What Makes a Blog Handcrafted?
And how the typos in you inbox are part of a long artistic tradition.
You can read Green Room posts either as newsletters or as a blog, but these are often two slightly distinct experience, and those differences get at one of the reasons I call this place “hand-crafted.”
That term may sound contrived, eliciting images of curls drawn up by planes pushed over wood, or maybe blacksmiths, but this is how so many of my forebears have worked: Dad washing out brushes in the utility sink; Mom scraping plaque with a pick near the gumline; Grandpa Warren stringing up a telephone wire; Grandpa Lewie filing down the rough edge of a crown.
I know I’m not unique in this. Most of our ancestors worked with their hands. The Digital Age basically just started. Yet my great-uncle Vic saw this sea change over a longer term, and inspired me to hold on to the analog aspects of art.
Granted, these letters aren’t carried to you by a courier, the ink smeared or stamped on paper. But my writing does often begin as jots in gel ink on Field Notes or Docket Gold legal pads, or notes jutting out like sun-rays from quartered story circles. Then, eventually, after a series of filters and drafts, they reach you in a finalized form.
Except that’s also when a fracture happens, because as soon as I click publish I begin reading the article through your eyes and my awareness widens, sort of like the Math Lady meme. Then I dash back into the document and correct further.
What this means is if you arrive more than an hour after I’ve sent a post, you’ll likely find cleaner and more complete copy on the Green Room website. This also means your email is unique, like an ‘89 Fleer Bill Ripken rookie card.
Like the handle of Billy’s bat, the mistakes in my articles probably aren’t intentional, yet I’ve also made a conscious decision to let them be. In the past, I’d invite the editorial oversight of The Machines through Grammarly, but lately I’m more prone to let these essays fly on their own wings.
Some of this stems from what my friend Peter once told me about how Navajo basket-makers would deliberately weave in imperfections. . They believed a part of themselves was left within their work, and the ch'ihónít'i, or “spirit lines,” offered a path out. These themes of deliberate inperfection repeat in the Japanese aesthetic principle of wabi-sabi, in Punjabi embroidery, and the architecture of cathedrals, churches, and mosques all over the world.
This theme reminded me further of a passage in Sheldon Van Auken’s Severe Mercy, where Sheldon and Davy christen a new car by hammering a dent into its fender, a sort of ward against perfection’s dark side.
The concept of deliberate imperfection rooted in me because my pursuit of perfection can be paralyzing. I think of my late teens and early 20s, when I wanted to write but felt frustrated at the lack of stories I’d lived. I’d envy Hemingway and Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers, who powered through their inexperience and wrote brilliant work anyway. What have I not written out of this fear?
Yet that fear is based in reality because the words we speak and write do reveal deeper truths about us than we’d like to admit, particularly to skilled listeners. If we knew all we said with our words, we’d probably say and write less of them.
That’s where another level of courage steps in, where the artist trusts the Creative Spirit to unveil truth both through and about them, which brings to mind one of the major themes drilled into me by Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir. Throughout the book, she calls writers to unmask, to tell the whole truth whether they’re writing or eating wings with a buddy, to be, as much as they can, their same, truest selves everywhere.
I’ve endeavored to that honest integration ever since, and I’ve learned I work best when my heart and feelings meld with my head and thoughts, which are then pressed out through my hands. Finding the balance is rare, but it’s a worthy pursuit, and I’m honing my ability to read my own flaws without falling into stasis and shame.
Yet even now, I’m facing a parched Christmas tree, drooping from the weight of ornaments. It’s mid-January and I am a messy man. How could my writing ever be perfectly ordered and neat?
In conclusion, you are free to glean what you will from my Freudian slips. This is the nature of the work, and I accept the hazards.