Signifiers; Signified

While the odds of anyone coming back to read this, at some future date are pretty slim (about the same as anyone coming to read them at all, really), I'm enough of a traditionalist to think that there should be some sort introduction at the beginning of things; where I, your humble narrator, establish my aims and try to excuse this little corner of mine.

While that's the ideal, I'm really not sure how to make it work, simply because of the vague nature of what I'm trying to do here. I'm not out to change the world, not out to win friends and influence people, not even out to impress the friends I already have. What I am trying to do is present myself, as truthfully, and apologetically as I can, all while ignoring the irony of my writing with a pen name.

What this all stems from is something that George Orwell said in his essay on Charles Dickens, about the nature of writing: "When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer ... [w]hat one sees is the face that the writer ought to have." While Orwell wasn't always right (there are some real howlers, for instance, in his 'The Prevention of Literature'!), it's thinks like this that make me love him, even when I disagree with him. Perhaps it's just that he too wrote under a false name.

In any event, it's a good aspiration - to write well enough, and true enough that you people out there on the other side of the monitor will come to know me as I am - so I'm claiming it as my own. I can't promise to always be interesting, or even coherent. I can only be me. I hope that's enough.