Fuse #8

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Maternal Feelings and my Poor Little Maggot

Colleen Mondor and I don't intersect very often in the blogosphere. She dwells on adult and YA topics. I stick to kidlit with the occasional YA aside if I'm feeling distractable. But when it comes to insightful analysis from a cool clever head, there are few places better to head towards than Chasing Ray. Colleen recently wrote out a rather beautiful piece entitled A Question About the Big Picture which takes in hand the recent kerfuffle surrounding the notion of blog reviews vs. print reviews. The focus of the article is a Critical Mass entry that seemingly came out of the blue by a less than wholly talented critic. I read Critical Mass when I've a chance but I missed this particular smackeral of tripe when it aired. Take a glance at Ms. Mondor's piece if you've a chance to do so. One of the finest pieces of writing I've seen in quite a while.

Labels: , , ,

2 Comments:

At 10:12 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Seems like nobody is kerfuffling on the same points. That original controversial poster says most (not all) book bloggers don't do original material every day, which is true based on my totally unscientific survey. I didn't take that observation to mean that book blogging in its entirety is useless or that all blog reviews are lower caliber...my experience is that there are a lot of crappy book reviews by amateurs, but the blog reviews by pros (determined by technical qualifications, professionalism, and/or experience) stand head and shoulders above most of the print reviews. Seems like many of the reactions I've read group all the book bloggers into a single entity. I guess if I were a blog reviewer myself, I'd worry about being lumped in with the posers and wannabes. You true blue-ers should let your work speak for itself and resist the temptation to defend your work. The best rebuttal would be continued fine blogging...

 
At 6:32 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for the kind words Betsy - much appreciated.

And anonymous, what bothers me about the whole "conflict" is that most (if not all) of the anti-lit blogging comments are always general - they never say a specific blog is pointless, or silly, they always frame their comments as applying to the entire lit blogosphere.

Honestly, I've been told since elementary school that as long as I do my best, I will be appreciated for that alone. But every now again you have to kick back at the ones trying to tear you down (whether they are aiming disparaging comments at your profession, hobby, sex, ethnicity, etc).

Every so often, you have to let them know that what they say is wrong.

Colleen aka Chasing Ray

 

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home