Early Modern Notes

Here is the latest early modern Carnivalesque, for the pick of the last couple of months’ early modern blogging. Thanks to those who sent in nominations; apologies to those who like witty themes and smart commentaries.

Cenotaphs
Airs, Waters, Places comments on John Weever’s book on Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631) and “the way he writes about the correlation between the location of the dead in the afterlife and the physical realisation of their memory in monument form in the world”.

Early Modern Gardens – Kenilworth Castle
The Gentleman Administrator draws attention to the social and political significance of early modern gardens by looking at the reconstructed Elizabethan pleasure garden at Kenilworth Castle, originally built by the Earl of Leicester for the visit of Queen Elizabeth in July 1575.

Vade Mecum
Bookn3rd has found some lovely digitised examples of these small manuscript handbooks of the medieval and early modern periods, which could contain a variety of medical and calendrical information.

Essayes of a prentise
Wynken de Worde highlights work from a student project on King James’s The Essayes of a prentise, in the divine art of poesie. The book is a collection of poems and translations in Scots dialect, and includes some luxuriously lovely poem layouts.

Casting Painting as One of the Liberal Arts
Notes on Early Modern Art looks at Johannes Vermeer’s ‘Allegory of Painting’ (c. 1667) which “seems to have expressed the artist’s desire to raise his own social status and that of painting as more than just manual labor”.

On the uses of newspapers, in and out of the classroom
Dave Mazella at Early Modern Online Bibliography considers the possibilities of using online collections of early modern newspapers in teaching students.

Collaborative Readings #3: Sayre N. Greenfield’s “ECCO-locating the Eighteenth Century”
Also at EMOB, Anna Battigelli discusses Greenfield’s essay on using ECCO as a research tool, “revealing both its possibilities and its current limitations” for text-mining early modern texts to trace specific cultural threads.

Some things memorably considerable in the conditions, Life and Death of the ever blessed and now eternally happy Mris Anne Bovves
Westminster Wisdom discusses this pamphlet (and its bad poetry), and concludes that its writer “is less interested in Anne than in Anne as an example of a religious life”.

Cromwell: the blog post of the book of the film
Investigations of a Dog is reading bad historical literature so you don’t have to; this time, it’s the novelization of the notoriously dodgy film Cromwell. Don’t miss the cover. It’s, er, striking.

Walker’s Office of Entries
Mercurius Politicus looks at a less well-known aspect of the life of the 17th-century pamphleteer and preacher Henry Walker, his entrepreneurial ‘Office of Entries’ “which seems to have functioned as a mixture of financial agent, employment agency, and bulletin board”.

John Lilburne – Abolitionist
Edward Vallance explores the appearance of Lilburne in the precedents brought by lawyers in Somerset’s Case of 1772. “In the eighteenth century, it seems to have been Lilburne’s punishment by Star Chamber in 1638, rather than his activities as a Leveller pamphleteer that were deemed worthy of attention.”

Nature’s Bias: Sex Testing
Early Modern Renaissance draws parallels between early modern and modern difficulties in establishing sexual identity.

Hystericon
The Quack Doctor discusses the ‘Hyſtericon’, an obscure 18th-century remedy, one amongst many, for the ‘Fits of the Mother’.

A London marriage gone sour, 1652
From Early Modern Whale, a news report of the suicide of a cuckolded husband.

Early Modern Underground has a series of posts on John Webster’s tragicomedy, A Cure for a Cuckold: part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4.

What on Earth?
Meanwhile, Ink and Incapability wants to know, “what on earth is going on with Shadwell’s The Libertine?” and concludes “this is totally the weirdest play I’ve ever read”.

‘I see dead people’s books’ at LibraryThing
Early Modern Intelligencer notes that LibraryThing now includes a number of famous dead people’s libraries, with early modern examples including Marie Antoinette, Thomas Jefferson and Mozart.

And finally, the Eastern Association is a treat that should not be missed.

The next Carnivalesque will be an ancient/medieval edition hosted by Bavardess sometime in the latter half of October, exact date to be confirmed. The next early modern Carnivalesque will be in November and needs a host – email sharon {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk if you’re willing and able!

Yesterday I tweeted a question, as one does, to see what would come of it: what to do next with the #historycarnival?

