(B)logrolling in Our Time

I'm on the verge of a likely blog hibernation due to the imminent arrival of b-a-b-y to the home. But the blog-o-theatro-sphere is in much more capable hands than mine in any case, based on my recent reading...

George Hunka returns from a trip to Wales with a fascinating and self-revealing post about his heritage and his personal sense of exile. Explains a lot, and yes, he's lost me by the last few graphs (and I can't even begin to scan his final sentence), but a bracing post nonetheless.

The oft-maddening, extraordinarily thin-skinned Leonard Jacobs likewise had an exceptional post recently about his career-building goals via his blog. Helps put some of his pique and snark in perspective, I guess.

Isaac Butler has been promoting his Honest-to-God True Story of the Atheist production in D.C. but still blogging furiously. There's still no one the scene with anything close to his energy and passion.

Garrett Eisler has been on something of a roll at Playgoer lately--even without a Rachel Corrie to gnaw on, Garrett is consistently on the beat in a way that feels both journalistically circumspect and yet idiosyncratic, personal.

Speaking of the line between journalism and blogging, along with everyone else I've been following Boston critic Thomas Garvey's exhaustive, tendentious takedown of Emily Glassberg Sands' study of gender bias in re: female playwrights (where is the long-awaited Part III, we wonder?). This strikes me as a kind of test case of blog journalism. It's longform, it's informed, it's passionate...and it also seems to me intemperate and, Garvey's protestations to the contrary, mean-spirited. I know what Matthew Freeman means here, but I also get why Isaac got so riled by the piece.

Which brings me to David Cote's nine wishes for NY theatre on the Time Out Upstaged blog. No. 5 is "Bloggers: Engage/enrage." He doesn't name names, but he cries for "more arguments, more dirt, more bloody knock-down-drag-out fights. Not just self-promotion, obscure manifestos and production diaries." Ouch, but a fair cop.

For myself, I prefer to take tip #9 to heart: "I wish that composers would dare to write beautiful, complex, slow and orchestrally rich music." That I'm up for, if not in the blog-o-theatro-sphere.