Montevidayo has become a daily must-visit for me, not least because Johannes Göransson’s posts so often challenge my own ideas about literature and literary culture in ways that cause me to think pleasingly heretical thoughts.

Today’s post, “Another Post About MFA Students: Outsiders and Insiders,” complicates the ongoing Internet-wide discussion by challenging its assumptions about what’s “inside” and what’s “outside” and speculating about why people would position themselves on one side of that divide or the other.

What I like about it (and what I like about Johannes Göransson’s posts in general), is that it’s not just another attempt to draw a boundary between the good guys and the bad guys. Instead, it’s an attempt to understand a conversation that has become very confusing. Not many commentators define their terms or agree about what the definitions would be if they did. Grievance is at the bottom of all of it. There’s only so many goodies to get, and why did he or she get them instead of me?

Göransson has grievances, too, but he is very clear about what they are, about what he wants and hasn’t been offered, about what his various positions in the power structure have been (he’s been a landscaper, a Ph.D. student, and, now, an instructor in Notre Dame’s MFA program), and how the power structures look from those various vantage points.

I wanted to excerpt from today’s post, and, characteristically of Montevidayo, I had a hard time excerpting. I often post mini-blogs for the sidebar at the Rumpus, in which I pull a representative quote from an Internet article or blog post, and then say something like: More on _____ at ______.” It’s an easy thing to do, because journalism and thesis-based writing has taught almost everyone to write toward a single end. I think that this habit of mind can encourage the kind of either/or thinking that keeps so many of our culturally important conversations from really engaging with the complications that are driving the things we’re claiming either or or about. At Montevidayo, though, it’s the active form of essaying that is most often driving the argument forward, to an extent to which the argument is not reducible to anything less than all fifteen paragraphs it took to make the argument. To make the matter of excerpting even more difficult, the posts at Montevidayo often assume that the Montevidayo reader has already read previous Montevidayo posts, and is as actively involved with the conversation and its conversants (posters will often refer to one another by their first names — Johannes, or Joyelle) as the poster.

It’s a different approach to literary blogging than I see at the Rumpus or HTMLGiant. The Rumpus feels more like a daily magazine, and the convention of the sidebar blogs there is magazine-like. HTMLGiant is more all-over-the-place, in a way that I enjoy–it’s hard to imagine a group of blog-makers less uniform than Jimmy Chen, Blake Butler, Chris Higgs, Roxane Gay, Lily Hoang, and me. Montevidayo has a narrower and more unified aesthetic. If I had to identify the form, I’d call it a long conversation among highly educated people who are rebels in thought who haven’t abandoned their sometimes nourishing engagement with institutions of higher education.

I don’t think Montevidayo is as interested in addressing or pleasing readers as HTMLGiant or the Rumpus is. I think the Rumpus aspires to be a latter-day replacement for the really good magazines, and, as such, it is very kind to the reader, the reader is always foregrounded, and the comments section, which is heavily policed, is a gentler place, but also a less reader-driven place–comments on the Rumpus are an afterthought to the article they follow. At HTMLGiant, there is often a pugilistic aspect to the relationship between the writer and the reader. Often enough, the HTMLGiant post is a provocation, and the real action happens in the comments section. At Montevidayo, the feeling is that the reader is being allowed to eavesdrop on a conversation among the posters, and although the readers might weigh in by way of their comments, and although the posters might respond and extend the conversation, the conversation in the comments section is secondary to the primary conversation that is happening in the posts.

There are other differences, too. I think that there is often (but not always) a coldness toward aesthetics deemed too mainstream at HTMLGiant (but not from everyone who posts here) or Montevidayo (in today’s post, there is yet another jab at “psychological realism”). And I think that the Rumpus, in general (but not always), is less attuned to the less-realist end of the literary spectrum.

I detect a sense of comraderie and mutual respect among the people who post at these sites (and there are others of note — Big Other and The Millions, to name two.) There’s a fair amount of cross-posting and cross-site conversation. Those who post at both places or post at one and comment at another often seem to be aware of the implicit rules of engagement at each, and more or less respect them and operate within them.

I think it’s good for literature to have these multiple public conversational platforms. I also think it’s good for human beings to have access to daily conversation among the other people around the world who care most about the same things. Because of these websites, I feel smarter and more connected and more useful and less alone.

Tags: Montevidayo