Resolute
Careful crafting and consideration throughout the holidays: I have decided to murder this blog as a New Year’s resolution. The other resolution is to exercise at least four minutes a day. However, this is a very complicated undertaking, this blogocide. The perfect murder. Let me explain.
Like most people, I’ve had my reservations about blogs—what they meant, what they implied about the culture, the typical quality of thought that goes into any given post on any given person’s website. (I guess mine, not everyone’s. Who knows about everyone.) John Updike’s rather crotchety and backward-looking screed from right around the time of this blog’s genesis has lingered in my mind, despite its dogmatism. And while there are hundreds and hundreds of legitimately good blogs across the internet, I think what I’ve ended up deciding, after 15 months of feeling a little weird about having one, letting various kinds of energy and emotion about writing get slopped down onto the typepad webportal, locating interesting and ridiculous excuses to just surf for surfing’s sake, and really, ultimately, never feeling particularly great about anything having to do with blogging, is that there are probably three or four essential qualities to the production of a blog that’s “valuable” in some way (very mysterious term there), and you definitely need, like, one point five of those qualities in order to justify a blog’s existence—either Blogger Doe has to have an obsessive sticktoitiveness that leads to many, many posts (definitely not me), a particularly fresh and disarming prose (not really), a particularly unique perspective (not really), or some other actual reason to be doing it at all (not really). Otherwise it’s a little dark. Not dark like whiskey alone in the woods, screaming, crying as you lie down into a pile of mud and remember back when you were happy. Some other kind of dark—my generation’s invention of an electronic darkness, one that’s part distraction, part hope for connection, part passionate demand for a larger and more relevant arts community, part capitalistic enterprise, and part babbling. Again, I suppose this is all my own sense of a darkness, not necessarily one that is truly out there inside of the internet, but it’s all I’ve got, so I guess I have to stick with it.
Blogging as a fiction writer introduces another level of complexity; in one sense you are not at all doing the thing you are ostensibly supposed to be doing, but in the other sense, depending on your willingness to stretch the definition of “supposed to” in an economic atmosphere that essentially dooms the majority of authors—especially authors of short stories—you are doing something very close to what you’re supposed to be doing. Writing. But there are many, many different kinds of writers, and one thing I know is very true (especially now) is that just because you’re the kind of person who sits around thinking about short stories or novels or even aspires to write one once in awhile really says very little about whether your opinions on the culture at large—other books, politics, social justice, shoes, surfboards, kitsch, or whatever—are very interesting to other people. That’s not to say there isn’t a tremendous future for fiction and storytelling on the internet, and that enterprising writers, editors, and enthusiasts will not keep finding ways to place art at the fingertips of any person who happens to sit down and load a web browser. I just don’t really know what those ways are, and I find myself either unable or unwilling to properly explore them, preoccupied as I am with trying to write things while not at all connected to the internet.
Just outside, standing on the porch in my socks, avoiding the sort of wet snow/slush of a late Chicago December, I thought of this question: what would my generation’s identity be without the internet? Last night I saw a preview for a movie called “One Missed Call”. Alexis, frowning, turned and asked what possible reason there could have been to make that movie, but both of us sort of knew, both of us again felt the same darkness. Not hard to imagine a room of (in-house?) marketers, one entering with lunch and saying, “I had a thought as I was standing in line, fellows, waiting for these Classic Italian Sub Sandwiches; I was watching a 14 year-old beside me on her cell phone and she never once looked up from it the whole time I was in the restaurant; she both typed messages and talked. What was important, though, was her focus, the way the phone in her hands became a fetish, how she couldn’t not hold it and touch it, even if it wasn’t telling her things. So what I’m thinking, guys, is we can exploit that fetish that’s evolved and plug it into the genre horror machine and see if we can’t get gross sales of around 25 million with a budget of just under 10. It will not be a particularly good movie because it doesn’t have to be. Should we get somebody on the phone?”
As most people who sign up for a blogging account know (I wonder, by the way, how many dormant blog accounts exist—how many blogs are out there with one post, subject line either “Hello?” or “Is Anyone Out There”, post itself saying something about how neat it is to blog? Am I wrong to imagine a whole fleet of phantom blog-ships floating atop the internet ocean, each with one little tiny skeleton standing at the helm? Some of the skeletons still wearing trucker hats?) , once you click that button, a little tiny nubbin of “you should be doing this” pops into existence inside the dark chaos of your brain, and is there, a little seed, all the time. Usually it’s pretty mute. Usually you can just look at it and it wilts away. But it’s there. Sometimes—especially after you find yourself doing things like posting images of Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama with zero accompanying text—it pulses a little brighter and becomes angrier. Have I contributed to the Zeitgeist in my own interesting way? Is it enough? And you wake up one Sunday morning and say to yourself, “This day will be the day I write a really cool post on my blog.”
