Can We Be Taken Seriously? - Part 27

The old Sri Lankan blogosphere is awash with talk about the Galle Literary Festival and most of these awashings are about the session on blogging and whether us bloggers can be taken seriously. There's this on ICT in General, there's these daily diaries on Sach's blog, this piece by David Blacker, who many of us didn't know had a blog. David, thank you for mentioning my blog as a "pimped out diary". I love that description and may use it in my header.

There's Indi's post and this one by the Missing S. My favourite is this in Lakbima News. There are more sour grapes in it than in the bottle of wine Rajpal brought to the last Sri Lankan bloggers' get together. And as a lowly blogger I respectfully suggest that Mr Abeynayake gives his young blogging cousin a call and asks for some variants on the word "kitsch". It's bouncing around that article as if there's been a "kitsch" deficit at Lakbima for many years and suddenly a crate of them has been delivered to the office.

The esteemed editor of Lakbimanews is keen to make some rather negative remarks about bloggers. That's his opinion and he's entitled to it, but somewhere in the back of my mind is a vague memory of a Sri Lankan Sunday paper copying and pasting a load of Sri Lankan blog posts and pretending that they were the work of its staff journalists. Bloggers were clearly good enough for that newspaper on those occasion!

I was thinking about blogging, journalism and writing and music and suddenly I felt as if it had all become clear. This sometimes happens to me and it's usually before I fuck things up big style so I shan't get too carried away. But, the music comparison is a big one as it's what I can relate to easily.

Here it is; I'm not the best drummer in the world by any stretch of the imagination, I'm probably not even the best drummer in either of my two bands (thanks Mr McCartney), but over the years I've put in a hell of a lot of effort in learning how to play the drums properly. I've studied with many great teachers (and a few crap ones), I've done lots and lots of practice and I think I've got quite a good grounding.

Music, the playing of it, is a study that can take many lifetimes and no musician would ever say that they have reached a level that cannot be surpassed, but I feel comfortable in the knowledge that I'm ok at my drumming. And, like any musician, I often see some half arsed fuckwit playing the drums in a famous band. Someone who clearly doesn't know how to play very well, who's just got lucky and is attaining a level of success way beyond that which his, or her, talent deserves.

That's what some people, the "proper" writers, those with books published and who make a living from their words, think of us bloggers. Not that we're crap drummers, although they may think that of me, but that we've attained a level of success we don't deserve. It's as if we've written a book, published it for nothing and then gone out and delivered it to people free of charge for them to read.

Many of us haven't had to learn how to write properly, we haven't had to sell ourselves to publishers and newspaper editors to get published and we sure as hell haven't had to deal with the pressure of trying to make a living from writing. We just chuck some words out on a PC monitor, hit the "publish" button and some people read them.

It's not as simplistic as all that, but I must admit that I can see the viewpoint. The lines can get blurred beyond recognition when blogs are written by proper journalists or bloggers get to publish stuff properly, but the fact is that many of us just haven't paid our dues. That's why we'll never get taken seriously by some, we'll always be looked at as a crap drummer in a successful band.

Rajpal made some points that seem valid in his article, but to me his credibility suffers from a massive surplus of negative criticism. His recurring theme, that the festival wrapped literature in a Barefoot sarong, seems trivial. I for one have no problems with that packaging. I have cupboards full of Barbara Sansoni sarongs and will not hear a word against them. There are few things I can imagine that would not look good in one of them.

But Sri Lanka needs things like the GLF, it needs to get people into the country and to get hold of their money and it needs unique selling points. The Galle Literary Festival is a big one and I think the organisers have done a fine job in getting it to where it is in the literary world.

When the mainstream media starts to write articles about the blogging workshop at the GLF then surely we must be taken seriously. When the GLF has a session centred around bloggers then surely we are already crossing over into the mainstream. When people think that literature is for all, not just for the elite, then we will be taken seriously.

Or will we?