1. Why do you blog?
I spend most of my time writing. My first love is the novel and faced with a novel to write I find myself committed to a single project for months or years. Blogging has many of the same features as any other kind of writing, but it is short and pithy and comes with an immediate payback in the sense that you can see your work published instantly, and receive feedback from readers within hours of posting.
Blogging will never replace what I regard as my day job, which is the novel. But it’s fun and it can be instructive and serious as well.

2. Which author and/or book has most influenced you?
The novel I return to more often than any other is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, ‘cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town’. I love the character, the fact of the boy who refuses to be ’sivilized’. In many ways he is our only hope.

And I have never ceased to be impressed by Twain’s condemnation of the idea that personal conscience is an ‘unerring monitor’.

3. Which three blogs do you most visit?
Ridiculous question. I visit hundreds of blogs. I visit any blog that I’ve never visited before. And I return to many of the blogs I’ve sworn never to go near again.

4. Why do you read fiction?
It’s my main interface with a world which I experience as absurd. I don’t remember asking to come here, but with trial and error I can pass for normal on an almost daily basis. Fiction has taught me to understand people, not all people, or even most people, but I’ve learned to understand some people, living and dead, and I wouldn’t want to be without them. Proust referred to fiction as a story which is hidden inside the writer. He described it as a series of hieroglyphs. It is there, complete, but in order to gain access to it the writer has to translate it.
In the attempt at translation the writer begins to open up hitherto sealed crevices of memory. The writer begins to discover that s/he knows things that s/he didn’t know s/he knew. Just as I, the reader, nod inwardly as I also discover things that I didn’t know that I knew, or I knew it but couldn’t have put it into words. Or I knew it once but had forgotten it.
I don’t read fiction for the apparent story, the plot, I don’t care too much what happens. I read to stimulate my memory and my imagination. Give me a writer who is willing to make me work and I’ll stay up with him or her all night long.

5. What makes you laugh?
Almost anything. I like satire. I like slapstick. I like jokes that play on words. I like puns. You can make me laugh by pointing out how I or anyone else is ridiculous. I laugh along when others are laughing . . . like joining a queue.

Bald man in a blue dress shirt and tie bursts into the bagel shop and starts talking to the woman behind the counter as soon as he’s through the door:
“I’m sorry, Marge, I’m in a rush, I have to pick up lottery tickets, I’m on my way to a funeral in New Jersey, and now Marcia’s decided she needs a bagel for the ride!”
The counterwoman takes this in stride. “Two bagels then?”
“Two plain, yes, please, and to top it off, it’s funny, I’ve got a funeral this morning and later a fiftieth anniversary, Marcia’s parents.”
“You’ve got a full day.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, enjoy. The latter part anyway.”

That little scene went straight into my notebook. My notebooks are full of little scenes like that, along with random thoughts about writing and art and movies, political fulminations, observations about the weather and the scenery, snatches of memories of good and bad times, stories and anecdotes told to me by friends and others. At the time I was in a funk about my “real” writing, my fiction and journalism, and as I was adding the conversation in the bagel shop to my notebook, I got to thinking that as a writer I had more fun keeping my notebook and writing letters than I had writing stories and book reviews.
Considering the way my professional luck was running, I began to wonder if maybe I was a better notebook keeper – a better journalist – than I was any other kind of writer.
Too bad there’s no place for me to publish this stuff, I grumped morosely to myself.
Then it hit me.
My pal Nancy Nall, who is also one of my favorite writers, had (and still has) a popular blog, and she had been pushing me to start one of my own.
What the heck, I said. At least I’ll be able to read my own notebook online. (I have terrible handwriting, and it’s a chore even for me to decipher it.) Maybe a few other people will find it interesting too.
Within the week, Lance Mannion was up and running.
The conversation in the bagel shop wasn’t my first post. Almost immediately, the blog went off in an unexpected direction. I still include notebook entries, though, they’re in my archives under the category headings Mining the Notebooks and Sketchpad 1 and Sketchpad 2. I still have the most fun writing those pieces.
And, it’s turned out, some people have found it interesting.

2. Which author and/or book has most influenced you?
Before I started blogging I’d have said Dickens and David Copperfield. But nowadays I’d say Thoreau and Walden. I read Walden when I was in eighth grade and at the time it’s main influence on me was to convince me I needed to build a cabin in the woods behind my parents’ house. My father refused to help me buy the lumber though, so I put that ambition aside. But I kept reading Thoreau. I went from his books to his journals and from his journals to his friend Emerson’s journals and from reading Emerson’s journals to keeping my own notebook and from keeping my own notebooks to . . . well, see above.
Emerson and Thoreau would both have made fine bloggers. As a matter of fact, Thoreau has a blog. It’s here.

