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words, metawords, and scripture
13 Apr 06
words is intended as a sort of external memory, a place to put stuff that otherwise will be only dimly remembered. As the passive mood of the previous sentence illustrates, and with the exception of this and the very first post, use of the first person pronoun will be forbidden. There’s nothing worse than subscribing to a blog because the subject matter seems interesting only to discover a rapid deterioration into personal diary. (Not that diaries can’t themselves be interesting, it’s just that they so often aren’t. Don’t worry baby… I’m not talking about you.)
The metawords category includes an element of self-parody. Librarians and other geeks have taken to adding the prefix “meta” to just about anything, sometimes in jest, but other times quite seriously. Metawords could be taken to mean “words about words”, which in this context means “words about words”, or posts about this site itself. Perhaps, since this post is in part about the metawords category, one could argue that this is a metametawords post, but hopefully no one would do such a thing.
The scripture category is both one of the main purposes of this blog and an example of what motivated its creation. Somewhere not too long ago I read in a work of fiction the idea, expressed well, that in a way everything that is written is a form of scripture. It may have been in Eco’s Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, but having flipped through the book a dozen times since, I can’t find it, and of course I never wrote it down, nor do I have the patience to read the entire book again, at least not so soon. The scripture category will feature thoughts about things that are written (scriptura), but limited to those things I read in print. For me, at least, it is still only with a book in my hand that a text can be not only a thing that is written but also a thing that might resonate with something that could be called holy.
Posted by pzed on April 13, 2006 at 2.11pm
Categories: metawords
