This one goes out to our thousands and thousands of friends

Andrew Sullivan has a nice little apologia for blogging in the current Atlantic. It's called "Why I Blog," and here [SPOILER ALERT] is his conclusion:

Words, of all sorts, have never seemed so now.

Words: gotta love 'em. As Hamlet once said. But in case you are not as "now" as me or Andrew Sullivan, here's a summary of his article in picture form:

"There are times, in fact, when a blogger feels less like a writer than an online disc jockey, mixing samples of tunes and generating new melodies through mashups while also making his own music."

"Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive."

Blogging is also like cloning, baggy jeans, AIDS awareness, startups, ecstasy, Don't Ask Don't Tell, McMansions, and Kosovo.

(Blogging is so 90s.)

"If you compare the meandering, questioning, unresolved dialogues of Plato with the definitive, logical treatises of Aristotle, you see the difference between a skeptic’s spirit translated into writing and a spirit that seeks to bring some finality to the argument."

If there's anything bloggers love more than humbly accepting the transient, imperfect nature of their form, it's comparing themselves to Plato. "Why I blog is because it reminds me of being the founding father of Western thought."

That's why I blog, too.

Catch you on the slopes, wiggaz

Read This

From Sarah Boxer’s NYRB essay about bloggy writing:

Bloggers assume that if you're reading them, you're one of their friends, or at least in on the gossip, the joke, or the names they drop. They often begin their posts mid-thought or mid-rant—in medias craze. They don't care if they leave you in the dust. They're not responsible for your education. Bloggers, as Mark Liberman, one of the founders of the blog called Language Log, once noted, are like Plato. :-) The unspoken message is: Hey, I'm here talking with my buddies. Keep up with me or don't. It's up to you. Here is the beginning of Plato's Republic:

I went down yesterday to the Peiraeus with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, to pay my devotions to the Goddess, and also because I wished to see how they would conduct the festival since this was its inauguration.

Wait a second! Who is Ariston? What Goddess? What festival?

I like this comparison of bloggers to Plato. Personally, though, I am reminded more of this passage from the Symposium:

Socrates: Have you guys seen “Drunk History” yet? Hilarious.
Also, this totally cracked me up at work today:

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is that the Fug girls are way too hard on Zac Efron. Anyway who cares how he dresses when he is such a hottie!!!1!
Agathon: I can not refute you, Socrates.
Aristophanes: Man and Woman used to be One or something.