ESSAY
The Widening Web of Digital Lit
By DAVID ORR
Published: October 3, 2004
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/books/review/03ORRL.html
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World Wide Web is a glorious collection of the best that has been
thought and said, especially if it involves Free Mortgage Advice 4 U!
or sexual positions that approach the purely theoretical. In addition,
however, the Web is home to hundreds of sites that talk about, pick on,
poke at and generally mull over books, writers and writing. It would be
impossible to list, much less describe, all of these destinations, but
the following guide should provide you with an introduction to literary
life on the Web; where you go from here is your own business. The sites
of print publications (like The New York Times Book Review) have been
excluded to allow more space for pure creatures of the Internet.
Beatrice (www.beatrice.com):
The best lit bloggers are keen and devoted readers, witty gossips and
perceptive critics of the book industry. The worst lit bloggers sound
like what you'd get if you seated the title characters from
''Heathers'' around the Algonquin Round Table and gave them a photo of
Zadie Smith on a bad hair day. Ron Hogan, who runs Beatrice, stays on
the right side of that line. Beatrice delivers daily literary news with
an even tone and an open mind; the site also includes interviews Hogan
has conducted with authors like the science fiction ace Bruce Sterling.
Like most Web-based interviewers, Hogan prefers to keep things loose;
in his conversation with Sterling, for example, he puts his tongue
firmly in his cheek and asks the question that, let's face it, we'd all
like to hear answered: ''How scientifically feasible is your bad guy's
secret weapon, anyway?''
Bookslut (www.bookslut.com):
Although it sounds like an adult personals service for fans of ''Madame
Bovary,'' Bookslut is actually a friendly literary hub that aims to
provide ''insightful reviews, commentary on trends, updated news, and a
lot of silliness.'' The editor of Bookslut, Jessa Crispin, is one of
the best-known and most devoted lit bloggers; she's also the author of
such valuable ''Slutlessons'' as ''How to Talk Like You've Read
Something You Haven't'' and ''How to Throw a Bloomsday Party,'' two
subjects that presumably are not related. The taste here runs slightly
more to Chris Ware and Chuck Palahniuk than Geoffrey Hill and W. G.
Sebald, but the site makes a worthy effort to accommodate all visitors.
That's what a good Bookslut does, you know.
The Complete Review (www.complete-review.com):
The Complete Review (or CR) offers more than 1,200 original reviews of
high-quality titles in several genres, as well as links to reviews from
other sources, from The Economist and Entertainment Weekly to the Swiss
newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung. The CR doesn't just review a book,
though; it assigns that book a grade -- and not just its own grade, but
the grades that (in The CR's opinion) the book's other reviewers would
have given, had they been using an A through F scale. So Martin Amis's
''Night Train,'' for example, gets a B- from The Complete Review, a C
from The Boston Globe, and a B+ from Time. (How accurate is the
grading? Probably about an A-.) The anonymous site owners also write an
appealingly cranky blog that is notable for its erudition, its
passionate advocacy of literature in translation and its
passive-aggressive wooing of the comely young author Nell
Freudenberger. Though The Complete Review sometimes seems never to read
a book without perusing a work, it remains one of the best literary
destinations on the Web.
Cosmoetica (www.cosmoetica.com):
As a poet, Dan Schneider is, by his own humble admission, ''better than
Walt Whitman.'' In between writing the poems that will make him
immortal, however -- and he's apparently got more than 10,000 of them
-- Schneider has found time to offer a few helpful criticisms regarding
his fellow poets and reviewers. If you were looking for someone willing
to call T. S. Eliot ''1 of the most grossly overrated writers in the
history of the world, & the English language,'' Schneider is your
man. His site includes similarly jolly commentary on a large number of
contemporary writers.
Everyone Who's Anyone in Adult Trade Publishing (www.everyonewhosanyone.com):
One of the great treasures of the Web, this site is a listing of every
agent and publisher the writer Gerard Jones contacted in his quest to
get his various manuscripts published -- in other words, everyone who's
anyone. Jones has reproduced many of his e-mail exchanges with his
targets verbatim, which in some cases makes the publishing community
look like decent, sensitive people doing the best work they can in a
difficult field (here's to you, Daniel Menaker!). Other times, not so
much. Either way, the site will tell you more about the book world than
any five ''How-to-Publish'' treatises combined.
