WHY DO I BLOG?

My wife's best friend's husband is a photojournalist who spent many years working for the New York Times. Currently, he's working as a picture editor for a paper in the midwest. In other words, he's firmly ensconced in the business that I spend a lot of time talking about. Recently, he checked out my blog and sent me some feedback via email:

Ron,

So I have checked into your blog....and well, as a journalist who reads far too much, there's not much new for me to digest. The whole blogging issue makes me feel that too many people are spending too much time talking at each other rather than with each other.

http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcase/la-op-billmon26sep26.story

Of course, some journalists feel that blogs can help the business:

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=53&aid=71447

Others try it instead of straight news:

http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=66794

and of course here's even more:

http://www.poynter.org/search/results_article.asp?txt_searchText=blogs&txt_searchScope=all

See, I joined a listserv or community to share and mentor in the business, and try to add a reasoned and balanced voice to my shitheel excuse of a newspaper but after that, sadly, I have learned that rhetoric and discourse, especially in politics, have been replaced by shrill tv clowns yelling at each other and bloggers lamenting out of some remote corner.

Perhaps the reason your blog attracts so little feedback may be due to the steady stream of left, leaning commentary. Your friends who agree with you, have little to add and maybe every now and then you can have a dissenter to debate with.

I think it is laudable how we are starting to see playwrights crafting politically inspired productions. I know that exercising my creative wherewithall in my craft is more satisfying than just floating my opinions in cyberspace.

Given your talent, I think you could scrub the blog and devote that energy into a politcally inspired play. I mean, the issues with National Guard troops on extended deployment, prisoner abuse, outsourcing of jobs, students who can't learn, healthcare and those who can't afford it......go to legion halls and vet hospitals, talk to the war wounded and the soldiers families who are struggling....there's people there with real problems whose thoughts, situations and dialogues are the kind of ingredients with which a Tony Kushner could make a hell of a stage meal. You could probably spend time in one small parrish and find a rich subject area.

just some thoughts, from an underutilized picture editor in a town that is an ugly collision of the Rust Belt and Appalachia and has the chutzpah to think it is midwestern because everyone goes to church once a week, to make ammends for their selfishness and bigotry the other six days....nah, I don't have any issues.

regards,

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"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." - Hunter S. Thompson

He raised some very good points, which got me thinking, once again, about what I'm trying to do with Real Art. Here's my response to him:

Dear $$$$,

Thanks for visiting my blog, and thanks for your thoughts and suggestions. I must admit that I was slightly disturbed to have you poking your nose around my little corner of cyberspace simply because of who you are. That is, you're a journalist, and the thought of having someone from the business looking at my missives is intimidating at the very least. However, after having been studying acting in graduate school for the last six weeks, I'm growing more accustomed to feeling like I'm under a microscope, so your email was only the cause of some mild anxiety. Maybe my skin is getting thicker.

At any rate, I think your analysis of the whole blogging phenomenon and right/left dialogue is right on the mark. I don't really think my blog is doing much at all in the way of adding anything significant or noteworthy to what passes for national political discourse, especially because I receive so few hits. For that matter, I don't really look at many blogs, myself. I check out Eschaton and This Modern World pretty regularly, and a couple of others, but generally, I prefer actual news sources--I mean, bloggers are typically just guys at their keyboards like me, so why should I even care? It seems like there are millions of blogs out there, and I don't really feel like I have the time or inclination to even try to check them out. As a weird cyber-trend, I find blogs to be interesting, but that's about it. Ultimately, I think that only a few key bloggers, with huge audiences, make any real difference, and I expect many of them to be absorbed by the more traditional forms of news media as the years go by. I'm reminded of successful independent film makers, or indie rock bands finally getting big contracts after some years of trudging away in the trenches.

Why, then, do I have a blog?

That's hard to say. The most simple answer is that I seem to get some kind of personal satisfaction from it. People commenting, a blog with a larger audience linking to my blog, an upturn in hits for a day or two, all these things are nice, but really just frosting. The cake, for me, is having my own little soapbox. Also, after blogging for nearly two years, I've come to see some other personal benefits. I've found that my writing, and thus, my thinking, has become clearer and more succinct. Disciplining myself not only to follow news and other topics on a daily basis, and usually writing a brief bit of commentary on what I encounter, has made me a better conversationalist, especially with the likes of our mutual acquaintance, $$$$$$$ $$$$$$$. I also think I might be stoking my own vanity by creating a record of my thoughts and feelings about what I believe to be important--I've always wanted to have a diary or journal, but I've never been able to keep it going for more than a couple of weeks: the blog-form seems to have gotten me beyond the apathy or laziness that always seemed to doom my previous efforts. Maybe feeling like I have an audience motivates me more.

Now, having said all that, I also have to say that I actually do believe that my blog makes some small bit of difference in the lives of a few people. Years ago, I pretty much gave up on my youthful desire to change the world for the better--I suppose it's simply reaching a certain level of maturity, but somewhere along the line, I decided that an individual effort was pretty much futile, which, I assume, has been obvious to you for many years. However, at the same time I reached this conclusion, it also occurred to me that I can conceivably change the people around me, and hope that they will change the people around them. Even though I haven't noticed massive waves of social change emanating from my own sphere of existence, I have noticed that my words, both written and spoken, have led some people to consider things differently. My six years of teaching sucked, on the whole, but this particular aspect, trying to open up people to seeing the world in a new ways, was pretty satisfying. To some extent, my blog is a sort of unencumbered, free-form extension of my work in education.

As for your suggestion that I turn my energies to playwriting, I'm right with you. Indeed, after about a year or so of teaching, it hit me that I would end up with enough material to eventually put together a one man show about my experiences in the classroom that could be a sort of rhetorical platform for discussing social issues in general; I've got a lot of ideas bouncing around in my head: it's pretty amazing how public school both affects and is affected by society at large, and I think I could put together a pretty cool and relevant show once I'm able to put my mind to it. Of course, my blog has been helping these ideas to coalesce.

Thing is, grad school is pretty hardcore, and I don't think I'll be able to sit down and hack this thing out until I've gotten my degree.

Speaking of grad school, I wanted to mention that I think you've encountered my blog during something of a down-time; I'm so damned busy. I would totally love it if you could find the time to check out some of the posts I've written in the past that have pleased me. For instance, my post on economics. Or my post on good, evil, and Christianity. Or my post on Scalia's dissent in the Texas sodomy case.

Finally, a couple of questions. First, would it be okay if I posted some or all of your email and my response on my blog? There's nothing like a bit of self-referential navel contemplation, I always say. Second, is your new town really that lame? Could it possibly be worse than Houston's east side? And, by the way, good Dr. Thompson quote, although I must admit that I'm more fond of the quote on the back of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; you know, the one with the list of drugs and the comment about a man on an ether binge? It was like a call to arms when I was an undergrad.

Anyway, I've rambled far too long. Thanks for bearing with me, and thanks again for your input.

Ron

Actually, my photojournalist friend never got back to me, so I'm running his email without permission. I got tired of waiting, and I think it's a pretty good exchange. Hopefully he won't be enraged or anything.

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