July 16, 2008

More From Annie Dillard...and a Momentous Occasion

"The printed word cannot compete with the movies on their ground, and should not. You can describe beautiful faces, car chases, or valleys full of Indians on horseback until you run out of words, and you will not approach the movies' spectacle. Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor...
"Why would anyone read a book instead of watching big people move on a screen? Because a book can be literature. It is a subtle thing--a poor thing, but our own. In my view, the more literary the book--the more purely verbal, crafted sentence by sentence, the more imaginative, reasoned, and deep--the more likely people are to read it. The people who read are the people who like literature, after all, whatever that might be. They like, or require, what books alone have. If they want to see films that evening, they will find films. If they do not like to read, they will not. People who read are not too lazy to flip on the television; they prefer books. I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place."


I just noticed that this will be the 104th posting on my blog. I passed 100 with out even noticing!
People, this is a big deal for me. This is my most successful attempt at blogging ever.
It has caused me to reflect on my past blogging experiences. I started on Xanga.com. The website that, when I hear or see it's name, I now turn up my nose. It was never as good to me as blogspot has been. I can't say that I'm particularly impressed with blogspot's templates, and I know I could set out and create my own. But I am just not that html-savvy. I can only grasp the simplest of actions, like bolding and italicizing and underlining words. I've even been known to change my font and the color of my font, but I've long since forgotten how to do that.
Back in my xanga days I had a few friends who journaled on there. It was quite the fad. But, because we were young and didn't realize we had more important things to worry about, xanga just caused drama.
Actually, one girl in particular caused drama with her online writing. In fact, though I'm not really friends with her anymore, that girl is still trying to cause drama with her online writing on Myspace and Facebook. She used to (and still does) write ugly things about people, acting as if those people wouldn't realize who she was writing about. But she ran into a little trouble (and still does), it was blatantly obvious exactly who she's viciously libelling. Is libelling a verb? Is the phrase viciously libelling redundant? I think so. But there it is. That's who I am.
Anyhow, there was this ridiculously huge falling out that particular time she chose to be catty. I think pretty much the only people reading her blog were the ones she was saying bad things about...so it didn't go over well...
Oh yeah, I was one of the people she didn't like (I learned after reading her blog...?).
She should star in one of those "stop online bullying" commercials. As the villain.
But after that I was totally, like, I'm so over that. And there was just a bad taste in my mouth about the whole blogging thing.
I've made a few more failing attempts since then. Most of the time I would start a blog, never tell anyone about it, and then give up on it. But since no one knew about it, it didn't make much of a difference.
And here I am today, writing on my blog and really enjoying it. It gives me a dumb excuse to write, which I enjoy. And I've actually spread the word a little, started lurking and even commenting on other blogs, and even inspired a couple of friends to join the blogging world (so I'm spawning my own commentors, see?).
All that random nonsense is leading to this (I'll pause while you sigh with relief):
Thanks for reading and commenting. While blogging in itself seems self-centered and vain-glorious (I just wanted to use that hyphenated word...), the fact that people are actually reading this makes it so much more worth while. And it makes me feel that maybe, just maybe, I might be a little less nerdy than I thought. Maybe even "cool."
Well, I wouldn't go that far. But it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Keep talkin' to me!

6 comments:

  1. That's all very nice, dear, but "vainglorious" isn't hy-phen-ated.

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  2. i have nothing to say... except, here i am on this thing

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  3. lurking. i like that word. "lurker" heh.. i approve. i am glad you have made your blog available for people to seeeee!

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  4. p.s. you need a picture on your profile.

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