I've been watching the weather predictions pessimistically for the last week or so, expecting nothing short of cold, rainy weather for the duration of this pregnancy.
Oh, I've been wanting to sit on the front deck and read during my lunch hour. I've been hoping to cover my belly with at least one of the spring maternity tops hanging in my closet. I've been yearning for a walk on the bike path or a short hike in the woods. I've been aching for an hour in the garden, transplanting hopeful flowers from one shaded spot to another.
But I've been afraid to get my hopes up ... until today. Today it was 65 degrees and sunny, and I sat on my deck and read blog posts from a book:
Midway through my lunch hour, Jeromy arrived home with the mail, which included Richard Lawrence Cohen's new book of fiction and other writings from his first year as a blogger: Only What Is.
"Do you know what this is?" I asked Jeromy. He didn't, of course.
"It's a book of blog posts," I explained, holding it up. "I've been so excited to read it."
He was happy for me but smirked anyway and rattled of a list of things that he'd much rather get excited about: a sale at Home Depot; a new rifle; an accepted bid for concrete counter tops.
I started to argue my case but decided instead to head outside and read.
And so I've been thinking this afternoon about the differences between books and blogs. I've been thinking, in particular, about the beauty of books. Their portability. Their flexibility. Their cohesion. Their contents. Their completeness. Their finality. I've been thinking how nice it is to take a pencil to their pages and mark favorite entries, to underline sentences and to star paragraphs. I've been thinking how different that is from reading a blog.
I subscribe to more than 50 blogs via bloglines, an rss reader that serves up content from my favorite bloggers and lets me save, categorize and mark favorite posts for future reference. But even when I have the best intentions of linking to one of those saved posts here on my own blog, the truth is, I rarely refer back to those entries once they've been saved.
With books, it's different. I often pull favorites from the shelf to search out marked passages, re-read entire chapters or recommend worn copies to a friend. It's simpler and somehow more available.
Cohen's book starts with a post from Dec. 13, 2004. I started blogging myself that same year in July but didn't discover Cohen's blog until mid 2005, so many of the entries in his book are new to me.
As I read, this brief post reminded me of the infamous art professor, Eldridge, at OU. These two paragraphs reminded me of Robey and his cousin Max - and yet they're about God and all the people on earth. From there, I continued marking.
You see how it's different, though. The pencil scratchings are effortless compared to the searching and linking and hyperconnecting that you do on a blog. Yes, there are benefits to sharing these ideas with you here online - and blogging makes that easy. But it's so much easier to sit on my porch and underline the words, "Why have I loved trees so much and learned so little about them?"
But then I can come downstairs and sit at the computer and try to tell you, as I'm doing now, the memories I discovered within that line. When I put my pencil to the page and marked a path toward the question mark, I recalled the sensations of climbing trees, longing for tree houses, writing poems for the dead and losing my way in the woods.
I can share that here on this blog in a way that I can't in a journal or even in the margins of a book.
So which is better, the book or the blog? Will I remember these things again someday when I look through the archives of this site? Or am I more likely to remember them the next time I pick up the book and re-read that line? And which form offers more room for the memories to roam before it's time to move on and follow another link or mark another passage?
I don't know. But isn't it amazing to know that the two can marry and bring forth a blook? That I can pay for that blook online and receive a signed copy a few days later in the mail? That I can sit outside at the end of March and flip through short passages that first appeared online? That I can mark my favorite lines with a pencil or pull up a Web page and find those same passages living online and waiting for comments? That I can link to those passages myself from this post and ramble incessantly about the whole experience?
Isn't it all extraordinary?
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