The Memes That Bind
The best thing about running Spike is the people I meet because of it. Recently I've met up for fascinating conversations with both Emma Larkin and Chris Moore, both Bangkok-based writers who found me through Spike and dropped me a line. Kevin Smokler saw my post the other day about his book Bookmark Now! and dropped me a line to say he'd send a copy. And, best of all, Ana from Out Of The Woods now asked me to inflict my musical taste on splinters readers through one of those "pass it on" questionnaire things. Insert the "I wouldn't normally fill these out, but" disclaimer here. I get a real thrill from this sort of connection happening, for the simple pleasure of having conversations online and offline with intelligent people. Intelligent conversation is becoming scarcer and scarcer (e.g. an exchange where each actually listens to the other one) so I'll take it any way I can. (Matron).
Plus, of course, I love the free books.
Despite Spike having 2000 plus visitors a day and Splinters around 250 daily visitors (with the same again reading through the RSS feed), it's very quiet here, besides Nick from Plymouth Blog going quietly mental on occasion. I'd like to generate more conversations in the comments, get more people talking: I wonder if it's because books - the sort of books we write about, anyway - don't lend them themselves to conversations very easily. Or if the posts published here need to be phrased differently to encourage more conversation. Or maybe there are other great conversations about all this stuff going on elsewhere on the Web. It's difficult to figure out. I don't know - what do you think?
More on intelligent conversation:
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What kind of books do lend themselves to conversation? I’d say books in general are difficult to chat about unless there’s something extrinsic. I’ve been “controversial” on This Space (about the LBC Read This! debacle) but it gets comments only over some piffling misunderstanding!
There’s also a practical consideration: comments are attached to individual posts. Splinters, for instance, displays only the five newest messages. It’s hard to strike up a conversation about a post that is, say, a week old. Old-fashioned discussion boards are more suitable for this kind of thing.
But as Steve points out, most online discussions swiftly take a nosedive to semantics.
“into” semantics, surely?
Before I went to sleep, I actually tried to remember whether I’d written “in”, “to” or “into”. Prepositions are my sore point. A constant source of agony, as well. (Especially when I’m writing something late… at… night.)
The whole discussion board thing is something I ponder. We used to have one but it quickly became a graveyard. I wasn’t around much to try and keep it alive either, to be honest. I wonder about trying again given there are some much more user-friendly boards around nowadays – but the volume of repeat traffic you need to keep it going seems to be beyond spike.
Maybe I need to push the splinters mailing list more and get people to use that for discussion. Although I think it would turn into a flame war pretty rapidly.
Personally, I like to read a text (any text) and immediately throw it into the compost heap of my mind. Then I’ll wait for a while to see if it’s something agreeable (scraps of plastic litter the fertile soil). If so, elements of the source text (a phrase, my hostile take on its point of view, etc.) become a part of something I’m working on. This process takes time and I don’t think overt discussion would help a whole lot.
(Plus I hate spellchecking each and every tiny message.)
Hmm. I think there is also the consideration that reading is a somewhat solipsistic experience; opinions of novels may overlap but without a set of shared assumptions it will be rather difficult to sustain dialogue.
Perhaps the alternative is to expand the number of writers on spike; the set of blog pieces and responses on Crooked Timber with China Mieville seemed to work for them, so something like that?
Yeah, more writers is good. Having Ismo here has definitely helped out – I have got another ace writer who’s keen to blog as well once he can get away from real-life commitments (honestly, children and building conservatories need to go far further down the list of priorities in my opinion).
I haven’t looked at Crooked Timber Richard – ta for that. I *still* have to go and have a proper look at 400 Windmills too – Don Quixote is one classic I’d like to tackle.
I want to find a format where we can rapidly talk about books, as in, rapidly describe our feelings about them without getting bogged down in composing essays. Shit, I think I’ve just invented the Book Tickbox Survey. Stop me.
Did you yawn during reading? Tick.
Did you have a certifiable aesthetic experience? Tick.
Did you feel ‘a member of the literary elite’? No tick.
