You're reading this on your lunchbreak, right?

Shocked, shocked I tell you! What blogs cost American business:

Blog this: U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs.

Currently, the time employees spend reading non-work blogs is the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs.

About 35 million workers — one in four people in the labor force — visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks — blog readers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break.

Literature, Genre, and Ambition

If you are not reading Olen Steinhauer’s work then you are missing a real treat (see here for example). Olen has had a blog for awhile but it has been neglected of late. He has returned, however, with some interesting thoughts on ambition, literature, and the potential of “genre”.

It kinda jumps off a post by Sarah this summer on cliches and gimmicks that had an interesting debate in the comment section.

So read ’em both. Plenty to chew on for writers, readers, and critics alike.

Auster's Son May Explain Some Literary Darkness

In the latest Eclectica Magazine, Andie Miller writes on several elements surrounding Paul Auster’s life, chiefly his father and son, as a possible explaination for dark elements in Auster’s most recent prose. Miller writes:

In 1979, Auster concluded his Portrait of an Invisible Man, of his father, with these words:

“Past two in the morning. An overflowing ashtray, an empty coffee cup, and the cold of early spring. An image of Daniel now, as he lies upstairs in his crib asleep. To end with this.

“To wonder what he will make of these pages when he is old enough to read them.

“And the image of his sweet and ferocious little body, as he lies upstairs in his crib asleep. To end with this.”

It was these words that touched me, and made me curious to investigate what had become of this little boy. Now I am filled with a profound sense of sadness.

Googlebombing 'Failure' and 'Read This'

Google’s official blog explained last month the reason a search for “failure” leads first to the White House biography page for President G. W. Bush. They say it’s called “googlebombing,” the popular use of select key words when linking to a site.

“In this case,” Google reports, “a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush’s website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases.”

As an apparent retaliation, webmasters have made the second link listed for this search Michael Moore’s site.

But this is key word method Google uses to be the best search engine on the Net. Googlebombing is natural. Searching for “fabulous” takes you to fabulous.com. “Brilliant” takes you to brilliant-tutorials.com. “Read this” takes you to the Wikipedia entry on Podcasting, unless you put the words in quotes, then you reach help page on suicide.

And if you search for “Litblog co-op,” you reach that topic on Mark Sarvas’s blog. In fact, you won’t find The Litblog Co-op site in the top 40 links of that search, which was as many as I cared to scan just now.

May I suggest a googlebomb to the litblog community? Let’s mark Read This as a common term for linking to The Litblog Co-op. The bloggers involved are encouraging us to broaden our reading. Let’s help by encouraging our readers to Read This.

For whatever reason, The Litblog Co-op uses a meta tag to tell some search engines to ignore it. Google and Ask Jeeves appear to ignore the site. I see that Yahoo and Altavista pull up the right site under a “Litblog co-op” search. Dogpile’s combined search lists the Co-op as #6-7. Still, I suggest we link to the co-op using Read This, thereby increasing exposure to those who don’t read litblogs.

Boyle's Undefined Worldview

Ed Champion’s latest edition of The Bat Segundo Show is an interview with the prolific writer T.C. Boyle. Boyle stated that writers tell stories from their own worldview, but he did not write with a truth or point in mind because that would kill the art. While he’s confident a scholar could distill from all of his stories a long list of Boyle’s positions on various issues, he did not write to advance those issues. Stories must have moral content and judgements within them to be good, he said, but what his worldview is he didn’t know. “It keeps expanding,” he said.

I wonder how he would do in an argument or discussion on truth. Would anything be settled absolutely or would we just get comfortable with the rightness of a decision for the time? I remember an interview with Joyce Carol Oates in which she couldn’t conclude a particular action was unethical because she kept bringing up caveats. Isn’t the strongest literature that which illuminates wonderful truth? How strong is the artist when he confines moral judgements to the current story?

As the Jars of Clay song goes: “Cold is night, but colder still is a heart made of stone turned away/ And if you follow me, you’ll see all the black, all the white, fade to grey.”

Kudos to Ed for the good work on this. Maybe 50 minutes is too long for radio, but some of it would make a on-air great feature (by which I mean, he ought to be paid for an interview like this).