BIROCO.COM ~ Metablogging, & Pablo Neruda in the garden

Metablogging, & Pablo Neruda in the garden

APRIL 5 03 – Rebecca Mead apparently wrote a famous article on 'blogging' in the New Yorker. Some say it spawned the phenomenon whereby half the world now seems to have a blog and the other half is reading it (I wonder who my one person is?). I mentioned to four friends last month that I was thinking of 'doing a blog'. None of them knew what a blog was. I felt both relieved and somewhat soiled by my advance knowledge. I said: 'Well, I don't read them myself, most of them are crap.' What's a blog? they asked. 'Web-log, blog, like an online journal… but I'm more thinking of doing dated essays,' I said, excusing myself, starting to feel I was being sucked into a place I didn't want to go, admitting to myself that I had no life and all my cultural references were now in cyberspace.

'All the books I read are on XHTML and CSS,' I said to Gyrus, who I bumped into in the library the other day while looking for a DVD, 'the sun's coming out, I want to sit in the garden reading Pablo Neruda again.'

So anyway, Rebecca Mead's article, yeah, it's incisive, and interesting if you know of the people she's writing about – i.e., if you've read their blogs, in which case it's already too late for you, you're part of the conceit that makes media stars out of people who have nothing better to do than keep a blog. I should talk. I came upon Mead's article surfing the web empire of accessibility guru and amusingly rude gay man Joe (very Orton) Clark, one of whose blogs is at http://fawny.org/

He has deconstructed Rebecca Mead's article.

Well Joe Clark's a funny bloke and an astute commentator. I'm glad he said this, it saves me getting into it too deep. The bottom line is that anything has its attached 'scene', and scenes are dull, self-referential posture-paradises for people who hold onto impressions of themselves as 'belonging'. I hope anything I do only bears a superficial resemblance to what they do. They probably think the same way. Oh dear, it's starting…

Hell, even William Gibson has a blog now.

I've never read Neuromancer but his blog is interesting, talking in Barcelona with Jorge Luis Borges' former personal assistant somehow that has the air of real life about it, or at least the literary life, rather than incessant chatter about web technologies, imaginary friends with other blogs, and amateur pundit drivel on the war. Well, I only read three of Gibson's entries, there is too much to read everywhere. Glanced in at Gibson's discussion message-boards. Teenagers talking crap and typically empty newsgroup stuff. I've had more interesting conversations about the best way to pickle onions. Although I liked this that Gibson wrote, in his very first entry on starting his blog on Jan 6, 2003, probably referring to those same message-board people:

So welcome, and special thanks to those of you who arrived early and started colonizing the place before it was even completed. That really cheered me up, a couple of weeks ago. I don’t have to feel I'm moving into an empty (and dishearteningly brand-new) structure. There is already some human space here, the start of that sense of duration and habitation, and soon there'll be, I hope, more.

In spite of (or perhaps because of) my reputation as a reclusive quasi-Pynchonian luddite shunning the net (or word-processors, depending on what you Google) I hope to be here on a more or less daily basis.

Joe Clark ('Junior Member' on the discussion boards), the same Joe Clark, writes there that he has annotated Gibson's novel 'Pattern Recognition'. Why, he doesn't say. Surely only obscure and enigmatic classics of the ancient world are worthy of annotation, and the odd medieval occult or cryptography treatise.

I once had someone who is annotating Alan Moore's comic Promethea writing to me on an almost daily basis asking me questions about the various occult minutiae of Promethea. In the end I told him I'd ask Alan (right). So I asked Alan, 'What did you mean when you wrote about this qabalistic pathway called "The Fountain", there isn't a qabalistic fountain path, this guy who's annotating Promethea keeps emailing me asking me questions about it.' Alan looks at me: 'I made that shit up Joel…' Now you know the inner workings of creative talent, the deep significance embedded in each creative choice that some worker ant will later write a commentary on, annotating every detail with voluminous notes. I smiled: 'Now I understand why you aren't on email.'

Anil Dash writes on March 27 03 in his weblog:

Two or three years ago, I read about a dozen weblogs. Now I actively track nearly a hundred, with another hundred that I either check infrequently or read because they're linked from the sites I am already visiting.

I think he's supposed to be 'someone' in the world of blogs. Apparently he caused a stir at some annual American bloggers' conference called SXSW:

The second idea that I really believe in, despite the fact that nearly everyone who heard it thought I was either being crazy or facetious, was that in 2 or 3 years, many of us will be reading 10,000 weblogs.

To me, he's just one off the slushpile I needn't look at again. I'm whittling down from six.

