Blog?

“For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconsistancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal.”

 

(Andrew Sullivan, “Why I blog”, from “The Atlantic”, November 2008)

 Why blogging? Just do your thing, publish your ideas regarding Electronic Literature, reseraches,  your own opinions on some works…but while I was trying to give shape to this website at some point I realized that something was missing. I actually needed a blog. I’ll tell you why.

 

 The first thing that made me change my mind was that if the subject I am dealing with is changeable and unpredictable by itself, then a blog is the right way of rendering this sense of constant mutability. That’s why I will post here all the interesting things and links that show up in my navigations through the Web. It is a way of keeping track of what I am finding while I am finding it, a kind of chronicle on the spot.

 Secondly, one of my aims is to demonstrate that literature is still alive – as the title of this website says, and I always keep my promises. So what is more alive than a blog, in which (hopefully) posts and comments alternate in a  provocation-question-answer chain? Moreover some people consider blogging itself as a new genre of literature, which is what I am mainly dealing with here.

 To cut a long story short, I hope that this blog could become a platform for sharing contents and ideas. I will use it as an impressionist sketchbook: when something catches and leashes me, I will immediately jot it down, so not to loose the immediate sensation of marvel that only an extemperaneous and pleasurable discovery can give.

 

Blogging adds a further value to it, though.

 Blogging opens up to a new concept of “generosity” as a free exchange of words and thoughts as gifts to someone that not necessarily is next to us. “Sharing” is its name.

 Blogging exposes you to the risk of being criticized, for someone it is just the “vanity publishing by egomaniacs”, but I believe that the accidental web surfer who reads these things has the right of telling his/her opinion about them.

 If I am learning something through electronic literature that goes beyond the mere literary aspect of it, is that human knowledge is the result of the mixing and intertwining of multiple voices, and that we have to be always ready to redesign our intended paths. Sometimes we are lucky, sometimes we regret abandoning our old habits and our certanites, but I am deeply convinced that, whatever the final result, what we can experiment and learn through attempts and mistakes is always worthy and can counterbalance (almost) every disillusion.

 

 

“May the Web grant me the serenity to accept what I cannot design”

(Stuart Multhrop, “Victory Garden”, http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/VictoryGarden.html )