Our friend Paul has been on LI’s back for some time about upgrading this site. Putting in, for instance, the standard roll of links.

We resisted. LI has been around for three years and some fraction. During this time, we have done an admirable amount of linking from our posts. We admire it, at least. Most of that linking, the diligent reader will discover, is not to other blogs. This doesn’t reflect the fact that we don’t go to other blogs – we do. But, in LI’s view, the blogocentric viewpoint of the Web taken by all too many bloggers actually impoverishes the ‘surfin’ experience’. Blogs, journals, pix, stories, texts – there is an incredible diversity out there. The flora and fauna are as outlandish as were the plants and animals of the New World to the first European travelers.

However, it is time to surrender to the debile Zeitgeist. LI is going to be making some changes and trying to become more popular. There is one reason for this: November 2. LI originally wanted this site to be as caviar to hoi polloi – not to everybody’s taste. Snobbishness, for us, is not just an attitude – it’s an aesthetic imperative. But the election has left us with a sense of ulcerated alienation that has made us crave popularity the way a psycho gunman on a tower craves more moving targets.

Beyond the psychopathology, however, LI still aims to serve. So our list of links is not going to include links you probably have. If you are reading this and you don’t go to Crooked Timber, for instance, you should. It is the best blog on the web, in our opinion. Not the best written, or even the most creative, but the most consistently interesting, the one blog that we can think of that can compete with a magazine like Slate. Nor did we include the Online Library at UPenn on our list, since we presume that you know about it. Black Mask, however, which, along with a for profit download part, essentially hijacks texts from around the Net and conveniently puts them into various readable formats, is perhaps less known. We could have linked to our archive of articles at the Austin Chronicle, but that somehow didn’t appeal to us. Does any reader of LI really want MORE Roger G.?

If you have a link you want us to put in, send it to us. Use the comments section, or send it to rgathman@netzero.net.