`A Different Name for Conversation'

Take up Tristram Shandy and open to Book II, Chapter XI (page 79 in my old Everyman’s Library edition), and read:

“Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all; -- so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good-breeding, would pressure to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.”

The conversation at Anecdotal Evidence commenced one year ago today. It was one-sided at first, the monologue of a man with a head full of books and a desire to talk about them. I lacked technological confidence, and still don’t know how to add links to my blog roll, but I taught myself to blog in what I fancy is the old-fashioned American way – by doing it, making a lot of mistakes, and paying attention to them. I’m a natural-born blogger who spent a lifetime waiting for the technology to catch up.

Now to acknowledge many debts: Most obviously, Dave Lull, proofreader, surrogate conscience, friend; and Frank Wilson, who let me go on doing what I was already doing but with better editing and pay. Also, among others, Maxine Clarke, Michael Coppola, Michael Gilleland, George Hunka, Joshua Kurp, Kenneth Kurp, James Marcus, Brian Sholis, Terry Teachout, many nameless librarians, and readers, named and anonymous, in the U.S., Canada, Israel, Iran, England, Scotland, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, and even a few lonely outposts in Texas.

I’ve enjoyed the discipline of posting daily, but that only requires me to do what I was already doing, except now I take the time to write down the words I was allowing to languish in my head. What have I not enjoyed? Occasionally having to wrestle with Blogger, a temperamental mistress. Tantrums from obstreperous readers rooted, naturally, in politics. And spam in the form of blog comments. At first that was limited to solving my credit worries and making large sums of money doing absolutely nothing. Now it’s usually for dubious computer software, dubious pharmaceuticals and dubious women.

A few of the unspoken assumptions I’ve learned thanks to blogging for a year: truth exists and is knowable; language used honestly and with grace separates the civilized from the barbarian; not all opinions are equal, and some are more equal than others. A passage in an essay by George Garrett on Fred Chappell’s poetry distills this project. Substitute “blogging” for “poetry,” and “blogger” for “poet”:

“St. Augustine said, and poets for more than a thousand years never saw any good reason to question the validity of his statement, that the purpose of poetry was to tell the truth – truth being caritas (charity), the love and peace that pass all understanding. Its opposite is cupiditas (sin), which blooms brightly in the false garden, in the soil of untruth. This beautiful simplicity is complicated by the shifty and constantly shifting, mutating shapes of appearance and reality and by the fact that any poetry can contain this meaning. It cannot exist separately from the poem. It lives in and from the poem.”

Thank you, readers, and happy birthday!