Χαιρε, βλογων!

First, then, the verb has to be βλογω (blogw, with the omega pronounced as another “o”). It’s a standard -ω verb whose spelling makes a nice echo of λογος (logos, “word”) and λεγω (legw, “I am building with tiny bricks”—no, it means “I am saying”). The recourse to a double-g in Latin won’t carry over to Greek, where that would be pronounced as a “ng” sound. The future active, the second principal part, must be βλοξω. There’s no obvious reason to assign it a second aorist form, so the third principal part will be βλοξα. Perfect active will involve a conflict between the γ and the κ, so we’ll treat it on the model of φευγω, hence βεβλογα.

The noun form “blogger” should derive smoothly from the participle βλογων (“blogwn,” it means “one who blogs”). A written blog would be a blogomenon, βλογομενον. I’m sure I’m forgetting a form I should be supplying, and have probably mangled a form in here somewhere; my Greek composition is terrible.

My Weinbergerian school motto would then read, “βλογομεν εαυτους εις το ειναι”, “We are blogging ourselves into existence.” Since David Salo’s Latin motto sounds a specifically Latin (gladiatorial) theme, and my Greek motto sounds a metaphysical theme, perhaps we can have both.
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      ( 7:36 PM )  

David Weinberger Is the Best

Salve, bloggator!

We might have opted for “Blogavi, bloggo, blogabo” (“I have blogged, I am blogging, I will blog”), or “Bloggo, ergo sum,” or “Bloggamus nos in esse.” Alex suggests “Blogorum animae manu dei sunt,” though David would emend (I think) to “Bloggatorum animae in manu dei sunt.” A veritable field day for recondite erudition; thank you, David!
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      ( 8:15 AM )  

Experience and Individuality

Elaine probably didn’t mean to sound condescending, and I’m pleased that she feels the years between my age and hers—which don’t seem nearly as numerous as they once would have—will conduce to my growing in wisdom and experience.

On the other hand, David’s older even than am I, and some other very old and very experienced observers have likewise doubted the necessity of thinking oneself the creator of one’s own identity. I’ve gone on too long about “identity” in other posts here; suffice it to say in response to Elaine and Tom that I’m thankful for their participation in forming my own identity, thankful that it’s not up to me to create or to decide who I am. While Tom cites his health as part of the rationale for asserting his adherence to the premise of self-creation, my own well-being depends as much on attaining a true sense of my interdependence with others as on relying solely on myself; indeed, an exaggerated sense of self-reliance predictably gets me into trouble. But, as Elaine notes, people will disagree about such things.
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      ( 7:34 AM )  

Bleak Friday

Yesterday would not have illustrated that inclination toward the sunny side. I didn’t sleep well Thursday night. The morning began with considerable annoyance and wasted efforts as I tried to push my (inconsequential) first blogpost from the cookie on my PowerBook to Blogger’s server, and thence to the Seabury server—without explicit word that the problem lay in the catastrophic Blogger meltdown (the problem wasn’t announced on status.blogger.com until midafternoon CDT).

Then I turned to an academic essay long overdue to an editor whose patience has worn thin. My determination to squeeze out the twenty pages I owed him drove me hard through the afternoon, but the determination to write and the fruit of writing aren’t the same thing. I managed only a few paragraphs, and the dissonance between the urgency of producing some scholarly wisdom and the pedestrian periods I’d typed engendered some bitterness about the whole deal. Now, resenting a gift—and the vocation to reflect and to write falls firmly into the category of a gift, even when it’s unwelcome—resenting a gift is a serious business, and I might have taken that as a sign that I ought to turn my efforts elsewhere (though I’m so very far behind that it’s hard to concede the possibility that having a break might advance th cause of writing). But by late in the afternoon, I was feeling embittered and barren.

Then Jennifer found that she had to leave sooner than we had expected, and though we knew she’d have to leave Saturday anyway, her early departure added poignancy to our dropping her off at the train station. Her dwelling in our lives has been a blessing to us, to our local family and also to our SPU friends, and it’s hard to see her go back to New York after only a week.

After dinner, the children and I watched The Godfather, Part II, a brilliant movie that follows the triumphant perseverance and tactical ingenuity with which Michael Corleone refurbishes and extends the Corleone family’s operations in Godfather I. In Godfather II, though, the exuberance of Corleone’s come-from-behind reconquest of the tumultuous New York underworld gives way to a grim determination to sustain and extend the Corleone empire at the cost of everything that young Michael Corleone, and even that the young Vito Corleone (Michael’s father, the Godfather of the movie’s title) held dear. I don’t recall seeing Al Pacino smile even once in the entire movie. The effect sears us with icy bleakness, and I climbed the stairs from the TV in the basement weighed down even more with the day’s cares.

And when I went to check my email at the end of the day, I received word that a wonderful friend’s mother had died, early in the week, and that I hadn’t found out because my email address was wrong in the original mailing. Spambots from every con artist representing every relative of every deposed tyrant in sub-Saharan Africa can find my mailbox, but the messenger of mortal tidings depends on equivocal memory and the fragile gestures of manual transcription. The memorial service was held yesterday, hours before I received the message, days after my condolences would appropriately have been sent. As I explained all this to Margaret, she reminded me that my mood constituted a breach of marital role conventions, that she’s the one permitted to observe the gloomier aspects of life while I’m entrusted with keeping the balance of perspective and hopefulness.

All that doesn’t make a patch on the harrowing daily challenges of others’ lives, among them some who’ll read this page, and I apologize for presuming to kvetch when these local burdens amount to so much less than what friends and neighbors carry.

This morning dawns gray, but cool, and I have a good notion for how to extend my essay, and Margaret and our lovely children have decided that today we actually need to go to a department store to pick up oddments for Nate’s packing for college, for Pippa’s summer wardrobe (she probably ought to have more than one pair of shorts that fits), and various other impedimenta. Whether the sun breaks through the clouds or we get some needed rain, I feel my heliotropism kicking in again. More later.
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Selling Out

Since the University of Blogaria has become a mini-meme—at least, to me and about twelve other people—the notion has been flitting about my head that I should contact Cafe Press to make some of those tacky academic trinkets that campus bookstores always stock: t-shirts, coffee mugs, and so on, all with the U Blog logo. I had dismissed the idea as too tacky even for me, when Alex Golub prodded me to reconsider the possibility.

So I opened a Cafe Press site, but that raises the question: what should a U Blog t-shirt, coffee mug, or whatever, look like? Should I just continue the uniform-jersey type style on the U Blog blogsticker

or develop a more distinctive appearance—with, say, fraktur or Art Deco letters?

   

What about coffee mugs for each of the profs (I can see the Simpson Chair of Desultory Conjecture selling a lot of coffee)?

What about a mascot for U Blog? Back when I taught at Eckerd College (insert your favorite drug joke here), I led an honors seminar in which I made students read Wittgenstein and Borges and Foucault and Lyotard and loads of stuff like that. At the end of the term, some of the class got together and made a t-shirt with Wittgenstein’s famous duck-rabbit:

Would the Duck-Rabbits be an appropriate emblem for our eminent institution?

Or is the whole idea as ill-advised as I initially suspected?
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      ( 2:48 PM )  

The Blogfather

Gary Turner asks how many people owe their blogging ways to Chris Locke’s instigation last fall, and gets lots of positive answers. I like Chris; when the whim to blog strikes him I enjoy his page, and I admire EGR. But my blogfather has to be David Weinberger. When one day I was reading JOHO and noticed the "We Blog" link, it was only a matter of time till I decided, "If that guy can write a weblog, so can I."
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