FanFiction.Net (www.fanfiction.net):
You probably finished ''Pride and Prejudice'' thinking, ''That was
fine, but I'd have liked at least one hot encounter between Darcy and
Wickham, especially if it involved exposed chests and a healthy
slathering of cheap cologne.'' Reader, they've written it. Fan fiction
(''fanfic'' to its practitioners) is short fiction -- or less
frequently, poetry, plays or novellas -- based on TV shows, movies,
and, of course, contemporary and classic literature. Fanfic uses the
source's pre-existing characters, tends to be raunchy, and has a lingo
that can be as bewildering as it is fascinating (a ''plot bunny,'' for
example, is a fanfic story idea). There are several fanfic archives on
the Web, but FanFiction.Net is one of the few that include a ratings
guide. Moreover, the site's header invites you to ''unleash your
imagination and free your soul,'' which sounds like a good idea, so
long as your soul isn't horrified into immobility by the site's
inclusion of 42 fan fiction stories based on ''The Diary of Anne
Frank.''
Foetry (www.foetry.com):
In addition to being the unacknowledged legislators of the world, poets
are a bunch of kiss-ups who scramble around for prizes and teaching
gigs like piglets after apple cores. Or such, at any rate, is the
premise of Foetry, a Web site devoted to ''exposing the fraudulent
'contests.' Tracking the sycophants. Naming names.'' Although the
site's blustery tone can be off-putting, Foetry has helped focus
attention on a serious issue confronting the poetry world -- as the
number of poets has increased, and with many of those writers spending
upward of $25,000 to acquire an M.F.A., the institutions intended to
help preserve and develop American poetry sometimes operate as if the
art were an 18th-century guild, complete with secret handshakes. Can
the poetry world become more transparent? If so, would it make
contemporary writing more interesting? And regardless, will the people
behind Foetry get their pants sued off? It's anyone's guess, but in the
meantime, the mud is flying in the Foetry discussion forums.
Godawful Fan Fiction (www.godawful.net):
When you have had your fill of slash, gen and 'ship fiction (fanfic
terms for various character entanglements), when you groan at the
arrival of each new ''Mary Sue'' (a ludicrously empowered author
proxy), when you find yourself wishing every story you read had been
beta-ed (i.e. edited), then it's time to visit Godawful Fan Fiction,
where the worst fan fiction on the Web is filleted with the hot knife
of peer criticism. The Darcy/Wickham encounter mentioned above under
FanFiction.Net is just one of many scenarios to have been deboned in
the gleefully malicious Godawful forums.
Identity Theory (www.identitytheory.com):
Identity Theory includes reviews and a Web log, but its real
attractions are Martin Amis, Anthony Lane, Ben Katchor, Andrea Barrett,
Christopher Hitchens, Donna Tartt and Thisbe Nissen -- or any of the
other 150 or so writers and illustrators whose interviews with the
journalist Robert Birnbaum are posted on the site. Birnbaum's
interviews are more like off-the-cuff chats, and his calculated
informality often elicits responses that are as candid as they are
amusing. Here, for example, is Jane Smiley on her hope that older books
will remain on bookstore shelves as long as possible: ''I am taking a
medievalist's view. That's what I studied in graduate school. And when
you are a medievalist you don't study what's good, you study what's
left. And you try to find good things in it.'' Even better, though, is
Chip Kidd's response when Birnbaum suggests that Kidd has become a
celebrity: ''That's nonsense. I'd love it if they asked me to be a
judge on 'Law & Order.' ''
The Literary Dick (www.jonathanames.com/blog/literary_blog.html):
That's ''dick'' as in ''Private Detective.'' The Literary Dick is an
offshoot of the writer Jonathan Ames's personal site, in which Ames and
a writer named Michael Wood (no, not that Michael Wood) attempt to
answer questions about various literary mysteries posted by readers.
Ever wanted to know why Edmund Wilson was called ''Bunny''? Curious
about Henry James's testicle injury? Seek here and ye shall find.
The London News Review -- Books Diary (http://www.lnreview.co.uk/books/diary/):
Easily the funniest of the lit blogs, Books Diary speaks not softly to
the objects of its scorn. When the poet and critic Tom Paulin suggested
in a recent essay that Wordsworth's use of the word ''mountain'' was
actually intended as a reference to the Jacobins (''la montagne'' being
the name for the highest benches in the French National Assembly),
Books Diary responded with typical restraint: ''This is so eccentric,
so semi-demi-hemi-rational, that there's really only one way to argue.
. . . 'Stop saying weird, dull stuff. And get a prose style.' '' The
ashes of Tom Paulin's critical corpus will be scattered over the
Atlantic by Aer Lingus this Thursday. Tough as it was on Paulin,
though, nothing can compare to the opening line of Books Diary's recent
post on Plum Sykes's novel ''Bergdorf Blondes'': ''This is the most
fascinatingly bad book since 'Swan' by Naomi Campbell.''
