.
A quick preface -- if you do
nothing else i ever tell you to do, do this: Get. The. New. Weezer. Album.
"The Greatest Man That Ever Lived" is a track which is the kind of epic that you makes you wish that choirs of men singing falsetto followed you around talking smack about your enemies. You probably won't understand what I just said.
But you will.
Onwards:
I was very nearly on the verge of posting, last week, but I hesitated. I hesitated because the subject matter was pretty touchy, pretty personal, kind of controversial? I hesitated.
Sometimes when you're really up close to something, its hard to see what everything really looks like without taking a step back. But sometimes even that doesn't really help, and you need someone else to sit next to you and narrate the scenery and tell you about what you're looking at. Writing is like that sometimes too -- I can't even tell sometimes, I guess because I'm so embroiled in it, if what I'm writing makes any sense at all. Or if it sucks. Or if its totally fucked up and problematic and I'm majorly putting my foot in my mouth. So... I palmed it off to someone else and asked them to read it first.
They did. But afterwards I felt just as... unsure... as I did before they read it. And even though it seemed to
resonate, and even though we
talked about the subject matter, I didn't feel any change in my position about whether to post it or not.
Although... I was also grocery shopping at the time, so in my head the memory that really sticks out is my desperate (and fruitless) search for tamari.
(Maybe I didn't give the conversation its due space. Now I'd like to sit back down and really talk about it, for an hour or two, but... too late.)
Recurring theme: revealing the big piece. I struggle with how personal the political becomes, I struggle with how much to give away for the sake of writing, for the sake of understanding. And sometimes I wonder what the fuck my motivations really are. The entry I was going to post was about really specific topics which I simply have no vocabulary to write about without speaking very candidly and personally about them.
But I mean, isn't that our entry into most things? And how divorced can the intellectual be from the personal, when these things HAPPEN. And they happen TO US. We don't exist in a bubble, protected from all significance and meaning. We exist in context, although for me, my context is usually very personal and very tied to a hundred other things. Maybe thats the sign of a good writer: someone who can write about one subject, isolated, and divorce it from all personal meaning.
But I know that's not true. So when I claim that this blog is about culture and society and politics and news and art, and not necessarily about ME, am I full of shit?
I'm pretty sure I am.
To compound my sneaking suspicion that I'm not only full of B.S., but also not fooling anyone about it, I read an article in NY Times Magazine about Emily Gould, a former blogger at Gawker, and why she decided to bow out of the blogging world.
For those not initiated into the micro-culture of NY social culture, Gawker is a catty, scathing gossip website, where bloggers essentially complain about NY and NY related shit that anyone outside of that micro-community doesn't give a damn about. Sorry if I sound biased; I am. I think Gawker really represents the lowest common denominator in terms of ruthless gossip and petty name-calling. To me, Gawker was that girl in high school who wasn't as popular as her friends, and developed some kind of deep psychological complex about it; she knew she'd never be as popular, never be as pretty or interesting as the first-in-commands, which caused her to try twice as hard to be twice as vicious.
Somehow that viciousness made her even uglier, and its wasn't like she had such a lovely character in the first place, although somehow her cruelty made you forget that she was just like you, except with biting commentary about people's most vulnerable flaws.
Maybe you didn't have that girl in your high school, but I'm sure you know the kind of person I'm talking about.
Gawker is like that -- no holds barred, no conscience, no borders. And no scruples either; Gawker is perfectly willing to forgo decency and all standards of privacy and respect in the name of reporting the "juiciest" gossip and the most scandalous pictures of those that have the unfortunate pleasure of landing in the crosshairs.
In an earlier NY Times article, Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker Media, wrote that: “THE ideal Gawker item is something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head."
Although ask the bloggers at Gawker who's a hypocrite, and the answer will be pretty much anyone who's breathing.
I try to stay away from Gawker, because reading it usually manages to both lower my I.Q. and make me seriously nauseated. Once you start reading it, its like a drug -- you feel this intense panic that if you don't keep reading, all the time, you're not going to be in the loop, you're going to miss out on something really important that everyone else will have in their frame of reference. (Before you started reading, of course, none of it meant anything to you, and you were completely fine without it. But once you're initiated? Its an obsession. Describing this weird panic is hard, and only a certain subset of people, a certain generation if you will, really get what I'm referring to when I say its like facebook. If that reference just rang a bell, you implicitly understand Gawker. If it didn't, then I'm afraid I don't really know how to explain the sick psyche of the internet to you. Sorry.)
Emily Gould was a writer for Gawker a while back, kind of a blogger darling, but had a magnificent fall from grace that ended in a pretty long bout of obscurity. When I say a magnificent fall from grace, I'm talkin' about the kind of fall where you trip and fall flat on your face in front of the whole Varsity football team, and your new skirt flies right over your head, and you're wearing underwear with Muppets on the ass, and then your crush walks up and laughs.
Yeaaaaaah, a HARD fall.
I didn't really pay much attention to any of that while it was happening, I just was kind of vaguely aware that it did. Then, this past week an article in NY Times magazine chronicled Emily's rise to "fame" and subsequent horrific disposal. Written by Emily herself, confessional style, she talked about her reasons for getting into Gawker, why it happened and how she started. Before she joined the company, she had written another, more personal blog about her life. In one entry, she referenced her boyfriend, who was incensed at being mentioned on said blog:
"
My blog post was ridiculous and petty and small — and, suddenly, incredibly important. At some point I’d grown accustomed to the idea that there was a public place where I would always be allowed to write, without supervision, about how I felt. Even having to take into account someone else’s feelings about being written about felt like being stifled in some essential way. As Henry and I fought, I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted. I don’t think I understood then that I could be right about being free to express myself but wrong about my right to make that self-expression public in a permanent way. I described my feelings in the language of empowerment: I was being creative, and Henry wanted to shut me up. His point of view was just as extreme: I wasn’t generously sharing my thoughts; I was compulsively seeking gratification from strangers at the expense of the feelings of someone I actually knew and loved. I told him that writing, especially writing about myself and my surroundings, was a fundamental part of my personality, and that if he wanted to remain in my life, he would need to reconcile himself to being part of the world I described.
