Oh, the Cleverness of You

I like prowling around this micro universe. Reading strangers' strange rants and friends' friendly prattle. Bloggers are at once clever and boring as h-e-double-hockeysticks.

Really? You posted on that?

This is what I think every day. It is what you think when you read that I called a home where a Kip Dynamite impersonator lives and bothered to write about it.

Whoever you are.

We are all of us engaged in different vocations, attracted by different causes, incensed by myriad injustices.

Myriad.

You're very clever, you. Much cleverer than I. Evidence can be found at Amilia Rait Ibid who is one of the most inventive writers in the blogosphere. Yes, I said that. Test my theory. Do it! Stale, temporary, vacant--these are most blogs. Or politically motivated which can be much worse.

Or at Lone Prairie, a blog I never miss reading. That says something for my excellent taste. Then again, its author is a writer and an artist. And a keen observer. So her lengthy posts are worth reading.

Or here, where some very curious men occasionally address each other as poopy pants.

Then there's Glib and Superficial, and with a name like that, why say more? Oozing cleverness.

Glib.

Oh the cleverness of you. It is hard to compete with the cleverness of these and dozens (but not more) of other writers, among them my sister (she will sneak up on you). If I didn't mention you, does it mean you're not clever? No, but would it matter if I thought so?

Compete. Is it a competition, you ask? No. Never. Silly.

But I will write a better, more engaging post than you. If it kills me I will.

WHY. BOTHER.

Will I a nudge a jot or tittle closer to Evelyn Waugh?

His mail had been prodigious. Some correspondents were sceptical, other derisive; one lady wrote to ask whether she read him aright in thinking he condemned the practice of baiting these rare and beautiful birds with terriers and deliberately destroying their earthy homes; how could this be tolerated in the so-called twentieth century? A major in Wales challenged him categorically to produce a single authenticated case of a great crested grebe attacking young rabbits.

Or top the utter enclosure I experience with Willa Cather?

Instantly that stupid face became intense, prophetic, full of awful meaning. With her finger she pointed them away—away!—two quick thrusts into the air. Then, with a look of horror beyond anything language could convey, she threw back her head and drew the edge of her palm quickly across her distended throat—and vanished. The doorway was empty; the two priests stood starting at it, speechless. That flash of electric passion had been so swift, the warning it communicated so vivid and definite, that they were struck dumb.

Or expose human nature like the incomparable observer Jane Austen?

You have given us an amusing sketch, and human nature cannot say it was no so. We must all feel at times the difficulty of fixing our thoughts as we could wish; but if you are supposing it a frequent thing, that is to say, a weakness grown into a habit from neglect, what could be expected from the private devotions of such persons? Do you think minds which are suffered, which are indulged in wanderings in a chapel, would be more collected in a closet?

You are very clever. Worth reading for the most part.

But why are you still here?