Recursive Words

Many years ago I came across an article on the old Huffington Post website by Norah Ephron, and a passage within it became a personal call to arms throughout the decades that followed – a vindication that emptying my head into the keyboard is as valid as any marketing moron eschewing “how to write”, “what to write”, “when to write”, and endless guff about writing needing a purpose.

This evening I set off in search of the article, and was somewhat horrified to discover the powers atop the Huffington empire threw away much of their earlier content when re-imagining themselves as “HuffPo” – including Norah Ephron’s posts.

As you might imagine, it’s all I can do not to fill this entire post with foaming invective aimed at the clueless marketing morons that see more value in how things look than what they say.

Has the world really devolved to a point where if you perhaps only ever scroll Tiktok or Instagram, and have never read anything by anybody of consequence ever, you will only consider that which is shiny and new – and willingly disregard anything that came before?

Like I said. Horrified.

After jumping down the Internet rabbit hole, I finally found the origin of the text that has been pinned to a notice-board in the junk-room at home for at least the ten years;

one of the most delicious things about the profoundly parasitical world of blogs is that you don’t have to have anything much to say. Or you just have to have a little tiny thing to say. You just might want to say hello. I’m here. And by the way. On the other hand. Nevertheless. Did you see this? Whatever. A blog is sort of like an exhale. What you hope is that whatever you’re saying is true for about as long as you’re saying it. Even if it’s not much.

Norah’s post was published on 23rd March 2006 – just over twenty years ago – and it’s just as valid now as it was then.

It survives – more by luck than judgement – in the “Wayback Machine” – a grass roots attempt to record the entire internet for future generations. You might wonder why such a thing would ever be needed – until you discover that HuffPo have deleted all of Norah Ephron’s old articles.

Anyway.

“A blog is sort of like an exhale”.

I’m going to make use of those words every time I see some idiot trying to tell anybody what they should or should not be writing about.