Prosing About the Web

Writing on the Web good not is. Too fast, it move. Too quick, it change. And telegraphed its punches are.

Of course, that’s the nature of the beast. Be angry at the sun for setting if these things anger you. Every morning, I read the newspaper editorials linked on Real Clear Politics , the magazine pieces linked on Arts & Letters Daily , and then I start on the blogs¯and the blogs and the blogs and the blogs. Some are thoughtful, some are clever, some are informative, and some are wide-ranging. Mostly they serve as filters¯as if to say: We too have been browsing around the Web, and we’re better at it than you are, and here are the interesting things we’ve found, with a pithy comment to mark each one.

Fair enough. To ask for extended passages of fine prose in such things is like asking for a complete explanation of Georgetown’s use of the Princeton Offense in the thirty seconds of college-basketball highlights on the evening news. Or an accurate description of the pope’s new apostolic exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis in a daily newspaper .

But sometimes the eye wants a little more¯a sweep of prose, a few fun paragraphs in a row, a more-than-pithy passage. Why is it any surprise that the Web doesn’t provide many examples? You’d need to find writers who could do it at thousands of words every week. The shock is that there are any at all.

Still, there are some. Voice turns out to be the key¯as it always has been for prolific authors. Think of G.K. Chesterton: The only way anyone could write that much readable prose is by owning a voice like a stamp mill that can shape anything to its form. The Web hasn’t exactly found its Chesterton yet, but there are a few genuine writers out there who have found their voice.

Take, for instance, the unlikely success of Manolo, the great shoe blogger . Our assistant editor Mary Ruiz is the only other person I know who reads both First Things and the musings of Manolo. Outside our offices, of course, others have discovered him. The Washington Post , for instance, has started publishing him on its fashion pages¯mostly because his prose is so good.

Adopting the faux voice of an Italian fashion obsessive whose English is much worse than he thinks it is, the blogger has managed to create a genuinely fun device for using footwear as an excuse to talk about almost anything. Try yesterday’s entry :

Manolo says, one of the Manolo’s dear internet friends has asked him the question: "Querido Manolo, I have just received an invitation to present a paper in Helsinki this summer at a conference on the laws of war . . . . Could you please recommend a pair of show-stopping shoes?" . . .

Oy, to the Manolo this does not sound like fun. Indeed, it sounds as if the Manolo’s nameless friend is riding out to the annual Mongol Golden Horde company picnic, featuring all the roast badger and curdled mares’ milk you can eat, followed by the spirited game of "Kick the Head."

In this case, she should do as the Manolo does when forced to participate in the strange native rites: behave as if you were the eccentric 19th-century British explorer. Be polite, be friendly, be sympathetic, but make it clear to the cannibalistic savages, through your dress and your comportment, that you represent the superior culture, one which offers these benighted souls the benefits of indoor plumbing and the afternoon tea.

Thus, when the lawyers of war offer you the drink of honeyed mead in the polished skull of their slain-in-battle senior partner, you must sip politely and smilingly promise them, in your best Queen’s English, that you will return soon with the Royal Navy gunboat and destroy their God-forsaken way of life.

Of the course, in the meantime, the Manolo’s friend must dress in the manner that shows them that she is the powerful and important person in her own culture, one who must not be trifled with (or, at the least, one who must not be cut up and tossed into the bubbling cauldron of lunch.)

What better way to do this than with the aggressively beautiful shoes?

I’m sorry, but if you don’t like "when the lawyers of war offer you the drink of honeyed mead in the polished skull of their slain-in-battle senior partner, you must sip politely," then you lost the capacity for delight in prose.

Meanwhile, every morning¯like many others¯I read James Lileks’ calm account of his day . A newspaper columnist in Minnesota, Lileks is capable of strong judgments, stern conclusions, and clever epigrams. He loves pop metaphors and references, in an autumnal light, to Americana from the 1940s through 1970s. But mostly what makes his blog entries work is the voice of quiet wonder at how nice is the world through which he and his daughter (nicknamed Gnat) wander every day. Here’s a typical posting from yesterday :

Not just warm, but hot. Monday morning we slid down the sidewalk to the bus stop, taking old-man-on-ice steps down the slick insidious plane; this morning we strode with confidence, jeering at the dead and withered drifts. Oh, there’ll be snow again¯that late-season bitter vindictive snow¯but winter’s back has been snapped, and the drifts have only the dirt to preserve them.

It’s called Snirt, and we hate it. But it gladdens our heart nevertheless, because it means that snow has retreated to its redoubts and surrounded itself with craven collaborators. The end is nigh.

Gnat said something interesting this morning: "Isn’t it cool how the water goes under the ice?" She was looking at the melting snow flowing under a shelf on the sidewalk, and the moment she said it I remembered my own reaction to the same thing, forty years before.

Of course it was cool. Mysterious, too. When I went to the bus stop eight hours later I noted how the water gathered on the underside of the shelf and formed big perfect circles, traveling under the translucent ice like corpuscles jostling in an artery.

