blogging

A Blog Convalesced From Clamor

This blog has been lying fallow for a spell. Its keeper needed to recuperate from exhaustion. The descent of politics into mimicry of the worst of popular culture, the drumbeat of disarray in the Church, an overarching sense of dissolution—it all drains the spirit. I retreated to the studio where world-noise does not follow. Depleted resources need some time away from the clamor to be restored to themselves. So here we are. Having caught my breath, I want to return this weblog a bit closer to its origins. Continue Reading

Straightaway, a housekeeping item. Several readers have emailed to ask why there is no place to comment at the end of this blog. One reader complained, “It is a nuisance having to look up responses on Facebook.” Maybe I should explain. The comment box is disabled for a jumble of reasons. Chief among them is the snowball effect of comments on individual readers. Positive comments roll one way; negative ones, intimidating, roll another. It matters to me that readers respond to the content of a posting on their own, without being distracted— bolstered, diluted, or bedeviled—by other respondents. Continue Reading
A Blog of One's Own

It is an odd thing, this culture of blogging. I am still not fully at home with it. The very word blog makes me wince. It is an ungainly term, ugly to look at on the page and even uglier to hear spoken. Gelatinous. The word comes dangerously close to blob . If I had to pick a visual correlative for the term, it could only be this: Somewhere in the pudding of phonetic associations, is blah and blab . Worse, frog —as Emily Dickinson used the word:
How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!
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