Many people on here joined us later, so I want to share this blog’s origin story.
I got my first Kindle almost immediately after they went on the market. It was insanely expensive, I couldn’t remotely afford it, it was clunky and glitchy. But it was 2007, I was constantly traveling from Canada to US and back by bus to see N, and the Kindle was a life saver.
It was the golden age of blogging, and the Kindle would recommend you blogs to read back then. It recommended to me a mega-popular feminist blog. I started reading it and was stunned by how bad it was. There was a post that etched itself into my memory to the degree that I remember it clearly 19 years later. The author said that she loved her boyfriend, but he routinely raped her. He preferred to have sex in the evenings, and she always enthusiastically responded and participated in sex with him. But in reality, she would have preferred to have sex in the mornings. She never communicated that preference to her boyfriend or discussed any reservations about evening sex. But he should have guessed! She gave clues. He never noticed the clues, so it was rape.
All the rest of the posts on the blog were in a similar vein. The blog was massively popular. I realized that if I started a blog, I could definitely write better than this. At that time, I was trying to get over the realization that my writing was atrocious. Before starting my doctoral dissertation, I had always written and published in Russian and in Spanish. Stupidly, I assumed that I could write well in English in the same way I did in Spanish. I had absolutely no idea why my essays in English, populated by mile-long sentences with 15 subordinate clauses and tons of introductory expressions, weren’t successful. The professors didn’t want to hurt my feelings, I guess, and never told me the truth.
Finally, one honest professor found the courage to inform me cheerfully that, in her entire long career, she had never encountered writing as terrible as mine. I was floored. I had always thought that my writing was great, and it was. In other languages, but not in English.
So I decided to learn. Writing a blog was meant to give me daily practice in writing.
Blogging died many years ago because not only Amazon but also Google stopped promoting blogs. Instead, people got funneled into social media, where the discourse is easy to control. I’m still writing, and the blog is now similar to Chirbes’ diaries (in purpose, if not in quality), but open to the public. I’m in awe of the readers who are sticking with the blog, in spite of my admittedly extreme ideological swings. Their tolerance is extraordinary and worthy of admiration.
It’s sad that blogging died. I find social media to be a very poor substitute for what we were doing back then.
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