The Dancing Sausage Web Journal

I finally got around to reading the article in the New Yorker about Blogger. It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. In fact, it was kind of frivolous; felt like a return to the bad old Tina Brown days. I guess that was intentional. It was a light fluffy piece which didn’t come to a point… form follows function, I suppose, as this was an article about the software which makes posts like the following possible/ubiquitous:

Friday, November 10, 2000

Last night i went to see Charlies Angels with my friends Jami and Pat. Right now im on the phone with my friend. Im sooooooooo bored and my mom wants me to clean my room. Tommorrow i have to go to a bat mitzvah for my friend Allie. There is going to be only a few people that i know. I better look good, lol! Well w/e

Ilana

posted by Ilana H at Friday, November 10, 2000

(from 220 Kelvin, someone else’s blog. next entry begins “I’m bored.”)

Somehow I was cowering in the fear that the New Yorker would ream Blogger for the way it trivializes the written word… well, I spose it doesn’t need to; all it needs to do is gesture in Blogger’s general direction with a knowing smirk, which is essentially what it’s done; a bear can swallow all the bees it has to.

so, I was cowering? yes. Too much of my ego rests on my writing, no matter where I put it. I’m enjoying having a means to self-publish– it’s gotten me to write more regularly than anything but email. At the same time, I am always aware I’m standing in public, a self-consiousness I wish I could overcome. I feel the need to be all-knowing and all-saying. I had the same reaction to this feeling when I was writing for the Omen at Hampshire: I tend to write rigid, unimaginative essays with a pedantic tone.

I’ll admit it: it’s because I have this desperate drive to be Remembered, or for the moment, Known. I’m casually spreading the link to my site around wherever I can. I was delighted when people from the IMC suddenly started poking at this site without my telling them it was there; I realized it was because people were using the link in my sig. I have this stupid fantasy… Mark Hugo sits around hatching wild get-rich-quick schemes which involve Winnebagos and wrestling and porn, maxing out his credit limit, and me, I stay up way too late typing and hoping someone will see this and give me a job doing John McPhee work without my having to work my way up through a string of nasty proofreading positions.

Ultimately this comes down to not wanting to be erased, not to die without having somehow meant something to the stream of history. Does everyone feel this way? I’m not sure I’m dealing with it in appropriate ways.

OK, no more meta. Not for a while.