My father (R.I.P. 1989) had no filter. I’ve had to think about him from this peculiar distance for most of my life, and thank the gods I knew him as long as I did, because I don’t know if I would understand myself as much as I do without that solid decade.
Near the end of that decade, he acquired VCR, then rented a number of really challenging films for a nine year old to wander into the room and watch.
2001: A Space Odyssey. Altered States. Rocky Horror Picture Show (calling Dr. Freud, bring clamps) and oh gosh, and I sort of wish this wasn’t so, but among these mind-bending stalwarts I have to list A Clockwork Orange.
I was nine. Maybe ten.
Now, I’m not saying that I’m a bad person because my daddy didn’t monitor my viewing. I’m saying these are some heavy duty psychological loads for an absorbent mind to bear. The circumstances of my life had already conspired against me being normal (Montessori is scarily effective, for the record.) Now I had the mental imagery to suit, stewing in my preadolescent brain, waiting for me to stumble into my libido.
But I like who I am. I don’t think I’m a bad person because I have peculiar tastes. I’ve never thought that, no matter how often people have tried to tell me it was so.
Disclosure: I got the idea from KJ Charles, whose writing I love beyond reason. She seems to review a book a day, and never gives star ratings. As I currently base my (writing) life on her (unintended) teachings (it’s complicated, okay?) I saw no reason not to follow suit, and every reason to do so.
The world is awash in opinions, and where there aren’t words, there are metrics. Thumbs, likes, hearts, reposts, pingbacks. Too often, star ratings become a goad to beat authors with, and sometimes other readers. Some aggressively misguided fans take less-than-perfect reviews as personal insults, and harass reviewers for their honesty. These same fans will only and always leave their authors five-star ratings, no matter what the book is like. As for me, I can’t predict whether a book I read next month will blow every prior book out of the water (it happens, see KJ Charles) making all my old ratings irrelevant.
So I’m not playing that game. I’m already a bit ashamed of the ratings I assigned when I started leaving reviews. What is a five-star book? One I loved but won’t re-read? Or ought I to save it for the very best, the life changers, the read-it-once-a-year-until-I-die books? But how mediocre is mediocre? What about books that end up on the dreaded DNF pile? Those deserve a review because it matters why I didn’t finish, but taste is too big a factor for me to deride a book simply because it wasn’t one I liked.
And I’m an author too. Far be it from me to want to harm another writer’s chances to be found by someone who likes different books than I do. So there. I won’t star-rank your books if you don’t star-rank mine. Hate all you want, but do it with words, not algorithms.
I’ve tried to blog many times over the years. Aside from my life-long inability to keep any kind of regular diary for more than a few months, blogging about oneself seems incalculably trite. And damnation but I hate a long-worded ramble about people’s family values on my way to their rhubarb pie recipe. Being no great fount of wisdom about any particular thing, I have never felt I had much to write about.
Doctorow is already a bit of a legend, and this goes a very long way towards explaining how and why. It is also the most instrumental, calculating, analytical, yet least mercenary (Doctorow’s emphasis) description of the value of blogs I have ever read. It has altered my worldview considerably, and I say that as a person who actively alters their worldview on the regular. I do enjoy it when an outside force does it for me.
For you TL:DR types, what makes this different from all other advice I’ve read about blogs? It’s the fact that Doctorow’s primary audience is himself. Most advice says to use the blog to make yourself likeable, create a human persona so you can “connect” with your “target audience.” Whatever you do, don’t write about writing, they say, even though my favourite authors blog about writing all the time. Even though we’re meant to “take the reader on our creative journey.” Write instead about your “passion” or some hobby or your pets… then mention to fans of this aspect of yourself that you happen to write books…
This feels like trying to suck up to rich classmates by talking about horses, then asking if they’ll buy your lemonade. Dude, I’m busy. My passion is writing more books. I don’t want to make small talk. If I’m taking the time to write blog posts, it’s gonna have to be about bigger stuff, and it’s going to have to serve me more directly.
“(T)he thought of carrying everything around in a neat little (searchable) package was frankly staggering.”
Doctorow welcomes the public to observe, comment, suggest, reframe and so on, but he blogs first of all to keep a record of his own thinking. Yes, a book or a private e-journal does the same thing, but the internal coding of blog design makes them taggable and searchable. All his ideas, given at least the semblance of coherence, cross referenced, and available all the time, everywhere. I wept, just a little. So much of my time goes to what can only be termed data management that the thought of carrying everything around in a neat little (searchable) package was frankly staggering.
The Commonplace Book as Doctorow describes it is present in mainstream thought most obviously as the Bullet Journal. Many bulleters do indeed publish, as five minutes with the hashtag will reveal.
But I don’t know what I’ll do. Utterly inconclusive I admit, but I have a well-practiced habit of promising more than I can deliver, and so I now make far fewer promises. Is this my Commonplace Book? Comments clearly welcome.
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