Some Random Notes On Blogging

      When I first started this blog (almost a year ago, and it boggles my mind that by the time that year-mark comes, this page will have been 'hit' around 5000 times), I conceived of it as a kind open notebook for whatever thoughts and ramblings and the like that I might have. In some ways, this blog is still that way, but as time's passed, well, it's mutated. It's become a kind of Frankenstein's monster of bits and pieces, mostly humourous; the literary aspect has been far less pronounced, and the philosophical aspect has all but fallen by the wayside. Now this blog is less an open notebook than a log of what I've found on the net, things to share with those of you with minds approximately as twisted as my own. Somewhere along the line, adding stuff to this blog became a kind of responsibility more assumed than imposed; after all, if people are going to all the energy and labour of clicking to go to your site, you'd better damned well have some new stuff. No, not quite. It's also that this blog also became a kind of open email that my friends could check to know that, yes, Doctor J is indeed still alive; it's also meant that writing individual emails has become as monotonously draining as Kantian prose in translation. There's a degree to which blogging extends or enlarges one's public life. I can't say this is anything especially new. Teaching is a much more public profession than most, and if you have any pause on that just think of how you think of teachers from your past; and now imagine them in their underwear. 'Nuff said? That's another oddity to this whole scenario, that as 'public' as I am in maintaining this blog, I have very little idea who's out there reading any of this, and those that I do know I'm sitting and praying that they're not reading this blog in their underwear. (I assure ye all, I'm writing this fully clothed.) Somehow, this isn't quite the same thing as reading Dickens while you pick a booger out of your nose.

      This leads to another question, one RK mentioned on his blog, and that has to do with the persona one assumes when blogging. Some people tend to rather overt in their blogs, using the blog more expicitly as a capital D diary. Others are much more clipped, refusing to talk at all about anything in their personal lives, and these blogs are more like issue boards. Then there's the wide gap in-between. It can be a tricky gap to navigate, though. I know that my response to this is to play on the Doctor J persona, a persona not fake but not completely genuine, either; this Doctor J is the mildly amiable, generally casual, often cynical, and occasionally quite serious figure that tends to what some would call "the pub personality." It's a bit of self-mocking persona, but it works, and generally I like it. In Leonard Cohen's words, "It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and ever face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance." Logicians, I'm sure, will want to splatter their brains across their computer screens after reading that, but there's a truth to it. Oh, the little tricks of the trade-- referring to oneself in the third person, playing up an image one minute then playing it down another, and so on and so forth. I have to say, though, that I find a lot of the blogs out there pretty tasteless in their solipsism ("I found out I got gonhorrhea and I'm going to kill that rat-bastard that gave it to me. Went to the store. Bought chips. And I'm like Helllloooo! but the counter-guy didn't recognize me. And here's a link to a porn site I found when I got home. Gee, I need to go take a dump. Back in a bit."). Ah, the underwear image seems pretty relevant now, n'est-ce pas? I guess the key is to negotiate a persona with which one can be comfortable, without vaulting headforth into blatant exhibitionism or general emptiness of character. Oh, RK, doesn't this sound like a puzzle for French philosophers? Lots of absences and traces and authorial undeadness. The playfulness would be the thing.

      Another point about all this. I find blogging is encouraging verbal sloppiness on my part, at least when it comes to writing entries more than two sentences long. My typing isn't the best to begin with, but between typos and collided words (one of my most common goofs, typing "withe" when I meant to write "with the"), the akwardness of writing without a paper product, and the general 'aw-fuck-it'it's-good-enough' mentality that comes with writing something to which one doesn't commit oneself whole-heartedly, one can get lazy, sloppy. And, yes, I see myself getting that way, making errors I wouldn't likely make in a more substantial (read in: less digital) form of writing. Blogging is chattier than normal writing. It's also more onanistic. More publicly onanistic. I imagine D.H.Lawrence would have loathed blogging.

      Oh well. There we are. My apathy -- and my fatigue-- are setting in. Did I make any significant typos, or any stylistic blunders I'll for which I'll be kicking myself later? Who know. Aw, fuck it, it's good enough. Post and Publish. It's time for Doctor J to get to bed. And, no, Doctor J will not reveal what underwear he's wearing, and he will not be reading Dickens. I'll leave the booger-picking to your imaginations. Achoo.