AS BLOGS BECOME BOOKS

one of the challenges is making sure the book can do more than just offer an edited version of what had been drafted viz a blog. I know that when I incorporated the blogged memoir of my father's last days in The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes, I was also very conscious of recontextualizing it into something larger than the specifics of a particular family's story (e.g. the blurring of the father with Ferdinand Marcos and the daughter with Imee Marcos) and the incorporation of other authors' works to reflect how the blogged memoir was influenced by responses from this blog's Peeps.

In this way, DEMENTIA BLOG (Singing Horse Press, 2008) by Susan M. Schultz is highly effective. DEMENTIA BLOG tracks, in part, the progression of the dementia that afflicted the poet's mother. And it is effective not because (as I attempted with The Light Sang...) the book seeks to transcend its blog(ged) beginnings but because the book organically integrates the blog form as being critical to the book text. For example, the book's use of reverse chronology (per blogs) makes sense in terms of Schultz's address of the loss of memory. Another example: several of the blogged posts end by replicating what's often shown on a blog's column: a list of its most recent posts. But, as shown by this example below, that list then also becomes a logical offshoot of dementia's deterioration of self, viz the incompleted phrases and seemingly arbitrary narrative juxtapositions between the list's lines:

November 19, 2006 Nothing left except loss of ...
November 12, 2006 -- What I do not say to her: th...
November 11, 2006 -- Houses are square, with pitc...
October 15, 2006 -- No Imperial Mints in Chiswic...
September 30, 2006 -- The lyric in wartime. If...
September 25, 2006 -- The former President lost h...
September 22, 2006 -- The words bear weight, bu...

So, yes, I do think a blog can become a book project. But unless the book becomes more than just a polished version of what's already been blogged, I think the result is aesthetically unambitious, not to mention environmentally shoddy. Kudos to Susan for her ... scope.

[If I get my act together and/or get some free time, I'll present a longer engagement with DEMENTIA BLOG in the next issue of Galatea Resurrects.]