I apologize, but for the second time in a row, I’d like to open with a quote:
“I’m always a little embarrassed to tell people I have a blog, because everybody has a blog about anything. ‘Today I went to JCPenny.’ And there’s one comment, ‘JCPenny, eh?’ That’s not a blog, that’s a text message”. – from Mike Birbiglia’s My Secret Public Journal: Live
Again, I find that someone I admire has said what I really want to say, so much better than I ever could. I don’t really like having a blog. When I write posts for it, I feel so narcissistic, as though I am foisting my opinion on a fairly indifferent world. I feel the same way about twitter, facebook, myspace, indeed social networking in general. I find it a) an impersonal means communication, b) a terrific waste of time (and I’ve already talked about my preferred wastes of time), and c) as I’ve already insinuated an incredibly narcissistic endeavor.
Of course, a blog is a different beast than facebook and myspace, and at least it lets me say well over a hundred and forty characters. Still though, something inside me says this dynamic of just spewing my own nascent ideas about…well anything that seems to come to mind, it seems. At least I come up with things that a tad bit more interesting than “’Today I went to JCPenny’” (not by much, but hey I try).
My real problem with it though is that frankly, I am not experienced or particularly knowledgeable about the topics on which I write. It’s not like I’ve ever got a story published. My words are absolutely meaningless to anyone truly interested in writing or Hamlet; I think they’d rather read a book by someone like Harold Bloom, much as I dislike him. A large part of this is that I have trouble imagining the person who would actually read my blog. Even people in this class would likely find slogging through its poorly edited depths to be a very special kind of hell. If anyone has ever bothered reading it at all, something that I honestly doubt and really don’t care about.
But it does feel a bit like writing in a vacuum, that all of these words that I am writing now, once published will just disappear into the great ether of lost thoughts. It’s lonely doing this, and its also so conceited, I’m sick with myself half the time I write these posts. And I can’t honestly believe that this means much outside of a grade. I don’t think writing consistently is helping my (limited) craft, because as I’ve said my real issue with writing is with editing.
On the other hand, I don’t get many occasions to quote Mike Birbiglia, Michael Chabon, and Sarah Vowell, in a forty-eight hour period, so it’s not all bad. Plus, I got to bad mouth Harold Bloom. Who cares if I’m writing in a vacuum? Actually I think I just gave the answer.
I wouldn't focus on the blog as a genre, the stereotypical confessionist. Instead, look it as a canvas, like Microsoft Word or Pages. Instead of writing for your Macbook then turning it off, you're writing for others. Also, there are many kinds of blogs out there. Some are used as cookbooks, as a class website (like Sakai), as a book with chapters, as a news feed, etc. Some people don't even call their blog a blog. They refer to it as their website. That's how I reference my blog about teaching with technology. The cool thing about working on a book within a blog instead of Microsoft Word is that you can actually obtain commentary from readers.
ReplyDelete