Ok, I'm just going to say this briefly. Wealthy bloggers sort of make me crazy. Yes, I would love to try your salmon recipe. Salmon has been off the grocery list for almost a year ($6.99 a pound!?!). I sure love the precious wooden toys made from renewable forest wood. But I won't pay $40 for them. Those are the cutest shoes ever, and quite a steal at $300. A tremendous amount of disposable income (and being able to justify $300 shoes) have never been part of my lifestyle. Some blogs are really like lifetyle magazines or Restoration Hardware catalogs: shiny representations of a sort of luxurious meta-world to which few Americans can likely relate.
Nicholson Baker describes the sort of scene one is likely to see in catalogs (and now catablogs, yes I just coined that term but it isn't that clever):
In one of the latest J. Crew catalogs, there is a literary interlude on page 33: a man in shorts and plaster-dusted work boots, sitting in a half-remodeled room — on break, apparently, from his labor of hammering and gentrifying — is looking something up in what close inspection reveals to be a Guide Bleu to Switzerland, probably from the forties, in French.
That's from his essay, "Books as Furniture" in The New Yorker, June 12, 1995.
