Michael Bérubé is going to close his wonderful blog down. I'm very sad. First Billmon, now Bérubé. Is this some sort of a hex on people with names that start with the letter B?
As Michael notes, we can still read him in other contexts. Which helps a little but not enough. But thank you for the three years you gave us in the blogosphere, Michael. May the snakes guard your path with ferocious tenderness.
Something in Michael's farewell blog strikes a bell with anyone who has tried blogging even semi-seriously:
Blog maintenance on this scale is a daily, sometimes hourly thing, regardless of whether there’s a new post up. And even if I didn’t try to maintain the blog on this scale (a good idea in itself), there’s still the problem of the invisible blogging. I don’t write these posts out in advance, you know. I sit down for an hour or two (more for the really long posts), write them in one take in WordPerfect, look ‘em over, transfer ‘em to the blog, preview, edit, submit, and then proofread one last time once they’re up. (Because sometimes you can’t catch a typo until it’s really up there on the blog, and even then, I’ve missed a bunch so far.) Which means, among other things, that I do a great deal of the planning-before-the-writing while I’m not blogging. And that’s what’s been so mentally exhausting. It’s like ABC from Glengarry Glen Ross: Always Be Composing. And while it’s been great mental exercise, and it’s compelled me to think out (and commit myself in public to) any number of things that otherwise would have laid around the mental toolshed for years, it’s not the kind of thing I can keep up forever, and it wouldn’t be seriously affected if I went to a lighter posting schedule. I’d still spend way too much time thinking about the Next Post and the Post After That.
There is an umbilical cord from the blogger to the blog and some days one is always tripping on it.