Today, I am in Wichita, Kansas, on day two of a long - and hopefully low-speed - trip through northern New Mexico and central Colorado. I have a bad habit of trying to rush my time on trips, but today I am near-giddy to admit that I am feeling no such rush. I once called Wichita "the poor man's Omaha"; this goes back to Reid and I's propensity to use that phrase whenever possible. It always makes me giggle a bit inside - not least when it is an unjustifiably reductive and one-dimensional comparison.
To wit: is blogging just the poor man's writing of literature? It often feels that way to me - but, perhaps that is because in my blogging I strive to rise above the mere accounting of facts and to write something internally consistent, something with a shade of permanence, something encoded with some wisdom. Literature is supposed to be nothing BUT that, but I usually find it to be a lot of work. If literature is a world where I might spend a whole morning crafting a particular paragraph to be just right (and I have spent much longer than that), then blogging at least allows me to quickly complete something that I feel accomplishes its purpose, and release it into the world.
Will I ever publish anything literate that I have written? I suppose it pivots on the word, "publish." I would like, at least, to call something finished, and put it in some format that feels, well... Set in stone in some way. I love to think that could be a book that sits on my shelf, but perhaps even that is unnecessary. In any case, I have perhaps six or seven months before my free time largely evaporates; it at least suggests a natural deadline to finish something. And, I suspect I have enough short stories that I like - or, at least like well enough - to form into something that feels "of a piece."
If there is any problem with this strategy, it is that I have not learned how to tell when something is done - I think a person can go on changing a story essentially forever; the longer you gaze into the characters, and the situations, the more cracks you see, and the more you can try to go about fixing them by shifting elements in the story. Doing so, it turns out, is approximately as likely to cause additional cracking as it is to fix the original cracks. Because of this, determining when a story is finished seems to me to be, itself, an artform.
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I have a Twitter account (@D3302) which I use mostly to follow particular topics - Finance chiefly among them - and a spattering of other unique individuals that I stumble across (Twitter is especially good at that sort of "discovery"). One of those is Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade). He is an ex-Wall Street banker who travels the U.S. and photographs the poor, especially certain groups that stand for what you might describe as particular "structural" issues in our social fabric - things like drug addiction and immigration. I am not often touched by works of art focused on those subjects - to me, many of them can't help but feel of a piece - trod upon ground, and so for me their impact has largely been drained. But his photos and writing make it through - they feel unlike anything else I have experienced, and they feel important. Somehow, his work seems more real (that old artistic trump card!) than anything else out there right now.
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