Yes, I applaud their intent to democratize writing and journalism by seizing it back from the literary journals that operate like private clubs behind locked doors marked "MFAs only" and the professional journalists whose access to the people they write about long ago stripped them of any objectivity they once had. The problem lies in the execution. Anything Microsoft ever stuffed into a box comes to mind.
At their worst – and nearly every one is a cringe-worthy example of "the worst thing I've ever read" – they're tedious exercises in self-aggrandizement. There, the mindless minutiae we all go through every day is examined and held up for display, as if "blogging" were the sound of undigested chunks of someone's life being regurgitated for public consumption. And we do lap it up, don't we?
I'm perpetually astonished how ferociously people protect banal pieces of data like their weight, age, how much rent they pay, or what they make. But they seemingly have no qualms whatsoever about taking what should be intimate thoughts, hopes, desires, triumphs, heartbreaks, or just about anything we once naturally kept to ourselves and handing it over to the entire world for comment. It's like having a therapy session on a street corner.
"Airing your dirty laundry" is how my grandmother used to put it.
If you put it out there, people will look. Whether we're being subjected to some loser's search for a girlfriend/wife/mommy/wet nurse or the ramblings of a small town nobody trying to navigate the "big city" or the descending arc of a no-talent bar band with unattainable visions of arena glory, or any of ten thousand other blobs of mental flotsam on a virtual sea, someone somewhere will read it. But just because you woke up alone again this morning and someone else reads about it, that does not mean you have anything to say. It simply means the people reading your pointless drivel lead even more boring lives than you do.
The only blog that was ever any good was "Julie and Julia" by Julie Powell. Actually it wasn't just good. It was astonishing for the obvious reason that the woman can write. She can say more with a few well-chosen adjectives that most people can say in a thousand words. And that's it right there. Having a keyboard in front of you does not mean you can write. Clacking on a laptop in Starbucks no more makes you a writer than renting a car makes you Dale Earnhardt Jr. It does, however, make you a tiresome cliche.
Tragically, writing seems to have been taken over by a generation of hipsters for whom it's enough to look the part by wearing a smirk and an ironic tee shirt. Working on what they want to say and how they want to say it, crafting a sentence, developing a voice all take up time that's better spent promoting themselves. Most of these writer/blogger/posers put less thought into the words they're typing than they do in choosing which dirty watch cap to wear that day. But that's okay. For some reason, abusing the language apparently makes them seem "of the moment."
On the subway the other day, I noticed a headline in The Daily News over another passenger's shoulder that read: "Israel Sez Offensive to Continue." Sez? Really? Is The Daily News so desperate to appear relevant? I guarantee somewhere there are Daily News readers who think that's the way the word is spelled. I refuse to contribute to the downward spiral into cultural imbecility wrought by the web.
So is it a contradiction for someone who holds blogs in disdain to write one? Not at all. Seeing an Ed Wood film doesn't keep me from watching movies. Paintings of clowns don't taint my enjoyment of Renoir, Velasquez, or Cezanne. I think it's time for a well-written blog with a unique voice and a sense of humor. One that's carefully thought out and presented in complete sentences, proper spelling and all. Yes, it all sounds very Old School, but we did manage to communicate before email and texting and even blogging.
From time to time when I was growing up people would say to me, "You ought to write a book." Though back then and where I grew up it came out as "yawttawrittabook." So I am. Sort of.
Stick around. Things are about to get interesting.
