Blog AestheticsI know, what a silly header. To many people, just absurd. Blogging is writing’s karaoke; a poor analogue of the journal, where links are presented as important and/or current facts wrapped in half-baked commentary slash thought. And yet it’s a new media with a third estate all its own, leaning somewhere towards an op-ed state of personalised journalistic integrity and immediacy without the legal finality of publishing proper, and hence easily ignorable, unworthy. What’s aesthetics got to do with it.
Well, new technologies are usually not appreciated for their potential art or integrity. And in the weblog’s case, this all boils down to the art and integrity of the writer using the medium. So, from this POV, I mean to bring blogs back into the (potentially) literary fold, by focusing on the quality that goes into them. But in terms of potential aesthetics, in a medium so shiftless and gossipy, where does one begin to draw a system or code of criticism? And indeed, what’s the point when there’s already a complex and well-mapped history of literary criticism directly related to writing proper?
Well, I’ve just disclosed that I tend to like blogs that share many of the same qualities of good writing. And all that guff about literary theory is just that; I mean what’s the use of stucturalism, reader-oriented theories or deconstruction in an online environment? Theories based on the heritage of novels used as a primer for media in which novels are not written (
yet), or hardly even considered in depth, and which is fiendishly anti-quality or -textual care… as you can see, it’s a spur for self-questioning, for mediated conscience of a kind.
But anyway, my point: and I regret that it is only a little one: what I like about good books and what I like about the fine punctuation of literary styles is a certain sensitivity and attentive care to
detail; and hence I like blogs which not only differentiate particularities of thought, expression and idea with subtle scalpels of honed prose, but in particular those blogs which tend to approach the literary in quality by boosting the amplitude and imagistic resonance of details. I mean the kind of stuff that makes any writing memorable by casting it diagonally, obliquely into the mind’s memorial faculty. A clarity of images which makes one a trusted voice in terms of narrative, reader-care as well as the cerebral tingles of literary creation and participation. Which gives of a certain completeness as opposed to just so much more tiredly interpretative thought (or criticism, reviews, as the case may be).
Let that be my care and incentive from now on.
