Later this year I will celebrate ten years of blogging here at LTG. And what a celebration it will be! Or not.
I really only mention this as a way of bringing to your attention this blog from Will Wilkinson lamenting the death of “old school blogging”. Now, given my propensity for bad writing you may consider LTG an example of “no school” blogging. But at least I haven’t sold out. Which I guess would apply to any other purveyor of shit–“yes, it stinks. But I have lots more where that came from!” Ha, I may make that my blog’s new tagline.
Anyway, Mr. Wilkinson is a writer and if his Wikipedia entry is any indication, a really, really, smart guy. But my first reaction to his Old School post was similar to that of Althouse: “What is this ‘old school’ blogging you speak of? An aversion to paragraph breaks?” Which actually made me laugh out loud.
Moving on to the substance of the matter, Wilkinson uses a bunch of $10 words that I don’t really understand and am too lazy to look up to make the case that blogging for money is new school and laments the loss of the purity of the old school blogger:
The idea that the self is an “illusion” tends to be grounded on the false assumption that if the self is anything at all, it must be a stable inward personal quiddity available to introspection. But of course there is no such thing. The Zen masters are right.
I truthfully just don’t know what to say about that. In part because I have no freakin’ idea what the hell he is talking about. In her response, Althouse offers this:
What do the Zen masters say about purity? Hei Neng said: “If you cherish the notion of purity and cling to it, you turn purity into falsehood. Purity has neither form nor shape, and when you claim an achievement by establishing a form known as purity… you are purity bound.”
Which I suppose makes more sense on a level just beyond my total comprehension.
Taking the intellectualism down a notch, this is what made me wade all the way through Wilkinson’s interminable paragraph:
Every time I’ve been hacked and had to take the blog offline, it felt a little like an amputation. A blog is a sort of history of one’s mind, like a diary or a journal, but it’s public and that makes a huge difference.
See, I can relate to that sentiment. There have been a couple of times when it appeared I was going to lose almost ten years of blogging history and it really did feel like an amputation. I don’t pretend to have anything profound, unique, or particularly interesting to say here, and lord knows I don’t express myself in a fashion that warrants any consideration other than as a bad example. Which might explain why I only have a handful of loyal readers (assuming small hands). But what I share here is a part of me that would not otherwise be expressed. And yes, most of it is bullshit. As is most of life in general.
I don’t know if that makes me “old school” or not. But LTG is an important part of my history and I’ll continue writing that history until I have nothing left to say. And that’s never stopped me before!
