The Utican becomes Lit Blog
I’m glad I kept my college textbooks because I just had to reference one of them. Charles Dickens published his second novel, Oliver Twist, in monthly installments in the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany. Nowadays we see bloggers doing the same thing: publishing their attempts at the next Great American novel in installments on their blogs to an audience of, well, mostly nobody. But we can’t blame them for trying, can we? The selfish, narcissistic phenomenon of blogging casts in sharp relief our desire to be part of a network. The alone hours that we all endure can sometimes seem like interminable, vast wastelands of white noise. Driving in a car we listen to the radio, because like the television or blogging, it makes us feel connected to other human beings. It is a shared experience, and shared experiences have real value, like a conversation or a handshake or a back-rub. Blogging is a shared experience, because while you are sending your thoughts out into the void of silicone and binary, millions of other people are doing the same thing. And there is always the possibility that someone will happen across your blog by random chance further validating your existence. But one is validating their existence by simply making an Internet footprint. The more footprints we leave on the web, it seems, the more we are asserting ourselves in the world.
I’ve been watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles on Fox since it debuted last month. I admit I’m fascinated to see if the son and his mother living off the grid and befriended by a cyborg from the future can prevent doomsday from occurring. But another reason why I watch the show–and TV in general–is because I know that, while I’m sitting there watching the tube at home alone, millions of other people are tuned in to see how John Connor will escape from the grips of yet another cyborg assassin sent through time to kill him. If I were to Tivo the show and watch it later, it wouldn’t have the weight of being a real “shared experience” because I would be watching it alone instead of at the same time as millions of other people. So, in a way, blogging is the newest “shared experience.” We do it alone, maybe nobody reads our blogs, but it is a part of the world wide web. Surely it has to be more permanent than writing your name on water.
But what the hell am I talking about? I’m rambling. I actually wanted to introduce a new segment to this blog in which local writers can have their fiction published in installments just like Dickens had Oliver Twist published in Bentley’s Miscellany(or Nick Hornby had The Polysyllabic Spree published in The Believer, even though that wasn’t fiction). So, without further ado, here is the first chapter of a story by a writer friend of mine. He wishes to remain anonymous, so I will just give him the name Dickens used as a pseudonym when he published The Pickwick Papers (which was also published in installments in a magazine).
Actually, chapter I is above this post.
