Back to Blogging

That was an unforeseen hiatus! No real reason, just a bunch of minor annoyances and roadblocks. When I get behind with things, I tend to take the deer in the headlight approach and remain motionless, wondering how I will ever get caught up. I fall prey to the raspberry syndrome. I know that the answer is to forge ahead and I am filled with admiration for those bloggers who put fingers to keyboard daily and do not allow the vicissitudes of life to stand in their way. Even the most faithful take a break on occasion and I was delighted to see that two of the elder statesmen of bloggers, who had been silent for a while, are back. Elizabeth, who had shared her life at Abeyance since 1999 is back on Live Journal. Pregnancy and arguing a case before the United States Supreme Court haven’t kept Beth busy enough, and she has resumed writing about her life in Sacramento at Bad Hair Days.

If I want to unravel all the details of the early history of blogging, I suppose I should go to a book mentioned the other day by Kymm (she’s in it.) With chapters like “Social Functions of Online Diaries in America” and “Male and Female Cyberbodies”, The Mirror and the Veil sounds like interesting reading. The more I read about it, the more it sounded like a reworked Ph.D. dissertation:

The Mirror and the Veil offers a unique perspective on the phenomenon of online personal diaries and blogs. Blending insights from literary criticism, from psychoanalytical theory and from social sciences, Viviane Serfaty identifies the historical roots of self-representational writing in America and studies the original features it has developed on the Internet. She perceptively analyzes the motivations of bloggers and the repercussions their writings may have on themselves and on American society at large. This book will be of interest to specialists in American Studies, to students in literature, communication, psychology and sociology, as well as to anyone endeavoring to understand the new set of practices created by Internet users in America.

And to think I have written about jam.