May 11, 2005

No posting for the rest of the week

I have been asked by our web team to suspend blogging until they have moved the campus blogs over to MT3 (an upgrade to our blogging software). I feel like my arm is about to be cut off. Anyway, I'm still here; I've not gone into witness protection or anything like that. Also, I've been told that the blog may be wonky after the move, so I may have to mess around with my templates, etc. Please excuse the lack of posting, and any subsequent mess. Maybe I will think of something to post over at The Valve in the meantime.

May 07, 2005

Wailing and knashing of blogs

In case you've missed it, there is a controversy bubbling about the inequities of blog rankings, focusing on Technorati, the Truth Laid Bear, and blogrolls. Shelley at Burning Bird set the ball rolling with a provocative post, and Lauren, Joseph Duemer, and others (?) have either dumped their blogrolls, or are (or were) at least considering it. While I agree wholeheartedly with the criticisms of obsessive ranking and jockeying for position, and while the lack of diversity in blogland is manifest, I have to say, with PZ Myers, Krista, Clancy, bitchphd, and Netwoman, that I intend to keep my blogroll. (And not just because I paid for the upgraded version, either.) I use it continuously. I subscribe to Bloglines and Kinja, but I just can't seem to get too excited about using them; I like to visit others' sites, and read what they say in context. The look, the feel, the design: it's all part of the experience. And I use others' blogrolls, too, to find other blogs to explore. And as others have said, the blogroll is a kind of statement, of community, among other things. Of taste. Of interests. Of politics.

I'm sorry not to be on Lauren's blogroll any more, but as she no longer has a blogroll I can hardly take it personally. She, and Shelley and Joseph, shall remain on mine, because I like all three of their blogs a lot and can't imagine not reading them (Shelley didn't have a blogroll anyway). Besides, various other bloggers I like and have blogrolled either haven't linked back or don't have blogrolls and I still link them so why should I treat Lauren et al. any differently? Of these latter — I am thinking of Jill Walker and Liz Lawley, neither of whom have blogrolls — I have assumed that this was more of an aesthetic choice than anything else: a desire for slicker, sleeker blog design. I periodically envy these more pared-down blogs, but as I am more of a pack rat than a minimalist, I always end up adding rather than subtracting. If I were convinced of the political argument that blogrolls actually impede diversity I would of course reconsider, but perhaps I'm being dense but I just don't follow the logic. So, the blogroll that ate the eastern seaboard, to the right there, is safe for the time being.

May 06, 2005

Yay!Yay!Yay!Yay!

The marvellous Isil just told me that our wonderful webteam people have just purchased a site license for MT3 and are in the process of testing it. They are going to set me up a test blog. So! Now the great migration.

Has anyone read Monty Goes South by Mark Tetro? It's one of the Jinker Boy's favourites.

Update for the uninitiated: MT3 (Movable Type 3) is the newest version of the software used for this and other UNBSJ weblogs. It offers more features, and is apparently much better at dealing with spam in the comments.

Doing a workshop

tomorrow for a group of students going abroad. Have put together a cleverly-titled resource blog. It's heavy on the general stuff but light on material specific to travelblogs; I will have them search out some themselves, as their first exercise, before walking them through setting up their own blogs.

May 05, 2005

Fame at last

I'd like to thank all the little people. (Though the wrong campus is mentioned).

May 04, 2005

Fictional Blogs

is the name of Betsy Friedrich's new blog about ... fictional blogs (Jill Walker calls it "a treasure trove"). I'm not sure what discipline Freidrich is in; it is my completely uninformed impression that most people studying blogging are in information or communication studies. I wonder how many litcrit types are looking at this stuff?

April 20, 2005

Quel scandale!

