Word-A-Week Blog Brainstorming

[willowesque]

So I've got two on board so far. YAY! If anyone wants to join in at any point, just jump right in. I've pulled a good site that has the full text of Montaigne's essays. He deals more with concepts rather than words, but that's kind of part of what got this whole thing bouncing in my head. The relationship of concepts to words and the attachments that cling to a linguistic structure. Ya know, pretty standard linguistic turn sort of talk. And really, I guess I only thought immediately of Montaigne because he is generally considered the inventor of the essay form, or at least a pioneer in starting that genre. It seems to me that the widespread rise of blogging has some threads of the essay and the meditation. It depends on the blog, of course, and therefore also the author of the blog (hrm--giving the author and the text equal status here, but where is the reader? The reader is always already there (pardon the overt Deconstruction terminology, but it is exactly the right description, so I have no choice)) because of the nature of blogs and blogging. It is a social activity. So, essentially I'm interested in how the sort of exercise of meditating on a very specific subject changes when brought to a social environment and to a text of which the reader is already an understood element. Anyway, I'm saying all that because its been bouncing in my head, and I don't think I'm articulating it very well. But I'm hoping that it will ooze on out a little more clearly over the coming days. So it seems that my purpose in this is twofold: the primary purpose is to explore cool words and their cultural trappings and have fun so doing, and the secondary purpose is to look reflectively at the process itself as it unfolds. Oooo! Fun!

Gigantic Nerd, c'est moi.

Oh the Montaigne Link.