Something New
I remember reading somewhere, maybe in Guy Davenport, an old maxim that says, "You don't keep a lion; the lion keeps you." I feel much the same way about the Internet.
Even so, I've found myself missing blogging lately. Not so much because there's stuff I want to say—though there's some of that, too—as because even in the midst of the present awfulness I see a lot of good, interesting, funny stuff slipping by that deserves a bigger and better hearing.
One of my mottos—yes I have several; no I won't tell you the others—is "All the wrong things are thriving." I'd be lying if I said it wasn't having a fairly unbeatable run these days. Still, it's my firm intention not to let this blog turn into a vehicle for regular complaint. Even less do I want to use it to use it for waging fruitless skirmishes in the endless, all-devouring culture war.
Instead I'm going to take as my manifesto a favorite passage from a favorite book, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities:
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
I'm soft-launching this thing because I don't have any real plans except to share work that makes me think, goggle, or laugh. Once in a while I may sit down and scratch out something that gets up into a four-digit word count, but for the most part I intend to write short and sporadically, so as to keep myself from feeling beholden to the lion that is Online. (Not to be confused with the dog that is Matteo, who's watching me with the same expression he has at the top of this post while I write it.)
Assuming I manage that trick, and don't change my mind next week, it's possible and even likely that I'll bundle a few posts from time to time and send them out as a newsletter. Subscribe below if that sounds appealing. I'm not making promises about anything but I can assure you that this blog more likely to disappear without warning than it is to sprout a paywall. The minute it becomes part of the inferno it's gone.
Oh, and the title? I don't think I'll ever beat Digital Emunction, the name of my old outfit, which I stole from Samuel Beckett, but I like Rack & Manger as a reminder of what is and, as the poet sang, what should never be.
