Continuing a conversation on avc
Replying to a couple of comments on Fred Wilson, reblogging here:
Good points. In your blog you do, however, focus in on a specific area (as per your blog’s title, a VC). That makes it all hang together, and focuses your insights. Others might think out loud, but it’s unfocused (although in the aggregate, it can all cohere into a pattern).
Are you familiar with the term “bricolage” (in Levi-Strauss’ academic-structuralist sense)? The Bookman (blog) describes it as a “willingness to make do with whatever is at hand… The ostensible purpose of this activity is to make sense of the world in a non-scientific, non-abstract mode of knowledge by designing analogies between the social formation and the order of nature. As such, the term embraces any number of things, from what was once called anti-art to the punk movement’s reinvention of utlitarian objects as fashion vocabulary…”
http://thebookman.wordpress.com/2008/03/01/post…I’m way too scientifically-minded to appreciate bricolage as any kind of ideal, and I’m definitely not saying that either one of us is a bricoleur, or that I want to be one and do bricolage (although it sometimes feels like that’s what I’m doing). But even when you’re just “thinking out loud,” I do think that your expertise lets you record your “rarely … completely baked thoughts” like ingredients in a recipe. And your readers know that they often enough add up to a movable feast: they cook your stuff in the comments board – to use a typically bricolage-y analogy.
On the other side of the coin, there’s the rock star blogger, someone so star-like s/he can blog about underwear and people read it. (In fact, people would probably read it *because* it’s about underwear…) I’d rather chew off my own leg than fill those boots, though. The pressure would kill me. 😉
Originally posted as a comment by Yule Heibel on A VC using Disqus.
(See also my June 15 post, Fred Wilson Is:.)
I agree. I’d rather just be myself than try and make myself be about something. If all else fails, I will have a centralized spot to look back on years from now and see what I was doing with my time. Hopefully it was not just blogging.
With the widespread fabrication of themes to gain SEO traction, people are forgetting what it means to just “be a person.” The way I see it, the gestalt of personal activity and thought will amount to a theme on its own.
Comment by Davin Greenwell — June 18, 2009 #
I should clarify that I don’t blog for the purpose of sensationalizing banal minutiae and it doesn’t hold any interest for me. I write about my interests, as diverse or unfocussed as they may be. There’s a unifying theme – and that is that I am the one doing them .. I don’t have any interest in splitting personalities into different artist names because it is frankly too much work. Normalizing all my activities, I found that all my projects had one thing in common – myself. It’s fun to make up entities for artistic projects, but it’s pure exhaustion to maintain all of them discretely for the purposes of a solid, uninterrupted and superficial theme.
Alright – self-imposed coffee break is over (I am working from home today) and I must get back to the grind.
Comment by Davin Greenwell — June 18, 2009 #
Thanks for the comments, Davin. Good insights – I too can’t split myself up into various personas. Although I am starting to think about how there could be two, perhaps (the high-falutin’ intellectual one and the get-‘er-done one). At the same time, I realize that I’m trying in some ways to do too much already. At any rate, focusing in is good.
Comment by Yule — June 25, 2009 #