The time is 18:00 here in Freiburg Germany, 12pm in Brooklyn New York, and 9am in Gig Harbor Washington. It has been decided, after 17 months of no internet, to return to my blog and give family and friends a simple retreat into a world not too far away, no matter what time it is. It would be sort of silly to rack my brain over all that has transpired and try to fill in such long periods of absence with the presence of mere words. I guess whatever presence of myself that you, my valued reader, may feel must be earned on my part through genuine reflection, honest observations, and a conscious effort to met you half way. This “I” is new. This blog is relatively old, circa 2008. I hope you will come to find that perspectives have changed, sensibilities refined, prejudices purified and defiled. My past horizons will inevitably merge through my future blogs and a bit of where I was will mingle with where I plan to be, still these are just words, lets take a deep breath together.
Can you feel the breath of Fall already laying down outside? In Pumpkins, singed purple gold, dwindling green, hazel eyes, shivering leaves, and the sound of a blue plastic tarp being dragged across the yard. The sun was setting so I went for a run before it would become too dark. Did you notice?
I want to also set a few guidelines for myself before I go any further. I will try to channel my more abstract and theoretical compulsions through this blogs ultra-violent brother, which you are welcome to take a gander at. I will try to keep mere Blathering fenced at the margins and mighty Point at the center of my discourse…but there are so many points (of view, of fact) that are up to, on, or beside that I may as well let it all go and simply write.
Tomorrow is the return to old routine with a new twist. By 6:20am I will be on the tram, by 6:50 the train, and by 7:40 hopefully sitting at my oval table “teaching” business English. My life will fall back on track, literally, after nearly a whole month in vacation mode traveling with my Mom as if on a cloud high above the iron horse I now must ride four days of the week. After returning from my morning class I make the daily omelet, read the morning paper, and make it back to the station for afternoon appointments. The twist is that I am now in position to write my masters thesis, so every movement or thought not spent cradling its development could be regarded as gross negligence, punishable by death-wielding baton shaped question-marks. So the plan: turn a 50 minute train ride into a structured part of my research time. A train to Siemens and back, well thats two hours of Byron. Shoot I could have a lesson on Don Juan retold using the target language of mergers and acquisitions. I could give a tour-guide exploration of the landscapes of capitalism as told through the narrative style of George Elliot or the ridged rules of a Pope or Johnson regarding grammar and syntax. Or better yet, just become a damn teacher of English and be done with this silly teaching of English as a Second Language. All in good time. Need to save up for the move to Berlin once my baby has been delivered to Professor Fludernik. Some give birth to babies, some to books. Some make love to the Mind and some to the Body and some don’t prescribe to such dualism. None the less some generation is at work and I intend to be its author. Damn back to work. Got to sleep. Good Night. Schlaf gut.
September 25th, 2012
Well very little sleep was had, I tossed and squirmed all night because after believing myself to be finished with last nights blog I came to find that my blog was simply no longer available. This came as a shock. Four years of writing, some moments better than others, and I had always believed that they would be there for posterity’s sake. The following few hours were spent vainly trying to find some point of contact, someone who could help, some authority who could bring my blog back into existence. Only impersonal links to “general” problems. The story is this: At some point Google purchased the blogging host I was using and turned it into what is now known as “Blogger” and introduced some new and exciting changes, including spam bots powered through algorithms to find and disconnect blogs that are deemed offensive. Some blogs however are regrettably lumped into the category of “false positives,” including my blog. As I work to regain access to my own blog I am struck by how little control I actually have over my own information and by what criteria these “spam” bots are using to determine what is and isn’t “offensive.” What effects does this have on the status of art for example if it must be filtered through some algorithm that determines its acceptability? Some art is meant to shock people out of their automatonic lives, make things new, grapple the unnoticed. How can something shock and still maintain its acceptability within these new terms? My blog was never shocking, but I sure wish it was in a way that would cause it to be removed.
No comments:
Post a Comment