Hello world!
March 28, 2008“The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.”
–Robert Burchfield
I am going to attempt to chronicle everything I read. Actually, I’m lying: that’s an impossible idea which would produce a really boring blog. I’ll settle for trying to chronicle everything that I read which I find interesting or substantive.
This endeavor is partially based on a narcissistic desire to share my internal monologue with the world (it is a blog, after all) and partially a weapon in my Sisyphean struggle to chisel as much knowledge as possible into the shifting, fragmentary surface of my own memory. This will help me maintain the illusion that the time I spend slacking during my workday is actually part of some grand autodidactic endeavor. Yesss!
Although, honestly, there’s a bit more to it than that. The truth is that the idea of forgetting makes me uneasy — maybe even scares me. I can monologue at length about how the malleability and selectivity of memory is an inevitable feature (and a huge functional asset!) of our neurocognitive architecture…and yet, on some pre-analytic level, I still subscribe to a naive solipsism that makes me feel that if I read something and then forget it, it didn’t happen. (Which, coupled with a healthy dose of neurotic perfectionism, leads me to conclude that by reading and forgetting I’m wasting my life on nothing, erasing myself by squandering time. Yay!)
Let’s ignore the fact that this line of thinking, taken to its logical conclusion, would require me to spend all my time documenting everything that happened to me in order to make it real. Let’s definitely ignore the fact that spending all my time documenting would force me to start documenting my documenting, leading me into a morass of infinite self-reflexive banality haunted by botched algorithms, undergraduate lit theory majors and social networking websites. (No, seriously, let’s not go there. I will TURN THIS CAR AROUND.)
Instead, let’s all just read my writing about reading others’ writing…and maybe spend a warm fuzzy minute reflecting on the ways that we really do define and create ourselves through narratives, albeit narratives of the unconscious internal sort.
I’m sold. Your effort to take on this Narcissistic, Sisyphean task is truly Herculean.
hot! i love it when i can look back after the fact and observe how my use of one word associatively primed my use of another one!
my memory gets worse and worse all the time. it’s honestly terrifying. i can’t remember movies i’ve watched, who helped me move, or whether or not justin cooked dinner all last week. i keep a calendar of the stuff i do because really, i’m not sure i’ll remember it later. i wouldn’t even know how much i forgot unless justin was around to point it out, and that’s even more terrifying.
i can relate. sometimes i wonder if i’ve destroyed my memory somehow…but i have a (comforting) theory that i’ve always been forgetful and have just forgotten how forgetful i once was. :D stuff i forgot this week is so much more salient than stuff i forgot ten years ago!
you are totally hot.
i just wanted to add here that i think it’s rad that you, the moderator, are represented in the comments thread by a faceless generic humanoid torso-plus-head, whereas the rest of us are given an empty gray box. way to mine the depths of abstract minimalism!