The Gathering Begins

June 15, 2007

I am stretched too thin. I can’t think. It’s time to wean and weed. I follow many more blogs, sites, and publications than are listed in my always outdated sidebar and it’s become too much. I don’t have time for it and I don’t think I’m getting much intellectual return from most of them.

So over the next weeks I will be evaluating my engagements. I will look at every blog and mailing list I participate in and every site I follow and ask myself the fundamental question: is this doing anything good for me? Is it adding to what I am rather than subtracting? I’m going to gather what little intellectual muscles I have in preparation for trying to make some kind of leap.

I don’t mind being challenged. I like strong differences of opinion. But it’s still opinion. I don’t believe in an absolute, non-relative, non-subjective reckoning of art and literature. If a site authors basic approach includes things like:

• Emphasizing non-productive, artificial, and almost wholly subjective divides like the “School of Quietude” and the “Post-Avant” or “real” poets vs “posers”
• Confusing attacks on others with forceful statements of their own positions
• Mockery and condemnation of whatever group(s) the blogger dislikes
• Continuous moaning, bitching, complaining, whining
• Constant discussions about art without at least examples of the art itself… the endless abstraction
• Staking a claim that their aesthetic taste represents the Truth about what is good and worthy or, conversely, that they can also recognize and share the Truth about what is bad and unworthy of our attention

then I don’t have time for it. Similarly, if a mailing list is predominantly of this ilk then it has to go. Book discussion mailing lists are the worst in this respect. I’d love to be able to find a good group to discuss books with, but most of the lists I have found are dominated by a few blowhards… which wouldn’t be bad if they didn’t add active attacks on any who dare disagree with them to their already annoying output.

Even the (much more fun) groups that talk around art simply because they are such immense time sinks will be ruthlessly culled because they are such time sinks.

Many “post-avant” sites and blogs don’t define themselves through negativity and I’ve appreciated them as I tried for the last few years to make sense of their kind of writing. Some of those will be winnowed because I still don’t understand them. I like poems and fictions that I can read and make some kind of sense of… and that other readers can make a stab at explaining. I’m sorry that I don’t have the intellectual firepower to appreciate word art that doesn’t convey meaning or follow any rules of syntax that connect it with my frame of understanding. My taste and understanding have been enlarged thanks to many great bloggers and zines, but I have to have my own arbitrary borders as well, without which I will not retain my sanity.

And that is really what all of this comes down to in the end, the constant arbitrariness of aesthetic judgment. Tell me what you like; tell me why; better yet, show me why… don’t run down the things you don’t like, don’t try to convince me of the Rightness of your opinion, don’t try to convince me of the wrongness of my own. I can deal with a fair amount of defending of one’s own arbitrary aesthetics, but I have no stomach any longer for those who mistake that for some kind of doorway to universal truth.

Tags: blogs, lists, Psyche, reading