why blog
This blog lacks a theme. It doesn't lend itself toward categorization. And that elusive quality--the read-ME (or is it READ-me)--aspect is still in development. So why blog?
I kept journals throughout my teens and twenties. I dropped off writing them about the month that Mychal moved into my studio, for no specific reason other than not enough time in the day. More abstractly, though, I think I stopped writing my journal because I had an interlocutor, someone who shared my space both physically and imaginatively. I missed keeping a journal, but not to the point that I ever overcame the accumulated inertia to pick up a notebook.
At some point (ok, I just checked: in 2001), I started to keep a journal on my computer. Through all the years that I had kept a journal in various notebooks, my media of choice was pencil. This always troubled me, because I knew that pencil smudged. Whatever I wrote began to evaporate as soon as I turned the page and the friction of pages commenced. But I loved the way the graphite felt on the pages; so a large part of keeping a journal was the physical sensation of writing. I also liked the physical object--its reassuring heft, the way the paper felt after it had been written on--somewhat softer, more pliant, and that it could be leafed through, providing different entry points for thought trains. The journal as text document never gave itself to random perusing. And once the document was closed, it was as if it had never existed: no notebook to be moved from bag to bed to table to desk to bag, reminding me of its presence through it's very physicality. In a sense, the lacking physical object of the text journal is what revealed to me why I write: because I like the medium of language. I simply like to put words next to one another, to see where they will lead, to see what they produce, to hear what they say. And that this all takes place in a silent realm is all the more satisfying to me, for some reason.
More than the unspooling of one's thoughts in silence, the public nature of a blog renders it not quite a journal. Yet, unlike standing on a crate in the middle of a public square, shouting into the heavens, writing in a blog does not necessarily mean we will be heard. It is quite possibly the most basic expression of hope available today: we blog, never knowing whether we will be found, whether we will be read.
A blog is not a journal; no matter how personal one makes it, its form distinguishes it as something quite different: public, searchable, infinite, hyperlinked, textual and graphic. Lacking concrete dimensions in time and space, it is something virtual; a something forever in the process of becoming.
I kept journals throughout my teens and twenties. I dropped off writing them about the month that Mychal moved into my studio, for no specific reason other than not enough time in the day. More abstractly, though, I think I stopped writing my journal because I had an interlocutor, someone who shared my space both physically and imaginatively. I missed keeping a journal, but not to the point that I ever overcame the accumulated inertia to pick up a notebook.
At some point (ok, I just checked: in 2001), I started to keep a journal on my computer. Through all the years that I had kept a journal in various notebooks, my media of choice was pencil. This always troubled me, because I knew that pencil smudged. Whatever I wrote began to evaporate as soon as I turned the page and the friction of pages commenced. But I loved the way the graphite felt on the pages; so a large part of keeping a journal was the physical sensation of writing. I also liked the physical object--its reassuring heft, the way the paper felt after it had been written on--somewhat softer, more pliant, and that it could be leafed through, providing different entry points for thought trains. The journal as text document never gave itself to random perusing. And once the document was closed, it was as if it had never existed: no notebook to be moved from bag to bed to table to desk to bag, reminding me of its presence through it's very physicality. In a sense, the lacking physical object of the text journal is what revealed to me why I write: because I like the medium of language. I simply like to put words next to one another, to see where they will lead, to see what they produce, to hear what they say. And that this all takes place in a silent realm is all the more satisfying to me, for some reason.
More than the unspooling of one's thoughts in silence, the public nature of a blog renders it not quite a journal. Yet, unlike standing on a crate in the middle of a public square, shouting into the heavens, writing in a blog does not necessarily mean we will be heard. It is quite possibly the most basic expression of hope available today: we blog, never knowing whether we will be found, whether we will be read.
A blog is not a journal; no matter how personal one makes it, its form distinguishes it as something quite different: public, searchable, infinite, hyperlinked, textual and graphic. Lacking concrete dimensions in time and space, it is something virtual; a something forever in the process of becoming.
posted by aelis at 3:22 PM
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