It brought an immediate offer from Katrina Gulliver to host an edition (for which I’m grateful), so in the short term it worked. (Clearly, I should have thought of it earlier.) It’s also generated an interesting suggestion and one response asking what I meant. That I can’t do in 140 characters, so I’m going to have a go here.

The History Carnival has been having periodic crises for pretty much as long as it has existed. If you’ve read here for any length of time you’ve read me moaning and asking, what’s the point?, at some stage (quite apart from arm-twisting/begging emails behind the scenes), and you’ve often responded brilliantly. But this time I wonder if it goes deeper.

There was a good deal of comment a couple of months ago about how the blogosphere has changed in recent years, including an argument that bloggers don’t link to each other anywhere near as much as they used to. I’m not sure if that’s true, but what’s indisputable is that history blogging has expanded far beyond the small excited groups of bloggers I knew four or five years ago, and inevitably become much more fragmented in the process. Many of those c.2005 history bloggers aren’t even active any more, or only intermittently so (*cough*).

A number of previously active history-related carnivals have withered of late (Asian History and Military History in particular spring to mind). Who is reading the History Carnival? I certainly don’t see many links to it any more – and if it’s not being linked then it’s not going to find new readers, just the gradually diminishing band of old bloggers who were reading it three years ago.

And if it’s not being read then I don’t see the point of bloggers spending time putting editions together, and I’m not going to be motivated to spend time chasing hosts and maintaining it either. Which is why I didn’t try particularly hard to find a host for September, to be honest.

But maybe Twitter can help out here and revitalise the Carnival (and other history carnivals too). Suddenly there’s a single place where growing numbers of historians are communicating with each other: Katrina Gulliver has started to compile a list, and coined a new tag to help us find each other: #twitterstorians.

You can tweet nominations for next weekend’s History Carnival to @katrinagulliver including the tag #historycarnival (as well as the usual channels – announcements coming). You can also use the #historycarnival tag to tweet suggestions in response to my original question – or if you want to be old-school, you can of course comment below.

Where do you think the History Carnival could or should be going in the future? Or is it time to shut up shop?

If you haven’t already discovered Prof Hacker, “a site dedicated to pedagogy, productivity, technology, and especially the intersection of these, in higher education”, wander on over now.

Example 1: Facebook. I came out against Facebook quite a long time ago, and that was even before I knew about the privacy and data issues, and how difficult it is to get out once you’re in. Facebook: still saying No.

Example 2: Twitter. I’ve been resisting signing up for Twitter for a while. Not because I didn’t like the idea. Quite the opposite. It looked thoroughly entertaining and addictive – but not, perhaps, all that useful, and I waste quite enough time playing with foolish things on my computer as it is (*cough* damn Sudoku *cough*). How can you possibly do anything meaningful with 140 characters?

And yet, what is Twitter if not another manifestation of the adaptability of the blog as a medium of communication? You can use it for crowdsourcing. You can use it to protest against political repression. The famous can use it to stay in touch with their fans. The non-famous can use it to stay in touch with each other.

Twitter’s genius is not the 140 characters. It’s the hash key. Oh, and the @. Tagging rocks, and metadata rules our world, baby.

So I’ve given in.

@sharon_howard is probably going to regret this…

Excellent idea from The Guardian: Datablog, and the associated Data Store.

Everyday we work with datasets from around the world. We have had to check this data and make sure it’s the best we can get, from the most credible sources. But then it lives for the moment of the paper’s publication and afterward disappears into a hard drive, rarely to emerge again before updating a year later.

So, together with its companion site, the Data Store – a directory of all the stats we post – we are opening up that data for everyone. Whenever we come across something interesting or relevant or useful, we’ll post it up here and let you know what we’re planning to do with it.

How to get data out of the Data Store

Mmm, data…

Update:
There’s more: Get your API hats on. Could be really interesting to see how this develops.

Don’t forget: Darwin Day on 12 February. In preparation, you could do worse than to read Blogging the Origins. John Whitfield, a science journalist, is reading On the Origin of Species and blogging each chapter.

Back to work on Monday. Bah. Do not want. Apart from that, Happy New Year everyone!

Sarah Werner’s Wynken de Worde, a fine blog with an emphasis on early modern books and reading, has won the Cliopatria History Blogging Award for Best New Blog.

