To whit: I read an essay the other day written by Dan Cohen, a historian whose area of expertise is the “digital humanties.” (No, I’m not gonna  explain. Ask ten people, and you’ll get ten different explanations of what that is and does. Google it. Or Bing it. Or whatever.)

Cohen, suggested using the term “blessay” to identify a particular form of “new” writing: The blog essay that is relatively short, and both expertise- and idea-driven. An essay that’s not just a short “here’s what I had for dinner” blog entry, but also not a five- to thirty-thousand word essay weighted with footnotes and written for a peer-reviewed or for a traditional publication (like The New Yorker). An essay written for “an intelligent general audience.” (Nope. Can’t explain that either.)

His essay prompted a Twitter-based debate and quite a few comments at Cohen’s blog. I missed the debate (and only came across the essay after the fact on my Google reader feed) so I had to do some backtracking to find said Twitter-debate.

What I found intriguing, however, was that the discussants quickly shifted from the merits of Cohen’s term of choice to a discussion of the audience for “blessays.”  For whom are such blessays intended? (Other than “an intelligent general audience”?

One Tweeterer (I’m waiting for someone to tell me that’s the wrong term to use) suggested that the audience is

 para-academic, post-collegiate white-collar workers and artists, with occasional breakthroughs either all the way to a ‘high academic’ or to a ‘mass culture’ audience.”

To which I mentally replied: Ugh.

(I hasten to add that the people who were responding via Twitter to Dan’s essay were all people I “follow.” They’re all WAY smarter than I am, and way more educated than I am [not, frankly, that either of those states is hard to achieve].)

Others chimed in to say that such essays were similar to the work created by “public intellectuals” back when there were still such things (there are still), back, say, in the mid-20th century. And one person wondered:

 Do academics who blogs get readers from outside? (not so much big but wide audience)

To which I thought “Hmmmm.”

So where am I going with this? (Bear with me; I’m thinking on the fly.)

A large chunk of what appears on THIS on this “blog” are precisely the kind of essays that Cohen suggests naming “blessays”: I use my particular form of expertise (I’m a historian) to comment on what teachers back in the old day called “current events”: I discuss Events of the Day by framing them in a larger historical context. (Sometimes I also describe/talk about my work as I do it, to give readers a look behind the scenes of how historians “do history.”)

I write “blessays” in part because doing so helps me think about my own work, but also because I’m aware that, in general, Americans don’t much care for history, and who can blame them? (Read: the teaching of history, like the teaching of most subjects, is done badly if at all.) So my general goal in blogging is to “do” history in real time, if you will.

Who is my audience? Anyone who comes strolling past. I don’t care if the reader is “intelligent,” a “para-academic,” an “artist,” or works in a “white-collar” job. I don’t care if the reader collects garbage, collects debts, or collects comic books. I don’t care if the reader is from the “outside” world, wherever that may be, or the inside one.

All I care about is communicating the complexity of the human experience to ordinary folks like myself. That means I intentionally structure my blessays to be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.

After all, the truly amazing and wonderful aspect of the web (and of software/platforms that have made “blogging” so simple and accessible) is that our potential audience is everyone, and so we need not limit our content for a specific audience.

Can we (self) impose limits to our intended audience? Aim the content for a specific slice of possible readership (eg, “para-academics,” and no, I don’t know what that is or means. I’ll look it up when I’m finished.) Of course!

But slapping a label on the scholar-who-uses-blogging-as-a-way-to-communicate-with-a-general-audience strikes me as defeating the purpose of the scholar-driven blog. If we wanted to aim at “intellectuals,” middle brow or otherwise, well, hell, we can all just write conventionally (on paper) and send said writing off to someplace like The Atlantic or The New Yorker and hope the editors there will take the piece.

So:  it’s the big, ‘ol high-middle-low brow audience for me and my decidedly low-brow form of scholarship. But if no one minds, I think I’ll just stick with “blogging.”

Since handing over the manuscript for the meat book, I’ve been reading up on what got neglected while researching that book: Contemporary food politics. The big irony of my work is that reporters often call me for comment on stories related to my work, but they’re rarely interested in the historical angle. Which means that most of the time, I’m commenting on current news rather than past events.

Which is another way of saying that I wear two hats: Historian and observer-of-the-current scene. Which is why (hey, that makes three sentences in a row starting with the same word…) I’m spending my time reading up on said contemporary food politics.

And (oh, relief! Something other than “which”) last night it occurred to me that some of you might be interested in boning up on the subject yourself. Problem is that it’s difficult to find material that’s not heavily weighted toward one “side” or the other. (*1) And even harder to find books whose authors take care to be accurate about what they’re reporting.

But in recent weeks I’ve read three books that I recommend for those who are looking to understand the basics of the “food debate.”

First is Food Politics, by Robert Paarlberg. (NB: If you decide to read it, make sure you pick up Paarlberg’s book, and not a book by the same title but written by Marion Nestle.) (*2)  Paarlberg has been involved in the science and politics of food for decades and knows his stuff. The object of this book is quite simple: to provide readers with a basic overview of the main issues in global food politics. (This book is also a prime case of what I mean about reviewers on Amazon — see note *1 below.)

Second is Tomorrow’s Table, by Pamela Ronald and R. W. Adamchak. The two are husband and wife, both employed at the University of California-Davis. She’s a geneticist; he run the university’s organic farming operation. The structure of the book is a bit dorky, and it wasn’t proofread, which means there are zillions of annoying typos. (*3) But if you can get past that, this is a superb introduction to the debate about the politics of food genetics. Highly recommended. Again, I urge you to read the reviews at Amazon to see what I mean about the one-star reviews. Never mind that she’s a highly qualified scientist, and a vegetarian . . . . Hilarious.

