ishikoro

Illustration: Creative Thursday

In Japan neglected or abandoned blogs are called ishikoro, pebbles.

One of many tidbits about blogs in Sarah Boxer's review of many many books re blogs and blogging in this week's New York Review of Books.

Much as Boxer struggles (or pretends to struggle) to define "blog writing", that thing that "stinks of the link", and how it differentiates itself from traditional journalistic writing, she wraps up the piece in true blogger style as she marvels "at the large numbers of bloggers obsessed with masked superheroes":

Finally, I think I get the superhero fixation. It's the flying. It's the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it's like, "Dude, the ball."

Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can't fake that. ;-)