Category: Blogging

Synthesis the other day wrote:

“You can make aesthetic and critical judgments about politicians, current events, art, literature, and most everything else.

Why not people?

That’s the inevitable conclusion. If your life is a story, you can be judged. If it’s found to suck, well, let’s just say nobody will read your blog.”

I was so offended by that argument that, despite the fact I’ve been preoccupied with finishing up writing on Anne Sexton, the idea has been swirling in my head all week.

To complicate matters, this idea keeps bouncing off another current hot topic, self-esteem. And, of course, both of these made me recall Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.”

If thirty years of teaching high school taught me anything, it taught me not to trust group opinions. Popularity in and of itself is not a proof of worth. The most popular students in high school had nothing, except popularity, over students who are hardly noticed, or who were even made fun of. Another obvious example is the media. Is a popular movie written for teenage boys really better art than a less popular play written by Samuel Beckett? Popularity is not proof of much but popularity.

Perhaps the most annoying part of the argument, though, is the implication that other people have the right to judge you as a person on the basis of your blog. I doubt that anyone has the right, or the ability, to judge another person’s life, particularly based on something as superficial as a blog. Society as a group is no more capable of judging the worth of a particular individual then they are of resisting the pressures of the mass media that make their lives a living hell by convincing them that material possessions can somehow fill the void in their lives. Emerson isn’t far from right when he says, “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”

Maybe self-esteem is important in our society because it allows us to make our own decisions, allows us to stand up to those who would make us conform to their standards and impose their ideas of right and wrong on us, whether those standards are truly applicable to our lives or not. Everyone, parents, teachers, friends, class mates, claims to know what is best for us, but it is an illusion. In the end, no one can live your life but you, and no one, no matter how many blogs you blog, truly knows what you feel inside.

Though I’m less than certain there is a clear connection between a lack of self esteem and a need for praise from others, a lack of self-esteem seems to make some people, at least, seek affirmation from others instead of trusting themselves. I suspect that people like Anne Sexton craved attention to fill a void in their lives. Their lack of self-esteem makes it necessary to seek outside confirmation that they are “okay,” even though they can never truly be okay until they themselves believe they are okay.

Increasingly in our society people need to feel “popular” to be happy. Some seem to even feel a need to attain their “15 minutes of fame.” They will do anything to be noticed, to be “somebody.” If they produce a blog and are desperate enough, their blog might very well become “popular,” or at least get an amazing number of hits. Does that mean that their life “doesn’t suck?” Does this kind of popularity have any meaning at all, except, perhaps, to confirm that an amazing number of people have bad taste?

On the other hand, another person might produce a web page that appeals to a limited audience. As a result, the page gets only a limited number of hits, but it draws the people the blogger was looking for. Does that mean that his life “sucks?” As far as I am concerned, if the person has produced the page he wants to produce, it doesn’t require a certain number of hits to validate the worth of that page. As Emerson says, “The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.”

Trading Democracy airing Tuesday February 5th at 10:00 on most PBS stations This program promises to show how “NAFTA’s secret tribunals have the power to put a price tag on environmental and health laws. And we pay the bill.”

Considering American businesses’ exploitation of the Third World, it seems truly ironic that the recent rise in concern over NAFTA, particularly Chapter 11, should be inspired by the Canadian company Methanex’s attempts to sue the State of California over the banning of MBTE as a gasoline additive, especially since Chapter 11 has been repeatedly used by American companies to fight environmental actions in Canada and Mexico.

As an avid environmentalists who’s equally worried about exploited Third World workers everywhere, I’m constantly bewildered by the complexities of world trade. Although I consider myself literate and fairly well educated, economics have been sadly neglected in my education.

NAFTA, has been particularly confusing to me because I have felt America has exploited Mexico so much in the past by relying on Mexican workers for cheap labor while neglecting to develop the Mexican economy itself. Thus, while I was worried about American and Canadian jobs being exported to Mexico, I saw NAFTA as a chance to help Mexico build their own economy.

At the same time, I have little trust of large business organizations, international or otherwise. I’m not blind to the environmental damage they have done to our environment. It’s frightening to imagine what they would do if the legal system was unfairly stacked on their side.

Moyer’s show Tuesday is definitely going to be must watch for me.

There’s a number of good background sources on the web if you want to be more informed before watching the show:

IISD net offers a summary of Chapter 11’s impacts on the environment.

Public Citizen offers background on a number of lawsuits filed on Chapter 11.

Melinda Steffen offers a legal opinion on the California lawsuit.

Not wanting you to think I’d forsaken all else for the sake of poetry, I’m taking a day off (at least from writing about it) to mention a few blogs I’ve been visiting regularly.

Moving near the top of my list (though not likely to replace wood s lot is Visible Darkness a blog written by a young writing teacher in Arkansas, although he seems to be missing California at the moment. Though I don’t necessarily share his love of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, I find most of his blogs fascinating. They certainly provide me with a fresh view of the world, something I desperately need while I’m caught up in my review of graying and past-graying poets.

