Blogs and Reading Groups

James Lileks has taken over the buzz.mn blog of the Strib. He overwhelms the other posters by sheer volume, breadth of subject matter, and wit.

The prolific bloggers like Instapundit and Lileks and Captain Ed remind me of the Victorian novelists in their productivity--lots of quality stuff all the time. Trollope, one of my favorite Victorians, wrote every day before going to work at the Post Office, cranking out five hundred words or so each time. He made the mistake of telling us about his output in his autobiography, which did not endear him to the Flaubertian school of critics. Anyway, there is a Victorian work ethic with these bloggers that is an inspiration.

I have been posting again to Dickens and Trollope reading lists on Yahoo. There is one crabby professor from George Mason who forced me off a different Trollope list that she owned because I had the temerity to quote George Will quoting Trollope. That was beyond the pale to her wway of thinking. Other than that individual, I enjoy these reading groups very much. They are mostly composed of not academic specialists, just enthusiasts.

One person I recall who also ran afoul of this crabby professor was a guy named R.J. Keefe. He has a number of blogs, and on one he reviews the book reviews in the New York Times Sunday book section. He does not appear to have or need gainful employment, signing himself R.J. Keefe, gent., of Yorkville, New York. I see that he has a link to the professor, so they must have patched up their relationship.

Posted by Finn MacCool

A Golden Age?

I was thinking how much I enjoy reading blogs. They consitute a golden age of writing and argument, instantly available and free. Part of the pleasure is iliterary--the joy of well-turned phrases. In the phrasemaking department, Lileks writes at a consistently high level. Today, he tackles his Strib colleague Nick Coleman on gasoline prices, and puts in Coleman's mouth some comical bits of inarticulate rage. Last year he described the new Walker Art Center as looking like an "angry robot god." I have used Bleats in my classes to illustrate similes and metaphors.

But the pleasure is also that of argumentation. What can match the back-and-forth of the writers on The Corner, for instance, or the logic of a Eugene Volokh? (Law professors in general make good bloggers.) Who combines humor and logic and fact so well as Tom Maguire on Plamegate or the Duke lacrosse miscarriage of justice? Mark Steyn, of course, is sui generis, although I must say I like him and Lileks better in print than on Hugh Hewitt. Writing gives you the chance to edit and polish. The mots tend to be more juste, less adulterated by the exigencies of the moment.

The other great benefit of blogs is that they provide a perspective usually missing from the MSM. Here are two current examples. The New Yorker this week has a Talk of the Town piece on Rachel Carson. It lambastes the Bush administration for gutting environmental regulations, to favor rapacious corporate interests. But the piece avoids all mention of the great debate about "Silent Spring" and DDT, and how the ban on its use has cost a great number of lives in poor countries because of the resurgence of malaria. Blogs have made the argument that Rachel Carson has indirectly been responsible for thousands of preventable deaths.

The other example concerns another Rachel, the U.S. Attorny for Minnesota, Rachel Paulose. The Pioneer Press today breathlessly reported that Monica Goodling admitted to considering party affiliation in the selection of Paulose. The PP is shocked, shocked to discover politics playing a role in political appointments. But as Powerline noted, there may have been a U.S. attorney appointed by a president of the opposite party, but it's not how things are done usually. More proof that the center-right blogosphere serves as a welcome counterpoint to MSM bias.

Posted by Finn MacCool

Blogs on Writing

As someone who has returned to teaching college writing courses, after 25 years of doing other thngs, I enjoyed reading some blogs by other writing teachers. One, called Teacher. Wordsmith.Madman,is written by a guy who teaches at Carnegie Mellon. He does a marvelous job of poking fun at gaffes in newspaper articles, for instance. But I gave up checking out his blog because of the coarse denigration of President Bush and his policies. I wrote to him once, explaining how I liked his blog but that I also liked well-writtten conservative blogs like Powerline. He responded by jeering at Powerline for what he called its howler of blaming Democrats for a memo about the Terry Schiavo matter. I replied that the blog was speculating about the possible origin of the memo (Iwhich later turned out to be from the office of Mel Martinez), and that when the truth came out, Powerline acknowledged its error. So where was the howler? Should the blog not have engaged in self-identified speculation? That would eliminate a lot of interesting blog posts. Anyway, it wasn't the disagreement, but the overall jeering, sneering tone of the blog that finally turned me off.

Posted by FInn MacCool