But now the blog’s purpose has come to an end, both this blog for me as a writer and the blog in general as a cultural technology. I appreciate the readers who have stopped by over the years, and invite anyone who likes to keep in touch with me via email: jonsealy [at] yahoo [dot] com.

Blogging as social media

Things happen fast online. In 2007, Web 2.0 was a new phenomenon. Blogs were on the rise at an exponential rate. Social media existed (Facebook’s NewsFeed was launched in 2006), but connecting online was still novel. Blogs served a kind of social media function.

Jumping on the bandwagon, a number of graduate school friends and I created our blogs and posted our thoughts and commented on each other’s pages. It was a network, and we were linked by the  “blogroll.”

Since then, several things have happened. Twitter (launched in 2006) became mainstream; Facebook granted more control over your wall so that your Facebook page could serve the same function as blogs had in 2007; and a number of other social media sites emerged, including Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr. Each of these forums offers a better way to connect, socially, than a blogroll or an RSS feed.

Perhaps most importantly, mainstream media got on board the bandwagon. Sites such as Forbes and The Atlantic have great blog content, to say nothing of all-online forums like The Millions and The Rumpus. Online content has exploded to the point where we need filters. The role of mainstream media is to filter out us masses. Individual blogs, now, are like sparks firing in a wide and lonesome universe.

‘A Writer Reads’

Back on Blogger, I titled this blog “A Writer Reads.” I was in graduate school, in my apprenticeship years, and all the best writers I talked to said the same thing, that the secret to being a good writer was to read a lot and write a lot. In those years, I’d set a regimen to read 100 pages and write 1,000 words each day, at least five days a week.

Having a blog to report to was a way to keep me on task, and over the years I’ve thought of it as being my version of Henry James’s Notebooks. Now I’ve got a library of books in my living room, and since starting this blog, I’ve completed three novels, one novella, and a book’s worth of short stories. Some of the stories have been published, and I’m shopping around one of the novels.

In short, reading and writing have become habit for me, and I think I’ve graduated from my apprenticeship years, at least as much as any writer ever does. If you follow blogs regularly, you know that unless the focus is current events, blog-writers eventually run out of content. I could keep writing about books I’m reading, but it would be more of the same, and I feel my time is better spent elsewhere.

Contact

One reason I moved from Blogger to this website is because an editor once left me a comment saying she liked one of my stories she’d read elsewhere. I stumbled on that comment by chance many months later and sent her a story and an apology for not responding sooner.

Her magazine took my story, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss any other opportunities. I’m building my freelance business now, and I’m in still in what I’m calling the “look at me” phase. I’m marketing myself and trying to land clients. Right now I have some weeks of 75% work and 25% marketing, and other weeks of 25% work and 75% marketing. I suspect I’ll eventually be doing mostly work and occasional marketing.

So too as a fiction writer. I’m sending “look at me” letters to agents, trying to sell a book, but if all goes according to plan I’ll eventually be on the bookshelves rather than in my cyber-sandbox. But until then, my plan is to create a static home page for this site and archive the blog for the search engines until I have a book coming out.

Final comments

Check out this article in The Atlantic about Facebook making us lonely. The writer starts with an anecdote about a B movie star who died and wasn’t found for nearly a year. Her network had grown wide and shallow.

On Facebook, we accumulate friends from all the nooks and crannies of our lives, but with several hundred connections, I believe it’s impossible to sustain anything meaningful. My recent posts there mainly have been links to interesting articles elsewhere, and when I log in I mostly do so to find some interesting meme, such as Texts From Hillary. A wide network, shallow connections.

The internet is full of such trends, sparks that flare briefly and fade just as fast—a Tweet, an infograph, a blog post. Trying to create a more sustained fire might be anachronistic, but in response, I’d quote the epilogue to Blood Meridian, which seems to be about a Gnostic hero carrying the fire in the face of an indifferent world:

In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again.

My wife says I’m a pessimist about humanity’s future, though I might argue it’s an act of radical optimism to attempt to make lasting art in today’s culture. With that thought, I’m off to the desert to try to make fire.

