Badger Badger Badger!

(Watch this if you're interested in understanding the layer of meaning of this post title that pertains not to TrinBlogWarriors' reading material, but I warn you: it's kind of like audio/visual crack).

Because I cannot seem to catch up on reading for anything else (thesis reading? All of Pride & Prejudice in 24 hours, you say? Psh. Piffle), that tonight I caught up with blog class reading makes me feel like a veritable superstar and entirely justified in overindulging in Turkey Day comestibles and tomorrow joining the squalling hordes of consumers to justify retail minions' anxiety over the most terror-striking, awe-inspiring of all workdays known as Black Friday.

I read in entirety Badger's lengthy and remarkable essay . You tell me remarkable, and I'm usually dubious, but this article really is both of those things. I found informative the section on photobloggers (besides, hchamp's stuff is really quite nice), and the discussion of photo continuums and their capacity for storytelling with both clarity and ambiguity was a point well made. I especially liked this as a summation of the wedding of photo/video/text in the blogosphere, so kudos to Badger for this:

"The blog medium is one that allows disparate elements and contrasting styles to co-exist harmoniously, rubbing up against each other and influencing the way we respond to the other elements contained there. It is hard to think of another publishing medium that creates such a successful blending of tone, style as well as the public and private aspects of the one person."

But of course I found elements with which to contend. Muahahaha.

Exhibit A:
"weblogs deliver bite-sized portions of information on a daily basis to an ever expanding audience. Weblogs are the conjunctions of the Internet: the ands, the buts the ors – they add to online conversations, refute them, or provide new perspectives altogether. "

I'm a bit puzzled as to what these two sentences actually mean. To me, this assertion of Badger's reduces blogs to mere fragmentary slices of petulantly random interjections. This invalidates blogs just a wee a bit, doesn't it? Is that Badger's intent? I, for one, believe blogs are more than just conjunctions of the internet (even though that metaphor is cute); can't they be regarded as entities in and of themselves? Come on! Legitimize blogs! Waaaah!

< / end petulantly random interjection >

Ah. And on to one of my most favorite topics: the blog as public or private medium/monologue or dialogue. Badger writes:

"The Internet feels like an intimate space. We tend to view it on our own, and up close; the computer screen is like a face, watching us as we work. The weblog format propagates this sensation; the first person narrative with its confiding tone can make us feel that we are partaking in a one-on-one exchange."

It seems to me that Badger starts off talking about writing blogs, then somehow conflates writing blogs with reading blogs. Logistics aside--I wonder how many bloggers actually intend for what they write to feel like a one-on-one exchange? When blogging, I, for one, do not feel as though I'm interacting with a sentient confidant. The blog is a comfortingly blank confessional space, not a kindly ear with an inherent bias or repository of presuppositions about me or what I say. I write with the understanding that others may read what I write, and even some vague, fuzzy notion of who those others may be; yet I am not talking with them--I'm talking at them. I'm collecting and spewing out all of my thoughts on my confessional space before the eyes of observers get to comb them-- in effect, observers have no choice once I've published (save halting their reading) but to let me talk at them for a little while before collecting up their own response. Blogs provide a nice way to ensure that all of my thoughts get presented and everything I want to say is given some voice before I get cut off by anOther's aside. It's a way I can fully think through my ideas and express them before an interjection of mine or anybody else's intrudes and sours or simply changes the mental riff. I'd contend that while it's being written an original blog post (unless it's a response to something read in another post) is NOT a one-on-one conversation--it's a mental dump created with the awareness that, when all's said and done, somebody may want to hop on board, create another post, and turn it into a conversation. A single blog post in its creation stage is not inherently a conversation, but an open ended invitation to begin one that reads something like, "Here's what I'm thinking. I'd be completely amenable to speaking with you about it/defending my ass/kissing yours, so please by all means do reply if you like, but don't feel obligated."

I also really, really liked this Rousset quote Jill of jill/txt pulled and translated from French:

"...this temporal position, which makes the narrator contemporary with what he is telling, tends to make the narration itself into the action . . . The epistolary instrument makes it possible to imagine a narrator who would tell nothing, who would have no other object than his own writing and its effect on himself or others."

Hmm. Narration as action is not a NEW thing--(don't make me dive back into the 18th Century and earlier)--but the idea of a narrator as a being telling his own writing, and caring for nothing but his own writing is fascinating to me. On the one hand, this thought seems like it may punt the act of blogging into a territory swollen with narcissism (I concede that this is a realm in which it may rightly deserve to dwell), but it DOES make for the ultimate in attention to rhetoric, no?

Anyway. I think I'm through being an internet scribbler for the evening. Perhaps I'll start Pride & Prejudice early and buck the poor habit of last-minuteness I've bred into myself over the years. We'll see. In all likelihood, I'll go lay on my bed and stroke my poor cat Gemma, to whom I don't pay nearly enough attention, and read Barth. :)

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.