I’m confused. I’m not sure what I should do with this blog. For some time, I’ve written five articles per day. And the average length of the articles has been about 600 words. That makes for 3,000 words per day. That sits very well with me because my first novel had chapters that were all about 3,000 words long. It seems like a proper amount of work for one day, even though each chapter took me quite a lot longer than one day to write.
But for whatever reason, the articles I’ve been writing recently have been much longer. Articles and coming in at about a thousand words. And I don’t think this is because I’m padding. I think I’m just going into a little more depth. And in the three articles I’ve written today, I’ve already reached close to 3,000 words. Do you deserve more? Well, of course you do! You don’t come to Frankly Curious for in-depth analysis. So I will continue to try to put out five articles per day.
Just the same, it can’t just be five articles per day. I actually have a problem with posts that are just an image or a video. That’s all fine for people who are on the cutting edge of what’s happening. But if I present a video to you, it probably dates from the 1950s. But there is another option.
I’ve long thought what it would be like to be an Atrios kind of blogger. His is the kind of blogging you can do only if you already have a huge audience. It is rare that he writes more than a paragraph, and usually he writes only a sentence. For example, where I wrote a thousand words about Jonathan Chait’s apologia for football, Atrios would have written, “When I read this, I thought some people never get over high school.” That’s not to say that Atrios doesn’t have keen insights that he communicates pithily. But it does seem like a bit of a cheat. It seems like idea aggregation. And the commenters rarely discuss what any given blog post is about. Each could as easily be open threads.
Regardless, I don’t have it in me. Even when I try to be brief, I find that I manage 500 words of lead up. Anyway, all of this is to say that I don’t know quite what I’m doing. What comes, comes. It is the nature of Frankly Curious anyway. It was never intended to be consistent. That’s why I can go days talking about nothing but politics and then go days not talking about politics at all. More and more, I’d like to spend my time not talking about politics. There isn’t much to talk about anyway. And what little there is makes me wish that I had been born into a more enlightened time and place — perhaps into a Neanderthal tribe on the coast of the Mediterranean.
Most likely, Frankly Curious will continue on as it has gone on. Because above all else, this website continues to be a kind of addiction for me. Some men feel a compulsion to kill people and have sex with their dead bodies. I have a compulsion to write five articles here every day. And even though some of the articles are really little more than filler like this article, I think we can all agree that this is a far better use of my time than serial murder. For one thing, there’s the whole ten thousand hours that is required to become an expert in anything and I haven’t even spent a minute murdering people. Do you really want to wait for five years while I perfect my craft? No. I think I’d better stick to what I know.
Frank, I find it interesting that when I try to write a brief comment here with one topic I usually write a one that turns out to be a screen long.
To me you are an interesting, open-minded writer, with something to say. You largely are unconstrained by convention. So lacking models, you are going to tend to go on. It’s because you’re a smart guy, Frank. Even after reading that French semiotics blockhead.
Thank you. Actually, this article comes from the fact that I’ve been reading a lot of books recently, and I feel like that’s a better use of my time. I’m not feeling inspired. Or at least I wasn’t yesterday. But I hope to do better today.
I don’t ever think like Barthes because I’ve far too practical. But I still think he was brilliant. If you haven’t read it, you really should read his deconstruction of professional wrestling. It has become sort of common knowledge, but at the time it was revolutionary. Plus, I have an odd love of the French. ;-)