Last Week’s Biggest Development in Blogdom

No it’s not Six Art Bloggers in Search of an Author, the e-mailed roundtable, moderated by critic Peter Plagens in the November issue of Art in America. (The actual title of the piece is: “Report from the Blogosphere: The New Grass Roots.” A.i.A.’s barebones website never links to its articles.) This five-page compilation of answers to such questions as “What’s the purpose of your blog?”, “What are the boundaries of your blog?” and “Where will your blog be in three to five years?” fails to include…(sob)…me. Unlike the participants, I’m a contributing editor of A.i.A., making me feel even more like the wallflower not asked to dance. Still, I’m willing to bet that none of those other bloggers has ever been the subject of an Arkansas newspaper editorial.
Nor is the big news the recent return of the NY Times‘ irregular ArtsBeat blog, which has flooded the zone with five pop music critics at the CMJ Music Marathon. This must indeed be a very important event. It is here that we can learn about such future musical classics as “‘Enjoying Myself,’ a party song with lyrics that mischievously imitate the moronic conversations that partiers often have. (‘I like enjoying myself at parties/So do you/We like enjoying ourselves.’)”
No, the big event (and I mean this sincerely) is the inauguration of The Board, a blog by the 19 members of the NY Times editorial board. These prolific pundits have more opinions than they know what to do with, and now they let them rip in a blog that has has tallied 17 posts in its first five days. Their sharply pointed commentary makes for lively reading. But in their last post on Friday, The New Jersey Blues, they diss my home state. They do concede, however, that the state best known for its turnpike has somehow mananged to produce “a steady stream of great Americans, such as Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, Frank Sinatra, and Bruce Springsteen.” The Times must like Brennan because he wrote the opinion in the landmark libel-law case that the newspaper won, “New York Times v. Sullivan.”
The Judge, the Chairman of the Board, the Boss…and, of course, the Sopranos. Not to mention novelist Philip Roth, sculptor George Segal and poets Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. What a state I’m in!