Looking at that sentence, one that is definitely a real brain-sentence that’s been produced by my own brain, makes me sad.
Anyway, we’re getting into personal issues about what one should do with the hours of a day, and those things don’t really matter. Back to sneaking up behind my blog with a huge knife and slitting its throat.
I looked at the “Delete This Blog” button yesterday and really didn’t want to do it; it was the raw first impulse to kill that brought me deep into the “Configure” pages of the Typepad account. What kept me from doing it right there, though, was the simple sense of lost potential. You can have all the optimistic ideas you want about the future of the internet and it doesn’t really help to then decide not to use it so much anymore. In my case the lost potential feeling links up with this other desire, honestly unrelated, to write more nonfiction and explore things like memoir, criticism, philosophy, and cultural criticism. These are kinds of writing I’ve always been interested in but have never tried too much, feeling, as I usually do, so fucking frantic to produce fiction that it was just unthinkable to sit down and begin writing something about, say, the mutant pumpkin my father grew in our backyard in 1993 and subsequently entered into the state fair. (With memoir it’s a somewhat similar suspicion, isn’t it? Like basic anti-blog positions? Grit your teeth a little bit and think to yourself, “What the fuck is this, anyway? Why would I care? Why would the author be so presumptuous to think I would care?” Is it the central question of the arts? At least the arts in the 21st century? Even though these feelings occur to me, I think, in the end, they’re not really fair. We could ask the exact same questions about fiction. It’s just that it got decided a long time ago that people should actually care about novels and poems and other “shit people make up.”)
So I think to myself, hey, I wouldn’t mind trying these other sorts of writing, and I also think to myself hey, there’s a blog account with my name on it. I have the password and it actually connects to the internet. So another me walks up and takes my hand as I raise the knife to kill the blog and says, “Wait, you could make this work for you if you just added a little discipline.”
“Discipline?” I say. “That’s the problem. I have discipline. Being disciplined about writing a blog post feels like being disciplined about pissing off the back balcony of my apartment. It’s a little interesting but also totally pointless.
I got stuck in this part of the dialogue for about a day. Then I remembered, though, something about how Michael Chabon’s wife (Ayalet Waldman) had been a blogger but quit or did something interesting…I couldn’t quite remember. In my imagination I remembered a long and tortured decision-making process that was nonetheless interesting, culminating in some sort of internet-peace accord in which she retained her sanity and left the world of blogging happily. Well, it turns out that she just started getting paid for her writing by Salon. So maybe not so romantic as I remembered.
Nevertheless! The idea was hatched by those false memories. I will kill this blog, but this blog will not die until December 31, 2008.
Already I feel the relief of taking aim and firing into its heart. But there’s more. Like World of Warcraft, there is something about blogs that violates my more traditional narrative sensibilities—it never ends. The internet allows for entities that never end. I feel confident, when walking into a movie theatre, that I will at some point in the future walk out of it. Whether or not I will have been entertained is irrelevant. The same goes for opening up a book. And while you could say that newspapers, in a sense, never end in that there’s always a new one the next day, at least you can close the last page and throw it away. Without a physical form, blogs—blog ownership, actually—feels to me, uh, Sysyphean.
The conclusion to this whole post is simple. I like the idea of an endpoint, and I think that having an endpoint will let me be a little more ambitious when it comes to the various posts I truly do want to write. All future posts will be long and I’ll try to make them essays; what I do not want, not at all, is a casual embedding of a youtube clip. No matter how much I like Townes, putting him up there and just letting him sit makes me nothing more than the Yellow Pages. Or this other problem: the horrendous idea that for some reason has gained traction in our culture that any given person can be defined by his or her tastes, and that to show you what I like (Townes Van Zandt, Futurama) really has anything at all to do with who I am. (I have more thoughts on that subject, but maybe I’ll wait for a 9,000 word post in March. I’ll say things like: why is it that having a list of the 745 books you’ve read posted publicly has somehow become a proxy for intelligence? Why is it that being able to recite the top 80 indie bands of 2007 shows you to be an interesting combination of edgy, arty, and left-wing? Why is it that young people in particular have confused the list of their likes and dislikes with a list of their own beliefs? Isn’t it obvious that this is something that has been done to us, not done by us? That identity defined by taste is the ultimate model for consumerism?)
Anyway, that’s the plan. Although, fuck. Maybe I’ll just quit in February.



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