Amateur Writers Make Good: More Blooker News

Following last week's tsunami of Blooker news (...blews?), the Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS) offers a brief but very entertaining interview with Julie Powell, one of the Blooker judges this year, author of Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously,  and last year's Blooker Prize winner:

   "I Was Just So Relieved the Zombie Didn't Keep a Blog" (Interview with Julie Powell)

I like Julie Powell a lot, but it's ironic to me that even someone like Julie --  whose book (blook) came about (and did well!) thanks to the possibilities of blogging -- feels the need to make a snarky aside (as did another judge, Nick Cohen, a couple of weeks ago) about the generally poor quality of writing online. Who cares!

The quality of blog writing doesn't matter in the slightest. The Internet is a perfectly free market. It makes no difference if the market is inundated with bad writing because unlike, say... poisoned dogfood, a lot of bad writing  on the Internet does no one any harm. What people have an interest in reading -- good or bad -- becomes popular. What people don't want to read does not.

And, frankly, when we talk about writing the discussion of what is good and what is bad very quickly becomes a silly argument. Is "Harry Potter" good writing? Let the earnest folks fighting over tenure argue about that sort of thing. The rest of us have better things to do. Like blog.