Sunday, May 20, 2007

"Blog on, my little honeybees"?

I'm nothing if not behind the times and so just now saw the piece Anthony DeCurtis wrote a little over a year ago about blogging. There's been a stream of mostly pointless controversy about political blogging for a few years but just recently we've seen people like Michael Dirda and Richard Ford knocking literary blogs even while admitting that they don't read them. DeCurtis not only has that same proud ignorance but is surprisingly condescending, mainly because he's making the assumption that bloggers write for the same reason he does which is apparently only the money. (Resulting in a line like "And maybe it's a function of growing up working class, but I've never had any particular enthusiasm about working for free" which is just plain offensive when he's not trying to grab a moral high ground, as if most bloggers were trust fund babies.) If he had read more (any?) blogs then DeCurtis would have seen that almost none are done for the money. Even blogs from well-known writers rarely seem like they're doing anything for the money no matter what the real intentions may have been. Maybe it's just the "working" in his claim - where he thinks writing is work and money necessarily attached, most bloggers are just having fun or filling that old writer's need to, y'know, write.