(OX-BOW) The life of blogs, or rather, the life of one’s blogging, I am not sure has been studied in any scholarly or rigorous way. The goal here is to give them something to study when they start. Toward that end, today I acknowledge some developments in the life of this blog. Things here at the Propositions Press are different compared to three and four years ago. Though still personal, the blog is no longer as much of a journal as when I started it. Now it is something like a file of short and sometimes incomplete essays and tales about art, travel, and politics. There is an unlimited cast of characters but also recurring figures, for instance my collaborators. In the blog is a set of evolving ideas about place, space, mobility, and identity. The one I have been fixating on for some years now—corridors—is what this blog is becoming about. So why not say so: Propositions Press 2.0, Corridors Version.
Practically speaking, I have been posting about once every five or six weeks, but leaving texts on average longer than those in the frequent postings from 2007-2010. This affects content on the level of my inability to report on current events in a timely way. For example, I still have not gotten around to finishing a response to the June 5 electoral defeat in Wisconsin. Most of the stories from now on that I do tell will have been long over by social media standards, which necessitates another kind of writing. Which, in turn, necessitates a different kind of reading.
The evolution of the blog follows my interests on the level of content, and my life on the level of form. In the last year I lost and gained people very, very close to me. As a consequence my family duties changed. I have both less time and less interest in frequent postings, less patience for having to read over my own postings about trivialities or text fragments that don’t say much, and less need to practice as frequently.
Propositions Press 2.0—planned as an improvement, but inevitably causing unintended consequences of its own—has arrived. In far from grand fashion, and not even all at once. It floated in, as if on one of the rain clouds that came in last Wednesday from over Lake Michigan, dampening Ox-Bow and maybe most of southwestern Michigan with some much-needed moisture.
Same as happened when the front came through back home in Madison, the plants and soils here drank it all up.
Comments