Back to basics

The rumours of my death are greatly exaggerated

Mark Twain did not say this, but he’s been stuck with the quote and it’s too late for him to do anything about it, so..

I recalled this alleged statement while thinking of whether to restart my blog, given the many obituaries that have been written in the wake of the supposed demise of blogging. Then I trawled through my ‘newsletters’ folder and realised that blogs never died: they just did a costume change and came back as newsletters. I also realised, inter alia, that there are too many of the damned things — I am still trying to work my way through last week’s offerings.

So — blogs. Specifically, my blog, which I am reviving now as a quiet space for me to “write in order to know what I am thinking”, as Joan Didion put it in this circa 1976 essay. While on which, PS, it is amazing the number of writers who give “thinking aloud” as their reason for writing. For instance, the Flannery O’Connor version is “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

PPS: If you have gotten used to getting your fix via email, you can always subscribe.

What will this refreshed avtaar of the blog be? I have no idea. What will I be writing about? Again, I don’t know. I only know that with each passing day of being “waterboarded by the news” — a phrase so apt for our times that I recall it every day since first encountering it in this Gabrielle Hamilton piece — I find I need space to allow my thoughts to breathe.

There are some things I won’t do. I won’t inundate social media with links to everything I post here — if you are inclined to read (and respond), you know where to find me.

I won’t tie myself down to any fixed schedule — daily, weekly, whatever. Rather, I’ll write when I want to think through something, and I’ll do it whenever the need arises.

Here is what I will do: I’ll be regular even in my irregularity; I won’t vanish for months, as I did last time. I’ll be mixing up short posts intended to document events I think are important with longer posts when I am trying to connect up discrete dots and see what picture emerges. And I’ll be posting links, and occasional clips, from what I am reading.

So for now, welcome — or welcome back, in the case of one or two of you — to my space.

NB: Here is a link to the George Orwell essay Why I write, that Didion references in her NYT essay linked above.

And, PS: I wanted to get this revised, and now permanent, site in some sort of shape before I began posting. But yesterday, I accidentally hit the ‘Publish’ button instead of the ‘Preview’ button on a post I was working on, and inadvertently jumped the starter’s gun, so here we are.