Archives and Canons Presentation Final
Click to download a PowerPoint slideshow on Digital Literature becoming a canon.
When someone mentions literature or I think of literature, my mind automatically thinks of something in print or a trip to the bookstore. Prior to this semester, I never would have considered to get on my laptop, go to YouTube and search for literature; I didn’t even know that was a possibility. Literature comes in many forms and I am going to focus on literature in the digital world, and how this type of literature can be read and treated like printed literature that most of us are the most familiar with. It takes a little while to get used to the idea of going to YouTube finding a video with a poem incorporated into it or some form of literature. Sometimes following what’s going on and trying to read into the other aspects that are also shown in the video is difficult. The music, the images, the tone of voice and trying to put all of these together while still focusing on the poem that is being read in the background. It is an interesting process and I usually have to watch the movie many times in order to grasp all of what it is representing and the point of it.
Love Bomb
I found an interesting example of digital poetry on YouTube called Love Bomb that does many things all at once keeping the viewer engaged. What I first noticed about this video was the voice in the background that was reciting the poem. The way she speaks sort of intrigued me and made me want to watch more to see what was going on in the poem. The images in the background add to the effect of the poem and enhance it, lots of effects are used. It makes me wonder if this poem and the video that goes along with it were supposed to provoke some sort of fear in the viewer. At the end of the clip, the poem scrolls across the screen which was nice because then the viewer could read it and try to discern its meaning. It had a pretty powerful message.
Cracks in Memory (2009) Caterina Davinio
The next example I found of digital poetry on YouTube is very unique and does not have any words, just sounds and images. The effect this has is very eerie and haunting. I get the feeling that this poem is trying to convey that something bad happened in this house/location. The crackling noise in the backgrounds makes me think of the crackling a fire would make and the use of the color orange and the haziness suggests that a fire may have happened here. The title Cracks in Memory is of interest to me because it suggests the idea that maybe this is not an accurate representation of what happened entirely. That maybe this event traumatized the person who created this digital poem and they could only remember bits and pieces of what actually happened.
Classic Poems Turn Lyrical on Natalie Merchant’s New Album
The next search I did on YouTube was just the word Poetry and after some stumbling around looking for something of interest, I found a video about Natalie Merchant. It was a very out of the ordinary representation of poetry. Merchant takes classic poems, such as Mother Goose Rhymes and other children’s poems, and made a whole album out of her singing these poems. I found this to be rather fascinating, because I have never heard of someone taking children’s poetry and making them into music. When I stopped to think about, I figured that this could be consider digital poetry and literature, just not like any of the other types of digital poetry I have already discussed above. Merchant sings poetry that has deep meanings and that are thought provoking. This is neat, because when listening to it, it is as if you are listening to someone actually read you the poem just in a different format than we are used to.
Free verse-Beautiful
This following YouTube movie is a great example of free verse poetry. When watching a YouTube video there are many ways in which you can gather information about the culture of the video. Some of these ways are analyzing the narrator who is reading or speaking in the poem helps the viewer decide whether it is someone of high or low culture or status in society, as well as the quality of the video produced. With such easy access to these ‘texts’ like I mentioned before these very well could be the next new type of a cultural cannon because of the accessibility they offer and variety of types of media available on YouTube. It is the way to get word out about an up and coming band, artist author, etc.
The Final Word – Inspirational Kinetic Typography Animation
Lastly, I briefly wanted to touch on one last example of digital poetry. This is the example that was on the class blog under the information about this assignment. There is something very appealing about this representation of poetry. It has a deep meaning about the many different ways that people can choose to live and view their lives. The format of this poem is scattered and fast paced. I believe it is supposed to represent that fact that if you don’t stop to appreciate what you have in life and take a minute to be thankful for what you have, you may not realize what you had until it is gone. The male narrator’s voice for this poem reminds me very much of an army or marine television recruitment commercial. When I thought about this way, it seems like a recruitment for life, to take time to enjoy what you have. The fast paced rhythm of this poem represents how fast paced society is today and how there always seems to be a shortcut for something. When I read into this, it suggests to me to slow down for a little while, don’t take shortcuts and enjoy the time that you have, instead of trying to get more of it. I thought this piece was empowering and what made it this way for me was the distinctive narrator’s voice.
