100 bloggers marching along, 100 bloggers singing a song

Jon Strande’s 100 Bloggers book should be out in April or May. The project began, as I’ve noted in an earlier post, in December 2004 and I wanted today to quote extensively from some of the contributors’ responses to Jon’s inquiry,

1.) What does 100 bloggers mean to you?
2.) How are you explaining it to others?

The comments in full appear here.

We'll start with the comments of John Moore from Brand Autopsy:

The purpose of the 100 Bloggers project is to showcase the connectedness of blogging and bloggers and to highlight the power of a networked conversation.

Frank Paynter of Sandhill Trek wrote:

100 BLOGGERS is for me an opportunity to contribute a few tiles to a mosaic that will, I hope, when all have contributed reveal a picture of something new, broad, different that is happening in the world of arts and letters - culture and commerce.

Brendan of Slackermanager wrote:

I've been describing it to others simply as a book that has 100 different perspectives on why blogs are important and why the authors are writing. What I haven't really thought about until now is that it seems the majority of writers are business bloggers to some degree. Hmmm. As to the first question, I'm just curious to read the responses everyone gives. Unrelated note: it would be really nice to have an OPML file of all 100 feeds. The book could reference the file and readers could subscribe to all 100 at once.

Dave Pollard’s comments are not representative of the content providers as a whole but throw some light on the kind of perspective sometimes taken in business blogging, one which interests me because of the time I spent mooching around the Worthwhile.com blog before the magazine launch.( That’s right, a PR blog).

I'm very focused on the CUSTOMER. What 100Bloggers means to me is an opportunity to open up a new world of writing and connection to people with a literary bent who are now only participating as readers. I'd like to see the outcome of the book being 1,000,000NewBloggers. That's why I think it's so essential that we each convey clearly WHY we blog in our chapters -- it's more important than the rest of the content in the book, and that Chapter One be a SYNOPSIS of those reasons. Then the last chapter tells them HOW to blog. I'd love to see each blog that starts because of our book put a little logo on their blog to acknowledge us as their inspiration, and virally market the book at the same time.

One of my favourites, Jory Desjardins, had this to say:

To me 100 Bloggers is an introduction for those who are exposed only to traditional media to blog content. They are used to reading ideas diluted by editors' concerns for advertisers, editorial guidelines, etc. They assume that other forms of media are dishing out the best there is to offer because they pick and choose what that content will be. In fact, the best and most innovative "stuff" is coming from blogs, but blogs are hard to vector. You need to enter into the conversation and become a part of the blogosphere, typically, before you know what blogs appeal to you. We're cutting through that and offering up peer-reviewed work. I don't even think book editors "get" what's the best on the Web--they read USA Today to get a sense of what's out there rather than really dig for content. We're saving the public the trouble.

At least one commenter , David Wolfe, has noted the similarity between blogging and letter-writing:

Blogging has restored the pre-20th century practice of people routinely communicating informally with each other through the written word. The main difference is, bloggers can speak to an audience of many because of the distribitive nature of the Internet.100 Bloggers is a show and tell exposition that demonstrates the professional and personal benefits of blogging.

Chris Corrigan announces that new voices will be heard in this book:

I've been telling others that the book will be an exploration of voice, and that people will see how the medium of blogging is being used by voices to give rise to meaning across cultures and continents. I've also been saying that these bloggers are not the A-list bloggers we have heard from before: instead, the bloggers in this book are mostly newer voices coming at blogging from a variety of perspectives.

And finally Mick Stanic of SplaTT throws down a gauntlet to those outside the blogosphere:

How do explain the book to others? As a great way to get the perspective of 100 amazing and intelligent people on the power of blogs. You don’t have to listen to the lone voices like me…but at some stage, you are going to have to listen to the combined voices of all of us.

In the political arena, it seems to be speed that gives blogs a voice; in the literary scene, the voices are myriad and often heard but not commented on, like a quiet wave gathering strength in the background; so what impact will a book have on business, marketing and general blogging? What if it has no impact at all? How will it be marketed? ( I'm not crazy about Pollard's suggestion myself - it's certainly viral, but is it marketing?) All questions that need to be asked.

you heard him the first time - Adolf's grandson

Pretty much in the flavour of our local CNNNN, from the real CNN's Jon Stewart Daily Show.
I have to show this to my husband, he keeps bringing Financial Review articles on blogging home for me. Found via Halley Suitt and Buzz Machine.

the kindness of bloggers

Another supportive mention for li'l CFN!! at Chekhov's Mistress. (The Fernham blog is an attraction I have also visited via Chekhovia.) Bud Parr and Scott Esposito co-host this elegant New York blog, the envy of all those who visit. An erudite, considered tone and beautiful webdesign to boot. Check out (among other great things) this thoughtful summary of the litblogging scene ( and the links in the update too).

Sir Sagramore is fit, and Sir Lionel feels sublime

Keeping up with the joust? ( Click on the brackets in the right column to see other judges' deliberations in full.)

and speaking of circles

...thanks to David Tiley of Barista for his kind words and direction via trackback to another Ozblog with a general interest in literature, Troppo.
I'm not going to paste in the Haloscan code for trackback this week because I will migrate to Typepad in a couple of weeks' time, all going well.
I and my children are holding a major party for their dad next Sunday, Magpie balloowins ( only a few, mixed with silvery grey ones) and all - once that's over I'm going to get serious about managing the content on this blog.
The Gaddis blog is quieter, but hey, I stretched my brain. The balance struck on the American litblogs between pithy webchat and litcrit is very attractive. Please have a good look at any of those down below sometime and you will see exactly what I mean.
The Troppo trackback has connected me to Stack and Catallaxy - hopefully more Australian litblog connections are whistling down the cable. A while ago I found Alison Croggon's blog on theatre, Theatre Notes, and a Tasmanian blog, North of the Latte Line. The hunt continues.

where WAS salman?

We are blest here to have a gifted interviewer with the knack of getting her guests to choose music to punctuate the interview, then getting them to unwind. I was enthralled by Margaret Throsby's encounter today with Marianne Wiggins, an author whose work was temporarily derailed ten years ago by her proximity to Salman Rushdie - she was married to him at the time. Wiggins suggested in the interview that there is a book in the matter, however when pressed by Throsby as to when, then claimed it was Salman's story after all. I'm going to get hold of her latest novel, Evidence of things unseen ASAP - suffice it to say she engaged me totally.
But then Margaret is very good at letting people do that. ( The audio should be at the link for at least two weeks, so hurry along. You will not be disappointed.)

give me a home among the gumtrees

Moving right along from the previous post on Sonya Hartnett, it is possible to situate Craven’s review of Hartnett’s book in the context of a salvage operation when one considers it in the light of Andrew McCann’s blistering attack in Overland on the eucalypt aesthetic of well-published Australian writers such as Malouf, Carey, Bail and even Patrick White.
Reprinted in the same paper a few weeks ago, McCann has this to say ( and plenty more) about the state of Australian fiction:

…the various forms of intertextuality, magical realism and fabulism that we find in the work of Carey are often more important than any enduring interest in the political-historical issues Carey’s novels otherwise raise, issues that might ultimately compel us to question the aesthetic tradition in which he writes. This tendency is full-blown in Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus, a novel that opens as a critique of “dun-coloured” realism and that promises to engage with the ideological baggage of cultural nationalism, but that finally settles for the seductions of storytelling and a predictable claim on the reader’s desire for textual pleasure that is bound up with a tokenistic sort of cosmopolitanism. Similarly the mysticism of David Malouf, indebted to Patrick White’s modernist transcendentalism, returns us to the spiritual and the lyrical as the bedrocks of a literary aesthetic that has apparently survived its entanglement with colonial ideology. The overwhelming tendency is to supplement one pattern of limitation (realism) with a series of gentle and unthreatening upgrades designed to consolidate the ‘literary’ character of a text without running the risk of alienating readers: “art’s reconciling glow enfolding the world”, as Adorno, full of an irony bordering on disgust, put it.

And some good points to make about the dispersal of literary texts to the public – he speaks of vertical models, Kracauer and other tasty titbits. The article has helped stir and shake me a little. And I’m pleased to have returned to Overland today to find it online.

PR, sweetie

'Huge bookstore chains on every highway, Internet retailers, blogs, book clubs and other tools of publicity have changed the scale of the [fiction publishing] business', claims Wesley Yang of the New York Observer ( found first on TEV). I find that a luxurious sort of statement, I don’t think litbloggers are in this to make the publicists’ or publishers' lives easier. Unless it's to highlight the idiocy of chasing prizewinners and hot new things. Wang' s article addresses this last behaviour tellingly.

sweet surrender

Peter Craven gives high praise to Sonya Hartnett's new book in today's Review ( Weekend Australian) - not easy to see from here however, so here's a slice:

I don't think any of the feasible interpretative systems - Laingian or Jungian, Christian or gnostic - can contain this luminous nightmare that Hartnett has thrown in our faces like a revelation. The only thing that remotely reminds me of Surrender is the verse novel by the great Canadian poet Anne Carson, The Autobiography of Red, a long poem of contemporary life and one of the greatest poems of the past 50 years, in which the young hero is also the monster Geryon, red and winged.
Hartnett is a writer of vast ambitions and singular gifts. Her imagination is as savage as Dostoevsky's or Emily Bronte's and as gothic as a death's head. She has as keening a sense of the tears in things and the doom that falls like rains as any latter-day tragedian from the American south. It's fortunate that she also has the humour and the poetry to make the art she creates wonderful and bright... [Surrender] is full of beauty and terror and unearthly poetry and it traces with something like love the beauty of youthful faces that must fade and die.

Sonya Hartnett is 36 and has been a published writer of fiction since schooldays at our alma mater, Siena College in Camberwell ( a pretty bland space for such a talent to mature in - our other famous past student is Magda Szubanski, Mrs. Hoggett from the Babe films.). Other novels include Sleeping Dogs, Of A Boy, Wilful Blue and Forest. I can thoroughly recommend Sleeping Dogs and Wilful Blue, and am yet to read the others. She does have a spare, dark touch as Craven notes that is easy on the ear but not gentle on the imagination.

100 bloggers: from little things, big things grow

An interesting demonstration of the power of the blog ( to publish collaboratively in this case), here .

notes from the diaspora

This fine writer continues at full strength. The first international blogger I've read who may know someone I know. Time to start a 'Life and the blog' category in them links down there.

Mmm..what does the Lord want me to wear today?

I have saved this post to share with my daughter - she is a South Park devotee and understands such kookiness.

brouhaha alert ( okay, so it was a while ago...)

PR versus Pressthink. Words, words - who is spinning the hardest? You be the judge.

Although I do not hope to turn again...

Caught up with the Gaddis reading at last and pulled a couple of chapters of Steven Moore's book off the Internet to read. What an amazing book The Recognitions is, it is surprising that it is not better known or more widely studied. Or is it? Should I be surprised, after all Faulkner was out of print for a while. As I have already noted on the blog, perhaps there is not enough room for T.Recs on a university reading list that would automatically include Ulysses and ( maybe not automatically) some Beckett prose. A chase around the noticeboards, anyone? I just look in the Melbourne Uni bookshop de temps en temps, is worrying enough ( what ARE our students paying to read these days? Last time I looked it was The Story of O.)

should I stay or should I go

I've had a quick look at the bare bones of Blogger now and am not convinced that I can spare any more time to write 'out loud' as it were. As usual, I'm aware I need to read. Last night I chewed up more than half of Hanif Kureishi's 2001 novel, Gabriel's Gift - what a wry, sweet read this one is. And enjoyed some browsing time in the City Library over Broken Song, an enormous bio of the man behind Chatwin's concept of Australian Aboriginal songlines, T.G. Strehlow, linguist and translator of Aranda legends and songs. And all this must be done.
I had a couple more posts this week to work on, but there's Gaddis to re-read and Cloud Atlas to start, and the contents of the Australian Film Institute research collection to savour when I volunteer there on Tuesdays. Found a great book on Eisenstein and Dostoyevsky there yesterday... So I'm going to save my links in a text file and hang up the hat for a few weeks, or maybe months. Thanks for visiting and commenting, and putting up with me practising.