¶ Matins: This entry was supposed to be a straightforward re-introduction to the canonical hours that serve, here at The Daily Blague, as a framework for everyday links. We took a summer break; now we’re back. Keep reading, if you’re interested, for a bit of bloghstory. Even if you don’t, have a great Labor Day!

Oremus…

§ Matins. In the fall of 2003, my nephew, a graduate student at Columbia and a political junkie, began to tell me, in emphatic tones, that I ought to keep a blog; I was crazy, he asserted, not to. My resistance was mighty. The only thing that I “knew” about blogging was that it was an obsessive, full-time occupation masquerading as a publicly-kept diary. It would take ages to learn that an obsessive, full-time occupation was just what I was looking for, but, first, I would have to start blogging, which I did in November 2004. Formally, that is. I’d been pseudo-blogging at my Web site, Portico, for several months by that time. I had also discovered a number of engaging blogs, some of which are still very much with us. I had an idea, when I began, of what blogging was all about, but it was a provisional, temporary idea, just strong enough to get me started but no stronger. It wasn’t until early 2005 that I came to see that, if I were going to keep any kind of blog, I would have to make it daily blog indeed.

November 2004 doesn’t seem that long ago, really — but each of the Twentieth Century’s two World Wars were wrapped up in scarcely more time than it has taken me to get where I am now. While I’m happy to report that there has been no loss of life, I am as callused as if I had clawed my way up every one of the second war’s beachheads. And I am still very much in the clawing business.

At the moment, there appear to be two forms of Daily Blague entry. There are the quasi-departmental Notes — on Reading, Friday Movies,* Housekeeping, Books on Monday, the New York Times Book Review, visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and so on. Except during the summer, I begin my day with chapters from a block of six or so famous books that I haven’t read before; this is the Morning Read. Lately, I’ve been posting Weekend Updates, mini-memoirs of life away from the computer. All of these “departments” might seem superfluous, given the abundance of categories, or tags, that I’ve spawned; in fact, they reflect a concerted attempt to impose some coherence on content. Simplification has a way of introducing complication.

Like the Notes, the Daily Office is a recent development, dating back to last winter. It’s my solution to a problem that swelled in my mind after a few years of living with the blogging format. I came to feel that more or less ephemeral links ought to be collected throughout the day in order, not reverse, chronological order, with the oldest entries appearing before, or “atop,” later ones. My solution was to group such links within a single daily entry, while adjusting its timestamp so as to make it look like the latest posting. That’s why the Daily Office usually appears at the top of The Daily Blague. (To read about how the Daily Office utilizes the canonical hours of monastic life to tick off the time of day, read “About the Hours.”)

* I’ve been going to the movies every Friday morning for several years now. Over the summer, I experimented with other days, but that’s not the important thing, as long as I see a new movie, in a movie theatre, once a week.

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