Crediting the Muses

Earlier this week I read something (don’t remember what) that made me wonder what other people do with their blogs. I had run across one or two, but really hadn’t followed any blogs until I started reading JPK’s first one. It was mostly rambling, with poor grammar and lots of big, misused words. But he gossiped to a reasonable degree, and that was fun. All of my friends talked about it: what he wrote and didn’t write about them, about himself, about what had gone on the night or the weekend before. I didn’t think he did a particularly good job, but he was the only one doing it. While I stirred up plenty of trouble with gossipy group emails, I had never considered putting it on a blog and really causing grief.

My other inspiration was a website called 570 Bars. This site is about two friends who got a list of every place in Seattle licensed to serve alcohol, and then they had at least one drink at every single one. Obviously this isn’t done in a day, or even a month, but in chunks of 3-4 bars at a time over the course of more than a year. Matty told me about the site a long time ago, but I ran across it one day last fall and was so hooked that I read it one sitting. I marveled at the beauty and scope of their vision. The authors became experts at capturing the bar and what they did there. You can see the development of their aesthetic from one bar to the next, until each review is a single gem capturing their experience that one night, that one drink, that one bar, with that one little group of friends. Each review is sparse and direct, like a shot of cold vodka. It’s beautiful.

Now I read a bunch of blogs, from Anonymous Lawyer (the writer is more bitter than Matty, and almost as mean) to Shiokadelicious! and a few in between. JPK has a new blog of course, but he rarely writes in it. And when he does write, he’s exchanged rambling for cryptic references to people and events that no one knows about. His grammar remains poor, and he’s still king of the solecism, but now the entries don’t even say anything understandable to anyone but himself. Blogging is essentially public navel-gazing, but nonetheless entries should be entertaining and understandable. Cryptic references without context are annoying, but that's not out of character for JPK.

And speaking of boring and annoying entries, this is one. But what the hell, check out 570 Bars and forgive me for my pointless blather. I’ll do better next time.