Critics and journalists often suggest that blogs are not worth reading.

So let me pose a similar question.

The Guardian book page:  is it worth reading?

The reviews are fast and sloppy, barely more than plot summaries.

Don’t get me started on the reader reviews.

Then there are the staff writers.

Alison Flood, who used to write amusing articles about her middlebrow reading taste, now does cut-and-pastes from other journalists’ writing.

And Robert McCrum cannot be quiet about blogs.

What is it about him and online writing?  He was editor in chief at Faber and Faber, is an associate editor of The Observer, and the author of a biography of P. G. Wodehouse.  In a recent article, he aligned himself with Orwell and Jonathan Swift (and I can only say, “Really?”) and wrote about the “abuse and impoverishment of English in blogs and emails.”  He writes:

Some while ago, with reference to Orwell’s essay on “Politics and the English language”, I addressed the language of the internet, an issue that stubbornly refuses to go away. Perhaps now, more than ever, we need to consider afresh what’s happening to English prose in cyberspace.

To paraphrase Orwell, the English of the world wide web – loose, informal, and distressingly dyspeptic – is not really the kind people want to read in a book, a magazine, or even a newspaper. But there’s an assumption that, because it’s part of the all-conquering internet, we cannot do a thing about it.

Doesn’t he understand that hundreds of thousands of people love to write? If you have ever gone to a writers’ conference–I did in 1984; does that make me George Orwell?–you will discover that doctors, waitresses, counselors, professors, lawyers, salespeople, plumbers, housewives, and painters are writing books in their free time.  And they pay $300 to $1,000 to spend a week or two writing and attending workshops where their writing is analyzed (usually constructively).

The blogosphere is like a huge writers’ conference: one or two people are very good, but the others all love to write, too.  Bloggers are writing for themselves, a few readers, and the bots.  Oh, and our husbands.

No matter the quality, our blogs are not going to be praised by conventional journalists.

My friend Ellen suggested that the FBI is reading our blogs.  God forbid!

And now for Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s “borrowing”

In her not very good new novel, Two-Part Inventions, a novel about musical plagiarism, Lynne Sharon Schwartz includes a scene that is surprisingly similar to something I wrote at my old blog.

In an essay about trying to get ice for my mother’s iced tea at the nursing home (I went to the nurses’ station, and was told to go back and push the call button), I said that you could push but not  too hard because you didn’t want anyone to hold it against the the patients.  I added a few lines about my  mother’s former pushiness when I was in fourth grade:

It’s like the time in fourth grade when she complained to my teacher when I got a B instead of an A in geography.  For the rest of the year, the teacher humiliated me by asking,  “Are your grades good enough for your mother?”

In Schwartz’s novel:

Her quarterly report card gave him nothing to reproach her with.  Until, in the fourth grade, she presented a report card to him as usual for his signature…  He gave the report card a cursory glance, a small folded four-sided document on stiff paper that attempted to look official.  He was searching for his fountain pen, when he noticed the B+ in geography.

Schwartz’s scene is better-developed, and the  father makes his daughter confront the teacher herself.  But it is similar.

What are the odds?  I mean, B’s in  fourth-grade geography?  A parent displeased?  Why not change the subject and grade?

At my old blog I highly praised Schwartz’s novel, The Writing on the Wal, and she probably continued to read my blog.

Is this kind of borrowing “plagiarism?”  Or is it something else?

She thanks a lot of people in the Author’s Note, but my name isn’t mentioned.

I would really like to say to her, “Get out!” like Elaine in Seinfeld or “Get the f___ out!!” like Susie Essman in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

I don’t want writers “borrowing” from my blog.