A Meta-Note on Blogging

So I have to pause and express my deep discomfort with the blogging endeavor. It’s not the blog per se, I remember having this feeling the last time I sent out a mass email from the remote town I’d been deployed to in Eastern Albania. On the one hand, here I am with this ultimately unique set of experiences and it seems almost my social obligation to document and share them with friends, family, anyone who might have any interest in them, derive any pleasure of recognition in them from their own experiences or learn something new from them. On the other hand, there is something so deeply self-involved, even self-obsessed, with the project of cataloguing one’s own experiences. There is an arrogance to assuming the social worth of one’s own particular voice. It brings to mind an image from a Kundera book—I can’t remember if it’s the Unbearable Lightness of Being or the Book of Laughter and Forgetting—but the image is of all these pink flamingoes at the zoo rushing up to people in a crowd, urgently wanting to tell their own story, all straining their necks to get around and ahead of the others, each trying to have its own voice heard over everyone else’s. Kundera wrote so far before the Internet revolutionized social communication but his image of this tangle of desperate flamingoes with their craning necks and ultimately drowned out and non-sensical voices seems a perfect description of the Blogosphere. There is a desperation, competition and seeking of validation inherent in just putting oneself out their, in deciding that there is an audience for your stories that I find completely distasteful and want no part of. But again, the pull from the other side is equally strong and ultimately it’s winning out. I am in this crazy place. I am about to meet new people, learn new things about the world, confirm some prior beliefs, disconfirm others. And while I would like to think that somehow my dissertation will be a distillation of all that I’ve learned over the course of the year, I am absolutely certain that won’t be the case. The longer I’ve fought to push myself upstream against the currents of grad school, the more it’s become clear that the academic world is not my natural environment, not the forum for expressing my truest or clearest voice and that it really is in these (somewhat worthless) vignettes that I think I’m able to convey what I’ve learned about the world. So with this slight disclaimer, here I go, taking up my flamingo suit to bring you stories from Kazan.

Oh and also, I would hope that anyone reading this would feel free to comment. Not only so that I know I am not sending these blatherings into the universe to no end, but more so that my self-obsession can be kept in check. If something I write seems overly self-indulgent, florid, just plain wrong or otherwise distasteful, PLEASE call me on it by commenting or shooting me an email. Also, I’m a bit curious what people think about the insertion of pictures into the text. I know that when I read something there is a certain intensity of my own image-building and to the momentum of the journey I’m on with the author that pictures might actually disrupt rather than enhance. I’d be curious to know whether people think it would be better to post links to pictures elsewhere or to keep inserting them into the middle of stories.

Another question/note is the issue of names. I’m not sure what common practice is about protecting people’s anonymity or even privacy so I’m kind of improvising. When talking about the local people here I’ve changed the names and information completely because it seems like a human subjects concern. That is, I do not actually live on the 19^th floor here and my landlady while Tatar is not named Aygul and the guy who picked me up at the airport had a Ukrainian last name but it wasn’t Shupenko. As for friends, I think my policy will be to use the name when all references are completely innocuous and maybe use letters or even different letters when they are involved in more sensitive activities. Feedback on naming policy is welcome. I guess I’ll also google around and see what other people do.

Correction: I now seem to remember that they were ostriches or emus without voices in the Kundera book, but straining just the same