I also recently discovered If in my referrer logs and have been reading it regularly since. While many of the entries are short, they almost invariably lead to new and interesting destinations. Short and sweet is hard to beat. Take it from someone who probably has way too much to say.

I also discovered Synergyin my referrer log. It turned out to be a letter from someone suggesting that he look at my page. Later, though, I found a link to my â€?”Why I Blog” essay, you know the one in the upper left corner that Diane recently suggested I should add to the page (as if I didn’t have more than enough to write already). I haven’t really had much time to explore Synergy yet, but I certainly love the page’s motto: Something beautiful every day. There can never be too much beauty in the world, that’s for sure.

In fact, my son-in-law the other day said that â€?”In a Dark Time” seemed like a very depressing title to him, but the truth is that it’s the second half of the title (you know, the part where it says â€?”The Eye Begins to See”) that’s most important to me. I’m not into denying reality, but the truth is that I tend to see the world more positively than most people imagine.

I’m also glad to see that Whiskey River has recently returned to regularly updating his page, as has Cloud 9. At my age I tend to become a creature of habit, and it’s annoying when you find yourself reading an old entry day after day.

I take that list of blogs on the left seriously. If I quit visiting a site regularly I take it off the list. I won’t recommend a site to a reader if I don’t visit it regularly myself. I’m not into linking for the sake of linking or simply to draw more visitors to my site. Actually, I continually add and subtract to the list of blogs I read regularly, but I don’t include my entire list in my recommended list until I’m convinced it’s something I want to read regularly. And I don’t necessarily recommend all sites I personally like.

Speaking of form and the limitations necessary for art, writing about May’s book has made me very conscious of the limitations of a blog. In fact for a moment I almost, but not quite, missed the classroom where I could have a dialogue with students about a book rather than just “lecturing” to myself.

Having written the summary of the first two chapters of The Courage to Create, I resisted writing more summaries (as you could probably tell if you came back for several days in a row). Although I admire Philosophical Investigations’ attempts to discuss Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations online, I personally find it very difficult to discuss a long work in my blog. The first time I tried to discuss a philosophical book, I posted an entry but then later deleted because I couldn’t figure out how to finish it online.

I find that quite frustrating because novels, and other full-length works, have been just as influential in shaping who I am as poets or musical artists have been, and I would like to deal with them in this blog. Although they aren’t as easy to deal with as a poem or a song, they have sometimes been more influential in my life. Books like Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure have been pivotal in shaping my “world,” to use Rollo May’s term.

I’m convinced that the philosophy that has emerged from my interaction with the “real” world and the world of ideas that I encountered in literature have allowed me to cope with my experiences as effectively as possible and to avoid, though neither unscathed nor unchanged, the life-crippling despair and bitterness that many of my friends have experienced when they experienced similar situations.

One of many reasons I became a teacher after my experiences in Vietnam was the belief that the young soldiers I served with in Vietnam has not been prepared for the “world” they met in Vietnam. To the contrary, they came to the war with an idealistic view of America’s role in the world that was belied by most of our actions in Vietnam. These recruits came expecting to gloriously rescue the “good” South Vietnamese from the “evil” North Vietnamese. Instead, they encountered a peasantry that, at best, was indifferent to the Americans, and, at worst, was fighting at night to defeat us.

Many of these young soldiers reacted very differently to the war than I did, and I’m convinced that in many cases it was because I had a different background than they did. After four years of reading modern literature in college, I was more skeptical of America’s war aims. Books like Camus’ The Stranger and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead gave me a different expectation of war than the patriotic, distorted high-school history classes these young men had taken. They had been told about all the great ideas America stood for and about our noble deeds in the past. Unfortunately, the media and their teachers had ignored all the bad things we had also done, like our treatment of the American Indians or America’s questionable practices in South America

As ill-prepared as they were psychologically, little surprise many of them simply couldn’t come to terms with the reality of what was going on in Vietnam. They couldn’t reconcile their “world” with the “real world” of Vietnam.

I, on the other hand, suddenly understood Camus’ The Stranger, a novel that seemed incomprehensible when I encountered it in college five years earlier. Existentialism itself became clear. Kiekergard’s despair became my despair, but at least it didn’t come completely unexpectedly. I must admit, though, that sometimes even I was shocked to realize that just a few years earlier I had been sitting on a college campus reading poetry and watching all the beautiful young ladies walk by.

When I came back from Vietnam, I couldn’t believe the changes I had undergone. I was even half-thankful that I had gotten a “Dear Loren” letter before I left because I didn’t think the girl could possibly recognize me as the same person I was when I left, for I hardly recognized myself.

The point is that books have played an integral part in developing my philosophy. If I’m going to continue to blog and explore who I am online, I need to find a satisfactory way of dealing with long works so that I don’t bore the hell out of myself and anyone else who just might drop in to see what I have to say on a particular day.

If you have an opinion, drop me an email.