On the other hand, neuroscientists more recently are demonstrating on the beneficial effects of reading fiction. As the NY Times reported, brain scans that measure what happens when we read “a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between character” suggest that reading literary fiction stimulates the brain and affects how we behave.

Enter Farmer. The entire project of this novel seems to be contemplation. Set in rural Michigan in the 1950s, the novel is about a 43-year-old farmer and schoolteacher named Joseph who has a bum leg and stands at a crossroads: His mother is dying, his school is closing, and everyone is urging him to marry his long-time girlfriend. He also has struck up a relationship with a 17-year-old student, which complicates things.

Despite the drama of the above synopsis, most of the novel’s prose is dedicated to quiet meditation and careful observations of the world on the farm. The first chapter opens, “Ground ivy, glecoma hedereceae, or called gill-over-the-ground: it spread from the pump shed attached to the kitchen out to the barnyard where it disappeared under cow and horse hooves and the frenetic scratching of chickens.”

Later in that same chapter, Joseph’s sisters grow nostalgic while looking at old photos. Joseph’s attitude is that the “dead were irresistible, another planet so near but invisible to earth, whose gravity turned and colored the steps of the living.” The novel is filled with precise descriptions and poignant observations.

Joseph’s story is engaging and moving, and Farmer is reminiscent of other contemplative novels in which not much happens, in particular John Gardner’s Nickel Mountain, Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.

Robinson’s fiction has won numerous prizes, so can’t argue readers don’t appreciate quiet fiction any longer, but when you read the newspaper headlines or consider the idle chatter on Facebook and Twitter, it does make you wonder what kind of a future there is for writers like Jim Harrison, whose interest seems to lie in looking at the world, describing what he sees and considering what it means.

Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil predict a looming technological singularity, where humans and machines will merge into god-like superhumans with direct mind-to-network access. Words like “contemplation” and “meditation” seem quaint when you consider what life will be like with a metaphorical Google-chip embedded in our brains, but for now, Farmer is a pleasant reminder of what serious fiction is capable of.

I read In the Woods in a single day, and immediately bought the next two and read them within the week. Each novel is about a different mystery, so there’s no reason to read them in order, though it is interesting to see how French develops as a writer and how each new narrator lives up to and defies the perspective from the previous narrator.

In the Woods is narrated by Rob, a murder squad detective, who as a child was one of three kids to go into the woods. He was the only one to make it out, with blood on his shoes and no memory of what happened, and the other two children disappeared. Now, Rob and his partner, Cassie, are sent in to investigate the murder of a child in those same woods.

This is a well-plotted mystery, and French keeps you turning the pages even when you think you know what happened. What separates French’s work from the average mystery is her attention to language and her verisimilitude. She evokes the characters and the setting with an attention to craft that reminded me of The Wire.

Her one weak spot, in this first novel, is that you occasionally can tell the author is a woman writing as a man. Rob is a self-destructive character, but French takes pains to explain away his purely Platonic interest in his partner—and that over-convincing borders on overcompensation.

That challenge is alleviated in The Likeness, overall a more confidently written novel told from Cassie’s point of view. In a Wicklow village outside Dublin, a young woman is murdered, and she’s the spitting image of Cassie. Since the police have no suspects and no motives, Cassie goes undercover into the woman’s life (the woman, herself living under an assumed name, roomed with four Trinity students in a spooky old house) to see what she can dig up.

As with In the Woods, The Likeness is a quick read and a well-written novel. The situation is completely unrealistic, but given the situation, French totally convinces you of everything that follows. What’s more, part of the intrigue is that you, like Cassie, are able to go undercover, to experience the dangers of being found out, and to see first-hand the menace of Ireland’s class tensions, which are rooted in the history of English rule and Protestant ascendancy.

Faithful Place leaves the murder squad for the life of Frank Mackey, who runs undercover operations. Frank grew up in a rough tenement neighborhood in Dublin, and he left home for good at nineteen when his girlfriend abandoned him for England—or so he thought. Twenty-two years later, he receives a call from his sister; they’ve found his girlfriend’s suitcase in an abandoned tenement, and he goes home to investigate, and in the process he must reckon with his crazy family and the childhood he thought he left years ago.

