Blogs are the New Black

Blogging, apparently, has become the thing to do. Like, this week. Okay, so they’ve supposedly been big for years, but I’ve never really been all that trendy. Last week, I broke down (and broke my wallet) and bought an iPod. This week, I’m tackling the blog. Baby steps, folks. Baby steps.

But seriously - blogs, suddenly, are popping up out of the woodwork, poking their little heads up in every facet of my life. Not that I’m complaining – the more ways I can find to fill up the some of the more mind-numbing hours of my work day, the better. I’m starting to feel like I’ve been invited to join a secret society. Did everyone always have a blog and I didn’t know it? Am I only just paying attention now, or are they really the trend-of-the-month?

I noted to a friend the other day that I think blogs are going to be our generation’s way of connecting writers together.

Whenever I picture my absolutely-perfect-I-won-the-lottery-money-is-no-object-I-get-to-do-whatever-the-hell-I-want life, it always looks a little like Hemingway’s description of the Parisian expat life in A Moveable Feast. Writing all day in cafes, random, lazy conversations and high-brow gossiping with other high-minded intellectuals, plenty of coffee, even more wine, summer drives with Fitzgerald and wild parties with Gertrude Stein. Don’t get me wrong – I’m no Hemingway (my proclivity for multi-claused sentences and frequent parentheticals and interjections being only one of the many, many giveaways). That’s where the lottery-winning part comes in….ol’ Hem may have had to sweat the money (but oh the romance of the life of the poor artist), yet he also seems to have been able to make his rent off his writing. I’m not going to count on that one just yet.

But to get back to my point – and, I swear, there is one. What I’ve always wanted is to be part of a community of writers – to get to spend my days writing and talking about writing (or at least ideas to write about) with other writers and thinkers. Hemingway had his circle of expats – Fitzgerald, Pound, Stein, Joyce. Romantic-era writers like Keats and Shelley corresponded prolifically through letters. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady and other Beats all did their mad beat thing San Francisco. And our generation, it seems, has blogs.

Maybe some day, enterprising young English PhD students searching in vain for a half-way original dissertation topic will try to find knowledge – or at least a thesis – in the blogosphere. Maybe the post-post-modernists will embrace blogging as the newest way to reconstruct meaning (deconstruction being oh so passé). Maybe undergrads looking to write biographical- interpretations of the great literary works of this era will look to blog posts instead of letters and memoirs to find understanding.

And maybe all the fellow bloggers that seem to be appearing in my life these days are my community. If so, let the wine and coffee flow.