-A Critical Primer for Critiquing the Critics-

1. Don’t.

2. Okay, if you must, do it once and effectively, and then call it a day.

Very likely KingMob’s initial rhetorical lash, since muted, reflects a bad reaction to the herpes vaccine he himself has injected directly into his throat. {See Exclusive Photo}

He is also motivated by an eagerness get past a literary dry spell. Controversy is a fertile muse, as you will see below, and the image of two editors clashing like rival pontiffs probably appeals to him as much as it does me.

It is less likely, but still possible, that he fairly upbraids me for callousness and narcissism, owing to the fact that my passage encompasses both personal and external events, and gives short shrift to the external suffering. Would that this were true - I could accept that criticism as valid. The amount of blood suggests that the injury was less than fatal, but it certainly hurt more, physically and emotionally, for the victim(s) and the bystanders, than a bout of work-induced sleeplessness.

Because of the latter, (and this was the real reason for the fuzzy-minded reflection) I expected to see spelling and grammatical errors. And I riffed on that theme, throwing in a last-ditch attempt at an inside joke only at the conclusion of the piece, one that winked at Mob himself for his joke that he “owned” the right to comment on the blood pool on the bus; a joke REPEATED (because aren’t jokes funnier when they are repeated? Aren’t they funnier when EXPLAINED?) in this “See You Next Week” entry. Scanning it (the Hornbook entry, not “See You Next Week”) now, I see there’s nary a spelling or grammatical error to be found. Glory be.

The glaring error, obviously, is one of content. Leading off with typical Graduate student bitching about lost sleep, and finishing with mass transit bloodletting may convey a “let them eat cake” attitude to anyone accustomed to reading inside an inverted pyramid news structure.

Of course, this weblog is a new medium with few rules, and fewer sacred cows. Faster then the stream of consciousness, more contagious than anyone’s interior “kissing disease” monologue, no one need edit, just as I promised in the same entry. Let it stand as a moment in time, till external circumstances or time itself takes it down.

When we suffer ourselves to endlessly critique the critics, we resemble those portraits of mirrors reflecting infinite mirrors. As a result, we endlessly reflect an increasingly weak simulacrum of the original content, without creating any content of our own.

{Uh-oh}



Of course, I don’t think KingMob really meant anything vicious by his censure, though he has a history of berating the content of many such websites in the past. He takes issue with what he refers to in his piece as “minutiae,” or content featuring (probably) trivial, insignificant events, unworthy of electronic musing.

This, in the end, is really my only point of dispute with Mob. Yes, at any given moment, most, if not all blogs are insignificant and silly to anyone who isn’t intimately involved with the actual events. So it was with the hornbooks of goodywives in New England 300 years ago, so it is with “Heir to the Hornbook” today. Mob struggles with the question of why we write, constantly asking “What’s the point of all this?”

My pithy answer: “When the only resources you put into it are your time, enjoyment, and few stray electrons, there doesn’t have to be one.”

Addendums:
1. To see KingMob's response to the response, click on the "mirror of diminishing returns" picture above.
2. I've delegated the responsibility of responding to his response to the response to Jabberwacky's team of rhetor-bots. See the highlights.