Once you
start looking, Ur-blogs & protoblogs abound. Whoever had the bright idea to
start running the diary of Samuel Pepys
as a blog got it right. Thoreau was a blogger, he just didn’t know it. And Robert
Duncan’s H.D. Book (the PDF of which
appears to have disappeared from its
What brings
these thoughts up however inchoately is the appearance in print form of Bruce
Andrews’ “Reading Notes” in the latest issue of PLR: The Prague Literary Review, technically vol. 1, number 4. Ostensibly a series of “notes, at times
manifesto-like, on the (often neglected) dynamics of reading radical texts,”
that use, as a point of reference, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk’s Ogress Oblige,
Andrews’ notes want only for a scrollbar & maybe a Squawkbox to become
bloggish in the extreme.
Andrews, in
a move that will not be unfamiliar to his readers, is out to take no prisoners:
The call is out for a writing
that frustrates, or doesn’t bother with, a leaning
back style or comfy ‘read.’
Which is to
say without necessarily naming names
that Andrews is taking on large portions of even the best younger post-avant
writers with such a challenge. Comfy would very much seem to be on the agenda,
so Andrews is definitely prodding here. Poking to get a
response.
As is so
characteristic of the blog form – short note: short note: sweeping conclusion –
Andrews’ “Notes” proceed not so much as an argument, but as a list,
specifically B-1 through B-5 & its parallel portions amid the C’s or, more
accurately, graphically,
B-1 through B-5
& so
forth, out of what would appear to be a larger suite, possibly A through J. One
need not read them sequentially – indeed they seem programmed to catch the
bouncing eye that wanders about this tabloid-sized PLR page. Virtually every section & sub-section appears about
to burst into topic-sentence-ness at the drop of a droll quotation:
Action: “to repudiate a
lineage.” We can experience such a ripping up of convention as we get over
being spooked by those ghosts of coherence & consensus that had been
bottled up in them. “Time’s showroom exegete”
wants our votes for continuity instead. Yet continuity is little more than the
concession that death makes to life, or to dynamic change. ‘Close reading’ is
taxidermy The best continuity is death.
Hardly any
member of my generation (or, as AARP now titles its new mag for boomer
geriatrics, My Generation) has half
so consistently pushed for an extreme or complete engagement with the
problematics of meaning & society as has Andrews, bursts of wit,
documentation, perception, emotion exploding off the page with incredible
density – the man never lets up. Trujillo Lusk is extraordinarily fortunate to
have, in some sense, found her reader in
Bruce Andrews – this is, after all, close reading at its most engaged.
But it’s
not a blog – we need to get Bruce to Blogspot or Onepotmeal or Typepad for that –
but two pages in a 20-page tabloid, printed on fabulously heavy paper – more
the paper stock you would expect for posters than newsprint. Andrews’ first
page has, by way of illustration (I read it more as comment), Robert Smithson’s
A Heap of Language,
the second page wrapped around Carl Fernbach-Flarsheim’s
The
Boolean Image. Overall, PLR is
a great read, tho hardly a comfy one [buyer beware: the lead article in the
issue is by yours truly, a piece scribed originally some time back for Leslie
Davis’ never-to-appear 20th century anthology].
Still a
piece like Bruce’s points both ways – it reminds us once again of just how
close to journalism the blog itself as a form is (but with so many critical differences) &, vice versa. Andrews
himself would in fact make a great blogger. Hey Bruce, you
listening?
* Translated
by Gian Lombardo, whose versions of Aloysius Bertrand
I have also been enjoying of late.
