Nilanjana S Roy: Scheherazad in the online world

SPEAKING VOLUMES

To be in on the beginning and the end of a phenomenon while still retaining bystander status evokes strange feelings in the human breast.

The world of weblogs, or blogs as they are commonly known, is a relatively minuscule segment of the Internet. Blogs can be anything from online journals to useful compilations of links.

They can send tremors through governments, as happened recently when an intern rocked the US by keeping a record of Congressmen (and congress of various kinds) she had known; they can offer an alternative view, as Salam Pax, better known as the Baghdad Blogger, did; they can be the pulse of a city, as Gawker and Wonkette are for New York.

If you have a taste for literary blogs, you're looking at a microcosm of a subculture, the flea on the underbelly if you like. But I began reading literary blogs over two years ago because of a growing dissatisfaction with the way mainstream media covered books.

Reviews shrank; serious critics shared space with blurb readers masquerading as reviewers; publishers were increasingly justified in creating a culture where authors were the celebrity du jour, because the hype worked; and some genres close to my heart (science fiction, science writing, graphic novels, fiction from subcultures, crime and detective fiction) never got any kind of meaningful attention.

It seemed I wasn't the only reader who felt this way. Blogs like the Bookslut and The Return of the Reluctant slammed the incestuous preciousness of Dave Eggers and company ferociously, refused to take the pronouncements of the NYT's awe-inspiring Michiko Kakutani as the word of god, pointed us in the direction of wonderful new authors whom we never got to hear enough about and generally shook up the landscape.

Over at the Literary Dick, Jonathan Ames plays sleuth, answering questions about "literary mysteries and scandals". Maud Newton and the Literary Saloon red-flagged the New York Times for its new review policies.

Sarah Weinman at Confessions of an Idiosyncractic Mind brought crime fiction and noir fiction to the forefront, and there are at least a hundred others, not forgetting the granddaddies of litblogs, ArtsJournal and Arts & Letters Daily.

The litblogs opened up new spaces. At their best, they returned criticism to the fore: they questioned the way the publishing industry worked, offered antidotes to the gas buildup induced by the hype machines, and they brought back an enthusiasm for reading that more jaded, professional souls had perhaps lost.

But two years in Net time is an aeon, and as bloggers begin to write for the same institutions they had trashed "" The Washington Post, NYT "" and some picked up book contracts, the underground feel of this strange literary movement started to disappear.

Some bloggers insist they will change the media machine from within, a promise that sounds familiar from a thousand failed revolutions. Some, and I'm of their company, are increasingly disenchanted with blogging itself: everyone links to the same stories, we have a party line of sorts on certain institutions and critics, there isn't enough in the way of new, original work coming in from the underground.

But whenever I've come close to deserting the esoteric world of literary websites and blogs, something has happened that's restored my diminishing faith. In the last few months, it's been an interesting publishing paradigm, neither new nor old world but a careful blend of both.

Mohja Kahf is an author and professor who was born in Damascus and now lives in the US. She's published scholarly essays and a book of poetry called E-mails from Scheherazad. She agreed to come in on the Muslim Wake-Up website to write a series of columns for their Sex and the Umma section.

Except that instead of sticking to conventional rants against the system (the Islamic version, in this case), she chose to present her views in fictional form, as a series of linked short stories. So "Lustrous Companions" had Maryam and her friends asking a religious leader at the weekly gathering whether women get to have sex in paradise, or whether that's just a male prerogative.

The most recent story, "The Rites of Diane", features an American woman who survives rape and seeks safety in Islam's restrictions on women, attending the wedding of Reyann and discovering that many of her companions in the faith have different ideas.

"Then Reyann opens the first gift, from her irrepressible Aunt Maryam, and it's crotchless panties, three pair, in black, white, and fire-engine red, and Diane's mouth falls open and Chand says, 'This is so not what my desi friends would get from their aunties as a bridal shower gift.'"

Kahf's stories will be published in book form eventually. I intend to buy the book when it's available, but part of the joy of reading Kahf right now stems from the online experience. She writes every fortnight; the day her stories go up on the web is marked in red ink on my calendar, and having to wait for the next one is an exercise in self-control.

She elicits reactions "" and how! "" from a very mixed cross-section of the reading public. Some, like me, are there for the literary quality of her stories; some are fiercely feminist; some are deeply uncomfortable with the presence or absence of adab in her stories.

The debates are spectacular, entertaining and often deeply enlightening-and Kahf intervenes every so often, making this a truly interactive storytelling session. I would never have found Kahf's work on my own: I stumbled across this modern-day version of Scheherazad courtesy a litblog. And that's why, despite frequent bouts of apostasy, I remain committed to the weird world of litblogs.

Kamala Markandaya dies: The publishing world may be celebrating "multiculturalism" today, but it had precious little space for Kamala Markandaya, who died recently at the age of 79. Markandaya was best known for Nectar in a Sieve, her debut novel about the life of a village woman.

Six other novels were published, and many have continued to be read, even if it was the library rather than the bookshop that kept them alive. She gave few interviews during her life, though she was a pioneer in terms of many of the themes she addressed "" an early writer about diaspora, an early writer in English to look at a world of unwritten women's dilemmas.

Over the years, it became harder for her to find a publisher; in a world where Rushdie and Seth ruled, and where younger novelists tackled a complex India, she seemed to have fallen out of step. Cruelly, her death might spark a revival of interest in her work, where her life met with indifference.

nilroy@lycos.com