Why I started a personal blog

Putting a pen to paper is an essentially dishonest action. There’s almost no possibly pure motive for wanting to do a zine, nor for writing in general. It’s like wiping your ass and then calling your neighbor in to take a look.

Jim Goad, Factsheet 5 #61

I thought I was resisting fragmentation by not starting a personal blog.

Various factors meant that when I moved from Leeds to London in 1999, I stopped writing for a while. During 2000, I inadvertently ended up writing a column for an AOL UK (eek!) ‘channel’, on sacred sites. I told myself that the discipline of writing to a low word-limit was good after years of self-edited (i.e. not edited at all, thankyou very much) self-publishing… But secretly I longed for the time and inspiration to unfurl some new, gargantuan article that would reconfigure its reader’s neurons and cut through the bitty shards of soundbite culture and web-based communication. Or—as expectation dictates—write a book.

Instead, my energies were poured into Norlonto. A couple of articles here and there found their way out of me, and I put loads of old stuff up, but where’s my overarching, wide-ranging new vision of things, goddammit!

Norlonto’s cool (though I say so myself) but it’s disfigured slightly by the conflict between where my slacker-than-Bob collaborator Jim Fitzsimons and I were when we planned the whole thing, and where we were when we launched it. ‘Online publishing community’ was the vibe when we started bouncing ideas around back in ’99. Three years later—after slack on both our parts, plus a stupendous amount of coding—and all the wonderful facilities we’d built into the thing for people to publish their stuff on our site went largely unused. Why?

Partly, for various reasons, we didn’t have the motivation to run around pestering people to contribute. Jim started his own blog, and his energies went into that. A very curious thing, it is, to discover things that happened the other day to your flatmate by browsing the web—as I’m sure Jim’ll discover in due course ;-). When this dissonance had settled, I got well into reading his blog. Then I started giving more than a cursory glance to the blogs of allies like John Eden.

Jim and I had already decided that Norlonto 2.0 would be reorganised quite a bit, divided more into subsites, the top-level bit being more focussed around a discussion forum than served-on-a-plate content. When a drunken birthday Mr Eden explained to me how Jim’s blog was more engrossing than Norlonto itself because of the personal element (not to mention more frequent updates), I had to admit he had a point. I’d started thinking that maybe, in the cycle of decades, we’d now swung back to the me-me-me ego thing of the 80’s, only mitigated by all the cultural melting of the 90’s.

Despite my high level of web-savvy, and the inordinate amount of time I spend at the keyboard, I’m not the kind of info-junkie who thrives on a constant stream of virtual stimulation. I socialise much more in real life than on the web. Which, truth be told, really isn’t saying much, but at least I get the ratio right. Still, even I’ve finally admitted that blogging is where some of the most interesting publishing is being done at the moment. The whole phenomena, to me, is really just a conceptual shift coupled with the spread of online publishing software. Moving from "This is my website, check this page for updates" to "These updates are my website" has happened alongside a gradual settling of web publishing conventions and the lowering of entry-levels to running application servers and databases.

So, why not go with the flow? Why hold on to some idea of what I think I should be heading towards with writing and publishing, when in actual fact, a blog would serve me very well. The flow of ideas certainly hasn’t ceased since I stopped writing long articles and pamphlets. They’ve just never coalesced into anything ‘substantial’. I always used to see writing as making room for new ideas (like, say, going to the toilet so you’ve room for fresh nourishment). Surely a fragmentary format would serve my thought streams much better than some carrot-on-a-stick idea of what the ‘best’ format is?

On the train to the Occulture 2003 event in Brighton yesterday, I was trying to explain this to my good friends Lee & Iokasti, and I started saying, "I think by not doing a blog I’ve been trying to resist…" "…totality," was Lee’s end to my sentence. Now, Lee has a strange facility for getting at the truth of the matter by misinterpreting things, so I paid attention, even though I was very sure that blogs were all about fragmentation. Totality? "Yeah, putting it all there in one place," Lee said.

Occulture itself was a buzzing cauldron of inspiration, and I found ample flutters of synchronicity confirming both my recent inner developments and my impetus to start a blog. At the heart of my day was a shuddering experience in the dark with a rare caffeine high and the Qabalistic percussion of Z’ev. The drumming and darkness were meant to induce ‘lights behind the eyes’, and though I felt more caffeine spasms than seeing lights, I did have a strong sense of energy funnelling down from above, into and through me. I had to take my shoes off to earth it. When I got back, I was flicking through Joel Biroco‘s journal and found a series of snippets on what blogs are, and what they can be, which just cracked open the already crumbling dam holding me back from the earthing of random musings that is blogdom.

So here I am.

My guess is this’ll be a kind of inverse of my 90’s writings, which were grandiose, fanciful and inspiring theories on psychology, mythology and magick, laced with personal indulgences and cultural references. Just stick the personal crap and culture stuff upfront, and pepper it with dubious and engaging theoretical musings, et viola! There’s no comments for now, but that may change… As may anything else, at any time.

So what’s with that Jim Goad quote at the top? I stuck it alongside a piece on publishing zines in Towards 2012 part III, and I thought it was worth connecting this whole blog thing back to the zine scene, as well as reminding myself of an important, if cynical bottom line (no pun intended). But, as I’ve been naturally gravitating towards alchemical models recently, I don’t think the idea of publishing my mental excretions necessarily stinks. You have to start somewhere, y’know? Just as the blog format itself can have an aspect of totality as well as fragmentation, as it wends its way through 21st century culture’s ever-intensifying fractal solve et coagula.

As if to confirm my initiation, when I checked the web to find a page about Jim Goad to link to, I found that, surprise surprise, he’s got a blog.