IVP - Strangely Dim

Born to Blog

By David A. Zimmerman

Any idiot with Internet access can maintain a weblog. I can prove it.

I’m closing in on my first full year of "blogging"—that's a technical term for navel-gazing online—at Strangely Dim, and though virtually all of the traffic on my site has been curious spammers of the most obnoxious sort, I still keep doing it. I even brag about it in other venues: “Check out my ‘online column’ [never ‘blog’].”

Occasionally over the past year someone who doesn’t work for an online casino or an online pharmacy or an online porn retailer visited my blog, read it and even commented on it. I would get a notice by e-mail every time such a comment was posted, and I would always follow the link, giddy with dread, wondering whether I was being asked a question about my latest posting or being invited to enhance some underserved portion of my anatomy. When I got a serious post, I’d do a little internal dance, compose myself and then compose a response.

Week in, week out, I slog through the blogging process more for my own entertainment than to make some significant impact on my universe. There are other blogs that are more pointed—driven by political ideology or religious zealotry or some other motivating impulse. Some blogs are even more self-indulgent than mine, with bloggers rambling on about their lunch or their favorite song lyrics or the guy who just checked them out on the subway. Mine is somewhere in the middle.

Believe it or not, I do have deeper thoughts than what I often post here; I just worry that to reveal them might be to announce to myself and all my friends that I’m a heretic or a hopeless sinner or a complete nincompoop. So I play it safe and keep it just shallow enough to not fuel any great controversy, just detached enough to not divulge too much of who I am.

That in itself is a reflection of who I am. Historically I’ve pursued more breadth than depth in my relationships, to the frustration of those close to me and the irritation of those who want to get away from me. Unilateral discourse about picayune matters has, consequently, proven to be a safe way of introducing myself to the world and inviting the world to introduce itself to me.

There’s a song by this singer, Dar Williams, whose chorus says “If I wrote you, you would know me . . . and you would not write me again.” What a strange and sad and brave thing for a writer to write. And yet what else can a writer do but to write, and what other fear might exist for a writer than that her words will be her undoing?

Dar Williams should stop singing and start blogging. It may be slow and tiring sometimes, but it’s safer over here in the shallow water. Year two, coming right up.

***

Check out archives from the past year.

My book is just weeks away from being in print. Coming soon: a disturbing promotional video . . .

Poster Children for Perpetual Youth

By David A. Zimmerman

Who would win in a fight, I wonder: Spider-Man or Harry Potter? Both have proven themselves heavyweights—each starring in a blockbuster film this summer. Both of them have exceptional abilities, and generally both of them fight the forces of evil. But what if they fought each other?

Would it be a fair fight? Spider-Man has the proportional strength, speed and agility of a spider, along with the ability to spin webbing as a weapon and a knack for sensing trouble just in the nick of time. Harry Potter, on the other hand, has a growing command of magic and a keen eye for the Snitch. Laying them both side by side, I’d have to vote for the one with the webbing.

I’m probably betraying my age by siding with Spider-Man. We were, after all, kids at roughly the same time—if you count about twenty years’ difference as rough. At least, by virtue of the comic-book convention of capping a character’s age at about thirty, I’m closer in age to Peter Parker than I am to Harry Potter, and by virtue of J. K. Rowling’s late entry into publishing juvenile fiction, Spider-Man had a profoundly more significant impact on my upbringing.

Spider-Man was a poster child for teen angst in the 1960s, and though he grew to young adulthood before I was born, his stories still had relevance for me by the time I started reading them. Here was a hero who was obviously younger, with more joie de vivre, than other costumed heroes such as jingoistic Superman and dour Batman; here was a hero who liked to bounce around the bad guys, cracking wise, even though his girlfriend had just dumped him and his Aunt May was nagging him and his boss was being a jerk—not to mention that his enemies were trying to kill him. Peter Parker, even before he was Spider-Man, was a child of promise who was having to endure the growing pains of adolescence and, later, young adulthood. While lots of characters were my heroes, he was a role model.

By comparison, Harry Potter is a scrub, too wet behind the ears to know what’s good for him. He goofs around, bends rules, slacks off, frustrates his professors, goes looking for trouble and bungles relationships. He wastes so much of his potential by risking his neck; he needs to do some serious growing up.

Again, perhaps I’m dating myself. In reality, Harry Potter may well be the Spider-Man of his generation. Here’s a kid who’s coming into his own sense of empowerment and character formation before our eyes, who from book to book and from film to film is the same old Harry yet substantially different, who is forced by horrible circumstance after horrible circumstance to grow up fast and yet who somehow still manages to enjoy his youth. When I step down from my grouchy old thirty-something high horse, I have to tip my hat to Harry; he’s living life to the full.

But Harry, just like Spider-Man and just like all of us, will grow up. Rowling has suggested that Harry’s adventures will end after seven volumes have been written, and though the series will continue to entertain and inspire young people for years, he will eventually, necessarily, yield the stage to another icon as his generation yields to another. And in the meantime, if things ever get tense between him and Spider-Man, my money’s still on Spider-Man.

***

Check out my book, in stores this December.

Who is this masked man?