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Darren Hughes

Tell us about your blog.

The name of my site, Long Pauses, was inspired by Denise Levertov’s poem, “Making Peace,” which compares the act of writing to the process of living one’s life. A snippet:

     A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .

At my most idealistic, I think of writing as a kind of spiritual discipline. It’s an occasion to sit quietly and alone and to process ideas – to learn. Of course, Long Pauses is also just another blog filled with half-formed thoughts and random crap. Though, on the whole, I think the ideas-to-crap ratio is relatively high.

How would you describe your readers? Do you have much contact with the people who read you?

I could have answered that question better three or four years ago. Facebook and Twitter have taken their toll on blog discussions, I’ve noticed, both at my site and others, so I don’t have as strong a sense of who is reading now. Certainly, over the years I’ve developed many great friendships through Long Pauses. Some I know only virtually; others I see once or twice a year at film festivals. Not surprisingly, the readers I’ve met are typically a lot like me – over-educated, curious, thoughtful, perhaps a bit below average on the socialization scale, people who’ve spent a large amount of their lives in the company of books, records, and movies. It’s a pretty great clique, actually.

Tell us how – and why – you started your blog?

I launched Long Pauses in 2001 when I was studying for my comprehensive exams and was sick to death of writing in that thick, impersonal language endemic to graduate humanities programs. It all felt so joyless and pedantic. I wanted to write in the first person about subjects that genuinely interested me, which at the time was a mixture of the arts, politics, design, and religion. I wanted to test my voice as a writer as well. Also, as a professional web developer, I needed a playground. I really had no ambitions beyond that. Eight years later, Long Pauses has been through eleven major revisions, and the most recent is my favorite yet.

Describe your blog day – do you work at home? Go to a café? Sit in an office?

Among the many reasons my academic career fizzled is that I’m a ridiculously slow writer, and when I’m totally focused on a project I become a real son of a bitch. (The health of my marriage is directly affected by the number of hours I spend writing each week.) At any given moment, I usually have two or three posts saved in draft form, and I peck at them whenever I find the time, usually during my lunch break at work or late at night at home. Occasionally I’ll carve out a couple hours on a Saturday or Sunday, although that’s becoming increasingly rare. I sometimes think I could be a pretty good writer if I were single and a mild alcoholic. I’m at my most productive after a couple drinks.

How do you find things to blog about and how do you decide that an entry is worth being in your blog?

To slip again into idealist mode, the defining principle of Long Pauses has always been that old English-teacher warhorse: “Writing as discovery.” I only post when I have something to say, and I’m painfully conscious of the fact that I really only have something to say after I’ve taken the time to wrestle with a problem. The kind of writing I most often do, criticism of foreign and classic films, is a dime-a-dozen on the Internet now. The world doesn’t need another plot summary and review of, say, Heartbeat Detector. But the process of writing about that film’s editing was instructive – to me, at least. If a couple other readers learned something from it, too, then so much the better.

What is your favorite blog entry?

My post about Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, which I read for the first time five days after Hurricane Katrina knocked a hole in the South. That post comes closest to epitomizing my sense of Long Pauses: it melds the arts, politics, faith, and feeling, and it includes a couple of the best sentences I’ve ever written.

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Long Pauses

What was your most popular/controversial blog entry?

Want to drive traffic to your site? Write well about the texts that are assigned in high school and undergraduate English classes. I’m always surprised when I look at traffic stats, because six of my ten most popular posts are responses to books and plays. The most visited page on Long Pauses is a short piece about Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan.

Controversial? That’s harder to judge for an annoying technical reason. Long Pauses predates Blogger and the other free, hosted blogging services, so for years it was a patchwork of static HTML and various 3rd-party tools. In the latest iteration, I deactivated Haloscan, which hid thousands and thousands of comments. Two posts come to mind, though. The first was my rant that followed Bush’s reelection, which brought out the conservative readers I didn’t know I had. The second was my very personal response to a small, well-intentioned film I hated. The director found the post, and we ended up in a three-day debate that took its toll, emotionally, on us both.

Is blogging the new path to fame and fortune?

Not in my case, no. When I launched Long Pauses I very deliberately chose to never make a cent from it. I’ve had a few offers over the years to join for-profit writing ventures and have always politely declined. The only exception, I guess, is the handful of freelance print pieces I’ve written for editors who approached me after stumbling on the site. I’m really particular about Long Pauses remaining my avocation. I like being an amateur, in the best sense of the word.

What separates journalism from blogging?

Editorial interference? I’m not sure if I can do this question justice in less than a thousand words. This debate is too often framed in a way that ascribes a romantic nobility to journalism, and I just don’t buy it. I’m too cynical, I guess, about the profit-making motives of the owners of our media, which is why I’m loathe to shed a tear over the rotting corpses of so many magazines and newspapers. Or, to put it another way: I’m grateful that writers like Seymour Hersh and Charlie Savage are still allowed – by the current economics of publishing – to do the hard work of investigative journalism; I’m glad that my annual donation to National Public Radio helps keep their foreign bureaus open; and I’m glad there exists an economic model (and technology) that allows a brilliant blogger like Nate Silver to publish directly to the web. When it comes to reporting and criticism, I seek out and support the exceptional and do my best to ignore everything else, so the blogger/journalist distinction seems increasingly irrelevant to me.

I’ve been film blogging for eight years now and have watched with real pride and curiosity as what began with a few, isolated conversations has grown exponentially and, in the process, has reshaped the international dialog about film. Because I don’t have an economic stake in film journalism – and also because I don’t live in NYC, where these issues have been the subject of much face-to-face conversation (or so friends tell me) – I’ve never had much interest in the “how are blogs affecting film criticism?” debate. I read every issue of Cinema Scope and Film Comment cover-to-cover, and I always have two or three film books on my bedside table, but I’d guess 75% of my film-related reading occurs online. Partly it’s a social act – reading a friend’s post is like sharing a beer with him after a screening, something I get to do far too seldom – but, truly, I much prefer the writing I find online to what typically appears in even the best newspapers. The lack of editorial interference on the Internet breeds a greater variety of voices and subjects.

Who are the bloggers that you read religiously?

According to Bloglines, I currently subscribe to 220 RSS feeds, which are then subdivided into ten categories. (Hey, you asked.) Some of my favorites include: Slacktivist -- If you’ve ever wanted an insider’s perspective on American Evangelicalism, written by a clever and politically-progressive journalist, Fred’s your guy; What’s Alan Watching -- His posts on The Wire are among my favorite things; FiveThirtyEight -- Nate Silver and his team are the only political bloggers I read religiously. I recently trimmed back the number of film blogs I follow. At the risk of sounding like a cranky old man (“Back in my day . . .”), I regret that so much of the film blogosphere is exhuming the print model of film journalism, as more and more writers race to review this week’s theatrical releases and cover the latest gossip. The film bloggers I most admire have catholic tastes and a personal voice – people like Dan Sallitt, Girish Shambu, and Doug Cummings.

How has your life changed because of your blog? Has it gone in any new directions because of your newfound prominence?

Last September I had a 40-minute conversation with Claire Denis, my all-time favorite filmmaker. That certainly wouldn’t have happened without Long Pauses. I abandoned my Ph.D. 70 pages into my dissertation, in part because the writing I was doing online was so much more vital than my academic work. Or, how’s this? I can now walk into the Cinematheque Ontario on any given night and find a friend to sit with. That’s kinda cool, I think. Honestly, Long Pauses is a journal of the last eight years of my life, so I have a hard time separating the cause from the effect. I’ve changed a great deal over that time, and Long Pauses reflects that change and has also been an essential catalyst.