Abandoned blogs litter the Information Superhighway (anyone remember that metaphor?) like the traces of wreckage that line the road to Las Vegas: this, apparently, has become one of them. However gone it may have become from the screen you're looking at right now, though, it hasn't left my mind. I've started a number of posts in my head, but the rules of the game I've designed so haphazardly for myself have kept me from exploring any of the ideas I've generated any further than the first few sentences. How frustrating.
So I haven't posted, and I haven't posted, and I haven't posted, and here lies another noble attempt, one, I suspect, of many. It turns out that the major audience for my blog (me) got bored with my maunderings about the very little I have to say in so many words. I'd wager that lots of blogs peter out for just the reason: some word-drunk buffoon gets all excited about the possibility of generating lots and lots of prose for the delectation of an anonymous throng or posterity or the self-regarding buffoon and blurts out a dictionary's-worth of text that nobody but the buffoon can tolerate or get meaning from--and eventually even the buffoon fails to tolerate it. So the buffoon stops doing it, and the attempt sinks back under the smooth dark fizzy water of the Information Supercanal (I made that one up) to join its many fellow failures like the big dark hull of a sunken pirate ship drifting toward the bottom of the Sargasso Sea. What, then, does one do?
I (assuming here that I am this one I'm talking about, which seems plausible) could keep on in the same vein, pumping out the dregs of my vocabulary until I'm hollowed out into something I'm not as tired of. The very lack of posting that I've been going on about seems to indicate that I'm not going to do that, and I hope I don't seem to be complaining about it. No experiment truly fails; even when the information it produces disappoints the researcher, failing to confirm the cherished hypothesis, it does indeed result in information, which helps the process's progress. So, though I can't call what I was doing a failure, I can call the experiment concluded and move on to something that annoys me less. The operation has revealed that I've pretty well explored my verbal stream of consciousness to the extent that it doesn't take me much of anywhere I haven't already seen, at least to my own satisfaction. I may try again after a while, but I don't expect much to change.
The difficulty seems to have lain in two areas: my lack of subject and my unwillingness to deviate from the Ginsbergian fake of "first thought best thought." Both of these conditions led me to an ultimately boring pile of prose, addressed to no one and concerning pretty much nothing. Why would anyone (including me) read that?
Having thought about it for a while, I believe I've figured out how to alter these conditions, correcting the problems I see with this blog and making it, ideally, something worth reading for someone besides me. First (and fairly obviously), I'm allowing myself to go ahead and revise as I type, the kind of thing I did plenty when I wrote essays in school. I might even start outlining to achieve the improvement in communication that comes with enhanced cohesiveness. This, I think, indicates a little more concern for the reader: you. Second, I've decided on a topic. This presented a little difficulty, since I don't consider myself an expert on much besides grammar and myself, neither of which seem too interesting to anyone besides grammarians like me and any other people identical to myself, two (I strongly suspect) infinitesimal audiences. However, I also know about myself that I read books, many books, a number of books that flabbergasts most people I meet. I also have opinions about these books; I can state these opinions with a high degree of articulacy (and, also, in many syllables, hurrah). Therefore, I figure that people--even people distinct from me--might find interest in my opinions of the books I read. I believe I've figured out a subject.
Notes on my Notes, thus, has become a blog in which I write about the books I'm reading. To repeat myself, I read a lot, so I'm pretty sure I'll have something to say fairly frequently. I hope you'll find that something interesting and useful. Perhaps you'll even take advantage of the "comments" function to tell me what you think of the books I'm discussing and of my opinion of them. This could, I think, work. I look forward with cautious optimism to the development of my re-adopted project. To complete the metaphor, I've redesigned my airplane and plan to fly it somewhere fabulous. I hope you're coming along.
