Ah, the earnest hours

They usually fall between two and five AM, sometimes lasting until dawn. Trivial hours for serious bloggers. Posts I write during that time might include stuff like this:

Life--that wonderful solar-powered accident of proteins and amino acids--is naturally bounded by its beginning and its end. Before its beginning and after its end, the intricate chemical processes that give rise to the Sistine Chapel ceiling and love and sonnets are mostly about atoms going about their nanoscale business. Bonds are created and broken, first during the anti-entropic dance that eventually bursts into the actuality of consciousness, and later during the complex decay of substances into other substances, all of which will eventually be reused, like that molecule of oxygen you shared with Buddha just now.

Then they really go off the rails. Life! Fiction! Death! Meaning! Fresh fruit! Spare us, darling, please.

Consulting a dictionary about "earnest" will get you a definition along the lines of "a serious and intent mental state," which doesn't sound so bad. I find it it such a peculiar quality to get wrapped up in on the page, though, that the line between seriously meaningful and downright goofy seems to be gray, and fuzzy about the edges, and not very straight. Maybe not even stationery. "Earnest" can kill your fiction in short order. Plot, dialogue, and--most tragically--characters become subverted, pressed into the service of the Big Big Idea, that particular thing you want to express which will somehow elevate your prose into the rarefied realm of Art, but the Big Big Idea itself can become a supermassive hidden structure at the center of your tale, distorting everything with the force of its Suck.

Then, too, there's the quality of "earnest" as contrasted with the modern conception of irony, which I find increasingly difficult to differentiate from simple insincerity. In an interview with Larry McCaffery, David Foster Wallace said,

Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.

The average Schmoe who's been soaking the modern culture of irony usually hasn't absorbed the subtler aspects of the form, so that contrast further reduces to "Fuck you! And I mean that," versus "Fuck you!" with a wink and a smile, and the infection of the latter is so widespread that some days I think I shouldn't bother writing anything here in this space that I might actually mean, because it's on the Internet, that fortress of possibility built upon a foundation of LOLcats and Mel Gibson losing his shit. There is the omnipresent danger of unencumbered sincerity sparking off a frenzy that results in remixes and tee-shirts. It's become downright dangerous to mean anything at all these days. You're liable to get your fingers caught in the roaring meme-chipper and then sprayed out over the frozen lake of an ever-diminishing online attention span.

My previous media empire was built on politics and war, and it gradually devolved into public depression and unhinged rants about sexual identity and psychiatry; this one's a bit more of a walled garden, somewhat isolated from the facets of my life that don't pertain to fiction. And I've heard it said that that's exactly what you don't want to do on a blog, because people want to relate to the individual behind the site. I suppose that's true, for some people. When I first started out, people were still saying "weblog" and my immediate predecessors, in terms of Internet generations, were folks like Instapundit and Lileks. The former is a link aggregator, and the latter a somewhat obsessive writer, collector of ephemera, and chronicler of his life. Now, the 140-character Tweet is the lean, evolutionarily sleek perfection of the form. You can offer every little detail of your life and convey nothing at all about yourself.

I've just deleted a long and rambling paragraph about the vast and deliberate difference between the writing of fiction and the writing of the blog; and about how, in the former, I spend a great deal of time concealing all traces of myself. I deleted it because I was in danger of attempting to writing some sort of Meaningful Post, and I'm actually in the late night frame of mind where, if I close my eyes for even a second, that momentary closure threatens to turn into minutes, and my thoughts wander off, and I come up with stories about having drinks with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who's wearing a suit in a very bright banana-yellow color and cheating on his wife, and needs my help to hide from her.

And that means its time to just punch Submit and hit the sack. Perhaps, while my dreaming self ponders the words I've just written, it will come up with a better way to write here for just one person instead of the world.