It was only a little over four years ago, in the fall of 2003, that M le Neveu began to insist that I start up a blog. My strenuous opposition to the idea was partly rooted in my fear that I’d become a slave to the project — a not unreasonable misgiving, if easily lifted when I recognized that the only difference between slavery and a vocation is the vocation — and ownership. Far more than that, though, I was put off by odor of sophomoric self-indulgence that blogs seemed — or were reported — to give off. One man I talked to dismissed blogs as “what I had for dinner last night.” The very term, Web log, suggested dear-diary entries, and the feedback element, the comments, seemed thoroughly questionable. Not for me!

Four years later, in any case, I have certainly changed my mind about blogging. Comments remain to be sorted out, I think, and I’ve been thinking hard about how to reconceive them (without requiring any changes in the code). I expect that I shall, though, and my belief in the virtues of the Web log as a literary form has never been more intense. It’s dispiriting, therefore, to see that The New York Review of Books is still publishing the kind of thinking that would have kept me away from reading blogs, much less writing one myself, if it had not been for a brilliant graduate student’s impassioned advocacy. (I refer to M le Neveu.)

As promised on Monday, a few words about the kind of coverage that Web logs are getting — almost as childish as the blog writing that it focuses on.*

¶ Sarah Boxer on Blogs, in The New York Review of Books.

* Once again, thanks to George Snyder for linking me to Ms Boxer’s piece a day before the hard copy arrived.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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