This post is retrieved from On Blogging, a 1,000-post tumblr blog I maintained from 2014 to 2017.
985
Sausage-making is a good metaphor for blogging as a practice of exploring accumulating a heterogenous mix of ideas and interests across a uniform surface.
manuel arturo abreu turned me on to the work of Javier Fresneda, who wrote an article for Rhizome titled On the Gaze in the Era of Virtual Salamis. There he compares “sausage-like elongation” to “the way that images accumulate”—and, as such, notes that “If either sausage and image are being distributed across a potentially endless series of elongated versions, we can only access images by slicing them.” The idea of the slice describes how “capturing the environment with our digital devices creates a discrete, framed incision in our surrounding milieu.” I’m too tired to fully understand what this means, but I like the sound of it.
A single blog post is kind of like a slice of sausage, right? Or you could call it a slice of life, which is the same term we use for certain types of stories that focus on a possibly messy mix of lived experiences delineated by a frame of time. In these case we are thinking of representation, of a relationship between the representation of something elongated and heterogenous on the one hand, and that very same elongated and heterogenous thing on the other. We are thinking of the life that is like a sausage in that it stretches out (life into days, sausages into meat-tube), and the more it stretches out corresponds to the more stuff you put in it, stuff which tends to be “scraps and trimmings,” as Fresneda notes.
Scraps and trimmings ground up and stuffed into a sock, and then sliced out in increments to see/eat, increments which themselves contain the messy heterogeneity of the whole tube, microcosm’d in some speckled texture.
985.6 It is still October 6, 2017. I woke up with extreme anxiety. Now I’m drinking coconut water. I’m playing board games tonight. I tried to write some fiction but it’s hard to gather my energy / make efficient use of my time. The fiction I’m writing involves sausages.