This is a personal blog. That is, I’ve nominated it with the same tripartite name given me at birth; so I’ve foisted on it, as my junior, the fate of representing me in this digital space. But like any offspring, it isn’t all parts me, however named, and though its bones bear an uncanny resemblance to mine it is inflected with the strange flesh of the blog and all the cultural genealogy incumbent on the blog, and I must allow with parental clemency that it spin off utterly from my intentions and attain a life of its own.

I am partial to this figuring of the blog over the blog as monetizable entity or advertisement of acumen–probably a vain, gurgling protest under all these leagues of blood sacrifice to reigning Mammon, and at least a jarring accent if not rising to the strident volume of a protest. The blog medium, ephemeral as any generated within the hyperactive past few decades’ Internet culture, is obsolete, says the Zeitgeist. (This importunate spirit will interrupt the monologues contained herein incessantly.) In the irresistible present, the possibilities for “self-expression,” if you will pardon this reduction, exist only in the array of the dominant social media with their cultural and institutional bulwarks. So while the blog medium is flotsam, the blog form sails on in such platforms as Twitter, ahem, “X,” propelled by our Zeitgeist toward the horizon of shortest-form content to which all the major platforms are racing. I do not mean to say that this is really an irresistible or uncontested force, but only that it is so much the dominant one that complacent submission to its draft is commonplace. One cannot even meet this complacency with vitriol; it pervades the intelligentsia, the enlightened e-commentariat (far from lumpen* with regard to other matters) with an insidious defeatism. The technocrats have sole proprietorship of the means of expression–we have no choice but to accept and adapt ourselves to the media with which their ingenuity has provided us, and, further, the stimulating content et cetera their algorithms feed us. But we know in champing we fatten ourselves for the slaughter.

All this is merely to justify an antiquarian (for so it must be considered) interest in macroblogging on a personal website. I don’t suppose this is a politically discursive enterprise and quite contrarily I think it’ll house the sort of intricately idle designs one finds in the household of an aged hobbyist, allowing that there are sometimes bold suggestions in these cobwebs.

The vocal tendency here, where the inheritance is clearly traceable to me, is toward a singsong figurative play. Anything presumptively autobiographical shouldn’t be trusted as such, and although I expect to write some meekly topical entries, I’m far more interested in outlining the vacuity of Wikipedic info windows than in posturing as educator in a given field of trivia. I might avow that the whole scroll is one work of fiction. But it’s my blog to write and not to fact-check, and if I’ve lured you, reader, with my shrill voice only to baffle you with its dislocated source, I’m sorry.

*Terminological jargon of this sort must be forgiven as a virtual means of producing an effect or meaning whose contours are impossible to represent with exact fidelity; as an analogy, consider the relationship of the raster to the vector graphic