Tower of Posts

My blog is the Friendly Towers. Get it? The blog is vertical.

There is this common move in academic survey classes where they give you this classical text and set it up like it's this sacrosanct talking baby of information (c.f. Napoleon Chagnon's Yanomamo: The Fierce People for anthropology 101). Then the instructor proceeds to assign all the readings that trash the canonical text by exposing all its flaws and subjectivities.

In rhetoric and composition, there are these two more or less classic essays: Walter Ong's "The Writer's Audience is always a fiction," and Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede's "Audience Addressed and Audience Evoked..." (To get technical, these essays are not diametric opposites by any means; but they do offer the reader many opportunities to read them against each other.)

The point of Ong's essay is that any time you're writing, it's ultimately only between you and the paper or keys; so even if you're writing down a speech you're gonna give to some people you know pretty well, you're still writing to what you imagine to be those people pre facto. Ede and Lunsford counter this argument by saying that we always have someone in mind when we write--even if it's ourselves--so it's not like you're writing to some completely ideal audience; rather, the audience is imagined but very much based in material reality.

This gets me to what bothers me about my blog. I try to write with the intention of making an argument to the most general, fictional audience. This is what I've been trained to do for my job, so it comes almost naturally to me. However, at the same time, I know very well that most of the few people who read this are people who know me pretty well. So in a sense, my audience is anonymous enough that I'm not writing to anyone in particular, but not anonymous enough that I can pretend to write to myself.

I feel like that's what I hate most about blogging. The pretense I maintain that I am writing to myself. I'm really writing to you, person who I probably know.

Saw some people tonight who I don't see much anymore. With the exception of the few who I talk to often, I think my fascination with keeping in touch with the bygones is dwindling.