On The Blogshelf
Weblogs -- better known as blogs -- are the hot (or is it cool?) new medium for self-expression. Now you can read the best of the Net the old-fashioned way: between the covers
From the National Post, August 28, 2004

If you enjoy the writing of Joey deVilla, a Toronto computer programmer and accordion aficionado, you have two choices. You can buy a copy of the new anthology Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers and read The Girl Who Cried Webmaster -- a poignant piece of real-life intrigue in which an anonymous stranger saves deVilla from a compulsive liar. Or you can visit accordionguy.blogware.com and read the same article for free, along with hundreds more of deVilla's postings about politics, music, beer and computer culture.

Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers is a best-of-blogs collection, edited by Alan Graham and Bonnie Burton. The anthology includes articles about being a public defender, the indignities of working at a porn shop for minimum wage and some thoughts from Wil Wheaton (aka Lt. Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation), who is one of a growing number of celebrity bloggers. While freeze-drying and repackaging blog excerpts is a new idea, those who follow writings from the margins will recall a similar trend occurring during the zine revolution of the mid-1990s.

Zines, short for self-made magazines, trace their lineage to mimeographed science fiction fanzines that first emerged in the 1930s. These cut-and-paste publications became the perfect medium through which to proselytize about punk rock and its do-it-yourself philosophy; two decades later, zines served to articulate the debates surrounding the rise of 1990s alternative culture. Given their visibility (even the hipster boutiqueUrban Outfitters had its own zine for a time) and popularity, 1997 saw the publication of two anthologies (The FactSheet Five Zine Reader by R. Seth Friedman and Chip Rowe's The Book of Zines). Meanwhile, Jim Goad and Paul Lukas (among others) published books based on their photocopied musings.

Similarly, a British information technologist named Mil Millington was rather chuffed when a large publisher asked him to convert his humourous blog, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About into a novel of the same name in 2002. Millington isn't an anomaly, however, since he'll soon have plenty of company on the blogshelf. Normally a blog-into-books trend piece would end here, concluding with a list of bloggers that will soon add "author" to their list of credentials, including Belle de Jour (an anonymous diary of a London call girl), Elizabeth Spiers (founding editor of Gawker) and Glen Reynolds (instapundit.com). But unlike the straightforward transformation from Xeroxed zine text into softcover, blogs have managed to mingle some of their HTML DNA into the musty, creaking pages of the book.

The McLuhanesque heat exchange between the cooler medium of blogs and the hot medium of the book can be subtle. There appears nothing extraordinary about the new book We The Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People by Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor ­ that is, until the epilogue. There you learn that on March 10 of this year, Gillmor, in an act of (pick one) stupidity or bravery, posted the introduction and first chapter of We The Media on his blog and solicited feedback. The cast of dozens who replied (many complete strangers, the same variety of digerati that saved Joey deVilla and his accordion from a Cruella De Vil) provided not only fact-checking and clarifications, but in some cases offered substantive critiques of the work in progress.

One particular e-mail, from a New York computer geek named Stephen B. Waters, tore Gillmor's text apart with constructive criticism both macro and micro. As Gillmor writes, "After retrieving my ego from the trash, I thought about what he said. I called him up." The conversation resulted not in a screaming match but further collaboration, according to Gillmor, who continued to post chapters of his book: "Waters took his virtual blue pencil to every chapter I posted. I carefully looked at his suggestions and incorporated many of them."

Not only can blogs intensify and improve the editorial procedure for book publishing, but the digital diary format is now familiar enough to be considered a recognizable literary device. Like those early-adopters who inserted e-mails, misspellings and all, into their work (e.g. Douglas Coupland in his 1995 novel Microserfs), a small but growing group of authors are experimenting with blog entries inside their books.

Toronto author Jim Munroe recently published An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, a novel that explores the urban occult through a series of blog entries that detail the strange habits of a new roommate. "It's a weird feeling, not knowing if anyone's reading this," writes protagonist Kate, early in the novel, as she explores the boundaries of public and private writing. "This blog feels like it felt when I walked around scantily clothed in my old place, a condo on the 14th floor. Sure, there was a big window, but who's going to look that far up?"

Unlike Millington's Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About -- a blog that was converted into a book-- An Opening Act is reverse-engineering the process. Since Monday, August 9, Munroe has been posting one entry from the novel each day at www.roommatefromhell.com, and soon all 88 entries will be available online. For free.

The quality of the writing, however, is what will dictate whether books with blog entries are mere gimmick or a meaningful new way to invigorate prose and convey ideas and stories appropriate only to this new medium. As Benjamin Errett wrote recently in this newspaper, in a review of Transmission, "Kunzru has managed to work the e-mail form, with its staccato and often passive-aggressive structure, into the narrative without seeming too clever by half. This alone is an impressive feat, one that many have tried and failed."

Blog entries tend to be short and snappy, trading on the currency of immediacy, and full of links to related articles and ideas. They also encourage feedback and commentary, something that books are still unequipped to provide. Still, the Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers anthology refuses to apologize for its lack of interactivity, arguing in the intro that "ideas are always living things, regardless of the medium."

Whatever their effect on more traditional publishing formats, blogs will remain a vital component of literature over the coming years. Blogs, like zines before them, offer writers an opportunity to experiment with language, style and topics both mundane and taboo. As Nick Denton, the mind behind a mini-blog empire that includes Gizmodo, Fleshbot and Wonkette said in a May, 2004, prweek.com interview, "Blogs allow ... writers to circumvent the usual journalistic training program. It allows them to have the voice they have when they're young, without having it knocked out of them."

Zines, despite their comparatively arcane method of creation (scissors, gluesticks, photocopiers) remain popular. Broken Pencil, a Canadian magazine about independent culture, continues to receive and review dozens of zines every issue. But compare the money and effort required to visit Kinko's and collate and staple 100 copies of your latest zine versus the free and nearly frictionless publishing mechanics of the Internet and it is easy to understand why blogs are getting all the attention.

A new blog is created every 5.8 seconds, according to blogsphere authority Technorati.com, who keeps watch over three million of the damn things. As the editors of the Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers anthology write, "We estimate that at least 30,000 blog entries were read in order to narrow the initial selection down to about 170." If blogs become the de rigueur place to search for new authors, the needle and haystack problem will only worsen. Beleaguered interns at publishing houses will soon view the Internet as a slush pile devised by Satan himself.

Ryan Bigge is an editor for Broken Pencil.