Is Blogging the Jazz of Writing?

Chip Quips on blogging as the jazz of writing.  It is a metaphor that works for me. I play the keyboard.  Sometimes, I like to think I've made some real music.  Other times I hit an offbeat chord.  Some bloggers remind me of a saxaphone at dawn while others a drummer who went off somewhere and doesn't know how to get back. Collectively you could say the blogosphere is just filled with all that jazz.

Comments

[Matt Edmundson]

When I was 16 I took up playing the flute. It turned out that I was bad at playing music where you had to follow it note for note from a music score. I could, however, play jazz and play it well. It didn't subscribe to the same rules - just that you had to vaguely follow along and improvise the rest. At school I was bad at English. My grades were useless. I hated writing essays. But Blogging is a different story. Follow some basic principles and improvise the rest, just like Jazz.

[Jeremiah]

Intersting, I played the keyboard and jazz trombone. left some thoughts here:

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2006/09/11/participatory-arts-jazz-and-blogging/

[Ted Demopoulos, Blogging for Business]

Interesting, and a slightly off topic comment:
A friend has stopped reading his email first thing in the morning and now plays the piano instead.

Hmmmm, I have a piano. I know how to play although I really don't -- perhaps I should?
Maybe it would help my blogging as well?

Wonder if I can play and surf online at the same time :)

[Sterling Camden]

Thanks, Shel. What a great line. We can only hope that the other artists (fellow bloggers) will kick in if we ever get lost in a drum solo.

[L.L. Barkat]

Tah, shah, seh bee bah, tah... tah shah tah...

some bloggers have good rhthym, but, like jazz, they feed the soul more than the mind.... yet, the mind is freed up in the play of rhythm... so, who can say, in the end, that the mind has not been engaged and expanded?

[Recruiting Animal]

Seth Godin is always talking about riffing on his blog.

[Kami Huyse]

I love the anlogy, being a singer myself, you could say it resonates with me. There is a reason my blog is named after a musical term.

[shel israel]

Of course. An ovetone has to do with harmonics and acoustic waves. I had forgotten that I knew that. Thanks for reminding me.

[Jeff Buddle]

Oh, god. Jazz and writing. Didn't the Beats try (and fail) to fuse jazz and poetry years and years ago? At least they understood jazz and tried to emulate the improvisation of its finest players...but blogs-as-jazz? Would you say that print journalism is classical music? I deeply dislike this metaphor.

[shel israel]

Well, Jeff, we ain't gonna be joined at the hp on this one. For one thing, I thought Ginsberg and Ferlinghatti succeeded wildly, even if most of what they did was never recorded and cannot be passed to the current generation. I know the beat poets heavily influenced me when I was a student hanging out in Greenwich Village.

[Sterling Camden]

Jeff, I didn't say that blogs ARE jazz, I said that blogs are to writing what jazz is to music. Analogy.

And I would say that a novel is analagous to classical music. Print journalism, OTOH, is more like pop radio Top-40.

[Jeff Buddle]

Don't get me wrong, I think some of what the Beats wrote is great. I'm just not sure that the metaphor/analogy is apt. Jazz is what it is, and writing is something different.

The current Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami compares what he does to jazz in that he has starting off points on which he improvises and riffs.

The Beats tried to capture the intensity of a John Coltrane solo in a collection of words, and sometimes they got it right, certainly Ginsberg did with "Howl."

But are Ginsberg's poems or Murakami's novels "the jazz of writing", or are they something unique in their own right? I'd opt for the latter. Are blogs? Nah. Most of the time it's not good enough to even approach an artistic midpoint. As Truman Capote said in criticisim of Kerouac, "That's not writing, that's typing."

[Manny Hernandez]

I completely agree with this concept... As a matter of fact, I will borrow it (giving you due credit, of course) for a coming seminar on blogging I will be delivering at the college where I work.

BTW, I am reading the book and loving it. I will be reviewing it in Amazon.com very soon.