I'm trying to repeat myself more than I have been. Though at one point this sounded to me like the exact opposite of what I should be doing — you gotta stay fresh, you gotta change it up, you make like the proverbial rollin' stone and gather no moss — it's become important with a shift in my thinking about the very nature of blogs and the broader class of work to which they belong. Before, I thought of blogs as ever-expanding books, snowballing accretions of discrete mini-articles. If a piece was posted, it was posted; anyone wanting to read what I have to say on a subject can dig up the relevant entry, so why post about anything I've posted about before? Over the last year or so, I've come to see blogs in a different way: they're not magic anthologies; they're places, and as such should be constructed with an eye toward what's interesting to inhabit, rather than what's interesting to consume, digest and excrete (intellectually speaking).
There are a stack of other serviceable metaphors I could whip out here — materials, symphonies, textiles — but after traveling back in time to 1996 and studying its grandiose articles on cyberspace, I find that terms of place seem to be most useful. If a blog is a place, what's its visual design? The paint and furniture and architecture, I suppose. (It probably comes as no surprise that I hew to minimalism, and hard, in all those elements in real life.) Who are the readers and commenters? Obviously, they're the locals; the hangers-out. (The metaphor also admits tourists and passers-through.) But what are the posts themselves? Trickier, but this is the meat of it: the posts are the very essence of the place, the driving energy — the "ineffable ancient mystical qi," if you like — that remains when you pull the humans and the physical infrastructure from the equation.
A blog whose posts drop off is like a place that somehow loses its underlying appeal. We've all seen how rapidly, and often inexplicably, hangouts fall into disuse and disrepute; it's almost as rapid and inexplicable as the tubes' staggeringly high rate of blog abandonment. So a blogger's job isn't particularly different from a place manager's: keep the subtle shifts rolling to attract interest, but don't flail around to such a degree that you alienate the clientele. Do indeed keep it fresh, change it up and gather no moss, but do it organically and iteratively.
And yes, there are those words again. I fear a developing dependency on them, but aren't they appropriate in this case? My
- Pick a new topic
- Post about the topic
- Pick a new topic
blogging mindset has become a
- Pick a previous topic
- Post about the topic from a new angle or extend it in a new way
- Pick a topic from the now-slightly-expanded roster of previous topics
blogging mindset. Where I used to step from subject to subject to subject, a wake of intellectual descruction behind me, I now find myself visiting and revisiting ideas, mutating my treatment of them a bit each time and following the most promising branches of the tree. What could be more biological way to go about it? Reader Dan Owen also put it in a way I liked:
I love the deeply self-reflective approach you both take, even though you're working in very different fields, and I love the thinking-out-loud structure, which tends to be more circular than linear. You open the subjects you write about, rather than narrow them down to a point.
"Circular" instead of "linear." Choice.
This links up with thoughts I've been thinking about cultural projects more generally, and how circularity in creation might just lead to more effective stuff than does linearity. Many of my favorite filmmakers — a Wes Anderson, say, or a Sang-soo Hong — and even some writers — your David Sedarises, your Haruki Murakamis, (to an extent) your Alexander Therouxs ("Therouxes"?) — hold the superficial qualities of their work constant, continually doubling back to the "same" sort of material in order to explore it in different second- and higher-order ways. This draws the criticism of always "[verb]ing the same [noun]," but who ever made something incredible listening attentively to that sort of nonsense?
