8 OCT 05
dear N,
Right--so what exactly is a blog. "A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links." Always dated, newest entry at the top. Part journal, part letter, part scrapbook. A place to connect with others, share enthusiasms, think/work in the open, try out ideas, experiment with genres. A forum, a soapbox. Reb says: "My dad calls it my 'diary to the world.'"

Every blog is manned (so to speak) by a character created by the fusion of (& friction between) the writer and the form. I don't think I can really know people through the things they make, but by reading, say, Amy King's blog, I can get acquainted with more personal aspects of her public character. This gives me (among other pleasures) an additional entryway into her poems.

With artists of all kinds I've always sought this--it's like a kitchen door, as opposed to the front door of their work. The kitchen door is available through interviews and magazine articles, biography and published notebooks--and now (if an artist has the bent) through blogs. Keeping a blog myself provides back steps and an old screen/storm door for anyone with that kind of interest in my work. Strangely, it offers something in that vein to me as well, as I'm curious about the interior life of my own public character.

"How can another see into me…without my being able to see in there myself?"  (Derrida)

I think I can use my blog to see into my public character, in order to "thoroughly inhabit the role," like a method actor. Is this crazy? I have a project in mind, still a few years off, that calls for research, interviews, critical analysis, and (for balance) some overt memoir. It's totally beyond me but I'm hoping that, by then, it won't be beyond her. I believe that character is the one who will be able to write the book.

I imagine you asking me how "being real" enters into this. I think of an afternoon when Max helped our neighbor Steve install a gutter on the overhang of his new porch. It was mid-December. That morning, Steve had taken his kids to see Santa Claus down at the mall. Max asked him, "Was it the real Santa?" Without hesitation or irony, Steve said, "They're all the real Santa."
love,
k

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