I've Consulted the Consultants
They've recommended a retooling. I've decided to make This Old Blog less political. Like everything in this fallen world of ours, the Fox has become not-quite-what-was-intended, which I aims to fix, starting now.
The way I see it, a blog is supposed to be a mirror for the interior, a guided tour of the cerebrum, complete with public restrooms, little brochures and a gift shop (or something like that). The Fox has increasingly become anything but that. Of late, I've only been blogging about THE BIG ISSUES OF THE DAY, whether religious or political (or religious-political), when in truth I continue to consider such things secondary in importance to the little issues of my day. It's like the story of the Holy Rug of the Visitation, in which the Archangel Michael informs Mark Shea of God's great plan for him: he must go and set the table for dinner. The ordinary stuff of everyday existence, that's what really counts; that's where men are damned or saved, where invisible treasures are built up or lost, where real happiness (and real sadness) can be grasped at. It's not that the BIG ISSUES aren't important, it's that they're secondary. I don't think this is navel-gazing; I think this is keeping life in perspective. And, at any rate, it's how I really feel, and my blog should reflect that.
I'm not entirely sure how things got so off-the-rails. Partially, it's been the result of laziness on my own part. I was eager to get into blogging. It seemed fun. You can meet new people. If you're lucky, you can get quasi-famous like Professor Reynolds, the Oxblog guys and Matt Yglesias have done. The problem was that I didn't have my own unique voice, and I was too lazy/in-a-hurry to be bothered to develop one, so I just hobbled something together in imitatio various bloggers whose work I enjoyed - Jonah Goldberg of NRO Online, Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, later Old Oligarch and Mark Shea. (Please don't sue, guys, by the way. Sincerest form of flattery and all that.) The problem was that the voice wasn't mine, so it had a hard time talking about things that were personal to me, about my day, about how I was feeling. What it could talk about were public issues, since my inspirations were all (sort of) public intellectuals who had to have, and write about, opinions on the big public issues. So that's what I wrote about, and let everything else I had to say languish. Which made for a blog that gave a distorted impression of what I'm really thinking about. Which was a shame.
The other major reason, I suppose, was my foolish ambition. When I got into this nonsense, part of me hoped I'd strike gold and become a quasi-famous blogger. Not one of the big dogs like Instapundit or Andrew Sullivan, who are read by hundreds of thousands of people a day (my vanity and stupidity aren't that great), but a known-and-notable blogger, the kind of guy who gets linked to on Instapundit when he has something interesting to say. So I tailored my blog to what I thought people would want to read. I figured people I didn't know - the kind of people I wanted to read my blog if I wanted to hit it big(ish) - would be interested in my thoughts on politics (and later religion, as that became a more important part of my life) in a way that they wouldn't be interested in my never-ending battle with my landlords who won't do the repairs we request but insist on doing needless repairs no one wants, even though in truth the latter is a much more important subject to me at the moment. I see the obvious folly in this now. The great bloggers are great because their blogs are honest, are reflections of who they are, and people are drawn to that. Take Eve Tushnet, who is to my mind the best of all the bloggers. She can write about obscure comic books that I've never read, will never read and don't care about, and yet I'm still enrapt by it because it's clear that you're really seeing Eve Tushnet and what she thinks about and what she thinks about what she thinks about. There's an awful vulnerability to blogging; it really is like opening your diary to the world, if you do it right. But if you don't, as too often I haven't, then you're just a hack and a poser, as too often I've been.
I'm not saying there won't be any more poli-blogging, or religio-blogging. There will be. But it'll be balanced out with other things, the personal and the aesthetic, so that Mansfield Fox will present a more accurate picture of who Angus Dwyer is. I'm also not saying that I don't think about or believe in the things I've posted here in the past eleven-odd months. I do. They're just not all I think about, and not all I believe. If you've been reading the Fox, especially lately, you might think I'm some dour Republican-operative/religious-warrior who thinks about nothing but terrorism, abortion, gay marriage and sacrilegious reception of the Eucharist. And I'm not. I mean, I am. I mean: I am a Republican, and I am religious, and I do think about those subjects, and think they're important. But that's far - far - from all what I yam. (Quoth Ronald Reagan: "where's the rest of me?!?") I still love the "three B's": beer, babies and baseball (not necessarily in that order). I still smile when I see the baby in the little yellow rain-cap in the closing credits to TLC's "A Baby Story". I still want to build an unusual dream-house someday, though it's changed from a full-scale treehouse (complete with monkey-butler) to a solar-powered, sod-insulated, human-sized Hobbit hole (a much more adult and serious dream-house, I'd say). I'm still on the lookout for The Right Woman, someone with whom I can take leisurely Saturday-afternoon naps, sing folk music off key, and sire a bustling brood of pale, myopic wee'uns. And I'm still pretty confident that no such woman exists. (sigh.) My favorite lunch is still tuna on wheat toast with french fries and a coke. I still love to swim in the ocean, even in the frigid waters off southern Rhode Island. I still love absurdist humor and lame puns, and remain oddly fascinated by the "knock-knock / who's there? / banana..." joke. Couldn't tell you why. I'm still caught in the awful tension between loving to smile and being embarrassed by my stubby yellowish teeth, though at this point I usually just say "fuck it" and smile. I'm still just me, and that me's going to blog a little from here on out.
When I started this thing, I wanted to blog on subjects like why I like rainy days, why all Caucasian babies look like either Churchill or Eisenhower, and why you can only see lions in Kenya. I got away from that, for which I'm sorry. Let's give it another try.
