(not so ) new site: reeling and writhing

It's official. Please pop by.
All the posts from this site are archived there, sorry I was too impatient to list comments individually.
The name (this update in April 2008) has been changed - please change your bookmarks if you have been kind enough to blogroll this space (and I have not emailed you already).
http://austlit.typepad.com/cfn

Goodbye little green, grey and red place, you have served me well....(yes, I know the colours have changed. My goodness this is old, isn't it. )

group blogs are GO

Another great offering, this time from a conglomerate of litbloggers who are not necessarily academics. Sorry, that should read Co-Operative. My fave blogger Mark Sarvas has rounded up all their strength and sweetness into one...umm, the Marvell parody just ran out of juice right there. But you should have a look, it's a useful space which should work very well.

Both this blog and The Valve will provide the interested reader with constant analysis of the phenomenon of litblogging. So I will be pointing you in the direction of a few titbits from time to time, saving myself the task of said analysis, as well as hanging around 400 Windmills, Chekhov's Mistress, the Australian blogs listed on the right, and The Elegant Variation.

I'm enjoying the travel to work on the train as an excuse to indulge the charming Melburnian habit of reading on the rails ( apparently not very common on public transport in the States, some bloggers claim).

Recent reading: Hanif Kureishi's The Black Album, interspersed with literary mags from the Victorian Writers' Centre ( one of which published two articles from weblogs), chunks of Don Quixote and the Phoenix Book of Irish Short Stories 2003 ( okay, I read that one at home in bed like a good Melburnian). And speaking of bed...

abandoning the print

Dan Gillmor's portentousness aside, this is an interesting and substantial piece on the flight to online news sources.

Finding a Valve - what would Trilling do?

‘Your voice is your own, if you take responsibility for it. This unimpaired prospect of suiting myself holds back concerns that the sheer volume of blogstuff has gotten appetite suppressing… Then there is the worry that compulsively reading 30+ blogs a day has all the hallmarks of mild narcotic addition. And, yes, the fact that the blogosphere has been colonized by all literary and intellectual vices known to man, and a few invented specially for the occasion.’

From a lovely new offering, The Valve, Miriam Burstein of The Little Professor and Dan Green of The Reading Experience are part of this venture and the first substantial post on offer is written with Trilling’s essay, “The Function of the Little Magazine” very much in mind.

I couldn’t help chuckling the first time I read this – I really thought they meant invented voices here, not vices. And plead guilty on all counts. Even if I’m not being paid to speak or play up, Fran.

getting around the traps

Blogrolled again - this time at Mountain Murmurs and Stack.
Mountain Murmurs is one of those lovely creations developed by yet another cleversocks who knows how to install Wordpress. Great design, Ron...There seem to be quite a few Wordpress devotees in Australia - Kent at Dock of the Bay is another.
Stack is a friendly spot for booklovers and those of you already reading overseas literature blogs. Georgina hails from NSW but despite that! we are pretty much kindred spirits. This post is pretty funny - shades of Black Books.

Writers and Blogs

Librarians love to compile search logs, and love to develope little silvery snail trails across the Web of how they did this and that.
And these tools are terrific as long as they fulfil the following criteria:
The Right Tool ( relevance, topicality, ability to be updated)
The Visible ( find it!) Tool
I intend to write a log of the blogging trip and am finding that the trap with this blog as journal/repository is that it can be all things at once – and nothing. I will write a chat piece about tools, rather than write the serious log I need to compile on this blogging trip so I can deliver materials at some time in the future to writers who might (conceivably!) be interested.

Inner voice says – but you will write the log. Put it on the list. And spend some time away from the blog. (Inner voice speaks in purest green, Arial.)

I do wonder, however, if I would write about this at all if I didn’t have a blog – which begs the question of what kind of person blogs in the first place.

Writers of fiction who have not worked, for example, as journalists or researchers, or in public relations, might find the sometimes feverish quality of this deeply hyperlinked discourse unsettling. I’m already finding it works well as a writing exercise – but what am I producing? What am I opening up when I open my Bloglines subs and start webhopping? Am I a locust? A scavenger?

Librarians are big on purpose and direction because if they have any cataloguing experience at all, they are ripping into print and online materials quickly every time they open something, trying to determine where relevant subject matter is and what their users will do with it.

I’ve enjoyed this over the past four years as I study and enter the profession, but suspect it detracts from the meditative qualities prized by writers I enjoy – Wordsworth, Marvell, George Herbert, most of the high modernists, people like Shirley Hazzard and W.G. Sebald, Carson McCullers, Randolph Stow, Tobias Wolff…

I somehow suspect the writer’s mind might work differently, though it could simply be me feeling Romantic.

What could fiction lose? if all writers blog?

How many Cantos does the world need after all?

Hang it all, Browning, perhaps it is time to read Sordello.