Aphorisms
I started this blog basically by clumsiness. A friend invited me to comment on one he was working on and it asked me to sign in and create an account – he did not allow anonymous posting, or maybe I just did not know what I was doing. I had the idea of keeping a joke going. There are indeed a lot of blogs that don’t say much. I’m not judgemental about that, most are not hurting anyone, I just thought of continuing the non-effort more explicitly.
Then another friend asked me to read her blog. Hers is definitely not a blog that says nothing and I have spent hours enjoying her writing. She got me thinking about putting more effort into my own.
My profession expects of me that I be a writer. I’m not, in my view at least, a good writer, both from the perspective of the product and of the process. I write densely argued journal articles about things I think matter or ought to matter but I manage to say these things in ways that require a lot of subsequent explanation. “Elegance” and “parsimony” are strangers to my prose. So, could blogging help?
When I defended my PhD dissertation – an historical study of intellectuals in a country under military rule – one of my dissertation committee members gave me a good title, which, regrettably, I was unable to use for the finished book: Killers and Thinkers. It was exactly right and elegant to boot. Years later, my blogging friend introduced me to the Smiths. She explained my current research to me – on everyday life and global politics – in terms of an assertion from one of their songs: barbarism begins at home.
It’s good to know real writers – she’s courageous and true. It’s not just that she writes courageously and truthfully. Her aim is true: she finds le seul mot juste in the writing of others. When she played the Smith’s music for me, she not only threaded the needle of my research agenda with that astounding summary but she also opened other windows in the Smiths for me to look out of – windows I would have missed had she not pointed me at them. There is more to be written on the topic – like thank you – but I’ll need material for another entry some day.
So I’ve been thinking about aphorisms. The very small jokes I used to begin this blog (“thinking is hard” – well duh!) don’t quite cut it as aphorisms. But there is something appealing about being able to say that thought in one sentence. I’m pretty sure that won’t be the substance of this blog but I do intend to try them out from time to time.
Then another friend asked me to read her blog. Hers is definitely not a blog that says nothing and I have spent hours enjoying her writing. She got me thinking about putting more effort into my own.
My profession expects of me that I be a writer. I’m not, in my view at least, a good writer, both from the perspective of the product and of the process. I write densely argued journal articles about things I think matter or ought to matter but I manage to say these things in ways that require a lot of subsequent explanation. “Elegance” and “parsimony” are strangers to my prose. So, could blogging help?
When I defended my PhD dissertation – an historical study of intellectuals in a country under military rule – one of my dissertation committee members gave me a good title, which, regrettably, I was unable to use for the finished book: Killers and Thinkers. It was exactly right and elegant to boot. Years later, my blogging friend introduced me to the Smiths. She explained my current research to me – on everyday life and global politics – in terms of an assertion from one of their songs: barbarism begins at home.
It’s good to know real writers – she’s courageous and true. It’s not just that she writes courageously and truthfully. Her aim is true: she finds le seul mot juste in the writing of others. When she played the Smith’s music for me, she not only threaded the needle of my research agenda with that astounding summary but she also opened other windows in the Smiths for me to look out of – windows I would have missed had she not pointed me at them. There is more to be written on the topic – like thank you – but I’ll need material for another entry some day.
So I’ve been thinking about aphorisms. The very small jokes I used to begin this blog (“thinking is hard” – well duh!) don’t quite cut it as aphorisms. But there is something appealing about being able to say that thought in one sentence. I’m pretty sure that won’t be the substance of this blog but I do intend to try them out from time to time.
posted by spike at 10:45 pm
1 Comments:
One of my friends wrote a poem that was a series of Nietzschean aphorisms, although a few borrowed from Walt Whitman as well. One went, "do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain platitudes."
As do we all.
Poetry, as well as barbarism, begins at home.
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