Mercurius Politicus has found some splendid manuscript, palaeography and book history resources. Manuscript sources are the next big growth area for digital early modernists, as digitizers work out that although it’s not that easy, it’s not that hard either.

But there are losses in digitization. Diapsalmata has been reading a special issue of Image and Narrative on Digital Archives, in which several articles engage with the relationship between digital humanities and the archive.

Whereas Ted Vallance has some thoughts on those quaint paper book thingummies in 2008. (His New Year’s resolution is to buy fewer rubbish books in 2009.)

Chris at the Virtual Stoa has a New Year’s Resolution I can really get behind. Eat more butter. Mmmmmmm.

Nominations for The Cliopatria Awards for the best history blogging are open until the end of November.

The award categories are: Best Group Blog, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, Best Writer.

Forgetful types may find the following resources useful for memory jogging:

Cliopatria’s History Blogroll
The History Carnival Archive

Final selections will be made by judging panels of history bloggers and announced at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in early January.

Niche interest? Fetish? Perversion? Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century

Many of the following pages have graphic and clear images of the masculine mustache in all its forms, both sublime and grotesque. My intent is not to shock or titillate, but merely to inform on the subject. The Nineteenth Century gave us many things, but above all it was a hotbed of facial hair experimentation and this is but a poor sampling of those many lost forms.

Well, it’s been a bit quiet here lately. Recently this has been mostly because I was spending a few days as a guest of the NHS to get rid of this little bugger. (Google tells me that Youtube has some video. Having already heard the surgeon’s detailed explanation of what he was going to do to me, I’m really not sure I want to look…) All gone well, and now I’m back at home, it’s not a bad time to be skiving off work for a couple of weeks and surfing blogs all day, now is it?

Whatever happens next Tuesday, there is something rather wonderful about observing the great wingnut-blogger meltdown. Although some of it is not really safe for reading when you’ve got holes in your tummy and the district nurse hasn’t been round to take out the little staples yet. Laugh-Sting-Ouch. So much to choose from, but Jon Swift’s Great Moments in Election-Year Blogging should be remembered as a true classic.

So much lunacy in one short season…

Ed has asked me to give the IHR Postgraduate Seminars (in London) and History Lab a bit of a plug. Ed is hoping to use the History Lab blog in association with the Seminars this year, to post reports and hold discussions of each paper. This sounds like a Good Thing to me.

I hadn’t really heard of the History Lab before, but it’s intended as a ‘network for postgraduate students and new researchers in history and related disciplines’, with membership free to any postgraduate student enrolled on an MA, MRes, MPhil or PhD.

The autumn programme for the seminars is below.

16 October Brian Casey (National University of Ireland, Maynooth)
Matt Harris: a forgotten Irish revolutionary

30 October Rob Dale (QMUL)
‘Rats’: Bureaucracy and corruption in post-war Leningrad through the eyes of demobilised soldiers (1944-1950)

13 November Oren Margolis (Jesus College, Oxford)
King René, Janus Pannonius, and the politics of cultural transmission in Renaissance Italy

27 November Iain Sharpe (IHR)
An Edwardian party funding scandal? Cecil Rhodes and the Liberal party

11 December Rosie Macarthur (Northampton)
Unnecessary wants? Luxury goods and the Hanbury family of Kelmarsh, 1720-1845

All seminars start at 5.30pm and take place in the Low Countries Room of the IHR (Senate House), 3rd Floor. (They finish, naturally, in a nearby pub at some subsequent point in time.)

1. CFP: Reading Conference in Early Modern Studies 2009

The next annual meeting of the Reading conference on early modern studies will be held on 6-8 July 2009, with an informal theme of ‘Authority and Authorities’. “The Reading conferences are as broadly based as possible, reflecting the most interesting developments in current research. Accordingly we welcome proposals for either complete sessions or individual papers from scholars in any discipline or any area of early modern studies, including Atlantic, European and imperial perspectives…” (Full details at the link.)

