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August 26, 2008, 08:14 PM ET
Finding My Bloice
A real Weblog would have me talking like a regular person, right? I mean, writing all the time about the talking all the time that goes on in my head, narrating my life in the pointless, pointillist way one does just in order to keep going, keep sane, when nobody is listening and nobody is watching and god knows nobody at all is expected to read?
Since this is the first day of classes, and since I have finished teaching these first of my classes, maybe I should entirely indulge myself and write in an unfiltered legit blog voice.
(Would that be called a “bloice” by those who make a habit, or a profession — it’s probably a profession by now; somebody has a Web site about it, I’m sure, somebody is making a profit from it somewhere — out of combing words?)
But I’m not sure I can unedit myself, put words into some kind of order without looking at them the way an English professor looks at her students’ essays, thinking “Wouldn’t it be better if you’d…” and saying “Can’t you make this stronger and more focused by…”?
Is that a talent, a habit, a trait, a gift, a freedom, I’ve forfeited by doing this job for, count ‘em, 21 years? The unedited version, the just-put-it-on-the-page part of things. Is the unselfconscious always unselfrespecting? Is the unselfconscious writer always supremely selfish, not caring what the reader thinks because there isn’t an imagined reader?
On my worst days, now, I think nobody is reading; does that mean I have lost the chance to write, as maybe once I did (who knows?) when I thought maybe nobody would ever glance at anything I put on a page?
Hey, look, I’ll write about Hillary Clinton at the convention (I swear, I threaten), in order to compensate for this indulgence. But I owed it to that 1987 self, the one who showed up at the UConn campus twenty-one years ago, to give this a shot.
With a wave to my younger self, l write for the hell of it. For the fun of it and to see what my bloice might sound like after all these years.
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