Dog-gone BLOGGER!

How many blogs could a dogged blogger blog,
if a dog-gone blogger didn't get clogged?

As 2011 closes out and 2012 begins, this is the question I am asking myself.  I've committed myself to blogging on three sites besides my own.  My loyalties are to all four.  Some might argue that my personal site should take precedence over my work-related blogs.

I don't see it that way.  I instigated the other three blogs; thinking we were missing the boat(or the blog) at work.  I hate leaving any stone unturned.  We were not giving ourselves, our employees and volunteers a chance to have their say.  I am supposed to pick up the slack, when there is no one else to shovel another load of words into cyberspace.

Over the last two years, I have become more facile at writing blogs.  I used to write them in MSWord, panic over punctuation, agonize about an opening sentence = DRIVE MYSELF NUTS.

But, no more.  I've graduated.  I write directly into blogger, compose in my head, and surprisingly I'm more content.  This is a pretty good way to kick off 2012, even with three other blogs looming in the future.

LIVE IN 2012:
ricepaddyrandalls
learninggardenrandalls
gardensrandalls

It's All About Me

St. Augustine Moi  Errol Flynn  Augustin Burroughs  Moi   Jean Jacques Rousseau  Cellini

The New Yorker, January 29th issue

But Enough About Me by Daniel Mendelsohn 

What does the popularity of memoirs tell us about ourselves?

A review of Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda


Daniel Mendelsohn's review blew me away.

"...The greatest outpouring of personal narratives in the history of the planet has occurred on the Internet; as soon as there was a cheap and convenient means to do so, people enthusiastically paid to disseminate their autobiographies, commentaries, opinions, and reviews, happily assuming the roles of author and publisher."

"...And it may well be that the answer lies not with the genre (memoir) - which has remained fairly consistent in its aims and its structure for the past millennium and a half or so - but with something that has shifted, profoundly in the way we think abut ourselves and our relation to the world around us."

Inspired by Mendelsohn's in-depth analysis of memoir: I had to start blogging about the act of blogging.

The blog is the world of the self, this much is obvious.  In the blogosphere, there are two distinct kinds of blogs.*  Blogs which are primarily informative and blogs which focus on narrative.  And sometimes, those of us who are like ping pong balls bounce back and forth between the two forms.

In the garden world, the informative blog, runs the gamut from info on plant cultivators, new tools, reviews of books,  postings of lectures, visits with noted plantsmen, itineraries of garden trips, etc., etc., etc., and of course, most importantly, the promotion of self.

In the narrative blog, the blogger becomes something like a writer, in the sense that he/she builds a story.  And in building that story, enhancement, embellishment and distortion become the norm.  Does it matter?  The notion is essentially the same - if afternoon becomes evening, if boyfriend becomes husband, if vacation becomes business trip, if jelly becomes preserve.  When we change these facts - we change the truth, but do we expect the truth from a blog.

"...The gist is that a seemingly inborn desire on the part of Homo sapiens for coherent narratives, for meaning, often warps the way we remember things."

As Mendelsohn points out the evolution of talk show confession to reality TV to blog is barely a hop, skip or jump.  It's a nano second in the world of narcissism.  When I started this blog, my mind was snowed in.  I have found that a blog builds your ego.  You begin to think better of yourself and I would argue you think better, in general, because blogging what's on your mind, organizes your thoughts (sort of) and that brings a certain amount of clarity to an otherwise pretty big muddle.

Putting together one sentence after another is definitely an art form.  If I can learn to string two or three words together as well as Daniel Mendelsohn, I will be a happy camper, no a happy gardener.

*My notion of what blogs contain is based solely on the blogs I read:  gardening, landscape and art.
**The photos across the top are noted memoir writers, with the exception of myself.