Q: How to start a blog?
A: Throwing up is a place to start. Vomit of the verbal kind, that is. And then when your insides are nice and cleaned out, proceed to put your fingers in it, shifting things around, putting half-digested chunks of that or that into corners of the puddle which make some sense.
Tell you where I am: It is currently Saturday, May 31st, 4:24pm, the third floor of Belk Library. I look up and see only five people besides myself. Peace at last. There was a sort of florescent humming on the first floor, making it difficult to read. Humming like sandpaper. Sandpaper like a cat's tongue, assuming that you are in no mood to be licked. Anyway, I had to move. It's nice to meet you here.
Tell you what this is: A BLOG. A first blog. Not like the livejournal account I kept intermittently during my freshman year of high school (happy searching...). This one's different. More professional perhaps, or not at all. I suppose, ideally, it's a place of meditation and of interaction. Self-promotion? Sure, I guess... indirectly. All I know, is what I love: writing, the act/craft of the writing, reading writing, thinking writing, language. And I want to show you what I love so that you might love it too, or, at least, develop a more-informed hatred.
Tell you what to expect: More posts; links to things I'm interested in; reviews of new and old literature; self-indulgent introspection; small talk to you; rants about things that aren't important; poems by me, by friends, by people I've never met/would like to meet/will probably never meet. We'll have a good time.
Tell you what "pareidolia" is: "
the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist, as in considering the moon to have human features." Like, seeing faces in a cloud.
Also, a creative process. The moon may not have a face, but it has enough of a face to make us think it does. Imagination inhabits the space between the arbitrary falling of space-boulders into craters and the phantom visage. Imagination inhabits the space between the arbitrary assignment of letters/sounds and their meanings. Now, what if every word (or image) in a poem were a man-in-the-moon? A whole poem made from moonmen. And you might say: "well,it'snotamanbutit'sprobablyarabbitorsomething." And then I'd say, "well, you're probably right. all I know is that if the moon weren't here it'd be mighty dark."
Pareidolia is imagination finding it's way out of you without your permission (not that you would mind). The act of making strange and interesting connections between un-connectables. Seeing what isn't there, and at the same time, is there, because, after all, you saw it.
Welcome,
Connor Childers