Maud Newton (www.maudnewton.com):
Maud Newton is a New York writer and former lawyer whose blog is one of
the Web's best sources for publishing industry news and general
literary chatter. Newton has recently begun running interviews with
authors and editors; her encounter with (or should that be
''cross-examination of''?) Brigid Hughes, the new editor of The Paris
Review, is the kind of conversation that should happen more often in
the book world. Though she occasionally indulges in the chronic vice of
the blogs -- has she mentioned her fellow bloggers? And how clever they
are? And how much she really, really likes them? -- Newton is usually a
reliable guide and a fair-minded reader. Her site's well worth a daily
visit.
MobyLives (www.mobylives.com):
Once one of the Web's literary fixtures, MobyLives is currently on
hiatus. Nonetheless, the proprietor, Dennis Loy Johnson, deserves to be
mentioned here for his famously anti-establishment blog postings (this
newspaper's books coverage came under regular fire), his focus on the
good work that gets lost in the publishing shuffle and his intriguing
guest column series. The MobyLives archive is still active, and
includes articles on everything from the effect of the Patriot Act on
libraries to the rationale behind the sexy author photos in The New
Yorker's debut fiction issue. Dissatisfied with heckling the book world
from the back row, Johnson became a publisher himself in 2002, and has
handled books by, among others, Bernard-Henri Levy and the notorious
Atlantic Monthly polemicist B. R. Myers.
Poetry Daily (www.poetrydaily.org):
Every day, Poetry Daily posts a poem by a contemporary poet, which
means that if all American poets were to hock their laptops tomorrow,
Poetry Daily could only continue for another fifteen or twenty thousand
years. (Yes, there are a lot of poets, and yes, they write a lot of
poems.) Perhaps the best thing about Poetry Daily, though -- aside from
the occasional terrific piece of writing -- is its archive, which
catalogs poetry news from around the world daily.
Publishers Lunch (www.publishersmarketplace.com):
Publishers Lunch is an e-mail service that provides daily updates on
the nuts and bolts of the book world. Subscription for the basic daily
e-mail message is free, and messages usually offer salty takes on
current literary news (''Prof Finds That Best Sellers, Um, Sell
Well''), a link to job postings, compilations of best-seller lists and
news about book deals. In its deal listings, Publishers Lunch avoids
exact dollar amounts in favor of fig-leaf adjectives like ''nice''
(i.e., $1 to $100,000) and ''major'' ($501,000 and up), none of which
will prevent most readers from figuring out which writers can afford to
buy them drinks.
The Underground Literary Alliance (www.literaryrevolution.com/):
Karl Marx once said, ''Of all the great inequities of capitalism,
perhaps none is so heartbreaking as the slush pile at Random House.''
Fortunately, the Underground Literary Alliance is here to change all
that. Led by an impresario who goes by the name King Wenclas (like the
Christmas song, only burlier), the rough-and-tumble populists of the
U.L.A. are determined to shatter the snotty New York publishing scene
and bring good ol' two-fisted, hard-working, not-terribly-well-written
fiction back to the masses. Accordingly, they have caused ruckuses at
readings, fired out screeds with titles like ''The Art Revolution vs.
Corporate Art'' and gotten into shoving matches with the writer Thomas
Beller (the ''moody giant,'' in Wenclas's poetic description of the
fracas). Do you hear the people sing? Singing the song of angry men?
Web del Sol (www.webdelsol.com):
Granted, the Web del Sol site is so confusing that it sometimes seems
to have been designed by monkeys flinging paint. If you're willing to
spend the time, though, you won't regret it; Web del Sol is a sprawling
Internet hybrid that acts as a portal to many different literary
magazines (Painted Bride Quarterly and Southwest Review among them),
and also contains assorted interactive features, various hypermedia
gewgaws, a kitchen sink, several book columns, another kitchen sink, a
large amount of original writing and the lost treasure of the Knights
Templar. The general aesthetic here is ''the more the merrier''; though
the site hosts No: A Journal of the Arts, which specializes in
experimental writing, it also promotes the poetry critic Joan Houlihan,
who absolutely loathes the stuff. The site's founder and editor,
Michael Neff, holds these disparate elements together with enthusiastic
good will.
Words Without Borders (www.wordswithoutborders.org/):
Everyone hates a do-gooder, especially when he speaks Norwegian. Still,
it's impossible not to admire the intelligence and idealism of Words
Without Borders, a site devoted to the translation of foreign writing
into English. As the site administrators point out, half of all the
books in translation are translated from English, but only 6 percent
are translated into English -- an extraordinary imbalance that can't
help affecting the way people in different parts of the world view each
other. A recent issue, focused on religious literature, included Abbas
Saffari's wry Adam-and-Eve poem ''Our Story'' as well as Adolfo
Albertazzi's tale about a demonic spirit that resists all attempts to
banish it, only to be overcome by a German professor's stunningly
boring lecture on demonology.
David Orr, a lawyer with
Wollmuth, Maher & Deutsch in
New York, reviews poetry for
Poetry magazine and other
publications.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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