On Disclaimer Dogs and Blogging Bitch!

As for every tooth, there exists a sly bacteria who, in his heart, wishes to make it his/her home, to live there in holy matrimony, till its dental demise. So for every post there is a disclaimer which, if you do not state, keeps swaying in your mental map to remind you that what you write is utter common sense, and at worse pretentious nonsense. I know, for the next post, my disclaimer should be clean and clear, "I haven't read Nabokov and have read only one book by Dostoevsky, yet I have the balls to field them." I have found that if not stated and surrendered, disclaimers bark in every sentence in the form of clauses, in all grammatical flavors driven by guilt of ignorance and fear of quarter-knowledge.

A real intrepid blogger (I thought I should write "writer", but thought otherwise) is one who can dare to be politically incorrect, trust his readers and leave loose ends. He can say something like "All Art is Divine". A mouse-hole meek blogger will write, "I feel that a work of creation that comes within the tenets of art, acceptable art, with time and thought, must ultimately turn out to be a divine experience, given the observer is able to get it". The more funny part is that the latter serpentine sentence will seem better to a blogger audience which actually caters to his own common sense and associated insecurities, for this is a post-modern age. To say this in more literary way, he relates to (or identifies with) the fellow blogger.

One point here, beyond disclaimers, is choice we make to read. Would you like to read a politically incorrect, raw personal blogger, or a well rounded blogger who gives you all the perspectives on something and never lets you know what he himself feels, and when he does try to, with his umpteen clauses, what we get is a stink that he knows a lot. I feel the second type of blog gives you a buffet when you have just asked "Do you drink?" I also don’t like the idea that a blogger, a baby-blogger-reviewer, should be excessively well-read and educated in matters of literature, philosophy, films and music. If he is so, fine, but it is not a requirement of any sort that he had seen The Seventh Seal, to talk about death. I know (disclaimer alert !) , to appreciate art we need to know some back ground, but my idea of blogging is not reading the perfect prose to get the perfect insight, I am not “giving” myself to the blogger’s post, but it is to get the tone of noise in the room full of random, insightful, new, left over and co-product ideas. I am more interested in allowing myself to wonder that such views still/also exist. If I need to read a review for the purpose of getting myself enlightened I know where to go, or I will, in my capacity, figure it out. And here comes the beauty of all this so-called crap generated on blogs, because it allows you to choose your own crap - pick and choose, slice and dice. It is the onus of the reader, his onus to read and comment and write correctively, if he wants to. I am not defending blogging etc, what I am saying is that it is as stupid to restrict the type, quality, who-should-write-what etc of blogging as it is preposterous to restrict breathing in common atmosphere because we know its polluted.

The first type of blogger is a blogger who inhales freely, and vomits profusely. His thoughts are philistine, much like the comments on a Bela Tarr youtube video, but it does tell us two things that look good to me, he saw the Bela Tarr video and he wants to express. Also, from the perspective of a good reader, they can be easily dismissible posts, but not entirely without fun. Actually they are so unintentionally funny at times, that they give you most divine pleasure, which intellectuals reserve in brain banks for the so-called real arts.

The second type, the know-all, and read-all type, is a little dangerous blogger, and requires more effort from the reader’s side. He, of course, knows more than you, so it’s difficult to trash him, and even laugh at. Slowly, in a few cases, you start admiring the honesty and knowledge of the person and in some case, you start admiring the flow/pun/taste of his writings, even if you are not very satisfied with the content, and in others you get more insights about the general quality of writing in professional circles than that particular post. We have read bloggers, who in their free time write and get published, and we now know that they make slips too on their blogs, which is not anything bad. Actually, in some way, it breaks that myth among people that a writer is always well studied, well researched and right. I am not saying that, if at times, they wrote badly, gives me the right to write because I write badly all the time, but one can try, its harmless. What I mean to say is that it does open our eyes and it does, in one way or the other, make you demand better from them.

There is one more, the most pathetic, breed of bloggers, a blogger who is an artist (or artist-will-be) in one-half of the heart and a pure unknowing thief in the other half. By saying he is an artist, I mean, that he is taken by that admirable urge to write, but god had played a trick on him, a devilish trick to give him all the teeth to chew, but none to bite - the holy cow, the opposite of dog. He behaves like an old man from rich-literary country, who tells the brilliant folk-tales from his country to the alien masses, but being a part-time artist, he, fearfully and carefully, dresses them up in his own fashionable clothes. The artist in him, I know, can die otherwise, but he survives on folk tales, internalizing them, and then beautifully puking them on paper. No search engine can detect him, except himself, for he puts borrowed notes on his mundane music, just to survive. He is, to borrow from Chekhov’s The Seagull, a gambler with no money. One must pity him, for he is a victim of desire, and a misfit to fulfill it. One must pity him for he knows the double pain of pulling out the wrong tooth by the dentist. For he, with bad breath, can not kiss.