Why the Blogs?

I started the story blog on Google today. It's my fourth blog and is called “The Stories of Dennis Littrell.”

The first story is “Soar Legs” which is a bittersweet tale of a little guy in the world of pickup basketball in the South Bay of Los Angeles, set in the late seventies or early eighties when I played a lot of pickup basketball. It's a bit of a science fiction story, rather familiar in some respects but very precisely written if I do say so myself. I wrote it perhaps 13 or 14 years ago. If I had been persistent enough I might have gotten it published somewhere. I would rate it as one of my better stories.

The idea of these blogs is (1) to put my unpublished work before the public even if it's a small public; (2) to have a digital copy of work on Google, which presumably will not go out of business anytime soon; and (3) to give me an incentive to do one more edit of my work. It could also be said that that a publisher or an editor or an agent or maybe a movie producer will stumble upon my work and make me an offer I can't refuse.

The yoga blog which is the book, “Yoga: Sacred and Profane” now has eleven entries, an Introduction and ten chapters.

The “Look Out Kid, They Kid It All Hid” blog, entitled incongruously “Rants, Prejudices, and Earthly Delights” has eight entries, eight chapters. Another title for it might be “Too Cynical Is Never Cynical Enough.” It's an attempt to show that the world is not as we think it is.

This blog called “The End of Desire Is Death” will be about the progress of the blogs. Yes, there will be more blogs. I might even do a poetry blog, so watch out. This blog will also be about some miscellaneous thoughts.

For example, I have given a lot of thought to the future of publishing in light of the rise of the Internet. Already we are seeing the death of print newspapers and desperation on the part of some magazines. The book business will come under pressure next. It will last in its present form longer than the newspapers and the magazines will because there is still something agreeable, handy and maybe even comforting in having a book in one's hands. And people like to collect books. But competition from Google, Kindle, and our cell phones portends great changes to come in the book business I believe.

But more than that and deeper is the change in the authority of authorship that the Web is bringing about. There is the information overload which is horrendous with millions of blogs to choose from and millions of other sites with massive streams of information in video and text. In the information business before the Internet, we had agents, editors, and publishers to decide what would see the light of print. In a sense they operated as a kind of screening device that kept out the “not fit to print” stuff whether because it was not well written or because it was false or because it was too controversial or for any number of socially or economically directed reasons. With the Internet we don't have the same screening devices. Anyone can write a blog and say just about whatever they want. With a little more money anyone can start a Netzine or whatever they're called or even just a propaganda site. And they do.

So we are overloaded and without the kind of guidance we once had. In some ways this is good. A lot of really worthwhile points of view never saw the light of day because of the old screening process. But now they do. Because our time is limited, choosing what to read is now the problem. I believe that the next great breakthrough on the Web may come when somebody comes up with a site that identifies quality writing for readers. Right now this is very hard to do. Google typically counts clicks. Other sites rely on reader's reviews or opinions. But what is needed is the sort of authoritative guidance that can only come from experts in the various fields--experts in short story, experts in the novel, experts in political discourse, in economics, in good writing in a hundred fields. And this can only come about by getting experts to read and review what is out there on the Web to read.

But how can this be done? Wikipedia has somehow gotten thousands of expert or semi-expert people to contribute knowledge about a myriad of subjects. Maybe identification of quality writing will come about in a similar way. Amazon.com had something like that going with their customer reviews, but that deteriorated into product promotion because that is what was best for Amazon. They realized after a while that quality reviews were not what was really wanted. What was good for the bottom line were reviews that moved the product off the shelves. Consequently they changed their rating system and the format of their customer review pages to reward and make visible reviews that tended to move product. Instead of several hundred reviews for a major movie, what Amazon wanted was at least three reviews for every product. They figured out how to accomplish something close to that.

But the identification of quality writing, quality information, quality opinion, quality social criticism or merely quality observations on our culture and its many aspects does not seem to have a motivated sponsor as yet. Some entrepreneurial visionary with some serious capital might want to build a site that identifies quality on the Web using—and paying for--expert opinion.

I expect this to happen eventually, maybe sooner rather than later.

–Dennis Littrell