Reading between the blogs
Pondering the five or ten or eight or however many blogs I can't live without returns attention to my persistent hesitation about my participation in the 2010 Blogathon. I write "my participation" because I want to be clear, whatever my personal qualms, that I appreciate Michelle Rafter's work putting the Blogathon together and that I am impressed I with the project's ability to stimulate writing minds, to stoke creativity, and to develop community among writers. When I composed the "Hesitations" post, I don't think I made clear what I meant about only writing when I have something to say. Amanda Hirsch of Tastee Pudding responded to my post to try to urge me not to be so hard on myself as a writer and to remember that there are many creative ways to respond to and recollect the world around us. I do agree with her, and I agree that having a daily writing schedule adds discipline. I feel in many ways that I'm still trying to develop that discipline for myself as a writer, even as I near my one year anniversary of finishing grad school and, eventually, two years since I worked full time as a newspaper editor and writer. Still, does developing that discipline mean I have to constantly produce? Being a disciplined writer doesn't necessarily mean being a public writer.
It comes back to personal decisions. What do we want our writing to be about? What do we focus it on? Where and how do we publicize it? How frequently do we publish? How thorough is our writing? I'm avoiding adding the question "how do we define a blog" because "blog" is a meaningless word, as is "newspaper," "book," "show," etc. Words are words. Information is information. How we combine words and present information is all that matters. We can decide to arrange them to represent reality as we comprehend it and think others might accept, to construct fantasy, to reflect emotion, to inspire, to dissuade, and so on.
What I grapple with is what my definition for Lascher at Large is, particularly because I spend a good part of my days trying to trade on that definition. I pitch editors, apply for jobs, and develop community all so often by referring to this site that has layered upon it now so many different meanings, so very unlikely not the meanings I originally intended. I want to accept that shift in direction, but I can't deny it's drifting from what I want with this site.
This is all one very long route toward addressing today's theme for the Blogathon: a list of favorite blogs we can't live without. With all I've said in mind, I have to share, simply, Todd Sieling's Slow Blogging Manifesto. Not a blog itself, Sieling's manifesto can be viewed in contrast with the Blogathon, though I take something else away from comparing the two (the ability to do so being itself a core theme of the manifesto): both share an encouragement of a deliberate approach to writing. Clearly what Rafter intends with the Blogathon is to develop in participants an attitude to consciously write and blog, to develop at our own pace, in our own way, what we are and what we mean to the world. Though she places a trellis along which we might meander, we still determine the direction, the rate, and even whether we will do so, and I don't think that attitude is in opposition to the Slow Blogging Manifesto.
Slowness is trendy these days, but those who grasp it, grasp it because it has meaning. And when we say slowness, we don't mean slowness. We mean consciousness. So, I could refer to one of my other favorite blogs, the simple yet consistently helpful, inspiring Zen Habits. However, in thinking of the recent attention paid to slowness, it's worth noting another favorite site of mine: Human Transit, where there has recently been a discussion on Slow Transit (an offshoot of that discussion should inform a planned post later this month). That discussion is only the latest in the intellectual feast that is Human Transit. With an academic approach unafraid of length or depth in dissecting how we move across our society, Human Transit is a site I wish I had discovered before completing my master's project on Measure R and the evolution of L.A.'s transit system.
I might also have welcomed Low Tech Magazine. Though it might not have directly contributed to my master's project, its refusal "to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution" would fit with my own refusal in classroom discussions and elsewhere to assume that journalism would be saved by technology. Just as Low Tech conveys "A simple, sensible, but nevertheless controversial message; high-tech has become the idol of our society," I feel it is equally controversial to insist that high-tech has become the idol of my profession (though Rose Medlock might disagree in some fashion). Say you don't believe high tech will save journalism, and you're cast off as unrealistic, idealistic, regressive, or otherwise unsuited to live an economically sustainable life covering the news and documenting life, society and the world.
Yet, as Lapham's Quarterly -- itself an exhilaratingly unhurried curation of historic treats -- points out with its Deja Vu blog, much of what we read in the day's news has deep, deep roots.
Take time to explore those roots at your peril, though. Meander from the present into the past, watch it weave around another timeline, as the themes of this piece have done, though, and you'll find yourself so very far from where you thought you were and somewhere so very different from where you thought you'd end up.
Isn't that the point of reading, though?
