New meaning for illuminated manuscripts

The question came up today: What's the difference between a blog and a book?

Both are the end destinations for prose and poetry. Both require the same skill. Both can be furiously fussed over, with words polished until they scream for mercy. Both can reach large audiences, if you're lucky.

So, what's the difference?

First, length. That's a gimme. Although some of us in the blogsphere have been putting phrase to pixel for months or years, it can't reach the same level and duration as a book.

Second, content arrangement. A blog is more like a diary. People post entries, bite-sized syntheses of their lives in progress. While diaries or rolling meditations can make their way into a book binding, it's the redheaded stepchild in storytelling forms when it comes to traditional long-form novel. When you read a book using the diary template for its prose, there are two options on how the story ends: the author finds some kind of happy ending (since the author lived long enough to write the source material), a la "Bridget Jones' Diary" or it ends abruptly, a life silenced when the pen falls, a la "The Diary of Anne Frank."

Unless the content is lined up in a linear fashion, complete with some kind of running storyline, it's a rambling avalanche of events, loose of context and devoid of dramatic push or pull. Most blogs I've read have their authors make a running stab at addressing and re-addressing events in their lives (breaking up with boyfriend, trip to Europe, new puppy in the family), but you'll mostly his short bursts of alpha-release thoughts wrapped up in small text packages...no set order, no reason to be except to recollect what was.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you. Books are more deliberate in planning and constructions, though...far more than blogs. Books are skyscrapers. Blogs are sand castles.

Speaking of dimension, let's talk physical parameters. A blog, in case you've been living in rural China or (until recently) under the thumb of a certain Iraqi dictator, is a computer-based outlet for writing and reading online text through a template-based publishing system. Blogs exist on a Web browser slate, which you can expand or shrink at will. You can move the slate around the screen, tile it with other applications to make it look like you're doing actual work at the office, or click the little 'x' at the top of the screen to kill the blog all together. You can read a blog with the machine you use to play Minesweeper, check stock quotes, scan pornography or order flowers for Mother's Day. Blogs are ephemeral, a ghost of real, nearly liquid in its transformative abilities in a browser window. It's a wall of content in an HTML frame... and the words change, vanishing with the next URL entered or when the author feels like a new entry is in order.

Books, on the other hand, are weighty objects you can carry around with you, mostly to impress someone in the cafe with if you have the right tome in hand. Literary mating rituals at your local Starbucks aside, books carry permanence, an attribute that give it still an arrogant swagger among the majority. A book means something, something accomplished, leisurely and relaxing. Computers? You use those at work, or at school. Computers are fancy TVs, and we'll all try to say out loud that we're more well read than those mindless TV addicts. One is noble, the other slovenly. If I haven't read a book in a while, I feel myself going soft in a cerebral sort of way. Blogs, with a few exceptions, are mainly empty calories of political trash-talking or frightening examples of "little-man syndrome," with the blog owner mouthing off vile things he could never say in the offline real.

Computers are also lousy at confining the eye. Too many distractions on the desktop. An mp3 player going in the background, another corner relegated to instant messenger software. The eye skips over the open windows: one idea runs up against a spreadsheet, which runs into your e-mail folder, which is overlapped by your customized mp3 playlist that's flowing out of your speakers. Where does it end, where does it begin?

Books are built to trap the eye. Consider the use of polar elements on the pages, with black text and white pages as absolute contrast. Reading from left to right, you start at one end, reaching the white space boundary at the other, only to ricochet back and down one line to the left rail of vertical white space. And you begin reading again. Repeat until you fall asleep, the phone rings, or you finish.

Fourth and final, books are highly technical works, often taking many hands to write, edit, rewrite, galley proof, produce, ship and publicize. While blogs may have some invisible hands working behind the scenes, it's just one person writing, hitting "publish" and watching the editor churnchurnchurn until, bing, out comes your entry into blogspace. Besides the cost of your Internet connection, any advance blog package you may have bought and your time, blogging is pretty cheap and low on the labor-intensive meter. In fact, if you read this at work or at the library, one could argue it's practically free.

That's not to say you can't find something compelling to read on a blog. There’s a difference, that's all.

Minor puzzle

A question to ponder: Can art created in part out of revenge be a liberating thing for the artist?