I found many distinctive types of digital literature and poetry today on YouTube. While this form of literature may not be considered mainstream yet, I think that in the near future it may. If digital literature continues to appear on YouTube and other literary sources online then it may be recognized as a normal form of literature.
I went to YouTube and searched for digital poetry as well as digital poetry using photography. I was surprised with the amount of results that this search gave me. I watched several of these digital poetry clips and then narrowed it down to my four favorites based on uniqueness, artistic appeal and the poem’s prose.
1. Her Waiting Face
This was one of the first digital poetry clips that I watched. What immediately struck me about this digital poetry was, the only audio was the music, no one reading the poem out loud. It is up to the viewer to read and interpret the poems meaning. I liked the way that the poem was presented; it is very visually appealing, yet simply done. Before this, I had never looked up digital poetry before and I was pleasantly surprised with Her Waiting Face.
2. Know Where to Go Crazy – A Digital Poem by M. D. Friedman
This digital poem was vastly different from the previous one I viewed. This one encompassed images and text in the background, someone reciting the poem, as well as interesting sound clips to create the mood for this poem. While this one was very creative, it was almost, sensory overload for me. There was so much going on at once that, I didn’t know what to focus on, the poem, text, images or sound clips. It is definitely worth checking out though.
3. Trifles – Poetry, Siri Grunthaler-Alme / Photography, Tanja-Tatjana Krklješa
This was a result of my digital poetry and photography search, and is by far my favorite example of digital poetry thus far. The reading of the poem and the images do a wonderful job of complementing one another. Also, the way the poem is read really captured my attention and the images were amazing. It is simple and that I think it what appeals the most to me about it.
4. Shadows Never Sleep by Aya Karpinska
This last digital poem I found from doing a search on Google. This search lead me to a website called, Poetry International Web and a link lead me to this poem. This poem is an I-phone app, but it can also be viewed on the computer as well. It is a very creative children’s story, and it in a form similar to that of a comic book. It is done in all black, white and grays. It is creative, fun and a nice change from the digital poetry that I found on YouTube.
Literary Outlet:
http://media.poetryinternational.org/bop/ 
This is a really clever web site. It is a list of links to different digital poetry outlets. I briefly visited some of these links and found some neat examples of digital poetry.
I would highly recommend visiting these digital poems and webpages and checking them out for yourself.
For this blog I decided to use Twitter to find a literary outlet and six writers that are connected to this outlet. I happened to find a neat profile on twitter called Fresh Fiction. I looked at who was following Fresh Fiction and from here I choose six people/writers/authors/artists that were all following Fresh Fiction to discuss in my blog. They are all related to one another because they associate themselves with the same literary outlet on Twitter.
First Writer: Joanna Aislinn
Aislinn is an author who writes stories that the reader can relate to. Her genre is contemporary romance. From her Twitter page, I went to her blog which lead me to her webpage where I learned a little more about her. She just wrote her first novel called No Matter Why. I am not familiar with this author or her novels but after browsing her many social media outlets, I might give her book a try.
Second Writer: Carleen Brice
Brice is an author from Colorado, who has published two books, Orange Mint and Honey
and Children of the Waters. I went to her website and from the looks of it she sounds like a promising author. Here is a passage from her website “The Lifetime movie “Sins of the Mother” based on Orange Mint and Honey won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding TV Movie and Jill Scott won for Outstanding Actress in a TV Movie for playing Nona, the mother in my story. I’m hard at work on a sequel” (http://www.carleenbrice.com/). She has won several awards for her novels.
Third Writer: Ann Charles
Charles is from South Dakota and writes novels of many different genres. Some of them being mystery, comedy, paranormal and more! On her webpage there is an “about me” section that is interesting. She has written and edited software for a company which is surprising. I wouldn’t expect most authors to do that. She wrote a series of books called the Deadwood Mystery Series.
Fourth Writer: Tanya Anne Crosby
Crosby was yet another author that I happened to find when browsing the Fresh Fiction Twitter page. She is a bestselling author and an award winning journalist. That is a fantastic combination in my opinion. When doing a little research on Crosby I found a lot of praise for her novels. “The entertaining banter of Crosby’s characters will keep readers engaged…” -Publisher’s Weekly . Yet another author I have never heard of but would like to find out more about and read her literature!
