The Rant

The problem with blogs is that they lend themselves to ranting, and the problem with ranting is that it's the most perilous form of prose. Letters and e-mails are directed to individuals or, at most, small groups. Books and articles are carefully edited and screened before they're published. Nobody reads poems. Rants, which have lived in history for a long time in pamphlets (which as we all know exploded following the invention of the press), became universally publishable via the internet, especially when automated blogging setups like blogger meant that you didn't even need to know a single HTML tag to share your thoughts with the whole wide world online. So, anyone with access can now publish anything they want to publish and anyone with access can read it. Search engines and tagging mean that everything published is theoretically accessible and efforts like the Internet Archive mean that every piece of old horseshit you ever wrote will stay available until the end of time.

So why do I care? I have two reasons:

First, because rants are usually underthought. There is no accountability in ranting; the term itself evokes an emotional outpouring, not a reasonable one. One says things in rant format that one would not normally say, or would at least say better in a different format.

Second, because rants lend themselves to would-be Bukowskism. To briefly rehash my stance on Bukowski: he's fine, but he spawned a whole generation of men who thought that getting drunk and being belligerent was carte blanche to become a writer or a poet. As Modest Mouse says, "yeah I know he's a pretty good read, but god who'd wanna be such an asshole?" The results of Bukowski-inspired writing have always been universally awful.

So this is the peril of blogging for me. In real life, I hate confrontation and I love reconciliation. I try to find the middle ground and the shared belief in almost any conversation and I deliberately seek balanced, evaluatory positions in my scholarship (side note: I feel like such a fucking cad calling it "scholarship"), not polemical ones. I am, however, also a deeply cynical, pessimistic, negative person and so I get angry and then sometimes I blog about it. It is, how you say, contrary to my nature to rant publicly, but that's precisely what blogging is for me and for a lot of other people.