Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
I have a shadow, created by no form of mine. It follows me everywhere, but always arrives first, and lingers long after I’m gone.
The more light I shine on it, the stronger it gets. So I hide it among my other shadows, in hopes that one day, it will fade away.
I was tickled, tickled I say, to see that Jonathon is continuing the discussion Steve started about weblogging and (l)iterature. Not only is he continuing it, he ups the ante in bold, relieved defiance of weblogging protocol:
That’s it: where my own interests lie. In other words, hardly anything to do with telling the literal truth; and everything to do with fashioning an authentic persona from bits of alibis and consistent lies.
…bits of alibis and consistent lies. Jonathon is truly a rebel in our midst – threatening to bring a story teller’s narrative into this land of raw id and Venerated Truth. A year ago, I would have been appalled. In fact, a year ago I was appalled – it was one year ago when the infamous Oblivio Duck Sign incident happened, and Jonathon first brought up the concept that not all of this is as it seems:
Yet, even though I don’t regard Oblivio as a weblog, others might. I suppose it could be mistaken for a weblog, just as Michael Barrish could be mistaken for a real person. He probably is a real person since he also uses the website to solicit web development work (though he maintains separate sites for each purpose, for reasons he explains in the story Motherfucker ). But Barrish is also a character who appears in his own stories. As does Rachel, his girlfriend. Whether she really exists and whether she’s his girlfriend is impossible to determine, without knowing Michael Barrish. Even then, the real-life Rachel may bear only a fleeting resemblance to the Rachel in the stories. (Just like the women in some of my stories.)
At the time my response was:
Of all possible outcomes of yesterday’s writing, what I didn’t expect is that the story that originated my passion might be allegorical rather than experience. I am left wondering whether I am a sophisticated patron of the arts or an incredibly gullible fool. And that’s the inherent danger of mixing the art of creation within the context of experiential recounting.
In this day of weblogger meetups and get-togethers, and discussions of digital identity and authentication, the thought that a weblogger would write as a narrator, crafting stories and putting him or herself into them must seem almost blasphemy. But whoever said that authentic and true were one and the same?
I rejoice in Jonathon and Steve and their defiance and most of all their literature. The writer has been too long superceded by the journalist, the gossip, and the community node.
