BLOGGING URGENTLY

It’s a unique kind of reflexivity to have to consider how the media (access, creation, preservation, distribution, compensation, access) affects one’s own writing, particularly in a predatory world that gobbles up writing faster than any one person or even any one slush pile can provide it.  Through flattery and unlikely promises, there are plenty of cyber-sites looking for free content, whether family photos that can be resold as illustrations or naive writing that is likely out on the edges — if not across the boundary — of the accepted stream.  The people who post advice about writing don’t often consider the changes.  They are stuck in the past.

My metier is blogging, long form (a thousand words per post).  It is blogging because I post it daily on blogspot, beginning in 2006, so that it is a steady stream of writing on a variety of subjects in a variety of styles, a little like a newspaper column.  For years I had a co-writer or two, but most of that work went to a different provider because it included video.  I also stockpile fiction on Wordpress, which is supposed to be the high-end high-prestige provider.  I find it difficult to use and over-concerned with making things fancy.

If you like “fancy,” Sharon Brogan is a poet in Missoula who explores the ultimate in “fancy,” a kind of graphic digital collage derived from “scrapbooking.”  https://sbpoet.tumblr.com  It is unique, hosted by Tumblr which is a site that excels in visual work and sound as well as print.  Since their audience is younger and edgier, I sometimes post there, esp. during times when I’m posting spoken words instead of print.  But I don’t do fancy — usually just a photo at the heading.  I try to use my own photos.

“Blog” originally meant a log of what one visited.  When I’m bouncing off someone else’s posts, I try to remember to link to them, either so my reader can follow back or so I can retrace how I got to my own piece.  I appreciate the online resourcefulness of word invention, like “pokemon” to mean “pocket monster”, because they are so evocative and funny, but I’m finding that many people are just baffled and don’t like learning new words anyway.  It’s part of what discourages computer use.  

Of course, with a search engine even I can keep up with slang and neologisms — very useful when watching something like “Top Boy,” a Netflix series about Jamaicans in London.  I’m always surprised that something like Google can know so many unique words.  “Bell me,” the boy says, making the telephone gesture from the days when one picked up a receiver.  I’m even more surprised when many of these conflated languages include the characteristic “init” that Blackfeet use.  

The fact of producing blocks of print on many subjects finally means I have thousands of entries along certain threads.  Thus I’m accumulating streams or themes that could be printed as books and are POD (print-on-demand) at www.lulu.com/prairiemary.  They aren’t as smoothly edited or neatly sequential as purpose-written books with the paraphernalia of intro, index, footnotes, and all the other evolved bits.  

I’ve got one “book” about Valier that follows the water: the historical construction of Swift Dam to create the irrigation canal system for grain growing and the town that resulted, connecting to railroad and oceanic shipping and thus to politics.  Today the crumbling edge of the future is melted glaciers, diminishing snowpack, and therefore smaller reservoir content.  Also the empowerment of the reservations along the mountains, which means that this writing can make some people very nervous.  If this were a conventionally published book, there would be pressure to trim facts certain ways.  Sid Gustafson’s book entitled “Swift Dam” is fiction, mythologized poetically, which means the irrigation industry is not threatened.  It's true in a different way.

I wrote a proper book about teaching on the rez called "Heartbreak Butte," but it was unpublishable for political reasons so I converted it to being a blog by posting the chapters separately.  Heartbreakbutte.blogspot.com

Another book I’m “accumulating” is theory about how to create intense experiences, possibly religious.  "The Bone Chalice."  It began as my proposed thesis in seminary and by now has been transformed by the amazing new research in cell-level neurology, the actual creation of thought in response to experience.  And that has doubled back to the literary theory of Lakoff, et al, that was developing at and around the U of Chicago when I was there — but I never knew it except for the early books.  This approach to understanding is metaphor-based which gives me an advantage as a former English teacher.   (God is a metonymy.  Also a personification.) To be convincing, I will include a lot of vids, both talking heads and creative experiments, which is possible online.  The end point may turn out to be a paper handbook with links.

Today’s world is so hungry, so avaricious, so boundaryless, that it is impossible to copyright or even control whatever is created.  There is no use in expecting profit.  One must not be surprised when work is diverted, twisted, exploited.  My strength is that, nearing eighty, I have such a backlog of experience that I can keep up momentum.  It is an advantage to have my family’s albums as resource and reminder.

A gray panther rather than a “cougar”, I seize the online evasion of editors in order to be as “pervy” as I choose and use as offensive language as suits me.  Those who read what I write must come to the source voluntarily but are free to shun me.  I won’t even know.  So much about sex and other previously censored life is waiting to be sorted and understood.  The taboos are melting back like glaciers.

Blogging is such a strange mix of the eternal — if you understand the Wayback or if you’ve downloaded a lot (recently I ran across pages and pages of printed-out posts from an early Native American chat room in the 1990's, when I thought it all might disappear so I should save it) — and the inscrutable.  I still can’t figure out how to access any streaming services for movies (Hulu, et al) except Netflix which frustrates me with their lowbrow offerings.  Maybe it’s just as well — I should read instead.  But I write reviews and I like to review movies.

All this is so “thick” and uniquely and internally contradictory that I’ve only run across a few people who can follow — one or two of whom have led me into even more esoteric places — but another characteristic of old age is not wanting to be a consumer except on my own terms.  People try to make contact by offering things.  I’m discouraged that they don’t think in terms of anything but subject matter.  Media, skill-level, intensity, uniqueness, connection to shared experience — all seem to mean little or nothing.

At this point, time is short.  I spend my mornings writing, in theory do maintenance in the afternoons, and these days am following Rachel Maddow through the terrifying jungle of history-in-the-making.  I hope we both survive to the end of this cataclysm.  I believe with many others that we may be witnessing the death of democracy, the end of the Internet, the self-snuffing of the last hominids.  I sometimes feel I’m scratching lines with a rusty nail on a last chunk of rubble.  It’s urgent.