It’s a pursuit that is seen as passe. Perhaps never rose to the precinct of fad. In some place, the butt of jokes. The BLAH-G. Blah, blah, blah-log. Scratch the surface and you’ll see what’s behind: naked self-promotion, pointless grandstanding, professional necessity (literary agent to emerging writer: “Do you have a blog? No? Get one.”)
Some blogs, not many, rise to writerly if not literary notebooks with a purpose, in my case, to write every other day in the hopes, yes, of offering some insights, telling some stories, linking to essays and books and articles of interest to me, and through the wonders of the Internet, to others. At root, Running for Your Life harkens to the blog-work one of my literary heroes, Jose Saramago (1922-2010), whose select blog entries between September 2008 and August 2009, are compiled in The Notebook http://bit.ly/bDqiLj, An example: “The division between actors and spectators is over: the spectator attends not only to see and hear, but to be seen and heard.” The ideal is to, perchance, elicit comments and responses to what I have put down here now for 12 months. According to my Blogger Account, today marks 79 posts on Running for Your Life. In the past 12 months that’s 1,856 visits. Average time on the site: 2:17. And many repeat visitors, I’m happy to say. Good enough for a blah, blah, blah-log.