Fifth Writer: Jessica Park
Park is a young adult author who has a new novel coming out soon, she also wrote a novel called Relatively Famous. Her books are available in paperback, Kindle, Nook and most other e-book readers. Park is keeping up with popular culture by offering her books in these formats.
Sixth Writer: Nicholas Kasunic
This author caught my eye because he is new and just published his debut novel, Losing Michael Malone. “In Losing Michael Malone, five characters search for happiness in a time of suffering. Emma is blind to the sunshine that gleams around her each and every day. Maddie witnesses a drained and exhausted marriage. Jack is without solitude in a life of inner conflict and self-loathing. Love and compassion rip and tear through the life of Kathryn. Michael hurts too much to feel anything” (http://www.nicholaswrites.com/). While it sounds like a sad and haunting novel, it is always nice to read someone who writes a rememberable story and that’s what this sounds like to me. It is impressive to see a debut novel from an author who is still in college and is only twenty years old!
All six of these writers were following Fresh Fiction. The name Fresh Fiction suits most of these authors well because they are ones I have never heard of. This is an effective way to get the word out about both up and coming authors and already seasoned ones.
For this blog post, I went to many different profiles on Facebook to research this mode of communication for literary resources, printing/publishing houses, authors, artists and so on. These searches that I conducted resulted in many useful findings.
First I would like to address the question of whether different literary communities or networks that have different visibility settings or types of profiles may make one profile greater in the sense that it is more readily accessible. As opposed to other profiles that are more generic or need to be “friended” in order to see all of the Facebook profile. To research this, I went to several literary Facebook pages and most of them you didn’t have to send a friend request to see more than the info page. Almost all of these literary and publishing house pages that I went to let the person navigate this page and see everything, their info, wall, photos etc. Then if the user liked what he/she saw they could then proceed to request this literary outlet as a friend. In juxtaposition to this I decided to look up authors’ Facebook pages. 
I got very different results. What I came up with when I did this search was not an actual author’s Facebook profile, like you would find a author’s profile on Twitter but, instead it was a brief page with a generic (usually Wikipedia like) synopsis about the author and what books she/he has written. Instead of having the option to friend these authors, one is only given the option to like them. When comparing these two vastly different profiles side by side, I immediately knew which one I found far more satisfying. That of the literary Facebook pages/profiles, which provided far more information in the form of text, photos and feedback from friends and fans. In conclusion, these types of profiles are greater because they have depth to them.
While the communities that offered more information on Facebook were more appealing to me, at the same time I saw them as being more “inclusive” and “exclusive”. This is because of the friend feature. This person, publishing house or writing group may deny certain friend request for many reasons. Maybe they don’t accept friends they don’t know, or maybe they don’t friend people who don’t have friends in common with them. Whatever the reason may be, it makes these communities and networks seem exclusive. Thinking back to the authors’ Facebook profiles, it is nice that anyone can like them and not have to go through the process of getting “accepted”.
Torch Literature
The role of the author in different literary communities is to spread the word about their work(s), publishing house, art piece or gallery, etc. Facebook is the perfect outlet for a literary person to do just this. It gets the word out to many people and friends through friends find out about new communities and people that they never knew existed and the fan base keeps on spreading. The use of text on these different communities Facebook pages is important because through utilizing symbol status updates and posts, these literary communities and people can get the word out about a new blog post on their blog, a book review on an up and coming book or an update about what is to come from a certain publisher. You get the idea. It is a crucial means of communication and one that can get instantaneous responses. There is one Facebook page in specific that I found when I searched the word literary in the Facebook search engine (I guess you could call it that). Anyway, I got this need profile called Torch Literary Arts. This profile stood out the most to me for retaining and representing a sense of literary culture. I got this sense of literary culture through reading some of the most current posts by Torch Literary Arts. An example of one of these posts follows; it is because of the picture that accompanies the text that this profile has the feeling of literature instead of a thrown together status update. “With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist,” author Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and two teen… by Workman in Books – Fiction, Fiction, and Tayari Jones” (Torch Literary Arts Facebook profile).
Photographs to be displayed at the Illiterate Gallery!
I also searched the word art on Facebook and found many profiles with similar visibility to that of the literary communities. One of these communities is Illiterate Magazine. This really neat community that allows someone to submit their artwork and writing to them for a chance to get it published in the magazine or in the gallery.