Seen Joy Press's article in the Voice: "Could cyberspace be the novel's best friend? Litblogs take off—and grow up"? Lots of interesting bits, particularly about Mark Sarvas's new venture. But people's ire has been raised by Jessa Crispin. Press writes:

[Crispin] describes the litblogs as a kind of parasite, feeding off the mainstream media. "They aren't generally about content—they just link to it. So if something is dominating the print book reviews, that's what the blogs have to work with."

Scott Esposito at Conversational Content has angrily posted a list of recent content-rich posts, some by Valveteers. M.A.Orthofer clears up a mistake and offers his take.

But I can't stay mad at JC; she just linked to a story about Margaret Atwood, and her cohort, Michael Schaub, posts about Canadian poets (Canadian poets!).

April 18, 2005

Thinking about blogs

Jill Walker has two recent posts to make note of: first, her definition of weblog for the recently published Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory is bound to become the classic. Second, she links to an old post of Chuck Tryon's, Thinking Through Blogs, in which he compares blogging about research to epistolary novels, "writing in the moment." Not sure whether or not I read it the first time around, but it pertains to things I'm thinking now about the organization and purpose of this blog, and how I wish I could cross-reference categories, and the like. A blog really isn't that good a tool for storing things for retrieval, unless you remember that something in particular is there. Otherwise, there is a lot of browsing, and enough surprises to make me wonder what else I have tucked away safely, never to be found again. Maybe I need a wiki.

Maybe I need a hole in my head.

April 17, 2005

Venting

I am getting so sick of spam! As long as MT Blacklist is working, I can manage, with the offending comments only appearing until I notice and remove them. But now the Blacklist — or our installation of it — is apparently at capacity and so one must go in and remove older entries in order to add anything else. All very time-consuming, very aggravating. Our uni is apparently discussing buying a site license for MT3, which I understand is better at dealing with spam. I hope this moves quickly — it would be nice to have the summer to deal with the upgrade, instead of mucking around during term. Frankly, if I had more of a cash flow I think I would have gone it alone some time ago. I may yet be driven to it. So stay tuned for the latest news about sexua1 enh*ncement drugz, h0t as1an ch1cz, debt c0ns0l1dation, and my developing ulcer.

April 10, 2005

Group blogs

Genevieve at you cried for night just posted about group blogs. As well as The Valve, there is another new bookish blog, the litblog co-op, with some of my favourite book-bloggers involved. The plan is for the participants, and whomever else, to read and blog about the same book: one chosen, every quarter, by the co-op. Check back on May 15th for the announcement of the first book.

Some other group (or dual) lit/book blogs:

400 Windmills: Reading Don Quixote
About Last Night
BookNinja
Chekhov's Mistress
Collected Miscellany
Foreword
identitytheory
Kitabkhana
The Literary Salon
Maud Newton, in practise if not in theory
The Millions
MobyLives
NewPages

(I'm sure I've missed some. Please let me know.)

No idea of the general ratio of single to dual or group blogs, but forming dyads or groups would seem to be a characteristic of bookish blogs.

In a similar vein, Daniel Green posts about litblogging communities and how they are trying to build the sorts of discussions the print media fail to foster.

April 07, 2005

Blogging and print publishing

I had started to draft a post about the manifest wrong-headedness of the idea that engagé critics are only interested in literature instrumentally, but got sidetracked by an article in the April issue of Quill and Quire, “Canada’s Magazine of Book News and Reviews,” for which I was interviewed: “Better marketing through blogs: Publishers ponder potential of opinionated online outlets” by Charles Mandel. (Not yet available online — the website still features articles from the Feb. issue — and anyway, one needs to be a paid subscriber. There is, however, a weblog).

Update (9/4/05): Sorry about the broken links. Damn curly quotes. Thanks, Melanie, for the heads up.

