Daily Blague

Do you think that it's possible to engage with the Internet in a reasonable manner? Or will we always surrender to pings and possibilities, no matter what we're in the middle of? Or will I, that is; I only care about you if you're doing better. Heaven knows, I'm a shambles. Once I have decided to write something, I'm all discipline, and only take breaks when it's useful to do so. But when I get the work done, I sit at the computer like a zombie, clicking on links without rhyme or reason. And if it's incoming email!

I don't get as much email as I'd like to get. Not nearly. This is not because I don't send email myself. I send plenty. That is the problem. Allowing for all the dumbing down of the Twentieth Century, I think that I can proclaim myself the Henry James of email. The late Henry James of email. I never met two sentences that I didn't prefer to join with a semicolon. I get "raising the bar" a lot from friends who want to excuse themselves from the burden of replying in kind. It appears that my correspondence is an infliction.

(On at least two occasions, one affable friend has actually checked out of Gmail in order to check my chat. I want to say to this friend that it's not necessary to take such drastic action, but then I think, why should this person trust me? I'm not sure that I have the gift of the gab, but I sure have the gab.)

I appear to be coming out of a period during which most of the people on my affinities list (doctors call it "the blogroll" - and does anyone out there still get the "doctors call it..." joke?) have had other things to do than write blog entries. Two of the Paris blogs, for instance, are showing signs of life after long hiatus*. Michael Smith has promised to write more. Ms NOLA is finding time to write, despite a harrowing schedule (M le Neveu moves his digs this weekend.) All of this is good, because I was beginning to feel like the only one.

When will I start following political blogs again? I haven't looked at a political blog in over a year. Part of me gave up on the politics of the United States in 2004, and even the Democratic recapture of Congress has done nothing to recapture me, probably because I am never going to believe in the Democratic Party again; the Democratic Party is like a philandering spouse whom I have forgiven for the last time and who has then philandered.

And when will the Virginia Tech story go away? I ask this abstractly; it's still pretty fresh and awful. But it will linger into staleness. Such stories always do. Such is the degraded state of the American spectatorate that reality horror is the preferred entertainment. It's frightening, but it's also inconsequential. There's nothing to do about what happened at Virginia Tech, except perhaps to reconsider gun control (the NRA would have liked the victims to be armed, so that they could shoot back - what a great idea!). Kathleen and I both believe that the most decent response to the massacre is to stop tuning into it. Talking about it is one thing; "reliving" the nightmare is ghoulish. Kathleen says that, if she had a child who had been killed at Virginia Tech, the last thing she'd want is protracted media exposure. As a parent, I have to agree. I would hate to see Ms G's photo plastered everywhere simply because she'd been unlucky.

You might be wondering what this entry's title means. It's taken from an ad that was reported in Tuesday's Times - an ad from China. What it's supposed to mean, according to a caption that translates the accompanying Chinese characters, is "Find something new and be pleasantly surprised," which, even though it makes literal sense, strikes me as pretty inscrutable. Why would anybody say such a thing? If the US and China are fated to be coadjutant superpowers, we're looking at a long future of linguistic disasters. Both nations - China for ancient reasons, the United States for novel ones - top the list for diplomacy failure when it comes to understanding other cultures.

Meanwhile, I stagger from blog to blog in a disordered haze that, even when no drinking is involved, must be called "alcoholic." Whipsawed every day by the unique offerings du jour, I waste countless hours playing FreeCell just to restore some sense of equilibrium. (I never play FreeCell for fun.) I was discussing soft-boiled eggs with a British friend not too long ago. We agreed that tapping the egg in a pretty little egg cup, opening it up, and then managing to eat it - as opposed to cracking the contents into a bowl - is something that one is "bred to." You grow up knowing how to do it, or you never learn the trick of it. I shudder to think that the same is true of the Blogosphere. Having grown up in a blogless world, I'll never develop a smart way of responding to the huge variety on offer - when it's on offer.

* Thank you, Wheelock. (É, are you reading?)