[25 March 2009]

For some time now I’ve been carrying around a little notebook with (among other things) notes on various topics I have thought it would be useful and interesting to make blog posts about. I haven’t had time to work out coherent expositions or arguments on most of the topics, though, so nothing happens. All I’ve got are short fragments in a telegraphic style — just enough (I hope) to remind myself, when I come back to the topic, of the line of thought I wanted to pursue.

Sometimes I think I should post the notes I’ve got, despite their incomplete, inadequate formulations. It might not help you, dear reader (sorry) but it might make this lab notebook more useful for me.

(See also Matt Kirschenbaum’s ruminations from 2005 on the use(s) of blog posts, which is a message in a bottle I’ve just run across.)

And I have begun to wonder if this explains the aphoristic, telegraphic style I associate with the posthumous notebooks and journals of great writers, full of incomprehensibly terse remarks. Are the fragments of (say) the Schlegels nothing but notes for things they would later have worked up into blog posts, if only they had not been born two hundred years too soon?

Or perhaps I should say:

Notebook full of ideas for posts.

Telegraphic — aphoristic — apothegmatic?

Schlegels (Nietzsche?) as bloggers avant la lettre?

Is profundity nothing more than haste to get something — something — a trail of breadcrumbs? — down quick?

Hmm. Breadcrumbs. Guess DanC (all of DIG?) thinks so.

Hmm.