Frank might be French’s most intriguing narrator. He’s smart and cunning and has fewer moral scruples than her previous narrators. While this novel, ultimately, has the same combination of police investigation and psychological exploration as her first two, her prose is more confident still, and her attention to the nuances of place—treated obliquely in her first two—is fully realized.

The plot is set up like a detective novel: Galip’s wife writes a cursory note and then disappears. She may have run off with Galip’s cousin, Celal, a political newspaper columnist with a huge following. Galip goes around the city trying to find them, and he enters Celal’s life and begins writing his columns. He spends his nights in one of Celal’s many apartments, and begins fielding threats from an obsessed reader. The danger rises.

Unlike a detective novel, however, The Black Book is a dense, postmodern gambit about identity and the nature of storytelling. Every other chapter is one of Celal’s columns (which after a while, I began skimming and then skipping altogether when they got boring). And Galip finds himself ruminating over truth and fiction, and telling stories in bars, and considering Celal’s fame as a product of the story he’s told about being a native of Istanbul.

I say “gambit” because it reminds me of Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. I skimmed plenty through The Black Book, through places where I saw what he was up to but that I wasn’t getting much out of, but the ending is well worth the patience to reach. I don’t want to spoil anything, but there’s a kind of new layer added to everything, involving the narrator of the story, which is strange and interesting.

The first story, “Wittgenstein’s Lolita,” is about a dude named Rideout, who gets involved with this neighbor woman whose boyfriend is abusing her. It shares all the trademarks of a William Gay story, and is a strong piece except for one copyediting moment where for a page he starts calling the boyfriend Alfred instead of Albert. That really threw me. The second story, “The Iceman,” is short and strange and less memorable than the first. The back of the book describes it as an excerpt from Gay’s forthcoming novel, which I presume is referring to The Lost Country.

What I’m really hoping is that someone will collect all of Gay’s stories into one volume. He’s got several, including “Wreck on the Highway” and “Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?” that were published in journals but not in a collection. That collection would rank right up with O’Connor’s complete stories (though I think it would be shorter than O’Connor’s).

In the opening, Schwartz recruits Henry and takes him under his wing so that three years later, the boys are best friends, the team is having a championship season, and scouts are considering Henry for the big leagues. Of course, trouble ensues as the story opens up to focus on the college president, Guert Affenlight, his daughter, and Henry’s gay roommate.

With its sprawling cast of characters and 500+ pages, the novel has been marketed as the next Great American Novel, and perhaps no recent novel save Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was as highly anticipated. Last October, Vanity Fair ran a long piece about Harbach’s path to publication, which involved 10 years of copyediting in New York and keeping the bill collectors at bay, followed by a half-million dollar advance, editing by the guy who edited Hemingway’s posthumous works, and global fame and fortune.

Harbach himself wrote a telling essay for Slate, “MFA vs. NYC,” which set off a firestorm among at least the MFA crowd of writers. In the essay, Harbach argued that there are two distinct literary cultures in America today: the MFA culture, which centers around the workshop, emphasizes the high-brow short story, and trains future writing instructors; and the New York City culture, which centers around publishing parties, emphasizes the middlebrow novel, and aims for fame and fortune.

No reductionist argument is completely fair to either side, but it’s hard to consider Harbach’s novel without also considering the system surrounding its publication. I think he sees himself in the NYC culture, and his novel definitely appeals to the wide middle—almost to a fault.

While I enjoyed reading it, and while the characters feel real and fully developed, it doesn’t have the larger stakes that a novel like Freedom has. Whereas the War on Terror and the Bush administration’s appropriation of the word “freedom” underlie Franzen’s latest novel, the closest Harbach gets to cultural commentary is two players arguing in the locker room: “Israel!” “Palestine!” “Israel!” “Palestine!”

This isn’t to say the book needed to be more political, just that it lacked a kind of breadth I found in the Franzen. The Art of Fielding has more in common with Michael Chabon’s exuberant yet cloistered first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh—a good book (especially for an English major) but maybe not the Great American Novel reviewers would have you believe. (Whether the Great American Novel is still possible, or ever existed to begin with, is a different discussion for a different day.)