Joe Gervis [gah] Jervis posts a lot. Not, like, twice every day a lot, but more like 20 or more times a day. That’s a lot. Joe.My.God makes every other blogger look lazy.
That daily deluge of posts isn’t all long essays or original reporting, of course. Joe.My.God is a blog blog. It’s an example of what the medium looks like when it’s used by someone dedicated to the art of blogging. Jervis isn’t writing — posting occasional essays, reflections or op-eds that others can read. That’s what many of my favorite blogs are like, and I love that too. But if, say, Ta-Nehisi Coates were to shut down his blog, replacing it with an email newsletter, or even with a paper-and-ink newsletter sent through the post office, I could continue to enjoy his writing no matter what medium he used to put it out there.
But you couldn’t replace Joe.My.God with a paper-and-ink newsletter. It’s a blog, and it makes full use of all the many ways that’s different than other forms of publishing. Even in the unlikely event that after you click this link and check out Joe.My.God you should then decide that it’s not your cup of tea or that nothing there interests you, I’d still encourage you to subscribe or follow or bookmark the site anyway. Add it to your blog-reading list for a week or so just to get a sense of what blogging can be as a medium.
And but so, Jervis is a maestro at the medium, what about the content? I mean, one could argue that Rush Limbaugh is a maestro at the medium of talk radio, but that doesn’t mean that any decent person would want to listen to him.
Well, Jervis is a charming, funny, cheerfully sarcastic host. His blurb for Joe.My.God says it covers “Gay culture, short stories, politics, and fabulous disco trivia.” That’s misleading. The blog actually covers gay culture, politics, movies, theater, music, television, New York, the religious right, fashion, LGBT activism, bears, viral videos, fabulous disco trivia, and anything else that happens to strike Jervis’ fancy. So even if, like me, you are neither a gay man nor a New Yorker, many of the things that catch Joe’s interest are going to catch your interest too.
And besides, the posts come fast and furious, one after the other, like the jokes in one of the old Airplane! movies. That one doesn’t work for you? Fine, here’s another. Even if you only laugh at every third joke, you wind up laughing a lot.
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Edited: To fix my embarrassing misspelling of Joe’s last name. Thanks to those who caught that in comments. And good note in comments, too, warning/advising about the comments at JMG.
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