the nobility of your endeavor

Dear Litbloggers of the Coop varietal,

thanks to you and Ed Champion for the invitation to guest-blog.

I must tell you, first, my great appreciation of your individual and shared endeavors. Somehow a half-remembered quotation by Henry James comes into my head, something stoical and grand and, surprise, Jamesian about doing this labor one does, in the dark, for its own good. "We labor in the dark --" etc. Unless I'm misremembering it, which is not altogether unlikely. More significantly: this recent immersion I have had, within the world of your individual and collective blogs, makes me more optimistic than I have felt in a long time about the state of writing, reading, and the intelligence of at least a good sector of the public. Which, in this time of crazed aggression, makes this despairing pacifist somewhat cheerful. We may go down grasping our vases in Vesuvius or whatever, but at least we're raising aloft some kind of thing of beauty -- with our last gasp of vitality or community.

I always loved what Benedict Anderson says in his book IMAGINED COMMUNITIES (with its title that gives away the thesis) about the stitching-together of readers each book does. When I gave readings from my first novel, THE FAR FIELD, for whatever reason, apart from acquaintances and friends and so on, my audience tended toward being composed of lonely older bearded men with glowing eyes and brilliant and teenage savants (perhaps tending toward the socially challenged end of the spectrum) with their thumbworn copies at hand: so why was that?

And do I reveal too much with the foregoing?

Last night, when reading at Book Passage near San Francisco, I chose not to do my standard paperback-tour reading schtick for CRAWL SPACE and instead, for my own listening pleasure, chose to moderate a panel of some smart friends/literary acquaintances, calling the event, perhaps too glibly, Dispatches from Dystopia. Sylvia Brownrigg (whose great book THE DELIVERY ROOM should be published in the States, but apparently is too dark for us Americans, despite its great reviews in England; Carolyn Cooke, whose THE BOSTONS is one of my all-time favorites; and Joshua Braff, who is working on a new novel after his comic debut with THE UNTHINKABLE THOUGHTS OF JACOB GREEN).

Book Passage treats its writers as royalty, and when you're done with your reading, the booksellers present you with a giftwrapped box containing a massive amount of stationery embossed with your name. I haven't had embossed stationery since I was a thirteen-year-old, and seeing the gift made me remember, again, how the impulse to write came out of my love of reading, yes, that whole thing you all know about, the private intimacy of being close to someone else's soul through his/her words, but the desire to write also came out my love of all things related to letter-writing. As a wee girl of the sea-monkey breed of optimism, I wrote letters to so many people. As I read all your blogs, I think most bloggers must share this love of letterwriting, finding your ideal readers and so on.

Never mind imagined -- with this Litblog Coop, there is a real community you have stitched together: cross-referential, intertextual, alive with personality -- and it is impressive. With a kind of samizdat spirit, and despite the toppling towers of books you must have deskside, all from hungry publishers (which could make books start to seem like so much detritus, as I remember from the days when I worked as copy editor/book reviewer at certain unnamed New York publications), you make books matter again. And do so by coopting the very medium which was supposed to spell the demise of books. (I felt this, as well, btw, when I had live conversations with your Ed Champion and Scott Esposito, a document of which I think Ed is posting online in this space or in www.edrants.com tomorrow.)

While I've taught writing for years, in New York and Sri Lanka and California, I have in darker moments wondered, when among writing students, whether all we teachers of "writing" "workshops" perpetrate a mad hoax, some kind of folie au groupe, or however one wants to put it; that our students will end up having a reading public. A reading public?

Though the optimist in me tends to feel every book will find its rightful readership somehow, the darker side makes me quote this thing I believe Don Delillo said (sorry for my faulty memory -- I'm writing offline, having stolen away from moving boxes to a loud cafe for the morning) about how, in an era when the terrorist has coopted the narrative space, writing in the margins of a dying art (the novel) gives one greater freedom.

I see such promise in so many of these writing students who are coming up, with their apocalyptic or tribal ideations, and generally feel hopeful about whatever next book they or I or anyone else I love will write, all premised on an idea that there will be a warm world of readers awaiting. So: your work as bloggers helps me speak a bit more in good faith, whether to the other writers or to myself. No kidding.

Okay, that little homage to the smartness of your work from this one appreciative writer aside, I will be able to respond more specifically to some of the more recent comments on CRAWL SPACE which I've read on the actual LitBlog site once I can get online later today. We're in the middle of a move from California to New York, which is one part of the delay (Ed had suggested I do this litblog Thursday and Friday of this week).

For now, please know that everything I've read that you've written -- whether positive or questioning -- has been incredibly useful for me: the depth with which you have been considering my odd character Emile Poulquet, and the implications of the aesthetic choices I made while writing CRAWL SPACE, makes me want to send a thank-you note to each of you on some kind of stone tablet, never mind any fancy embossed notecard.

Because why do we write if not to communicate? What's behind this graphomaniacal compulsion? And therefore: how satisfying to be traveling the diverse geography of your blogs, with all their questing vales and ecstatic peaks. Seriously. This sounds naive but so what -- before, I had read litblogs in a kind of random, glancing way, but having explored all of your, I now feel I discovered some Middle Kingdom, or, say, the multi-tiered world of dwellers beneath the New York subways.

Whew, that was a mouthful. Sorry for the logorrhea!

And -- with great respect for you and your enthusiasms, and to your continued thriving,

Edie (Meidav)*

*though I wish I had a 40s-ish title like your OGIC, Our Girl in Chicago, but as I'm in northern California right now and returning to upstate New York this week, what could it be? Our Girl of Dystopia? And anyway, can one self-dub as OUR girl? I think not, right?

Comments

[kanani]

I came from a small town.
The world opened up to me in three ways.
Movies, books and letter writing.

Reading their letters showed me how other people lived. The cool kid who grew up along a fancy beach in another part of the state, the naturalist who had something called a gerbil, and the friend who moved away to a big city, thousands of miles away. Writing them, gave me the opportunity to describe my life, no matter how mundane. Whether it was describing how I felt about school, my dog, or the long days spent in 110º weather, it was a blank page on which to play with words.