The basement of the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge sells used books. There’s an enormous market for used books in Cambridge, and anything interesting that winds up there tends to be immediately snapped up. The past few times I’ve gone to look at the fiction shelves, I’ve been struck by a big color-coded section in the middle that doesn’t change – a dozen or so books from Jerry Jenkins &Tim LaHaye’s phenomenally popular Left Behind series, a shotgun wedding of Tom Clancy and the Book of Revelation carried out over thirteen volumes (so far). About half the books on the shelf are the first volume. None of them look like they’ve been read. They’re quite cheap.
Since the books started coming out (in 1996), there’s been an almost complete absence of discussion of the books in the mainstream media, save the occasional outburst about this lack of discussion (“These books have sold 60,000,000 copies! And nobody we know reads them!”). I suspect my attitude towards the books is similar to that of many blue-state readers: we know these books are enormously popular in the middle of the country, and it’s clearly our cultural/political duty to find out why . . . but flipping through the first one in the basement of the Harvard Bookstore, I’m stricken by the wooden prose. I can’t read this. Also, there’s the matter of time: I still haven’t finished Proust. The same sort of thing seems to happen to other civic-minded would-be readers.
And then, on the Internet, Fred Clark’s blog Slacktivist gallops in to save the day. For the past year and a half, Mr. Clark has been engaged in a close reading of the series, explicating the text and the issues it raises in an increasingly fundamentalist America. This project isn’t a full-time project; his blog has other commentary, but once a week, he stops to analyze a few pages of Left Behind. It helps that Mr. Clark is a fine writer; his commentary is funny, personal – recollections from a Christian childhood pop up from time to time – and he has enough of a theological background to elucidate telling details and the history behind Jenkins & LaHaye’s particular brand of end-times fever.
It’s an admirable project as well because of the shear magnitude of it. In his first year and a half, he’s made it through 105 pages, working at the rate of roughly six days a page. By my calculations, it will take him eighty more years to finish the 4900 pages of the series, though additional prequels have been declared, which will take the total up somewhere over a century. Lengthwise, he seems to be running about neck-and-neck, though it’s hard to tell on the screen. This can’t help but remind one of “On Exactitude in Science“, the parable by Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy Casares about the map that became the size of the territory it set out to survey. And of course, when a map gets this big, you’re going to have issues with organization.
How do we start reading something like this? I was forwarded a link to the blog itself – http://slacktivist.typepad.com – and found the top entry dealing with Left Behind. Not all of Slacktivist deals with Left Behind – but enough of it does that Mr. Clark has made a separate category for it, http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/left_behind. Clicking on that gets you a single page with all of the Left Behind posts, from newest to oldest. Being interested (and a fast reader) I decided to read the whole thing. To do this, you have to start at the bottom, scroll down a little bit (these are long posts), and then scroll up to get to the next chronological post. This does become, at length, tiring.
One point that’s important to remember here: the Left Behind component of Slacktivist differs from the majority of blogs in that its information is not especially time-sensitive. While there are references to ongoing current events (the Iraq war, for example, not without relevance to the text under discussion), these references don’t need to be read in real time. A reader could start reading his close reading at any time without much loss. (Granted, there is the question of relevance: it would be nice if in ten years nobody remembered Left Behind, but that probably won’t be the case: Clark points out Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth from the 1970s as prefiguring the series – and, it’s worth noting, it still sells frighteningly well.)
A further complication for the would-be reader: Mr. Clark’s posts, while they form the spine of his creation, are not the whole of it: his writing has attracted an enormous number of comments from his readers – somewhere over thirty comments for each of his recent posts, occasionally more than sixty. These comments, as you might expect, are all over the place – some are brilliant glosses, some are from confused Left Behind followers who have stumbled in, some declare the confused Left Behind followers to be idiots, and there’s the inevitable comment-spam, scourge of the blog-age. Some have fantastic archived conversations of their own. Some are referenced in later posts by Mr. Clark, and become part of the main text. It’s almost impossible to read all the comments because there are so many of them; it’s hard to tell from the “Comments (33)” link if the thirty-three comments are worth reading. It’s also much more difficult to read the comments chronologically: some older posts are still, a year later, generating comments, becoming weird zombie conversations.
What can be done to make this a more pleasant reading experience? Because blogs keep their entries in a database, it shouldn’t be that hard to make a front end webpage that displays the entries in chronological order. It also wouldn’t be hard to paginate the entries so that Mr. Clark’s more than 50,000 words are in more digestible chunks. I’m not sure what could be done about the comments, though. Seventy-five posts have generated 1738 comments, scattered in time. Here’s a rough diagram of how everything is connected:
The bottom row of blue dots represent Mr. Clark’s posts over time (from earliest to most recent). One post leads linearly to the next. The rows above represent comments: the first red row are comments on the first post (an arrow which leads to the first), which are frequent at first and then tail off. This pattern is followed by all the other comments on posts. Comments tend to influence following comments (although this isn’t necessarily true). But, unless you have eagle-eyed commentators who make sure to click on every comment link every day, different comment streams will probably not be influencing each other over time. The conversation has forked, and will continue forking.
A recent study seems to indicate that the success of a blog (as measured by advertising) is directly related to the feeling of community engendered, in no small part, by the ability to comment and discuss. But that ability to comment and discuss seems to get lost with time. What’s happening here might be an inherent limitation in the form of the blog: while they’re not strictly time-sensitive, they end up being that way. This could perhaps be changed if there were better ways into the archives, or if notifications were sent to the author and commentators on posts as new comments were posted. But: especially when dealing with an enormous volume of comments, as is the case at Slacktivist, the dialogue becomes increasingly asynchronous as time goes on.
We don’t think of physical books as having this problem because we assume that we can’t directly interact with the author and don’t expect to be able to do so. With electronic media, the boundaries are still unclear: we expect more.