Mandel asked me if publishers sent me review copies, and I replied that generally, they did not. (Mandel seems to think that Canadian publishers are behind the times, here). Apparently I then said, about book-blogging, “It’s kind of more like a book club.” Now leaving aside the ticklish issue of whether or not an interviewer should clean up an interviewee’s verbal stumblings, I’m trying to remember what I said, and more to the point, what I meant. I was probably being modest about my own blog and ended up sounding as though I were minimizing everyone else’s as well. Sorry, everyone. And just before that pithy quote, Mandel paraphrases: “While Jones believes blogs may end up supplementing print reviews, she says many people just like to blog what they’re reading.”

I am not claiming here that Mandel misquoted me. I used to do media work; I knew the interview was to happen; I neglected to formulate some points ahead of time and made the mistakes of just chatting, and of not framing my remarks adequately. Well, face it, in this interview I sound like Diane Keaton in Reds:

Jack Reed (Warren Beatty): Louise is a writer. Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton, turning, interested): So what do you write about? Louise Bryant (Keaton, giggling and rolling eyes): Oh, everything! Goldman: (stares, then turns back to Beatty and continues previous conversation).

Or words to that effect.

For the record, what I think I said was that most people probably still rely on print reviews though that would likely change. And the majority of book blogs do function like book logs and/or reading clubs, though if I had had my wits about me I would have focused exclusively on the ones that don’t. The ones I read, in fact.

Several publishers are quoted as saying that, no, they haven’t gone after the "blog market” because they don’t see much economic potential, as of yet. Well, hell yes! That’s what most of us like about it. The blogosphere has its own economies of links and hits, of course, but they are refreshing separate from commerce. (Leaving aside the question of the elusive book-deal. And not all publishers are convinced: Mandel quotes Rolf Maurer of Vancouver’s New Star Books as saying that a "certain mental capacity" is required to frame an argument over a couple of hundred pages, the ability to write shorter pieces is no guarantee of said capacity, and people who have it, can be found in print. Somewhat tautological, but hey. Helen Reeves of Penguin Canada, on the other hand, is apparently looking at blogs as part of her search for “cutting-edge fiction and non-fiction,” but admits that most publishers prefer the quality control of going through agents.)

Apparently, then, the interests of most Canadian publishers are limited to this: blogs are cheap venues in which to advertise and they represent an interested niche market, so why not?

Again, I don’t want to sound like I’m going after Mandel. He is writing about the book business, for the main paper of the Canadian publishing industry, after all, and his article reflects that. But with some exceptions, it does not reflect much about what blogs are; it's much more about what they aren't. Though he does quote Alana Wilcox of Coach House Books describing how Ron Silliman blogged about Mark Truscott’s Said Like Reeds or Things: “It’s all about community, especially in the poetry world, and blogs are the perfect vehicle to communicate to a community, especially when poetry doesn’t get reviewed anywhere anymore.”

Some publishers have set up blogs for writers; some of those writers have kept them up. Most seem to peter out, or have a limited duration: Guy Gavriel Kay kept a blog on his recent tour to promote The Last Light of the Sun, but he closed it when the tour ended, citing the standard Gibsonesque argument. Anansi set up a "web blog" for Michael Winter when he toured last year, and he continues to post (though he seems to leave the technical side to others). Mandel goes on to discuss publishers who set up house blogs, and quotes one bemused marketer, from Random House, who complains of blogs in general, "Because they are fluid and changing, it's hard to figure out how to target them from a marketing perspective." Momma always said, be a moving target.

I suppose this post is by way of an apology to the blogosphere, for not better representing us, and the possibilities of what we do, when I had this chance.

And I bet I didn’t sweet-talk my way into getting many review copies sent my way, either.

But the truth of the matter is that I read a lot more about books online than in printed reviews, because I have found a cadre of bloggers who review books that interest me, and whose opinions of those books I have come to trust. And part of the reason I have come to trust them is that they are, or seem to be, disinterested participants in an intellectual exchange between like-minded people. They are not worried about their advertisers or their editors. They are not paid by the line (they are not paid at all). They are amateurs (amātor, lover, from amāre, to love).

