bloggers of the Canon
Okay, it's Sunday and we want to take it easy. My parlour game for today is this: of the old writers we love, who would have had a blog, if there had been blogs back then?
I'll start:
Charles Lamb YES
Byron YES
Defoe YES
Pound YES YES YES!
Eliot NO
Mary Wollstonecraft YES
Mary Shelley YES but it would have all been about Shelley
Joyce YES
Proust NO
Fanny Burney YES but under a false name
Johnson NO, & then someone would have persuaded him, but it would have been SHORTLIVED
Li Po YES (I've taken the word "Western" out of the title as I realised that)
Any other ideas?
5 comments:
Keats - yes, but only as a contributor to Leigh Hunts, and about politics
Hemingway - yes, but he wouldn't have contributed since the bullfighting episode in Spain
Fitzgerald - no
Zelda - yes, about dancing
Flaubert - he'd have set up a blogger identity but would still be thinking about the perfect blog
Pound--Yes, but full of crackpot economic theory
Berryman--Yes, but full of double-edged comments bout Robert Lowell
Lowell--Yes, but all about his ex-wives
Sexton--Yes (you can imagine)'
Auden--No, but he'd make snarky comments about Sexton't blog
Thanks Adrian and Quincy, spot on. Quincy, you didn't need to say "but" though: Pound's blog was ALWAYS going to be full of crackpot theory, that would be why he had it; ditto Berryman, and indeed all the others. Auden would tell dinner party stories against people's blogs.
Can we imagine Shelley blogging about free love and equal rights for women, while the girls were making the dinner, minding the babies and planning how to kill themselves over him and Byron?
What we need is all those lame people who've been emailing me about it to actually leave a comment here with their lists! I for one am eager to see them.
Kingsley Amis - Yes - about the tedium of family life.
Virginia Woolf - Yes - in the persona of an anorexic self-harmer.
Evelyn Waugh - Yes - ludicrously transparent anonymity and would be sued by peers for disclosing personal information.
Sylvia Plath - Yes - cookie recipes.
Philip Larkin - Yes - and he would get fired for doing at at work and also downloading porn.
Dorothy Parker - Absolutely not - why type when you can spit.
oh my God I am killing myself laughing. Don't move away!
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