I was going to write an entry today on John Corsi. If you remember, he was the author of a controversial book in 2004 that challenged John Kerry’s readiness for the presidency (as a function of an unflattering reading of Kerry’s military service). Corsi has published a new book on Obama that supposedly accuses the presumptive Democratic nominee of more substantive ties to Islam than the Illinois senator has thus far admitted. I am trying to finish a short essay on the top 10 rumors/conspiracies circling the election campaign these days, and Obama’s alleged Islamicism is one of the most popular ones. That’s what got me interested in the Corsi book, and that’s why I would have written about the new book.
But I am trying to revise my approach to blogging a bit this week.
That’s because the genre is far trickier than I realized. For one thing, many readers still want to imagine it as a polished/finished piece of writing. Readers’ comments often seem predicated on the assumption that they are responding to a fully-formed, edited, and vetted essay on a particular topic of the day. That is even more likely a stance when an academic has penned the blog, especially since we sometimes seem to defer to the “essay” (or conventional journal “article”) as the aspirational endgame for most of our writing anyway.
I, for one, have very rarely written a kind of overtly stream-of-consciousness post, and not just because it tastes a little too uncooked for my own scholarly palate.
I also find it difficult to fight a growing urge to reduce the value of any one of my blog posts to the number of responses it elicits, to how many comments it receives — be those comments good, bad, or indifferent.
It is easy to get addicted to that single criterion for judging the success of a posting, to make a fetish out of the number of comments a particular post can boast. Never mind that those responses sometimes devolve into the same few people cyber-yelling at one another over issues that can get awfully tangential to the theme of the original post. Never mind that every fourth comment or so is submitted by someone who is unabashed about the fact that he or she didn’t even bother to actually read the post. And never mind that there are even accusations (from one of the folks who comments on my Brainstorm blog post) that some readers are secretly creating pseudonyms and arguing with themselves in their comments. Even given all of that, it still feels like a mini-failure whenever a post gets 2 responses instead of 22. And my previous stream-of-consciousness posts, the one or two that I have written, were met with deafening commentary silence.
So, I would have written about Corsi today (on-the-fly, but in a writerly style that mimicked essayistic conventions), and I would have hoped that the topic alone might have shaken commentators from their slumber, whatever side of the ideological/political divide they occupy.
But the piece wouldn’t have been an essay, and it would be a misreading to approach it as such.
It would have been a stream-of-consciousness piece pretending to channel the tone and tenor of a semi-polished writing form. And I would have hoped that readers (i) could to see that difference (ii) and still use the posting as a nice excuse to offer up their two cents on the topic.