In my utopia we would each work with our hands a couple of hours a day to meet our material needs. The rest of the time we would do what we loved, for its own sake, and for no external reward apart from the appreciation of others who shared our interests.

And beggars would ride, I guess.

Some links:

Author's Blogs Authors with Blogs at BookBlog Blogs and Weblogs by Speculative Fiction Writers Literary Ezines Maud Newton and Daniel Green on publishers using blogs as promotion. Well, that's enough.

(This post is cross-posted to The Valve.)

April 01, 2005

April fools

The internet is a fun place today:

"Fathers’ Rights Activists Dress As Trolls And Protest In Online Role Playing Game" (Trish Wilson breaks the story on her blog and at XX).

Publishing World Upset:

ONTARIO, Calif. — Jack Chick, author of Christian tracts, made a surprise purchase of some of the world’s best-loved comic strips and is spreading the gospel in typical Chick fashion through the Sunday funnies. ...

... readers of Zippy the Pinhead will especially appreciate the new Chick sensibility. Read more at Foreword.

Matthew Cheney adopts A New Tone. Though I fail to see what is so funny about posting the occasional, tasteful quiz.

BoringBoring: a directory of dull things.

Geeky larfs from No Fancy Name: podshankers get protection!, and GoogleGulp, the new drink of choice.

And remember, it's always April Fool's at Fafblog.

March 31, 2005

Drum roll!

Please get your little tushies over to The Valve: a literary organ, a new group blog set up by John Holbo of Crooked Timber and John and Belle fame. John's inaugural post, "Form Follows the Function of the Little Magazine," outlines some of his vision for the site.

It is going to be interesting. There is quite a range of ... everything — style, politics, you name it — among the contributors, and then of course there will be the comments, and later, various guest bloggers. All those voices, drawn together to engage in "intelligent, bloggy bookchat," to quote from John's post. Should be a lively conversation.

So drop on by. And not just because I am a contributor.

March 26, 2005

SpellBound

No, not the movie. Just installed a Firefox extension called SpellBound, a spell checker. It is fiddly to install and be sure to read the instructions — a novel idea — but what a handy thing!

March 14, 2005

Server wonky

over the weekend; very frustrating. And I see that I have been sp__med again. It's been a very bad week in terms of the luncheon meat that dare not speak its name.

February 27, 2005

Streetprint

The Flowers of Maiden Lane, Pub. John Pitts, London, c1818 (Click on image for more information and a typscript of the text)

Jim Chevalier just posted the following to C18-L:

... this site has a variety of 'street literature' — including ballads, newspapers, etc. — much around our period.

It also uses a tool — the Streetprint engine — especially designed for this sort of thing that might interest anyone looking to put a collection of documents on-line.

Streetprint is open source:

A collection of British street literature needed an online home, a place where students and researchers could interact with these fragile texts as though they were sitting down with the original artifacts. The technological complexity of this task soon became a problem; specialists in centuries-old popular print are rarely internet wizards.

In search of an ideal solution, our team in the CRC Studio developed the Streetprint Engine, free software that gives researchers and collectors (like YOU!) easy-to-use tools to create powerful digital archives and share them on the web.

We broadened our focus along the way, creating a system which can now showcase much more than "street print." We like to think, however, that the ideals which underlie our first collection — finding value in the popular and the importance of public circulation, among others — remain at the core of the Streetprint Engine's mission.

What a wonderful idea. And a beautiful dovetailing of the web and print culture. Of all the texts that need to be digitalized, it seems to me that ephemera is close to the top of the list. It's certainly convenient to have canonical texts online, particularly for teaching, but the various projects, large and small, that digitalize street literature and other ephemera are invaluable. The Revolution and Romanticism collection at U of A contains a broadside about William Corder that I hadn't seen, quite possibly the only copy extant, and I probably would not have visited the collection and so might never have known of it.

