The Blog Obsession!

Posted on July 23, 2002 in Blogging Journalists & Pundits

Everything that has built up inside of me flows out on Monday, leaving me feeling like the south end of San Francisco Bay at low tide come Tuesday. The heat that everyone has been complaining about across the nation has come to Trabuco Canyon. I closed all the windows, discovered a cat-butchered set of Venetian blinds, turned on the air conditioner, and fled from the house so I wouldn’t obsess about whether or not it was getting cool in our condo.

Obsession seems to be a common syndrome that bloggers fight. Clever Little Minx disabled the comments on her site, she writes, because she found herself running to the computer several times a day just to read what other people were saying about what she wrote. I can relate, though I have only today acquired a comment from a user who was pushed my way by a favorable comment by The Grey Bird. It’s nice to see my words being read by people outside of my IRC circle (who are doubtless getting sick of my annoucing that I have added yet another cute anecdote or clever rant to my pages).

John Gardner wrote that real writers write for “glory”. I love the glory thing. Just seeing my words laid out on a web page that I know others can find causes me to elate and ullulate. I try not to wake up my wife in the middle of the night to tell her about my latest entry, but my IRC friends have suffered much from my constant hectoring of them to read my stuff, write a comment, sign the guestbook. A few of them do seem to enjoy their visits, however, and they like to show up in Dalnet #peanut_gallery to tip me off to the twisted URLs that I love and read quotations from the comments written for blogs such as that of Crazy Tracy. snaily^, a dear friend from Atlanta, doesn’t like to do the surfing but she does like to say the word “blog” repetitiously on the channel. There’s a roque eloquence to the term that I have to admit and if the academics can be ignored, I anticipate that it will have a long and healthy life as part of our language.

Academics don’t like IRC chat because they can’t control it, but blog, unfortunately, is an obsession that some think can be codified. I don’t think they have evil intentions: they just have their own obsessive compulsive habit of putting things in order. When I was touring the country and styling myself as “a new kind of journalist”, I received much encouragement from professors who were just as sick and tired as the rest of us of the narrow definitions of what news thrust upon us by the so-called liberal media.

I don’t think journalists themselves much like the creative conditions that their employers thrust upon them. The life of a jounalist seems stutifying at times with all the style books and reporting conventions that they must follow, conventions that go beyond mere good grammar and usage to shape the content itself. The system seems to work like this: the journalist writes his story based on the facts he has found. He sends it off to his New York editor who reviews the piece to make sure that it says nothing that will offend the folks who are paying his salary. The editor completely rewrites the piece to weed out the irreverent references and to make it sound like all the other pieces being published on the subject.

When I was in Zagreb in 1992, you could find most of the journalists in town at the bar of the Hotel International. Give the narrow confines of the job that they ran to because they loved it, what with the government press agents and their own bosses, I can understand why they’d choose to remain inebriated between press conferences and junkets to the scene of the latest atrocity. The life of an academic can’t be much better. Like the journalist, he or she must stick to form. The academic is all but forbidden to comment on matters “beyond his speciality”, even if those things are within the same department because every institution is carefully balanced with experts whose turf cannot be encroached upon.

I couldn’t be either a journalist or an academic because I don’t take well to shaping myself to fit another person’s idea of a hole. I suspect that most journalists and academics want in on blog for pretty much the same reasons I do it — to allow them to express their forbidden obsessions, personal comments, and opinions that their peers, their editors, and employers will not allow them to make in the usual fora.

I guess I can tolerate their presence as long as they don’t try to tell us that they own blog more than anyone else does. Journalists and academics are more like me than against me. I even know of an editor who writes an interesting blog. The one thing I won’t tolerate and never will tolerate is some one coming in and telling me that my blog needs “a professional look and feel”. Such people are salespersons. They’re after my money. If they truly love blog, my message to them is simple: Do your own!”