After a standoff, he conceded that I should be allowed to put the post back up. As he sulked in the other room, I retyped what I’d written, feeling vindicated but slightly queasy for reasons I didn’t quite understand yet."
Of course, as I read on, I began to question my own motivations for blogging. Like Emily, I've always had some kind of online journal where I could write about my thoughts ... although sometimes I digressed into airing my grievances and vaguely bitching about something abstract that was obviously a very real reference to someone or something. And what had started as me wondering about what was appropriate to include on here, began to dissolve into a total paranoia about blogging in general:
"
... But is that really what’s making people blog? After all, online, you’re not even competing for 10 grand and a Kia. I think most people who maintain blogs are doing it for some of the same reasons I do: they like the idea that there’s a place where a record of their existence is kept — a house with an always-open door where people who are looking for you can check on you, compare notes with you and tell you what they think of you. Sometimes that house is messy, sometimes horrifyingly so. In real life, we wouldn’t invite any passing stranger into these situations, but the remove of the Internet makes it seem O.K. Of course, some people have always been more naturally inclined toward oversharing than others. Technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale. Long before I had a blog, I found ways to broadcast my thoughts — to gossip about myself, tell my own secrets, tell myself and others the ongoing story of my life... "
The more I read about Emily, the more I started wondering if I, too, fell into that category of bloggers who chronicled their every minute movement for validation of their life and existence.
For Emily that validation wasn't only an obsession; at Gawker, it became her job. Writing about others, speculating on their lives and spying on their daily routines was what she got paid to do, and as she writes in the article, it pretty much consumed her. The more she wrote for Gawker, however, the more she started to mix up real-Emily with Gawker-Emily -- in fact, they became one and the same. Suddenly there was no line between personal and professional; Emily's profession
was the personal, and not only was there no line, but she found herself infamous enough to actually begin to be posted ABOUT on Gawker. This weird new-found celebrity, where anonymous commenters/tormentors knew every private thought and all the sordid details of her life left her feeling kind of like she had eaten a pound of gummiworms: kind of ill, full of crap, and deprived of anything with real substance and nutrients...
"
For a year, I had been getting up each morning at 7 a.m., my thoughts jostling in my head, eager to escape. I wrote constantly, responding to the events of the day in real time, under perpetual pressure to condense everything I thought and read into something readers could consume. But now I was burned out and directionless, and without an audience, I lost the narrative thread. ... Soon after that, I lost the will to blog altogether. The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn’t realize was that those ideas and that urgency — and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head — could just disappear."
I sympathized with her, honestly. Even though I wanted to feel superior, I understood the entire "will to blog" thing. I've lost mine too, several time, where I simply can't work up the energy to say anything, let alone anything of substance. Sometimes, writing something comprehensive is exhausting, and writing something where you have to finesse a feeling of expertise... well, that takes guts, guts which I sometimes wonder if I have enough of to claim knowledge about anything. Often, the will to blog means having the will to be part of the world, to be a functioning human being in the universe who exists via the internet. And honestly, there are some days where I seriously want to say a big "fuck you" to every online social-tool and wouldn't care if to others, I seemed like I just stopped existing. If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? If I don't exist on myspace, do I really exist in the world? And, to be serious -- what happens to the record of people who never make a mark of themselves in this world? Once we're not aware of them, do they simply stop existing too?
In the end, Emily removed herself from the world of blogging. She left Heartbreak Soup, her more personal online blog, unshuttered -- "
Late one night, I unlocked Heartbreak Soup and wrote one last post there. In it, I talked about how a single blog post can capture a moment of extreme feeling, but that reading an accumulated series of posts will sometimes reveal another, more complete story. I talked about how taking the once-public blog and making it private, though tempting, felt like trying to revise history. Knowing that the worst of my online oversharing is still publicly accessible doesn’t thrill me, but it doesn’t scare me anymore either. I might hate my former self, but I don’t want to destroy her, and in a way, I want to respect her decision to show the world her vulnerability. I’m willing to let that blog exist now as a sort of memorial to a time in my life when I thought my discoveries about myself and what I loved were special enough to merit sharing with the world immediately."
The article made me question myself, especially in light of the post I was *about* to post. It seemed like a cautionary tale, a "this could happen to you if you put too much of your personal life online!"
It gave me the impulse to wipe out any record of myself online, to shutter this blog, take back all the things I'd said for fear of the mistakes and flaws about myself i may have exposed in writing here. But then, the last thing that Emily said struck me; that she had left up the blog as record of her existence.
Maybe that motivation isn't so bad. I don't really think its so un-relateable to want a record of your own existence, to know you existed and to prove it to others. And in a technological age where no one seems to have time enough to sit down and have those deep conversation about life and God and politics, those thoughts go nowhere. Like little boats set adrift on a sea of human consciousness, they have to land somewhere. When no one is physically there for them to land on, they seek other harbors; like the internet. So although the internet becomes a substitution for human interaction, I wonder whether that substitution is part of complex chicken-or-the-egg debate.
Like in High Fidelity, when Nick Hornby wonders:
"
What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"
Did we start blogging because we had lessened human connections? Or have we lost human connection because we're so preoccupied with blogging?
For that matter, did I start this blog because I didn't have anyone to talk about these topics with? As a substitute for human connection? Or have I stopped trying to have these conversation with actual physical people because I blog about it instead?
