What I like about bloks is that they eliminate the role of the gatekeeper. The traditional writing infrastructure is one of a thousand small literary magazines or journals that are only read by those who submit to them. Guarding the integrity of the literary enterprise is the "editor," a creature who is unknown to the wilds of the Internet. With the editor comes the sadomasochistic process of "submission," humiliating for all involved. The submitted piece is categorized as "fiction," "essay" or "poem" and judged either on merits of form or of postmodern anti-forms that are just as formulaic. If it makes the cut then it goes into print and your life is complete, until you realize you have been caught in a vanity feedback loop that finishes exactly where it started.
I'd rather my words go directly from heart/mind/gut to word processor to online to meta-online to meta-meta-online. There they will either disappear into the ether or survive as an eternal intangible monument upon my death. There is no binding, no vetting process, no submission guideline to mediate. The world clicks on it and/or immediately clicks past it. A part of me would like to write a book but: I come in spurts, in every sense possible. My saint is the Argentine master of saying much in little, of not so much defying rules of form as simulatenously pre and post-dating them. Edwin Williamson notes that:
Not only did Borges throw off the constraints of realism, he called into question the preeminence of the novel in the hierarchy of modern literature. He was drawn to modes of storytelling that had long preceded the novel-fable, epic, parable, and folktale.
The novel is a wonderful medium. But why is creative writing only "official" when it is in that format? There are millions of novels in existence, most of them unread and forgotten. Rather than contribute to the scrapheap, forcing creative designs to fit the narrow straitjacket of publishable material, why not go above and beyond "the hierarchy of modern literature"? Just as there were modes of storytelling that preceded the novel, there will be modes of storytelling that come after. Postmodernist and post-colonialist novels seek novelty through unfamiliar form and content. Eventually however, the halo around the "marginalized" will fade due to overexposure, and Dead Black Females will join Dead White Males in the ranks of the officially passé. As for postmodernists, one can only subvert convention so much before what was formerly subversion becomes just another convention.
My object in writing is not to subvert anything. Nor is it to write the "Great American Novel" and achieve widespread adulation and fame. The days of the writer-as-rock star are dead anyway. You can't have adoring masses as a literary figure when the masses are functionally illiterate. I'm not marginalized and I do not have a voiceless people to be the voice of; nor do I think the voiceless would really appreciate my voice. I write so I don't go crazy. That's more or less it. It may not pass muster with a gatekeeper; it may not be neatly categorizable; it may not be publishable: but the ether calls and I must answer.
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