"written by fools to be read by imbeciles"

or, the joy continues

Literary critic of the moment John Sutherland may have started a trend. Blogosphere readers will recall the hoo-ha started by his piece in the Telegraph about the inferiority of online book revewing. Well, now The Wall Street Journal, not content to look less tech-savvy than the Brits, has jumped on the bandwagon with its own blog-bashing comment piece, by Joseph Rago. I've just caught up with it thanks to the New Criterion blog, Armavirumque.

The wonderful thing about Rago's piece is how he employs his fantastically erudite vocabulary and frame of reference only for good, to make his point, and unwinds the lingering skeins of his sentences across the floor of meaning, so that the whole knotty conundrum of the blogosphere - including the cheap psychology behind it - is laid bare all over Grandma's carpet.

But enough of that. The real find, thanks to Armavirumque, is at a site called Iowa Hawk, which purports to have uncovered Rago's first draft "in an empty ink barrel in an alley behind Dow Jones".

I read it before I read the original, and I thought it needed some editing. "Old Rago's right," I thought to myself. "Those bloggers have no self-discipline whatsoever." Imagine my joy when I discovered that most of the egregious bits are still in the final version!

Ms Baroque has never claimed to be high-brow, and see how that 's paid off?