Did you forget pretty much everything you read immediately afterwards? Tick.
Did you think this might be the last book you’re going to read? No tick.
‘it’s very quiet here, besides Nick from Plymouth Blog going quietly mental on occasion..’
Me ‘quietly mental.’ For once I don’t know how to take that!
Ismo! That’s genius!
No, really. I think we *should* come up with a list of questions like that and apply it to (some) book reviews. It’d be fun. A different way to cut things.
We can include “Is it the sort of book that will make Nick from Plymouth Blog go quietly mental”
What is this the pick on the quietly mental comment section?
I refute the idea with a wave of the hand in the fashion of a dandy.
Any how, may I add a penny worth here, even though I’m writing from my nice little cell in Bedlem. One of the ways around the problem of narrowness on Spike is to expand outward the base of writers. New fresh ideas will will tumble through these pages. Or you could start writing about things that you don’t like… but then trying to wheen people off Blanchot & Boobs may have a reverse effect.
Must go. I have to take my pills now.
I see what you’re saying Nick, and it’s fair enough. But I think bringing Ismo – and possibly this other chap I have in mind – into the blogging fold is quite enough. Splinters will be awash with posts otherwise – more than a couple a day is a bit much I find.
If you’re not happy with the steady diet of Blanchot and boobies, there’s not much I can do about it. Or I would want to do about it, actually. Blanchot and boobies, for better or worse, is what Steve and I do. There are quite a few other litblogs out there that have a wider compass. I don’t personally feel any obligation to provide a wide coverage of literature. Just the stuff I like and Steve likes, which is mostly ignored by most other people anyway. That’s why it’s important we write about it. Insofar as a blog can be important.
Next we’re gonna launch a bookshop – free sex toy with every Blanchot book!
That’s fine if your happy then stay happy. It’s just that I thought that may be one day you may have taken the site professional ( not that its not at the moment ) like Salon.com did about what is it four or five years ago now. Which would in the long term need a widening of subject matter – and the dropping of writing about books which I don’t think you will do:)
Going pro is something I’ve often thought about. When I worked at Future I even proposed a books magazine. (It got turned down, funnily enough, despite all those publisher marketing budgets sloshing around…). The problem is that you inevitably wind up chasing the dollar, having to feature “popular” authors, finding the lowest common denominator, yadda yadda. And I couldn’t be bothered with any of that.
We just need to do a better job of making ourselves visible I think, rather than chasing after readers.
All that said, I’d love it if I could make spike earn enough to pay my writers something – a Christmas bonus at least, if not per article. But it’s all still beer money at the moment.
It is good to bear in mind that Spike is, ultimately, a “small, mobile, intelligent unit” (to use Fripp’s phrase again). And that’s what I like about the site, and what made me a regular visitor all those years ago.
I mean, there’s a reason why the weblog is called “splinters”.
Spike gets under the skin of culture.
(Fuck, I’m going to end up as a copywriter.)
So the indie spriirt is alive and well at spike – and there was me thinking that indie was dying and on its last legs or may be even had been buried somewhere at the begining of the ninties – may be I’m looking in the wrong place.
Any way: ‘…it the sort of book that will make Nick from Plymouth Blog go quietly mental” ‘ What hell are these books that would make me go quietly mental?;)
Actually Nick, why don’t you tell us what makes you go quietly mental – Top 5 Best Books and Top 5 Worst Books. “Quietly mental” can be both good and bad…
‘Quietly Mental’ Fiction and non-fiction.
Top Five
———
Jean Paul Sartre – The Age Of Reason.
Jack Kerouac – On The Road.
E M Forster – Howards End.
Anais Nin – Diary.
Roland Barthes – A Lover’s Discourse.
Top Five Hates
———
Oliver Goldsmith – The Vicar of Wake Field.
David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas.
T J Clark – The Painting Of Modern Life: Paris In The Art Of Manet And His Followers.
Roger Scruton – England: an Elegy
Henry James – The Turn Of The Screw.
————–
I could have added many more to this list. This after all is only the tip of an ice-berg.