How to blog like Thor.

In which I explain how obscure-yet-uberpivotal blogger Raven Belle codified the rules for blogging with muscle and precision for the rest of us mere mortals.

Now there is a twist to the origins of this instructive and insightful narrative, and to the Secret Identity of Raven Belle. And on my honor as a former Webelo, at the very end I will Reveal All (and without outing a soul, which you must admit will be a cute trick if I can pull it off), but I’m tres old school about such things and think it’s way more fun to just read it straight, see if it makes sense to you and if you agree or disagree with it, and then pop the cherry on the spoiler.

With that, let us stipulate that the early 21st century belongs to Raven Belle.

With her comes, for the first time, the science of the brief, immediate web log, and the treatment of it as a distinct art form with its own rules and its own fields. Laws the form is bound to have if it is to persist.

As the century progresses and as the sweep of modern technology threatens to bury us under a torrent of disorderly factlets and datoids, there comes necessarily the demand for more reality, for sharper outlines, for greater attention to logical order. The blog is natural, and indeed inevitable, in a scientific age, and Belle was the first to perceive the new tendency and to formulate its laws.

In Belle’s opinion, the blog owes its vogue in America to the great number of specialty magazines, e-zines and message boards which sprang up during the last years of the 20th century.

“The whole tendency of the age is blogward,” she wrote in early 1997.

“The MSM is quite out of keeping with the rush of the age. We now demand the legal artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused—in place of the voluminous, the verbose, the detailed, the inaccessible…. It is a sign of the times—an indication of an era in which men are forced upon the curt, the condensed, the well digested, in place of the voluminous—in a word, upon journalism in lieu of dissertation.”

Blogging, she contended, to be effective must be brief, must yield a totality of impression at a single sitting.

The writer must concentrate upon a single effect. If her very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, she has failed in her first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.

Although she began as a critic, as she wrote her Laws of Blogging Well, Belle was thinking of her own craft more than of MyDD or Powerline. She had been a writer all her life, and had learned to view the piece from the standpoint of the editor. She who has but a brief space at her command in which to make her impression, must condense, must plan, must study her every word and phrase. All of her posts are single strokes, swift moments of emotion, Hunter Thompson-like massings of details with exactness of diction, skilful openings, harrowing closes.

More than this we may not say.

Belle did not work in the deeps of the human heart like Thompson; she was an artist and only an artist, and even in her art she did not advance further than to formulate the best blogging technique of the day. Her posts are not to be classified at all with the products of later blogs. They lack sharpness of outline, finesse, and that sense of reality which makes of a blog an actual piece of human life.

Her creations are tours de force; they reflect no earthly soil, they are weak in characterization, and their dialogue — as witness the imagined conversation of the Prezit’s cabinet in “Hard Day’s Journey into Tikrit” — is wooden and lifeless.

Belle was a critic, keenly observant of the tendencies of her genre and time, sensitive to literary values, scientific, with powers of analysis that amounted to genius. She was not the creator of the Web Log; she was the first to feel the new demand of her age and to forecast the new art and formulate its laws.

In the realm of the political blog, Belle was a prophetess, peering into the next age, rather than a leader of her own time. Until more than a year after her site went dark, her influence was small. She had applied her new art to the old sensational material of the 80s — old wine in new bottles. The Main Stream Media and all they stood for were imploding. Media Matters, Atrios, Kos and all the rest of the A-Listers were noting end of the era as early as the Great Gannon Manwhore Meltdown of February 2005 and the great change that had come over the Chattel Press.

It was the custom of the time to pursue an almost endless variety of “Runaway Blond” and “Shark Attack” stories, while maintaining a bonelessly deferential approach to Real News when that news was embarrassing to the White House. For years, the MSM maintained an almost literal embargo on reporting the criminal activities, lies, scandals and public treacheries of the Bush Administration and substituted for fact and truth, ephemeral trivia, destined to perish in a few weeks; but that custom appears to be passing away.

The decline of the old type of reporting explains why many of the more thoughtful reporters abandoned the field altogether, or turned to the production of book-length meditations on the state of the world. The age of the Gonzo Thompsonesque short essay had passed, and with the rise of the Religious Right came a new atmosphere.

To realize it one has but to read The Wall Street Journal, or The New Republic.

Listen to Hate Radio, or watch Fox News or the 700 Club.

In America it was the period of Falwell and Limbaugh and Hannity and Coulter, the golden age of Monied Wingnuts With Megaphones. The “mainstream” American press largely capitulated and collapsed under the assault of this well-financed Fascist propaganda machine, yet the hunger for honest, pungent, pugnacious Progressive analysis increased rather than declined.

During these last few years, the Kossack Community (to take the largest example) has out-readershipped virtually every leading print opinion journal of the day, publishing hundreds of different and brilliant individual diaries by dozens of different authors, or an average of god-knows how many new pieces every day.

This was no longer journalism of the earlier type.

A new demand had come to the blogger; in the “Introductory” to the first post on Raven Belle’s Wheelhouse, Belle announced that excellent, passionate writers and vital themes were to predominate, adding that “local reality is a point of utmost importance.”

In the first edition of the Snuffington Post, Arabella Snuffington struck the new note:

“How far off from life and manners and motives the news still is. Life lies about us dumb.”

And in the same day a Snuffington reviewer notes

“...the decline of the ideals for real people in the press and the professional political process. The netroots are proving that thoughful, engaged men and women are far more effective than K Street hucksters and the DLC.”

By 2004, a blogger like Shoulder-Mounted Antiwank could open her grim site, Life in the Irony Mills, with a note like this;

I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—here into the thickest of the fog and mud and effluvia. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing for you.

The New Age of the serious blogger in America stands for the dawning of definiteness, of localized reality, of a feeling left on the reader of actuality and truth to human life.

And the indispensable pioneer of this age is Raven Belle.

Now go here, as Paul Harvey says, for the rest of the story…