AN ENGLISHMAN IN NEW YORK (and beyond…)
To return to an earlier theme, I find myself reflecting on my Englishness within this e-community of Americans. And it's a curious feeling. We write in the same language of our abhorrence of this war. We are struck similarly by its anomalies & absurdities. We laugh caustically at the cartoons & doctored photographs of Bush as he flounders his way through public declarations, so manifestly neither Churchill nor Kennedy. We share a sense of a world gone mad.
Yet when I tour the weblogs & read the musings on subjects less urgent & immediate & more personal I'm frequently baffled by their references, ignorant as to their contexts & nonplussed by their messages. And the welter of responses that some of these cryptic utterances draw puzzle me even more. I gaze solemnly at the windows framing them, unable to recognise the coordinates of the lives being enacted behind. So much of what I read here in Salon country is stimulating, amusing, entertaining, exciting; but much too leaves me feeling - as I have already observed - like a stranger in a strange land.
Compounding this curious sense of alienation is the relative lack of reciprocation my own weblog draws. Aside from a small group of regular visitors - welcome souls, all of them - I have bobbed consistently in the lower reaches of the ranking order, more recently not featuring at all. Not, I hasten to add, that I make any great claims for my weblog. I include largely material that has a humorous slant, a few ponderings about the war in Iraq & the larger political context, some poetry & a little lightweight navel-gazing. There's not much of great substance here, nor do I seek to bare my soul in this most exposed of locations. But I do wonder what determines the weblog reader's interest overall. And of course I would be delighted if I found myself interacting with a larger proportion of the Salon community.
Now, I'd better clarify at this point why & how this both matters & yet doesn't really matter at one & the same time. It matters because no one writes a journal in a location as public as cyberspace if they wish to maintain discretion, modesty & privacy. We're here because we want the world to be in on our mutterings & murmurings, our lamentations & our rejoicings. We want both a sense of shared perception with like-minded individuals out there &, if we're being entirely honest, maybe a little admiration from them too for the originality & fecundity of our thinking. We want both to communicate & to make an impact. So acknowledgement does matter: it confirms & validates in a small but important way what we offer of ourselves.
And yet, in the final analysis, whatever our non-blogging pals believe of us, most of us live in the real world of family, friends, work & recreation & they sustain us at our deepest levels. So what we achieve via the medium of a keyboard, a 'phone line & an 18" screen occupies only one corner of a busy life.
So I guess that for as long as I fill in those oblong windows with my bits & pieces, the flotsam & jetsam that I find floating by & my own thoughts & reflections, I'll continue to wonder what it is that has a reader returning regularly to the same weblog. It can't just be sex or the confessional because Rayne Today, Gnosis, The Raven, Driver 8 - all popular weblogs - contain material that is challenging to & demanding of the reader. Maybe in the end it is, to some extent at least, culturally determined &, for my part, I shall remain - not entirely unwillingly - an Englishman in New York…
10:55:29 PM 
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