It’s funny what stays with you over the years.
In the mid-nineties there was a review of the contemporary reissue of The Worst Journey in the World. The review began with a conclusion: that we do not really know what it’s like to go to the moon, because no one who had actually done it has written well enough about it to convey the experience to us. On the other hand, the review went, the men engaged in the early 20th century exploration of Antarctica were a remarkably literate bunch, and their experiences are a part of us now. A. Alvarez, the reviewer, liked WJW best, but after going through as much of the literature as I ever will, I like to put Shackleton’s Boat Journey at the top of the pile.
So where’s the literary product of parenthood? Who has written well enough to convey to us the experience of being a parent, a mother, a father? Writers have generally looked more closely at the condition of childhood than parenthood. The only author I can think of right now is Oe Kenzaburo. And maybe Freud. And the author of King Lear. Is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about being a father? Knuffle Bunny also comes to mind, which isn't surprising because I read it twice today, aloud.
Can parent blogging contribute? I assume that blogging or on-line writing, as a minor new form, will eventually foster its talents. Can blogging convey not just information, but meaning? With so many parent blogs going now, and blogging being a pretty good form for parents, who don’t have time to write more than five paragraphs a week, maybe there will be a petri dish effect. I’m tossing my spore in!
You know how literature shows you how to live? What do you read that teaches you how to live like a parent?
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Now that I’m reading some blogs and thinking of it as a workshop of potential literature, some pre-web authors seem like bloggers to me. The bloggin’est of all is MFK Fisher. Man, she’s just a stone foodie blogger. All her recipes are lousy, too, if you try to make them. And Beeb the Mom's home page is the most famous work of another pre-web blogger: early genre pioneer Samuel Pepys.
