I'm having a quasi-existential ... crisis is too strong a word ... moment, let's call it a quasi-existential moment of reconsideration about my reading-writing-blogging life. Mostly the blogging part. Or that's the only part I care to comment on here. I had a whole list of links that I was going to post here next time I got a chance but instead I just dumped them all. One or two of them had some slight literary aspect but nothing of much import, and nothing about which I have anything unique to say. The others were all newsy, current-eventsy: the Zionist attempt to ban a pro-Palestinian LGBT group from marching in this year's Pride parade in Toronto, the stupendously appallingly racist anti-immigrant law just passed in Arizona as well as the furious organizing against it, more on the world climate change conference in which 20,000 people took part this week in Cochabamba, Bolivia. All of which I'd gleaned from other websites at any of which you can find better, fuller information than I'd offer here. Get a grip, I told myself as I tried to muster up a blog post consisting of these links and accompanying brief commentary. This is not the purpose of this blog.
This blog is supposed to address questions about literature and the class struggle. The former, literature merely, this writer said this blah blah blah that writer wrote that blah blah blah and all such petty-bourgeois blather, well, it's available on many other sites. The latter, the great project of the revolutionary overturn of the racist, oppressive, exploitive system that is destroying the planet, well, I subscribe to it with all my heart and soul and I take part in it to the best of my ability, but there are many fine places to read about it and, more to the point, many urgent ways to join it. There's one particular aspect of the socialist movement that is or should be the purview of this blog, and that's the literary angle. A small corner. I want to occupy it better, if it's worth occupying at all.
My proposal is to regroup. Rethink. And then return refreshed and with, I hope, a more focused approach. Who knows what this will mean in practice. Maybe not much. Fewer postings, probably. More rants, perhaps. I'd also like to do some more interviews, offer up a guest blogger or two. Whatever shape it takes I will try to keep Read Red in shape. To the point. The point being rumination about books, reading, writing and fighting for change. Less linking and more thinking.
