Mad Atoms

The thing is, any fool with an internet connection and a keyboard can blog. And for the past five to eight years, most do. It used to be if you were literarily inclined you’d buy yourself a spiral-bound notebook and keep that shit to yourself. Gone are those days.

Now everyone – regardless of whether or not they’ve ever written more than an in-class essay or two – keeps track of their lives on a daily basis. Many keep us updated on the hour. I read in the Times that more people are writing memoirs than actually read them. We live in an age of literary fecundity where literacy is not a requirement.

A blog is good if it makes you laugh, for the most part. Or if a celebrity wrote it, or if it involves a vagina, or if it broke a big story (usually involving the exposure of a celebrity’s vagina). But you’re not going to find the next Henry James in this never-ending slew of blogs.

Yeah, I know, there are blogs out there that fight for political prisoners in distant corners of the globe, and I commend those writers. They are using the internet in a maximally useful way, as an international wall on which to spray messages of dissent.

My beef is with the wannabe writers who will never read War and Peace but will probably die with a higher life word count than Tolstoy. The posers who couldn’t for the life of them get through a chapter of anything by Joyce but will write four times as much jibberish as he wrote in Finnegan’s Wake.

People who take writing seriously don’t need to have every little piece of crap they type validated in a comments section. There was a time when public acclaim required more than a page-long analysis of your body fat.

Let me know how much you agree with me in the comments section.