I’m speaking of blogs here -- not drugs. When I ask some people, “do you read my blog?” they get upset. (I just want to know whether I must repeat information.) To them it’s something unknown and therefore evil and something I’m imposing on them, unlike something published which is approved the authorities (or at least their publicists) and one SHOULD read to keep up with the Joneses. (No one knows whether the Joneses do indeed read, but they casually leave big books with familiar names on their coffee table. And they certainly have a nice house and a new pickup.) To some folks a blog is a pop quiz.
Beyond that, many people only read the pharmacy label on their meds and if their doctor tells them to use meds for an off-label purpose, they do it. (Like, say, botox to get rid of frown lines? Don’t find out about botox -- it’s scary.) Doctor knows best. HE has a nice house and a new car, though he has no time to read anything, not even the AMA journals.
The kids are different. The kids look at life, let alone anything electronic, as a Gameboy -- or Gamegirl. Gameperson. Gamer. “What can I do with this stuff? Stuff I want to do?” They might become hackers. They’re born Macgivers.
I’m no hacker, but I could see the possibilities of blogs right off. For one thing, it is publishing. So is Facebook, but I don’t like Facebook. Tim’s using that but the print is too teeny and pale and the computer’s idea of who my friends might be do not match reality because we don’t use the same set of criteria. Mine might not fit into any algorithm. And I don’t like Facebook’s constantly changing ideas about privacy. I know they’re making lists and lists and lists, quietly behind the scenes, to sell. Tim thinks blogging is passe, but I’m reframing it, taking it off-label. My latest iteration of OSX is letting me put photos and vids right in documents. My natural metier is long-form essay, which might someday lead to money, and which has been in the past my key to success as a student and preacher. Each post is roughly the length of the answer to a graduate school exam question, or at least what they used to be. They’re about half the length of a sermon, but one has a whole week to write sermons. Sometimes I go to fiction and write a short story or a book chapter. Writing is in large part training, like athletics.
I don’t worry about images much, except the ones that come to mind supporting words. Temple Grandin said on the radio that she thinks in images: say “cow,” she SEES a cow. THEN she thinks of the word. The first alphabets after cuneiform were images. They say an A is supposed to be an ox’s head. Sometimes I wonder a little whether you are seeing the same cow I am. How many cows do you know? In person, I mean. Grandin says that animals think in images (including all the senses) which are the means of the preverbal brain and the deepest night time convictions.
Sometimes images work very well. Blogs make good storage, so I put all my father’s photos of Swan River, Manitoba, when he and his sibs were teenagers, on a blog called www.swanrivermanitoba.blogspot.com. The whole family and a certain number of Manitobans have looked at this online album.
And I have blogs to which only Tim and I have access which are a record of all the little pieces I send to him. He doesn’t always post them, especially my poetry (not all are worthy, not all fit the theme he’s running), because he has a background as an editor and he knows blogs are publishing. So I suppose that particular blog is a “morgue” of unpublished pieces. Once in a while I go back to see what I said, and might even rework something. The point is that my pieces are a resource for his blogs and vlogs and that’s why I write them. The focus and rhetoric is quite different from what I put on my own blogs. Because my own blogs are mostly for local consumption and those folks do not appreciate continental conceits like irony or subversion.
I do not use pseudonyms. My house and income are not vulnerable to censorship at this point. I no longer care about being published by publishing houses. I just put them on www.lulu.com/prairiemary. I would like Bob Scriver’s work to be curated and I am qualified to do that for those who will listen, who are not the same people as those who control the work and fear what I might say. My blogs are not reprinted (except in www.iNewp.com , the New York Times’ citizen voice), but they are read by newspaper editors and board members.
On another blog, slowly -- exceedingly slowly -- I’m accumulating photos of myself between birth and graduation from college or maybe only high school, for the purpose of creating a memoir (for lack of a better category). This is another strategy for using my father’s family photo albums. I will try to use the “eye” principle described by a writing advisor, which is to write about what you could see at that point rather than how you felt. The reverse is in part what makes today’s generation of bloggers so profoundly boring. But the photos are a record of who is speaking at what age. My remaining brother is very wary of the project. He finds me shameless.
My accumulation of material about Blackfeet is constantly in need of sorting and editing. I assign a category, stick what subjects fit that definition on a blog (maybe decade by decade or maybe by some principle like geography or controversy) that substitutes chapter headings for the date, and then -- when it’s all worked down enough -- post it on www.lulu.com/prairiemary where the result can be bought as a book or sometimes acquired free as a pdf. The general public has not figured this out yet. They do not understand that a book is a long, submerged, reworked and reworked product (whether by me over time or by a paid editor) -- most of which no one sees. That’s why it seems mysterious. And yet many people insist on seeing a book as springing whole, complete with binding, out from the platen of a typewriter. (Yes, typewriter. They haven’t figured out computers, let alone Espresso.) That’s why they don’t understand what I do with all my time.
But part of that last assumption is just a pose. They think it is more refined to disdain ebooks so as to praise the fragrance and texture of actual books. They think it is low-class to “advertise oneself” and they like their books as they like their sermons -- reassuring and familiar. But secretly they are afraid. And they ought to be. A writer is likely to come slashing at them when least expected. They want me to bake cookies instead.
Luckily, now that my community is also the whole English-speaking world, I have the advantage of networking with people who do what I do, live for ideas, write well, and share a sophistication that previously only came from the population density of universities and cities. I am sitting here with my morning coffee in the company of people in cafes in Paris. What a brilliant invention, these blogs!
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