Tales of Blogging Passion, Part I.

I love blogging.

You’re probably thinking that I don’t blog frequently or consistently enough to really sell that sentiment, and I’d be hard-pressed to disagree with you. My time does not always go the way I’d like and the nature of my responsibilities don’t always jibe with the demands of a dependable blogger.

But I do love blogging, and I love the blogging communities that I visit.

I even have my own community of bloggers, a set of writers who, I’ve discerned, are in similar situations as my own: many of them blog for fun, for excitement, for interaction and communication, not for a living. They do so out of love of film or their cynicism about pop culture. Some of them blog simply because their powers of societal observation are more acute and more cleverly realized than others, and clever writers - as I’ve come to know them - usually have a hard time keeping it to themselves.

This community I’m speaking of may not even know that I’ve created a community with them in it! Most of them have, no doubt, at least seen me cross their comment boards and traffic statistics, and certainly I’ve linked to many of them. I visit them every single day through my Netvibes RSS reader, and if there can be any one excuse for my own sporadic writing, it’s that I spend so much time reading, linking, commenting and being fascinated by the work of my blogging community that I inadvertently eat up all of a given day’s precious blogging hours instead of using them to contribute to my own site.

All in all, reading the work of writers I love isn’t a bad way to spend those hours. Not at all. It won’t get me linked to or popular or rich or Technorati-powerful, but it does feed my soul in different ways.

So what I’d like to propose here is that I’ll periodically focus on the work of my online community - the bloggers who are motivated, excited by, thrilled and passionate about what they’ve chosen to write about. Some I’ve mentioned here before, some perhaps not - and in many circumstances you have probably already found these writers in the bloguverse, as prolific and clever and dependable as they are.

As passionate bloggers go, what Damian has set out to do at Windmills of My Mind throughout the month of August is pretty damn extraordinary. 31 Days of Spielberg revisits one film per day from this country’s master of cinematic blockbuster entertainment. To regular Windmills readers, Damian’s love of Spielberg films is yesterday’s news; but to watch him plow headlong into these movies in long but well-paced and measured posts that are packed with information and insight, written with cinematic passion, and conceived from the excitement of someone who so obviously loves movies and the kinds of effect they have on us - this is true blogging passion. That Damian is an unabashed Spielberg fanboy - and it takes one to know one - is clearly without argument. But at the same time he’s able to step back from the instinct purely to hype Spielberg’s films and instead place the filmmaker into a greater context. From his analysis of Sugarland Express:

Though sometimes his endings (particularly his more recent ones) are a bit more ambigious than he is given credit for, most people seem to agree that endings tend to give Spielberg some trouble. It is, of course, a legitimate criticism that Spielberg can oftentimes add a happy ending to a film that really doesn’t seem to deserve it. At the same time, however, it could be argued that Spielberg’s unabashedly hopeful outlook on life is merely at odds with a culture that’s growing increasingly more dissatisfied with happy endings in general.

When Damian first proposed 31 Days of Spielberg a few months back, I was intrigued and a bit awed. Seven days into it now, I’m absolutely hooked. His blend of synopsis, dissection, anecdotal information and personal observation have made for blog posts that are absolutely engaging and enjoyable. He also teases the next day’s post, which of course is just a smart application of Blog Content Creation 101.

Thanks for your blogging passion, Damian. I’ve added Sugarland Express to my Netflix queue because of it.

(Spielberg picture above courtesy of TheRaider.net)