2. Guest bloggers wanted

Brandon Watson is looking for guest bloggers at his early modern history of philosophy blog Houyhnhnm Land; not necessarily history of philosophy specialists – “the posts have to be on some facet of early modern thought (or approaches thereto), but just about anything falling under that label would work. I’d love, for instance, to get historians of all kinds, literary scholars, and the like adding their two cents; I’d also love specialists from outside the early modern period looking at how later periods viewed the early modern period or how earlier periods prepared for it; and so forth.”

3. Carnivalesque and History Carnival hosts needed

I really, urgently need History Carnival hosts for November and December (1st of the month). Please email me as soon as possible if you could do one of these: sharon {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk.

A host is also needed for the November ancient/medieval edition Carnivalesque (same email address will do, or carnivalesque {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk).

Both carnivals will also need hosts next year, so if you’re too busy in the immediate future but might like to take one on later, get in touch.

I have been known to say a few words about people who don’t really understand blogging presuming to hand down blogging commandments. (Let’s not even get started on the frauds popping up everywhere to tell us ‘How to Make Shitloads of Money from Blogging with My Ten Brilliant Commandments that No One Ever Thought of Before’.)

Thoughtful reflections coming out of long experience of reading blogs are another matter, so I like this list of What Makes for a Good Blog. Especially perhaps this one:

Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?

(H-T.)

Welcome to the 42nd edition of Carnivalesque, a summer special for everything early modern. Many thanks for all your nominations!

Research (or, the Holy Grail)

Gavin Robinson has been investigating saddlers’ wills. You might at first think this a dry and narrow subject, but it got more nominations than any other post, and I recommend reading it to find out why. As Gavin notes, early modern wills can tell us a lot about people’s lives and family relationships, not just their property. William Deacon’s will provides us some insight into his marital relations, perhaps: he instructed his executors to make sure that his wife didn’t embezzle anything from his estate. Or there was William Chevall, who left his niece just one shilling because she had got married without his consent. (Bonus links: a few useful resources, 1, 2, 3.)

At Mercurius Politicus, Nick posts a series on The Pamphlet War Between John Taylor and Henry Walker (2, 3, 4, 5), based on a paper presented to the Birkbeck Early Modern Society in July. He examines in detail the two writers, the texts, the readers and the publishers, to illuminate the sophistication and complexity of the pamplet wars of the 1640s.

Politics, religion and war

Well, if it’s the seventeenth century, we’re never far from religion, politics and bloodshed. Executed Today visits Prague’s ‘Day of Blood’. On 21 June 1621 ‘the Habsburg crown took 27 nobles’ heads in Prague’s Old Town Square for attempting to lead Bohemia to independence’; merely the beginning of far more widespread death and destruction, the Bohemian Revolt sparked off what is commonly known as the Thirty Years’ War.

In ‘It is good for me that I have been afflicted’, Dave Noon discusses the assassination of Metacom, aka King Philip, on 12 August 1676 and the brutal war that bears his name. For the English colonists, the war was a test sent by God, and their eventual victory a sign of His blessing. (Bonus link: Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative.)

Gracchii explores and contextualises the Plot against Pepys, at Westminster Wisdom. Between 1679 and 1681 (and perhaps there has never been a more fertile moment in British history for plots and paranoia, accusations and counter-accusations), Samuel Pepys was accused of transmitting secret plans to France and threatened with execution; he survived because he was able to discredit his accuser. (Pepys the blogger.)

K at Musings and Imaginings has been pondering The Book of Martyrs. She notes that many of the authors on Jesuit missions to England in the 16th and early 17th centuries and the Gunpowder Plot are sympathetic towards the Jesuits and concludes that it’s largely to do with the widespread appeal of martyrdom and self-sacrifice.

Debunkers and awkward buggers

David Rundle asks When was the Renaissance? He uses a visit to a recent exhibition on the art of ‘the renaissance’ as a springboard for a thoughtful discussion of the artificial and not entirely helpful academic divide between ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’, and the need to be aware that ‘Renaissance’ is an invented concept that can obscure as much as it illuminates. ‘In short, it is tidier to have a Renaissance confined to the sixteenth century and certainly less complicated to imagine it was a single phenomenon which manifested itself across Europe. But, in this case, I am on the side of messiness.’

Bill Poser at Language Log argues that it’s wrong to view Sir William Jones (wikipedia entry, if you’ve never heard of him) ‘the discoverer of the Indo-European language family and founder of modern historical linguistics’ for two reasons: he wasn’t the first to recognise a relationship between the languages, and he didn’t use the comparative method. An interesting discussion ensues.