Overall, it is the public and readily accessible Facebook profiles that seem to be more successful than those that only give a brief overview of an author or publisher. Not only do these profiles have more friends, but also they are more official and are more in-depth.
For awhile now I have noticed how many websites have RSS feed subscriptions, Facebook and follow on Twitter buttons on their webpage’s or blogs. Now that I am really tuned into this I am noticing these buttons on just about everywhere I go online. This feature caters to everyone’s different interest allowing them to subscribe, share and tweet what they are interested in. These different websites/blogs hope is to gain more follows and more public attention by utilizing these features. I analyzed the following five blogs/websites that I found by searching on Facebook and Twitter for content and there use of social media outlets.
Trystan Photography
Trystan Photography is based out of Colorado Springs and specializes in wedding photography. Their Facebook page has a link to their blog and the photos tell most of the story and the length of the post varies. Not much needs to be said after looking at the different wedding photographs. Each post gives a little insight on what is going on in each photograph(s). 
“Evergreen. I am almost embarrassed by my complete lack of knowledge of what Evergreen was, is, and has to offer. I have lived in Colorado since I was 10 years old, and especially in high school up in Fairplay, CO, I would drive through Evergreen almost every on my way to do things in Denver. I was under the impression that Evergreen was simply some little mountain town of the highway. That’s it. Little did I know that Evergreen was this really gorgeous and almost secretly hidden mountain paradise (the fall colors didn’t hurt, but honestly it doesn’t look like much from Hwy 285, and that might be on purpose).” The prose tells a story and gives the reader an idea what it felt like to be shooting a certain wedding or engagement. The writing is full or personality of the photographer, but also tells the reader a little about the couple in the photograph as well. Going to this website is like reading a picture book, first you look at the photographs and gather what you can and then go onto to get the full story from the text. This site is simple yet full of endless stories and is frequently updated on my RSS feed and on Facebook.
Lets Love Art
After doing a little more searching on Facebook I found this really neat page called Lets Love Art. Through the Facebook page I was able to go to their digital art blog. It is a blog by many different artists and people are able to upload their own pieces of art onto this blog. There isn’t any text on this blog only comments. It is all about different forms of art. This blog has many different networks to follow them on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and RSS subscriptions. 
A larger blogroll can be found on this blog as well. I am going to check out some of the links and see if there is anything of interest. The fact that it is also on Facebook may lead me to find some other literary and artistic people and networks.
Illiterate Magazine
Illiterate Magazine is another local blog and magazine that is based out of Colorado. This blog I have had in my reader for a while now and today I decided to check out their Facebook. “Illiterate cultivates interaction with art, literature and creative community. 
We provide dynamic opportunities for individuals to develop their artistic voices and use them to engage themselves, each other and the public in dialog” (Facebook Info page). It is a tastefully done blog and gives people the opportunity to submit their work in two categories visual and literary. It gives people a chance to have it on the blog and get feedback on it. There is a lot of talent to be seen on the Illiterate blog and much new content added regularly.
Salon
I recently stumbled across this website, Facebook and Twitter pages. It is a website that covers a lot of different topics. There are two sections of this site that I tend to frequent the most often, the book page and Writers and Writing page. This site is active on both Twitter and Facebook and I always know when there is an article of interest because of the many posts Salon makes. Today I read an article called Advice to Writers: Skip the scenery too much description of landscape and weather has ruined more than one literary novel.
There was one paragraph that I found to be very helpful, “‘Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” Is there any doubt that the most skipped parts of novels, even popular novels, are the descriptions of landscape and weather? The longer a novelist makes them, the more readers end up skipping, until it occurs to them to skip the whole thing altogether’” . This site always has helpful tips like this one.
New York Magazine
The last publishing network that I found both on Facebook and Twitter is the New York Magazine. The New York Mag has such a large following on both Twitter and Facebook. 
It is heavily involved in the online social media world. What’s convenient about the New York Magazine and the other blogs and websites I have discussed is the ability to see a post on Twitter and Facebook and look at it because you’re interested or disregard it and not have to search through the whole website for something of interest. While this website is more commercialized than some others, has something to offer everyone. It’s a one stop for everything; news, book reviews, art, entertainment, fashion etc. Because, of this though, it is lacking a personal element that the blog, Illiterate, gives the reader.
