Dr Bloggenstein
The recently-closed restaurant branch of one of my favorite food shops. I’m sorry that they didn’t make a go of it, but I never gave it a try, either. I’d say that it was in the wrong part of town. It would have been heaven in or near the theatre district. Or perhaps in Grand Central Terminal.
The weather today suits my indoorsy, stock-taking frame of mind. Without the slightest intention of cutting back on my posting, I’m considering changes. Metamorphoses, perhaps. It’s as though the sheer weight of the blog’s verbiage were altering the site’s nature, its composition.
Ordinarily, I don’t like to write about blogging — I’d rather just do it. But lately I’ve felt the need for some public throat-clearing. The fundamental nature of the enterprise hasn’t changed; The Daily Blague is still a combination diary and notice board, pointing on occasion to longer, less dated essays at Portico. If I’ve offering very few links to the rest of the Blogosphere, that’s because I haven’t really been visiting very much of it beyond the sites listed on the Blog Roster.
But the whole point of the blog seems about to tilt in some new direction. Literally — think of it as the vanishing point, the dot in the distance where all the sight lines converge. I’ve been looking for a new pole star. I haven’t found it yet, but of course I don’t have to, since I’ll be inventing it along with everything else.
This may surprise you, but assisting spring fever as a catalyst are the Diaries of Monty Python veteran Michael Palin, which I’m listening to on my daily walks (as read by the author). I can’t tell you how much I should like to shake this gentleman’s hand! Creator of many of my favorite Python routines (together with Terry Jones, whom I hadn’t properly appreciated), Mr Palin comes off as a charming but thoroughly decent man, with his feet on the ground, his heart in the right place, and his head stocked to bursting with articulate expression. It would be an exaggeration to say that the Diaries take one into his workroom, but they do give off the most invigorating fizz. Â
Earlier in this entry —
Just now, after finishing the Morning Read — which took forever to get through, as sometimes happens — I remembered that I hadn’t visited Booklust in a while. So I dropped in and saw Patricia’s new book, You’re My Guy Because… I feel terribly guilty about not having followed the progress of publication, which must have been thrilling for Patricia. But I’ve been a very bad blogger for months now, although in rather the opposite sense from what’s usually meant.
I’ve been so preoccupied by a shift in my own sites — and so crazy-busy trying to keep up with a self-imposed schedule — that I haven’t been a very good neighbor. It’s as though I’ve got blogging itself on the operating table, cut up and lying all over the surgery, with only a dim sense of how I’m going to sew it back together for my own purposes.The Morning Reads — I’m sure that most visitors don’t even skim them. But that doesn’t bother me, because even as I write them I’m feeling my way toward something that I can sense just on the other side of a membrane.
It’s a matter, I suppose, of marrying the intimately related acts of reading and writing on the platform of a blog. It is inconceivable that my notes en masse could interest everybody, but I should hope that each individual note would interest somebody, eventually, after — and how long will this take? — it occurs to likely readers that a blogger might be doing what I’m doing. But why would that happen, when even I don’t know what I’m doing?
In any case, even though blogging takes place in public, I feel as sealed-up and alone as any good writer, struggling with something that no one but me can see. It’s boring and it’s thrilling. It tends toward the all-consuming. And it has made a very bad neighbor out of me.
Catching up (ha! as if that were possible), I came across this bit of nonsense, via kottke.org.