I've been having a hard time with this in regard to Abstract Citizen.
Via Slate, a great piece on Internet writing.
It's hard not to quote the whole thing because the first half is insightful, so I'll settle for the same excerpt that Jack Shafer liked so much:
A text on the internet rarely takes for granted your decision to read it or to continue reading it. There is often, instead, a jazzy, hectoring tone. At home my boyfriend and I use a certain physical gesture as shorthand to describe it. To make it, extend your index fingers and your thumbs so that your hands resemble toy pistols. Then waggle them before you, like a dude in a cheesy Western, while you wink, dip your knees, and lopsidedly drawl, "Heyyy." The internet is always saying, "Heyyy." It is always welcoming you to the party; it is always patting you on the back to congratulate you for showing up. It says, You know me, in a collusive tone of voice, and Wanna hear something funny? and Didja see who else is here?
There are some good exceptions to this, and I'm not sure whether this overall writing tendency is something to be avoided or embraced. I think my general preference is to avoid whatever proclivity seems to be the most heavily trafficked at that point in our particular cultural history, but a preference isn't an axiom and I am human, after all.
I've also fancied myself a pretty good imitator of style and tone and that I can be...chameleonic? Protean? Slippery? Probably all of the above. Even now I'm probably just doing my best impression of how I think a carefully reasoned thought process should read. Which is sort of maddening, not knowing what is yours and what you are just borrowing. Do my poems sound like Robert Hass because we tune in to the same things in life, or simply because I am [shudder] Coldplay to his Radiohead?
So when I wanted to start a blog, I had a few reference points - unfogged has a great community with intelligent discussions although they can veer towards the pseudo-aphoristic and precious (but very funny nonetheless); a topic-blog like globalguerillas is really impressive, exposing a kind of universality of content through a very narrow topic but I'm not a specialist yet, so that option was out too; there are a few great local blogs, like whyihatedc and of course there's Amanda and Jordan and through them I even reconnected a bit with John, all of which adds up to an abundance of entertaining writing.
There are blogs written by people whom I don't know that are more personal but engaging - for example the raw Didionism of the defunct belleinthebigapple (well, not quite defunct but it's a much more focused blog now - the archive is still a goldmine of quality writing though) and outtamindouttasite (I actually commented on there for the first time today!), which is local and tips me off to stuff on washingtonian.com that I would otherwise have missed, but that's not my can of worms either.
The friend who dubs himself not so myteriously as 'The Black Rider' and I even tried to start a secret blog together, that we told no one about, and as he recently reminded me, over champagne on his deck, through the din of other conversations, "We really nailed Jaki Byard's birthday." He's right - no one saw it, but the corollary is, no one can take it away from us either. Unseen workers in a tiny darkened corridor of the Internet gave the late Jaki Byard a calm and deliberate salute on his birthday. We really nailed it and we know it.
The problem is that I don't want to do too much wondering out loud here, for the risk of sounding like I'm wearing a tutu, sitting in bed, in my underwear, smoking a cigarette, typing on my apple, wondering just what relationships are all about. But I will allow myself one moment here - as I was complaining just this past weekend in Boston that I have no idea what this space is about. Am I trying to be erudite, academic-lite? Do I just want people to know that I really like the beer list at the Black Squirrel and that I can't wait to see "The Dark Knight"? Do I want to post poems, short prose pieces, etc, and have this be a creative corner? Am I trying to get people involved, do I want active conversations? Is this a piece of my life, or is it divorced from it? Do I want people to read it, or do I just want people to read it without my wanting them to? I have no idea and just asking myself these questions makes me feel like an angsty teen again.
One of my favorite things to talk about is process (part of the reason why I was such a sucker for Obama's early rhetoric.) I'm hoping all of my quesions get resolved in the process, because maybe sometimes we can tend towards simplicity and resolution rather than chaos. Like a good romantic comedy often does.
Happy Friday!
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