Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Get Your Own Bloody Flag!

To those of you who hope to dictate the topics or timbre of this blog I have a couple things to say.

One is that it is not your blog. I should think this would be apparent, as it is my picture and my words which figure most prominently herein. But since it clearly is not as obvious as all that, here is my flag. I am planting a flag, so this space is now mine. You are welcome to stay, and have a mint julep or a Bloody Caesar according to your country's custom and some of those canapés over there, and listen to a story or a rant, but you cannot move in and take over the territory. That I have put my flag down here proves that.


Secondly, you should understand you are not my demographic. You are one person. One person is not a demographic, unless that one person is me. That I myself could be construed as my onlylonely target demographic is evidenced by the fact that I use the words 'patently' and 'frankly' with the same frequency as I use the word 'the,' as well as the fact that I employ my own idiosyncratic punctuation scheme in which I italicize words in quotation marks all the time in some kind of super-double quotativity -- and yet don't care. I don't care because this is my blog not my dissertation, and I don't care because if you are not sufficiently entertained as to keep reading, then you should by all means not continue reading.

Unless your intent in continuing is to ascertain before offering me a book deal whether my egregious lapses in syntax, my meretricious embrace of both high and low diction, and my slipping between overdone Latinate multi-clause monstrosities and staccato Anglo-Saxon gunfire can be ameliorated with the assistance of a patient and judicious editor.

Which it is not. Your intent, I mean.

So, if you are disenchanted, if you don't care how much sandalwood or oud I used in the last perfume, if you don't want to hear that I think none of the candidates is qualified to steer this Narrenschiff out of the shoals, or that in an effort to save time I electrocuted myself by toasting bread while bathing, or that I ate nothing but licorice over the weekend, or that I am contemplating making a flip-book of clothing items in order to make outfit selection a more organized and enjoyable procedure, then the best I can do is to relay a rumor recently passed to me that these Interwebs have some kind of 'page' on which you can write your dream of an electronic reading or viewing selection, and the Interwebs will then write for you suggestions of where you can go to find that. If I have been shorter of shrift on the travails of the house of Gucci than you might like, or if you wish I had talked more about the origin of the proscription against the split infinitive in English, then maybe you will find your dream elsewhere. In the meantime, click 'NEXT BLOG' at the top of this page. And may it be in Uzbek!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

erm, it was in Dutch.

Which, to this literary philistine, is indeed as difficult as Uzbek might be to interpret, split infinitive or not.