Cave Drawings · 8 June 2008

Scientific American just reviewed the research on how expressive writing is good for the body. Blogging: It's Good For You. 

It’s unfortunate that the verb for writing on the internet is to blog, and that the gerund is the even stupider and even more trivial blogging. Maybe if it weren’t such a stupid word, it would be easier to accept this activity as a basic modern form of self-expression and being.

Writer is noble; diarist is a contemplative vocation; blogger…? I don’t know if we’ll ever get around the fact that blog sounds like an uncouth airbubble that escapes from the body at just the wrong time—a kind of burp through the fingertips.

Blog, n. (new standard English) that which is spontaneously expelled from the body and into the internets

Every new medium of expression goes through this, though… I bet the early cave-painters were regarded by their tribes as writing down things that just didn’t need to be seen. What’re you doing man? We got arrows to sharpen and berries to gather. Stop drawing pictures of us. You know we look better than that.

From the article... 

-Expressive writing “improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and… even speeds healing after surgery.”

-“‘You know that drives are involved [in blogging] because a lot of people do it compulsively….’ Also, blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to stimulants like music, running and looking at art.”

-“Pennebaker is continuing to investigate the link between expressive writing and biological changes, such as improved sleep, that are integral to health. ‘I think the sleep angle is one of the more promising ones.’”

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1. Get it all out in the day, process it at night: makes sense to me.

   Posted by: RE · Jun 8, 08:28 PM · #

2. Yes… makes sense to me too. Even though sometimes I think all processing (talking and writing) are aesthetically unpleasing and want them to turn off.

   The weird thing is that my dream life and my journaling life have NOTHING in common. I talk in my sleep and apparently the dreams are full of puppies, teddy bears and other small fuzzy creatures that I giggle at and watch intently. And recently, hobbits, the undersides of furniture (seeing chairs from a kid’s-eye-view), googly-eyed fishes, and my favorite leafy greens.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 8, 08:39 PM · #

3. To me it’s a bit like vomiting. It’s becomes a totally involuntary action at this point.
   But then I always feel better after I puke…:)

   Posted by: Susan · Jun 9, 06:14 AM · #

4. “‘You know that drives are involved [in blogging] because a lot of people do it compulsively….’”

   Damnit of course! “The Drives!” Why do I always forget about “The Drives” when constructing my causal explanations?!?

   Posted by: R · Jun 9, 08:42 AM · #

5. Now y’all sound like a bunch of kooky left-wing BLOGGERS

   Posted by: cody · Jun 9, 08:44 AM · #

6. Oh R…, I love it when you get angry about causal explanations.

   I’m glad you noticed that though. What we have there is the conflation of biological- evolutionary argument (which is always reverse-engineered in search of efficiency) with metaphysical-Freudian mumbojumbo about compulsions of the Id— compulsions which even in theory have little to do with evolutionary efficiency or brute survival.

   Exposing this layer of psychological fallacy in evolutionary explanations (and its embarrassing presuppositions about both individual and collective consciousness) seems the most obvious way to honor Professor Tilly’s final injunction.

   Unlike you, I do believe in the evolution of consciousness. But not like this. This is sloppy biological theory.

   CP, blogging is inherently left wing? (Or perhaps the left-handed path of blogging is the inside-looking personal rant, and the right-handed path is the outside-looking political rant…?)

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 9, 09:56 AM · #

7. sorry to be vague – I was referencing Karl Rove’s recent attack on Scott McClellan – Rove said that Scotty sounded like a left-wing blogger, with both “left wing” and “blogger” being used as insults!

   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/28/rove-hits-back-at-mcclell_n_103872.html

   Posted by: cody · Jun 9, 10:12 AM · #

8. Wow. This proves that Karl Rove has officially fallen off my radar.

   Delightful to see he’s now totally impotent. Left-wing bloggers.... oooooohhhh. Veerr. That the best you can do, old boy?

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 9, 11:29 AM · #

9. Really, all gerunds are stupid. They have no snap. We have the Romans to thank for weak linguistic forms like the gerund.

   I wonder if the youth-fashionable, slightly uncouth sound of the word ‘blog’ might partly have helped to spur the popularity of blogging.

   Posted by: Carl · Jun 9, 12:13 PM · #

10. Gerunds are stupid. So is the word gerund.

    I strongly dislike blog. What an unfortunate accident—like the persistence of the horrible QWERTY keyboard—that we should be left with it.

    So many other ways it could have gone. Though I supposed the shortened form of “web journal” (B-Jo) might not be something to wish for.

    (For which to wish.)

    Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 9, 12:22 PM · #

11. web log was the origin of the shorter, “blog”, was it not? of course web log sounds like captain’s log or “to keep the log,” and then one is really just a high powered online diarist, but of course the main difference there is that blogging, depending on audience and width or narrowness of readership, is a place where one can quite publicly perhaps put things that are quite private (or that should be, well, unless one’s an exhibitionist of any stripe, not just that of the DSM iv).

    did you notice how long i deferred that period?

    that, my friends, is what i really get a kick out of, where expressive writing is concerned; just how fucking long can i go before i need to punctuate? joyce, naturally, holds what i believe is still the record, with forty pages. yes, yes, oh yes, yes, i said yes yes yes.

    ok, you may return to your normally scheduled discussion now.

    Posted by: patrick · Jun 9, 05:47 PM · #

12. Hi (0v0)
    I would add that writing, even in a blog, can be a form of spiritual practice as well.
    Cheers,
    Arturo

    Posted by: arturo · Jun 9, 06:54 PM · #

13. Some might recall the blog could stand for Brown Log and its amazing how many of those end up in public on the net rather than flushed in private. However, I will add that the Inside Owl is a Sacred Movement in that regard. The apanic aspects are quite profound if at times mundane and yet way over my head. Then again its from the muck and the mud from whence the lotus flower grows. And who is to say which is, in actuality, more sublime, that is flower or mud, or are they just two ends of the same stick?

    Posted by: e&sj · Jun 9, 09:16 PM · #

14. You give puns
    a good name.

    When embedded in word play as delightful as yours, I welcome it.

    Sacred movement, ahem. Off to nauli…

    Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 10, 04:24 AM · #

15. Me, I am off to salute the King of the Nagas ala Freeman of the Rockies. Please know, that your writings are of the most salubrious and subtle kind and for that I am most grateful. Enoy the churnings and other shatkarmas.

    Posted by: e&sj · Jun 10, 04:38 AM · #

16. ha! What Susan said!

    There IS something about the word that implies a need for apology. I’m glad to know it’s making me healthier & possibly saner.

    Posted by: boodiba · Jun 10, 10:15 AM · #

17. :)

    Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 10, 02:15 PM · #

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