Communicating Arts - Main Web Site
Through blogging, I wanted to explore an alternative to developing another web site for hosting those most wasteful of old fashioned things: letters, in the literary sense.
http://www.communicating-arts.com promotes my business, which at the moment I am treating as if it were a little bit south of the border while Anne, my girlfriend, and I wrestle with how to conduct more productive lives in the arts. We would both agree that life has gotten perhaps too busy and fragmented for getting much done in the way of whole, unified, and unique projects.
In realspace, the business of attending to jobs and social relationships--merely getting around; merely being social--takes up a lot of time, and with both, of course, usually the best or most energized of creative or intellectual time.
In cyberspace, the story's a little different: we have unprecedented access to conversations mind to mind, and many who have the inclination to participate in web communities may as well have no brakes.
In fact, I like the new coin: "posterbate." I have done my share, and that well into the thousands, if not more than ten thousand, of personal letters, short observations, pieces of advice, reports (may as well blog, I thought), and opinion pieces. The work's exciting: you know you have readers with whom you may keep company in open conversation, and then too on some sites quiet lurkers potentially into the hundreds of thousands.
Take a deep breath.
I don't have to ask where the time has gone--not for days, weeks, months, or years.
I know.
I know too that I have yet to receive a paycheck from any of the sites in which I've become deeply involved although it may be noted I've experienced rewards by way of education, intellectual challenge, and the cultivation of new friends, some of whom have become so in realspace.
Of my arts--creative writing, music, and photography--the Internet has so far been less than wonderful: it encourages talk (like this) far more than the discomfitting but productive isolation that goes with engaging in putting something together for the delight, education, and entertainment of others.
However much it goes against the grain, we all know the answer: get offline; do less; do it so much better.
I hope to do that with this blog riding along on projects small and large.
For my readers, I wish the structure of the Typepad.com blog were more cabinet-like rather than oriented toward the news feed; however, and over time, I hope this will become a great place to visit and write about art and related lifestyle issues as well as a first-view venue for my personal work.
I may gin it up into a semi-permeable (definitely edited) online magazine, but let's see how things go from this first journal entry.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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