QUAKE CITY

I have never attempted to put into words why I choose to blog. (Maybe some day I will.) Some decisions you make without fully articulating, let alone understanding why you make them. Sometimes you act and nothing more need be said.

However, were I to explain why I blog, I think it might sound something like this recent post from Roger Ebert. In addressing the nexus between writing and the Internet, Ebert writes:

What the internet is creating is a class of literate, gifted amateur writers, in an old tradition. Like Trollope, who was a British Post official all his working life, they write for love and because they must. Like Rohinton Mistry, a banking executive, or Wallace Stevens, an insurance executive, or Edmund Wilson, who spent his most productive years sitting in his big stone house in upstate New York and writing about what he damned well pleased. Samuel Pepys, who wrote the greatest diary in the language, was a high officials in the British Admiralty. Many people can write well and yearn to, but they are not content, like Pepys, for their work to go unread. A blog on the internet gives them a place to publish. Maybe they don’t get a lot of visits, but it’s out there. As a young women in San Francisco, Pauline Kael wrote the notes for screenings of great films, and did a little free-lancing. If she’d had a blog, no telling what she might have written during those years.

Ebert uses this as a jumping off point for a larger discussion on advice for young people tackling their own ambitions:

Yes! This is the best possible advice. I tell young students: Take film courses, certainly. But cover the liberal arts. Take English literature, drama, art, music, and the areas Bordwell lists. Learn something about science and math. A physical anthropology course was my introduction to the theory of evolution, which is an opening to all of modern science. Don’t train for a career—train for a life. The career will take care of itself, and give you more satisfaction than a surrender to corporate or professional bureaucracy. If you make careers in that world, you will be more successful because your education was not narrow.