Let me please introduce myself

I've always been a little suspicious of blogs. My experience with them in middle and high school consisted of sloshing my boring teenage angst all over the internet in as exhibitionist a fashion as possible, while congratulating myself on my subtlety (if being subtle had really been the point, of course, I wouldn't have bothered to write anything in the first place); my opinion of them since I first came into contact with Serious Blogs for Serious People has, in some ways, not much improved. Certainly there are good blogs out there, run by people who do a fine job of writing legitimately insightful, creative, clever, or funny analysis -- the blogroll to the side features a few of them. But a lot of the blogs out there seem to me to have fallen prey to the same weakness that marks the newsprint pundits that they supposedly made obsolete: the tendency to turn thought entirely into product, and to comment obsessively on absolutely everything that happens (I like to call this "opinion-shitting"). The sight of so many bloggers ravenously leaping upon each news article that makes its way onto the internet, as if they were worried it might drift away if they didn't hold it down with the sheer mass of their word count, hardly fills me with confidence.

But there's a level on which that's bullshit -- after all, there'll always be commentary, and what right do I have to criticize without making a real attempt to do it myself? So here I go. There's a passage at the end of the first book of Gogol's Dead Souls where he describes Russia as a troika, racing along the road through miles of flat countryside towards the tantalizing horizon of the possible and the unknown. He's not talking about the "real" Russia as such, which, by the 1840s, had a history and culture and society of its own, of a rather firmer nature than misty romantic paeans to the infinite variety of the future; he's concerned with his writing above all else, talking about Russia's literary identity, still mostly unformed and waiting to take shape on his pages. I have no task of comparable magnitude ahead of me. But I am about to go to Russia for the first time. So I may as well celebrate by foraying into the blogosphere -- not to blog about Russia (well, maybe slightly), but to get a hold on a place which, like Gogol's Russia, would exist just fine without me, to traverse its twists and turns and maybe add a few of my own.

What'll I blog about? Cultural criticism of no particular category. Politics. Leftism. Music. Words. Russia (sorry). But, most importantly, I want to write things that'll make you think and that you'll like reading, and that's less a function of what I write about than of how well I write (and think) in the first place. Onward!