blogs...

This is an image from a manuscript of Beato de Liebana's commentary on the Apocalypse and has nothing to do with what I am writing about.

I hit a few of my fellow bloggers' sites. Interesting collection. People writing their opinions on politics, companies informing their employees about office matters, bubbly teenage self-expression, advertising, and one blog called "Interracial Romance" that was mainly bad misogynistic erotica about large... well, you get the idea.

Who reads these things? Apart from friends and family, or followers of those blogs that "matter" and are read by journalists hoping for a scoop? Curiosity, a desire for quality, voyeurism? Each of us in our rooms madly typing into space. When I kept a journal, before I started grad school, I always did have an adolescent desire that someday my writing would be so successful that some patient editor would publish my journals after my death. Some of my best writing -- unfocused, impressionistic, undisciplined, but also lyric, lively, and true -- was in my journals. And the deeply private. I am no exhibitionist, there will be no confessions on this blog -- nothing overly salacious, at least. For that you will have to publish my old journals after I die. But maybe there will be something of the music and longing I occassionally happened upon as I scribbled into my notebooks while sitting in cafes and bars. Narcissitic? Of course. That's what it's all about. But maybe somebody will happen upon it and find it worth the few seconds they spend reading a post.