February 26, 2005

I have

already mentioned sorryeverybody.com, apologiesaccepted.com, and PostSecret. Now here is i used to believe: the childhood beliefs site (link from Pratie Place). Here is one:

When I was about five, and didn't understand the whole how and where babies came from, I used to think as we (children) aged our parents would do the opposite and become younger. And once we reached adulthood, we would become the parents and our parents were our children. Death and giving birth did not exist in my mind.

The Jinker Boy and I were watching television this morning and an ad for Pound Puppies came on. JB turned to me:

JB: When you are a little gel, I will buy that for you.
Me. Would you like one of those?
JB. No, that's for gels. When you are a little gel, I will buy it for you.

These online collaborative projects are fascinating. They channel the overwhelming number of competing voices on the web into something purposeful and understandable, something that builds community. But they are also a product or installation rather than a meandering conversation, so in that they differ from other forms of online community. They are limited; one sends in an entry (or two or three) and moves on. To use some of the common metaphors for online communities, these projects are like giant multi-artist murals on urban walls, rather than coffeehourses or townhalls.

February 20, 2005

Quick link

to Susan Herzog's excellent set of links on academic blogging.

Boy, we're a self-reflexive lot.

News flash: reading may be bad for you

An ill-defined plague, luckily more annoying than dangerous, is stalking through the world of lit-bloggers.

February 19, 2005

Blogging advice

I have linked previously to Henry Fielding's excellent advice to bloggers, channeled by melinama. He's at it again, and now, T.S. Eliot has got into the act.

Myself, I like Dorothy Osborne's advice:

All posts, methinks, should be free and easy as one's discourse, not studied as an oration, nor made up of hard words like a charm.

Osborne to William Temple, 2 June 1653

February 13, 2005

Academic blogging

A couple of days ago Liz Lawley posted a wealth of links on academic blogging. She has set up a wiki page on the subject, too; I just added my immortal On the Value of Blogging for an Academic.

February 09, 2005

Henry Fielding's advice to bloggers?

Came across an interersting new blog via referrer stats: Pratie Place: Reflections and news, primarily from the previous millennium. Because I can't keep up. "Pratie" is Gaelic for "potato" (and I've just got used to "tatties." And I don't even like the things). Of particular interest to me is one series of posts, "Fielding's Advice to Bloggers" (#1, #2, #3):

In the first excerpt, Fielding compares an author to a publican rather than a private host, the distinction being whether or not one pays for the meal. That being the case, I am not sure that bloggers are not more like private hosts (i.e. they can serve whatever they please, however well- or ill-prepared). Though of course there is an economy of blogging, even without ads, sponsorships, etc. etc. Bloggers — some bloggers, anyway — work for hits, links, and "googlejuice." I suppose, then, that we are publicans after all. In my case, of a kind of wine bar—gin joint—ice cream parlour fusion place.

In the second, he promises to write only when he has something of interest to write about.

Oops. Zero for two.

In the last, we are warned against being "morose snarling critics." Oh, like he should talk.

February 08, 2005

Mucking about

with the blogroll. I know I said that I thought it was better not to classify other blogs, as I don't (can't) classify my own, but the blogroll was getting unwieldy and the truth is that I often trawl through it looking for blogs of one stripe or another, so why not make it easy for myself? Of course, then comes the problem of categorization; some fit nicely on various shelves — indeed they jump up themselves — while others defy ones best efforts. As is their right. But then I am left with some wimpy-assed categories in an effort to avoid using "misc." or "other" or something equally flattering. As it is, some will no doubt wonder at their "shelving"; if that is the case please let me know. And if at all possible, let me know where you would rather be.

February 05, 2005

Clearly they didn't read my last post

The magnificent Isabella of The Magnificent Octopus just gave me a heads up that I have been noticed across the pond. And in such illustrious company!

But tell me the truth ... do I "meander"?

