Category: blog meta

Blogging and me, we go way back

I’m not claiming to have been a pioneer, by any means, but I became aware of the form early enough to be the one trying to explain it to lots of others.

“It’s basically a website,” I remember telling one of my hipper, younger professors in the hallway of the UMBC American Studies department in 2002, “but it gets updated all the time, and the most recent post is on top, and you can make these subtextual jokes by linking certain words to other pages…”

I had no idea what I was talking about, really, I just sensed some sort of unifying form under sites like Kottke.org, Talking Points Memo (back when it was just Josh Marshall in his living room), Matt Yglesias, etc., and decided to try to imitate it.

Courtesy of Internet Archive, you can see how my first blog, Talking Out of School (“A Baltimore-based weblog of education news and scuttlebutt, with an emphasis on education politics and justice, K-12, testing, and curriculum, updated regularly”), channeled that early combination of linking to real news sites’ articles interspersed with commentary that wasn’t half as pithy as I hoped.

Talking Out of School debuted in January of 2003, an auspicious year in the history of blogging. Jason Kottke had been going strong since 1998, but Heather Armstrong had only gotten fired a couple of months earlier.

As I acquaint myself with the history of that time, I’m tickled to realize that I opened my free account on the Blogger platform (home to all of those sites that are subdomains of “.blogspot.com”) a month before its acquisition by Google and a half-year before the releases of WordPress and TypePad. Not a pioneer, no, but then you couldn’t have said every inch of the information superhighway was paved yet, either.

Rewind a little further. I had operated a personal website called Margin Release since the fall of 2002. Amy designed the site for me, having learned how to use Adobe Dreamweaver in one of her classes. I guess that means it wasn’t quite hand-coded but it was obviously pre-CSS and WYSISWYG dashboards, so even minor typo corrections required their own FTP uploads over a dialup connection. (Remember this sound?)

So when I figured out that you could attach a Blogger blog to an existing domain name as if it were part of your site, I was all over it. Hence, first, Talking Out of School, and, later, a somewhat more personal/writerly blog called Behind the Mule, both subdomains of my original Margin Release website.

Then, in 2005, having fallen under the influence of Tony Pierce , The Pants, Raymi the Minx, OneLifeTakeTwo, and various sex bloggers whose names I can no longer recall, I formed the ambition to diarize and ramble and share potentially shocking personal tidbits about myself online. Why not? It seemed to be the done thing.

In this mood, I launched a new blog-focused site called Margin Notes. The earliest date Internet Archive crawled Margin Notes seems to have been June 30, 2005, which might very well have been the day of my debut post. According to my Dreamhost account records, I had bought the domain name only ten days earlier.

I took Margin Notes in various directions in the ensuing years. (Here’s a snapshot from 2008.) Fortunately for my career, family, and other innocent bystanders I never really went in the shocking tidbits/sex blogging direction (although note that nowhere in this post have I said that I’m offering a comprehensive list of every single blog I ever started, and I’ll just leave it at that).

Sometimes I tended more in the direction of essay writing and other times more in the direction of day-by-day diary. The latter format was most pronounced during 2007, when I fell under the influence of a true blogging pioneer named James Lileks.

Lileks’s Monday-Friday Bleat intrigued me partly for its subject matter—its consideration of the small moments in each day that make up a life—and partly for the low stylistic bar it set. “This isn’t writing, it’s typing,” I’m sure I remember Lileks writing typing at some point. I adopted this as my own motto as I commenced a project of exhaustive/exhausting chronicling of my own days.

The less there is going on, the more likely I am to stay faithful to a diary—that’s been a pattern throughout my life, even going back to the days when I had to make own ink from elderberry juice and scratch my words onto bound vellum with a sharpened rooster feather. So it makes sense that this particular format flourished on Margin Notes during the eight or so months after Amy moved early to Missoula to start a new job and I remained behind in Baltimore to finish out a round three years at my first real job and pack up the house. Leading a mostly interior experience during that time, I found it easy to write about what I did all day, i.e., not much.

I’d had a similar, albeit analog, experience when I was stationed in Miami in the late 1990s. I never managed to develop much of a social life in that city—no non-Coast Guard friends, no particularly strong off-duty connections with any of my shipmates—which was bad for my morale but great for my diary keeping. I would buy large hardcover sketchbooks at Barnes and Noble (I wouldn’t spot my first Moleskine in the wild until 2002, in the gift shop of the National Building Museum) and fill page after page with a fountain pen I’d bought at the old Levenger outlet near Palm Beach.

