(Re)Assessment

Something I've noticed about my own blogging (that is, the actual act of blogging, not the accumulation of entries and paratextual effluvia that could be [is?] metaphorized and nounified by the word "blogging"), is that it's almost completely impulsive. This is to say that the frequency and topic of any given blog entry has a lot to do with a) where I'm located (that is, directly in front of a computer or not), b) usually what I happened to read immediately before I begin writing, and c) a certain level of either circumstantial (rather than existential [or perhaps micro-existential (which kind of collapses circumstantial and existential, I guess)]) boredom (I'm writing from work right now) or frenzied desperation re: my own feelings towards my learning curve as a writer.

The impulsiveness of my blogging, of course, works as an antidote to the first part or Item C (the boredom part), and probably, I'm guessing, a hindrance to the second part. It's hard to think about (that is, to write about, which is a form of thinking about, maybe the only form of thinking about we can talk about [unless we get into boring cognitive sciences lab rat work, which is actually talking about rats] - i.e. the way that, when philosophers [I'm thinking (writing) of Heidegger here] write about other philosophers' "thought," what they really mean is writing) structure, lexical coherence, and all of the other things that make good writing good, when you're doing it by the seat of your (my) pants.

Sometimes I think long and hard about blog entries I'd like to write. For instance, I've got about 1,500 words about Robert Coover (which is projected to extend to about five times that length, and include Henry Darger and outsider art) sitting on my computer, but I can't really bring myself to finish it. Likewise something about Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary (and how awesome it is) lingers in my Blogger Dashboard, but the time for that has come and gone.

And so what results is a kind of mess of abstraction that lacks a certain concrete topicality, that has little external reference. I've lost my connection to thingness, I suppose, and found a sort of dumbed-down fractal abstraction in place of that solid grounding. And for all of my willingness to buy into (and the pleasure I take in) ideas and theories about the relationship of writing to reference, of signification, blah, blah, blah, I still find myself feeling more than a little guilty, more than a little solipsistic. Note how I don't seem to care that my use of parentheses makes my writing kind of unreadable at times (and the fact that, to me, this use of parentheses is an attempt to work against certain temporal facts of the reading experience, and to try to imagine what a manner of reading other than the one in which we're forced to participate might look like). Note how far we've come without a hyperlink.

Needless to say, it's just a matter of deciding to work harder, or at least work differently. While I like the fact that this blog probably isn't that interesting to anybody but me, I dislike the autobiographizing I'm doing, and that my self-critique here is just another way to autobiographize and that, really, as much as I would like to think that this isn't a "personal" blog, really it couldn't be anything else. Certainly this blog is in its adolescence, struggling with a question about identity that it can't quite articulate yet. And let's not even think about what that means for me, the writer.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I sat down to write this entry about David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, which Little Brown published earlier this month. I began to think about how I want to write about it even though I'm almost exactly only halfway through it. And about how I get that urge a lot when I'm halfway through a book. Maybe next time>