Third is Just Food, by James McWilliams. He’s a historian at Texas State University who’s written, among other things, the single best history of early American food (A Revolution In Eating). But along the way, no surprise, he became interested in contemporary food politics, and he brings a historian’s perspective (meaning he takes The Long View of the Big Picture and is obsessed with accuracy) to this new book of his. (And, no surprise, reviewers at Amazon take him to task because, ya know, he doesn’t support “their” view and because he debunks many of the most prized views of the “pro-food” crowd.)

So — there you have it. If you’re interested in learning more about the food debate, three great places to start.

___________

*1: One of my current sources of amusement is reading Amazon reviews of books related to food politics. The one-star reviews routinely start with something along the lines of “This book is useless because the author is biased.” By which the reviewer means: “The author doesn’t support my side of the debate.”

*2: Update: It’s not that I don’t recommend Nestle’s book, but I don’t recommend it for folks who are trying to bone up on the basics. Nestle’s book is important to read, but she has a tendency to play fast/loose with facts and she has an specific agenda. So it’s a good one to read after you’ve had a chance to read other, more factual, more “neutral” works about food politics.

*3: Proofreading of a manuscript is the responsibility of an author, whether he/she does the work him/herself, or hires someone to do it. In the case of this book, the authors apparently didn’t bother at all. Urgh!

This is first hilarious, and then not, and then rueful and wise. I’m glad (and lucky) that I never hated the part I love most. (Well, except when it won’t cooperate, but that’s what makes it interesting).

The gist:

But I secretly drew a line in the sand at Twitter. Most prostitutes have their boundaries, and for me tweeting was the one act so degrading I had to quietly take it off the table.

Most writers are closet exhibitionists, shameless only on paper, and having to perform and promote themselves is a kind of mild custom-designed torture . . .

I learned the meaning of the German word “sitzfleisch” — literally, the ability to sit, to spend serious time at something, devote your sustained attention to a single subject for four, six or eight hours, and resist the impulse to get up and take a break or check e-mail when you get fidgety or bored. I became a more disciplined person than I’d ever imagined I could be.

When you’re doing any kind of serious work, one of the most hazardous distractions you have to figure out how to ignore is the interference field of hope and anxiety associated with the results of that work, its imaginary payoff.

The part you hated was your favorite part.

All true —. Glad he wrote it. Glad I read it. And damn! I’m STILL the luckiest person in the world.

Most agents, especially those in very large firms, no longer represent authors. Those agents represent themselves, and exist to make money off writers. It’s that simple, and that disillusioning.

Uh, duh? And: WTF? OF COURSE agents exist to make money off writers (and athletes and actors and artists). OF COURSE they do. They’re in BUSINESS. What the fuck? Does this person think agents (of any kind) are in business to “help” someone? Uh, no. They’re in business to make MONEY.

(I should add that the article from which I took this inane quote is otherwise quite good: smart, detailed, solid. Which makes the inanity of the quote even more, well, inane.)

Lately I’ve been thinking about “business” in a general sense (all toward pondering my next book). I keep being surprised by how many people-in-business ascribe “noble” motives to various kinds of business people — while not failing to ascribe those same motives to themselves or to their employers.

Eg, agents are there to represent authors, but not to make money. But self-publishing authors are there to make money. Craft brewers are supposed to represent the noble art and craft of making “artisan” beer, but the beer-drinkers who get pissed when those same craft brewers expand in order to make money are themselves interested in earning money from their own jobs or businesses.

Weird.

In all seriousness, the blog entry I’ve linked to is worth reading because she delineates all the right reasons for making the switch. Any writer who isn’t at least thinking about doing so is crazy.

Apropos of all the other writer-related stuff (about which I’ve written more in the past week than in all of the six years I’ve maintained this blog), this interesting interview with David Eagleman.

A couple of money quotes:

On making complex ideas accessible (something dear to my heart):

I just follow the rule I tell all my students: if you can’t explain it to an eighth grader in a way that he/she would understand it, then you don’t understand it. As a corollary, one must understand the importance of narrative. Our brains have evolved to care about story. If you want to penetrate the brain of a listener, wrap the information in things they care about.

On writing “academic texts,” non-fiction, and fiction:

In academic texts there is a particular landscape of facts that needs to be surveyed. In nonfiction one chooses a particular path through that landscape, taking the reader on a special journey of your choosing. In fiction one takes off into the third dimension.

Also, Eagleman is also responsible for a “movement” (his term, not mine) called “possibilianism.” Who knew?

Have I mentioned how much I missed blogging?

A project that aims to learn about how literature influences science and scientists. As the “what this is about” note points out, typically the interest goes the other direction (how does science influence literature?). Take a look. Good stuff. Again: Do we live in interesting times or what?? (And if you’re missing the connection between this, genre writing, science fiction, fantasy, the turmoil in contemporary writing/publishing, well, really: there IS a connection. At least in my mind.)

Back to work.

UPDATE: I signed up for it. I can’t resist.

Anyway, I’m one of those dinosaurs who believes there is no free lunch, and on that note, here’s a blog post worth reading. It comes from a site devoted to “scholarly publishing” (something else in which I’m interested for a number of reasons, many of them only tangentially related to the “publishing” part). Here the author is thinking about “social costs” and “social good” but doing so in a broad context. Worth reading.

Two money quotes:

Cheapness has consequences in the long run. We all end up paying for it somehow. And cheapness has a funny way of being expensive.

And:

You can save yourself poor as a business or an industry.

Ain’t that the truth. (Hey! When else will I have an excuse to use a Zappa album cover?)

Cheap Thrills (Frank Zappa album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)