Since there’s no blog I really consistently keep up with, I’ve been rooting around the nets for one the past few days.  The Tumblr blog of cultural critic Nitsuh Abebe, called “a grammar”, definitely leans towards the “meta” side of things, so Abebe often ends up discussing a lot of the same thematic material as our class, with much writing on the nature of media and on criticism itself.  (I just haven’t been sure whether this is the type of blog I should be looking at–one that falls under the same “meta” umbrella as our class, or one that I can study as an example of a “normal” blog…um.)

In any case, I’ve really enjoyed his writing on Vampire Weekend and the incestuous, backlash-feedback cycle of criticism surrounding that remarkably polarizing band (as far as I’m concerned, they’re just a band that makes some damn good pop songs, and I don’t really give a shit that they wear madras onstage and sing about oxford commas).  Here is the link to all his posts tagged w/ Vampire Weekend.  Mostly, Abebe discusses the rampant bandying-about of racial/ethnic/class signifiers that has occurred in much of the criticism of that band (i.e. they are commonly called out for their “WASPiness”, despite the fact that frontman Ezra Koenig is Jewish and co-songwriter Rostam Batmanglij is Persian).  I quite enjoy his writing, enough so that I hope to continue to read his blog, and maybe then I’ll have a better idea of how to describe it in the context of our class.  At this point, the main thing I notice about its grammar/form is what I mentioned before: as a decidedly “meta” blog, a great many of the posts are based around some pre-existing piece of culture-related writing, building on that web of intertextuality that characterizes the blogosphere.

(*also: doesn’t it speak to the current state of things that, for some reason, I already feel kind of lame and outdated using the word “blogosphere”?  I cringed a little bit, typing it in.  Strange.)