What blogging should be about - and sometimes is

Last week the "secular right" blogger ZMan - who I had been reading regularly for several years - apparently died suddenly of natural causes; and I find that has saddened me more than might be expected.

The reason seems related to this strange and recent literary form of blogging, which I have been reading for more than twenty years, and myself doing regularly for fifteen.

In particular to the distinctive relationship that may develop (inwardly, perhaps wholly in imagination) between a blogger and his readers - and vice versa.   

To read and get-something-from a blog, it really needs to be a personal thing - either frequent, or else extensive. This is because there needs to be a persona behind the blog; we need to be aware of a person behind the opinions. 

(On the flip side; for a blogger to sustain his work sufficiently; he must himself be motivated by the process of blogging - and by its opportunity for presenting miscellaneous ideas freshly, and without being subject to overview.)

And - while there obviously must be a significant degree of common interest to keep reading a blog; there need not be any very complete "agreement". For instance, several of my long-term favourite bloggers long-term have been orthodox and traditional Roman Catholics - people such such as Bonald at the Orthosphere, who I've been reading for a couple of decades. 

Instead there has to be some kind of basic affinity with the blog persona - but especially with the person we infer behind that persona. I say infer, because we don't need to know much specifically about the blogger "in real life" - so long as what we do know is honest and unpretentious.

I personally find it very irritating/ intolerable when bloggers are trying to impress me, especially when they try to stimulate may admiration or envy!  - no matter what other valuable qualities they have. And there are many such bloggers, and unfortunately their need to brag seems to feed upon itself, and get worse.

In other words, we keep reading a blog attentively because (to use an English phrase) we have come to believe that the blogger is Basically A Good Bloke. That is far more important than a close fit of specific convictions or opinions.

But, as the pretentiousness/ bragging aspects makes clear - bloggers change; and someone we begin liking may evolve into somebody we find intolerable - and so we bale out from readership. 

Beyond that, because blogging needs to be relatively high volume, interest is maintained by insights - and a good blogger needs to generate plenty of these to sustain attention. 

Blogging is, I think, mainly a stimulus; rather than a medium for conclusive argument. So, a blogger like ZMan kept me reading partly because he had many insights that seemed personal rather than (as with mainstream journalism) merely parroted; and partly because I found what he wrote stimulating.

Even though I often disagreed with it both ultimately and superficially; and even though I think his blogging was constrained by the constraint of monetization and pseudonymity, which prevented it from achieving the highest levels of the form.

(I have come to believe that professional writers very seldom generate first rate work, although they may produce a large amount of second and third rank work - furthermore I think all the greatest writers did something else, worked some other "job", before they wrote their greatest work. Writers who have done nothing but write as adults; never, I think, attain the highest levels.) 

I think readers usually judge a blog by its best, rather than its average, level - just so long as the gaps between the good stuff is not too great. So long as we retain our basic liking for the blogger - we don't much mind the duds. 

And in fact we cannot have the peaks without the troughs, as we see from the history of even the greatest artists. Even so supreme and natural and artists as Mozart, for instance, continued to produce dud operas and concertos even during his greatest phases of achievement and right up to his death. 

To do our best, we must take risks; and when we take risks we shall sometimes (or often) fail. And we can learn much from acknowledging our failures - but first the failures have t happen.   

At any rate, blogging benefits from a careless attitude of freedo-, and the ability to shrug-off those times when posts don't take-off or just don't gel.

As an example of a recent example of the kind of blog post I like best; here is (non-famous) blogger Irish Papist; with a very personal and honest, free-associational development of ideas on the theme: Everything comes back to religion. 

As often said: writing is thinking (or it can be); and here you can sense AP thinking as he writes; and share his excitement at the insights as they emerge from the exploration.

I've been sampling Irish Papist on-and-off for several years - long enough to have decided he is a Good Bloke; and from this assumption I find that he produces a stimulating post every so often, that seems to set off associations and notions in myself. 

And this perhaps is what good blogging is about; and why regular readers come to care - at least somewhat - about our favourite bloggers; and miss them when they are gone.