In a discussion about "guilty displeasure" with Omar Karindu below, he wrote that "the aesthetic involved in guilty displeasure is, I think, a way of mediating/deferring a larger ethical-aestehtic judgment -- one that would properly be rooted, as you say, in a more nuanced or complex analysis".
I wrote in response that "A blog is really the ideal venue for guilty displeasure, then, isn't it? I can defer (endlessly) a more complex ethical-aesthetic judgment and excuse my own lapses because this is only a blog." The guilt of guilty displeasure, I added, riffing off of Omar's earlier comments, seems to be in the purposeful refusal of the guiltily displeased blogger - who, for the most part, still considers him or herself a critical thinker - to engage in any extended or nuanced critique: the blog captures an immediacy that often precludes scholarly depth, and just as often those initial comments will never be revisited. And the blogger is typically okay with that - it is, as I noted above, "only" a blog.
And on that note, I'm renaming the blog "Guilty Displeasures". Not because I'm only going to register guilty displeasures, but because I'm too amused by the idea that blogging is itself unavoidably a guilty displeasure to not use it. (And besides, "Neil Shyminsky's Blog" was hardly an awesome title.)
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