HEY, I KNOW YOU!
This post is in part a response to a rather pretentious Vox conversation about using the internet, not specifically blogging. Though I’m a solitary old lady past eighty, I write and some people read me, more than those who would read books by me. People choose whom to read according to name recognition or subject interest. Mine are limited.
“The thing that makes us human is a desire for recognition. His specificity on this is that recognition is to be seen as a human by a human.”
Note that this doesn’t mention fame and fortune. Just that someone knows who you are. In Valier and Browning that means, “I know your family.” But my family has all been dead for years and was never here. People know my marriage family.
I write in two modes: “Twitter” which is good for short quips, footnotes, and the like; and “Medium” which is good for long form (1,000 words or more) and will take images. The two outlets interact. On Twitter I don’t use my middle name, but on Medium, I do, because it’s more “writerly” and because it’s “Strachan” which is a good literary-related name.
In the Sixties, when I took my identity from Bob Scriver and was tightly joined to him, we were referred to as “BobnMary” and I was known as “Scriver’s old lady,” which means something like “owned”. I was in my twenties. Some people around here still call me that. It’s not a slam. People were warned not to mess with me.
When I was in ministry, one of my colleagues was Peter Raible, whom Alan Deale called “Peter Rabbit.” Peter’s first wife, divorced and tiring of being called “DeeDee Raible” changed her name to DeeDee Rainbow. This sort of thing was a practice of the indigenous people on the prairie, whenever events or some inner development justified it. Since women are required to change their names when marrying, it seems fair to change again after the marriage.
I’m pretty good with the quick quips, though sometimes wrong or mis-aimed. I’ve worked to achieve the kind of long form writing that’s worth reading because it responds to earned experience and follows a line of thought. In another situation, the the latter might have been published, meaning gathered, bound and promoted for sale — but not now. Not even if I do it myself. The shine has gone off the practice, though I’m still tempted into buying too many books, so the aura lingers.
At one time it was thought that being “published” by someone was a certification of value as when publishing was in the hands of educated people decades ago. Today being published is at about the level of toothpaste. Minor, everywhere, approved but not worth saving. Maybe useful. Discardable.
I have had two blogs. Prairiemary.blogspot.com was my first and includes a lot of local minutia and sentimental memories. Google owns it and since I have no Google account, it is frozen. People write long comments that I can read, but I have no way to respond. Anyway, that blog developed an audience I no longer want. They were often people who approach education as though they were hobbyists, accumulating minutia that suited their pre-existing map of the world. They wanted to tell me how clever they were, to have some tie between us. At first I was flattered. Pretty soon I felt belittled and invaded How could I express the grandeur, dimensions and exceptions of the world so they couldn’t make toys out of them? I’m closer but not there yet.
Blocking people who only want to argue is a big help. But what do I do about people who define “religion” in some political historical institutional way? They have no awareness that the story of God making people out of mud is totally a child’s story. They speak of God as real because they think he is, though they won’t admit it. To them, religion is power-broking because it is always institutional. God is CEO.
How do I find the things I want to read since they don’t fit the categories of some young man back east whose education is stuck in his sophomore year when he learned the names of the discipline boxes. Many of the thoughts I’m looking for are hybrid or use invented titles — such things don’t fit in silos, which are the marketing strategy that distorts so much of our thought.
I depend on the bibliographies of books which luckily often persist in technical papers. Another guide is the nature of the authors, who can sometimes be met directly on YouTube. Rarely do the silos of Medium suggest that I read something wanted, but sometimes I find a person that way who is worth following. Like Jonathan Poletti when he does biblical scholarship and gender exploration. But I resist the Playmate magazine strategy of rounding us all up into some kind of club.
Email is useless unless it is real mail. The emagazines are repetitious, overlapping, self-serving, often advertising. The exceptions are the technical mags: Quantum, Nautilus. Aeon and Templeton, which are the same, interpret humanities familiarly as home, family, pair-bonding, cooking, travel. But I want to know why just up the street two deputy patrol sheriffs have stopped, boxed in and are processing someone while their lights are flashing? Can I get the police scanner on email? (I looked it up — curiously one can buy a scanner but it’s often illegal to listen to it!)
This sort of sums up the state of information. It might be highly relevant to your life. You want to know it, you could pay a lot to get it, it might be illegal to know, and the suspense remains. Posting writing is becoming more complicated. Soon only a certain class will be able to do it, something like publishing.