I'm finding as I look further into this that the 'blog VIPs' (so-called 'A-list'), apart from a handful like Jeffrey Zeldman of zeldman.com and Dean Allen of textism, and Griff of ultramicroscopic, who can write and are funny and informative, are mostly involved in creating a world that resembles a virtual house of cards, blog leaning precariously on blog scaling the heights of sheer persistence in having nothing much of interest to say. Thankfully, I don't have a hundred blogs 'I actively track' and a further hundred as spares to feed my festering self-referential gloryhole ('did they mention me today?'). I am an outsider even in a world that creates outsiders. I want no part of it. I call this research to write it off, and then I can get on with what I do. I see no sense of community in one weblog 'blogging' another, just a sad collapsed world, chastening evidence of what Hakim calls 'the demise of the physical world' (see his letter to me in the about section). Is it too late to knock this on the head and go and live in a hut in the mountains?

Well, I won't be creeping round the established blogsters hoping for a mention in dispatches. There's even the Bloggies now, awards for blogs. Gawd. I don't want to hear any more. And as I write, two guys and a girl stop outside my window looking in the front garden, halted in their tracks by a blue flower: 'There it is! Like a bluebell. I want to know what it is.' I felt like shouting out 'grape hyacinth' through the open window, but then the guy uttered an excellently intoned 'Mun-key' and they walked away.

Quite without any effort on my part, even the flowers came up of their own accord, it dawned on me this guy had been walking down the road mentioning one particular garden he'd seen the other day that was filled with this beautiful blue flower, he wanted to show it to his friends, and then suddenly they got to my garden and it became a cause for celebration. Made me think, maybe an online journal can be like that. To hell with 'viewing figures' and hitting a thousand a day or 50,000. Bees come to the garden regardless. I just sit in it. Having a blog that's popular with 50,000 people a day with no taste must be like when the flying ants hatch out.

Sunny day, pretty girls in flouncy summery short dresses and shades. I'm going outside now.

Sundown, and an afterthought: maybe sometimes you come across a blog and find yourself reading it and liking something of what's gone into it, and maybe she's pretty too and intelligent and has interesting web design ideas, like this chick and waitress. And before you know it you've spent half an hour reading about something and nothing for no apparent reason. And that's good and you may return even. But why does one do this? Is it to find out why people do what they do as a clue to find out why I do what I do? And as I look behind where I'm writing this I see she wrote on March 25 03:

how come i can't read any good books anymore? the last book i finished was joan didion's 'play it as it lays' which, while well-written, wasn't interesting and didn't have any good characters or a plot. i used to read books and get into them, really enjoy them, spend entire afternoons with them. what happened?

how come i don't do anything good anymore? the last few things i did were the same things i always do, drinking wine and playing darts and blabbing about nothing to whoever will listen. i used to seek out new stuff every day, stuff i'd never done before, stuff that was different. what happened?

What happened indeed. What did happen? Well at least I read some Pablo Neruda in the garden. It's always the lines I initially think are rubbish that are the ones that stay with me:

The wind is a horse:
hear how he runs
through the sea, through the sky.

Beautiful in Spanish:

El viento es un caballo:
óyelo cómo corre
por el mar, por el cielo

[From: 'Wind on the Island', in 'The Captain's Verses' (Los versos del Capitán).]

Ultimately, the web is simply a medium. Learning web design for me was like learning to set letterpress books in lead type in a composing stick, tying up the letters with thin string so they don't collapse to form 'Pie' on transferring to the type tray, placing the chase (a strong metal frame) around the type and packing out the space with accurately planed pieces of wood, gently tapping with a small mallet on a block of wood on the top of the type to make sure everything is at type-height and no spaces are (responsible for black rectangles you sometimes see between words in letterpress books, where the space is at type-height and has taken ink from the rollers), 'locking up the forme', and slotting it into the press.

That and making a good impression was a learning curve, and so is web design. I'm doing it because publishing and communication is in my blood. But with the web it's easy to get side-tracked, it can assimilate you like the Borg and become a curious form of halflight reality. There is every reason to stay away from it. But the cost of staying away from it is being unable to take advantage of it as a medium.

Hakim's words 'I refuse compensation for the demise of the physical world' keep coming back to me, like I've made it my koan. He doesn't even have an electronic typewriter, still stubs his fingers on a manual.

There was a time when I lived in the wilderness and made chapattis from flour carried in my rucksack and water from a mountain beck. Like the penetration of superhighways into the wilds and logging companies marching faster than a column of army ants into the rain-forest (did you know a forest fire can outrun a galloping horse?), virtual reality pushes back physical reality into little pockets of resistance.

Coupled with that, most of the planet is hooked on television, and we even have additions to the language to describe the lethargy and lack of spirit it induces ('couch potato'). My TV went in the bin over ten years ago during an episode of the 'X-files' (amazing how many people ask me 'Which episode?' when I tell them that, rather than 'Why?').

