Readers and writers blog

We love our blogroll. We comb through it nearly every day, enjoying each of its writers. Like any proud host, we want them to be in their best light. But we also want them to be comfortable, so those who wish to appear in a little less light will be accommodated.

We call it TLC — tender and loving culling.

Since our last TLC six months ago, three of our blogroll’s weblogs have slipped into the shadows — New York Hack, Despair and Coffee and Varieties of Unreligious Experience. And so we give them the place of honor they deserve:

In the section at the bottom of our blogroll that we call ‘Inactive but still worth it’¹.

New York Hack was one of our favorites, but its author, Melissa Plaut, stopped blogging on Oct. 23 of last year, with no indication that she would continue. In fact, no word at all.

In our constant effort to keep our blogroll a combination of the best and most diverse weblogs, we’d like to find another taxi blog to replace New York Hack, but even in its curtailed form, it’s still the best.

Which is why Plaut got a book deal in the first place². Which wasn’t long before she stopped blogging and apparently quit her taxi job. More power to her. And we’ll continue to carry those 27 months of New York Hack as our taxi blog because, as we say, it’s still worth it.

Despair and Coffee is a different story. Its author, Nathanael, is a young religion student who, according to his blog’s subtitle, is pondering “the meaning of life, the elusiveness of true love and the apparent silence of God with cynical humor deliberately employed so I don’t sound suicidal.”

Nathanael notified his readers that he had taken a hiatus from blogging to deal with graduate classes and a lot of writing they required, and he hoped to be blogging again soon. That was last summer.

Nathanael’s writing reflects the uncertain inquisitiveness found in the best blogs written by today’s young people — and those not so young, for that matter — and it adds the factor of religion in a way that isn’t often found in so-called religious blogs. In fact, we haven’t seen anything else that’s quite like Despair and Coffee.

We wish Nathanael well and await his return.

Our saddest news is that the pseudonymous Conrad H. Roth has retired Varieties of Unreligious Experience, one of the most erudite, classy and intelligent blogs we’ve found.

Roth had given clues earlier that he was sliding into a dark musing about the world and his blog, questioning it all. And finally, on Jan. 2, two years after he started, Roth said his blog had “become moribund. And all around me I find the sites I once loved become monotonous.”

And so it was over. But we’ll tell you what we told him: Varieties will remain on our blogroll, albeit in the inactive section, because what he has written so far is worth reading for as long as our weblog is up.

We also worry about some of his comrades-in-erudition — God of the Machine and Outer Life, the former silent for the past month, the latter for two months. But we keep them on our active list and hope to hear from them soon.

There are others who are sporadic — The literary thug, Tim & Nancy’s Adventures and At Home, Writing come to mind — but we also keep them active. Because when they do write, it’s worth reading. And certainly worth waiting for.

Our goal, after all, is not to worry but to read and enjoy.

And speaking of enjoyable, we’re happy to announce that Readers and Writers Blog has been added to the blogroll of Bye Bye, Pie, a charmingly chatty weblog written with style and wit by June GonnaEatThat, née June Cutoff Cash when her blog was called Bye Bye Buy.

It’s great company. But so are all the sites on our blogroll — diverse, well-written, intelligent, some funny, some serious, some exotic, some just different. We planned it that way.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. Yes, there’s a ‘zz’ in front of the title, but as we’ve explained before, we’re not smart enough to override our blogroll’s compulsion to be arranged alphabetically. So that entry gets two ‘z’s just to keep it at the bottom. (There is a nice double entendre to the tag — like those blogs are all just sleeping peacefully.)

2. The book is Hack, subtitled “How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do With My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab,” published by Villard, an imprint of Random House.