To blog or not to blog, that is the blogation

This thought has been rattling around long enough, and recent events make it timely. Which earth-shaking ideas - generated while in the shower, or stacking firewood, or sweeping the kitchen floor, or meditating - are suitable for blogging? [Answer: the ones generated while stacking wood, sweeping the floor, and meditating in the shower, of course.] I heard that someone, somewhere, got fired for writing something in their blog, the kind of rumor that could self-censor a million people instantly. So the reasoning goes: BE CAREFUL! Don't let it all hang out; edit yourself scrupulously - or as the far more subtle saying goes: Don't shit where you eat. Limits are not bad. As John Hartford said (in a song), "Style is based on limita-a-ation." No limits, no style.

In the middle of another, pre-election, conversation last year some time, Jack Spatula asked me which John Barth novel I was reading, and for some reason I wasn't ready to get into it just then (even though it was I who brought it up). The thing that was rattling around then was how Barth is always telling a story in which a character is telling a story, and sometimes the semi-autobiographical fictional characters are reflecting on the space between their present experience and their creative output - or lack thereof - and the tension it adds to both. Tension as in energy to put to use, but also tension as in angst, pain, doubt.

Barth makes it clear that he believes there is a difference between the life of the writer and the story, so let's not conflate the two by saying, postmodernly or post-structurally, that a life IS a narrative text, the present experience IS a creative act, and vice versa. While I'm not ready to go down that slippery slope, it does present some fun phenomenological and fictional possibilities - say THAT three times real fast! For now, I'm with Barth, pushing the literary envelope enough to poke some life into the fictional characters AND their doppelganger sitting at the keyboard, but keeping a permeable membrane between them.

Which brings me to what I really want to talk about, Hunter Thompson. How he lasted as long as he did is a wonder, but this week the world lost a singular character and a voice that won't be replaced any time soon. Hunter - can I call you Hunter? - knew no limits, or at least made it his business to transgress as many as possible, in public if possible, calling attention to the transgression as much as possible. Drug laws, normative ethics, common sense, journalistic conventions, race and class and party and genre lines. In short, he took pushing the writing envelope to new heights precisely by blurring or obliterating the distinction between the writer's life and the story.

It has become commonplace to say that he and others (somehow Tom Wolfe doesn't even belong in the same paragraph) stepped into the arena while reporting on it, rode on the Magic Bus, etc. etc. It took a really weird guy at a very weird time in Amerika to see that the bigger, richer, more vibrantly true story could only be told outside the lines, not by writing to please the editor, the publisher, the reader, the power broker, the patron, or to keep a job. Without being coy about it, Thompson played that angle for all it was worth, and he did it convincingly, sometimes despairingly, in the only way that could tap into the not-very-pretty stash in the trunk of Amerikan culture. Kids, do not try this at home.