The PenOpticon

If you are a regular reader of The PenOpticon, you already know this blog is well on its way to becoming one of the most widely read and highly respected blogs on the net. Don’t be fooled by the lack of comments and trackbacks — the kinds of readers who frequent this site are too prominently placed in society — we’re talking, senators, judges, prime ministers and at least one respected ornithologist. These people can’t post comments with real names and emails and even posting anonymously would give ‘em away. And yet, in spite of the long-winded diatribes, the lengthy delays between posts and the lack of a clear and obvious focus, these readers return to the PenOpticon day after day after day. Now, I can’t prove these readers exist — or that you do for that matter — but if we can agree, for the moment at least, that you do exist, that still leaves one burning question: how did I get you here? That one is easy. First I studied the following 90 amazing tips for successful blogging. Then with rigourous discipline and care, I ignored each and every one of them. And that leaves only the 91st tip, which comes to you filtered through the blogosphere via Descartes and Offred:

I hope you enjoy the previous 90 tips:

• 13 Steps to Successful Blogging
  The 13-step program is by Yaro Starak, an EzineArticles.com “Expert Author”.
• 7 Tips for Successful Blogging by Michele Schermerhorn
  These tips come from Michele Schermerhorn, a self-described “Corporate Freedom Fighter” who wants to liberate cubicle prisoners so they can experience their own successful online business.
• Top 10 Tips for Blogging
  This Top 10 list comes from Sharon Housley, a marketing manager with FeedForAll.
• 40 Tips from Dehumanizer.Com
  This huge list of tips comes from Pedro Timóteo, a 31-year old network/systems administrator from Portugal.
• 10 Tips for Attracting More Comments
  These come from Chris Garrett, a UK-based former marketing consultant who now works for Performancing.Com
• Blogging For Beginners And 10 Blog Traffic Tips
  Yaro Starak “literally put together a 1500 word collection of blog traffic tips in an hour demonstrating that my brain is really full of Blog Traffic content ready to be poured out”.

In the few weeks that I have been blogging, I’ve been happy and bitter, optimistic and critical — and often a bit of a pompous ass! And, as I expected, I have not been able to focus on any one subject. I wanted to play a good April Fools trick on you — my non-existent readers — but as my satirical muse, Jon Stewart would say: I got nuthin! So instead, I’ll leave you with a few home-made MP3s and two pictures of Midnight (who went to the big pond / cheese factory / squirrel-chasing country in the sky last year).

Here’s old man Midnight looking at you kid!

Midnight could always make us laugh, no matter how surreal things got. He put up with us for 15 years and we walked hundreds of miles together all over southern Ontario. This was taken years earlier at the southern edge of the Oak Ridges Moraine near Richmond Hill, Ontario. Sadly, this valley has now been cut in half by a 4 lane bridge, the paths have been eroded by ATVs and thousands of new houses are crowding in where the trees used to be.

…and a few MP3s

It has been several weeks and at least one quail hunting accident since I began this blog and you have all been most courteous by leaving me to my lonesome self. That’s ok. After all, of all the packets being flung out of a hundred million web servers, and of all the bumph, blurbs and blogs you have to choose from, how could you possibly have ended up here? Like thousands of other hapless bloggers, I’m just typing away in a vacuum — a digital bell jar — hoping to break through the glass.

Anyhow, since you have stumbled upon something called the PenOpticon, there should be at least one entry explaining the rationale for the name. It was in fact inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s 18th century Panopticon, a design for a perfect prison. But, the only reason I knew about Bentham was from a shallow exposure to Michel Foucault’s discussion of the panopticon as a metaphor for all sorts of state and institutional power relations.

And so I wondered, to what degree does language operate as a panoptic structure. Are there ways in which the habits of convention and cliché imprison the writer in his/her own language? In another sense, I am locked in this blog, typing my brains out, knowing that anyone could read these words, but never really knowing if anyone does (assuming no one will comment!). The best I can do is try to write as if you really are out there — much like Offred in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: “I write, therefore you are”.

So here is the obvious conceit: just as Bentham’s Panopticon was an “all-seeing eye”, I suppose I intended to turn this PenOpticon into an all-seeing pen. Aside from the pun there is a more serious joke: the realization that the pen - the blogger - is truly constrained and imprisoned by the very institution of writing/language in general and digital writing in particular. So the PenOpticon is not a persona, but something to transcend. The goal is to break free of language and conventions that make communication difficult, to shatter the glass of this digital vacuum. And finally, just to mangle the metaphor a little more: as long as the vacuum remains intact, at least some of these posts are bound to suck.

Focus! That will be a huge challenge for me in this Blog. In the beginning all one can do is cast bread upon the waters to see what kind of interesting (and odd) ducks are swimming around out there. In this place the bread may consist of guitar, diabetes, health care reform, sensible weight loss, web design, computer culture, surveillance and privacy, reading, writing and wordplay, TV satire, hiking and birding, and a smattering of photography. I hope you’ll stop by now and again!