PICTURES IN THE SNOW

What? You don't like fish?
Fish are good for you.

You can even go fishing in my little aquarium,
down there, at the bottom of this thing. I just
added them, for heck of it.

Pictures..photographs...images...call them what
you may...why do some people seem to like pictures
so much embedded within their blogs? I've often
wondered.

Are weblogs supposed to look like magazines? Or
comic books? Or newspapers? Or television? Or..
or...or...is it style over content? That is the
impression I've always gotten out of them. I call
it "flash and dash". glitz.

Usually these blogs that contain hundreds of pictures,
are also accompanied by hundreds of quotations, as if
by adding a picture to the quote is going to strengthen
the quotation. Serves no useful purpose, and might
even serve to diminish the orginal author of the
quotation's orginal meaning and intent, and too often
the quote is so out of context, it serves neither
blogger, nor orginator.

Sometimes I can't help but thinking that a lot of
bloggers were raised reading comic books and never
read a solid book in their entire lives.

Or just maybe they don't have an original thought of
their own and wouldn't know how to express it if they
did. So they lean on other's thoughts, whether it's
worth quoting or not.

There are only four subjects in the world worthy of
writing about: birth, life, love, death. All the rest
are variations on the same themes, stated with any
luck at all, in a different way. That is the trick,
isn't it? How to say something that has been said
a hundred million times before in a different way.

A picture should support a thought, not the other
way around. It should be illustrative of something
the author was attempting to convey by adding a
sub-text to it. But if the text is not orginal, but
something borrowed, and the picture isn't original
but something borrowed, why bother?

Maybe it would be better to go spend some quality
time reading all 52 of the Great Books of the World.

I wasn't raised on comic books, or even illustrated
children's books, so I have a natural disinclination
to pepper my weblog with an endless supply of pictures
with my text which didn't even come out of my own
little camera.

Can you imagine a Normal Mailer, a Tom Wolf, an Ernest
Hemingway, Sigmund Freud - all of his works - a Virginia
Woolf, William Shakespeare, Francoise Sagan, Marcel Proust,
Socrates, Irving Layton, my mind is swimming with names
of authors/poets/playrights/journalists free-floating
around, can't think of a one who illustrated their musings
dotted with pictures in their work. Not a one. Wonder what
they would do today had they had weblogs?

Never mind. I'll get over myself. And probably you.