Jacob Lawrence, "The Migration of the Negro" #34 (1941)

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration of the Negro No. 34. The Negro press was also influential in urging the people to leave the South. (1941)

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Blogging as Cubism

Have you read Kafka's Diaries? These notebooks are more complex and interesting than their title implies. He'd switch between a conventional diary form, sketches for stories, and complete short works of fiction. Their editing seems to deny inner structure. But they read with a fascinating dreamlike texture.

To my ear this sounds made for blogging. If you begin with the blog as an arbitrary narrative space, you can switch between diary, fiction, essay, book review, grocery list, or any other formal possibility which suits your thematic purpose from moment to moment.

I've been trying to explore the practical technical implications. Initially I focused on parallax. Instead of "Modernist" parallax, which typically employed multiple characters perceiving a single event from within personal subjectivities, I brought different narratives into collision in some way, for instance via juxtaposition or superimposition. When narratives are related like this you end up with something like Cubism, in which the whole is, hopefully, greater than the sum of its proverbials. When it works the constituent narratives resonate together in a way in which none does separately.

Later I played with widening the technique, for instance by layering different orders of narratives, where "order" means of a different ontology. What happens if you add commentary? This is one possible example.

Eventually this idea of widening led me to group unrelated pieces in more or less arbitrary ways, implying a narrative that didn't originally exist. The grouping Loss is the most sustained attempt.

Lately I've tended to be less formal, using the space for traditional sketches and experiments with compression.

To my excuse for a mind that's the fun of the thing. Nobody's yet clamped rules around the form. Blogging can be whatever you like. It's fun to play around with, and it's great to have a space to work in where nobody can tell me I'm doing it wrong.

Thanks for checking it out!

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