Tag: blogging

bleah. i’m tired and my eyes are crusty/crunchy since i chose sleep over show­er this morn­ing. but on to today’s rant and my first shot at metablog­ging.

what i get tired of see­ing as i search through the morass of the wide­world­ofwe­blog­ging are the sites in which the entries become noth­ing more than lin­guis­tic acro­bat­ics. how cool can i make my mun­dane life and ideas sound? alas, i have been guilty of this myself. my beef cen­ters on the fine dis­tinc­tion between writ­ing to be ‘clever’ and writ­ing to be pre­cise. writ­ing to be ‘clever’ is easy. you just need a the­saurus and enough imag­i­na­tion to believe the weath­er fore­cast. then, util­is­ing Roget’s tex­tu­al inter­face a per­son can sub­sti­tute words for words cre­at­ing a ren­dered uni­verse of kaliedo­scop­ic intran­sience whose pletho­ra of sub­lim­i­nal gad­getry hides the fact that there is no actu­al con­tent to the damn thing. this ‘clev­er­ness’ is in fact noth­ing but inten­tion­al ambi­gu­i­ty. writ­ing to be pre­cise, on the oth­er hand, does not let the read­ing infer any­thing from the post. they are told what the point of the arti­cle is and it is explained suf­fi­cient­ly.

now some might say that i am dis­tin­guish­ing between two dif­fer­ent schools or writ­ing which could be rep­re­sent­ed but not nec­es­sar­i­ly defined by artis­tic writ­ing and aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ing. how­ev­er, what some might mis­take as my rant against the artis­tic is by no means my inten­tion. what i am rail­ing against is writ­ing that has form but no con­tent. neo-Dada writ­ing if you will. the point is that it has no point. fuck that. i believe that those who think they are being clever are actu­al­ly con­vinced that their cre­ations have con­tent and mean­ing.

what is nice to run across are the instances of pre­ci­sion that pierce to the cen­ter of the author’s intent and enlight­en instead of mud­dle. when words are cho­sen not for their clev­er­ness but for their apt­ness. where adjec­tives are used with the dis­cern­ing taste of a con­nosieur to empha­size, instead of the hap­haz­ard arse­nal employed by so many that mere­ly over­loads. good poet­ry is pre­ci­sion writ­ing at its best, and it is artis­tic.

i’d like to acknowl­edge that the oppo­site is true, writ­ing can be exces­sive­ly banal to the point of mild insan­i­ty but i’ll talk about that some oth­er time.

Nota Bene: this entry is also an attempt at reflex­iv­i­ty despite the fact that i dis­like the post­mod­ern, i am still a child of it. that is prob­a­bly appro­pri­ate for the post­mod­ern itself. coils with­in coils.