Photo by Jean-Luc Benazet on Unsplash
I miss blogs and I miss blogging. I miss a destination where I can click and shuffle through a person’s thoughts and post my own.
The first place I did this, or the most memorable place I did this, was Theresa Duncan’s “The Wit of the Staircase.” You may know Duncan as a game designer or one half of the Golden Suicides, but when I stumbled upon her blog in 2005, I was not aware that she was the former and certainly not aware that she would become the latter and so swiftly. I just liked reading what she wrote, which was always unexpected, no matter that she managed to sort it into categories like hotel bars, the history of electricity, and vanity.
Inspired, I made several attempts at blogging and abandoned them all until one. Along with a friend, I made a blog. Or, I should say, “We Made a Blog,” because that was indeed its name. Like Duncan’s, which has gone down with Typepad, mine is accessible only in flashes on the Wayback Machine.
The blog happened at a time in my life when I had taken a break from journalism. At that point, I thought I had left it. I’d seen too many layoffs and just wanted something stable. But I wasn’t me during the hours I was at work. So I poured all of the anxieties and grief I had about that into expectations around the blog. And it was really good. For many reasons, but mostly because of all the frustrations I felt about not being officially employed as a writer or editor that affected me at a fundamental level, the blog fell apart.
Now, in a way, journalism has left me. After the blog, I went back to it and had nearly 15 amazing years of getting paid to write full time. Those years came to an end in a phone call that lasted less than a full minute. Unlike the layoffs that preceded this one, I did not get a job within a day or the next few days. After a few months that were spent wading through the wreckage of what’s left of the industry, I got something, but it, too, ended in financially induced layoffs.
Media has taken more than one critical hit in the past few years. It will always exist at some level, and maybe one day it will figure out how to survive private equity and AI and become as robust as we need it to be. For now, I will continue to try to be a part of it, but I’m also setting out on a little lifeboat of my own. I don’t want to do Substack for all of the reasons why someone should not do Substack. While there are other newsletter platforms that function fine, I am not turning to them, at least for now. I want to blog like I used to, sending little posts out into the sea.
So I’m starting again today. The day that also happens to be Theresa Duncan’s birthday. A coincidence but maybe not in the universe’s view of things. So I’ll start my new blog with the way Theresa ended hers, with a fraction of T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker” where he wrestles with his need to put out words in a world that fights against them.
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
