Loose Ends, Number One

In late January I posted the last of my Busan travel blogs.

At the time, I had a new awareness that travel writing can only be convincing if one is actually traveling.  Once the traveling ends, the identity of the blog begins to fade; it loses urgency for both the writer and the reader.

Consequently -- the hiatus.

In 1998 -- at the end of the last communication-technology Ice Age -- I began writing a column for a local newspaper.  My column was one of four columns written by Houghton people to be published weekly, in rotation; each of us planned to write one column every four weeks.  We had contracted together with the newspaper and were to be paid, at least initially, $15 per column -- not quite enough even in 1998 to allow me to quit my day job, but enough to push our work into the professional category.

A newspaper column is a bit like a blog, or can be.

The four of us all did something a bit different, as one might expect. My column was called "Something to Chew on" -- what I thought at the time was a clever, though indirect, nod both to my tendency to choose eclectic subjects and to our location in dairy country.  I had charmed myself by imagining that I chose to observe the world around me in a kind of wide-eyed bovine wonder.

Don't think about that too long, please. My point here is actually with the end of that column rather than with its inception and intentions.

I submitted my last column in 2003.  By then I was the last columnist standing from the original four.  Two of the writers had, in a manner of speaking, written themselves out.  The third, Jack Leax, a well published local poet and writer, had already gotten a book out of his columns, Out Walking, and did not want the column deadline any more.

I will add that conditions at our newspaper had changed as well.  A new editor had replace the editor we had been working with and the money, for no apparent reason, had stopped coming.

I had hoped to continue writing my column.  But I discovered I could not. Something significant had changed.

[Views of St.Paul's from the far end of the Millennium Bridge, London, October 2010.]

My last column ran a month before the US military began its "Shock and Awe" operation in the Middle East. In that column I had suggested that if there were an alternative to war the Administration was obviously preparing us for -- if an alternative existed, we ought to try it.

I would like to think that had I continued to write my column, I would have tried to express the anguish I was feeling over the Administration's decision to fight. In any case, I was literally unable to continue writing the short pastoral essays that had been my column for five years.

Maybe not continuing was a bit of cowardice on my part. Maybe it was simply writer's block occasioned by my inability to detach myself from the horror of war, albeit from my safe side of the globe.  At any rate, although I wrote or started many drafts for columns, I was not able to submit any of them. They refused to come together.  I was not able to see my way forward from that point with that column.

Something of the same sort has happened with my travel blog.  Eight months ago I realized I could no longer find my way forward with my Busan Journal, given its focused identity and assumptions.

What I have determined is that I will launch a new blog in the old space, featuring the same old writer but with a new identity that will gradually make itself apparent.  While that is playing out, I thank you for reading past blog posts.  And I hope you will want to read the new ones.