Why I Do This
As perhaps representative of my life, I now turn to employ a practice I once looked upon with disdain, blogging. This leaves me with two choices: feel like a hypocrite, or no longer disdain blogging. I'm going to go with the latter.
In fact, this afternoon, as I sat entirely without shame in the "Diet & Health" section at Barnes n Nobles reading a novel picked up from the "New Fiction" piles, it occurred to me that blogging would not only be fine, but maybe a good idea. You see, the novel I picked up was a good one, in its many pages, there lacked that ill-defined but distinctly onerous quality I usually refer to as "shitty writing". By contrast, my journal of late has been full of shit. College social science has taught me well the art of prolixity, rehash, and overanalysis. On top of that, I was keeping my journal on the computer, which gave me a sense of infinite space in which to spin off from one inchoate thought to another without any structure or consequence. STRUCTURE! CONSEQUENCE! I yelled to no one in particular, that's what my writing needs. So now I am blogging. Perhaps it will help my writing . . .
If you're still unconvinced, here is what Virginia Woolf, in one of her novels a good 80 years ago, has to say about why it is good to blog. We pick up the scene where Lillie Briscoe stares impotently at her unfinished painting, and Mr. Ramsay, James and Cam reach the lighthouse ending the novel where, as usual, nothing actually happened:
"Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was--her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision."
So, that is why I do this.
In fact, this afternoon, as I sat entirely without shame in the "Diet & Health" section at Barnes n Nobles reading a novel picked up from the "New Fiction" piles, it occurred to me that blogging would not only be fine, but maybe a good idea. You see, the novel I picked up was a good one, in its many pages, there lacked that ill-defined but distinctly onerous quality I usually refer to as "shitty writing". By contrast, my journal of late has been full of shit. College social science has taught me well the art of prolixity, rehash, and overanalysis. On top of that, I was keeping my journal on the computer, which gave me a sense of infinite space in which to spin off from one inchoate thought to another without any structure or consequence. STRUCTURE! CONSEQUENCE! I yelled to no one in particular, that's what my writing needs. So now I am blogging. Perhaps it will help my writing . . .
If you're still unconvinced, here is what Virginia Woolf, in one of her novels a good 80 years ago, has to say about why it is good to blog. We pick up the scene where Lillie Briscoe stares impotently at her unfinished painting, and Mr. Ramsay, James and Cam reach the lighthouse ending the novel where, as usual, nothing actually happened:
"Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was--her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision."
So, that is why I do this.
posted by Quang Tran at 3:53 PM
1 Comments:
Just surfed in,
and I'll check back
with U!
:)
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