As a voracious reader and academic-in-the-making, I cannot help but be a bit of a Luddite in some instances. One thing that I tend to be very defensive about is the future for that object known as “the book.” The internet is great. You have navigated its wiles and have ended up here, reading this prose, itself housed in an offshoot venue related to an internet journal…about books, clunky and flammable things that they are. The internet is great for distribution, cost efficiency, some types of communication, instant gratification, and for social networking. With some exceptions, it is generally a bad place to find authoritative scholarship. There are a few places that present information with the same scrutiny and editorial control usually reserved for print writing, but as a proportion of the total amount of “stuff” on the net, those places are few and far between.
That said, one of the presentation venues (or is it a genre? or just a technology? a vessel?) that is least associated with scholarly writing is the “blog.” Webblogs can stand a lot of ground, from the diary-like confessional to the ardently updated, national news source. Blogs interfaces have superseded old types of self-started html design over the years. Blogs are quick, easy, relatively idiot-proof, and easy on the eyes. They are generally presented such that they maximize the clarity of information. Because of their ease and egalitarian ethos (ANYBODY can do it!), there are a lot of substandard blogs. I have probably seen more crap blogs than I’ve had hot meals (the values and qualities of the data are roughly the same, trust me).
But, surprise, there is a lot of great stuff on blogs. Some blogs strive for consistently high content and only deliver when this is possible. Others soldier on at all costs, with the highs and lows that one would expect from something that his continuously in the works. I wanted to use my “column” for the week to highlight two relatively recent examples that speak to what I am talking about. These posts or post sequences have convinced me that blogs can do some really authoritative stuff.
The first is pop culture all the way, but comes from one of the best on the scene. Stephen R. Bissette is a bit of a polymath, known equally as an author of comic books (his stint with Swamp Thing, to name but one), film critic (stalwart reviewer for Video Watchdog, and one of the experts consulted for the Danger: Diabolik [1969] DVD elements), and a teacher (at the Center for Cartoon Studies). Anyway, it goes without saying that Bissette’s blog is worth following. He updates regularly, writes in an always-entertaining but informative way, and tackles a wide variety of topics. The series of posts that I picked out as an example deals with his memories of the comics of a company called Charlton, especially an intriguing–and if you follow his sequence of posts, pretty wildly imagined–dinosaur-monster-comic called Reptilicus. My link above does a good job at showing his style. Lots of images of rare comics, links to related sites, scans of pages, and memories that double as pieces for re-constructing a lost history. This is a niche topic, of course, and not one that will have publishers clawing at the door. It is, however, a story that deserves to be told, for the benefit of fans, cultural historians, and those who are bored at work. The Reptilicus saga is long and fraught with intrigues and sexually explicit novelizations. I recommend this other part if you don’t have time to follow it all.
The other example of fun, but serious and important, blog-ership comes from “Simon,” owner of the rare groove jazz blog Never Enough Rhodes. He has written an eleven chapter history of a rather obscure musician called Todd Cochran. Eleven chapters? Brilliant! I do not know anything about this Simon, but he has created the definitive biography of this musician (I said obscure above, but as we can see, he has worked with some big names and deserves to be much more widely known). I am very interested in the jazz vinyl scene in blogland, a group of selfless collectors, enthusiasts, and even a few professional scholars who really want to people to know about some of the long-forgotten music of the past. So, this blog history of Cochran shows me that blogs can do things that books cannot. Here is a comprehensive discography, biography and piece of criticism. It is a story in words, pictures, and music. Listen to the first track as you begin to read and change as you keep going. See all of those links? Simon has shown us that other bloggers like himself have made vinyl rips available. It would be almost impossible to track down all the music in this post. The collector’s market cost of some of these discs is in the hundreds of dollars. We are fortunate enough to know that some are available on CD at low cost, and these should be purchased. But for the sake of being comprehensive, Simon has given us a window that looks out upon a land of a whole lot of killer music. Cochran was a young prodigy, recording on several sessions before he was even 21. His music spans straight-ahead acoustic jazz, soul jazz, outre spiritual jazz, electric and funky jazz, sideman and producer work on pop records, and more recently, several film scores. He has done so many different things for somebody that no one seems to have heard of. Simon has done a great job with this offering. As one of the commentors states, it should be sold to Downbeat magazine as the definitive portrait of a lost musician.