"The Opposite of Being Dead"

I've been blogging more than usual last couple of days, for no other reason that I have the time on my hands and I guess I would sooner type something - anything - as opposed to just mooning about looking into space. However, any time I have any pretensions about this blogging lark, I take on board the wise words that Hak Mao recently wrote:

"I have previously stated (can't be bothered looking for the links) my opinion that far from regarding blogging as a new frontier of journalism, for the majority of bloggers, resident in one or other of the bourgeois democracies, blogging amounts to nothing more than vanity publishing. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing - small volume publishing in the form of specialist magazines, fanzines, electronic bulletin boards and so on, has been with us since the requisite technologies have been available - but there is tendency for bloggers to overstate their own influence."

For must of us, a blog is nothing more than that - a vanity publishing project to let ourselves know that we are actually leaving footprints in the snow. Contrast that with the words of someone who has to write:

"I've always had this epithet "art is the opposite of death", and I still think about that whenever I feel really black about anything. I get in front of my typewriter. The function of writing is the opposite of being dead. You're living. This is the thing that always motivates me, because I hate the process of writing. I find it hard and hateful to do. But at the end of the day, if I write a couple of good lines, or I write a page that I think is good work, I feel justified in being alive. I feel I've got the right to be, in a shoddy way, pleased – I don't want to say, happy. "

Bruce Robinson interview in The Idler magazine, 12th November 1995.

Aye, it's a tad pretentious but you know he means it.