Occasionally a car passes when I’m waiting for the bus, and sometimes I wonder what people think: there’s no real reason for me to be where I am, since there’s no Bus Stop Sign, and the houses are up on a hill and nothing around here suggests a destination. If you don’t live here you keep moving. But there I stand, headphones on, looking up at the sky, or crouched on the ground examining ants or ice. Once when the bus was late I made a series of confounding foot-prints, hoping to recreate the Spring-Heel’d Jack panic of ‘37. When the wind was cruel I would simply stand there like an oak. The arrival of the bus always breaks the reverie, but it’s the bus that gets me out there for some random urban zen in the first place.

This morning we heard the Mystery Train louder than ever before. As I’ve noted, there’s no train anywhere around here. No tracks. But yet we hear the horn. What sounds mournful and alluring at midnight sounds different at 8 AM, though¯it’s rude, and it’s not taking any contrary opinions. At midnight the train horn says come with me; at 8 AM it says get out of the way.

Work? Yes. Filed two columns then wrote a third and filed it. Drove to the accountant’s to drop off tax material and returned a couple of DVDs my wife had rented . . . from McDonald’s. Really: she took Gnat and a friend to McDonald’s Moon on Saturday, and rented two DVDs from the Redbox machine. Now I get it: the point isn’t to make you go to McDonald’s to rent a DVD. The point is to make you eat at McDonald’s when you return the DVD. But I am immune to their charms and left without shoving my face in a giant feedbag of fries, as much as I really, really, really wanted to. So that was my day. That, plus housework and homework and other sundry chores.

Every morning, as well, I take a look at the blogger Diogenes . He can snark with anyone, of course¯but snarkiness is a general feature of blog prose, and Diogenes can also range to his right to snag the hard-hit grounder and do the police in different voices , to entertain the dugout during the seventh-inning stretch. Try yesterday’s entry :

Yet another exit interview with Frances Kissling , this one published in her own magazine, Conscience . William Saletan departs from his usual hardball journo act and, in his role as interviewer, pitches underhand to Aunt Fran. The results are surprising. Now and again there are glimpses of the old Kissling truculence, but she seems to be losing her grip on her dogma¯or better, she seems more willing to admit that the absolutism of "abortion any time any reason" is a useful, perhaps indispensable, political slogan, but that her true beliefs on the matter are more complex.

I’ve long nursed a suspicion that Kissling was never interested in abortion per se ¯or in "choice," for that matter. Her real crusade is aimed against the Catholic hierarchy, for whom she displays the antipathies typical of an educated feminist of her generation: the girls who, now in their 70s, still cherish resentment at injuries received fifty years earlier. Energized by wrath, and more nimble than the comparatively slow-moving and slow-thinking herbivores that had pastoral custody of Church teaching, Kissling spent her life enjoying the delights of vengeance, by claiming to be a good Catholic while pro-abortion¯and watching the reaction. She was canny enough to realize both the sputtering outrage that her claim would provoke in her targets, and their impotence at hitting back. She also understood, and capitalized on, the support her stance would attract from the Church’s powerful and wealthy despisers.

Kissling has never shown any genuine interest in or knowledge of the post-Conciliar Catholic Church. She applauds some Catholic relief efforts, but in a way no different from the Clintons or the Euro-Communists. She shrewdly continues to identify herself as a Catholic in good standing, however, which gives her the double advantage of newsworthiness ("proof" that the Church embraces a "diversity of positions" on abortion), and of positioning her in media eyes as David against Goliath¯Goliath being her old foe the hierarchy, of course.

Given the overwhelming media sympathy for her position, Kissling’s game was not a hard one to play, but even so she carried it off very well, and clearly enjoyed twisting the tails of her opponents, safe in the knowledge that they were powerless to hurt her in return. The show’s just about over now, and most of the fun is past. Now perhaps the ultrasound videos that she must have seen from time to time take on a new meaning, and images of those shadowy "somethings" somersaulting in the womb may make unwelcome intrusions into her wakeful hours at night. "How can you not be affected?," she asks Saletan, pointing to the scene in the surgical theater. There are hesitations in these farewell interviews we haven’t heard before.

"Revenge is barren," declared Friedrich Schiller, "its delight is murder, and its satiety, despair." Having devoted her life to the amusements of pay-back, Kissling can congratulate herself on murder, satiety, and despair¯which, in this case, takes the form of a sardonically emphatic childlessness not her own. As with her colleague Kate Michelman ¯who hoped that retirement would allow her "to indulge that ‘grandmother’ part of me" and who hoped that God would assure her on the day of judgment "that I was a good person"¯Kissling seems on the brink of the realization that the joke is wearing thin.

"The night cometh," Jesus said (John 9:4), "when no man can work." Or snicker.

There’s a kind of perfection in that ending: "Kissling seems on the brink of the realization that the joke is wearing thin. ‘The night cometh,’ Jesus said (John 9:4), ‘when no man can work.’ Or snicker." Enough, anyway, to keep me reading on the Web.