3. Which three blogs do you visit most often.
Minefield! I have too many good friends who have blogs to single out three. I try to read them all every day. I do not read the top American political bloggers all the time, I can tell you that. I prefer to read blogs by people who cover a wide range of topics or who, when they’ve decided to focus on a single subject, have chosen something other than politics, like the bloggers on my blog roll under the category Film Majors.
At the top of my blog roll is a category called To Be Read Everyday, and I do try to at least skim those blogs everyday. They’re sort of my daily newspaper.

4. Why do you read fiction?
Because from time to time I get tired of reading blogs and newspapers and magazines and op-ed pages and non-fiction books and just want to read somebody who’ll tell me the truth.

5. What makes you laugh?
Serious question that deserves a serious and straight-forward answer.
Everything by P.G. Wodehouse, but especially Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, and the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett. As my bedtime reading, I’m reading Pratchett’s Going Postal right now, which means that I end every day with a big grin.

Lance Mannion blogs at: http://lancemannion.typepad.com/

2. Which author and/or book has most influenced you?
Even though I didn’t read Virginia Woolf until I was 22, she has been the most important writer in my life since: a constant companion for the past 18 years. A Room of One’s Own is my favorite text of hers – as much for the gorgeous, lush, and learned texture of the prose as for the argument.

3. Which three blogs do you most visit?
Chekhov’s Mistress

WordMunger

Moorish Girl

4. Why do you read fiction?
To escape, to learn, and to revel in beauty.

5. What makes you laugh?
My mother, my sister, my daughters, and sharply ironic observations about human foibles. I don’t like misanthropy, but I love reading gentle, pointed satire.

Anne Fernald blogs at Fernham, which can be found here: http://fernham.blogspot.com

Well, at least in part as a modest public service, primarily to myself, surely, or whenever we decide to meet, but also as an offering without condition. No delusional fantasies of actual political pull, certainly, though a stronger counter-balance to the middlebrow hegemony in literature would be nice. Nothing quite as revolutionary or profound, as novel or philosophical as, indeed, some seem altogether either too quick to assert or too quick to disallow. In fact both responses strike me as the somewhat predictable result of an unhealthy over-investment in one’s “blogging personality,” frankly. Which over-investment, subtle phoria/phobia is odd, given the degree to which bloggers seem prone to commit so many cardinal sins of bad writing, generally. Nor do I place much value on the daily “practice” of blogging. I think it’s probably a vice, and for “lit-bloggers” (with whom I do not identify), especially. To seek to reconcile without serious loss the time-scales of literature (as that which seeks to come to grips with its very condition of possibility) and tabloid politics seems entirely absurd to me. If I don’t have anything to say, I don’t say anything. Bloggers should by no means repeat the graphomania–career-driven or otherwise–of the academic print world. I’m a firm believer in the primacy and patience of “print”, and of the standards and responsibility that process (ideally, at least) entails, but perhaps blogs at their best can induce some much-needed brevity, and even silence.

As a way to share things, certainly–often half-polished thoughts or items overlooked–or to engage in collaborative, semi-spontaneous reflection, or to take issue with certain things, ideally in small and precise and therefore meaningful ways. In truth, I often err on the side of grandiose pronouncement, but never habitually or entirely undeservedly, or without substance and insufferably so, one hopes. Sometimes, indeed often, these provocations develop into longer conversations. I also blog to be surprised. To stay curious and interested. Blogging is admittedly not the only way to accomplish this. But it is free, and democratic. And thank God, self-selecting. This was too long, I apologize.

2. Which author and/or book has most influenced you?

Between five and ten years ago I might have said David Foster Wallace, or Nabokov, or in a different vein, Thoreau. I think Romantic poetry, and some modern poetry have probably “influenced” me more than I would care to admit. Paul Celan and Walter Benjamin are writers whose extreme discretion I seek to live up to, someday. The literature of the generation of ‘68, particularly in France, and to a lesser degree its cosmopolitan counterpart in America. May I get back to you on Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx and Heidegger. I am often dismayed by the sheer ignorance and lack of original charity displayed by those who opportunely claim they take Derrida “seriously,” without demonstrating this at all, and especially never having read Blanchot, whose work and circle of influence forms something of an obsessional focus for me now. Not that one writer ever contains the magic key to another.

3. Which three blogs do you most visit?

Long Sunday: http://www.long-sunday.net/
Recording Surface: http://recordingsurface.blogsome.com/
Pseudopodium: http://www.pseudopodium.org/

4. Why do you read fiction?

One may as well ask: why read? It has to do with memory, testimony, death and love, and prosopopoeia. And maybe pinboys.

