Let us be clear about this from the outset. A vote (in the, you know) for We Remember Love on Monday is a vote for two posts by me. It’s a vote for two posts by Cuchlann. It’s a vote for dialogues in which lelangir and Shance play considerable parts. It is of course a vote for a whole goddamn lot of posts by Ghostlightning, who has contributed to Super Fanicom posts both thoughtfully imaginative and imaginatively thoughtful. GL comments here often, and WRL is one of the few places I comment with any semi-regularity.

I won’t play the part of the angsty underdog because 1) my enterprise and Ghost’s are pretty well entwined, and 2) owing to Ghost’s considerable skill at writing, forming webs of connections between bloggers, and somehow finding the time to blog while working and having a kid, he deserves the win. He’s invested more into blogging than I have — it’s as simple as that.

Or maybe it isn’t. I have another, somewhat more selfish reason for appreciating Mr. GL.

When he came upon this blog back in the Dark Blogoages, he was immediately sympathetic to what we did here. Let’s call it cerebral blogging — it is not by necessity academic or intellectual; it’s letting your mind take detours. Sometimes long detours through things not many other people enjoy. But that’s what we like to do.

I was content simply to keep doing it, to keep putting it out there for people to find and judge as they saw fit. Ghostlightning would walk up to you, shake your hand, and recommend a whole bouquet of blog posts, some of which might seem inaccessible if it weren’t for his suggesting them as one friend suggests things to another.

I think his way was better. His way opened minds. His reach meant that he could open a lot of minds.

And now cerebral bloggers are everywhere. A whole host of people contributed to this — IKnight, 2DT, Michael, 8C, animekritik, etc., etc. — but I give Ghost a lot of credit, networker that he is, for helping some of us realize that we weren’t the only ones doing what we did, that we didn’t have to be isolated pockets of bloggers writing about anime and lit theory, or anime and philosophy, or porn anime and linguistics. We could all get together and be the “anime and stuff” crowd.

Maybe this getting-together is what germinated The Untold Story of Altair and Vega.

What pisses me off about this blog is that it came to be when I was on involuntary hiatus, and so I didn’t even know about it until a few months ago.

No. What pisses me off about this blog is that it didn’t exist in 2008.

As an example of what goes down over there, I could point to a post with a long, descriptive title implying an involved examination to follow. One of the most recent is called “Acchi Kocchi, Ben-Day Dots, and the American Comic Style.” There’s, holy Jesus, there’s a post comparing Eureka Seven to the novels of Lloyd Alexander.

I’m not going to offer you any of those, though. I want you to take a look at a post innocuously titled “Mysterious Girlfriend X Episode 3.”

It seems typical enough when you encounter it on the front page. Bitmap expresses opinions, and I like Bitmap, so I give his opinions some thought — that’s what episodic blogging is. Then you view the post in full, and, wait, okay, we’re talking about magic realism now? That’s a pretty tough topic, there. It’s not an uncontroversial genre by any means. It’s about as good as a five-paragraph summation can be, though, relating magic realism to the show at hand while — no, now we’re talking about fanservice. While perhaps more straightforward a topic (or perhaps not), it’s certainly big.

I like this topical jumping-around. It challenges you to rethink the use and usefulness of the episodic format (something Ghostlightning has also done). But, really, it’s not as though these writers are wholly reconfiguring episodic blogging. I suspect they’re still being somewhat faithful to it. I suspect that, for them, an account of the experience of watching an episode necessarily includes these other topics. That’s how they consume. That’s how I consume, too.

The thing about Altair and Vega, though, is that I would’ve devoted some time to it anyway, tourney or no tourney. I follow several of the eight(!!!) writers on Twitter; I already pay attention to what they have to say. I should point out a few other mental-detours-style blogs that I found because of the tournament itself — the point being that, though it can get nasty, the thing at least serves its primary purpose.

Here’s one I didn’t quite expect: Beneath the Tangles.

I shouldn’t be able to get much out of this blog. Right? “It is,” says the sidebar, “the meeting point between anime and Christian spirituality.” In case you haven’t been counting, I’ve used the Lord’s name in vain twice already, once even before the break. Suffice to say that the faith and I had a falling out some years ago.

Well, give it a chance. It’s often more compelling than you might think.

First of all, many posts are thoughtful recommendations of other posts. They’re goddamn gosh darn useful. I wish only that these posts were more easily searchable — say, if there were a dedicated “Spirituality in the Anime Blogosphere” tag.

