Friday, July 31, 2009

blog block blah

haven't been blogging lately. I'm feeling somewhat paralyzed about writing (either blogs or poetry, though I'm not seeing much of a difference lately besides what medium I'm planning on presenting a thing in). Paralyzed, not by lack of ideas, but by a flood of ideas.

Keeping up with a hundred or so poetry blogs, more blogs, coffee blogs, local blogs, "culture" blogs, political blogs, music blogs, Reddit, rap beef, books (bought a bunch more Acker, and a 3 foot stack of new books I'm working through), music (just hip-hop and noise right now), "the news", comics, webcomics, "film" (hk action movies and Masaokis' YouTube channel), found out Zizek has a twitter (last tweet: "Bilbo Baggins is a perfect example of a liberal communist").

--started a blog about racism,
--started a blog about the word "crunch",
--started a blog about various people's conception of high/low art,
--started a blog about Harriet's new comment voting system,
--started various blogs about more SlowPo thoughts,
--thought about writing a blog "close reading" The Game's rap "beef" (just one-sided at this point) with Jay-Z.
--argued for a while with Joseph Hutchinson about conceptual poetry,
--argued for a while with Seth Abramson about the Henry Louis Gates bullshit,
--have begun a long study of Masaokis' YouTube cooking movies.
--began vague structuring of a blog on Parkour and Freerunning
--started about 30 or so poems in the last week,
--our noise band has been practicing for several hours a week,
--just joined some artist's group, not sure what we're doing, drinking and talking about art I guess.

I'm not making this list because I think it's impressive, I'm making it because I haven't thought of myself as "doing much lately" and it's just not true. So I just started listing things off to prove it to myself.

I go through periods where I think things aren't "worth" blogging about. And really I'm not sure what my problem is. I'm not sure how to pace myself with all this shit, cause I care a lot about all of it, and it even all fits together in my mind. It all has bearing on what I'm trying to do with the Pathologos blog. I'm just too fucking fascinated by every little thing (this morning, I spent an hour reading about frogs). I'm feeling very engaged with everything, which is good since it helps to counter this feeling of impending doom that seems to be settling over metro Detroit (15% unemployment for the state and rising). The stories I hear on the bus seem to get more depressing by the week. I'm happy though, for the most part.
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Some time ago, Ron Silliman said he was going to blog better and blog less this year (paraphrased). I don't really have any complaints about the result (and with 2 or more dauntingly invaluable link dumps a week, there's nothing to complain about). However, I don't see a connection between the value of material and the frequency of posts in a blog. In fact, I want to blog way more often, with less fully formed ideas. In general I'd like to see way more writing that doesn't pose like it knows what the fuck it's talking about.

I've said it before, but I'm way more interested in people's notes. I want to hear about what people notice, and what they're thinking through, more than I want them to force out some final word on the matter.

2 comments:

saracita said...

I like where your head's at.

The Smack Daddy said...

Why don't you change the name of your blog to "Pathofrogos" and just blog about frogs?