What are blogs for?

I was wondering why we do these things, and for whose benefit. Typing onto some website that some few or some many, or maybe no one will ever look at. And it may or may not mean anything to any of them, even yourself. Not exactly like a journal or a diary, because there is the possibility and even the hope that others will read it (as opposed to the presumed privacy of the thoughts one puts in that notebook he totes around in a satchel along with a subway map and this week's village voice; or some cleverly and maybe cutely bound book [with a lock?] one keeps in her top desk drawer next to photos of her last five boyfriends...)

And by some random turn of the psyche, that got me thinking about william arrowsmith. He was a serious classicist, by which i don't mean he taught priviledged white kids how to read homer (although he did that too). No, the thing is that he wrote important and alive translations of euripides and seneca and many others, while also writing plays and film criticism and teaching ancient languages, poetry and drama. He also turned me on to antonioni - via a simple twist of free association: a line in a lyric in a play i was in led me to a film director, who just happened to be the subject of a course taught by one of the greatest minds of his generation the following semester. So i took his class and opened up a visual aesthetic in myself. (i knew college was good for something)

Of course i wasn't aware of any of this until it had already happened. Odd like that. Anyway, he was one of the best teachers i ever had. Hero worship? No, fuck that. He taught me a lot about film and literature, drama and art (and more about writing than almost any english professor i ever had) and we got along well. But we didn't stay in touch much, and then, well, he died (may he rest in peace).

But one thing he used to refer to came back to me today - the 'great western intellectual butter slide.' Pretty self-explanatory, and perhaps a tad alarmist; but it's true that what is considered genius, brilliant, smart, even competent has, well, slid. We're at a point where starting and finishing a book, i mean reading one - in your native tongue - can be considered a significant intellectual achievement by altogether too many people.

SO maybe these blogs are an attempt to reach out to others, and bust out of this pattern. To escape from the habit of tv, mass-produced, commercially-driven advertainment. To cease to be a passive observer/consumer and actually do something, make something, say something.

Or maybe not. Maybe it's just some shit that people do.

Cause what are they saying? I had an entry typed out reacting to an article in the eyebeam journal on open source theory as it relates to fashion design (two areas about which i know almost nothing at all) but figured that it would be boring, not to mention ridiculously uninformed. But maybe that is just what this forum is best suited for. And after all, what do i typically end up posting? Plenty of nothing about haircuts and the shows i've seen lately. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

And of course, all of this rant may just be part of the butter slide. I could go on, but instead - one last quote from arrowsmith: “an alarmingly high proportion of what is published in classics—and in other fields—is simply rubbish or trivia.”

How 'bout that?