Annotating the Obvious

I'd like to think that blogs can be useful, but I'm not sure what that use should be.

I know that perpetual diary mode, while titillating at first, ultimately fatigues.

I also suspect that the running mini-commentary, a sort of self-styled advice column in which one responds to one's own tortured questions, misses the point of the blog while still, admittedly, making good use of it.

And surely I know that blogs, like this one, that regularly introduce the topic of blogs -- for the sake of confession and atonement, I guess -- eventually disappear into their own capacious navels.

Anyway, the sky is the limit and who cares. The NYTimes had an article this past weekend on photo blogs, which heralds nothing if not the revenge of the web page on blogging. It always comes back to the image.

Doyougetmydrift.blogspot.com?

Two months ago, poets were "leading antiwar protests." Where have all the poets gone, now that the war is "over"?

I feel like crying, and there's little this blog can do about that.

Tantamount to the directionlessness with which I am now preoccupied is a corollary resistance to all things definitive. Which means I can open the door but I can't walk through it.

How hopelessly useless.

But really, sitting down with my "post" window open I had no intention of singing this sad-sap song. It just came to me, unannounced, like a headache or a bad piece of international policy. It arises like a 'fiction' and so I think there is something to the idea of trying on personae or identities in this space that differs, somehow, from what goes on in chatrooms, MUDs, and disc-lists.

Like (in pursuit of direction now) the autobiographical push of text blogging has less to do with the person blogging than with the attendant wishful-thinking he or she might nurture like a pot of basil on the window sill.

I wish I had an audience, for example.

I wish I had never said what I said in third grade.

I wish GW had lost that fight back in college. Etc.

The great draw, though, is obviously in the rhetoric of "posting." You don't write a blog, you post an entry. Consider that sentence closely. There's a particularly inviting shine to the "post" feature in blogs that makes you want to spend the night or maybe move in for good.

It's not so much: you can't tear away from it, as: what use being anywhere else?

More sad-sap. Apologies.

The tremolo of ego evidently knows no bounds.