These details are important because with me it has always been difficult to separate my fetish for the tools and act of writing from the actual, you know, stringing together of words and acquiring the craft and discipline to shape them into something others might find to be worth reading. (I’ll also point out and save for later elaboration another important fact about these and almost all of the dozens if not hundreds of notebooks I’ve kept over the years: I’ve never gone back and read a word in just about any of them.)

So I really can’t say whether I grew up wanting to be a writer (in addition to a cop and a film director and maybe a film-directing cop) or just wanting to inhabit a sort of image of someone writing by hand in a beautiful old blank book, by the light of a candle or kerosene lamp. When I wrote by fountain pen in my B&N sketchbooks, I was keeping a record of my days, yes, but also more or less consciously aping an archetypal image of the pre-modern diarist, head bent over his notebook, dipping his quill, recording his observations and experiences for what would of course be a grateful posterity.

It wasn’t just the tools and the picture they contributed to that excited me, it was also the idea of a time—the times of Pepys, Boswell, Livingston, Darwin, Thoreau—when there were few records of anything and the world felt simultaneously undiscovered and knowable, if you just took good enough notes. When I saw the “Grail Diary” carried by Indiana Jones’s father in The Last Crusade, I sensed a kindred spirit in whoever designed and created it. It seemed the perfectly archetypal physical representation of my fantasy: An obsessive project of inquiry and investigation spread across the pages of a patinated leather-bound pocket notebook worth fighting and dying for. Oh, yes!

These are the various elements that explain why, as the idea for what became this blog tickled into being, it at first appealed to me to do it as a sort of daily diary.

At various points over the last year or so, when I was under influences that especially included Karl Ove Knausgaard, I experienced a longing for what I came to think of as a sort of automaticity in my writing.

From time to time I fell into the flow of just describing a day and it was so pleasurable I never wanted to stop. When, after a year or so of having consciously sworn off blogging, the urge to publish reared its head once more, it seemed only natural to merge both elements into another attempt at a daily chronicle.

After years away from Lileks’s site, I checked back in and was pleased and inspired (if a little concerned, in some ways) to see he is still plugging away.

With no illusions that my old Margin Notes diary had been any good, my thought was that, with ten years more experience as a writer, I’d be better at the line/syntax-level and could also introduce a few refinements, such as letting each day’s entry rest for a week before performing a final round of editing and then publishing it.

Such a schedule, I hoped, would enable me to find the kinds of focal points, organization, and larger themes that had eluded me back when I was just sitting down each evening to lash out a first-this-happened-then-that account of the day. My new approach, I hoped, would allow me to both publish every day and introduce a higher quality level.

Just imagine someone has assigned you to produce a daily diary blog and work within that framework to make it as good as possible, I told myself. It’ll be a liberating restriction, like Pirsig’s brick or Lamott’s one-inch picture frame, from which your creativity can take wing.

I bought the domain name (only later realizing who I was channeling in the form the URL took), selected this year’s default WordPress theme (discarding my old obsessiveness about customization).

This would be a basic, old-fashioned diary blog, hearkening back to those heady early days of the form’s popularity. I wouldn’t monetize with Amazon affiliate links, I wouldn’t try to build a mailing list.

I would just write—like it was 2003 again.

Next: Of course, it’s not 2003 anymore.

Permission to suck is hereby granted

Okay, forget all of that noise. No carefully considered “context pieces” after all.

That was really just me worried about quality, second-guessing myself. Finding great reasons to do hold back, do nothing. Missing the whole point of this project.

As I scribbled in a notebook this very morning:

Man, this blog is giving me fits. The tension between publishing every day—with the purpose of forcing myself into at least some review loops so that I can actually get better—and the worry that I’m not better enough and should wait to start publishing every day.

That’s not the point, the point is to see what would happen if I acted like it were my assignment, my restriction, to document every day (albeit with a one-week lead time, as I’m currently conceiving of it. My worry is overblown, it’s all prospective. I will learn as I go, I will get good at this.

So that’s that! Permission to be boring, permission to publish crap, permission to suck—is hereby granted. It’s the only way to stop sucking. Remember, the point is not what I have after any given day, the point is to see what a year adds up to.

What’s going on here, anyway?

(Please note, this post has been superseded.)

I have two, possibly contradictory goals for this blog.

  • Publish every day
  • Publish material that has at least a little more shape to it than hour-by-hour diary entries

Why?

As I alluded to earlier, my goal is to find a way to do what I think of as “processing my life in writing.” I want a structure and framework—a writing life—consisting of keeping an amazing diary (privately, because of course a truly amazing diary cannot possibly be made public until I die) and finding material in that that can be shared, can be made into something at least slightly further along the continuum from private diary to essay using personal experiences to illustrate the universal and all of the rest of that memoir workshop jazz.

