Tag Archives: blogging

Blogging and Dying

I’ve become a Substack reader but remain a devoted WordPress blogger. Political journalism and commentary thrive on Substack – the stuff of the chattering classes, to which I freely admit I belong. Yet for all its growth, Substack still can’t match WordPress’s audience reach. It tickles me to see analytics showing someone in Bangladesh reading my piece ‘Patriarchy and Harari’ and that my most popular post over the past year was ‘Titanic Languages.’  I follow other bloggers, literary journals, and arts magazines on WordPress, and after nearly a decade, the platform feels like home. If you’re reading this, WordPress, for our tenth anniversary, a gift subscription would be most welcomed.

Recently, I’ve been working on the appearance of these WordPress pages, and it’s been quite an undertaking. After scrolling through dozens of new themes and giving several a trial run, I ended up keeping my old theme but changing the colours. While in this digital housekeeping mode, I discovered that what looks good and professional on a laptop could appear dreadful and amateurish on a phone. For several of my postings, the image got in the way of the text, crunching words into the margin. Since most people read on their phones these days, I’ve been resizing, repositioning and replacing images while listening to Max Richter’s complete 16-hour playlist on Spotify. It’s been a journey.

The main image that needed to be replaced was the feature for the first instalment of my fictional prose pieces called ‘Bunny’s Vignettes.’ I had decided to employ the help of AI to get an image that I could use repeatedly with each instalment. When I explained to Copilot that I wanted a crayon-drawn image of an adult woman who was part rabbit, part woman, they gave me a beautiful sex kitten, complete with busty cleavage. Six prompts later, after I put her into a t-shirt, cut her hair, and revealed her bucked teeth, I was closer to what I wanted, but it didn’t seem to understand that she was still too attractive. ‘Make her normal,’ I protested. It wasn’t until I asked Copilot to make her ‘older’ that it understood ‘less attractive.’ Yes, AI reflects our society.

What I’ve been reading

A lot about dying and death. Joyce Carol Oates’s Breathe is a transformative novel that recounts how a 37-year-old woman, Michaela, navigates through her husband’s dying days and the months following his death. At times this is a love story, brought about through reminiscences and through her denial and later imaginings of her dead husband calling her to join him. Stylistically, the novel uses a fascinating form of free indirect speech. Often, we’re inside Michaela’s mind in a stream of consciousness. At other times, the narration steps outside her thoughts to record dialogue and scenes from her perspective. Occasionally the narration moves further still into a detached commentary that seems to arise from Michaela’s perceptions but with more sobriety. In one such moment, the narrator offers this gem:

‘The ontological mystery of Death: that the dead vanish and never reappear except in dreams. They are gone from us, and we cannot see them, speak with them, touch them, breathe with them. No matter how we yearn for them.’

I understand why this book resonates with support groups for those who have lost loved ones. But here I become the resisting reader. I couldn’t feel complete empathy with Michaela because I take a more Buddhist approach. Ideally, living in the moment, I resist grief that pulls me into the past and leaves me with a present defined by absence. In mindfulness, denial of the present has no place, nor do thoughts of the future that so easily stir up fear. I refer to The Tibetan Book of the Dead – which is not a book about death but really a study of the mind at the moment of death when illusions of what we perceive as life fall away. For the living, this classic tome on Tibetan Buddhism reframes death as part of a continuous cycle, encouraging a less fearful and confused relationship with mortality.

I am aware that this act of blogging is at times my way of working through these beliefs on death and dying.

Winding down my year of blogging

My writing goal at the start of 2023 was to write a blog every week. I’ve done it – well, nearly. According to my WordPress stats, this final blog of 2023 will be my 51st of the year. I managed to stretch the meaning of a week to 8 days here, nine days there, while changing my posting date from Friday to Monday to get more hits, ending up a week behind. In France, however, a ‘good week’ means 10 to 12 days if you’re a builder or government worker. By that calculation, and since I spent half of 2023 in France, I have over-blogged this year.

WordPress also informs me that these blogs have totalled nearly 30,000 words, a solid novella length. But that’s an unfair comparison as blogs belong to a type of creative non-fiction. Or at least they can be. I appreciate the often-quoted Dr Ian Sussman who said, ‘Blogging is not writing. It’s graffiti with punctuation.’ To paraphrase Sussman, blogging can also be long-winded, soft-sell advertising.

