This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004).
This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004
Blogging has suddenly metamorphosed from something to aid and abet procrastination into something to procrastinate about. Not that I'm surprised.
But I know that the tough get blogging when the blogging gets tough, so what better topic than Blogger's Block?
It's not that I have run out of things to write about. There are more than ever. It's something else.
I think I have some idea what it might be. Terje Rasmussen, a Norwegian academic bloggmaven (he spells it with a double G) wrote a paper on blogging as a "technology of the self." (The phrase in quotes is from Foucault, from an essay of the same name.) The gist of what Terje says (or more precisely, the gist of what I think Terje says) is that blogs serve the bloggers by helping them clarify the eternal question, "who am I?"
As I see those words transformed from thoughts to print (another Terje-ism, I think, the role of the blogg putting speech or thoughts into print readable by others), I hear in my head echoes of anti-individualist authorities: "narcissist! self-absorbed! self-indulgent! the Me Decade!"
Notwithstanding, Ayn Rand's view of man is a self-made soul; Otto Rank's of the artist is that one's own personality as an artist is the artist's most fundamental work of art. I eat that stuff up. And therefore, dear reader, in the event that you might exist some fine day: as an aspiring artist and soul, I hereby assert that the blogg must go on. And it shall.—JDL
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