"I decided, as an average music listener and music fan, to go through each of the 1,500 or so records in my husband’s personal collection..."

"... and write about each one. I’d never written about music before, so I just went with my gut and wrote stream-of-consciousness style about how the music was making me feel," writes Sarah O’Holla in an article that's teased on the Slate front page as "What's the Right Way for a Woman to Listen to Music?" The title at the article page is "Last Kind Words/Lost 78s and the insular world of music obsessives," and it's mostly about the book "Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records," by Amanda Petrusich. But I'm mostly interested in O'Holla's discussion about her own writing project, which is a blog called My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection, about which she says (in the first-linked, Slate piece):

I wasn’t following the rules about how you’re supposed to write about music, but people were connecting to it, and suddenly I had picked up thousands of readers. To my surprise, though, a small but very vocal group of women tried to shout me down: What I was doing was sexist since I was writing about my husband’s record collection and not my own. I was making it harder for female cultural critics. The only reason men were reading it was because I came off as naive or stupid.

Wow. I don't know how I missed that dustup, which happened last March. It's a nice example of people not getting blogging. Funny that men weren't bitching about her calling her husband's records "stupid." The problem was that she was writing about her feelings, free-form, and the feelings were toward not just music but toward her husband. The things that will get you in trouble these days, and what does all that have to do with Slate's attempt to pull in readers — female, no doubt — with the teaser "What's the Right Way for a Woman to Listen to Music?"

Clearly, there's no "right way," and women can listen however they want. The issue that interests me is how you can find something right in your own house and jump off it into a series of blog posts. Here's the first post on My Husband's Stupid Record Collection, dated February 22, 2014:

Alex and I have lived together for 9 years. In those 9 years we have packed up, moved and unpacked his record collection 5 times. It’s about 15 boxes, about 1500 hundred records “that includes the singles and stuff, which you’re also going to have to review.” Is what Alex just said to me from the other room.

This project was my idea, inspired by maybe one too many glasses of wine last weekend, when I was in charge of changing the music. “I can’t believe there are so many records here that I have never listened to. I should try to listen to all of them. And then write about it.”...

Nicely bloggy, I say, self-interestedly, having done a similar project beginning July 21, 2013:

I told you here that I was about to start a new project. I'm going to call it "Records From My Father." I inherited a big stack of record albums that my father bought in the 1950s and 60s and that were part of the home I grew up in. I didn't really understand what I was hearing and what these things meant to my father, who has been gone a long time.

I decided to listen to one album at a time — not that I'll endure all of them — and see what I think. I don't expect to recall my childhood memories or to reconstruct the inner life of the man who existed in ways that couldn't be understood by me at the time. I don't expect anything, really. The idea is simply to encounter these albums, because I have them, because he bought them, and because I know they have meaning, even though I don't think it is possible to find that meaning.

I'm jealous that I didn't get more attention, including from feminists telling me I shouldn't dwell on my father's music. If I'd gotten some criticism, I might have soldiered on, instead of only getting to 6 installments of "Records From My Father." I'm not the kind of person to doggedly commit to doing a whole big set, and even with more like 150 than 1500, I wouldn't do them in alphabetical order by artist. If you're going to play records and drift around within your own mind, you've got to have some choice about what to play. I can't imagine doing one Julie London album after another while thinking about my father. I had to mix it up with the Ray Conniff material, which also demands dilution.