There are more books on books than on any other subject, and all we do is comment upon one another.
--Michel de Montaigne
The problem with trying to write in the age of New Media is that no matter what you think up, someone has beaten you to it, and--what's worse--it is impossible to remain ignorant of that fact. So the other day as I was walking home from the subway stop, thinking "Montaigne's Blog" would be a good post title, I also knew before my next step that one Google search would burst my bubble.
Every jewel I think to share is snatched away by the discovery that someone else has been there, done that, and sold the t-shirt on eBay. This, Gentle Reader, is why I haven't written much yet.
I once knew an academic who, before giving a copy of his latest book to a colleague, would first pencil in "Hi!" next to the recipient's name in the bibliography, knowing that that was the first page his colleague would turn to.
I also know that most people who blog, whether they write political commentary or recipes, do so to participate in a community.
So I have contemporary as well as historical affirmation that we are all interested in being read and acknowledged, and I do understand that we are meant to cite each other; people have been doing so since the second book was written. And I'm trying to get over the newbie's naive arrogance that wants to achieve sufficient originality, or at least comment-worthiness, to warrant clicking the Post button.
The problem is that my fear of saying something already said goes pretty far back. In school, the only thing that terrified me more than the filmstrips they showed to boys and girls separately at age eleven, and later the Scared Straight-style slides depicting the consequences of drunk driving or not wearing a seatbelt, were the warnings of what would befall the student who committed the sin of plagiarism. I imagined that teachers had a database of the complete works of everyone in their brains (they didn't), and that as they marked my papers, they scoured them for the presence of a too-familiar sentence or idea. Just as now, I fear that anyone who might read my blog has access to a global card-catalog of just about everything that has been published (and they do). I figure the only way to avoid falling into an unintentional life of crime is by writing what I know.
So far, that approach is slowing my production a bit. What I know is the random stuff that happens to me, minus the stuff that bores even me to tears and the stuff that is potentially embarrassing to myself or my nearest and dearest. The rest doesn't exactly fill a journal in the purest sense: I won't have a post for every day, just one for every little thing that occurs to me. Like the recursive irony of being scooped by someone quoting someone who said all we do is quote each other. And then writing about it.
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