5. What makes you laugh?

My dog used to. My girlfriend, The Marx Brothers, Bill Hicks, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce and early Robin Williams at Carnegie Hall (at least the first eight times), Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, when they’re being bold. Will Self. It depends, you know, what kind of laugh.

Matt Christie blogs at pas au-delá, which can be found at: http://pasaudela.blogspot.com

(a) and (b) could be accomplished by having an email discussion, and that was my way prior to blogging. I discovered that not many people in one’s circle of friends wish to read what one has written up with a madman’s fervor, because people have different interests at different times. With blogging, one is relieved of the guilt of having invaded somebody’s (especially a friend’s) mailbox because only a willing reader will bother to visit. Further, a blogger’s potential audience is immeasurably larger and more multi-faceted than any email list can hope to be.

2. Which author and/or book has most influenced you?
Bertrand Russell’s books on philosophy, mathematics, and social commentary have been most influential in shaping my way of approaching a subject, and of describing it to myself and to others. His language was always crystal clear whether he was discussing religion, or symbolic logic or the upbringing of children. The “Three passions” page at the beginning of his autobiography is something that I return to very often.

In school, I was influenced strongly but temporarily by the harsh heroism in Ayn Rand’s novels; that fascination was tempered after reading a couple of biographies which illuminated serious flaws in her philosophy and personality.

3. Which three blogs do you most visit?
I started blogging on my own less than a year ago, and a very busy year it has been! Consequently, I do not find time to visit too many blogs. Here are the ones I read quite often (needless to say, all are on my blogroll):
(a) A Work in Progress at: (http://danitorres.typepad.com/workinprogress)
(b) Maud Newton at: (http://maudnewton.com)
(c) John Baker’s Blog at: (http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/)

4. Why do you read fiction?
I read fiction:
(a) For love of an unusual experience, even if it is a vicarious one and is lived by someone else.
(b) For love of language, because fiction allows language to roam free, much more so than non-fiction.
(c) Out of the self-centered and perhaps foolish view that, by generalizing and deriving the essence from the available cornucopia of people, experiences, histories, triumphs, and failures, I might become a better person.
(d) As a change from the fairly large amount of very technical non-fiction that I read (and write) at school.

5. What makes you laugh?
Many things. I laugh quite easily. But this smattering might be indicative:
(a) The image of Marvin the paranoid android switching himself off.
(b) My sister’s mimicry of characters from the Lord of the Rings films.
(c) Humorous character portraits from the late P.L. Deshpande, that highlight the absurdities in life and the uniqueness of the people who deal with them.
(d) Arundhati Roy’s evil little story in The God of Small Things, in which an old woman criticizes Estha and Rahel for their habit of pronouncing words backward, and then dies after being knocked down by a vehicle that is backing up.
(e) Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert

Polaris blogs at Mirkwood, which can be found here: (http://mirkwood.wordpress.com)

2. Which author and/or book has most influenced you?
Jack Kerouac. His joyous delight in words is infectious.

3. Which three blogs do you most visit?
My favorite blogs cover my three favorite subjects: the arts, music, and literature: Modern Art Notes at: (http://www.artsjournal.com/man/),
Uncanny at: (http://www.smileysmile.net/uncanny/index.php),
John Baker’s Blog at: (http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/)

4. Why do you read fiction?
To learn more about myself.

5. What makes you laugh?
My son’s giggle.

Alice Perry (aka Alicatte Amp) blogs at Amp Power,which can be found here: http://amppower.blogspot.com/

2. Which author and/or book has most influenced you?
Kent Harrington, Ken Bruen, Ray Banks, Al Guthrie, Duane Swiercysnki, and a certain John Baker.
As for books : Dia De los Muertos, The Guards, The Wheelman

3. Which three blogs do you most visit?
Confessions of An Idiosyncratic Mind at: http://www.sarahweinman.com/
CrimeSpot at: http://www.crimespot.net/
The Saturday Boy.

4. Why do you read fiction?
As a way to relax from the day to day grind. I find that most of the fiction that I have been reading lately addresses many social issues.

5. What makes you laugh?
My wife and kids. We all try to find the lighter side of life daily.

Aldo blogs at Mystery Dawg, which can be found here: http://acalcagno.blogspot.com

2. Which author and/or book has most influenced you?
Many many but has to be ultimately Alexandria Quartet – Lawrence Durrell or the Affirmation or Beautiful Mutants by Deborah Levy – i cheated!

3. Which three blogs do you most visit?
friends, but lit blogs – Moorish girl at: http://lailalalami.com/blog/
now what at: http://nowwhatblog.blogspot.com

4. Why do you read fiction?
for the language carried away immersion

5. What makes you laugh?
monty python . . .

Jai clare blogs at The Cusp of Something, which can be found here: www.jaiclare.com/blog