Welcome

As I was attempting to get this blog up and running, a friend of mine commented in an email that he simply doesn't see the point in blogs. My unverbalized response to his comment, and my rationalization for bothering with this whole endeavor, is expressed in the following quotation from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

Seeing is of couse very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it.

So, "37" is a means of calling my own attention to what I see.

Why not a journal or a sketchbook?

Well, a writing experience this past summer has convinced me that I need to be wrestling with a rhetorical audience--or at least the possibility of one. Stated more directly, I simply tend to think more about my writing and thinking when the possibility of a reader exists. And yet, that lurking reader can also paralyze me. This medium seems like a worthwhile means of simultaneously considering and rejecting audience.

Thus, we're off.