(I have to write this blog!) (But I’m still very confused about what a blog is.) (But I promise that this is the very last time I blog about blog ambivalence.) (Though if there are meta-blog websites or whole books on the metaphysics of blogging, please someone point me in those directions.)
I love Donald Barthelme, and I’ve nothing deeper than that to say. In “The End of the Mechanical Age,” he exactly articulates my digital age plea: “Lord, Little Father of the Poor, and all that, I was just wondering now that an age, the mechanical age, is ending, and a new age beginning or so they say, I was just wondering if You could give me a hint, sort of…”
Because if there were actually an important thing to investigate, then I would probably just write a poem trying to figure it out, dear Lord“ But this thinking aloud for thousands (okay, like two people, but they are very busy people)–what good can it do to add to the glut (72.82 million Chinese blogs alone)?
I also love Joan Didion. My copy of The Year of Magical Thinking has between two of its pages a very long grey hair I saw in my ponytail one day, years ago, as I sat thinking in the old upstairs cafeteria of the Los Angeles Farmers’ Market. Didion kind of replays time in that book. Some scenes from her marriage feel as if they are constantly unfolding in her mind–they still have not become past tense. Somehow the grey hair is a bookmark for this.
To make the present last longer“isn’t that why people love the immediacy of blogs?
And isn’t this what they call the specious present? (Let me check: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/#4) Um, not exactly, but I am going to borrow the term for blogging–blogging is its own specious present–both in the writing (supposedly cursory and of the moment) and in the life of the writing (a blog can be so truly of the twittering moment that by the time it is written, it has expired or else defy its very being and have a life far beyond its timestamp).
In the mechanical age, they had mechanical pencils and wrote in mass-produced notebooks. Joan Didion in “On Keeping a Notebook” (which I reread today for clues about On Keeping a Blog) writes of the purpose of this kind of writing “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” Sure, sure yes.
But then she says, “We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees…” Oh.
Shoot. Graceful pensees. Okay, um, Pascal?
So I just did a quick search for Pascal’s Pensees (thinking if I knew some of these off the top of my head I’d be such an awesome blogger–extemporaneous thought is always nicer when the thinker has a huge library in her head). Anyway, Pascal clearly foresaw the blogging dilemma. Look at these nearly-chosen-at-random excerpts:
There are many people who listen to a sermon in the same way as they listen to vespers. (Yes, Blaise, exactly! Obviously, blogging here is either “sermon” or “vespers” depending on your point of view.)
Scaramouch, who only thinks of one thing. (This one-dimensional blog.)
The doctor, who speaks for a quarter of an hour after he has said everything, so full is he of the desire of talking. (Yes, true– the blogs go on and on. Oh but for more time! Not to read more, but to write less. My boss at work always says something to the effect of “I don’t have time to write you a short letter so I wrote you a long one.”)
(And I just looked up who said this and oh, it’s Pascal. Hello again, sir.)
In high school how I loved that Richard Brautigan poem,
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster
When you take your pill
it’s like a mine disaster.
I think of all the people
Only, tonight, I substitute “blogs” for “people.”
All those blogs lost inside of you. And thank goodness. Lest the blog becomes, to quote William Gass out of context (well, sort of–actually, when he was talking about one-note minimalist work, he was probably prophesying blogging)…Anyway, thank the Lord for the blogs lost inside me lest the ones that do escape become “the less that yields less.”
When I pause to think (isn’t thinking supposed to be anathema to blogging? Sometimes no! Look at this awesome post by Sierra Nelson or anything by Martin Earl on The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Blog. These, I tell you, are not blogging, they are bessaying.) (You know, weblog=blog, web essay=bessay. Okay, totally stupid, but someone else really needs to come up with terms, levels, distinctions, scale.)
Here are some ideas for blogs. All of them in my slow hands would take way more than two hours, which is why I am writing this rambling thing instead. But soon, soon, I will sit down for a very long stretch and think about one of them, so Ray, or mom, if you have a preference:
-In the city that is the internet, something makes me want to go very, very local. I’d like to only talk about RI writers. Not Galway Kinnell, for god’s sake. He got out. I mean people who stay, or move here, and write.
-How I am wholeheartedly against NaPoWriMo (and lord, does that mean I’m not a democrat?); or, The Duino Elegies were awaited
-All my favorite poets keep calling themselves fiction writers.
-“The mind jumping from heartwreck to errands.” Brian Christian’s interview in the Seneca Review–how to forge a poetics that mimics that.
-A fake interview with the pride of Sweden, and one of my first loves, Gunnar Ekelof (fake, seeing as how he’s dead)
-A real interview with Dora Malech because she is my current favorite dark and playful poet.
Then again, what fun is it to write of intended things? Maybe I should write to you as I want you to write to me, of things “I wouldn’t think to vocalize, probably some absurd things, alarming things, a few beauties here and there.”