Slow Blog?(?!) 3

Dale Smith's blog turned me on to an article in the NYT about "slow blogging." There's slow everything now - it's the newest craze. But now that everyone is going to be unemployed, we can all do slow everything!

Which brings me to this article. One "slow blogger," who writes about her "walks in the Vermont countryside" has "recently left her job as a writing instructor at Middlebury College." She writes about "the icy impressions left in the snow by sleeping deer." Now, the unemployed writing instructors I know would be much more likely to shoot the damn deer for venison than blog about it. The subtext I read here is "someone else is bringing home the bacon [or already has] - enough of it to afford a place in the Vermont countryside." Well, why not do things slowly, in that case?

If you work for, say, UPS, your every movement is timed. I'm sure the same is true in most factories, bulk mail facilities, etc. And most of the employed writing instructors I know work 60-hour weeks. To be employed in this country (US) is to be fast, by necessity.

Another slow blogger gave up his blog due to lack of readership: "I called it the Robinson Crusoe feeling of blogging, and I think it's common." This guy just doesn't get it. That's the point - I call it the SETI phenomenon - broadcasting radio waves into outer space, hoping intelligent life will pick it up, perhaps, but not having any real sense that it will happen. It's a way of relating yourself to the dark energy between here and the edge of the universe.

But I've been posting LONG posts lately, and, according to this article, that makes me a SLOW blogger.

The deer lady says that slow blogging ("slogging"?) is about "not having what you write be the first thing that comes out of your head." There is certainly a danger of that, and I've skewered myself on the shit-end of that particular stick before. But I like the blog genre b/c one of the generic conventions is precisely that you do try out half-baked ideas that you'd never publish in a "real" magazine with an editor other than yourself (I'm talking blogs kept by individuals, here, of course - cf. the title, above). And even being too quick on the draw can have its benefits. Isn't the character for "danger" also the character for "creativity"? Well, not really - I just made that up. But maybe it ought to be.