TAKE BACK OUR CAMPUS!

Lawsuit-free since 9/14/05

Sunday, March 20, 2005

Still More Coverage of Take Back Our Campus

And some unbecoming rambling about the nature of blogging

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about-- and that is not being talked about." --Oscar Wilde

Some of us idly Google our names wondering what those on the internet are writing about us. There's nearly nothing concerning my real name on the internet, but Googling "Take Back Our Campus" brings more coverage than I can physically read.

Tonight, I found this short piece (again, by one of those wily Canadians!) about SLU's lawsuit against TBOC:
It seems to me that copyright was never intended to act as a lever in this way - but with special dispensation for content owners, it serves as a conduit otherwise inaccessible in most civil and criminal matters. File this one under 'abuse'.
It's interesting and worth linking to-- still, I worry about my habit of reading what is written about me (or written about my secret identity). Today I had the awful vision of Peter Parker, in a vespertine and desperately intoxicated moment, typing "Spiderman" into Lexis-Nexis for the anxious pleasure of reading about himself. Cazart.

Though, unlike some lesser-read and more vainglorious bloggers, I've usually refrained from writing about myself, I couldn't help but wonder about the nature of blogging. Is it unbecomingly like Kafka's Conversation With the Supplicant, in which a young man persists in making a spectacle of himself before a public altar?

When confronted by the narrator, the young man confesses:
"'There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are not fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that then they were calm and beautiful. It must be so, for I often near people talking about them as though they were.'"
Like the supplicant, do I nightly clack at my keyboard and fill my ashtray just to reaffirm that I actually exist? Is blogging nothing more than vain efforts? If that's true, then why am I so anxious every time I check my look at TBOC or check my e-mail? It's not the lawsuit (which is utterly frivolous and has left me firmly unawed), but rather, the fact that what I write may actually matter.

It is a wonderful thing to aspire to the "calm and beautiful" but for now I subsist on knowing that I write about things real and as they are-- always desperately hoping for "as though they were."

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