The Unexpected Guest

As I continue to explore the connections between blogging and arts criticism, I often find that those who have the most to say (at least the most to say in a way I find meaningful) have nothing to do with my field. Peter Kramer--writer, psychiatrist, thinker, blogger--whose work I have referenced on my personal blog, Going40, begins his latest post with these words about blogging:

An unscripted appearance on a radio show always leaves me a bit shaken. Was I too vague? Too assertive? I thought that the discussion Friday with Jim Gordon and Ira Flatow went well. Still, there’s always the problem of what the French call l’esprit de l’escalier, the mot juste that comes to you on the staircase, after you’ve left the salon. The great thing about writing a blog is that you get to speak in public from the staircase.

Kramer then gets to the meat of his post, the importance of labeling depression a disease. What is useful to me, though, is his notion of speaking from the staircase. Bloggers are sometimes accused of rash writing, of dashing off un- or ill-considered rants. There may be some of that out there (out here?), but more often, I find that bloggers, while relishing the immediacy of the medium, also take seriously their opportunity to consider their subject, whether it's psychiatry or arts criticism or midwifery, away from the pressures of conversation and heated argument. A conversation still happens, but in a new paradigmatic way: everyone, blogger and commenter alike, has the chance to reconsider, interject, redact. Instead of thinking of bloggers--especially amateur critics--as uninformed hotheads, maybe we need to remember that they're trying their level best to be excellent company: informed, considered, thoughtful.