It's all about the words.....

It's all about the words. This is the inspiration I read in the Globe the other day. It was Russell Smith's column on art, poetry and blogging. It begins by saying:

A blog is a hobby; a blog is a notebook; a blog is a forum; a blog is a piece of art. A blog is unpaid, and so can rewrite our idea of what a journal is, what publication is. It reminds us that, in the age of culturecrat jargon such as “viability” and “private-public partnerships,” we can give away art entirely for free and that art can infiltrate a larger culture and therefore be worth something all on its own.

...... in a sense, all art is about other art, if only in that it cannot help but refer to art that has preceded it. If it is a poem, it echoes all other poems that use the same language; if it is a painting, it exists in a continuum of paintings with the same colours or themes. 

(Art/blogging is) "an exercise …” The words that follow could be anything – line, colour, silence, changing scales, transgression – but the idea of the exercise is constant. (Evelyn Waugh, for example: “I regard writing not as investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.”)

This is all the rationale I needed to restart my regular blog again.

For me, writing is about this precision in the use of language. It's about bon mots, succinct phrases and the many nuances of words in carefully arranged sentences.

Writing 365 blogs in 365 days, a few years ago, was a challenge. However, I loved it. In fact, I wrote on topics I would never have considered had I not had my back against the proverbial wall.

I think that I have to try that again. Although my blog is called "Life is what happens," life is more exciting, if you make things happen.

The picture? For all those times when I can say that I have seen the light.