Facebook and Twitter allow both independent and larger blogs and websites to get noticed and gain some appreciation for their work. It also introduces fans of these blogs/webpages to new ones via follows posting things on walls and through tweets. In the end, a community of sorts is formed where one can go to feed their literary and artistic desire and whatever other interest they may have. Something is sure to be found on it, on Facebook or Twitter.
Now when I find a website or blog that is about art or literature that I find appealing, I immediately save it to my RSS feed. When the semester first began, I can recall thinking why do I need a reader when I can just bookmark the site that I like and frequent it when I please? Now I know the answer to my own question, a reader is amazing in comparison to bookmarking something, because the results I get when I go to my RSS feed are instantaneous. Everything is all within a click away, no need to go searching through my bookmarks for a website, all my favorite literary and art blogs and websites are all there. This is great! This afternoon I went to my Google reader and searched through the subscriptions I have, and found three literary outlets that stream regularly and are worthy of taking a look at and discussing.
There is a website The Daily Beast, on this website there is a section known as The Book Beast.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsmaker/book-beast/. Not only does this section of the website do book reviews, but it also has interviews with authors, articles and other interesting things that have to do with literature. What works about this literary source is that the layout is similar to that of a newspaper. It is easy to read and looks familiar, which is important, because a good clean layout keeps readers coming back for more. The simple color scheme(red, white and black) is pleasing to the eye. Lastly, The Book Beast is content rich, and everything is very well written. One article that I particularly liked is, Why Are Men So Angry by Kay Hymowitz. It is thought provoking and is relevant to some of my previous blogs. Hopefully after reading this passage of the article, you will want to read it as well, “Men in their twenties and thirties are fed up with women, but author Kay Hymowitz says you can’t blame them when women are demanding equality except when it comes to romance.”
The second thing I choose from my reader is a literary blog, it is called All Hook, No Chorus. 
http://allhooknochorus.blogspot.com/. This blog I found while searching Twitter, and I was immediately hooked. As for the layout, it is straightforward and very simplistic. Each post is unique and fresh, the prose excellent, and offers insight from others beside just that of the author. There is a post dating back to December 2010 where the author of this blog, Sara Jaffe, quotes a speech made at a graduation. It got me thinking. ““The problem begins when one forgets the artificiality of it all, when one neglects to pay homage to those designations that to our minds—to our reflex senses, perhaps—make of music an analyzable commodity. The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to an obverse, that it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it…When people who practice an art like music become captives of those positive assumptions of system, when they forget to credit that happening against negation which system is, and when they become disrespectful of the immensity of negation compared to system—then they put themselves out of reach of that replenishment of invention upon which creative ideas depend, because invention is, in fact, a cautious dipping into the negation that lies outside system from a position firmly ensconced in system.” –Glenn Gould, “Advice to a Graduation”. The only thing that doesn’t appeal to me about this blog is, it is very text heavy and I find myself getting bored of reading the same thing after a while. It would be nice to see it have more photos incorporated into the posts
Lastly, I chose The New York Times Books page on their website, because it is a great source for literary information and it is updated very frequently, http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html. There are many contributing authors on the website and this is nice because there are many different styles of writing and types or articles for different people. It offers fresh insight and you don’t get tired of reading one person’s writing over and over, which is one of the downfalls of some other blogs solely by one author. What is neat about this website is that it offers a variety of resources and information and is easily accessible. Also there are photos with many of the articles, which helps add a visual element to the text even though a lot of the articles are relatively short. The article I read today was about marriage, a book that was focused on marriage and the changes that occur though the course of one’s life. This article is called With or Without You by Liesl Schillinger and is written beautifully.
Illustration by André da Loba
These lines really drew me in, “The greatest human yearning, Marai suggests in his newly translated novel, “Portraits of a Marriage,” is to recover the sense of belonging and possibility that attaches to childhood, that ghostly sensation of how things felt when life was most promising: “simpler, but more mysterious and more important.” “It is the memory of expectation that lies at the bottom of all our lives,” Marai explains, adding: “That is what we love, what we are forever seeking. And for an adult, perhaps only love can conjure something of that tremulous hopeful sense of waiting.” I would highly recommend the New York Times Book section as a good literary outlet.
Check out these three literary outlets, because I guarantee you will find something that is of interest to you. I did.
