Road to blogging, or: How I learned...

I’ve wanted to start an arts blog for a couple of years now—the first such blog I stumbled upon, back in the spring of 2003 when the blogosphere was young, was 2blowhards.com. Inspired by its chatty but brainy tone—by the casual back-and-forth format that seemed to encourage an astonishing play of ideas between its two participants—a few friends and I launched our own group blog. But we didn’t manage to get much dialogue going on it; I had a lot of trouble shaking off my anxiety about shaping and developing my ideas into reasoned critical statements, couldn’t get comfortable just offering up my naked impressions of stuff. So we disbanded. One of us went on to start The Forager Blog, where he’s attracted a good readership and has recently been posting at a steadier clip than ever; another of us started a blog that eventually petered out but produced some lovely posts, especially this one. Me, I still felt excited about the blogging medium—especially when I saw Terry Teachout and Kyle Gann, two writers whose printed criticism I had admired for years, plunge into it fervently around the same time that my friends did—but I didn’t feel confident that I was temperamentally suited to the form. I took a couple more stabs at it but still couldn’t shake off my innate deliberativeness, couldn’t loosen up and get into the proper free-associative rhythm. But I think I’m finally ready to stop worrying and love the blog—my own blog, I mean.