Sunday, April 04, 2004
Real Literature
I don't like the word obsession, and I think I would be the last to use that word, but with the lack of a better word, I think I'm developing a little obsession. For the past month I've been finding myself spending more and more time online surfing through weblogs. Gosh, I'm afraid to admit that I've been enjoying it so much that it might just be making its way up to one of my favorite hobbies these days.
Not that I have the time at all, but some days I can find myself spending two hours just surfing weblog content. It's about 2am now and I could have sworn it was hardly midnight a second ago! Some days I don't spend any time sifting through the virtual pages of weblogs, but I suppose that's kind of a good thing. With all of my boring 21 credits worth of school work, I really shouldn't/can't afford to spend two hours a day on this kind of stuff.
So what is it about weblogs anyway? Something about the stories and the people... It's all just so much more real. Sure there are many weblogs out there that are devoted to propaganda, blah blah and all that stuff, but there's a ton of purely real, raw content. I like that. I wonder if my growing affinity for this kind of content has in any way formed as a result of the increasing amount of dry, academic content I'm sort of forced to read daily.
Having to read hundreds of pages worth of biology, linguistics and chemistry textbook material, scientific articles about food science, and sociological essays about stratification and inequality makes my eyes want to puke. Everything's so standardly type writing, so wordy, so long, so boring, so non-descript, so dry. It's like, get to the point!
I wonder what it'd be like if we had to read weblog stuff material in school. I'd probably get sick of it after a while, but for the most part, I think I'd appreciate it a whole lot more. The academic world just seems somewhat disconnected from any sense of the exigencies and stressors of the real world, and that's unfortunate. Do I really have to read an excruciatingly detailed description of morphophonology? Must I really have to endure the minute details about a statistical analysis that some sociological data from the 1960s were subjected to? Oh please, and don't even get me started on biology and chemistry.
I've been looking at the course roster for next my Fall '04 semester classes, and I noticed the first class listed under the department of Comparative Literature is called "Great Books." Or the English department's first listed course, "English Literary Traditions." I wonder if this weblog-style of writing is represented anywhere among the "great books," or if the many-thousands of voices of writers like us have any place in my college's (and others') concept of "English literary traditions."
To me, the writing that I read online seems much more like real literature. The fact that any anonymous teenager can just start writing about the everyday realities of his/her life and in the process build a strong readership out of nowhere, touch the heart of thousands of readers, and win awards just seems wonderful to me. Sure "academia" has its own time, place, and importance, but I think it represent a very incomplete picture of the world if it mostly ignores the phenomena of real literature that's developing more and more every day.
Not that I have the time at all, but some days I can find myself spending two hours just surfing weblog content. It's about 2am now and I could have sworn it was hardly midnight a second ago! Some days I don't spend any time sifting through the virtual pages of weblogs, but I suppose that's kind of a good thing. With all of my boring 21 credits worth of school work, I really shouldn't/can't afford to spend two hours a day on this kind of stuff.
So what is it about weblogs anyway? Something about the stories and the people... It's all just so much more real. Sure there are many weblogs out there that are devoted to propaganda, blah blah and all that stuff, but there's a ton of purely real, raw content. I like that. I wonder if my growing affinity for this kind of content has in any way formed as a result of the increasing amount of dry, academic content I'm sort of forced to read daily.
Having to read hundreds of pages worth of biology, linguistics and chemistry textbook material, scientific articles about food science, and sociological essays about stratification and inequality makes my eyes want to puke. Everything's so standardly type writing, so wordy, so long, so boring, so non-descript, so dry. It's like, get to the point!
I wonder what it'd be like if we had to read weblog stuff material in school. I'd probably get sick of it after a while, but for the most part, I think I'd appreciate it a whole lot more. The academic world just seems somewhat disconnected from any sense of the exigencies and stressors of the real world, and that's unfortunate. Do I really have to read an excruciatingly detailed description of morphophonology? Must I really have to endure the minute details about a statistical analysis that some sociological data from the 1960s were subjected to? Oh please, and don't even get me started on biology and chemistry.
I've been looking at the course roster for next my Fall '04 semester classes, and I noticed the first class listed under the department of Comparative Literature is called "Great Books." Or the English department's first listed course, "English Literary Traditions." I wonder if this weblog-style of writing is represented anywhere among the "great books," or if the many-thousands of voices of writers like us have any place in my college's (and others') concept of "English literary traditions."
To me, the writing that I read online seems much more like real literature. The fact that any anonymous teenager can just start writing about the everyday realities of his/her life and in the process build a strong readership out of nowhere, touch the heart of thousands of readers, and win awards just seems wonderful to me. Sure "academia" has its own time, place, and importance, but I think it represent a very incomplete picture of the world if it mostly ignores the phenomena of real literature that's developing more and more every day.
