine smashed through a house “bounced ten feet into the air, and then rolled smoking into the street.” The prose is spare, and Moser doesn’t spend much time explaining the impression this knowledge and sight of the swath left by the craft left on the boys and the community. But the reader gets it right at the core.

Roosters and TV, segregation and white Jesus, dogs and scuffles, plus ridicule (of Barry for his awkwardness and chubbiness, of Tommy for his eye problems and recklessness) permeate this chronicle of boyhood, but Moser makes certain readers understand that he was raised to be a racist and took some time to realize that his inherited view was unwise, unhealthy and unkind. The sibling rivalry is not unusual for two boys in a household, but the rift about race that amplified their estrangement gives the narrative a torque, underscores and taints many accounts of play, work, family misfortune and petty disputes.

How did the author begin to see the light? What were the benchmarks in this clash of world views as the pair grew older? Like a stone skipping across a still lake, the narrative touches still water, then rises again. Moser’s approach is a chronological sampling, gathering momentum rather than spending it, but headed for a surprising exchange of letters that brings two voices to life, cuts to the quick and, painfully, recalls what brotherhood is all about and how painful is the road to understanding.

What most attracted my empathy and seized my imagination in We Were Brothers is the way Moser achieves admissions of his own shortcomings without falling into a standard confessional mode. He sees himself as neither hero nor victim and recounts even horrifying lapses of humanity with more than a tincture of forgiveness. It’s a good story, as simple and complicated as most people’s lives, and Moser inspires confidence and teaches the lessons that he has learned without assuming the podium or the stage. He can do this partly because of his devotion to the atmosphere and the personalities of those around him, and there are times when you can feel the crackling heat and the mist off the river, see the “blizzard of blue and white feathers” that is a shotgunned jay. Overall, Moser has rendered a compassionate view of a passing world, mysterious and complicated as the South we know from the fiction of Welty or the photographs and constructions of William Christenberry.

SPASM THE FIRST: TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS, ONE A FRENZIED GALLIMAUFRY OF THE FANTASTIC

I have little patience with some of the heroes called Avengers and a steady appetite for others. Which enemies of evil fall into which of those categories is likely a function of my generational tastes and my own twisted eccentricities, and yet, though this be madness, there’s some method to it. I was weary of the graphic versions of Thor, Ironman, the Hulk, Captain America et al before they came to the giant screen, but I can binge with the most fanatical fans over John Steed and Emma Peel. I even harbor some fondness for Peel’s antecedents and successors like Cathy Gale, Tara and Purdey. If this is a little cryptic to some readers, The Avengers was a British TV series about a team of blue-blooded agents back in the sixties, and at least three of the four women who took the lead female role would be familiar even now to most American pop culture followers. Honor Blackman quit the show to become Pussy Galore in the film Goldfinger, three years later Diana Rigg (as Mrs. Peel, the brightest star of the whole series) stepped away to become James Bond’s only (and very temporary) wife Tracy in the big screen’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Those too young for that film may well know Rigg from her Emmy-nominated performances in Game of Thrones. Joanna Lumley, a widely successful actress perhaps most remembered for the BBC comedy Absolutely Fabulous, was the last of the sixties femme-Avengers.

Now that we’re straight on the players, just what is it that leaves me cold about the Hollywood Avengers, beyond the possibility that much of the production is aimed at gamers and comic fans perhaps too young to drive? Despite the few attempts at off-color humor or drive-by high culture allusion (a quotation from Nietzsche, reference to a Eugene O’Neill title), the stories resemble evidence in a repetition-compulsion case study. Heroes from the Marvel Avenger team – one a Norse God, another an inventor, yet another an indestructible WWII G.I. altered in the kind of experiment sci-fi writers have been cooking up since Wells – engage in endless fights (building to the most recent Mother of All Brawls) with a few misguided mortals and legions of cyberthingies (none of which can chill me like Hal). These bouts involve a magical Viking war hammer, zap rays, Glocks, fists, exploding arrows and the hurling of everything from furniture and vehicles to whole plots of urban real estate. Irresistible forces meet immovable objects again and again, things fall apart, and “those that build them again are gay” (“gay” in the Yeatsian, near-obsolete sense; that is: “merry”). These durable combatants include computer programs, glittery facsimiles of the aurora borealis, robots and to some degree humans, the superheroes being more than resilient than mere mortals.