Speaking of rain, it's pouring outside.
The way I see it, a blog is supposed to be a mirror for the interior, a guided tour of the cerebrum, complete with public restrooms, little brochures and a gift shop (or something like that). The Fox has increasingly become anything but that. Of late, I've only been blogging about THE BIG ISSUES OF THE DAY, whether religious or political (or religious-political), when in truth I continue to consider such things secondary in importance to the little issues of my day. It's like the story of the Holy Rug of the Visitation, in which the Archangel Michael informs Mark Shea of God's great plan for him: he must go and set the table for dinner. The ordinary stuff of everyday existence, that's what really counts; that's where men are damned or saved, where invisible treasures are built up or lost, where real happiness (and real sadness) can be grasped at. It's not that the BIG ISSUES aren't important, it's that they're secondary. I don't think this is navel-gazing; I think this is keeping life in perspective. And, at any rate, it's how I really feel, and my blog should reflect that.
I'm not entirely sure how things got so off-the-rails. Partially, it's been the result of laziness on my own part. I was eager to get into blogging. It seemed fun. You can meet new people. If you're lucky, you can get quasi-famous like Professor Reynolds, the Oxblog guys and Matt Yglesias have done. The problem was that I didn't have my own unique voice, and I was too lazy/in-a-hurry to be bothered to develop one, so I just hobbled something together in imitatio various bloggers whose work I enjoyed - Jonah Goldberg of NRO Online, Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, later Old Oligarch and Mark Shea. (Please don't sue, guys, by the way. Sincerest form of flattery and all that.) The problem was that the voice wasn't mine, so it had a hard time talking about things that were personal to me, about my day, about how I was feeling. What it could talk about were public issues, since my inspirations were all (sort of) public intellectuals who had to have, and write about, opinions on the big public issues. So that's what I wrote about, and let everything else I had to say languish. Which made for a blog that gave a distorted impression of what I'm really thinking about. Which was a shame.
The other major reason, I suppose, was my foolish ambition. When I got into this nonsense, part of me hoped I'd strike gold and become a quasi-famous blogger. Not one of the big dogs like Instapundit or Andrew Sullivan, who are read by hundreds of thousands of people a day (my vanity and stupidity aren't that great), but a known-and-notable blogger, the kind of guy who gets linked to on Instapundit when he has something interesting to say. So I tailored my blog to what I thought people would want to read. I figured people I didn't know - the kind of people I wanted to read my blog if I wanted to hit it big(ish) - would be interested in my thoughts on politics (and later religion, as that became a more important part of my life) in a way that they wouldn't be interested in my never-ending battle with my landlords who won't do the repairs we request but insist on doing needless repairs no one wants, even though in truth the latter is a much more important subject to me at the moment. I see the obvious folly in this now. The great bloggers are great because their blogs are honest, are reflections of who they are, and people are drawn to that. Take Eve Tushnet, who is to my mind the best of all the bloggers. She can write about obscure comic books that I've never read, will never read and don't care about, and yet I'm still enrapt by it because it's clear that you're really seeing Eve Tushnet and what she thinks about and what she thinks about what she thinks about. There's an awful vulnerability to blogging; it really is like opening your diary to the world, if you do it right. But if you don't, as too often I haven't, then you're just a hack and a poser, as too often I've been.
I'm not saying there won't be any more poli-blogging, or religio-blogging. There will be. But it'll be balanced out with other things, the personal and the aesthetic, so that Mansfield Fox will present a more accurate picture of who Angus Dwyer is. I'm also not saying that I don't think about or believe in the things I've posted here in the past eleven-odd months. I do. They're just not all I think about, and not all I believe. If you've been reading the Fox, especially lately, you might think I'm some dour Republican-operative/religious-warrior who thinks about nothing but terrorism, abortion, gay marriage and sacrilegious reception of the Eucharist. And I'm not. I mean, I am. I mean: I am a Republican, and I am religious, and I do think about those subjects, and think they're important. But that's far - far - from all what I yam. (Quoth Ronald Reagan: "where's the rest of me?!?") I still love the "three B's": beer, babies and baseball (not necessarily in that order). I still smile when I see the baby in the little yellow rain-cap in the closing credits to TLC's "A Baby Story". I still want to build an unusual dream-house someday, though it's changed from a full-scale treehouse (complete with monkey-butler) to a solar-powered, sod-insulated, human-sized Hobbit hole (a much more adult and serious dream-house, I'd say). I'm still on the lookout for The Right Woman, someone with whom I can take leisurely Saturday-afternoon naps, sing folk music off key, and sire a bustling brood of pale, myopic wee'uns. And I'm still pretty confident that no such woman exists. (sigh.) My favorite lunch is still tuna on wheat toast with french fries and a coke. I still love to swim in the ocean, even in the frigid waters off southern Rhode Island. I still love absurdist humor and lame puns, and remain oddly fascinated by the "knock-knock / who's there? / banana..." joke. Couldn't tell you why. I'm still caught in the awful tension between loving to smile and being embarrassed by my stubby yellowish teeth, though at this point I usually just say "fuck it" and smile. I'm still just me, and that me's going to blog a little from here on out.
When I started this thing, I wanted to blog on subjects like why I like rainy days, why all Caucasian babies look like either Churchill or Eisenhower, and why you can only see lions in Kenya. I got away from that, for which I'm sorry. Let's give it another try.
Speaking of rain, it's pouring outside.
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