Call it an art project, call it an obsession. It doesn’t fit any of what A Writer is supposed to do, but it’s the kind of writing that appeals now. Gosh darn it, I’m going to try doing what I want to do for maybe a couple of years and see what comes of it.

Anyway, all of this is to say I haven’t been satisfied with my output over the last week or so, so I’m going to reset and try a new approach. The basic plan:

  • Keep diary notes each evening
  • Try to shape something out of each day’s diary notes the next morning
  • Put aside the “shaped” item for one week, then revisit, edit, and publish

Before I start that pattern—to do it well—however, I need to build up a backlog of pieces that have been processed per the above. And before I start doing exactly the above, I want to run a week of background/introductory pieces so you have some background on me, this town, and other aspects of the context of all of this. If I’m “reporting on the everyday,” I want to start by sketching out the basic circumstances where that everyday unfolds.

All of this is to say, I’m suspending daily posts—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say relieving myself of the obligation to follow the above pattern—effective immediately.

Then, on Monday, March 18, I will start that week-long run of background posts, followed the next week by jumping into the pattern I described above.

That’s not to say I won’t publish anything between now and then, but the pattern I envision for this blog—the Pirsig’s brick/Lamott’s one-inch-picture frame restrictiveness I want to subject myself to—won’t begin unfolding until then.

And perhaps my vision for the precise shape of it will have shifted by then as well. I am anything but constant.

Imagine a carpenter

A quite competent carpenter.

Just fine at understanding plans, working efficiently and accurately, and adding nice touches to her projects—touches that may sometimes be more subtle than what a non-carpenter might notice, but which give her great satisfaction.

She has spent her career for the most part working to plan, on projects commissioned by and designed for others. She has given good value, and the people who hire her once are very likely to call her for their subsequent projects. She has every reason to think of herself as a good carpenter. With each passing year, she feels a little better at it.

Nonetheless, she has never been able to shake the feeling that she wants to build… something else. She is proud of her craft, proud that her clients value her work. But being valued for her contributions to other people’s projects increasingly feels like… not enough.

She feels—has always felt—a desire to build something that feels like her, something that she can sign her name to and that will tell people who she really is. She knows, in other words, that there is a difference between being good at the specific tasks of her craft and using that craft to build something that is uniquely hers, something that no one else could have built

* * * * *

This is how I feel about my writing. Seemingly my whole life, I’ve been told—first by teachers, then professors, colleagues, and clients—I’m “good at” writing. I make a good living from it—well, a good enough living.

The good living, and the being good at writing, all mean nothing, of course.

They do not scratch the itch.

Somewhere I read a quote I cannot now locate that goes something like this:

You must write many books before you write the one you can sign your name to.

I am 44, and it feels as though I’ve been doing something like the first part of this quote for most of my life at this point. I actually haven’t written any “books,” but I’ve filled dozens or maybe even a hundred notebooks, I’ve kept blogs, I’ve published a little journalism, I’ve explored in so many directions. And I’ve let myself off the hook again and again.

For the last year, I’ve experienced something of a creative awakening. A greater level of commitment to at least practicing my writing. Up every morning at 0430 so I can get in a couple of hours every morning. This practice and the flow I experienced was initially unlocked in the fall of November 2017 by what I experienced as the suspenseful banality or maybe the banal suspense of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle.

For much of this last year, I tried to write like him. It was the first time time that I had engaged in personal writing projects that were sustained over weeks and months. But I ended up abandoning everything I wrote last year, or at least putting it aside. Who knows, perhaps I will discover something there later on.

In my fascination with Knausgaard—a horrified fascination, at times, to be sure—I discovered in myself a desire to find a way to process life in writing, more or less as it happens. Although blogging might seem a natural way to do this at first glance, early last year I decided I had abandoned blogging forever.

Perhaps I was aping the way KOK (as I abbreviate Knausgaard’s name in my journal) seemed to cut himself off from the world, to care not a whit for what the world thought of him or how his writing affected others.

Certainly this way of working strikes me as brave, and, for KOK, clearly essential—and I could readily see how, in my past blogging, I had at times been hampered too much by thinking ahead to how what I was writing might affect or be received by my audience.

So I plugged along, in private, helping my words to flow and myself to be utterly honest by telling myself over and over that I didn’t know or even care if any of it were ever published.

Suddenly, a few days ago, something changed. There are too many inputs to that change to list here or even identify for myself. But something of the sentiment can be found in, of all things, an Austin Kleon blog post from about a week ago, reflecting on why he has produced the particular body of work that he has.

All I ever wanted to do was be part of the world I loved. The world I discovered in books and art and music. I want to be part of it. I don’t care how or in what capacity.

