Keep My Feet On The Ground: Notes On Keeping This Blog

      Oy, there's always so much I mean to put on this blog, for one reason or another, but which I never get around to doing, for the same vague 'reason or another.' I've meant for several weeks to post for Arby an explanation (defense?) of Eliot's poetry, which in many ways for me would be as easy as pie, except for the basic fact that it would take me just under an eon to say all the things I would want to say. Now and again I've even made stabs at starting the entry, but either something goes wrong (my computer's temperament is less than genial) or I, Hamlet-like, delay myself into inaction. (Aside: this blog wonders if Hamlet only gets his butt into gear after slays Polonius because he's finally developed a taste for blood. But no, that doesn't work, either. Gawd, that play is a monstrous mess.) It doesn't help either that there's always other stuff that I should be doing, and so this blog comes to seem more like an invitation to procrastinate, an invitation my humour wishes to indulge but which my responsibilities say I mustn't. It surely doesn't help that when I am stirred to make what seems to me a significant point, I tend to uncover a larger network of ideas I did not intent to expose at the outset. Hence RK's clever and true observation that Doctor J's "idea of a brief point is rather like Fidel Castro's. With the distinction that yours are usually right." (Right, Zane?) Well, hopefully 'usually right.'

      Then there's the other side of the coin. I've discovered that there are actually a (small) number of people who check this blog rather regularly not so much for the links or for what Doctor J is thinking at any given moment, but for "proof of life," proof that the Good Doctor is indeed alive and well and certainly not living in Paris. (Doctor J has the same problem with his bars-- at some bars in his stomping ground, if Doc J doesn't manifest himself for a few days, people start worrying and even threaten to send out the cops. And, yes, this is an insidious problem.) So, there's that tension, too: to post something, anything, now and again, as a kind of palliative-- for my readers to know I'm still in working order, and for myself to appease that sense that I should post something as a kind of personal diaristic discipline. Hence the tendency of late toward more humouristic piffle which, ironically, my readers tend to prefer to my more philosophical or literary discussions, or to the literary works I have posted here ostensibly for the edification of others beside myself. *Shrug*

      So, in the end, half the stuff that I'd like to get done here never gets done, and the other half is little more than computerized mental onanism. (With a distinct preference for the latter of late, mainly for reasons of time and energy.) But this blog was never meant to be overly earnest, overly serious to any particular project except its own existence. I'm not sure I'd want to keep this blog going if I kept it entirely to one field of ideas, or to one form of 'journal-ism.' It'd become more of a labour than anything, and it would end up precluding a lot of the incidentals of experience and discovery that end up being provocative or delightful in one sense or another. This blog is quirky that way, and to an extent it's proud of that quirkiness. Okay, maybe not 'proud' per se, but unashamed that it is what it is-- and that it is that it is. So there we are....

      Am I saying anything new in this post that most of my readers don't already know? Probably not. Sometimes, though, it's worthwhile to take stock of things, to go over the obvious all over again because it's when we lose contact with the obvious that we end up committing some of the most preposterous acts, like a dog chasing its tail, or a Freudian thinking Hamlet is really a person and not a dramatical construct, or a cultural-materialist refusing to see literature as an exercise in the hypothetical and the imaginative.

      And, yes, these notes may be Castro-like in their 'brevity.' But there we go. And now I really should get on to doing the things I ought to be doing: preparing my students' mid-term examination, marking, reading-- all the nefarious things that dog the real world of Doctor J.

      In the immortal syllables of Bob Dylan: "Blah blah blah blah blah."