Literary Blogs from the Golden Age to the (Diminished) Present

"If literary blogging helped lead us to the much-expanded online network that now serves as the locus of establishment literary activity, this process has unfortunately left no place for blogging. Even with the current unsettled circumstances in both internet publishing and social media (publishers keep going out of business, social media keeps fragmenting), I do not expect that litblogging as we knew it at the beginning will make any kind of significant comeback. Which is not to say that blogging will not survive, just that it won't again have the same king of salience to the direction literary culture takes as it briefly did in the nascent days of the blogosphere. Bloggers will have to be satisfied with a medium that offers limited reach but allows them maximum freedom and infinite space to say what they have to say at whatever length, and perhaps find an audience who wants to hear it. This may be the most invaluable promise the blog made to writers in the first place."

 Read the full essay "What Hath the Blog Wrought?" by Daniel Green here. 

Cancel Culture Dominates Children's Literature

Jonah Winter's article, "Cancel Culture Dominates Children's Literature," published on 5 February 2024 in The Wall Street Journal, is a sad story of the state of publishing today.

"Children's publishers now live in fear of these activists, terrified of showing up on their radar with a book or author that could be deemed “problematic”—meaning out of alignment with the activists' puritanical code. According to that code, an author's identity must match a book's subject matter. Further, certain books can harm children, the activists believe, and books they deem harmful must be removed. If that sounds similar to the right-wing activists' mission, it's because it is. The only difference is that while right-wing activists merely want certain books removed from particular schools, left-wing activists want the books they target annihilated."

The full article is here, but probably behind a paywall. Jonah Winter has also done a picture book for children (with artist Gary Kelley) on a related topic. It's called Banned Book. Worth a look, and worth supporting.