Readercon Fracas
One of the panels I was assigned to at Readercon was "Another Kind of Truth: The Personal Essay," in which the panelists were to address questions along the lines of: "Why do certain experiences lend themselves to fictional or non-fictional treatments? What are the things you can accomplish in one form but not the other? Which techniques can be used in both?"

Being on this panel was pleasant and interesting. The panelists--Barbara Krasnoff (M), Jonathan Lethem, Tom Purdom, Rick Wilber, and yours truly--were few in number and courteous in demeanor. Nobody did any grandstanding, the moderator managed things skillfully, everybody had substantial things to say, and all went swimmingly right up to the very end, when someone from the audience asked, "What about blogging?"

Jonathan Lethem, a GOH, responded tactfully. We had been discussing the effect of form imposed on personal material. Blogging, he said, was a little bit more like a phone conversation or a letter than an essay, people tended to shape and pace their statements less in a blog, and so on (I'm paraphrasing loosely). I was less tactful: I said that blogging was a WHOLE LOT more like a phone conversation or a personal journal entry than the story or essay that aspires to be art. "What I read on LiveJournal--what I WRITE on LiveJournal--isn't art," I stated boldly (and dangerously).

At this there came an explosion from the audience as Farah Mendlesohn, whom I for one consider an immensely gifted academic critic, burst into flames. She was outraged at what she considered a putdown of the blog, and spoke passionately, inter alia, on behalf of blogging as a teaching tool, a student exercise in writing (on the part of students who would otherwise not be writing anything). She fervently disagreed with the attitudes presented by Jonathan and me, especially me.

Rick Wilber, a very nice man, finessed the question by talking about the immense amount of output he finds in some blogs, causing him to wonder how the writers have time to do anything else (again, I'm paraphrasing). And Tom Purdom added that even in a blog he feels he's presenting himself to the public as a professional writer, and takes pains to do so well--a statement I imagine we can all relate to. Discussion in the audience became lively, and the topic of blogging began to emerge as more engaging to those present than the stated topic of the panel, i.e. the fictionalized treatment of experience vs. the personal essay which addresses experience directly.

Meanwhile it was slowly dawning on me that I had stepped into a cow pie. Who knew that this medium I had taken for a casual way of passing around news and ideas was of such central importance to so many, especially those below a certain age?

Well, actually, everybody in the room seemed to have a better grasp of this truth than I had. I got that I was seriously behind the times here, but I still didn't get why Farah was so angry. I mean, we'd been assigned to talk about two art forms. Blogging by its very nature resists formal constraints. Wouldn't it actively work against what I take to be its purpose, to put a blog through the many revisions one gives to a piece of fiction or an essay before letting go of it? None of the panelists said (or, I think, thought) that blogging was a bad thing, only--explicitly or implicitly--that it isn't an art form in the sense that fiction and the essay are.

When I apologized to Barbara afterwards she said not to worry about it, "bloggers tend to be defensive." In my innocence/ignorance I honestly hadn't imagined there was anything for bloggers to be defensive ABOUT. Now, thanks to this eye-opening experience, I realize that my remarks were genuinely offensive to some of those in the audience. Learning this hasn't changed my mind, but the last thing I would want to do, ever, is offend people out of ignorance, so that was a useful, if startling, corrective in how to behave at a con.

(Especially at a con I was attending mainly to promote a new novel, which you are encouraged to read about at www.judithmoffett.com.)