It is
unusual to use the verb 'to write' (or its French equivalent) as an intransitive, so unusual that Roland Barthes was being provocative and witty when he titled an essay, 'To Write: An Intransitive Verb?' One writes something, a book or a letter or a
poem. In contrast, the verb 'to blog'
seems to be more often intransitive (I haven't actually done a corpus
study). One can blog from somewhere (a
fair or convention) or about something (politics or football), but one doesn't
blog something, one just blogs, as an activity in itself.
When one
does blog something, the implication is often that one is doing something different from most blogs,
committing oneself to a finite project with a single focus. Julie Powell's The Julie/Julia Project,
on which Nora Ephron's current movie is based, is probably the best-known
example in the moment – all 536 recipes from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of
French Cooking in one year. One of my
favourite blogs, 101 Cookbooks, apparently started
in a similar way, as Heidi Swanson's attempt to explore the cookbooks she already had before buying any more - though she continued after she finished with her shelf of books.
In most of the
examples of blogging something that I have come across, that something is a
complex text. But to say one is blogging
that text, one is saying more than that it is one's subject matter; one is implying that it will be transformed by the form of the blog, a personal response given in short date-stamped messages rather than an essay or a book. If one blogs about the Bible, one could
comment on anything and everything to do with the Bible, but if one says one is
Blogging the Bible, as
David Plotz set himself to do in Slate, one is apparently committed to reading it (or rather, the part Christians refer to as The Old Testament) through from
beginning to end and writing something about every book. Plotz's project is different from the
thousands of Biblical commentaries over two millennia, not only because he does
not present himself as an expert or authority, but also because his responses
unfold in real time.
He doesn't promise us an overall reading of the whole text; he will just give us the experience, week by
week.
I tried to
see if there were other, similar projects out there by Googling 'Blogging
the'. That turned up several projects
modelled on Plotz's, such as Ziauddin Sardar's Blogging the Qur'an.
Churches around the world have a go at Blogging the Psalms,
but I find most are doing something rather different from Plotz, a series of more
traditional meditations or reflections than a project moving through the Book of Psalms over time. The Talmud Blog
is promising, because some might argue that the Talmud itself, with its commentaries on commentaries, has something blog-like, but blog is a noun rather than a verb
here, and it turns out to be about 'Talmudic
News, Reviews, Culture, Currents and Criticism', not a project of
reading the text. For readers in search of more secular meditation, there is John Whitfield's Blogging the Origin ,
in which a science writer tries to convey some of the experience of grappling
with a classic but often unread text.
I'm a bit surprised that I can't find a blog in which someone works
their way through Marx's Capital, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, or Joyce's
Ulysses; perhaps people feel they would
be too vulnerable, exposing their naïve reading of such heavily annotated
texts, or setting themselves us for a blog that stops awkwardly on page 82.
Perhaps the
best example of blogging as a transitive verb, and the example that started me
on this search, is Steve Coll's Blogging the Stimulus in the online version of The New Yorker (and once
again I owe the tip to the podcast of On the Media). Coll says he planned to do what journalists always do, skimming through the bill designed to boost the US economy after the financial crisis, looking for nuggets that might be the basis for an article. But inspired by Plotz's
Blogging the Bible , he made a project of
reading every one of the 407 pages, taking 21 posts over five months to bring out many
different aspects of the complex legislation. Though most would probably agree that the Stimulus Bill is rather less inspiring than the Bible, the blog is a wonderful exercise leading to many insights, with an appetite for detail worthy
of I.F. Stone.
But in some
ways, projects like Powell's, Plotz's and Coll's are atypical of blogging.Most blogs go outward, in all directions, taking in a range of
links; that is why they are best thought of in intransitive terms, as an activity having no particular object. Plotz and Coll stick to their one
furrow. And their projects, by their
nature, are finite; they are like HBO miniseries vs. the soap operas of most
continuing blogs. It is perhaps relevant that both Plotz and Coll are
professional journalists (as is Whitfield), writing for established media
outlets, not novices sharing their ignorance with the world; they are in some ways writing books in
instalments (and indeed Plotz's text has come out as a book). So it is probably fairer to
say that they have used the blog genre to do something it is not usually used
to do, but is certainly worth doing. I am on the lookout for more such
projects. Google says there is no 'Blogging the Munros', by one of those people who makes a project of the 284 peaks in Scotland that are over 3000 feet tall. I would take it on, but I suppose that the title would imply one was going to climb them, not just write a post about each of them.
