WhimsyLand

It has seemed to me recently that our blogging community has reached a certain level of maturity.  Many bloggers have been defining (or defending) what they do on their blog (CDY and Kasey come to mind).  I understand this need to look back and think about why we're doing this.  I started out avoiding personal details and trying to focus on topics, but there is this insidious motivation to write our lives.  Part of the compulsion derives from the fact that memories are lost without retelling.  You get on a roll and all of a sudden you're writing about the time your second wife tango'd with the steward on your only Caribbean cruise.  My buddy Scoplaw has posted some rules for blogging.  One of them was:

What I’d like to do with the blog is to create a record of my experiences and tell a few stories along the way.  Often those stories here, like all stories, are distorted for various reasons.  However, given the nature of blogging, I also deliberately distort things.  I may want to protect someone’s identity, I may want to skip extraneous details and get to the heart of something, I may combine several stories or scenarios to give readers a flavor for what some sort of “typical” experience is, so on, so forth.  Poets lie to tell the truth.  Which is why Plato gave us the boot from the Republic.

This sounds perfectly reasonable.  I suppose we all embellish our stories.  I try to recall experiences accurately, but I'm sure the storytelling get the better of me at times. 

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I admit that there are things in the common culture that I don't understand.  For example, I've never text-messaged even once.  It makes me feel very buggywhipish.  Anyone with children (such as my two wonderful sons) delays the inevitable out-of-touch-edness for a while, but it sets in eventually nonetheless.  The usual symptoms are 1) not recognizing even one of the 10 artists on music's top ten, 2) wondering if that stud in the brow of your hair stylist doesn't really hurt, 3) feeling a little nervous that your loved ones have only cell phones and no land lines.  There are probably another dozen I could think of, actually.  For example, I think I must be the only one on the planet who doesn't understand what CDY means when he says:  Clue:  Andromeda Strain.

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Interesting Things

Gabe's book is available for pre-order, and it's a LOT longer than 122 pages:  Generally, the writing gets better, less turgid, less corny, less kitschy, more precise, detailed, and happier, as the book progresses. My own sense is that this is indicative of the driver moving out of negative, self-involved mindstates—in which he was deeply embroiled.

Becca mentions that Suzanne has a review of Radish King: The collection opens with a woman preparing for a voyage. Her ship has a mast, she is going alone, arrangements have been made for the children, and the vessel we learn is not a ship, but a boat. The boat as vessel and the woman as vessel are in fact one and the same.

Robert's fascinating discursion on why the Right Wing isn't funny:  Major Premise: Comedy is inherently subversive of authority.

TT posts infrequently, but it's usually worth waiting for:  What I would want to discuss is the way I believe these above figures (James, Stein, et al) are engaged in a projection of immediacy, and that a full aesthetic experience of their works calls forth a similar, experimental projection of immediacy by the audience.  I think this is what Olson was trying to get at in the Special View of History when he talks about Keats’ negative capability as the “inch of steel” that “wrecks Hegel.”