Althouse: "One doesn't craft a blog, just as one doesn't plan to puke. One pukes. One blogs."

March 3, 2008

"One doesn't craft a blog, just as one doesn't plan to puke. One pukes. One blogs."

A magazine article by contrast is not puked.

There, I feel so much better now.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...: There, I feel so much better now.

LOL! :D; 3/3/08, 9:20 AM
Roger J. said...: Hmm--a magazine article.... Unless, of course, it is written by Stephen Glass or Scott Beauchamp and published in TNR.; 3/3/08, 9:24 AM
Chip Ahoy said...: Feeling threatened, is he?

Like the best neologisms, "blog," has always seemed onomatopoeic Here's a sentence crafted specifically to use two words learned in High School in an opening sentence to immediately establish his elite position.

But, yes. It sounds like a bell. Bong. bong, bong, the sound of a death knell to an entire industry that has for so long treated us to this sort of elitist tripe and to which cannot be spoken back. Notice the article is published online, a blog entry pretending to be an article, with a comment section with nobody bothering so far to comment there.

Puke. There's a well chosen word for you. Besides, some pukes are planned. Jacob Rubin apparently never heard of bulimia. He's scared to have hitched his wagon to a horse and then notices actual automobiles, hybrids now, pass him by. I expectorate, *ptew* on his elitism and his laughable scarediness. How's that for puke? Plus newspapers make your fingers messy and one must use a moist towelette to avoid transferring ink to the next several things one touches.; 3/3/08, 10:03 AM
George M. Spencer said...: Putting blog entries in book form comes as close to experiencing the real thing as an audio CD of Steve Martin does to seeing him perform.

Of course, consciously or not, Mr. Rubin--and his editors (lucky he)--craft their messages to what their advertisers think they want TNR's readers to hear. O, don't you know? They're too busy to read blogs. They have an average net worth of $1,300,000, 86 percent of them are professionals, and 67 percent claim to have post-graduate degrees. "Our readers seek out the best; they are professionally successful, well-read, civic-minded, patrons of the arts, world travelers, intellectually savvy, affluent, and active consumers." To experience the essence of perfumed pomposity, read the magazine's media kits. No bad smells there.

Therefore, it's best to tell these busy powerfolks that blogs are inferior to other forms of print communication. I mean, if you're going to listen to jazz, and, well, who doesn't at least sometimes do so privately, please do so in our little editorially cultivated TNR garden. Those little clubs have such a, how shall we put it, odor about them.

Of course, what's amusing is that TNR's online version reaches 500,000 different people a month, partly no doubt because it has its own blogs. (The print version only has 60,000 subscribers.) The best thing you can say about Rubin's essay is that creates blog publicity for TNR, y'all.; 3/3/08, 10:11 AM
Simon said...: Well, there's posts and there's posts. Sometimes a post happens very quickly - one notices something in the news, or a post at another blog, and something to say immediately comes to mind. Write it up, post it, it's the work of five minutes. It's not always like that, however. Last week, mixed in with the shorter stuff, I had two posts that each ran over five thousand words and thirty footnotes (and that's skimping on the pincites), each of which took many days to research and write. This weekend, I spent three hours in the libary researching a footnote for an upcoming post. I don't know if one crafts a blog, but I certainly put time into crafting many posts.; 3/3/08, 10:43 AM
Mr. Forward said...: "Sometimes a post happens very quickly "

Post holes take a little longer.; 3/3/08, 10:47 AM
Roger J. said...: Chip Ahoy: glad i was not the only person who felt there were some lame attempts to be--what? sophisticated? The sommelier line was a good one but then he blew that one when he talked about "quaffing." An elitist knows that one quaffs beer, not wine.; 3/3/08, 11:24 AM
Robin Goodfellow said...: There's a definitional problem here. "Blog" is a hugely encompassing word, equivalent to "book" or "magazine" or "letter" or even "writing". There are many fine essayists and literary writers amongst bloggers (though not enough), but because the term is so broad and includes more mundane and often more common forms of blogging some people seem to want to declare an equivalency defining "blogging" to be precisely the most common examples of blogging. This is quite silly in the same way that it's silly to overlook the works of Shakespeare or of Dr. Seuss merely because things such as teenager's diaries or supermarket tabloids are more numerous. If we were to extend this type of reasoning we would declare life on Earth to be merely bacteria, as that is by far the most common example.; 3/3/08, 12:10 PM
Fen said...: We could just as easily damn the entire MSM based on TNR's coverup of the Beauchamp fabrications. Not the lies of Beauchamp, but the way TNR dodged the fact-checkers.; 3/3/08, 3:40 PM