Why Write a Blog?
[Frequently Unasked Question #1]

January 1, 2008

The above notebook is one I kept from November 12, 1991 to February 15, 1992. The picture I chose for the cover is a nod to Walt Whitman's "The Open Road".. but also a very specific image: the dirt road that led out of Three Hills, Alberta. I had no car when I went to school there, but I walked for miles in every direction down the center of dirt roads just like this. Then there is that Ziggy cartoon with the caption: "Wow.. what a nightmare... My whole life flashed before my eyes... and Siskel and Ebert were giving it two thumbs down!" I always liked Ziggy.

I would be embarrassed to copy out any passages from this "diary" (as I called it). I include a picture of the cover here just to make the point that writing happens. For me it hardly feels like it was a choice. I felt a need to sort out experience and figure out what I thought about things. Then I clipped and kept lots of the ephemera that surrounded me, from church bulletins to comics to museum postcards of paintings I liked. My blogging is a direct descendent of this earlier interest in commenting on life and events.. and indeed it is a much more effective medium for capturing certain aspects of everyday life.

So why did I fill notebooks like this with longhand thoughts? And now why do I fill this column with typed text? I don't know if other people feel the same, but I often have vague responses to what I read or view.. or experience. The problem is that these responses are unformed and uncollected. They are more like intuitions than connected ideas. It is through the process of writing that I learn to put together my responses into something coherent. When I watch an interesting film I come away with a handful of critical comments settling in my head.. which might carry me some way in a conversation.. but it is only through writing that I get an actual opinion. As I write I often surprise myself by finding new connections and filling in gaps.

Why, then, should a blog be a public document and not a private one.. more like a traditional diary? My main response would be that one of the ways I have learned from my favorite teachers is to observe and learn from the cast of their minds. In other words, it is not a polished journal article that I most enjoy hearing, but the way a person goes about thinking and asking questions about the text. I learn just by being around people who know how to ask careful and surprising questions. The blog post functions as my intellectual sandbox for forming opinions and experimenting with ways to approach material.. but I also trust there is a possibility that others will both enjoy these critical musings and perhaps even begin to ask new questions about their own experiences.

That is not to set myself up as a teacher in this blog! I would much prefer the idea of a "friend".. which is what my favorite teachers have now mostly become. The notion of the blog as "friend" brings me inevitably to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.. my vote-getter for greatest proto-blogger: