About the Familographer

As of this writing, July 22, 2009, the header image fronting this blog is cropped from one of many taken June 27 in Quezon City, The Philippines, and is/was intended to accompany the post including the name of that city in its title. It signals a new direction for the blog, and for this blogger. It will be one more in keeping with the Familographer moniker, and I hope it, or at least the sentiments espoused in it, will benefit families everywhere, especially those of families so poor they get few benefits from anywhere.

I hope it will benefit women especially, too. I have benefitted from them, so it’s only fitting. On this “micro-relief” mission described in the aforementioned post, the material contributions, and their input of effort, by my Wife, my Mother and my sister Jane illustrate the principle as well as anything can. I am in considerable awe of the quality of character and caring that they bring to everything they do. Their sisters, all our sisters, engaged in the throes of single-parenting, deserve support and advocacy from any quarter where it may spring up.

I have as wallpaper on my monitor a Hubble image of a patch of sky too small to fit in the naked eye, but containing close to 3000 galaxies, so the astronomers claim, and I believe them.  As for numbers of stars, its big; its so big that its only really approached, in familiar terms, by things like the total sums about to be poured into the empty vaults of US banks and brokerages, looted by their venal overseers. These are the same criminals who have done everything in their power to weign in against a universal health care system in America as something unaffordable and (horror of horrors!) socialistic.

Below can be found what one of many wise friends perceived as a too-self-conscious tell about the Familographer. I didn’t know, when I set about blogging, that this would be the first page that the majority of explorers reaching the first page would want to look at. I feel a little foolish about it now; I have to remember to put myself in the reader’s position if I want to have a meeting of minds with him or her, and the initial intro to myself doesn’t rise to that standard. Reading this one over, it’s not a lot better. There are too many words in me and they aren’t nearly fun enough. That shouldn’t be the case, for I have had way more than my share of fun, too much fun, truth be told.

When I was a young reader, a kid, I read a lot of classics. I wouldn’t trade that experience for being a more taciturn, laconic writer myself. Reading words formed in the absence of telephones, word processors (even typewriters) TV, commercials, movies, radio, Internet, and a habit of instant information wish gratification, gave rise to stories, essays, plays and scholarly reports that, today, seem almost miraculous in their command of the art of writing. Not that good writing isn’t being done today: it certainly is. It just doesn’t benefit from the same degree of edit and rewrite that comes with the luxury of available time to research and develop and improve, and the results speak for themselves.

Nor do I claim to be the equal, in any important respect, of such men and women whose works I so thoroughly enjoyed, even wallowed in, as a boy. I’m not sure I can point to an example of such today, and some might object to the candidates I could name.

The word category that produced the familographer also contains ethnography, photography, cartography, geography and similar practices of “writing about…”. The familographer is one who writes about the subject specified in a ways general and specific. No book of rules exists for it beyond those governing efforts to be factual and truthful. When my thoughts and words are about to take off on evident flights of fancy, I’ll try to give fair warning in advance.

Family implies levels of propinquity, or how closely related are the individuals included. Here, I may use any level determined by blood, marriage, fictional ties or spiritual inclinations in a particular post, therefore the boundaries should be considered in the broadest possible context.

I feel keenly my close relationship with every other human who lives or has lived. Without education (not the same as schooling), we could scarcely distinguish between ourselves and the hairier primates. In this way, I follow Richard Dawkins’ view of Homo sapiens and every other biological species as ingenious versions of DNA strategies for self-preservation.

Of beliefs, I have few, beyond knowing that empire is an atavism, if we and our megafauna counterparts expect to stave off extinction and survive this experiment we call civilization.