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.

B for Blood (and beginning a weblog research collection)

Blood, Rebecca. "Hammer, nail: how blogging software reshaped the online community", Communications of the ACM. December 2004: Rebecca's Pocket 18 January 2005.
Blood, Rebecca."Ten tips for a better weblog", Rebecca's Pocket. 22 March 2003.
Blood, Rebecca. "The revolution should not be eulogised." ( this citation can wait, I've got a date with Typepad this Easter).
Blood, Rebecca. "There is a weblog in your future." Blogger Knowledge Base.

And D for Dan of course - check out this discussion. Topical, this whole blog will be in my collection.
Dan Green's Statement of Purpose will be filed away under Litblog Research.

Pluck out its eyes, prioritise...

If I can't get Typepad up by the end of the Easter break, I may well be putting this blog on the backburner for a few months. There will be a weekly update, but I have recently been employed! and have a lot of background management to orchestrate.

While I'm incredibly grateful to the people who have given me my break into the workforce after twenty two years at home - there are some wonderful people out there, non? - it is going to take some ingenuity, and occasionally some of my husband's carer leave, to juggle all this.

So this late- night ramble is in the form of online planning for the categories that may never happen but would be included on any future incarnation of CFN:
Litblog reviews
-Media (print, online)
-Original reviews by yours truly - a quick reference guide for the locals (and anyone else who is
interested in an outsider's opinion!)
Literature
Online writing resources
Journalism
Technology
History
Blogospherica - commentary ( mine and others) on where blogging is going in its various incarnations
- small section on Blogging Tools, resources if I find some stuff worth saving
If my employment does not resume again after its introductory period of three months ( yep, they're using up some funding on training new casuals), then these things may yet come to pass... In the meantime this corner is going to be less assiduously manned.

the cowardly lioness

Dan Gillmor reports on some interesting comments from Tina Brown, the powerful (ex?) magazine editor, on the role of bloggers. This ain't nice folks. It is not necessary to bandy terms like Stasi around - stopping just short of KGB or Gestapo, is she? I thought they were all pretty much the same in my versions of history.

I don't think I'll ever get used to female journos who say things like this about other women - this pap is directed at Condoleeza Rice, whose politics I oppose, but whose rise I am impressed by in my misguided li'l hippy heart
(okay, I know, I'm discriminating against powerful white women here ):

Condi seems to have shed gender, shed race, shed the need for any visible emotional life. Her hobbies -- ice skating, chamber music -- are intellectually pristine and demurely glamorous. As national security adviser in the Church Lady White House, she was the Policy Nun. As secretary of state and queen of Foggy Bottom, she shows signs of becoming the Bushies' Emma Peel.

I take exception to this nonsense here- it really is a lightweight piece ( Washington Post) with an aim to skewering bloggers on the pointy end of a media backlash:

We are in the Eggshell Era, in which everyone has to tiptoe around because there's a world of busybodies out there who are being paid to catch you out -- and a public that is slowly being trained to accept a culture of finks.

Slowly? Who the hell is she talking to here? Not the public, that's for sure. Like the print and broadcast media haven't been doing this for at least fifty years already? QUE??

And the last para is too silly really. If Ms. Brown doesn't want people to talk about her, but wants the freedom to print anything she feels like, then surely she is 'shedding' a few fundamentals herself.