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.
6 comments:
A great way to use a blog! I commend you, I think I'm warming up to essay writing but I'm not quite sure about it after I've done a lot of bloghopping.
I've rewritten this comment because I just found your blog - sorry! I'm an ignoramus.
Thanks for dropping by, please come again as Apu would say.
I like the way you linked to your old blog from the front page of the new one, might be the way to go here as well. I think I am suffering from a dilution of purpose right now... too many temptations out there and too much ramblin' around picking up snippets.
hmmm i reckon blogging makes you fluent....and puts all your little thoughts on to a pretty page you can add pictures to. its a very pleasant way to start the day, a little scribble: and if you know a mate or two is reading, all the better!
makes serious work like essays easier to get done because you just throw it all down and dont censor so much. thats what i think anyway. but you know genevieve i dont read fiction anymore, only poetry survives for me.
I am missing poetry, I try to dip into it every now and again. I think I am getting annoyed with reading and talking and writing all at once while wrestling with new software... I'll come good with a little discipline ( and a little less technology).
ohhhh. dont stresss:) no ones paying you for it:)
It's not about the money fran,
( wouldn't want to be, would it), it's about limited time and the need to pull things into shape for a sense of personal satisfaction. And there are some spunky looking blogs out there - it's just annoying not to have enough time to play with the code an' all.But I am over it I think. Treely ruly.
aahhhhh.
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