This is not me joining in the conversation about blogs as genre/medium/mode/conduit/freshly sliced avocado/the air between our ears. This is me sitting in the bathtub and reading Stories from the Nerve Bible and thinking. I'm thinking that lately my blog is a sort of personal art, especially since someone was nice enough to teach me how to put up pictures. But they're hardly ever my own pictures. Maybe a better description is as a big paste-in commonplace book. It documents my little obsessions - sophists, dead grandmas, Eugene Walter, rosemary.

[This week it's Laurie Anderson. I knew her work from my brief waltz with Art History in the early 90's, but I'd never really looked into her oeuvre. Then Mister Boyfriend delved into the depths of his massive record collection last weekend and pulled out all of United States and then reached into the CDs and pulled out Big Science and then went and got Stories from the Nerve Bible out of the bedroom bookcase and I've been entranced ever since. (Sorry about reading the book in the tub, sweetie. I promise it's still dry.) I remember thinking before that her art was very cold because of all the technology involved, but reading and listening to it now, I'm struck by the warmth of the words, and the interaction between performer and technology, and by electricity as literal and as metaphor. Interesting how a decade alters perspective.]

Anyway, so I'm flipping through her retrospective and looking at how she went from pulped newspaper bricks to books to music to film to computer generated everything to this to that to the other, and thinking about how much my perception of my blog has already been altered. I began it as a glorified research notebook, and that didn't last very long at all, because people started talking to me, and they were talking to each other, and it was much more interesting and social and constructed. Then it became a sort of public journal, not really of events but sort of, not really of thoughts but sort of, not really of memories. And now it's full of all that, and me pasting in entire bits of other people's stories, and photos and goofy postcards. It's sort of messy and incoherent, like me. It spills. If it had pants, it'd probably rip them a bit.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm starting to see my blog as an entity of its own, that lives and breathes and sucks things in, and that I feed every day. Maybe it needs a haircut. (The fact that it runs off a generic template bothers me not at all, because I very much like the idea of imposing personality on generic blankness. It's very similar to the big artist's sketchbooks I used as journals for years. But I do plan on tweaking the sidebar soon.) It's like a favorite pet dog or something. When the host goes down, I worry about my blog and where it is and if it'll come back safe. I wonder how long it'll be before I go completely batty and start talking to it? But maybe the entries are me talking to it. And maybe you people make it talk back.