Diary: John Leonard

When he was alive it was always at the back of my mind that John was following my work, and various comments he made over the years suggested that he actually got what its coordinates were, what the models had been. This came through in our very first conversation, at which point I had been publishing for ten years and going pretty much nowhere fast.

And now, after another decade and more of effort, I have arrived there, at nowhere. There's not really any gainsaying of that. (Some people owe John their career but I am not one of them; it's certainly not anything I can blame on him.) For the past year or so, the changing circumstances of the publishing world -- much intensified by, though not in essence caused by, the present crisis of capitalism -- have made it seem even more ridiculous to expect anything to improve.

But what else is there to do except keep on? What makes this harder, though, is no longer knowing that John is there. It was bad enough when Julie Jacobson died. When they were around it felt like working out of a tradition made sense, because they were reading from that vantage point.

Please don't tell me that the internet creates community and that blogging is the new public sphere. Seriously, this is not the time. For a long time I hoped that these things were true. It's not that now I think they are false, but rather that it just doesn't much matter either way.