An exercise in self-aggrandizement

I was talking with Dennis Loy Johnson tonight, the publisher of Melville House (www.mhpbooks.com) and MobyLives (www.mobylives.com). I don't want to share too much of what he said, because it will eventually appear on New Pages (www.newpages.com) as part of a series of interviews I've been doing on the publishing business. But I asked him about literary blogs, and what he thought about them, and whether there were too many of them, and what somebody should do if they wanted to write a literary blog that was actually useful and stood out from the crowd and was something that people "in da bid-ness" read. I was struck by his response. He said most literary blogs are dull because the people who write them follow this kind of format: "I went to a literary reading last night and this is how it went and afterwards this is how much I had to drink at the local pub and then this is what I heard on the radio on the way home from the bar." And his response to that is, "I don't know you, and I don't care, so why are you writing about this?"

I think he's right about so-called literary blogs. But in my writerly mode, I sometimes like to read strangers' blogs because I feel like I'm spying on them. By spying on them, I do not mean in any icky, stalker-ish sort of way, although maybe there really is no difference. I don't know--I'm the one doing the spying. What I mean by spying is that I like to read these things in the same way that I like to eavesdrop on people when I happen to be sitting one table over from them in a crowded cafe and I hear one of them say to somebody on his cellphone, "I swear, Ed, he is trying to kill me, I am not making this up!" or "It's my job to count the bodies before they got out." And yes, both of those are things I've actually heard real people say when I just happened to be near enough to hear their conversations. Blogs, MySpace, even Facebook are great ways to get material for books. What are people like? What will they reveal to perfect strangers? And anyway, what did her mother say to her when she brought home the local homeless dude for dinner?