February 03, 2005

Bombing for Choice

Just came across this, via feministe, and have added it to the sidebar:

Anti-abortion ideologues beware: I'm promoting objective, factual information on:

• Roe v. Wade
• abortion

You can too. Join me in Bombing for Choice.

I know some have questioned the efficacy of googlebombing, but if nothing else, it starts discussion.

January 29, 2005

Public/private

Everyone has seen the photos of stricken Americans at sorryeverybody.com (and there is a book out), as well as the responses at apologiesaccepted.com (my favourite is "It's okay. We're sorry for Arnold. — Austria"). Here is something more therapeutic, more anonymous: people draw or write their secrets on a postcard as part of a group art project originally mounted in a gallery, now online. Some of these are very affecting, in a cryptic, jesus-I-hope-they-don't-mean-what-I-think-they-do sort of way: "I love one of my children." "I liked myself better as a boy" (link from Liliputian Lilith, who links to me in the same post. Just so you know). It seems that the project is ongoing, so get out those 4×6 cards.

This reminds me of an episode of Northern Exposure, possibly the only one I ever saw, in which one of the characters writes down her regrets, past actions she can't let go of, etc. etc., makes them into little boats, and sets them adrift on a river. It has stuck in my memory. Though I always wondered whether or not anyone found the papers while they were out fishing.

If you try this, use soluable ink.

Writing has often been cathartic for me. Which is why I should do it more, I suppose. Though it is also a wee bit cathartic to read other people's secrets, and not just the ones that hit close to home.

January 25, 2005

A wierd thing:

I first tried Firefox some time back, when everyone was falling over themselves about it, and I found it inexplicably slow and crash-prone. So, have been chugging along contentedly with Safari. But decided to try Firefox again—same version, same system—and this time it works like a charm. With the added bonus of rendering some pages properly that Safari was mangling.

Poltergeists live in my computer, and sometimes they like me.

January 23, 2005

File under

that horse has left the barn: "Academics give lessons on blogs" by Shola Adenekan ends on a cautionary note:

David Supple, web strategy manager at Birmingham University, says while blogs offer significant benefits for academia as a strong tool for rapid knowledge development, their unstructured nature also creates further problem.

"Universities have to be cautious," he warns.

"This type of technology is very open and easy to instigate and that often means in the rush to use it, the bigger questions on the most effective ways to use the technology without creating legal and reputational issues for the institution are forgotten or end up being asked too late."

Perhaps if he had been less alarmed and more clear ...

(via BlogsCanada).

January 20, 2005

The people have spoken

and the consensus seems to be that any problems with slow loading are coming from the right column, specifically from graphics from other servers. So, I have minimized those; I will not continue the experiment of hiding graphics in the centre column; and in honour of that last, I give you this (saved in a smaller file than usual), as token of my sincere thanks:

Bonus links:

Zardoz: "Beyond 1984, Beyond 2001, Beyond Love, Beyond Death."
Listen to this, and then go here for more.
Zardoz Online.
A review which begins with the understated question, "Is there anyone with as varied a career, film-quality-wise, as Sean Connery?"
Zardoz NotWax with Teflon.

January 19, 2005

Experiment

A reader commented that this blog takes a long time to load, so I'm trying an experiment: I'm moving all the entries with graphics to below the fold, after a couple of days. Please send me some feedback, because this is a pain in the tuchas and I won't bother if it doesn't make much difference to most people. But if people are avoiding visiting because I'm slaphappy with the .gif files, I'd like to know!

January 18, 2005

Blogging on blogging

The Committee to Protect Bloggers:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (via BoingBoing).

Torill Mortensen on stretching the meaning of "blog."

Web site usability. Some good advice. (Via Jerz's Literacy Weblog).

11D comes out as a "mommy blog."

Great bloggy tee. About someone else's blog! (via BoingBoing).

January 16, 2005

Today is was the last day to vote

pour MOI, for Best Blog.

