This Blogging Thing

first-person-1024x705I’m having trouble getting into the swing of this blog-writing thing. Give me a cause or a cultural event or a political development and I can go off like a firecracker. But the assignment, as I understand it, to be (more) self-reflective, to find some sort of greater meaning in the quotidian of a typical day … well, it don’t come easy (to me). It’s somewhat (although not totally) against my nature, but it certainly goes against my practices as a writer, which for the most part have been outward-oriented and have shunned direct, personal reflection

This isn’t to say that you can’t find me in my writing. I’d like to think that when I was at my best as a music critic, writing dozens of concert and album reviews every month, there was a meta-narrative going on, that if someone who was following it all, reading closely, noticing connections I was making, could piece together the makings of an outlook, a criteria, even an aesthetic. And the two books I’ve written on music and Jewish-related topics were works of great personal interest and devotion, both were on some level intellectual memories, as much about the discovery of the manifest content as they were about that content themselves. Both, in a sense, about the explorer, meaning me.

FirstPersonBut granted that all was quite subtle (although a few astute readers over the years commented on precisely this notion, albeit a very few), and in the end, the reveal was almost wholly an intellectual one that still kept me at a safe distance. An intellectual memoir is just that, after all, and tossing around ideas and writing about historical movements and even making new connections …. It all can be seen as a way of averting the reader’s gaze away from the writer. There most definitely is something to be said for this sort of writing; indeed, the vast majority of writing should read this way, and way too much contemporary writing that should be avoiding the personal errs on the side of being way too personal.

There’s no such thing as objective writing and reporting (I always got a kick out of it when people suggested my reviews should be objective, or even today, that my news-gathering be objective, as if any writing is wholly objective or any editing doesn’t betray some sort of bias or world-view, which of course it should).

All that being said, I had a rule for writers when I edited a magazine: no first-person narrative. I spurned it and discouraged it, sometimes much to the chagrin of some would-be Norman Mailers or Hunter S. Thompsons. My point, of course, was unless you were a Norman Mailer or Hunter S. Thompson, no one needed to read your first-person accounts of a story that has nothing to do with you other than that you are telling it.

Occasionally, of course, I allowed the rule to be broken, when a writer made a good enough case that the story required a first-person narrative, or when the writer simply showed that he or she was good enough to pull it off. Those were few and far between, however.

All this is to say that I need to break my own rules, finally, if I am going to set out to accomplish what I targeted as my goal here, and what a few of you encouraged me to do. And I want to do it. I don’t object to it on principle. And when it’s done well, with both art and craft and humor, it can be a marvel to read. Everything is illuminated. I aspire to that, and I know if I can just break down the inhibitions and resistance I can achieve that.

In the end it comes down to being a good essayist – great essays, after all, are first-person narratives about people, places, things, ideas, typically with some sort of conflict that gets resolved opposing ideas birth new ones. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. I know those rules; I don’t even have to think about them. I’ve fully absorbed them and they are part of my unconscious approach to anything I write.

But there I go again….

One day, I’ll get it right (I typed “write,” a Freudian typo if there ever was one), and when I do, I hope you’ll let me know.

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