Career Opportunities Are the Ones That Never Knock

And to be blunt, I'm encouraged to pursue thinking about this by the sheer stupidity of some of the comments on literary blogging lately. (Sample.) This topic might be worth revisiting at some point. It's kind of tangential, but I find myself puzzling over it.

I hear a distinct note of anxious dread in the voices of some colleagues at magazines and newspapers whenever they talk about the future. This is understandable. And yet, while just about as prone to anxious dread as anybody can be, I've never felt the need to take a whiz on the bloggers to shore up my status as Serious Writer (dicey as that status may be).

No valid generalization can be made about blogs, any more than you can make one about all magazines or all films. The insistence on "othering" bloggers seems like a strange product of defensiveness and ignorance. It a real puzzle to me why some people who presumably ought to know better (or at least be capable of manifesting a certain noblesse oblige) are indulging in this.

Meanwhile, Adam Kotsko has a blog post up called "My Career as a Blogger." Which makes me wonder if that initial hunch isn't worth pursuing in any case.