Once again I find myself toting my laptop to a local coffee shop to use their WiFi. This way I can further my search for literary blogs that I find appealing and also learn more about world of blogging. I decided rather than doing a search on Google, since I have done that many times before I’d mix things up and try familiarizing myself with twitter while searching for blogs. It seemed like a good idea to me and as it turned out it was a success. I got faster results from this type of search than I did on Google. Instant gratification! What follows are my results and analysis of authority and power in relation to the concept of blogging hegemonies, from a comparison between three different blogs.
The first blog I choose to look at and assess is called, Cupcake Mafia (http://www.mycupcakemafia.com/). This blog is written with a sense of authority, but it is done in such a way that keeps the reader wanting to find out more, and engages the reader. It also gets you thinking and considering some of the things mentioned in the posts. The reader must feel as if the author is addressing him/her directly. An example of this is in the author Tali’s latest post Gratitude and Grace. The author poses the question, “Chances are if most of us pray for a stranger in some way, well then a stranger has sent good energy our way. Have you felt that before?” This is a great tactic to use while blogging. The design of this blog appears to be geared towards young females, being very pink and semi-frilly. I think this blog may attract more male readers if the layout was redone to incorporate more gender neutral colors, but I am sure that many of the female readers don’t pay this any mind. I must admit it was one of the things that made it visually appealing for me. The content of this blog is very rich and I like how it sticks to the theme of exercise, healthy eating, compassion for others and other topics that relate to this. Overall, it is a very appealing blog, one that I will frequent. 
I had another successful search on Twitter, this time by searching @literature blogs. I got so many results than I would never have time to sift through and look at all the ones I find to be appealing. There was one that stood out among the rest, so I just had to check it out. The blog is called The Village Voice Blogs (http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/2011/02/ten_best_draft.php?page=2). The blog that caught my eye was called 10 Great Food Moments in Literature (Plus Dining Guide!). If you have read any of my previous blogs or micro blogging posts I am sure you may have gathered by now, that I have a passion for food. When you mix food with anything to do with literature you have the perfect combination, in my opinion. This blog does both of these things! Let’s dive deeper into this blog and figure what it is all about. The composition of this blog is very good and well written. It does a good job giving a synopsis of a wide range of literature and something to do with food in the novel. Underneath this brief account of the novel is a brief blurb of a place where you can get the food mentioned in the novel and expect it to be excellent. An example of the way this is done can be seen as follows,
“Starving, by Elizabeth Strout
Strout’s short story deals with an adulterous couple who decides to help an anorexic teenage delinquent. The donut-munching lovers feel guilty, but instead of talking about their present misdeeds, they chitchat about their own childhood antics, like stealing a pear from a neighbor’s tree. They also go on diets and put off cigarettes, which, unlike their cravings for each other, are bodily appetites that they can control. One craving you should not resist: Bluebird Coffee Shop’s pistachio-cardamom donut. (72 East 1st Street, 212-260-1879)” 
While it may not have as much authority as the blog Cupcake Mafia that we recently discussed, it makes up for what it lacks in authority with its content. As for the design and layout of this blog, it is very commercialized and is very text heavy. On the plus side, the colors and font used in this blog are very simple. With a black text on a white background, it is easy to read which is very important in regards to a blog’s audience. This is a very unique way to present a literary blog!
The last blog I would like to talk about today in relation to blogging hegemonies is a blog called Book Maven (http://bookmavenmedia.com/blog/). This blog seems to hold the most cultural authority in comparison with the other two discussed above. It exerts the most authority for two reasons. The first reason being, it is beautifully written. This in and of itself holds precedent over the previous two, because a good literary blog must have excellent prose. The second reason being that this blog seems to be the one that is most up with popular culture and this is important in relation to “cultural” authority. The ways that it is current on popular culture is, it has twitter updates located in the sidebar of the blog, has an RSS feed option, makes references to new things in regards to literature and its happenings in pop culture. Here is a snippet of a blog, “What the heck is a vook? Vook just might be the next step in e-books that we have been waiting for. When you buy an ebook through Vook, you are not only getting the text, but an entire experience, including audio, video and social media sharing possibilities. This is one of those ideas that could be great or could fizzle out before ever really going anywhere. Only time will tell!” The types of references are important, especially in regards to a literature blog. I would deem the design of this blog pretty much flawless, because it is so well developed and has a simplistic layout. I think is one of the reasons I paused to read it in the first place. 