Second, the posts here are often concerned with people. And that doesn’t mean only consumers of [anime x] or [manga y]. Maybe this is because TWWK, unlike many Christians I’ve known, has bothered to learn the Gospels; you may remember that Jesus Christ also concerned himself with people. It’s an interesting perspective, at any rate, and one I often like. Sometimes this results in humble anecdotes; other times posts spring up at the intersections between art and personal theology. Many posts deal with problems, and I like problems. In fiction, I mean.

I can’t really agree with the proposed solutions to those problems. But, again, if the bloggers at Beneath the Tangles bring Christian ideas to the experience of watching anime, that’s what I want to see in the posts.

You want something a little more eclectic? Here’s Anime B&B.

In the interest of fairness, you should know that Marina is a grad student focusing in children’s lit. She could be a serial murderer (though she probably isn’t) and I’d still think of her as a kindred soul.

But, yeah, these posts are all over the place. I mean that in a good way. People with too many passions interest me.

There’s a whole section about food, for example. Sometimes recipes are included, but this isn’t a cookbook. Everybody has to eat, and people’s interactions with and attitudes toward food can say a lot about them. Anime is fertile ground for someone interested in food culture. Marina digs deep, makes connections, and brings in a fair but not distracting amount of personal experience.

Anyway, eclectic. It’s hard to recommend one post. On the front page is a post about mythology and seduction, and one about improvisation, and — hey, Hemingway! Now that’s within my sphere of expertise.

But I won’t elaborate. To focus on one post might obscure the real strength of this blog. Marina knows a lot about a lot of things. She appears willing to learn what she doesn’t know. Blogging is learning. That makes her more of a kindred soul than her degree program.

I’ll let the next blog introduce itself.

Lemma (Greek λήμμα; from mathematics) is a proposition proved or accepted for immediate use in the proof of some other proposition.

Submodality is the smallest building block of our thoughts something that helps us remember what we have seen, heard, felt, smelt, and tasted both externally and imagined.

So, Lemmas and Submodalities.

It’s a high-concept title for a blog that’s quite accessible. I don’t know what SnippetTee’s background is, but L&S is another eclectic affair. Here’s the philosophy:

… [M]y themes were usually taken from a small content, and then explored and amplified based on my understanding of the world and my senses.

Yes! This is a great one-sentence definition of what I mean by “cerebral blogging.” I also like the idea of focusing on minutiae; if 99% of life is inconsequential, the amount of inconsequential things is…consequential. Or something. The point being that I like SnippetTee’s posts about everyday things in anime.

For example, here’s a post about coffee culture. I realize that’s not exactly a small matter, depending on how you look at it, and the post doesn’t neglect to mention that. But drinking coffee is also a personal act. I don’t exactly judge people based on how they make their coffee in the morning, but that information does give me a kind of benign impression. It’s something I’m curious about, in other words. The post in question has a nice way of moving from the global to the local.

You might also like that SnippetTee’s posts aren’t text-heavy. You could read one at work without getting caught, which you may not be able to do with a post by, say, myself.

Regrettably, the blogothon has nearly ended. There’s only one blog left, and it’s called Baka Laureate.

Krizzlybear fancies himself a writer, and he comes at anime from the perspective of someone who constructs fiction. This is true of me, actually, though the amount of writing I’ve managed to do lately might suggest otherwise. This is why you’ll sometimes see posts here about storytelling choices that work for me. I’m taking notes.

It’s more explicit over there, though. There’s even a Writing category. This isn’t the entirety of Baka Laureate — there’s episodic content, too — but the writing bits interest me most. It’s not always easy to communicate thoughts on the creative process. Note that so much writing advice, professional, academic, or amateur, lands on the spectrum between hot air and bullshit. Best to learn by doing.

These aren’t really advice posts, fortunately. “Finding your Voice through Fanfiction” might seem advisory, but I read it more as an account of personal experience, and it’s a nice overview of the fanfic endeavor. I always appreciate it when bloggers take on fan fiction; I suspect it’s more significant an activity than its representation on the blogs would suggest. And, concerned as I am with structures, I also like the posts about discrete storytelling elements — here’s one about premise.

Hang on. Let me catch my breath.

Okay.

It took a while because I wanted to do these bloggers some shred of justice, but I mean to say simply that, while I always felt like I was in good company writing the way I did, the good company has expanded. The Aniblog Tourney inevitably forments drama, yes, but it also forms networks in a Ghostlightningian way. And if I failed to discover you via the tourney but you think I’d be interested in your blog, please do introduce yourself.

