How would Galbraith have blogged?
What kind of blogger would John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist and intellectual, who died on 29 April aged 97, have made? We get a hint from his obituary in this week's Economist:
"A devotee of Trollope and Evelyn Waugh — 'Scoop' was a favourite — Mr Galbraith strove to perfect his prose, reworking each passage at least five times. 'It was usually on about the fourth day that I put in that note of spontaneity for which I am known,' he once admitted."
A spontaneous blogger in the sense of Trollope, then, is what Galbraith would have been. BTW, Anthony Trollope churned out some 50 three-volume novels despite holding down a day job at the British Post Office (he invented the pillar-box) that saw him spending spells in the West Indies and Ireland. According to his autobiography, he achieved his remarkable output with a writing regime of three hours a day, starting at 5am. Those who enjoy lampooning life would do well to keep this piece of Trollopian wisdom in mind: "The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little — or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives."
