To Blog: A Transitive Verb?

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.

 

 

Comments

[BTM]

I think "blog" as a transitive verb is ugly, no matter the context. I'm not sure I grasp your distinction regarding "finite project(s) with a single focus." I know this is a funny thing to ask after such a lengthy (and interesting!) post, but might you elaborate on your reasoning? Because it seems to me that David Plotz is still merely blogging ABOUT the Bible, no matter how comprehensive his effort.

Further: If we do grant that Plotz is "blogging the Bible," don't we have to grant that Glenn Reynolds is "blogging a New York Times story" when he writes one sentence with a link? If not, why not?

There's something about "blog" as transitive verb that feels deliberate, self-conscious, political. It's got that pushy, early '00s, tech-evangelism vibe. Every time I encounter it, I can't help but sense an embedded message: "I'm helping change the world with my embrace of this exciting communications medium." I know that's a lot to read into a little jargon -- but that's the risk writers take when they try to bend the language into new shapes.

[Greg Myers]

BTM, I'll grant your point that the usage of blog as a transitive verb might be ugly; there is certainly something 'self-conscious' and even 'pushy' about it (though I don't know if that makes it political). In 1989 I published a book called 'Writing Biology', and in the preface I explained that meant I was talking about how writing constructed the discipline of biology, so I wasn't just analysing writing *about* biology. There were lots of other academic books at the time with similar titles: 'Writing Culture', 'Reading Woman'. So it may well be that the device of using the present continuous this way (rather than the verb taking an object) may sound rather pushy and yes, dated, even more dated than you say. It reminds me of those hyphens and parentheses that were once fashionable in literary theory. As with any slightly unconventional usage, it is drawing attention to itself in a self-conscious way, and that seems to be true too of 'Blogging the Bible'.

I can't claim any empirical basis for my distinction, because I didn't find a large sample of blogs that use this transitive sense of the verb, having no better tool than searching for 'blogging the'. Maybe some bloggers do use it to mean 'blogging about'. But I'd still argue there is a distinction to be made, between the kind of blog that gathers bits from all over the place ('Rebecca's Pocket'), and the blog as a project (like Munro-bagging or walking to Santiago or reading all the works of Trollope). But it is not just a project, the blog goes with the project every step of the way, as the record of it, like the pencil marks on the doorframe as a child grows up, and stops when the project is done. Glenn Reynolds called his blog 'Instapundit', which allows him to comment on ten unrelated topics in an hour; if he had called it 'Blogging the New York "Times"', I for one would have expected him to read through the 'Times', every day, writing a post or two on what he found there, resisting the urge to link to a bunch of conservative blogs for other stories. (And I wouldn't mind reading someone who was 'blogging the "Times"', finding something interesting every day that would otherwise be buried in its bulk, though I'm not sure Professor Reynolds would be my choice of guide).

Apologies for the length of this comment on a comment on a post; I really should just go find out if this is the way bloggers use this construction.