Recreations

John Fea (Religion in American History) is impressed by the integration of religion into the presentation of the living history musem, Colonial Williamsburg. (The museum site.)

At Philobiblon Natalie Bennett posts some reflections on Marlowe, Shakespeare and imagination, after reading History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe, by Rodney Bolt. This sounds entertaining: of all those daft-as-a-brush Shakespeare-wasn’t-really-Shakespeare conspiracy theories, one of my personal favourites is the Marlowe-didn’t-really-die scenario. (To be continued)

Writers and Readers

At Serendipities, Kristine Steenbergh reviews Katherine Craik’s Reading sensations in early modern England (2007), in which the history of reading and the history of the body are sensuously combined. The book argues that ‘reading in early modern England was a bodily, material experience. In its pages, readers can be found licking the sweet juice of stinking books, being tickled with sugared rhetoric, softened or sharpened by words, pricked or pierced by sermons, or stirred and inflamed by poetry’. It was believed that love poetry was effeminising, while warlike words could stir manly courage.

Sarah Werner (Wynken de Worde) compares modern and early modern information overload. The printing press seemed to contemporaries to unleash an overabundance of books in which useful knowledge would be lost; readers responded by developing reading and note-taking strategies to cope with the flood of information.

Roy Booth is investigating an early modern plagiary. A 1652 pamphlet on the ‘Black Monday’ eclipse, attributed to Isabel Yeamans, turns out to be plagiarized from a treatise by Nicholas Culpepper. Moreover, ‘Isabel Yeamans’ didn’t exist until Isabel Fell got married in 1664.

Michael Sisk looks at the fall and rise of metaphysical poetry at Campus Mentis.

Returning to the Shakespeare authorship ‘controversy’, Bardiac discussed this issue in a series of posts: 1, 2, 3 and 4. (Please note: You are very welcome to comment and tell me that I should take your particular Shakespeare pet conspiracy theory seriously. But if you do I will take the piss out of you. Don’t say you weren’t warned.)

Brief notices

Fun and Games! Never mind the Olympics, Bardolph brings us news of the Cotswold Games and ‘the lost sport of erecting castles on little plinthes’. And Edward Vallance reports on the Age of Intrigue, an online RPG based in the Restoration period.

Archaeologists may have found the remains of Shakespeare’s original playhouse in Shoreditch

Tilman Riemenschneider (1460-1531) was a specialist in limewood sculpture, including exquisitely carved altars.

Erly Mdn Txtspk. No, rly.

Bad news for Shakespeare readers: the Arden Shakespeare Controversy.

Well, that will do for today, because I haven’t had lunch yet and I’m hungry. I hope you enjoyed it and that you found something here that you haven’t already seen… And if I missed anything you think I should have included, you know where the comment section is, right?

The next early modern edition will be in October and as ever, we need hosts!

There seem to be two distinct kinds of blogs with highly active comment threads.

type 1: people write comments
type 2: people read other people’s comments and then write comments

You know the first type: full of people who clearly haven’t bothered to read what anyone else said before they rush to the comment box, because they repeat exactly the same moronic/inaccurate assertion that has been made, and answered/corrected, several dozen times already.

Hmm. We need technology that would recognise the duplicated comments and give the offenders an electric shock through their computer. That’d learn ‘em.

For fans of the History Carnival and Del.icio.us:

You can now nominate posts for the carnival by simply bookmarking and tagging them with historycarnival. They’ll appear on a special Carnival Uncooked page, to be reviewed by the upcoming host.

(This is thanks to an idea suggested to me a very long time ago by, I think, Alun Salt (apparently not) or maybe Jeremy Boggs??? – with apologies for taking so long to take it up that I can’t be sure who it was now. If you were that person, let me know…)

I forgot about my fourth blogiversary in June. My fourth anniversary at this location (and using WordPress) comes up at the end of July.

Some things hardly seem to have changed at all. There were presidential elections that year too. We’ll have to hope for a better result this time around.

Other things have changed a lot. So many blogs I loved in 2004 that no longer exist or are quite different now.

