The First

Purely as a way to organize, categorize and optimize my thoughts and desires, I began a journal during the middle of last year, which I feel has now grown beyond the confines of legal pads and Microsoft Word and needs to be instituted into a single location. Say hello to the blog.

I have had many blogs in the past: quote the raven, the new(er) edit(or), etc., but I decided this one should serve as the decisive, singular blog for my thoughts on everything in my world (not to be interpreted as self-centered, though.)

What better title for the blog than the Blog of Myself? Taken from Whitman's Song of Myself, the epic poem that changed my outlook on what Modern Poetry could look like, having only dabbled in interpreting Dickinson and Stevens' work beforehand, the poem was a far cry from ordinary--something I strive for in my life.

Concurrently, in our new digital age where the internet deserves its own chair at the dinner table, perhaps the 'song,' or the physical act of writing is not what it once was. That's not to say it's not respected, revered and still utilized by millions around the globe, but simply that it is an art form that has been transformed and has mutated and/or been augmented by our changing societies to include the computer as a standard tool for writing. Long gone are the parchments and papyrus rolls, so too must the ubiquitous scrap papers and filled notebooks; all in favor of an organizational form that doesn't try to steal the inherent joy in creating with the paper and pencil, but rather provides an outlet for its products. (Or even as an assistant to the process itself; to encourage and support it, perhaps.) So if the act of writing has somehow or somewhat become more public, more technological, it has also become more current, and that is a necessity.

With newspapers all around the US filing for bankruptcy, two questions still loom very large (ones which will be addressed in another entry shortly): what is the future of news, investigative journalism, and information, and what will our writing and reading habits look like in the future. I'm not saying Amazon's Kindle is a bad thing, on the contrary, it might just be a great step forward into encouraging reading in our children and young adults and NOTHING is more important than achieving a 100% literate country, interested in reading and/or writing and actively pondering the world. And there will always be a great desire to hold something in one's hands, to actually feel how the page crinkles between your fingers, or to read the news and close the paper after an hour and see bits of ink still clinging to your palms. There's an internal joy there that can't be matched with a portable reading device or with the internet.

So true, the blog may mean the skimping out of more traditional forms or writing in favor of new ones, but I belive it is something necessary if writing and reading are to transcend time. If Whitman could return for one day now and see his writing available to the entire world in a matter of seconds, for a fraction of the money it once would have cost, I'm sure he'd be pleased if for no other reasons than to see people reading, and especially reading his words. The greatest writers always had something to say, always had some new idea or radical interpretation, and the Blog of Myself is mine.