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July 13, 2009

descent, and then oblivion

First of all, I would like to express just how tremendously ugly a word ‘blog‘ really is. It reminds me of a sound that would occur above a bank of porcelain American Standard institutional toilets off the dining concourse of Grand Central Station after a night of heavy drinking at the Oyster Bar, at some point in 1962. -Where’s Irving? -Oh, he had too many Highballs…I think he had to visit the gentleman’s room. And beyond the gilded vaulting and Claude-Thornhill piano jazz standards of the Oyster Bar, out into the whispering marble hallways, you can faintly hear these spasmodic, regular sounds of intestinal anguish: Blog….blogg….bloggggg. Yes, the word blog reminds me precisely of the sound an average human being typically makes whilst vomiting. As such, it’s one onomatopoeic step away from various expressions of repulsion and disgust you still find in block letters in Peanuts cartoons. Snoopy kisses Lucy Van Pelt. -Blech! Dog lips! Let’s make this absolutely clear: blog, blech, blarg and Barq’s (that horrid root beer) all remind me of the sound of nausea.

Blog also reminds me of that famous ‘commercial’ that aired on the first season of Ren & Stimpy, back in the early 1990s when everything was made of baggy corduroy and Kurt Cobain, and I sat sprawled on the moss-colored wall-to-wall carpeting of my living room, having kicked my navy blue Doc Martens behind the couch, whilst watching Nickelodeon. You know…log…from Blammo, rolling down the stairs, over the neighbor’s dog, leading a clutch of witless kids while wearing a majorette’s hat and holding a baton…and those kids were in lockstep. Anyway, it was only a matter of time before the Tim Berners-Lee coined web and ‘log’ were squashed into a single ghastly word. Hence the ballpoint log.

For these (principally aesthetic) reasons, I refrained from starting a blog until now, which isn’t true. In reality, it was a combination of (1). laziness and (2). genuinely having nothing to say. Thus the pencil stump, which is a Dixon Ticonderoga HB. I seem to associate pencils in general with elementary school, when they were everywhere, and you had to fill in tiny ovals on standardized tests with them, and coral-colored erasers could be furtively gnawed on, and you were allowed away from your desk to walk to the bookshelf just below the blackboard and sharpen your yellow hexagonal pencil in the rotary dial of the streamlined chromium-plated mechanical sharpener mounted on the shelf, which was really rather an experience: fine graphite dust would emerge in a cloud, a grinding sound would occur, and you could bring the tip of the pencil to an exquisitely sharp conical point, like a miniature Himalayan mountain, snowcapped in shining grey-black. When a pencil has been undone through its purpose, and has been sharpened to a stub, what have we destroyed it for? What have we really said? At that age, I certainly had nothing to say.

For the delta-time ‘function’, it’s simply a matter of the way things seem to happen on weblogs, which seem to be built on the lost detritus of previous posts: the present is placed on top of the digital edifice, and everything else sinks lower and lower, until relegated to the limbo of older posts, where it remains, perhaps forgotten or unread, until archived or deleted. Time rolls like a log over all, down the Fifties-modern staircase of contemporary culture, upsetting a lamp, squashing the dog, and there’s simply nothing we can do. I’m reminded of the white porcelain descent into the steam baths of the underworld from Fellini’s silver-nitrate fractional masterpiece, 8 1/2, the relevant scenes in the Commedia, the circular atolls of coral Darwin witnessed from the deck of the Beagle, choral rounds of life and growth ringing an emptiness which allowed the reefs to cling and form.

Anyway.

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