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This does not have much to do with blogs, but with genres in general (hah) and how they relate to life...

On Thursday I heard Junot Díaz speak at Haverford. He just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I read in my Spanish class last semester--I recommend it to everyone. I am still excited about his talk 3 days afterwards, it was fascinating and he is just such a cool (or as he would say, "dope") person.

Anyway one thing he talked about that related to genre was how he thinks about fantasy, history, and dictatorships. (His book is about a fantasy-loving Dominican nerd named Oscar who lives in NJ, and his family in the DR during the time of the Trujillo dictatorship). Basically, fantasy/history/dicatorships all have the same structure in that they are controlled, self-contained worlds that have their own rules. For example, things can happen in Narnia or Middle Earth that can't happen at Bryn Mawr in 2008, or in a realistic fiction novel. In the same way, the rules for social interactions, technology, etc. at Bryn Mawr in 1895 were not what they are today (there wouldn't be computers-that would be against the rules). And during the Trujillo dicatorship, an atmosphere was created where it was normal for people to disappear without a trace and for killings and beatings to happen with no accountability, whereas outside a dictatorship that would be totally unacceptable.

I thought this was amazing. It's like genre is everywhere, because genre is the rules. We apply genre to literature, and blogs, but in a larger sense everything is decided by the rules we (society?) build up around our lives. Díaz said that there is something "sinister" about our desire for fantasy/fiction, because it is so closly related to our acceptance of other rules/realities. Dicatorships wouldn't exist if people didn't buy into the rules, the fantasy world, that dictators set up. If anyone can formulate a genre, then anything can happen within the "world" of that genre--from unicorns to genocide.