I thought it would be different this time. I really did. I wasn’t going to let myself go more than a few days without posting, certainly not weeks . . . this was to be the grown-up blog, the one that admits to itself that it’s a blog, favoring flow over content, never slowing down for the flies to gather over one particular post. Yet here it is, and that’s what’s happened.
Part of the reason for this is a general uneasiness on my part concerning the thematic scope of the postings and the format warranted by their level of content. Are they to be treated as pieces of real writing, with paragraph breaks and room to breathe in the margins? Are the things I post better suited to something like Tumblr (from whence I came), where brevity is the norm and community trumps autonomy? I made some effort to combine those two extremes on this site, combining the main column and the “Below the Fold” section. But the hierarchy inherent in this design seems forced. The layout is basically a first-shot adaptation of a sketch I made over a quarter-liter of red wine on a rainy day in the outskirts of Paris sometime last March, and I don’t pretend that it’s in any real thoughtful way informed by the content it must now contain. The recent expansion of my design education and attention has shifted my way of thinking, so that now I feel the need to envision my content, and create a thoughtful design to hold and present it. I’m leaning toward simple and fast-loading, less gimmicky, more readerly.
Also, I’ve wrestled with how intimate one should be when writing on a blog. My thoughts on this now are certainly different from this winter, when I was holed up and posting scads of information to Facebook and sending out oddly two-dimensional versions of myself to any computer that happened to stumble upon them. I’ve reined that in: Twitter (who knew) now satisfies most of my exhibitionist desires, I’ve stripped all extraneous jabber from Facebook and locked down my pictures, and I recently resumed writing entries in a private journal that I kept for ten days in the summer of 2007. I have turned inward, in a way that is only possible after solidifying one’s connections with the outside world.
But never fear. The bully pulpit stands strong, and my PHP/CSS skills grow stronger every day. Stay tuned for exciting developments in this space . . . or don’t. I’ll surely come knocking, or at the very least Tweeting, at your virtual door when I have something new to sell and advertise.
Reimagination and niche-picking
A new specification: not a travel blog per se, but one focused on the ruminations of traveling: its attendant pauses and double-takes, the fresh eye of a traveler above a river. Movement and discovery have always pleased me best.
I’ll explain the title of this blog. The words themselves just occurred to me as something that might sound nice. But it also relates to the idea of culture viewed in a sudden wallop of understanding, a fresh perspective like what the Zen monks are always after. The equivalent of the possibly-apocryphal “wheeled airplane” that drove up onto Eskimo permafrost many years after the people there had become accustomed to winged vehicles passing overhead.
I remember the time I first recognized the value of standing on one’s head. I was out in Center Campus at my high school on one fine spring evening. The quadrangles there are lined with nice little buildings and neatly-kept trees, and the chapel’s clean white steeple stands at one end. A very nice view, but like all views, it becomes customary for those who pass through it every day at 7:55am on the way to Mathematics. So it was, in an adolescent way, a kind of revelation when I flipped over and looked at things upside-down. I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if the whole world were upside-down and we could walk around on it and hang off it, our heads dangling into space! I stood up. But that’s exactly what we do. Problem solved. Magic is restored to the world of the living.
I’m going to Sweden in a couple of days to visit a grandmother I haven’t seen since I was three and an aunt I’ve never met. I’ll be staying with the father I couldn’t bear to think about for more than a decade, and a stepmother and half-brother I’ve only seen once. We’ll have a cottage on the water in Åhus, just a short drive from Kristianstad, where my father was born and my farmor still lives in an old people’s home. After my dad and his family leave, I’ll have the country to myself for about a week. Perhaps I’ll rent a bike and camp if the weather’s nice.
On Friday I’m flying out of PDX on a direct route to Amsterdam that goes North, not East, in a so-called “great circle” route up over the Northern Territories and into the Arctic. We’ll probably be flying in sunlight the whole time.
So this is the time, my big trip of the year. I’ll try to keep things updated from the road.