Random Thoughts About Blogging

“Hi, it’s me!”

I hadn’t heard her voice in almost a year. But I recognized it right away. We’d known each other for over twenty years. Lately, our friendship had run into some difficulties. We couldn’t agree on how to get out of those rocky shoals. So I was kind of surprised to hear her on my telephone line.

“Look, I don’t have a lot of time. I’m just in town overnight. Are you free at 11 tonight, for like half an hour?”

“You’re kiddiing, right?” It was already ten.

“No, c’mon, be spontaneous, come out and have a glass of wine with me!”

“Actually, no, not gonna happen” I said. “I have to be up at 5:30 to prep for my-”

“Oh yeah I know. You’re teaching. Oh, and it was so sad reading about your cat! I guess you have a new book out, which is great- oh, here’s my cab. I’m so glad we’re back in touch. Well, gotta go!

I’ve been thinking about blogs and blogging.

Thinking about what a blog can say, or do.

Wondering about what it means for bloggers to reveal themselves week after week.

Who are these people, invisibely visiting?

You invited them!

You wanted to be hyperreal.

They know too much, and too little.

You try to remember what your life was like before blogging. Did people call you on the phone and ask how you were? Did you once send letters, with stamps on them?

In an online scholarly article about food blogging, Isabelle de Solier writes, “The literary and photographic documentation of home cooking on blogs (…) allows foodies (…) to become the authors of their own culinary discourse, whether it is through the subtle inflections or significant
adaptations of cookbook recipes, or the production of their own recipes. This discursive
authorship positions foodie bloggers as culinary authorities, or amateur-professionals, in
the eyes of many of their readers.”

She’s not really telling us anything we don’t already know: Blogging provides a certain control over language. If language is power, then it allows me, in some tiny way, to upset the conventional ways in which language constructs me. It gives me a different way to be a citizen.

But what about all those things I can’t control?

I’m going to continue these self-reflexive thoughts, as I figure out some new philosophical and practical directions for this blog, amid a swirl of life changes.