Please note: This post is was stuck here at the top in a shameless bit of self-promotion. Scroll down for newer stuff.

Update: The less said, the better. It was an honour to be in such august etc.

Actually, it wasn't quite as humiliating as it could have been. And I didn't even vote for myself, so there! (Mind you, the blog I did vote for did worse than I did, so I don't know how to interpret that. Nor did my picks in other categories do very well.) Thank the goddess for Lauren.

January 14, 2005

Academic writing

Timothy Burke has a sobering post about publishing and perishing:

You can’t blame anyone in particular for this. Everyone is doing the simple thing, the required thing, when they publish the same chapter from an upcoming manuscript in six different journals, when they go out on the conference circuit, when they churn out iterations of the same project in five different manuscripts over ten years. None of that takes conscious effort: it’s just being swept along by an irresistible tide. It’s the result of a rigged market: it’s as if some gigantic institutional machinery has placed an order for scholarship by the truckload regardless of whether it’s wanted or needed. It’s like the world’s worst Five-Year Plan ever: a mountain of gaskets without any machines to place them in.

As a partial antidote, check out the latest issue of Lore: An E-Journal for Teachers of Writing (via Clancy Ratliff). There is a whole section on academic blogging. And hey! Clancy cites me in her piece! Which I honestly didn't realise when I began this post. (Hey, Clancy, thanks, eh?). Mind you, an online citation of a blog post and a toonie will buy you a cup of coffee. Which brings us back to Timothy Burke's post.

January 08, 2005

"What did Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot have in common?"

Adam Roberts just alerted me to a sobering occurrence in Edinburgh: a person fired after eleven years at a Waterstone’s book store for occasionally writing satiric posts about his work life. (For the full story, and the answer to the question in the title to this post, go to The Woolamaloo Gazette).

Update (9/1/05): Boing Boing blogs the story, and posts a list of organizations known to have fired someone for blogging. I don't know if I'm more surprised about Apple, or Nunavut Tourism.

Update (12/1/05): Interesting thread at Crooked Timber.

January 05, 2005

SF linkage

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database: "on online index to over 60,000 historical and critical items about science fiction, fantasy and horror" (via The playful antiquarian).

Matthew Cheney lists various nominations now open, including the Hugo and the Nebula, and offers a rich post on short stories he enjoyed in 2004.

Gwyneth Jones has a blog, which I did not know. And Farah Mendlesohn recently started one.

"Consensus Building," a short story by Tom Doyle, has been posted at Futurismic. Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing describes it as "a mean-spirited story about naked ambition, greed and the fungibility of computer-assisted memory," which just about sums it up. He goes on to say, "It's a great 10 minute read, perfect for the Web." Yes, it is that, but I'm not sure there is much new here: it's sort of Total Recall meets Disclosure.

And to end, something that isn't really fiction except technically, from Bookninja (01/04/05; scroll down):

In the year 2014, the New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is EPIC?

Should When this future be is realized, writing and printing on paper will be the radical, avant-garde acts. Back to the days of the underground press, or coterie publishing. Or both.

December 30, 2004

Women, blogging

Clancy at Culture Cat has started a link portal to posts that address the question Freud would have asked, were he around to ask it today: what do women bloggers want? Or something like that. As Laura writes, "Please refer to it every time you have the urge to beat that dead horse again." Or to the page Shelley has set up at the IT Kitchen Wiki. Here are two posts of mine on the subject from last spring, one short and one longer.

So where are all these women? Try What She Said! or the Progressive Women Bloggers Ring, for starters: both fairly recent and the former, at least, formed specifically to address the interminable question.

And remember: sometimes a Power button is a lot more than just a Power button.

December 20, 2004

Dec. 18

Incredulous that no-one in the vicinity, in such a built-up neighbourhood, seems to have wifi, I wander the apartment with my laptop open. Then, at the front of the building, I see it: "linksys." Score! I sit down to open Mail and the screen goes dark and the doorbell rings, simultaneously. I plug in the PowerBook, happy in the thought that when the company leaves I can go online. But hours later, I can't find it. Nor again the next morning.