…

What’s the point, here? Why do I even write books in the first place?

It’s just to join in the fun. To be part of that world that I love. To be in a chain that goes backwards and forwards, no matter how puny my link.

Nathaniel Hawthorne said in his 1851 preface to his Twice-Told Tales, that they were “not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart… but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world.”

That’s it.

That’s what I want.

I do, after all, want an “intercourse with the world” via writing (and via photography and podcasting). I want to run a blog that is, itself, something of a work of art, a rendering of my experience with the world.

Even in the few days since I’ve had this idea, I have felt something happening to the way I look at the world, I have felt yet another unlocking of some part of my creative self.

I want to engage with the world in writing. No time like the present, and why not every day.

Well… How did I get here?

“Maybe I’m fascinated with the middle class because it seems so different from my life, so distant from what I do. I can’t imagine living like that.”

David Byrne

I’m not living in a shotgun shack, but I am living in another part of the world.

Elkins, West Virginia is just a few hours’ drive from the city of my birth but mere driving time doesn’t paint an accurate picture of the real distance between the two places. Elkins couldn’t be more different from that place, from Miami, Seattle, New York, Berlin, Istanbul—all of the big international cities where I either lived or at one point in life would have considered it entirely likely that I would end up.

Instead here I am, a settled burgher who has now lived in this little speck of a place longer than any other spot on earth. A homeowner, a member of the local planning commission, the president of the board of a local do-gooding organization. The former city clerk.

Beautiful wife (and kids). Large automobile. My parents up on the hill, a five-minute walk away.

“We’re largely unconscious,” David Byrne told NPR in 2000. “You know, we operate half awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else.”

The twentysomething version of myself would have been shocked to learn how it has turned out by this point—shocked, and, dare I say, disappointed, perhaps even paralyzed by dread. I cannot express enough how opposed I once was to this kind of life.

What would really shock that earlier version of me is how much I have come to love it—this life, this strange little town.

I think it’s a mistake to compare how our lives have turned out to how the twenty-something version of ourselves would have wanted. That’s when we knew the least, that’s when we were trying on beliefs like shirts we couldn’t afford, turning this way and that in the mirror, imagining what if.

From the moment I first heard “Once in a Lifetime,” I suspected it had something important to tell me. Back then it was a prospective message—in fact, the way the song is worded suggests it is being spoken by an older person to a younger one. The cascade of lines beginning with “you may…” evoked the wide-open possibilities of the future.

I heard a note of warning. At the age of, say, 16 or 18 or 21 I certainly had no use for the idea of beautiful houses or large automobiles or any of the other well-chosen totems of a square, settled, middle-class existence. But that was all right, the song also held out the possibility of escape and reinvention.

Into the blue again, after the money’s gone.

I listened to this song most frequently during my four years before the mast, my shock-resistant Discman velcroed to the yellow metal wall of my little coffin-sized bunk as our ship labored through the rough waters of the Bering Sea. I was in my early twenties, I’d left college halfway through, no one back at school would answer my letters, I’d been unlucky in love. My life felt as wide open and unimaginable as the water stretching on all sides to the horizon. I carried around the feeling this song gave me like a sugar cube melting on my tongue.

There is water at the bottom of the ocean.

Like a tightrope walker, sometimes it’s not a good idea to pay too much attention to what you are doing. One second you are striding along confidently, then you look down at your feet and the ground and go all wobbly. What am I doing all the way up here?

How do I work this?

The person I was in my early twenties had a cartoon conception of the writing life. Brooklyn apartment, stubble, cigarettes. Need I say more? For a long time I felt like I shouldn’t write anymore, because I didn’t have the right kind of life to write about. I had let the days go by, I had ended up in the wrong place. It wasn’t that I didn’t love the people I’d ended up with. I just couldn’t love the person I’d turned out to be, the things I’d walked away from, let drop, failed to follow through on.

But words kept bubbling up in me anyway. I realized, I have the life and material that I have. There is nothing stopping me from writing about it.

There is water underground.

That’s the project here. Letting the days go by, finding bits to hold up and brush off and show to you.

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Thanks for reading.

If you like any of it, maybe you could share it with a friend.

If I do it at all, I must delay no longer

“[H]ow few of life’s days and hours (and they not by relative value or proportion, but by chance) are ever noted.

“Probably another point too, how we give long preparations for some object, planning and delving and fashioning, and then, when the actual hour for doing arrives, find ourselves still quite unprepared, and tumble the thing together, letting hurry and crudeness tell the story better than fine work.

“At any rate I obey my happy hour’s command, which seems curiously imperative.”

-Walt Whitman, Specimen Days

And we’re off.