The Coming Blok

I dislike the word "blog." First of all, it's guttural and ugly-sounding, like something to be spit out - "I have a blog in my throat." Second of all, it comes with a bunch of automatic implications I don't like. When people hear "blog" they think self-obsessive spewing of daily minutia (though Livejournal remains the gold standard) or partisan hack political punditry. I don't deny the self-obsession aspect of my experiment in blogging, but I think it's fair to say that it's of a different style than that of frequently updated pictures of cats. So what's the alternative? Web-journal is too long and pretentious, but I do like to think of this as a journal rather than a "log." Log implies I'm keeping track of something, and except in the loosest sense I'm not. This is in a rough sense a log of the evolution of my consciousness, but that isn't readily apparent to the reader and nor is it meant to be. So where does that leave us?

Nowhere. Utopia means nowhere and the Internet is surely the most advanced form of nowhere yet to be invented. Who was the perfect inhabitant of nowhere? Why, early 20th century Russian poet Alexander Blok! Author of such lines as, "Go on and live another quarter century - Nothing will change. There's no way out. Night, icy ripples on a canal - Drugstore, street, lamp." The connection between Blok and the word blog is readily apparent, but it was not I who came up with it. Rather I give credit to erudite Bulgarian expatriate Ipchuk at Winter House for noting the sublimely obvious.

So why Blok? It is guttural-sounding like blog, but in a harshly evocative rather than cloyingly bland way. There are also the puns on "bloc" and "block," and I do like to think this of journal as the Anglophone equivalent of the Bloc Québécois, or my own personal block of the Internet. Another bonus? The K implies a linkage with Kafka, the forerunner of the modern condition who kept a diary of a literary quality all "bloggers" should aspire to reach. So, following Ipchuk's suggestion, I'd like to second Blok as an appropriate term for those journals that don't quite fit in to pre-existing archetypes for what blogs should be. A sort of nihilism is implied by the word's origin, but this can take a variety of forms: struggles against meaninglessness, an embrace of meaninglessness, the search for new meanings.

It is easier to define something by what it's not, so let's say no: redundant regurgitation of already oversaturated links, purposeless recitation of day-to-day details of living (e.g. "Went to the Mall today, saw Brendan, bought a tiara"), inside jokes, tech-geek indulgences, animated graphics, family albums, crass political partisanship, intertextuality in place of content or frequently updated pictures of cats. The occasional picture of a cat is allowed, however.