Before we get to depression, disease or fit response to the human condition, before we get to Prozac, too much or too little, and divorce, boon or bane, before we get to psychotherapy, lost art and last hope, I want to think quickly about blogging.
Today represents the official start of this blog, “In Practice.” The five prior “spring training” postings hint at the subject matter—psychiatry, but also politics and literature and whatever else comes to mind. I hope that this aggregation is in the spirit of the medium.
Once, long ago, I dropped in regularly to a commune of fine artists. The members did not talk about subject or meaning. They discussed the qualities of one or another clay or paint or paper. We writers are like that. We want to know the limits and capacities and peculiar virtue of what we work in.
Blogs can be anything: snarky, one-paragraph comments on the technology of the moment, long columns that flesh out an op-ed page, public diaries, book reviews, non-stop rants. The best blogs, it seems to me, have a personal voice and an element of edge, part humor, part grumpiness. Often, the notes seem as much to the self as to the wide world. Speed is apparent and error unavoidable. Recursion is common, the repeated gnawing of the same bone. A gnomic, in-joke incomprehensibility is permitted. Sartre once said that the best jazz is like bananas, consumed on the spot. There are other sorts of jazz, of course, and other sorts of blogs. But the ideal, the pure form, is ephemeral, and excellent for being so.
In my longer writing, I strive to be measured. Even in books with an expiration date built into the title, I am, in a lesser version of Norman Mailer’s glorious grandiosity, aiming to fight the big fight, for the ages. Books demand constant attention, on the writer’s part, to structure, pace, arc, unity, judiciousness, and balance. Blogs should be well-formed, blogs should be fair, but an element of letting the chips fall where they may seems inherent to the form, along with a certain looseness of focus, as regards subject matter.
(Speaking of chips and of irrelevance: I am midway through Sue Miller’s The Senator’s Wife, about which more anon. Miller has a campaign contributor “calling in some chips.” Don’t we call in our chits and cash in our chips? A quick Google frequency check says otherwise, but what’s the logic there?)
This note is in the self-as-much-as-world category. Thinking of Odysseus, moral philosophers speak of “lashing oneself to the mast,” advance commitment, like our country’s Bill of Rights, to ideals that may run counter to our impulses. I will stray, no doubt, into the carefully structured essay, but I mean in this blog to take advantage of the medium—to keep the entries messy, idiosyncratic, and short.
