March 22, 2006
Blugh
I understand how the neologism “blog” derives, but that doesn’t keep me from hearing it as an unfortunately ugly word with an offhanded and breezy ring to it that has no appeal to me at all. I am sure it has its purpose, but it’s purpose is not mine. Blugh on it, anyway.
On the other hand, my almost-daily albeit short essay (now there’s a word I like) would, in my case, at least, be next to impossible without e-mail. I can’t imagine taking out my old manual “desktop” (we never called it that before cyberwobble talk) Royal which I sorely miss, then writing, addressing, and mailing 700+ copies of Out of Nowhere In to Somewhere all over the place five or six days a week and keeping up-to-date track of it, as well.
That said, there’s the matter of content. OoN is not the usual, heaven-forbid churchy, tuna-casserole supper type newsletter. Nor has it apparently ever bothered me all that much to be impeded by the Who-am-I-to-be sounding-off-like-this syndrome.
Nevertheless, if reader response means anything — and it surely does to me — the little homebound domestic gardenly and neighborly pieces usually get more response than the wannabe Tom Friedmans and Maureen Dowds. (Except from CP who’s not all that fond of the comments she gets at the grocery and elsewhere from folk who ask about some matter she’d up till then presumed was altogether private.)
Anyhow, I must confess that there’s an investigative reporter pleasure — albeit armchair — that comes from the temptation to make pontifical commentary on matters of state and church. These two institutions and their leaders so often seem yet in some adolescently stumbling awe over the treasures that have been placed by grace in their hands that it is hard not to comment on why they treat with them like the ne’er-do-well inheritors of some megabucks estate.
Succumb to that, and the “who-am-I” bit kicks in. Then I’m always reminded of my seminary theology professor’s marginal note on a paper in which I apologized for taking issue with the great Archbishop William Temple. “On you, Denson,” he wrote, “humility is unbecoming.” But then, humility among those of us — whether professional or just blogged down — who presume to write these things is never all that noticeable, becoming or not.