The relative lag time between posts on this blog has been bothering me for some time and is damn near close to becoming unacceptable. Strong language, I realize, but updating this blog has slipped a few notches on my list of priorities, and despite recent milestones of which I’m plenty proud, some of my passion for it has waned. I think it also has a lot to do with the now all-but-defunct albatross that is the IJOASa-oBC, hamstrung as it is by events beyond my control and demanding a great deal of time and energy so that even thinking about it, much less working on it, leaves me feeling sad and tired.
Notwithstanding all that, however, I’ve found recent inspiration in a new piece of writing by Andrew Sullivan in the current issue of the Atlantic, entitled “Why I Blog.” Sullivan gives a lot of reasons for blogging that I share but had never previously considered. The piece is worth reading in full, but for now I’ll just share some passages that grabbed me, and renewed my drive to blog on a more regular basis.
As blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism. …
As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did. …
For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
You end up writing about yourself, since you are a relatively fixed point in this constant interaction with the ideas and facts of the exterior world. And in this sense, the historic form closest to blogs is the diary. …
But a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and immediate one. It combines the confessional genre with the log form and exposes the author in a manner no author has ever been exposed before. …
The key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks. But the superficiality mask[s] considerable depth—greater depth, from one perspective, than the traditional media could offer. … A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit. It disempowers the writer to that extent, of course. The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.
A writer fully aware of and at ease with the provisionality of his own work is nothing new. For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that suggest the imperfection of human thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the humbling, chastening passage of time. …
Perhaps the quintessential blogger avant la lettre was Montaigne. His essays were published in three major editions, each one longer and more complex than the previous. A passionate skeptic, Montaigne amended, added to, and amplified the essays for each edition, making them three-dimensional through time. … Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth. …
To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth. …
If all this sounds postmodern, that’s because it is. And blogging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective. A traditional writer is valued by readers precisely because they trust him to have thought long and hard about a subject, given it time to evolve in his head, and composed a piece of writing that is worth their time to read at length and to ponder. Bloggers don’t do this and cannot do this—and that limits them far more than it does traditional long-form writing. …
There is, after all, something simply irreplaceable about reading a piece of writing at length on paper, in a chair or on a couch or in bed. To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading. Jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.
The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed. To listen to jazz as one would listen to an aria is to miss the point. Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other.
In fact, for all the intense gloom surrounding the news-paper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television’s dominance, had seemed on the wane.
My blog is not really journalistic, though I have blogged in that capacity before—and I owe at least some of my negligence toward this site to the time I’ve spent blogging for other online organs. But this thing here—this repository of half-formed, embarrassingly personal essayish dribs and drabs that, at their best, spark the sort of conversations Sullivan prizes in the blogosphere—this is still my baby.
To Sullivan’s reasons for blogging I would add that I also blog because, for all my avowals to the contrary, I crave attention for my writing, and this is the most immediate way to get it. Before I blogged I had maybe two pieces of writing I wasn’t ashamed to situate before another pair of human eyes.
Once I began blogging I became prolific, for better or worse. I began writing on a semi-regular basis. I figured out what worked and didn’t work. I generated essays that would eventually become my application portfolio for graduate school. Having considered myself a writer for many years without doing much actual writing, I was finally taking action.
So I’ve since refined my primary reason for blogging into the belief—more a fear, really—that if I didn’t blog, I might stop writing altogether.
And, considering that in the spring I’ll be getting paid to teach other people why blogging is worthwhile, I’d better not lose hold of my conviction that it is anytime soon. And “Why I Blog” will probably be the first piece of reading on the syllabus.
Posted: October 22nd, 2008 under Literature, General.
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