Introduction

Before I became a writer, I was and still am a reader. I studied the things that interested me, like the parallels between Samuel Johnson's views on the dangers of imagination and T.S. Eliot's writings on personality and tradition, Paul de Man's discussion of the difference between allegory and symbol, Jacques Derrida's treatment of harmony and melody, the Proustian involuntary memory, Roland Barthes' punctum and studium, Baudelaire's "correspondences" and Eliot's objective correlative--issues of critical and aesthetic judgment, communication and non-communication, isolation and unification, distance between signifier and signified, presence within time, submission and subversion.

In short, I enjoyed all the advantages of a perfectly self-indulgent and, in the context of the job market, perfectly useless education. The latter provided the perfect excuse to further pursue my interests with a graduate degree. However, my client status in the warm, womb-like undergraduate environment of the American liberal arts college in no way prepared me for the culture shock of a graduate degree in French academia, where my feeble murmurings about Steven Greenblatt's new historicism were categorically silenced by "Oui, mais tout ca n'a pas d'importance, car la Realite n'existe pas" (Yes, well all that's irrelevant because reality does not exist). I utterly lacked the ontological armor to effectively spar with the high priests formed by Normale Superieure Lettres. Despite my sincere efforts and their best intentions, the whole experience was doomed by miscommunication. My first "memoire" on Faulkner's Bestiary elicited some mild curiosity at cocktail conversations from those who mistook bestiary for bestiality, but was poorly received by my professors. My second memoire on 19th Century American literature and culture as reviewed by secondary literary critics in the no longer published journal, La Revue des Deux Mondes, did make the cut. By that time I had lost most the passion and conviction that inspired me to study literature in the first place.

Wanting nothing further to do with academia, I worked for some time as a writer for a financial services company and later joined my husband as Director of Communications for JBoss Group. I first came to notice blogs in the Java community when our product and the personalities associated with it started to appear in discussions there. At that point, I began to study the genre.

Some blogs seemed genuinely devoted to sharing insight about technology, however what interested me more were the language and peripheral behavioral patterns. It would appear that a significant portion of the blogverse had not left Junior High. There were some articulate and original individual voices. However, on the whole, bloggers seemed to aggregate in cliques of varying sizes in a lovefest of constant self-referencing and self-affirmation. The collective message generally reflected the following point "Me and my two best friends think I'm cool. And by the way, today, we all think X product or person is a loser." The other distasteful characteristic shared by some portion of the blogging community was the tendency to use blogs to settle scores and air petty personal grievances. "On such and such a day, X stuck out their foot and tripped me as I was sitting down at the cafeteria table, and this is why you should feel that is significant..."

I was already cataloguing the pitfalls to avoid in my own blog. My own blog, oh the horror, seduced by the meretricious allure of reality TV for would-be writers. How had I gotten to that point? In the words of A.S. Byatt, if there is one thing a background devoted to literary study is really good at, it is reinforcing the certain conviction that the practitioner is in no way worthy of writing herself. But the seeds of the fall had already been sown long before. When you study writers, you also read their biographies where you learn such contextual detail as the fact that Faulkner was rip-roaring drunk when he delivered his famous "I decline to accept the end of man" Nobel speech. And what does that really mean anyway, and isn't it a little pretentious, but who cares because the words sounded so good. Furthermore, I wasn't reading Nobel Laureates that much any more; I was reading writing that was no longer intimidating, by people who, rightfully or wrongfully so, were not intimidated at all by the idea of writing.

I decided to take the advice of Lady Miss Chablis, another Southerner, "Two peas in a bucket, f___ it," why not write after all? It's just a blog. What did I really have to lose? I could even assuage my literary conscience by familiarizing myself with the master of the genre himself, Michel de Montaigne. At the least I'd have a superior metric with which to measure my own shortcomings.

"This entirely original topic in literature, Montaigne on Montaigne, demanded for its full development a new literary form, the loose unstructured essay, replete with deliberate irrelevances, antiquarian references and classical quotations, with snippets of autobiography and fragments of philosophy...The final product, always and necessarily unfinished and open-ended, was to be the confused picture of this single confused consciousness at one passing moment in its unique history." Stuart Hampshire, Introduction to "Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works," Everyman's Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1943.

So, without further ado...my blog. I write because it pleases me, on subjects that pique my fancy.