slipstream

I’ve been reading. It’s a job, a project; NetNewsWire grooms for me, post after post, a reading list expanding without end, a list which splutters in fits and starts, mapping out a histogram of frequency, flooded with data, a mapping of observations which fall under disjointed tags. Is there an optimal number of blogs one should follow? Should one choose one or more based on the frequency of posting? Should one measure one’s consumption?

Sometimes I find myself unwittingly following certain posts, well, not the posts exactly, I find myself slipping into the glide path so to speak, into another’s slipstream, and this other is the poster of comments. Perhaps because I see his or her commentary consistently posted on a site that I follow, of a writer whose work intrigues me, I get sidetracked, I follow the commentary. Maybe I do not care much for the voice of this commentator, for his or her style, but because this body is a hypertext - levels of authoring beget authoring and voices mesh - I have to remind myself who it is that I’m reading, where I came from, the route I took, where I’ve got to, and whether it matters. My reading becomes hysterical; this reading revolves not in the kind of orbital circularity of the inertia of planets travelling at their own momentum, but more like a catherine wheel, spinning and spluttering fragments and sparks in unpredictable directions.

As these distractions occur, as the commentary swallows me up, I begin to imagine a nomadic kind of posting, a posting without site, without origin, which I admire; a reactive occupation, a parasitic commentary whose fuel is the writing that feeds it; a subversive, scatterbrained, machine-gun writing which originates nowhere, is untraceable, unidentifiable, seemingly without ego, asking for no response, seeking no acknowledgement, and which provides no track-back to home.

I regularly detect the hysterical ego when I read, the anxiety expressed in the ‘do I post often enough/when is the right time to post/what does my frequency of posting say/not say, about me, when does it exceed me?’, the blogging with obligation dialectic. The comment-only piggy-back posting I admire offers the neat solution; it is a kind of reading without writing, a hijacking of sites, a tainting, an invasion, an infection, a stalking, but neurotically, this is an endosymbiotic activity which provides validation whilst at the same time requires the life of the p(h)ost in order to survive. Like the festive mistletoe, once considered a pest that killed and devalued its habitat, but now thought to have a pervasive influence over its community, I find the commentary often precedes and exceeds its subject.

In the brave new world in which we switch off the comments, we find a kind of writing without reading and without the reading there’s no one to look after the writing.