I’m not much of a James Lileks fan. I linked him for a while when I was fairly new to blogging, but I also delinked him fairly soon thereafter when he stopped interesting me. I go to Target a lot myself, and with my own four-year-old daughter, so I don’t need to revisit those trips in reading other peoples’ blogs. Plus, I generally tend to keep a running list of stuff I need, and I go to Target either when the list gets pretty long or when the need for one item on that list becomes urgent. Lileks seems to grab the wallet and pack up the kid at the merest thought that he might need a new pack of Gilette twin-blades sometime in the next six weeks.
And generally, his political commentary isn’t very good, either — just a lot of anger, really, worded a bit more poetically, but even there he never manages to put anything in a new or interesting way. And the way he goes out of his way to locate the most un-nuanced left-leaning person out there and “fisk” what they have to say to within an inch of its life is just strange. I mean, we’re talking about a guy who once fisked, with great gusto, Harry Knowles, for God’s sake. Harry Knowles, of Ain’t It Cool News. (And there, of course, was Glenn Reynolds all a-twitter with the wish that we “read the whole thing”.)
But I still look over there once a month or so, just because I know that on average, Lileks does still produce an essay or post once in a while that strikes me as being really worthy, even if I think upon reading it, “Where’s the guy who writes this stuff, and why doesn’t Lileks let him post a bit more, instead of the pedestrian thinker with the tendency to rely on the too-cute metaphor?”
Anyway, I thought this was just marvelous. I hate to call such a fine piece of personal writing a “Bleat”. It seems more like a song to me.
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