The Home Stretch

At the beginning of our class I nurtured a fairly strong disdain for blogs in general. My own experiences with bloggers ranged from pushy to downright rude. I felt that they seemed to think themselves better than everyone else simply they had and published an opinion. Being an egalitarian and a firm believer in the fact that you are entitled to your own opinion and action as long as it does not harm anyone or impinge on their rights, I found blogging to be a form of proselytizing as all these bloggers that I had met rabidly asserted that their opinion was better than anyone else’s. So I was instantly reluctant to join this breed of self-promoting prophets. I maintained a small Myspace.com blog full of my creative writing posts and various thoughts about professors and school in general though only those people who knew about it and subscribed to it would go on and know that I had updated. I justified to myself that I wasn’t really a blogger because I didn’t foist the onus of reading it to anyone I passed and had barely met. However the first few critical posts got me kind of excited as I viewed them as a form of creative writing and as long as I didn’t talk about it to anyone else I could continue my view that I wasn’t “really a blogger.”
At the end of semester however I find that my opinions have changed. I enjoy writing in my blog. You, by far, have taught me more about reading critically than any teacher I have ever met. So maybe it was because I felt myself looking deeper into things that I normally wouldn’t have seen. The themes you outlined for us at the beginning of most of our classes helped immensely and gave me ideas to consider later in the semester such as the treatment of women in the literature, the meaning of stories, et cetera. Also in reading my classmates’ blogs I found that not all bloggers are as pushy as the ones I had met previously. I loved talking to them in person about their opinions though I didn’t often comment on them I talked with Jessica, Terrence, Rich, Ish, and Barry about our ideas fairly often. I also found a lot of blogs hilarious especially Rob and Kevin’s snarky wit. Though at the end I tried to tap my own brand of humor but I found it did not translate quite well onto the electronic page, but I enjoyed the jokes if only just for myself.
We discussed in House of Leaves that the new form of literature, some believe, will become a bunch of different authors adding to stories via electronic means. In this regard blogging gives us a chance to be a part of this new literary style. By posting our own views and allowing others to comment and give us more ideas we are forced, then, to add, revise, retract, rephrase, and rework our own thought and opinion. In this way we elevate literature from an insular experience, our own reading, understanding, and imagining of a story, into something much more fluid and alive. So our blogs become useful in understanding 21st century literature by making us a part of it. Additionally assignments like a blog make us a better writer, and allow others to comment showing us exactly where we must improve in order to be viable.
I found the improvement in my critical reading skills absurd and astonishing through the course of this blog. In looking back, my posts for The Mercy Seat were flat and pretty much only a superficial discussion about themes in the book. As we went on however I started to delve into the deeper meanings of the book and I found myself thinking deeper as to why someone would write something like this as well as author’s motives for choosing certain elements and actions for their characters in the story, graphic novel, play, diary of madmen that were the books we read. I also found the fact that I was truly enjoying posting blogs surprising as my initial hatred bordered on the all-encompassing.
If I could do this assignment again I would do more; I’d have more posts, more comments on other people’s blogs, more playing around with the texture and look of my blog. I found that lack of time severely restricted my dedication to this assignment and by the end of it I would have loved to have just put in more of myself to this. At the beginning it was chore, at the end was a joy; I feel that if I had spent more time in the middle the whole experience would have become fun much sooner.