Periodicals, from general-interest magazines to scholarly journals, commission reviews of new books — and only new books. We all know this, of course, but it's worth thinking about.
Scholars in the humanities often write about old books, but they're usually writing about them for other scholars who have already read them.
Periodicals feature reviews of, or essays about, old books under two conditions: when there's a new edition of an old book or when a writer argues that an old book is surprisingly relevant to the current situation. In rare cases, both happen at once. You gotta have a hook.
I take a particular pleasure in writing about older books — classic novels, forgotten novels, older but still readable works of scholarship, poems I stumbled across or remembered, whatever — and about older movies too, and I like writing about them for people who may not know about them yet. Of course I believe in breaking bread with the dead; it is morally and imaginatively valuable to increase your “temporal bandwidth.” But mainly I read the books and watch the movies at whim, just because my curiosity is aroused, and then I tell you about them in the most interesting way I can manage, hoping that you'll want to read or watch also, and that in any case you’ll appreciate being alerted to something you might not have known about.
I wrote a whole series of posts on Thomas Mann’s massive tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers not because I thought it Relevant to Our Current Moment but simply because it was fascinating to me. Maybe I could have come up with a hook if I had tried hard enough, and maybe then I could have gotten a periodical to pay me a few bucks for it, but to write about Joseph in that way would have felt like a kind of lie.
Sometimes I do see the relevance of something old, as in this post about Emile Durkheim, and when that happens I’m pleased to say so. But most of the time I’m not thinking at all about relevance. I wrote about Cluny Brown because I think it’s a wonderful movie, not because “it illuminates our current social crisis” and anything like that.
I do a lot of this kind of irrelevant writing on my blog, and I plan to keep doing it — in fact, I plan to do more of it. And if I’m going to do it, I have to do it on my blog, because there is no market in the world of periodicals for this kind of writing. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
As I often say, I’m not putting this writing behind a paywall; I believe in and want to support the open web, and will continue make my work available to those who can’t afford to buy me any dragons. (And even to those who just don’t want to.) But those of you who support me financially are telling me that you think this otherwise unremunerative kind of writing has value, and that really does help me stick with it when I’m feeling down. Which, you know, our ambient culture gives me plenty of reason to do.
So: back to reading (and viewing) at whim! You’ll continue to receive my reports.