Self-imposed blogging exile

I just can't get the focus together to blog right now since I've got way too much grading to finish up. Grades are due Tuesday. My wife is scheduled to give birth to child #3 next Thursday. I'm figuring I should get the grades finished up sooner than later (which should have been three days ago). However, the grading process has given me several ideas to write about . . . I'll be back soon.

Incidentally, and more on the subject of blogging than music, I noticed that famed Boston Globe sports columnist Bob Ryan has just started his own blog. On the evidence of the linked entry, I'd say that's going to be a great thing. Ryan is a terrific writer, but more and more I find the canned newspaper article format to be . . . well, canned. Ryan also happens to be an excellent radio/TV talking head and the kind of writer who clearly still loves sports with a fan's heart. Those qualities come through beautifully in his first lengthy blog entry, which is full of many great tidbits that probably wouldn't have made the cut in a column. (Constraints aren't always a good thing, although Christoph Büchel still needs to learn to play nice. Oooh, I have so much to say about that . . .)

Among the many shortsighted and closeminded things asserted by Richard Schickel in this recent opinion piece is that blogging is more a form of speech than of writing. (Technically, he's quoting someone else.) Without question I think Ryan's skills as a conversationalist make him an excellent blogger - but so do his skills as a writer. It's a silly (and, of course, self-protective) dichotomy that Schickel endorses, but I'm glad to see an old guard type like Ryan is not afraid to try something new.

Oh yeah, I'm not supposed to be doing this right now . . . I'm supposed to be grading writing that, as it happens, is usually much too conversational and desperately in need of more attention to constraints such as logic, factuality, having-a-point, etc.