blue sky, sunday morning, coffee and a computer

We spent a few hours last night at the Hitching Post, a dive bar on Troost near 55th, talking with artists, novelists, poets, filmmakers, students, and fellow academics. I revealed to a few people that I keep a blog, and suddenly they want the address.

Weez says my earlier post leaves her wanting more words. Why do I blog? Why do you read my blog? Look at the keywords below my name at the top of the page: literature, technology, culture, education, academia. Do I deliver on that promise? I feel like I don’t.

If all I do is tell you details about my life, I start to feel pretty selfish. Why should you care about my life? Some of you knew me before I started blogging. Some of you have met me since I started blogging. Some of you (most of you?) only know me through my blog. I can’t tell you everything. I usually leave the bad stuff out, so you’re not getting the whole story. Shouldn’t that frustrate you?

For a variety of reasons, my life has been turned upside down since about three days before September 11, 2001. But people I work with read this blog, and my family might one day stumble across it, and so I don’t reveal everything here. In this way, perhaps, I’m cheating you.

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7 thoughts on “blue sky, sunday morning, coffee and a computer

  1. George, you’re a student of the history of authorship: what form of writing or (self) representation has _ever_ revealed “everything”? Why should blogs (or the expectations that attend them) be any different?

  2. cheating on me…it’s not like you’re stepping out with some other blogger – I don’t think.
    Coincidentally (or not) today’s post (http://weez.oyzon.com/archives/000842.html) has similar themes – the idea of limited self-disclosure. It is to be expected, especially understanding that this is a public venue. So we hint and suggest and obliquely reference some things we may want to scream…which is fine. It keeps us civilized and enticingly mysterious.

  3. And, as I think came up in a related discussion last summer, any construction of identity is a performance, a process of crafting a notion of who you are based on the presentation of a series experiences, arguments, ideologies, and random crap. This is just an identity with a missing body.
    Plus, unless you can literally type as fast as you think, and have figured a way to blog those thoughts that never quite make it into language, then FULL disclosure is an impossible dream.
    As for why you blog? Well, I’ll tell you why I do: performers perform for an audience. In the theatre, you get a general idea of who’s watching because they’re right there, but in the blogosphere the identiy of the audience is even more mysterious that that of the blogger. As much as blogging is a performance of identity, its also a performance of faith, that when you put yourself on stage, somebody’s listening.

  4. Cheating on me? You offer me knowledge that is valuable enough for me to keep coming back. If I didn’t get enough out of it, and still kept coming back, what a waste that would be – but certainly not your problem.

  5. And do we cheat on you when we do not tell all?
    When reading your entries on the guitar lessons makes us weep for the music lessons we never had?
    Do we cheat when the pronouns are not in the first person singular?
    Is a blog like a “cheat sheet”?
    quote::
    In IT training, a cheat sheet is a reference tool that provides simple, brief instructions for accomplishing a specific task.
    ::quote
    http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci826102,00.html
    Wow with one word, “cheat” (surrounded by a bit of text), you, George, have tapped into the discursive networks of “literature, technology, culture, education, academia”. Man, that is some node!

  6. George —
    I’m late to reply: my modus operandi. And I’m speaking as someone who has known you since long before you became blogmaster G, which colors my judgment about what I want to read in your posts. I like the informative and the personal.
    But I think my preferences for the mix in reading your blog stem from my more general preferences–I like to have a sense of the person who writes. I don’t want logos, logos, logos, all the time. I think I’m not alone. (Although I have no logos to back that up.)
    Keep doing what you’re doing, I say. You contain multitudes and that’s cool, to paraphrase from another who wasn’t all about sticking to a topic or “delivering.”
    –Mike

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