vestige.org, the online space that was originally conceived as a “huge, rambling mess of a thing,” now offers some of the most thoughtful commentary on the Canadian book scene around. Creator August C. Bourré may spend his days scanning books for the Internet Archive, but at night he’s either crafting stories of his own or commenting on the stories of others, with a critical honesty that’s not often seen in the world of book blogs. With vestige.org alive and kicking since the year 2000 (and reimagined as a book blog in 2002), Bourré is both an old-timer and one to watch in the book blogging world.
August chatted with Books@Torontoist via email about vestige.org.
Torontoist: Vestige.org has undergone a lot of change since you launched it in 2000. Can you tell me about this evolution. Why did you decide to focus on the literary?
August C. Bourré: Vestige.org started out as a kind of catch-all. Blogs weren’t really an established thing when I bought the domain, though I was doing extensive, daily, and extremely personal online journaling on other sites. I wanted vestige.org to be more about what I was working on and the things online that fascinated me, and less about my personal life. I hadn’t really come into myself as a Book Person yet. The site had photography, bad poetry, bad fiction, a Rebecca-Blood-style blog, another blog where I incorporated links to interesting things into a piece of short fiction, and then a handful of mini-sites that were about experimenting with CSS-only layouts and typography and things like that (much harder to work with then than now).
It was a mess, really. It was just this side of impossible to update because I coded everything by hand and it had a very convoluted structure, and aside from the notorious Jakob Neilsen thing, I had a hard time connecting with an audience because I was all over the place. I killed the site for a revamp, and in the meantime I put up a basic news/politics blog, because there was an election on and it felt like something I could talk about consistently. Once the election was over I realized I didn’t much care about politics anymore, at least not enough to write about it on a semi-daily basis, and anyway I was reading 2,000+ pages a week for my English Lit degree and just didn’t have the time. I did keep a short list of the books I was reading in a sub-directory. I knew that the site needed something to focus it to keep me interested, and since I was devoting so much energy to books and literature (I wanted to be a professor) that it seemed like an obvious choice.
TO: For the past few years, you’ve been running a project you call Reading 2007 (2008, 2009, 2010). Tell me about this and why you decided to start this.
AB: It was a discipline thing, really. 2005 was an absolutely catastrophic year for me, personally, financially, career-wise, basically in every way that mattered. For a while I became the kind of person who ate, slept, went to work, and watched some television once in a while, I otherwise did nothing else. I felt lucky to be that functional.
I found a really amazing relationship that brought me out of that for a time, but when it ended abruptly I realized that I needed to make changes or I just wasn’t going to survive as a person. I needed a structure, a project, some way to impose a level of discipline on how I spent my spare time that would be a stepping stone to renewing that discipline in the rest of my life. I still had the list of books I was reading (which was literally just a list of titles), and I decided to expand that into full-on “reviews” of everything I read. One book at a time, in order, period.
It turned out to be fun, and just what I needed. I’ve had another couple rounds of really hard times since then, but having a project like Reading 20XX around means there’s always some kind of structured “work” I can turn my mind to. On top of that, knowing that my original career goals weren’t really possible anymore, it was a way to still feel involved in a world, in a conversation, that I really care about.
TO: You’ve been blogging long before book blogs became “cool.” What was it like to see the online literary landscape change?AB: It’s been strange. In the early days there weren’t a lot of people talking about books, or not in any kind of systematic or structured way. There were some academic sites, like Laura Trippi’s blog where the conversation was more about the esoteric theoretical concerns of reading, writing, and technology (which I liked as a student). That was where I first heard about wikis. There were a handful of personal blogs where folks would talk about what they were reading, but not in a serious way, and it was a long way from being the focus of their sites. There were some folks doing things similar to what Jon and I were trying to accomplish with Wooden Fish, but they were all (Wooden Fish included) difficult to find, and sometimes the quality was a little suspect.
Then Jessa Crispin came along with BookSlut, and that was the first time I realized that I could have access to industry news, and that was pretty cool. It was never the kind of blogging I wanted to do, because it seemed kind of snarky and gossipy and I was more interested in the books themselves, but it was fun for a while to get that inside view. I stopped reading when Michael Schaub got involved, though. Jessa’s snark always felt affectionate, the “I tease because I care” kind of approach, but Schaub goes for blood even when there’s no reason to. I don’t find that kind of commentary amusing or productive.
Then for a while it felt like everybody wanted their blog to be a newspaper. George Murray was doing his thing, which was, and still is, irreverant and hilarious, but he seemed to be the exception. There was lots of “news” (much of it just rehashes of press releases newspapers were running) without much real commentary, and everybody had to have Amazon affiliate links and advertising and author interviews that never asked anything that mattered. (One notable exception is Ed Champion, who asks excellent questions and provides very clear-sighted commentary, but his manner is often so aggressive and off-putting I’m surprised none of his interviewees have hit him yet–though it sounded like Richard Ford was thinking about it.) The business of books became the thing rather than the books themselves, and that gets hard to read after a while. In the last year or so the community of Canadian book bloggers seems to have expanded exponentially, and that’s great, because it seems like we’re finally having a conversation. I just don’t know if we’re having the right conversation.
