Almost a month into my Latvian sojurn, I'm sitting in a half-lit apartment, suddenly ipodless (more on that in a moment), finishing Modris Ecksteins' disorienting and decentering history and memoir "Walking Since Daybreak." It's one of those moments where writing feels like the thing to do, and I suppose it is a good moment to start my first-ever blog.
Which, such as it is, requires at lest a brief struggle with the concept of 'blog' and its more productive offspring, 'blogging...' Am I writing this for myself or someone else? Do people read these things? Why? Is it an expedient way to avoid sending mass emails, or a different endeavor entirely? Am I overthinking this? Course I am. The idea of a public journal is a difficult one to grasp, though. I suppose it isn't meant to replace the private journal, but perhaps to provide a venue for some of the contents of that journal to be made public. After all, not everything one writes down in one's little black book is a dark and intimate secret. Half of it is just schlock that pops into one's head after a concert or on the tram. But is any of that schlock really worth sharing with the world? The above digression is an ideal example. Do you really care? Further, am I writing this for myself, or for my projected audience, anxious as I must be on some level to impress them with the quality and candor of this, Whit's first-ever blog.
And about that projected audience. Because of course it is projected. If a blog is written on the internet, and no one is there to read it, is it really there? Anyway enough of this silliness. Here it is, for better or worse. I hope you'll email me for a more personalized take on these things. But in the mean time, here they are, gracefully cast in white-on-blue Helvetica.
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