Though the big, slick, expensive sites and services offer many of the things, and better, that ten years ago we went to (each other’s) blogs to find, they are inadequate for anyone seeking more than “the literature of a quarter of an hour,” but not involved in, supported by, or satisfied with traditional commercial and academic publishing. A blog might seem to belong to that species of 15-minute literature, but, once the all-consuming desire for passing interest has been stolen away or stolen back, the blog-as-log begins to disappear, revealing a virtual location: the site, marked by the non- or anti-ephemeral durability of logos rather than log.
Few of the visitors to this site on any given day leave comments or any other signs of appreciation or disagreement, or of attention at all, but, when I examine the trail of “views” they leave behind, I like to…
If you are committed to writing, and writing, and writing, day after day, in public, in a kind of literary intestinal bypass approach to authorship, then from time to time, for most of us quite regularly, you are going to say things that you or an editor would never leave to stand in a book or other traditional form of writing. Yet the opposite of what Sullivan says is also obviously true: Blogging is protection against making a total fool out of yourself because it’s a protection against any symbolically total or definitive statement at all. I don’t need to delete my foolishness. The next post, or the one after that, or the one after the one after the one after the one after the one will do it for me.
…just got to finish a proofreading… and will have survived the First Draft mostly alive (strained my back somehow, possibly lifting my blind little dog, possibly sleeping funny)… The way it works is that I then do a Second Draft…
Even than this frog’s hair: That’s a favorite answer of my Dad’s to “howyadoin?” and variations, and a reply to a kind inquiry from Mr. Miller via e-mail. Apparently, I’m such a loudmouth that a couple days not blogging or…