One more thing: a salute to Sir Ghost on the eve of battle. I only have an axe, but I’m proud to face the Gundam.

But it’s good to meet new people, right? So I didn’t object when informed that my blog would be thrown into a cage with other blogs and invited to eat their souls or whatever it is blogs do to one another. The whole thing makes me a little uncomfortable, but I agreed to it, I’m complicit. Which I suppose means I should be friendly and write a post about it.

Let’s go about it this way. Prior to about a week ago, I’d never heard of Assorted Explorations. The author has more Twitter followers than me, so maybe you have heard of it. But I figure it’s not enough to have heard of it. This is my monstrous zombie pet blog’s erstwhile rival. Let’s familiarize ourselves with those bits of it that I consider to be pretty good.

For a general overview, you may want to start here — this is the aniblogging credo in play. Actually, it’s a credo that hasn’t been in play for long; author Jay has blogged anime in earnest only since winter. His being pitted against a blog that came about in summer 2008 is evidence of the randomness of the matchups, I suppose, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that his newness is a handicap. Plenty of bloggers with hefty readerships started after I did — it’s a matter of breadth of appeal, something I only became interested in well beyond my start date.

Newness can be used to one’s advantage. You’ve got a truckload of blogs to consider when designing and focusing your own. You can keep what worked for other people and toss out what didn’t. If I had to identify a singular problem with Assorted Explorations, I’d say that it hasn’t finished doing this yet, or reads as such. And this is fine; Jay should take as much time as he needs to refine his voice.

With that said, we can certainly begin to discern a shape. Here’s a quote from the page linked above:

This is *probably* the only anime blog in the Aniblog Tourney that is powered by @tumblr.

This is exciting to me. I realize it defeats the explicit purpose, but I want to see more people use tumblr as a long(er)-form platform, or at least push the perceived boundaries of the tumblelog. The simplicity of the platform might offer certain advantages over others. It’s easier to customize — WordPress.com demands payment for CSS access — and it comes with its own social ecosystem.

And another thing:

Jay is confirmed for bad taste.

This is a good foundation, barring an assertion that “taste” shouldn’t be ranked at all. Maybe the former is a better foundation in that it’s less activist, and therefore less potentially offputting. It’s a simple acknowledgement that Jay writes about what he writes about, whatever the greater weebiverse thinks of it, and he feels no particular need to insist that the things he likes are better than the things you like.

This makes him useful. His best posts (that is, my personal favorites) don’t appeal to the desire to see products and their fans torn down, nor do they fit neatly into anyone’s confirmation bias. They aggregate in an almost lelangirian way. They point to amusing, insightful, complementary, contrary, and/or tangential opinions, and they allow you to choose among them as you see fit, in a suggested but not mandatory sequence. They resemble meeting minutes more than essays, only the meetings are fabricated, are in fact the “art” of the posts.

Which brings us to the important part –

Before you vote on Sunday, read “Watchlist: Symphogear #3. Tsubasa is still in…” and “Tweets of the Day: Against Symphogear (as per Episode 2).”

Full disclosure: I know approximately fuckall about Symphogear. I never even read a season preview for it. And the posts linked above aren’t examples of pushing tumblr boundaries; that’s something I’d like to see in general, an unrealized potential that may prove to be a product of my imagination, rather than something Jay actually does (or even needs to do).

But, when I’m not in the mood for extended analyses, this is almost exactly what I want out of episodic blogging.

I mentioned the lelangirian metawankery already. They also remind me of how Cuchlann approached the task of blogging shows reaction-by-reaction, episode-by-episode. The first post begins as a simple list of observations, then blooms out in many hypertextual directions — it even ends with links specifically for people who aren’t satisfied yet. The second is more of an addendum, but it demonstrates Jay’s willingness to track down opinions of all kinds for fun and profit and science.

You begin to realize that soapboxing isn’t what Jay’s about. He doesn’t really summarize, he doesn’t praise or complain with great voracity. Instead, he mentions things and invites you to think about them.

let’s take a look at the Nethustan armor

let’s look at the story rather then the art styles and the thingamajigs out there

Then he offers you examples of other people’s pursuits of these lines of inquiry. I called the posts meeting minutes, but maybe they’re more like transcripts of recordings of seminars.

