Why I Blog – The Atlantic (November 2008)

Being that this is a new venture for me and for all of us, I found Andrew Sullivan’s writing on the subject of blogging in this month’s Atlantic inspiring and also comforting.

For the purposes of TrueSlant.com, Sullivan’s thoughts on truth in the blogosphere being “inherently transitory,” seemed particularly appropriate.

[Blogging] is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in.

Why I Blog – The Atlantic (November 2008).

And on a personal level, his characterization of blogging as “the spontaneous expression of instant thought” brought me back to some of my earliest, most Ginsberg-ian (Whitman-esque?) feelings about writing — the kind of noble sentiments reserved for poets and high-school journal keepers: In short, the reason I, as a teenager obsessed with notions of authenticity and truth, began writing in the first place.

I wore a fedora, and was generally a lot more pretentious back then. But sometimes I would sell my eye teeth to reclaim even a shred of that early passion. Perhaps these new, “porous” borders will allow for a bit of the old youthful romance to come rushing back in.