I understand that this spectacle is all unfolding in the video-arcade post-realistic mode and with metaphorical implications with apocalyptic overtones, but I’m not stirred by the mix-tape version of which laws of physics are to be trusted and which not, when gravity works and what color button makes which items levitate or dissolve, all in the service of fleeting and sometimes indistinguishable steps in the tangled but plodding plot. In short, I don’t believe the creators of these Avengers are very interested in physics, astrophysics, metaphysics, phys ed or curative physic. And if the plot lines and character complications resemble WWW Raw, the cosmology is not too far off from the Scientologists’ version of our origin and destiny. Though I suspect that devotees of this kind of inventiveness may rush to the fore with charts, tables, Smart phones, cross-references, hard-drive burdening statistics that argue au contraire (and perhaps Tasers), I’m compelled to maintain that the boundaries and limitations of powers and faculties are viable only to the degree that they are systematic and successfully dramatized, which would require more clarity and less velocity than Stan Lee and his cadre are addicted to.

A central tenant in my impatience with the crew that Tony Stark funds and Nick Fury inspires is best caught in Coleridge’s phrase “the willing suspension of disbelief.” After all, if the aphorism that “religion is what we believe, even if we know it’s not so” carries any witty wisdom at all, then I’m prepared to suspend my skepticism and practical sense in order to entertain conceits like Marquez’s Macondo, Bond’s marksmanship, Erewhon, the magical Forest of Arden, Hannibal Lector, and certainly Renfield, if the improbabilities are marshaled meticulously and presented with originality and verve, which do not result from mere scale, volume, number, color and wholesale destruction. In other words, the film makers have to “sell it.” So the StanLeevengers leave me cold on a couple of counts: the plots are chess without rules played by characters whose physical limits are inhuman or superhuman but blithely undefined. I don’t even want to think about the psychology and motivation of gods, cybots, spybots, green Jekyll-Hulks and James Spader’s voice. Yet I’m sure they’re all calibrated just right for the comic books from which they leap with hands (or claws) outstretched to seize our admission fees.

That’s all my wind and energy for now, but in a few days, Confessions of a Nostalgic Em-appeal Geezer. Enter at your own risk.

First, I would like to mention the forum in which I am publishing this “post” – a blog. That is, I am publishing this opinion-driven, critical analysis of blogs onto a web blog itself.

I would consider myself a connoisseur of blogs. It all began with my Pinterest obsession. I seeded, watered and nurtured my boards until they each grew into a well-categorized garden of pins. Pinterest only whet my appetite. It became too soft for me; it no long satiated my interests for random and creative pictures. I started to move onto the harder stuff – blogs. Rather than surfing Pinterest for unfamiliar people with likeable pinboards, I uncovered a world of domains. These domains were owned by anyone from a mother catering to her son’s peanut, gluten, soy, dairy, fructose, and air allergies to a young girl posting Lilly Pulitzer picture after sorority craft after cakeball. What made this unchartered territory – unlike Pinterest – was the tab sitting on the floating menu above the posts, labeled “About Me.” I could now peek into the lives of the blogging elite.

A few niche boards

There is a blog for everyone. As my family and I sit around the TV at night, we spend our time searching the internet for personal interest blogs. My dad surfs for running gear review blogs, my mom visits her favorite design blogger’s sites, my sister sifts through young fashionista’s blogs, and I take a moment to appreciate the quiet and then redirect my attention to my own mixture of recipe, fashion, and review blogs. Lee Odden, author of Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing, argues that, “A blog is only as interesting as the interest shown in others.”

One thing that I love about blogs is the forum that it provides for the writer. He or she is able to express himself or herself, or not. “Blogs are whatever we make them. Defining ‘Blog’ is a fool’s errand” according to blogger, Michael Conniff. The blogger has the opportunity to get emotional, and no one can criticize them to their face – the blogger can even remove the “Comment” section if he or she so chooses. This makes me question, who is this blog for? Is the blogger censoring the reader’s freedom of speech by disabling this function? And, what is the point of hiding from others’ opinions? It makes it seem as though the blogger is hiding behind a computer screen.

All of this raises the question, with bloggers hiding behind their computer screens, and readers doing the same, are we resigning ourselves to a socially averse world? Do these people fear face-to-face, tangible relationships? I begin to wonder whether these people would be able to sustain conversation with others without taking time to cultivate, edit and contemplate their message before pressing “Post.” Also, consider, many times the blogger enables the moderation function. This means that the blogger is able to look at the comment and decide whether it is worthy of sharing with his or her readers – is this not censorship?

The blogging world has recently taken a very strong foothold within society. As blogger Luke Langford says, “The term ‘Professional Blogger’ is no longer an oxymoron.” I anticipate seeing where it leads and how people take advantage of the new forum. It can make for a light, thoughtless afternoon or a contemplative, epiphany invoking one. Make of it what you will.