They aren’t perfect. Being new and comparatively young has its disadvantages. But if Jay continues to work at prompting consideration and tying threads together, he could end up with a vast archive of diverse fan activity punctuated by personal insights. An exciting prospect.

When it comes down to it, Twitter is just another way to create content. The problem is that it can really impinge the other content creation you should be doing. It’s not just the constant distraction it can be, but the fact that it’s too easy a way to throw out some of those random ideas and thoughts that you really should be saving to pull together in a far more thoughtful and meaningful way.

I think this is why I have had even less of an inkling to write rants than i used to. You only have so much time in a day, and so much attention. I really need to be more selective in how that attention is spent. Twitter, as good as it is, is not really the kind of content i want to be producing. It’s like throwing out one liners rather than writing a full story.

This is relevant to my fairly recent structuring of my content production. Fred sees Twitter as a distraction, insofar as it tempts the writer to throw out undeveloped ideas, and thereby “waste” them. I look at it more as the first step in a writing process that goes something like:

Twitter (brainstorming) –> pontif.us (drafting and annotating) –> Super Fanicom (relatively polished final products)

If a comment is too long for Twitter, or seems to warrant elaboration, I’ll go into more detail here; if I’m working on a post here that goes over 600-700 words, I’ll move it over to Super Fanicom (which is what happened with my last post). I haven’t had much time yet to give this process a thorough testing, this site being so new, but it’s coming together in bits and pieces. I suppose I have two reasons for doing things this way: I’m interested in seeing what good could come out of using the internet for full (or nearly full) disclosure of the writing process, and I figure it’ll help me later to have these brief notes to draw upon and refer back to when I’m writing longer and more complicated posts.

I’ll leave you with this: if you use Twitter, how would you say it fits into your writing process, if at all?

First, I had a response to lelangir’s thoughts on the otaku-rhombus’s blogging teams.  He speculated on grouping similar-minded people together and bringing in like-minded readers, so on.  I happened to think a little while ago that this phenomenon isn’t exactly strange.  It’s magazines.  When a reader picks up a magazine, certain things are going to be set in — if we’re talking short fiction magazines (which is what I’m most familiar with), there’s an editor who decides what does and does not go in — and besides looking at “quality,” editors have a vision for what sort of content the magazine should have, what focus it should use.  One of my professors, who used to edit for a few different magazines, always told us that if an editor thinks the piece you’ve submitted isn’t right for them, that’s what they mean, they’re not trying to veil comments about your piece sucking.  My point is that, as a reading people, we collate things into groups that make sense to us.  It’s not strange that group blogs do the same thing.  This doesn’t mean everyone involved is exactly the same — any given issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction will have humor, near-horror, drama, (obviously) fantasy and sci-fi, so on, so forth.  There’s variety, just a basic guiding direction in the background.  I’ve stopped sending my parodies of epic fantasies to them, for example.  Of course, since Blood, Blade, and Thruster closed, I’ve stopped sending those out altogether.  Hm.

Anyway.  That’s my thought on the process lelangir describes.  The internet makes getting things easier, but I don’t really think it will change content all that much, save where content is at least partially defined by delivery method (please note that provides for things like Zero Punctuation, where the delivery method defines the content quite sharply).  

With that out of the way, let’s get to Stanley Fish.  If you’re not aware, Fish is a big name in reader-response criticism, a school of criticism that, according to my copy of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Fish said, is concerned with the “analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time” (1373).  Now, I have one problem with the reader-response critics:  they only regard the responses of readers who have the “correct” backgrounds to read the text.  I was told by a professor that Fish finally broke down and admitted, once, that yes, you had to be basically like the reader-response critics to read “correctly.”  (That is, one does not have to buy into their theory, but have the same background, inclinations, and ways of thinking.)  

Anyway.  Fish also wrote about a bunch of odd stuff, and I found, through JSTOR, an article he wrote for The Yale Law Journal titled “Dennis Martinez and the Uses of Theory.”  I found this article when I thought the reader-response critics would be useful to that Gothic in Video Games paper I keep mentioning.  Fish describes this scene where a sports reporter spotted Martinez, a pitcher, after a game and asked him what the coach said to him on the mound at this one critical juncture in the game.  Martinez responded [and I'm paraphrasing here] by claiming he said, “throw strikes.”  The reporter was looking for critical advice, but, as Fish argues, at that moment critical thought wasn’t required, and would have gummed up the works.  He mentions another story concerning a similar situation where engineers were trying to improve a prototype of a synthetic brush, and could only, after the fact, describe cricitally the process they had gone through to do so.  

