Now I'll let you in on a little secret. This past weekend, while feeling very frightened and frazzled at the prospect of losing my oldest continuous friend to a recently discovered mass of malignance, I took a silent vow that I would discontinue this blog if he didn't come out of his nine-hour surgery alive. Over this long and suspenseful weekend, I happened to see somewhere -- borrowed from the Cox & Forkum Editorial Cartoons site -- a cartoon of William Shakespeare sitting in front of a computer keyboard, his hand hovering tentatively above the keys. In a thought balloon were the words, "To Blog or Not to Blog... That is the Question." It gave me the feeling that something apocalyptic was in the air, something extending well beyond me to include other bloggers, as well. Could the End of Blogging Days be upon us? So soon?
Fortunately, my friend -- the Best Man at my wedding 33 years ago -- did survive his operation. His wife tells me that his squash-sized tumor had weeded through the musculature of one of his thighs, which had to be sliced through and repaired with muscle from his abdominal wall; this will require him to wear a knee brace from now on, but the mass was extracted before it could infect any of his organs -- so it's a more than fair trade-off. It was cleanly removed, and I'm grateful to be able to look forward to talking and laughing with him for whatever time is now naturally left to us.
But Monday, the day of my friend's operation, did not come and go without its losses. Two of my fellow film bloggers -- Matt Zoller Seitz of The House Next Door and Raymond Young of Flickhead -- announced around that time that their blogging days were over. Matt announced his decision to give up print journalism entirely (including his gig as a reviewer for THE NEW YORK TIMES, an even bigger step) to pursue filmmaking in an interview with his succeeding House blogmeister Keith Uhlich, while Ray simply said "Adios, amigo" with no further explanation.
As film bloggers go, Matt and Ray were major players; I visited their sites regularly, read most of their postings, and I will miss the distinct personalities they brought to the blogosphere. I had an attachment to Flickhead because I saw it as an incarnation of Ray's late, lamented fanzine MAGICK THEATRE, and in my early months of starting to read The House Next Door, I felt myself drawn closer to Matt by my discovery of his first feature, HOME (introduced to me by occasional VW contributor David White), and shortly thereafter by his blog's stunning report of his wife Jennifer's fatal aneurysm, just two years ago (nearly to the day)... as she was performing tasks at her computer. The impact of that posting was all the proof any of us needed that blogs do indeed form communities of the heart, not just of the head, and that the rending pain and disorientation felt by one blogger could be sent down the wire to be shared by everyone who read their work or shared their particular discipline. It was not long after acknowledging the second anniversary of Jennifer's passing with this touching short film that Matt made his announcement, so it is hard not to imagine that it had something to do with prompting his decision.
While I feel jubilant for both Matt and Ray, in that their decisions suggest a newly determined re-engagement of life and all its outgoing possibilities, it will take awhile to lose the habit of wondering what they might be thinking about this and that. At the same time, there is something about the very nature of cyberspace that allows such disappearances to heal over quickly, like the metallic skin of the T-1000. We feel a sense of disappointment that their words won't be there for us tomorrow or the next day or the next day, but regardless of the high quality of their work, the void they leave behind will likely not be felt for long. What Matt and Ray introduced into the blogosphere is still there, and, should it be taken down, something else by someone else will fill its place. Ether minus ether remains ether; you cannot subtract from it.
Come this October, I will have been doing Video WatchBlog for three years. That's three years in which I have initiated no new novel or screenplay project. This blog's numbers are not great in the great scheme of blogs, but they are respectable for a film blog, especially so for a film blog devoted to such outré films and things as I discuss. Last week, Video WatchBlog scored its highest number of daily hits ever when the NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN song posting more than doubled my usual daily average of 14-1500 hits. This proved to me that there is a larger audience out there, interested in things that interest me, that generally do not come here because the larger number of our interests do not coincide. They come here for a day or two, then disappear when our headline topic changes. In fact, this blog tends to attract wider response when it covers things like Bond, contemporary music (my Bob Dylan posts were BIG), comics, erotica -- things other than the horror and fantasy cinema that embody my core historian interests. I sense that large numbers of people aren't as turned on by horror and fantasy cinema as they used to be, at least not in a serious and lasting way as I was, and probably you were, but today's fans don't have the Universal films of the Golden Age and the Hammer and Eurocult films of the Silver Age in theaters to help turn them on. What they do have, that we didn't have back in the day, is a lot of information sources of unequal volume and value vying for their attention -- most of them in the form of blogs.
All around us, our growing indifference to the world outside our computer screens is causing newspapers with over a century of experience and tradition to topple, venerable bookstores to close, magazines to fold, literature to die. The vox populi has found a soapbox for itself, but here's the bitter truth: anyone with the talent to have earned publication in print -- like Matt and Ray -- is likely to find that blogging, while attractive in the short run, really isn't built for the long run. It starts out as a fun thing, but soon enough you realize that it's not a job, it just feels like one; it's not a career, because it doesn't help you to make the hand-to-hand, face-to-face connections that are necessary to anyone's professional advancement. What it is, blogging, is a daily deal with the Devil to keep producing, to track your numbers and referrals, and to stay abreast of the birth and death dates in the IMDb and all the other blogs kept in your personal blogroll. It's no way to live... but, by and large, neither is the way we live.
As this world of ours continues to place all its hopes for information and community like so many eggs into this ether basket, people ought to know what I am not ashamed to admit: that, sooner or later, it becomes the secret wish of all bloggers to stop blogging. The instant gratification of this format is nice, but it only lasts for an instant. It wouldn't surprise me if all the blogs I check each day -- rather than reading some of the acknowledged great writers whose works I've never read, finishing Thomas Pynchon's most recent book, or starting in on Alexander Theroux's new and forbiddingly long novel -- disappeared off the face of the net within the next year or two. One thing I can promise you about published writers, and generally about any writer of quality: once they have tasted publication, they are in it for keeps, and they will swim upstream toward maintaining that livelihood as long as there is breath left in them. As for Matt Zoller Seitz, to whom I send my best wishes and highest hopes, he's jumping into another stream with stronger rapids -- filmmaking -- but it's still a form of writing and, these days, perhaps the ultimate form of publication.
No, I'm not resigning this blog yet, but, like the wretch who lives in a small room containing nothing but a chair, a table and a loaded revolver, it's something I contemplate every day. For better or worse, so far, other contemplations have won the upper hand.
Donna tells me it's a beautiful day -- 77° outside. So I think that's enough blogging for today.
