"For twenty years Ginsberg had relished the ritual of pens and paper, the relief that accompanied the emptying of his thoughts and the satisfaction of notebooks with filled pages. There were the small spiral-bound pocket notebooks that he wrote in on subways and buses and there were sturdy bedside notebooks for nighttime cris de coeur or an early morning dream. Returning to a notebook after a day's neglect, he would begin in the present and circle back, writing his thoughts and observations not as he had them, but as he recalled having them. Periodically, he cast back through the pages prospecting for the glowing seam of a poem, like a miner long accustomed to working in the dark."
- Deborah Baker, A Blue Hand, Penguin Press; New York: 2008
I want to begin at the end. Chronologies are overrated, particularly when attempting to write in and out of some sense of my thinking. This blog isn't so much a receptacle, as Allen Ginsberg's notebooks surely were. No, this space is a site of articulation, when a whole host of things - notes, scribbles, marginalia, cocktail napkins, sketchbook pages, Post-It memos to myself - come together in an amalgamation. That being said, this space is nothing more than an ongoing photograph, a snapshot of thinking as I progress through my graduate "Teaching with Popular Culture" seminar.
Why a blog? It seemed to me the requirement to keep a journal would require me in turn to collect examples of popular culture, to trace paths of cultural evidence that refuse the tidy boundaries of text. I cannot imagine trying to articulate my thinking without imagery, without videos and photographs, links to other stories, to other writers. We live in an era of digital technology, and it seems even my thoughts come with embedded hypertext, with links, with an endless stream of possibilities. Even so, I imagine this journal-blog, (blournal) will not be so easily navigated. There are expectations, considerations, and deviations - all good learning seems to have this unholy trinity - so I expect to get lost in my own work from time to time. Perhaps this blog will become akin to the Bermuda Triangle ...
Like Ginsberg, I am traveling back into my thoughts, working in the dark, and hoping to cull some sense of meaning from my eclectic stake of things and stuff. We can begin here as I began weeks ago, with a scribbled note on the inside page of my textbook: "What is popular culture, anyway?"
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