Snog&Blog -- a short primer

Snog 'n Blog -- it's the new Kiss 'n Tell. And our recent back 'n forth in this area suggests a need to open discussion on some kind of further metablog standards for ourselves.

The intimate sexual confessional has been around a helluva long time -- anybody who cares to, may check out the Biblical Song of Solomon. More recently, we have the mutual erotic gotchas published by Henry Miller and Anais Nin in the '30s and '40s, or the differing intricacies of James Joyce or Lawrence Durrell, or the blunt force of D. H. Lawrence. Panting sexual description that shocked at the time, but these were actual literary works, covering more emotional ground than the kind of people who bookmark only the dirty bits ever give 'em credit for. I'd say this enterprise ain't interested in that. We ain't looking for porn, either. It's plain boring, often creepy, and way over-represented on the Web, already. Anybody who wants that sort of stuff has only to knuckle a few unimaginative terms into Google, or answer spam.

Considering how long we've mulled our own search criteria, and how difficult we're finding it to uncover someone similar to the 5th Muse, (You're good in your own right, Aggie, but quite different) our needs seem more subtle and complex.

We've already mentioned that the Muse never really blogged sex, per se, anyway. She was (and probably still is, somewhere) more about chronicling a very personal interior landscape, hoping to understand herself (and, at one point not too long ago, hoping to finally find a date that didn't appal. The two were linked) Her talent is in emotional confession of a sort that is raw, sometimes painful to witness, but that doesn't actually reveal all. It was highly open to interpretation, and interesting because of that, a quality that attracted our metablog in the first place.

Her abilities in this sort of edgy emotional striptease -- I've labelled it 'breathtaking', for too many reasons, too many times already -- seem to have made it hard to find a parallel. We've quite often thought the Muse's own analysis of her writing was way off, but, boy, she leads a rich and strange interior life, and she put a unique slice of it out there. It's about emotion, selective revelation, and relationships. We're real relationship junkies...