Bloggers? Not Too Close To Me...

A week ago, Joseph Epstein wrote the following in The Wall Street Journal:

All success to the best of the bloggers. But, as the Jews of Russia used to say about the czar, so I now find myself saying about them: May they live and be well, but not too close to me.

Epstein does not argue that bloggers should not exist. He is avoiding them simply because of the "information overload" problem; his brain is unable to process, let alone digest, so much information. He then goes on to give us his daily "intellectual hygiene" routine:

As for my intellectual hygiene, it begins with writing in my own, private, written-in-longhand journal, which I have been keeping for some 30-odd years and which no one else has ever seen. It continues with a brisk reading of the New York Times, beginning always with its obituaries (the only news that, as Ezra Pound said about literature, stays news). The Wall Street Journal is next. After checking my e-mails, with its many fine offers of cheap Viagra and chances to meet cheating housewives, I click over to ArtsandLettersDaily.com, which reprints a good selection of recent articles on culture and intellectual life in the Anglophone world.

As a new blogger I cannot agree, for obvious reasons, with Epstein's advice to stay away from blogs. But I do concur that Arts & Letters Daily is a superb source of readings from the Web. In fact, a recommendation about this website was my very first post .