No audience

Blogging seems the perfect and logical consequence of the profusion of literary magazines and journals in the 1980's and 1990's. I founded my own, Indiana Review, in 1981, and it's still going. Most of the ones begun then are still around, chugging along through subsidy, editorial grit, and human desire, fueled by the massive number of submissions from writers who, weirdly, dwarf the number of readers.

Litmags are still where good writers get their start, so the function is important. But even in my heyday as a "creative writing person," I never devoured them by the dozen, nor do I recall animated conversations with other writers about the latest TriQuarterly or Fiction issue.

So now we have come to the point where millions of us are Authors of cost-free Blogs about everything from thrift-shopping to cat-photographing, and often about nothing in particular.

I asked my students in arts management to invent an arts organization and their choice was one in which the audience members and the performers were essentially the same people. So it has become, in a high-tech reprise of the arts and crafts movement, a participatory, hands-on culture, where the work is done for its own sake, apparently, and not for the audience's.

If everyone is an author, what's really being said, exchanged, understood?

a holiday weekend meditation.

what if Martin Luther King Jr had been an unread blogger, writing the same brilliant words we universally celebrate today?