The Narcissist At Work

With the news that our publisher and son have taken the reins of the ab fab MNSpeak, I was reminded of an ongoing monologue I’ve been developing (I know, among all the other ongoing monologues) about the variety of blogs. Just within any particular medium, there are so many varieties that creating a typology is an endless task, and probably a pointless one. Consider, for example, the world of vlogs or video podcasts. This is a nascent thing–iTunes currently lists 83 vlogs. I guarantee that number will be in the thousands, if not the tens of thousands in twelve months– and already it makes very little sense to compare, say, Chasing Windmills with Rocketboom. One is a sort of daily variety show with an astonishingly annoying host, the other is an artful and funny and professionally produced soap opera. The same is true, of course, of the text-based crowd. There’s humor, memoir, political punditry, book reviews, gossip, just some guy’s random thoughts, and so on.

But this obvious point makes me consider what the essence of a blog is, if there is an essence. If there is anything new to it (particularly in print) it is the foreshortened form– the quick hit, the editorializing link, the ribald punchline, and on to the next post. By that criteria, this here operation is no blog at all, but a frequent writing exercise with disparate, idiosyncratic subjects like magazine publishing, hockey, life in the Midwest, and so on. Anyone who writes for a living ought to write as often as they can–sort of like if you consider yourself a professional skier, you should probably ski quite a lot. Now the difference is that most professionals don’t wish to practice in public. Most writers, if they know what’s good for them, will self-edit aggressively. That’s to keep up the quality of the stuff that makes it to the point of public consumption. You could also make the argument that too much publishing, whether it’s in a blog or a newspaper, devalues the product and the producer.

On the other hand, I think you write differently if you know there is a possibility that someone other than yourself is going to read it. It’s similar to the question of whether the artist can or should think about his audience. It changes the art, generally for the better I think, when it is intended for public viewing, because it should compell the artist to make extra sure things are looking their best. So blogging, for the writer anyway, is maybe a zero-sum game. Probably the best advice is to continue to write publicly AND privately.

If I tried to guage how much I write that actually ends up in the public domain–including here on the web–I’d say roughly half of it never sees the light of day. And that’s not because it’s unfinished or unintended to have readers. I hardly ever start a project without finishing it, whether its a bloggy graf or a magazine article or a novel. (Tried once. It is the worst thing ever written in the English language. No, that would be a selling point. It’s the most useless thing ever written in the English language, and I may well go to hell just for the vanity of forcing it on the one or two people who did look at it. I used to think the thing was merely unfinished–at 100,000 words. Now I know it’s not that. It’s that it is relentlessly bad from beginning to end.)

Not sure what my point was here, other than to do my own pushups today out here in view of everyone and everything, after spending a week or so writing in a closed circuit. The upside for readers, generically speaking, is that a good writer like Woolcott or TMFTML or Diablo works differently and more loosely in this medium, and often times they really shine without the interference of an editor or a publisher or, more subtly, their own censorious professional within. I like to compare the online and print writing particularly of Woolcott, because he’s always a gas to read. But on the web, he flexes all those ripped metaphorical muscles, and he regularly beats up on the deserving weaklings who dare to darken his doorstep with their muddled thinking and their mannered contempt.


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