And there were a lot of history blogs that started up around the same time as me: happy 4th birthday to all of you who’re still plugging away!

So, is there anyone still reading who’s been here right from the beginning? (Can’t say I would blame you if you’d got bored by now…)

This list of The Top 100 Liberal Arts Professor Blogs has been getting linked around.

I’m not sure why. It is a pile of stinking poo.

1. Basic errors. It lists ‘Another Damned Medievalist’ as an ‘English’ blog. I think ADM will be surprised to discover that she’s been relocated to the English department when she gets back from her London research trip. She would probably also want to point out that her blog is in fact called Blogenspiel (ADM is her handle).

2. A number of the blogs listed are inactive. Miriam Jones’s original scribblingwoman blog has been defunct for some time; Miriam now has a newer blog elsewhere. The English Eclectic hasn’t been updated since December 2007 (and was never very prolific, that I can recall; and, although it was quite a nice little blog, there are more than 100 blogs that are better). These are just ones I know about. The most recent post at a blog is at the very top of the front page, for god’s sake; it takes a split second to discover that no one’s been at home for months.

3. Crappy conceptualisation. 30 of the blogs are under the heading ‘English’. That appears to mean ‘in an English department’ (except when they’re not: see 1 above). This is in contrast to otherwise mostly specific discipline headings such as ‘sociology’, ‘history’, ‘philosophy’, etc. ‘English’ is not terribly helpful or meaningful, given the breadth of interests you can find in English departments. They also seem to have failed to grasp the concept of a group blog populated by members of different disciplines: Crooked Timber is listed under Philosophy. Which isn’t entirely wrong but doesn’t do CT’s range of interests any justice.

4. ‘Professor’ blogs? Some of the best ‘liberal arts’ blogs I know are not written by academic staff, but by postgrad students. There is something just not right about a list of academic blogs that (by definition) excludes blogs like Acephalous and Airminded. (I won’t pick on the UScentricness of the terminology since the site is primarily aimed at that market. Non-US readers should be aware, though, that ‘Liberal Arts’ has a particular meaning, which isn’t the same as ‘Arts’; and ‘professor’ in US universities refers to any member of faculty, not just the most senior people.)

5. I don’t want to get too much into inevitably subjective judgments about the quality of the blogs listed and what should be in and what should be out, but it is being presented as a serious ‘reviews and ratings’ site, not just personal opinions, so I will say: anyone who thinks those 10 history blogs are the top 10 in the blogosphere, even if you only include ‘professors’, is an ignoramus.*

6. And a final thing: the list in fact contains 101 entries, not 100. (There are two blogs listed under 73.) So they can’t count or correctly format an ordered list either.

I’m not fond of lists like this at the best of times, but I think this has to be the most incompetently conceived, sloppily executed, downright utterly worthless effort I have seen in four years of blogging. Now will people stop linking to it as though it might be a useful resource, please?**

***

*I’ve just realised that could be ambiguous. I don’t mean that all of the 10 are unworthy of being in such a list. A few definitely should be in anybody’s top 10. Several, however, are simply not in that sort of league.

**And before you say anything, I’ve added rel=nofollow to the link at the top. They ain’t gettin’ no pagerank from me.

Moan for the Day: I really am increasingly irritated by all the widgets and multimedia and embedded video and crap that gets added to blogs, which all tend in one direction: the blog takes longer and longer to load and hogs more and more CPU (and battery) once it’s loaded. It is not, to my mind, a good sign when a blog sends my laptop fan into overdrive dealing with a load of stuff loading in the sidebars that I have no interest in reading and youtube videos I can’t be arsed to watch. Just because you can add all that stuff doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

(It was much better in the good old days when blogs were all lean and light and it was about the fighting writing. Obviously.)

Update: I’ve upgraded to the new Lean Mean Firefox 3 Machine, which should by all accounts solve a lot of these problems. But that isn’t meant to encourage you widgety buggers, OK?

There are millions of people blogging. The NY Times appears to be surprised to discover that some of them take it to extremes. Or the NY Times thinks it can get a cheap story out of some of them taking it to extremes. You choose.

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

‘The premature demise of two people does not qualify as an epidemic’? This is a serious newspaper? ‘Death by blogging’, that’s a good one too.

This response seems appropriately respectful.