Tuesday 27 October 2020

what's a blog

 I can't pretend to know anything about what keeps a blog going. I actually think it's one of those very interesting activities embedded in the lives of thinking people which thrives best and is most interesting when you don't look too closely at why you're doing it. I get into rhythms of writing and then that rhythm is interrupted by something or other, and what brings the ensuing period of silence to an end is just a feeling that I should write something again, doesn't really matter what.

When I started this blog, in 2005, an individual blog lived in an ecosystem populated by thousands of other blogs; they were new but they had antecedents; they existed in and got a lot of their liveliness and meaning from structural relationships to prior forms or to coevals. Now, that's really all finished. I read about five or six blogs that are still alive. It's weird. It feels like being one of the last survivors of a shipwreck, but at the same time, all I have to do is open a different browser tab and ALL the people from blogging are still selflessly devoting eight hours a day to entertaining the crap out of each other on the internet. For a while somewhere in there I hypothesised that even though what the bloggers I constellated with called the 'blogosphere' was becoming a ghost town, another generation of blogs was probably growing up somewhere in a network unconnected to ours and therefore invisible. This was a wrong belief; the big social media platforms ate blogging. There are pockets of surviving colonies (sewing bloggers still blog and read each other - that kind of thing) but it's finished as a textual project. I think of my blog as still responding to live relationships still but they aren't textual or structural. They're actual 'relationships' relationships, with, like, people. I write thinking about a collection of individuals who I have a wide variety of relationships with. That spectrum of relationships spans the full range from lawful good to chaotic evil - and you're in there, of course you are - and the point is that the writing has to then be a private endeavour, to be shaped by what I know and feel about the people reading it, and not by a conception of working in a medium with conventions and publics. 

The usual impulse I have when I get down to writing one of these silence-breaker posts is to gesture in the direction of recapping what's happened since last time. Well, even though it's only been about a month, that feels like too big of a task to be methodically worked through. In the special category of pandemic news I will note that Melbourne's drastic shutdown of over a hundred days has successfully brought the daily numbers of new infections down to an incredibly low level. Which is great of course, but if the lockdown was the only possible course of action(because nothing else works) then I really wonder why the state is being opened up again. I think I've become institutionalised to the lockdown, like many people probably, and am having a bit of a hard time mustering enthusiasm for resuming many of the activities and experiences I've learned the hard way how to do without. That said, I have glimpsed, like the silver flash of a fish darting through a shaft of sunlight many metres below the surface of the ocean, a sort of fantasy of putting on a nice dress and carefully brushing my hair and going to one of those places where you sit on a chair you haven't sat on before and someone you don't know brings you food. One of these shoes fell out of the wardrobe the other day ( I was looking for a cat) and I laughed at it for a while. Then I took its pair out of the wardrobe and put them both on and sat on the end of the bed absorbing the strange, complex and not altogether dreadful but not altogether nice sensation of wearing high heels. 

Leonard went back to school at the start of the term, a couple of weeks ago, and is doing really well. I don't think his going to school muscles are properly built up just yet but school just makes him tired, not stressed, I think. The return of his social existence brought me such relief, I really cannot express it. I'm still processing the emotional aftermath of the release from the perpetual effort to compensate for everything he was missing. And I am doing a pretty shit job of catching up on the scary big backlog of work I neglected in order to prioritise being present and engaged for Leonard as much as I possibly could. The mental image is of a ship slowly righting itself after weathering a hugely destabilising wave. I will right myself and it'll take a little bit of time. 

Pompey is wailing to himself in the darkened hallway which means it's time to go to bed.

5 comments:

R.H. said...

Laura I'm a bit concerned about your present situation (and maybe needn't be); because when you got married I believed that was it, happily ever after, thus proving myself wrong yet again with assumptions about people, etc. Yet contrary to all that I'm very pleased to find you up and about banging the keyboard.

The word sorrow in your blog title always puzzled me a bit, concerned me, I wondered if something bad had already happened to you because sorrow is middle-aged and you were early thirties at that time.

Before discovering blogs I was reading and commenting on an American writer's site. The question came up of why people wanted to become writers and after thinking hard about it I surprised myself be saying "To be loved". The comment was well received for its candour, I guess, and maybe for its honesty. No one disagreed anyway. When I was very young my worthless father would bring other drunks home from the pub and sing to them all night (at the fireside). He wanted to entertain, be famous, loved. And eyes shut, body stiffened, he gave it his all, perhaps living his dream of being on stage, audience of thousands.

I knew at the start you and I were from different worlds. That hasn't changed. "structured relationships to prior forms or to coevals" bamboosals me. Professorial you. All the same, I admire scholarship, euredition, and I admire anyone who unselfishly passes on free their learning to all comers as you have done. I've benefited - speaking only for myself.

Miss Brownie, Miss Jahteh, Miss Laura, were my favourite blogs.

So....What's a blog? Miss Brownie has mentioned a golden age of blogging, and I agree there was one, approx 2005-2015. And we all miss one another. The more cranky, the more fun it was. (Whyisitso!- where are you now!)

Thank you, Laura. (And if I may end with a comment that's vintage RH) You're better looking than Ever.

R.H. said...

ha ha, I asked you not to publish that, and you did anyway. What a dirty trick. Well it was impulsive. And honest, which is the best of me.
Commenting gave me a life, an opportunity to mix with people beyond my ordinary reach. And I'm not happy to mention it, but it's class difference; missing a normal education is something you can never make up for. Much of my improvement, especially in text, came from reading blogs like yours and the Prodeo.
And oh golly!- the PRODEO! The arguments, logic, debates...(Rhetoric, if you don't mind!) Some of those liberation women gave me a genuine fright. Still do, when I think about it. But then there's Copperwitch, I don't know how to describe her and do her justice, she's bossy, practical, parental, with an unexpected wit that gives you a shock. Really, when I think of blogging, I think of Copperwitch.

R.H. said...

And of Brownie/Ann O'Dyne.

lucy tartan said...

Hello R.H. I don't think you did ask me not to publish your comment - I don't see that request, and look I really wouldn't have published it if I had seen that request. If I did miss something, I apologise. Either way, feel free to take it down if you want to, I don't mind either way.

I share your admiration of JahTeh and Brownie: two excellent bloggers.

R.H. said...

I asked you in an email, which you probably didn't receive; I'm no good at that racket. But mind you, suggesting I delete that comment myself is beyond outrageous! I have never deleted my own comments and never would.
Others did plenty of that for me.

-Robert.
Most deleted commenter in blog history.