This blog was supposed to have launched months ago. Not at all in keeping with the off-the-cuff spirit of the thing, however, I’ve been paralyzed coming up with answers to two questions common to would-be bloggers who have nothing in particular to say.
Question 1. What’s the point?
Purpose 1: Self-love, the ur-motive of bloggery and columnization
The Bironist will eventually be known as the most self-indulgent blog in the history of blogs (in case the composition of a 900-word introduction doesn’t mark it as that already). Should I forget to mention it later, I enjoy fruit smoothies for breakfast. My middle name is Lin, after my father. I dream of owning a Fender Jaguar guitar. Of the places I’ve lived, I like Montreal better than Toronto better than Edmonton better than Vancouver.
Go on, try and turn away.
Purpose 2: Promotion of media host
Publishing a magazine in Canada is a cash-intensive prospect. It’s stunning how much money it costs to print and distribute a treeware journal, even given such a vast and relatively underpopulated country. Fill it with 5,000-word articles such as “The Nature of Chocolate Bars: A Heideggerian Analysis” and go light on the T&A1, and it gets still harder.
Self-indulgent columns are a proven economic driver for media enterprises. I know, fans of Sports Illustrated‘s Peter King thought his unending updates on his daughters’ softball and field hockey teams were designed to sate America’s huge appetite for girls’ softball and field hockey news. Not so! In fact, they’re part of the brand that is Peter King, everyman reporter of NFL football, friend to the American soldier and barista, and vaguely dissatisfied critic of the Bush administration.
My goals are humbler: if all eight of the lit-mag fans in Canada, plus my parents, read this blog at least once next year, that will raise $0.04 in ad revenue for The Walrus Foundation’s coffers, leaving only a few million dollars, less four cents, to raise from other sources.
Purpose 3: Imparting of expertise
Imparting expertise is especially important here, given The Walrus‘s educational mandate. In accordance with our deal with the Canadian Revenue Agency, our content is supposed to be entirely edumacational.2
The most successful blogs, for instance andrewsullivan.com, tend to focus on one particular area (in Sullivan’s case, politics). Sadly, I’m a generalist. That’s why I work at a general-interest magazine. I’m not qualified to do anything but read Saul Bellow novels while playing tennis with my left hand and harmonica with my right.3
This limits me, essentially, to imparting what little expertise I have on general-interest magazines.4 As this isn’t likely to be of note to anyone outside of the nation’s handful of journalism schools, I’ll rely instead on distracted analyses of Bellow, tennis, and harmonica—or, more accurately, interests such as sports, international affairs, and the lives of past prime ministers.
Question 2. What’s the name?
I’ll spare you the list of rejected appellations for this blog, most of them involving horrible puns on my last name.
In keeping with Purpose 1, The Bironist’s origin story is peppered with references to cool people I know and fabulous trips I’ve taken. The short version: the term was inspired by former Walrus intern and current Stéphane Dion speechwriter Gillian Savigny, codified by former Walrus editor and current Globe and Mail writer Joshua Knelman, and coined by yours truly. This happened following the consumption of several Baltika syems5 at a beer garden in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Birony, defined: a literary device wherein a statement is designed to seem ironic, but is in fact sincerely meant.6
For an example of birony, please see my on-its-face-absurd reference to the possibility of running a 5,000-word analysis of chocolate bars through the lens of Heidegger, the most impenetrable European philosopher this side of Slavoz Žižek.
Guess what: I wasn’t kidding. I’d assign that piece in a heartbeat if I thought I could get away with it. I’d call it “The Noumena of Nougat,”7 and you’d drool over every Dasein8-infused word.
So there you have it, the mission statement of The Bironist. Consider our lives mutually enriched.
Next, on The Bironist: I break the story that Adolph Cameron, president of Jamaica, has secretly been acting as leader of another country.
Footnotes
1Not to mention the P&A, S&M, and A&W.
2Hence my decision to use spurious footnotes, which confer all of the sheen of education but require none of the noxious learning.
3Fortunately, I’m ambidextrous. Also, I’m not especially good at tennis, harmonica, or reading.
4Fun fact: in the early years of the New Yorker, managing editors were referred to as “the new Jesus” (or “new Jesi,” in plural), an allusion to both the saviour status conferred upon them by Harold Ross and to the ongoing cycle of death and resurrection the position saw until eternal life arrived in the form of the true Messiah, William Shawn.
Here at The Walrus, I’m referred to as “the new Bachman Turner Overdrive.” It’s complicated.
5syem=seven in Russian.
6Birony accrues an additional layer of meaning when it refers to matters of the heart, thus alluding to Lord Byron. However, as the concept then becomes, technically, trirony, the bonus layer is immediately deducted, restoring bironic balance.
7Noumena are, roughly, the aspects of an object that we may inquire into and comprehend. Visit Wikipedia to learn more. Tell them I sent you.
8Dasein is the main concept in Heidegger’s Being and Time. It’s a long book, and I only have the first half memorized (in English, anyway), so I’ll reduce it to an individual’s, um, being in time.
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