Astride the Writer Blogger Divide
I read the announcement that Ron Hogan and Sarah Weinman were taking over Galley Cat as editors with an odd mix of emotions. First of all, it’s weird that I would feel any emotion at all. I’ve never met Ron or Sarah, but I feel as though I know them. This is the weirdness of blogging wherein many degrees of separation vanish while others flourish creating a fourth dimension of strangers whose lives intersect frequently but rarely in corporeal form. Fans of Beatrice and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind have peered inside their brains without so much as a handshake to set the deal in motion, give it the familiarity of social tradition, the traction of names to a face or a faces to a name. Back to the emotional content, a scintilla of unease. What do these changes mean?
I’m not a Galley Cat fan. The tone has been too inside the Beltway for my taste, and my tastes are notorious for both their general irrelevance and contrariness. I’m prone to liking things others dislike just because they are held in such low regard. Here are some things that I like: Curtis Mayfield, the movies Performance, Putney Swope, and the idea of John Waters more than the reality. I like Ferdnand Leger, Edna St. Vincent-Millay, Willy Mays, Carlos Santana, Clint Eastwood, and all the members of The Band. William Kotzwinkle, Motherless Brooklyn but not Fortress of Solitude, Spike Lee, Eli Manning, Denise Mina, James Agee, a lot of the Four Tops, Beggars Banquet, Highway 61 Revisited, Earl the Pearl and Clyde, Fried Green Tomatoes, A Wrinkle in Time, Anne Sexton, the place in the Village with the great hamburgers that I think is on Jane Street. No one goes there and they should.
What can be distilled from all this? Unreliable narrator, former of square hamburger patties, critic without portfolio, all these things are true. I’ll probably read Galley Cat now. Ron and Sarah, good luck.