It is very accessible, visually pleasing and uses just the right about of photos, as to avoid having the blog appear too text heavy. This blog has a pleasant appearance and great prose, a win-win combination that will keep readers coming back.
Lastly, you may be wondering what the role of cultural authority is in respect to blogging. In fact, it is a key factor to keep in mind when blogging and looking at other blogs. It shows how in tune an author happens to be with popular culture and current events. For instance, who would want to read a blog where all of the posts were about something that happened years ago, when no one is even talking about it or into it anymore. I don’t think many people would frequent this type of blog. It’s a different to mention something from the past and relate it to present day events. As well as being current in a blog, the blog also has to be visually appealing, written well and reach out to its audience. In other words, a blog must strive to be the best and stand out. It must dominate all others.
I set such high standards for what a literary blog should look like and how it should be written, that I struggled to find a blog that met my approval. A blog has to be visually pleasing and cannot be text heavy. There has to be a fine balance between text and photos; this is a must. Finally, after an exhausting search on Google for a literary blog that suited my fancy, I found one that had a just the right balance of creativity and interesting topics.
The blog is http://thebookspy.blogspot.com/. This is a really intriguing blog because the author does something very distinctive. He discusses the books that he sees people reading on the subway and what train they were on when he spotted them.
Here is what makes this blog a suitable literary blog and worthy of reading. First, the layout of the blog is simple. It is pleasing to the eye without so much going on that the reader wouldn’t know where to look(like some of the other blogs I viewed today). The posts are short and to the point, but they are anything but boring. Not only is there a description of the book that was seen being read, but also an analysis of sorts of the reader, which adds a neat element to the blog post. It is safe to say this blog has won my approval.
During my search for a suitable blog, I found two other interesting blogs that were definitely noteworthy. The first one is http://pbackwriter.blogspot.com/. What I liked about this blog, is its use of photographs and color. It inspires me to add some more photographs’ which break up text and enhance the blog. What I didn’t care for so much about this blog was, while the photographs did break up the text in some posts, other posts seem to be text heavy which was hard to read at times.
The second blog that I liked had a unique twist. The blog Cook the Books http://cookthebooksclub.wordpress.com/, is appealing to read because the authors of the blog discuss a book they have read, but then they also cook a food that was mentioned in the book. They then discuss and critique both the book read and the food cooked. Definitely a blog worth checking out. Some links that are related to literary blogs and my search for them are, http://www.blogs.com/topten/10-best-literature-blogs/ , http://www.heavenhellandpurgatory-bookreviews.com/ and http://solittletimeforbooks.blogspot.com/.
I am an avid reader, so it was difficult for me to choose just five authors I think should be read. Every author has something unique to offer its audience, but these are five that I think have to be read.
1. Louise Erdrich
She wrote one of my favorite books Tracks. I had to read this novel in my Native American Literature class a few semesters ago and fell in love with her writing style and the unique story line. I haven’t read any of her other books, although I do have her novel The Painted Drum sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read once I have some spare time.
2. Dorothy Allison
I just finished her novel Bastard out of Carolina. The novel is beautifully composed. This is a coming of age novel and deals with family life and gives the reader an idea of what some people put up with when they “love” someone. It’s a sad novel, but one worth reading.
3. Sherman Alexie
I have read one of his books and would highly recommend it; Indian Killer is a great novel. The novel deals with what it means to fully associate with a given identity and what it means to be Native American or any other race. As well as how far some people go to feel as they fit their given identity or to change it. I have also seen a few of Sherman Alexie’s screenplays, The business of Fancydancing and Smoke Signals, both of which are thought provoking and composed very well. Sherman Alexie‘s work is definitely worth checking out.
4. Eden Robinson
She wrote the novel Monkey Beach which I read for my Ethnic Literature class. The prose was captivating and I couldn’t put this novel down. I would highly recommend it. There is a twist in the plot, though, that kept me hanging and the book ends not how I expected. This is part of what made it such a good novel.
5. Nicholas Sparks
I think he is a truly great author and if you haven’t read any of his books yet, I would highly recommend them. I can’t decide which one of his novels is my favorite. I think they are all very good.
Ashley 