The official channels, like the CBC, the National Post, and the Globe and Mail have been doing some fun, interesting things, but I think as proper news agencies they have an obligation to do real news coverage. Canada Reads and Canada Also Reads were a hell of a lot of fun, but the books arm of CBC’s Arts division sometimes feels like a tax-payer-subsidized PR firm. I don’t begrudge them the fun stuff, because I think we need that. But they are news gathering agencies, and fun stuff is not, and should not be, the core of their mandate. If we can’t count on them for the heavy stuff, who can we count on? I want to see the journalists be journalists again.
The Canadian literary scene is shockingly small, and a lot of the bloggers are from inside the industry, so I think maybe there’s a disproportionately large amount of…I don’t know, chirpiness…and an if-you-have-nothing-good-to-say-then-say-nothing attitude, but I can understand that impulse, and I don’t think personal blogs have any obligation to adopt a critical stance. I know that if I worked for a publishing house I wouldn’t be comfortable reviewing our own books on our blog, even if I loved them. Conflict of interest concerns aside, depending on who you work for, these days it’s often risky just to have a blog, never mind signing your name to it or having actual opinions.
But there are folks who do have opinions, and right now I think Steven Beattie writes the most thoughtful blog in the whole of the Canadian scene. He comes as close as anyone to nailing the conversation we should be having. Bronwyn Kienapple has also been running some excellent articles, and Brian Busby’s blog has opened my eyes to a side of CanLit’s development that I never would have guessed at. There’s tons of good things going on right now with bookish Canadians online, and I’m glad to see that a lot of it, even for the authors and publishers, doesn’t just come down to trying to move units.
I know I’m probably coming across as overly critical of my peers and of the mainstream coverage, but it’s out of love and respect. I really do respect what the other bloggers are doing, and I want them and our newspapers and whatnot to succeed, to help Canadian letters achieve the potential we all know is there. But I think that demands honesty. Whenever I fall down in life, my best friend is there to help me, but he also says, “August, you didn’t do your best. You deserve better than what you got, but you can also do better, and here’s where you have to do better.” Sometimes I get a smack to the back of the head to emphasize the point. That kind of honesty, to me, is a sign of true respect and affection. It’s true that we sometimes have thin skins in Canada, but we won’t be the great community I know we can be if we aren’t honest with each other when we stumble.
TO: What makes a book worthy enough to write about?
AB:In my case, it’s pretty simple: have I read it? Then I blog about it. Before the Reading 20XX thing I would have insisted that I actually have something to say about a book (I like to be informal on vestige.org, but sometimes “It was light, it was fun, and that was all I wanted from it” is a bit too informal, even for me), and I would hope that most book bloggers feel the same. To Hell with genre or publication date or the colour of the author’s skin or the bits between their legs or the gender of the person they love. Got something to say? Say it. The book is its own thing, and all the rest of it is baggage we bring with us, and most of the time it only gets in the way of our trying something new. It shouldn’t be relevant to your decision to choose a book, and it shouldn’t be relevant to your decision to write about it either. The only criterion that matters is quality.
TO: Why is the blog called vestige.org?
AB: For the dumbest of reasons. I wanted a domain that was a single word, simple to spell, and sounded cool. At the time I was a regular reader of another site that started with a “v” (can’t remember the name) and I basically scoured the OED looking for other interesting “v” words. The only reason I bought a domain in the first place is because I wanted an email address that was “august@whatever.com/org/net” and not some crappy Hotmail or Yahoo thing with half a dozen numbers in it to distinguish me from the other couple thousand creative people who wanted their electronic correspondence addressed to “Party Dude.”
TO: Who are some of your favourite authors or favourite books?
AB: That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer; I read pretty widely in a number of genres, and I like a lot of different kinds of books for a lot of different reasons. I’m a huge fan of A.S. Byatt’s work, because it’s sprawling, intellectually complex, and still emotionally intense. Her novel Still Life is one of only two works of literature to ever move me to tears, and I spent a year and a half as an undergrad writing about her novel The Biographer’s Tale, which is sort of like a shorter, more confident and mature reappraisal of the issues she dealt with in Possession. I also think she’s unparalleled when it comes to writing about colour and painting.
Michael Helm’s In the Place of Last Things is an astonishing blend of the physical and the cerebral, and Rebecca Rosenblum’s Once blew me away by being both magical and incredibly real. I like the ecstatic energy in George Elliott Clarke’s poetry, and the way Russell Smith blends frankness and satire. I can’t say enough good things about how Faulkner puts a sentence together, and his South is an uncomfortable mirror for my North. Much the same can be said for Flannery O’Connor.
TO: What do you hope to accomplish with vestige.org?
AB: The most important thing is that it remains rewarding. There was a period where I hated working on it, but it was an anchor, and there are times (like the last two months), when it’s been tremendous fun, but through it all it’s been my link with the greater CanLit conversation. Right now I’m not fortunate enough to work in the industry, and though I’m still plugging away, my own fiction doesn’t see print very often. Vestige.org is a way to keep the connection alive; if it ever stops being that, I don’t know that I’d see the point anymore.
TO: As a writer yourself, how does writing about other people’s work regularly affect your own work?
AB: The best way to develop as a writer is to read often, and write often. I have a very craft-and-theory oriented approach to my own fiction. Character and story are important, but I like to play with form and style in very organized ways and for specific reasons. The problem is that first drafts often come from the gut, and the gut tends to not answer the phone when it comes time for the second draft, or the fifteenth. I need to understand why I made the choices I did in order to be comfortable with them. By examining the choices other writers made, I can develop the tools I need to better understand and judge the quality of my own choices.
Images courtesy August C. Bourré
