Back in August of 2002 – a mere three years ago but seemingly in another lifetime – I started The American Sentimentalist with little more than an overabundant belief in my own abilities and boatloads of naivete. At the time, the site existed on the upswing of the blogger revolution: I hardly knew what a blog was when the site began, and, judging from some slightly overheated attempts at defining the new medium’s role a few months later, I quickly grew to misunderestimate my ability to grasp the obvious: If I had a blog, that meant within a short while everyone else would, too.

Back then, however, I liked to think my particular slice of the Internets was a bit different than the usual run-of-the-mill cant one found when surfing the blogosphere. After all, I reasoned, it wasn’t like I was simply linking to mainstream news media sites and adding a few words of opinion or a hopefully funny observation, like some were. Instead, I was writing, putting in three or four hours a day, lovingly crafting 1,200-word (or longer) posts filled with meaning, logic and inescapable insights into the human condition that had to–just had to–gain me recognition as a writer and thinker, and perhaps even make a difference in someone’s life.

What a fool I was.

It’s not that some people haven’t made their name writing blogs. In fact, many have, particularly among the political glitterati. Some of them were already known in the world of print journalism, like, say Josh Marshall or Eric Alterman, while others blew onto our radar screens seemingly out of nowhere, like, oh, I don’t know—Wonkette? Either way, the moment mainstream media outlets like the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal started turning to bloggers for reactions to the day’s news, you knew that blogs had become just another way to rise above the din of mass market oblivion.

But despite the blogosphere having become, for the most part, a Sargasso Sea of mediocrity even as it’s expanded beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, some people who run blogs have made a difference. Just take a look at the work Marshall has done on the Niger yellowcake scam, or the work Juan Cole has done in clarifying the reality inside Iraq. It’s not that blogs aren’t important, or useful. They are. Just not mine. At least, not how I imagined it to be.

I had a few good moments, of course. There was There Will Be Yanks (From The Banks Of The Wabash), a meditation on a war with no end we still find ourselves immersed in. This may not be what you came for, Jack, but it’s damn well what you’re getting was the closest thing I’ve come to in channeling Algren, despite the fact that he seemingly hovers over most of what I write that’s not straight reporting. The five part Escape From Freedom series, a fairly cogent if overly long examination of some core issues in American society, not to mention a 10,000 word scream of terrors and fears about what my country continues to become. Back before my beloved Chicago White Sox were world champions, I bemoaned the pain of following an eternally frustrating team who couldn’t even respect it’s own rich history. And I turned a lifelong obsession with jazz into a rambling, 6,000-word list of the 20 best records I had ever heard, and then some.

And, for a little while, I felt like a minor player in the left-leaning blogosphere, earning a couple of praiseful words and a few blogroll links from bloggers who I respected, like Jeanne D’Arc at Body and Soul or Lisa English over at Ruminate This. Hell, once I was even linked to by Mark Woods, who runs wood s lot, easily one of the shining examples of what a critical, thinking weblog should be and a man who very likely trucks few fools.

Ah, those were the days.

So why this jaunt down memory lane? Because by the time 2005 rolled around, The American Sentimentalist was little more than a repository of duplicate copies of work I was writing for other publications, and few examples at that. Soon after I abandoned the site completely, feeling that the effort of writing coherent, potentially thought-provoking pieces and shooting them into the blogospheric void was too much effort, particularly when I wasn’t making a dime off of it and the feel-good quotient for me and my readers was hardly enough to justify spending hours in my pajamas while my wife worked to pay the mortgage. When I first started, it was fun having a publisher who wouldn’t—couldn’t—turn me down, but after one realizes how hard it is to get the attention of enough real publishers and editors who are willing to pay real cash for 1,000 or 1,200 words, writing for free pales in comparison.

And yet, and yet. Suffice it to say, it’s much easier to sell, say, a story about how interest rates affect bond yields to a financial magazine, or a political gadfly story to a big-city weekly, than it is to attract interest in an atmospheric rumination on an emotional catharsis in a time of war. Nobody, you see, really wants those, no matter how much noise they may make in the pages of professional publications or in the hallways of editorial boardrooms, right after the PowerPoint presentations on the relationship between compelling content and corporate earnings per share.

Thankfully, writing has never really been the problem for me, but perfection has. It’s hard to just bang out a couple of thoughts or a short reaction to the day’s news, reasoning as I do that in an environment glutted with voices and opinions, value can only exist in the effort it takes to examine an issue or concept in depth, and with some care and understanding that goes beyond glancing at a news story’s headline and lead. That kind of value simply can’t be created in a couple of sentences, no matter how hard you try or how witty the rejoinder is to the link you posted to the New York Times op-ed page.

Which leaves me with a dilemma: Leave the site neglected and alone, and keep the hours it demands free for other, potentially emotionally or financially lucrative work (like the novel that keeps popping up in my thoughts as I drift off to sleep, taunting me with the belief that real meaning can only be found in a life’s work, not money-grubbing whorishness), or find a new method for its revival. And, even though it’s taken me far too long to get to my point, it is exactly that: with this post, The American Sentimentalist once again rises from the dead, and proves you can’t keep a good blog down. Or, at least, one that has such a compelling picture of its author on the front page.

But as you’ve probably figured out by now, the site is unlikely look the same, or read the same, either. The battle between brevity and meaning must be joined, and, along the way, the writer’s dilemma of learning to allow every piece of work to have equal value will be bested. My rallying cry will be: No More 10,000 Word Epics!

Whether or not I’ll be able to meet the new standard is open to debate. But you just watch: Someday soon, I’ll write something consisting of a few lines—or a paragraph or two—and nothing more, and I’ll still be able to sleep at night.

I hope you’ll bear with me as I try to figure out what it means to run a weblog that serves more as a hit-and-run dairy of daily thoughts than a stay-at-home repository of pendantism.

But, then again, if you don’t—how will I know?

I’ll guess I’ll just have to learn to trust that there’s value in places that not even I can see.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 6th, 2005 at 10:19 pm and is filed under On Writing.