October 17, 2007
Clippings
Heather Mallick celebrates Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize. (And The Golden Notebook is a slog, though I’m still going, but it feels like I might be reading it for the rest of my life. More on this later). I look forward to reading Lessing’s The Good Terrorist in the future.
I feel a bit rotten for having slagged off The Globe and Mail‘s “Focus” section last weekend– this weekend I read the whole thing through. I especially enjoyed The Next Very Very Big Things by Lisa Rochon on skyscrapers: that “it’s in our nature… to return to the street”. But otherwise, building skyscrapers into land 1.5 metres above the water table. A building that will consume 946,000 litres of water every day.
Elsewhere in the paper was Ann Patchett and Karen Connelly on reading up on Burma.
And yes, Christie Blatchford gets especially Christie Blatchfordish about blogs and bloggers. She doesn’t like them. “Writing, though, is one of those things that everyone believes they can do, sort of like breathing. Blogdom has only served to fuel that notion.” Isn’t she right though? Of course I believe that my blog is the exception to this rule, but then I imagine that most people do.
See, the other thing is that I love Christie Blatchford. I love her with the same militant obstinacy with which she loathes most things, and I am just as unrelenting. I wrote her a note once when she was writing for the NP (I worked there at the time and got it free, she explains…). A column she’d written in 2001 called “Craving life in the face of death” moved me so much I would clip it out and keep it, and I’ve got it now in front of me, yellowed even. Anyway, she wrote a few lines back and I’ve saved that too. Both the column and the letter meant a lot to me, and so much of what she writes appeals to me, even when our politics don’t coincide, which is almost always.
But it’s also true that I like to love Christie Blatchford because it annoys people. And that I respond by loving her even more might suggest that Christie Blatchford and I have more in common than you’d think.
Hmmmm….well, I can’t see what you have in common with Blatch, but that’s just me. Guess I’d have to get to know you better!
Yup, Blatch annoys me, when I choose to read her column, which is not very often these days. I agree that there are a lot of bad blogs out there, but it does annoy me to no end that no newspaper columnist makes the effort to search out the GOOD blogs, of which I know there are plenty. And of course, just like another self-absorbed columnist, Leah McLaren, Blatch only blasted blogs because someone wrote something about HER. But whatever. I have many issues with a lot of the Globe columnists these days.
I don’t find you in the least bit annoying. That is, until you declared your love for crusty ol’ Blatch. 😉
What I mean is that when my love of CB annoys people, I tend to profess it louder. Similarly when CB’s Blatchness annoys people, I get the impression she turns the Blatch up up up, just to amuse herself.
You are quite right though– it’s easy to write a column about why blogs are crap. A more challenging and interesting article would note some of the more wonderful stuff going on all the time. I never really thought of it like that.
It would make a difference too if people took the time to see what blogs are doing, which is different than newspaper columns. They don’t seek to replace, imitate, echo, but it’s another form of communication altogether.
Oh and it does please me that you don’t find me annoying. Whew!