Necromancy

So now I am forcing life back into this stillborn blog. Fitting, I suppose, in a way, given my interests. The forcing of life part is fitting, I mean. Not the blogging part. That's never jived with my interests, weirdly enough.

The gentle reader who has at least a passing familiarity with my person will know that my mind is surfeit with literary pretense. "Whence and wherefore then this dearth of a consistent Anima Umbrae web journal?" the gentle reader may well ask. "Blogging is living literature on the Internet, a forum whereby you could share your words with the faceless millions--or at least with an interested few, which at times is more audience than you have and mayhap more than you deserve. One might think that web logs would hold a profound allure for you." And if you were to ask this question and make these observations, gentle reader, you would be most astute! But the gentle reader is always astute, and needs not my assertions by way of affirmation.

The real crux of it is that I developed a severe hatred for blogs and bloggers and all things bloggish shortly after their debut. Back then, they were called online journals, and they were just that--personal journals. And not journals that chronicled cool things like people dying of the black death in London in the year 1665, but journals that described such noteworthy subjects as a kewlio new haircut or that boy in sixth period intro to bio who had the most soulful brown eyes or how Justine was such a biatch last week when she said that I said that she said that she was a biatch, and such other hyper-emotional adolescent garbage. I remember running across a number of journals of this caliber and thinking that the online journal, as a form, was doomed to failure, and that it would never ascend above the level of "journalism" that goes on in a fourteen year old girl's diary (the kinds bestuck with stickers and locked with tiny little heart-shaped locks that are a totally impotent barrier to any kind of serious effort to open the book, as if anybody had a desperate need to read the thoughts of the average fourteen year old girl).

And if it seems like I'm being misogynist or ageist here, let me be the first to say that I don't think I had very much to offer the world in the way of insightful or beautifully-crafted prose when I was fourteen, either. I'm glad I wasn't on the cutting edge of blogging, come to think of it; if I had been, I'd have to look back at that material now and be reckoned by it, and I expect that'd be a damn painful procedure.

Ah, Hell. I'm being too hard on adolescents. I'm just exaggerating for effect--creating a straw young adult. No real disrespect to adolescents intended. One of the coolest people I know is an adolescent. I have friends who are adolescents.

ANYWAY, what I mean to say is that I had considered blogging to be the realm of teenagers with ADD. And right wing extremists. I'm still amazed at the number of pro-military, pro-survivalist, pro-race war polemical blogs I stumble over when doing research on bulletproof vests or Biblical archaeology.

I didn't see the blog as being a proper venue for actual writing done by professional writers, as ironic as that might seem. Here was writing that could be distributed to an audience without the possibility of editorial rejection or the cost and humiliation of self-publishing or any of the hundred other things that keep me and writers like me from actually getting our work out to the people who might actually give a crap about it, and I wouldn't touch it. I think this is in part because of the disdain I've felt for those authors who sink to the level of vanity publication just to have something in print, and I viewed blogs in much the same way. I also, of course, turned a blind eye to my own anti-vanity in insisting that only work that had been validated by means of official and professional commercial publication was worthy of attention. I don't think that now. But more on these fantasies of official infallibility at some other time.

Then there is that issue of vanity. I would wonder that anyone would want to read anything that I had written. It's battle enough to get people interested my fiction, which is (in my estimation), the best of my work, and the best justification for my continued existence here on this planet. The person that produces the fiction, I would have thought, would necessarily be a lot less interesting than the product. I would think that people would care about me in the same proportion that they might care about the delivery person who brought a birthday present or a longed-for letter to the doorstep. You may love what is within the parcel, but that doesn't enkindle a love for the UPS dude in your heart. I didn't think *I* mattered, only that the work mattered. I didn't feel that the events of my life were interesting, and I didn't want to be like that solipsistic chit who felt that the whole world should compliment her on her kewlio new haircut. Again, these attitudes are changing, and we shall speak more on this at another time.

But I am taking these prejudices, whether outlashing or ingrown, and I am setting them aside. I am giving blogging another chance. I'm trying to keep my expectations in line. I'm not trying to be the high-handed morally superior voice howling in the wilderness, nor am I trying to convince the world of the worth of my thoughts and my words. I am not trying to disparage my own experience. I am trying to talk about things I find interesting--most of which will probably be related to art, and thinking. I am trying to be a better friend and be more communicative and read other people's blogs in turn. I am trying to write about the things around the writing, which ultimately serve to inform the writing itself. I am trying to get more actual writing done in whatever iteration rather than think about writing all the time without actually doing any writing.

So there. With this lopsided manifesto out of the way, the gentle reader can rest assured that the next post will be more concrete, topical, and accessible.

Which is to say that I intend to carp about how damn distracting it is to see so much cleavage at SDSU in a given day.