Reckoning

The first quarter of the year has gone by and I haven't spent much attention on my blog. If you're a reader (thank you), please don't be alarmed: I've spent my attention on a lot of things—hopefully interesting things.¹ Since the blog has always been a forum for me to experiment and play and puzzle out the ways in which I'm colliding with the world, I want to reassure you (and myself): I'm still experimenting, and playing, and puzzling. I've been busy, creative, and curious: exactly the way I want always to be.

I think of this blog as a sort of scrapbook where I can experiment with ways of reckoning with my confusions about the world. Sometimes, when I'm not writing, it's because I'm too overwhelmed with those confusions: they feel beyond my reckoning. But other times (like now), it's simply that those reckonings have found other outlets. And thank god, because, as much as I love writing this blog, ... it's just a blog; and it's nice sometimes to think that the sum of my life's work will include more than a pile of pixels on a screen.

I think often about something that novelist Zadie Smith said in an interview for The Literateur:

"It’s not a genre: 'experimental fiction'." The kind of experimental writer I care about is not the kind who sits down intending to write ‘experimentally’ so he can be part of some hipster crowd. DFW wrote the only way he knew how to, which was irreducibly strange. There are as many fraudulent ‘experimental’ writers as there are fraudulent ‘literary writers’. DFW was not a fraud. Kafka wasn’t intending ‘experiment’ as a kind of brand, nor was Beckett. Nor was Djuna Barnes. They were intending to be truthful to their own conceptions of the world, and it happened that their truths were rigorous, painful and difficult.

It's the same, I think, with life more generally: it's not a genre, "experimental living." We do what we can to carve out days that feel true and honest to our understanding of things. We continue to challenge our assumptions and try to steer toward experiences that will help us grow, without wounding us. And sometimes, often, we write about it.

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1. Specifically, I've been hard at work writing two teleplays, revising a screenplay, designing two classes for the upcomg spring and fall, and helping to create two new web properties that I think will make the crowded Internet a little bit of a better place. Good times.²

2. Truth be told, I haven't made much headway on revising that screenplay.