“If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all!”
If I don’t say anything at all, I’ll never say anything nice. So, resolved: I’m reopening this blog.
The immediate reason for my resolution is as usual I got annoyed at something I read somewhere. This time it was in the beginning to Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince. The phrase was something like “saints of art” (who consecrate themselves to silence, a pure sacrifice to purity of never doing anything less than perfect and hence do nothing at all), and I wanted to be sure I could never be confused with anyone anybody could approve of with such an awful phrase. (And then I got annoyed because I was being manipulated by a nasty author into an unearned sense of superiority over their main character for their own sinister purposes, but that’s another story.)
Less immediate: I need some kind of anchor on the internet (don’t wander too far from home). I need a place to scattercast my mental chatter from (one person at a time is too slow and I repeat myself too much). And I need something limited to focus my anxiety on (and make it productive). This will be those, and they will be it.
Regular updates to follow. Well, they ought to, but no promises.