Clattering Bat

Bloggers are winsome talky creatures. I had the opportunity of meeting the lovely and talented Gwen Alison, in the flesh last week, and during our 3 hour dinner chat, she told me about a blogger gathering she'd attended in her hometown.

"The entire room was full of people who talked - a lot."

Welcome to Rattle Tat.

This is a woman who is truly in love with the sound of her own voice, a self-described "freelance journalist" (I can only assume that she gets a per-word quota because she sure tries to cram those babies in there a mile a minute).

Let me give you an example:

After the third question it was clear the entire process was going to comprise geometrical shapes in absurd formations in which I was supposed to glean some trend.

Wow. That's pretty fucking exhausting to read.

And I have to say, it doesn't get much better.

It's verbose and sloppy:

This blog is an outlet for my compulsive writing, a recepticle (receptacle) for my verbal squits (squirts?), a haven for my verbosity - an assylum (asylum) from the editor's red pen.

Everyone can have a typo now and again, as I demonstrated so facilely last week. But this is a girl with multiple typos per post, even in her "about me" page. I bet her copy is literally a bleeding gash of red ink. This is a writer who needs to buy a dictionary to set alongside her well-palmed thesaurus.

The layout is nice & neat, and I like the colors. I like the name of the blog. It doesn't need three columns, as most blogs don't, and given that you know how to clean things up and put them behind buttons in your header, I have to ask why you don't do this with your blogroll, at the least. And frankly, I hate the "continue reading" links on any blog, but especially on yours where we get a sentence of introduction and, then, after the link, are confronted by an exhaustive cascade of black words.

But truthfully, any design woes are the least of the concerns here. It's the content. Frankly, it's ALWAYS the content. If we like the content, we will generally ignore the overall crappy look of a blog, but no amount of pretty trappings can whitewash a load of shitty prose.

I could like the blog, but it all feels so forced and contrived, as if each post is a "column" she's test-marketing to the blogosphere.

Consider this. It's very convenient. I don't get the sense that the authoress is actually doing any gut-wrenching soul-searching. It's just for effect, or at least, so it seems.

Almost every post is like this, wry and shallow, perfectly tailored for sale to a women's publication. Every post is about the same tedious length. Every post is full of neatly turned but empty phrases. Every post is cloaked in the same cultural identity-speak (urban hipster mommy). MEH.

I mean, this blog isn't terrible, awful or horrid. She has a deft turn of phrase. But, I don't love to hear her talk nearly as much as she loves to hear herself. Nor are we the sort of place to reward such endeavors.

Cute but shallow can suck my left tit. Thanks, but no thanks. I like real, even if it is harsh, gritty, depressing, and ugly.

But, I know real is hard to sell to the women's publications.

I give it: