Lightness

Read a weblog every day and you’ll see blogs that disappear as well as those which are transformed into new forms. I enjoyed seeing a blog disappear from Red Thread(s); another has appeared in its place, but I remember the first, and I can see it beneath the new one like a psalimpsest. And there was another appearance/disappearance at Poetics of Decay. In both cases, it was a matter of referring beyond the blog to a work of some kind – a grander project, a story …

Was the trouble that a weblog is in some sense closed upon itself, that it is troubling to point to a writing beyond the writing of the weblog? To me, this weblog records the traces of a work much larger and ambitious than anything I do here. Larger, ambitious, but this is also to say riskier – there is the great risk of botching the work in progress. Writing here, by contrast, is lightness itself, a kind of alibi, a trace left to prove to myself that it was worth spending another day in the office.

Meanwhile R. M. lies on what she calls the ‘floor of dread’ contemplating her impending deadline. ‘It’s the weather’, I tell her, when we note that we’ve spent 72 hours in the office over the past 6 days and produced, for all that, very little. The weather … well it’s clearing up, I think, though clouds are amassing once again. R. M. and I have taken up tennis and play in the rain until the balls get soggy. Sharapova is our heroine.