So Maybe Blogging is a Kind of Loud and Gaudy Cowardice?

Brother Andrew Goodwin over at the Professor of Pop leads me to Sarah Boxer's essay on blogging in the New York Review of Books. I thank him and honor it because it is a smart essay and it reinforces things I already think -- though perhaps presenting better them than I -- and it suggests to me things I had not thought.

Also, people, it is in the New York Review of Books, which gives it cachet, and I can now use my having read it as a blunt instrument of conversation in certain situations among certain people from whom I want either admiration or envy though I will settle for hate, if that is all that is left on the table.

She concludes:

Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can't fake that. ;-)

And why do I fall somewhat short in those areas? Boxer is right that it's the scabrous and the indignant that draw attention, particularly for those bloggers who really don't know all that much. She implies (don't think she actually spells it out) that many of these blogs-as- fulmination-and-aerial-circus are anonymous. ( Let me tell you, Mitt Romney: That really does let the dogs out.)

When I began this blog, I said who I was and what I was: a man with a name, a teacher at a Jesuit university towards which I feel some responsiblity and a surprising amount of respect.

Is it clear enough that I draw back from embarrassing my employers? Or that I try to draw back?

(I rather think in some ways I am an embarrassment, but only in the most benign and boyish way, and that I expect the university to endure.)

In some ways, I am rather pleased that I am little read. If that were not so, I would have to write down the recipes and stay open six days a week and keep regular hours if you know what I mean, though as a blogger (as Boxer points out) I don't give a damn if you don't.

Oooops. Forgive me, Father, for I have blogged.