I like to read Living in Dryden but had thought it was the work of a crazy old guy sitting on a sofa screaming at the authorities alone in the room dressed in what he is comfortable calling his pajamas. I have found I was wrong as I have come across this explanation of its focus on a small community east of Ithaca, New York:
A blog about Dryden has a naturally limited audience, but at the same time, the people who are in that audience likely have a thorough knowledge of the place. They drive its roads, pay its taxes, and hear its stories. Because of Cornell, there’s a large population just passing through, but even some of those people are likely interested in figuring out where they are at the moment.
The blog I started has a definite political angle (“One Democrat’s perspective”), and I started it after an election that didn’t go the way I’d hoped, but I don’t think there’s any reason that focusing a blog locally should condemn it to being less opinionated than blogs which look out on a larger world. Local politics is tricky, though – simple platitudes about “those who deserve work will find it” or “everyone deserves to get a good start in life” are hard to sustain when you’re writing at this level. People don’t necessarily know everyone, but alliances shift, ideology is frequently less important than communications, and the flow of news is irregular at best, making it hard to pick and choose stories.
It’s been difficult staying inside the town borders, and I’ve occasionally strayed elsewhere in the county when it seemed relevant, though I’ve tried hard not to discuss issues outside of Dryden unless they had a direct impact here. “Think global, but stick to local” might well be the motto for this kind of blogging.
This is good. Too much activity in Pajamastan is about what you do not know, blabbosity about someone else’s belief systems of politics and corporate consumerism abstracted from the author by many degrees. In my current hunt for good Upstate New York bloggers, having exhausted my eastern Ontario searching perhaps too quickly, Living in Dryden joins NYCO, Brian (who is away in Iraq) and Linda as do-ers, observers and reporters. For me that is the best sort of writing. For all the hype, they are few. Any recommendations for other first person writers of quality would be gratefully received.