Fish goes on to apply this to law practice, but I think it’s useful (not necessarily analogous, but useful) in dealing with writing — and keep in mind, no matter what they say on Fox News, that blogging is writing.  Well, most of it.  Fish, in capitulating his anecdotes with his proposed topic, says

First, what they [the examples] together suggest is that performing an activity — engaging in a practice — is one thing and discoursing on that practice another.  Second, the practice of discoursing on practice does not stand in a relationship of superiority or governance to the practice that is its object.  (1777-8)

There are two good things and one caveat that we must discover to do anything with this.  First, the second part of his statement is absolutely true — criticism is not superior to the original act it uses as a springboard (that statement, that criticism uses the act as a springboard, is of course contentious, not universally believed, and counter to what Fish is claiming here).  There is a perhaps mythic story of a scholar presenting on some topic, let us say a theme present in a novel.  In the audience is the novel’s author, and he or she stands during the question and answer period, then says he or she never put any of that in the book, it was never in his or her mind.  The scholar responded that he or she understood the book better than the author, that it was the scholar’s job to do so, and the author had no real business in the discussion.  Now, as true as this is in many senses — if you haven’t figured out by now, I usually hate the Word of God — the sense of superiority is misplaced.  If the author shows up, he or she has just as much right to discourse about the book as anyone else.  A local Memphis author came to visit one of my classes, and revealed that he wrote his book with the sense that the characters were people, and as such he didn’t quite wrap up every plot line, because he didn’t know what had happened to some of them; at a reading a woman asked why one character had killed another, and he was stunned to find out that was precisely what had happened, but he hadn’t known it until then.  So authors can discourse, but I don’t believe they necessarily have any extra clout in the conversation — at least, not when the conversation concerns interpretation.  

Now for the first part of Fish’s statement.  It seems obvious — talking about something is not, in fact, doing it.  And the act of criticism takes a different skillset than the act of creating — whether it’s an anime or a novel we’re talking about here.  However, Fish’s apparent attitude that the act of criticism is something else entirely is false for our discussion here.  It’s prevalent to view criticism in this way, and this attitude is basically what I’m here to try to counter.  Because while talking about baseball isn’t at all like playing baseball — imagine how much more fun those terrible ESPN analysis shows would be if the critics had to throw their critiques — writing criticism about writing is still writing.  And narrative subjects are, ultimately, writing; at least, read them as the same if I switch the words around.  

Simply, someone had to write that episode of Kannagi you want to write a blog post about, and your act of blogging it is similar to the originating act of creation behind the episode.  The difference is in method and execution rather than kind.  When we’re dealing with prose writing, of course, there is almost no difference at all.  There is, supposedly, an originating “spark” of inspiration that drives creative work that is, also supposedly, not present in critical work.  However, as Harold Bloom recognizes, even though he claims it’s not so good, all creative work is colored by what he calls “the anxiety of influence.”  Michael Chabon is more to my liking — in an essay in Maps & Legends he directly responds to Bloom, claiming he is comforted by the reach of influence, that all writers are, essentially, responding to other writing.  Clarifying that makes it sound a lot like criticism, in that criticism is accepted to be writing responding to other writing.  

What I think the real trick here is — we ought to extrapolate and really get to some awesome conclusions.  If writing is like criticism, then criticism is like writing.  Hopefully I’ve at least provided enough of a groundwork for you to accept that long enough to drive forward to the end here.  

So, the two arts here (criticism and writing) have similar methods, similar inspirations, and similar forms.  Should it not be true, then, that they would have similar goals?  I’ll refer to Chabon again, here, as he puts this very succinctly.  In the first essay of Maps & Legends, after claiming that he reads and writes for no other reason, ever, than entertainment, he says, “I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature” (14).  Glorious.  I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating (like a Freudian compulsion):  criticism is entertainment.  It stimulates the brain.  The audience of criticism enjoys thinking over things in the way criticism does, and makes the audience do.  As Fish said, it’s not better, but it’s not worse either.  It’s fun.  Not all kinds of fun are for all kinds of people.  Don’t like criticism?  Don’t read it.  Don’t like shounen?  Don’t watch it.  Simple.  

The point of criticism, its goal, is simple:  to entertain a group of people who are entertained by criticism.  That is, it has the same goal as every other kind of art.