the halting problem, for blogs
i just took a shower. but that is the most concrete thing i have to say.
in that shower, my thoughts were cascading, the way they were a year back when i was using the steam to 'steam-glue' sheets of paper to my shower, so that i could write the thoughts coming in streams like the water: words and lines of poems, parts and sometimes even whole poems.
strange, a blog is a sounding board; a diary; a sort of bulletin; and probably other things besides. it is a new sensation for me, since i am for the most part intensely private and since my sounding boards have been my own thoughts, my partner, and my few e-mail pals. strange but fun to think a few of the curious might gander down these lines, and a few of the few might be taken with something like interest. it is the same with poems: they are the workings-out of my own concerns, as well as embodiments of larger concerns. the calculated frolicking of ideas that matter to me, with a door cracked and opening a line of light others, if willing, may follow to somewhere they've seen but in different light.
marvin bell says autobiography rots (number 10 of his 'thirty-two statements about writing poetry', which i more or less follow), and i tend to agree with him. yet here is a sanctioned space for fatuous self-absorption: memoir without an editor to tone you down and broaden your appeal and relevance. or so it seems.
yet here is the chance to wiggle things into words without the pressure of it being all that worthy. here, even, is the democratic ideal that worthiness comes of process: of wordiness. it's all very new and exciting, even though i had a friend in college, ken (hi ken), who i remember back in the hinter-era of 1998 or 99 posting internet entries to what i think he called a journal, well before this craze got going. i remember wondering where he found the time, but ken was a marvel of efficiency on a bottle or three of jolt (my own poison of choice was red bull, back when it was new and 'small' and 'gross, like liquid smarties' -- back before it was widely discovered). i guess i have to admit that smarties, jolt, red bull and ken are all concrete.
so this is the halting problem for blogs. the churning continues, and a thought can't think itself over. (relatively) unfiltered thoughts are fun, even in this accumulating glut of memoir and personality cults that we call the new millenium. by now you see certain idioms -- or are they cadences? or are they memes? -- that i rely on in writing prose sentences. the thing is, i don't usually write the big, generalized, overbearing academic sentences that much anymore (i save those for the poems, ha!), so what gives? the spirit of pine view has found me, i guess, in more ways than one.
in that shower, my thoughts were cascading, the way they were a year back when i was using the steam to 'steam-glue' sheets of paper to my shower, so that i could write the thoughts coming in streams like the water: words and lines of poems, parts and sometimes even whole poems.
strange, a blog is a sounding board; a diary; a sort of bulletin; and probably other things besides. it is a new sensation for me, since i am for the most part intensely private and since my sounding boards have been my own thoughts, my partner, and my few e-mail pals. strange but fun to think a few of the curious might gander down these lines, and a few of the few might be taken with something like interest. it is the same with poems: they are the workings-out of my own concerns, as well as embodiments of larger concerns. the calculated frolicking of ideas that matter to me, with a door cracked and opening a line of light others, if willing, may follow to somewhere they've seen but in different light.
marvin bell says autobiography rots (number 10 of his 'thirty-two statements about writing poetry', which i more or less follow), and i tend to agree with him. yet here is a sanctioned space for fatuous self-absorption: memoir without an editor to tone you down and broaden your appeal and relevance. or so it seems.
yet here is the chance to wiggle things into words without the pressure of it being all that worthy. here, even, is the democratic ideal that worthiness comes of process: of wordiness. it's all very new and exciting, even though i had a friend in college, ken (hi ken), who i remember back in the hinter-era of 1998 or 99 posting internet entries to what i think he called a journal, well before this craze got going. i remember wondering where he found the time, but ken was a marvel of efficiency on a bottle or three of jolt (my own poison of choice was red bull, back when it was new and 'small' and 'gross, like liquid smarties' -- back before it was widely discovered). i guess i have to admit that smarties, jolt, red bull and ken are all concrete.
so this is the halting problem for blogs. the churning continues, and a thought can't think itself over. (relatively) unfiltered thoughts are fun, even in this accumulating glut of memoir and personality cults that we call the new millenium. by now you see certain idioms -- or are they cadences? or are they memes? -- that i rely on in writing prose sentences. the thing is, i don't usually write the big, generalized, overbearing academic sentences that much anymore (i save those for the poems, ha!), so what gives? the spirit of pine view has found me, i guess, in more ways than one.
posted by Christopher Phelps at 6/21/2006 04:29:00 PM
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