Why? Because I needed to make the decision during something I regarded as the best it had to offer, then I would know that the rest would not be missed. That and the fact that it was conking out and would only keep a stable picture if turned through 90 degrees on its side. So I was lying rather uncomfortably on my side on the floor watching this great episode of X-files sideways on and I just thought to myself, has it come to this, this is fucking ridiculous, and I unplugged it, carried it out to the bin, dropped it in, went inside and got a hammer and came back and smashed in the tube (so it wouldn't implode in the dustcart). Computers, the web, it's different, but just as dangerously engulfing. Doubtless I'll have more to say about this at some point.

Having mentioned the Bloggies, in searching for a web address for them to add a link above I came across… the Anti-Bloggies. Now this is funny… and the winner in the 'Most Dead Links' category is…

I visited 'Most Banal Content', entitled One more day… Okay, so it's bland, but at least it's completely unpretentious and not trying to be knowing. My first reaction to this blog must have been like that of those who chose to expose it to ridicule on the Anti-Bloggies. A certain feeling of snickering superiority, perhaps a degree of dumbfoundedness on reading the daily life of a person who monotonously catalogues the trivial surface events of the day, without any great interest in their interpretation, has uninspiring hobbies, and who does not appear to have any richness of inner life. As I delved further, however, I began to think one should not judge another's life in this way, that a blog so unpretentious deserved more respect.

I may return to this blog time and time again with the fatal fascination a kitten has for diving into an empty brown paper bag. Perhaps one day it will move me to tears. And therein lies the enigma of a blog, some certain elusive thing I had been looking for, and failed to find in the numerous very slick enterprises of web professionals attempting to appear cool in their time off.

Actually, the tears are here already. Reading it further, it touches me like when I first realised my unintellectual sunk-into-an-armchair-tv-watching father, later to be in a coma, had a life too, had lived and done things that I would never do. I found out after he died that at the age of 11, when his older brother Frank was knocked off his bike and killed, that he stopped speaking for two years. Ordinary folk, what lives they lead, what stories are locked up within them. I can't explain it, something to do with compassion, I know that, something to do with not looking down on others from our stupid lofty heights and thinking we're better than them and their banal lives. Lessons come from the most unexpected sources, the extraordinary welling up from the ordinary.

Finally, apparently THIS, according to 'The Bloggies', is the best weblog in the world for 2003, as well as winner in 'Best Humorous Weblog' and 'Best American Weblog' and 'Best Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgendered Weblog'. I think it must be to make other bloggers feel okay about themselves, I mean if this kind of unfunny self-preening wannabe-righton flake-on-a-lark webpro trash is somehow regarded as being the best the genre can offer then surely it is encouragement for anyone to give it a go, even gran, since the whole goddamn arena is flooded with crap and starved of quality. Hell, you could be an overnight sensation just by writing about masturbation and giggling. A million twats without an ounce of taste will be camped out on your cyber-doorstep every morning to read about you peeling an orange and peeing down your leg. Yeah, let me track those hundred blogs, like I've got nothing better to do than check out every morning what some stubbed-out fagend scribbler is saying about ME. Right, that's about all I've got to say about 'blog culture'. But I'll keep my eye out for any gems in the shitpile.

What after all makes blog content banal?

I mean, I can go days and days without seeing another living soul, bar a black cat who visits me, just pottering about, going to the shops, doing my stuff, absorbed in something or other, living what to some may seem an empty life. But I am utterly aware of myself and my status in the universe, I have a breathtakingly sharp sense of philosophy and the utter absurdity of many things, when I encounter people I have a charisma hard to fathom in the sense of accounting for its origin, hey he's just a guy who potters around, my conversation is littered with magnificent similes and wit, thrown away like skin flakes. Little of the minutiae of my existence goes unappreciated, for all I am also acutely aware of great limitation and restriction bearing down upon me, and a certain lack of love, but what the hell, I absorbed and inwardly nodded to the teachings to be found in the Enchiridion of Epictetus long ago.

So to realise that many blogs are indeed banal is saddening. Either people trying to make their lives sound cool and fulfilled, but frequently lying to themselves, or a kind of deadness in the eyes that you can see all about these days in cities. There is no richness of inner life to be witnessed at all in many blogs. And the frightening thing is that I dare say many people trudge through their lives carrying this monkey of unappreciated nothingness on their backs without even realising it. It is a vegetative state passing for life.

I'd much rather read about a person's loneliness than some cool party they attended, subsequently talked up forgetting to mention it was a complete drag that left them feeling empty inside. Performing monkeys I can see at the zoo, whereas someone just willing to say for a moment that they're not really fulfilled by this half-life that's going on everywhere can be paradoxically enriching. It cuts through the pretence that most seem to want to indulge about life. Sure, you open yourself up for poseurs to look down on you, but what the fuck do they know about real life? Surely it should be a concern of anyone to know whether they have really lived? Many blogs seem to illustrate that their authors aren't yet aware of the depth of their own feelings. Or, at least, few seem to take this as their subject matter. I wonder why not?