My blogs have been neither the swear-laden ranting of graffiti or promotional writing being masked as information. Blogging, as a creative exercise, has given me the chance to author pieces about items in the news without falling into reportage and to write about books without following the standard book review format, often combining books together under sociocultural or environmental themes. Speaking of the latter, looking back on this year’s blog, I’m surprised that I didn’t write more about the environment, aside from three pieces around this year being my year of trees. I suspect this is because I now subscribe to David Wallace-Wells’s brilliant newsletter that covers environmental topics I would otherwise write about and at more length.

These blogs are creative too as no one assigns me the topics. Even with writing every week, I usually have too many ideas bouncing around my head to write about and have had to quickly choose one before the weekly deadline has caught up with me.

I’ve enjoyed the creative side of blogging. It’s what has kept me going with it. George Eliot called her creative life, her ‘higher life – a life that is young and grows, though in my other life I’m getting old and decaying.’ Too true. But there’s only so much creativity and time to go around and this blogging year has taken away from other creative writing. I’ve noticed less journalling and only two new essays and one short story for the entire year. Having said that, I won’t be too hard on myself as I managed two academic articles and a book review, along with a couple of editing jobs. (Self pats her back.)

So, what’s the writing goal for 2024? To paraphrase John Updike, I plan to rewrite, rewrite and rewrite my fourth unpublished novel, the focus this coming year being on quality instead of quantity. As for this blog, it’ll continue to be my public notebook, but not likely in weekly instalments – once every fortnight or so.

I wish you all a creative and joyful 2024.

To conclude my year of trees, Paul Cezanne’s Chestnut Tree and Farm (1885)

Blogging the year

I’ve decided to make 2023 my year to focus on this blog. You might recall a few years ago I set myself the task of writing in my journal every day. That was an interesting exercise, not only as a writer, but for the self-administered psychotherapy that came with it. As this blog is more about the ideas I run into and less about me than my journals, I don’t know what to expect from a routine of regular weekly blogging. My current practice is a blog once every week or two, with larger gaps between blogs if I’m working on a writing project. During those gaps, I’ve made notes and journal entries on things I want to blog about but then didn’t get around to. There’s a stockpile of ideas and fragments of blogs in case I run dry some weeks. I don’t know if that will make me a breaker of the blogger’s code if I don’t always adlib.

I first took up an interest in blogs not as a writer of one myself but from the perspectives of sociolinguistics and psychology. In the early days of blogging, this written genre was a curio for researchers with a hint of condescension. Looking through my folders from a dozen years ago, among the pieces on ‘online language’ – I don’t know what that means anymore – I found an article saying this:

‘The results of two studies indicate that people who are high in openness to new experience and high in neuroticism are likely to be bloggers. Additionally, the neuroticism relationship was moderated by gender indicating that women who are high in neuroticism are more likely to be bloggers as compared to those low in neuroticism whereas there was no difference for men. These results indicate that personality factors impact the likelihood of being a blogger and have implications for understanding who blogs.’

You can read a lot into this, but I’ll stop myself from a feminist interpretation since this was written in 2008. Blogging has since become normalised and no more for the novelty-seeking neurotic than the ever so quotidian Facebook. Today blogging is used by writers of all sorts, a mainstay for citizen journalists, politicians, travel writers and activists. Let’s not forget the promotional blogs that pretend to be informative, masking their agenda to sell the likes of gardening tools, sports kit and (sorry publishing friends) books.

So, why am I blogging? I’m reminded of that worn quote, sometimes attributed to a character in the film Contagion: ‘Blogging is graffiti with punctuation.’ True, sometimes I blog to express myself on political and social issues with the attitude of a graffiti artist. Other times, I share ideas that I find give some meaning to life, sometimes making it clearer, sometimes more ambiguous. A lot of this is through the lens of what I read, fiction and non-fiction, or what I’ve observed in the visual arts and occasionally film and television. With all this in mind, I hope, dear reader, you will continue to read and enjoy my blogs. Here’s to the writing year ahead – clink.