If anyone is in my neighbourhood, just so you know: I leave mine on all the time. As a public service.

Update: "Linksys" seems to be a computer network, but one not (always?) connected to the internet.

Later update: I'm now in Starbucks. They are out of gingerbread coffee.

December 14, 2004

Excellent!

The NYT reports that Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database:

Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

I imagine it will be some time before any of the more esoteric offerings are available. Prioritizing the texts will be an interesting exercise in canon formation. I wonder who will make the list, and according to what guidelines?

Update (10:59am): The BBC report gives a little more detail about the types of texts being considered:

Users will only have access to extracts and bibliographies of copyrighted works.

The New York library is allowing Google to include a small portion of books no longer covered by copyright.

Thousands of Oxford's rare books will be made available online

Harvard is limiting its participation to 40,000 books, while Oxford wants Google to scan books originally published in the 19th Century and held in the Bodleian Library.

A spokeswoman for Oxford University said the digitised books would include novels, poetry, political tracts and art books.

"Important works that are out of print or only available in a few libraries around the world will be made available to everyone," she said.

About one million books will be scanned by Google, less than 15% of the total collection held in the Bodleian.

"We hope that Oxford's contribution to this project will be of scholarly use, as well as general interest, to people around the world," said Reg Carr, director of Oxford University Library Services.

The story has a small illustration of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market

(Heads up from C18-L, and Claire, respectively).

And Claire links to a thoughtful post by Muninn.

Merciful Minerva!

Someone I don't even know My wonderful blogging buddies Sharon and Lilith, without promise or even hint of either money or sexual favours, have nominated me in the Best Book/Literary Blog category of the BoB awards (thanks for the tip-off, Genuine. And best of luck with your Biggest Blog Whore nomination). Since I doubt I will make the cut, I'll make my speech now: It is an honour even to be nominated, and among such illustrious company. We're all winners!

Update (9:16): Er. I was reading the names above, not below, the entries. How embarrassing! Will there be a skill-testing question in this contest?

November 13, 2004

New things to read (or look at)

Vitriolica Webb's Ite: expat Brit artist in Portugal. Here is a great cartoon about bloggers (Thanks for the pointer, Krista).

Speaking of bloggers (well weren't we?), here is the hierarchy of blogging from Random Acts Of Reality, an interesting blog by Reynolds, a London E.M.T. (link from Sharon). But how humiliating to read. Who would have thought that all those links to Boing Boing would come back to haunt me? (Just went there to copy the main URL and noticed the top story: Girl found inside pinata. Perhaps Reynolds has a point.)

Also ran across Storyteller's World, which on the surface of it should not have appealed to me (given that the author is a Church of England minister wearing what looks to be a Tilley hat while I am 59% sketchy. Yeah, and thanks for that, ampersand). But I was drawn right in and have blogrolled him. Not sure if is was the post on the purloined bible, or the one about how the Civil War never ended (thanks to Claire, over at her new digs, for the link).

October 30, 2004

Busy, busy

Lots of marking; trying to memorize lines; Jinker Boy attached to my leg because he's afraid I'm going to run off again; working on another blog (which looks pretty good, I think); ongoing wonkiness at the university server: all of these elements conspire against better and more frequent posting.

On the plus side, there are lots of great places to visit in the blogroll. But do come back; I hope to have my brain well-oiled and firing on all pistons any time now.

October 25, 2004

Interesting blogs

Just came across these:

Fishbucket: Great links, including sections on abandoned and found stuff, pop culture, and ephemera.

Life In The Present: lots of pop culture links and other cool things.

October 23, 2004

You like me, you really like me

scribblingwoman has been named Blogliners Blog of the Day. Thanks, Sharon, for the tip off. You can all say, you knew me when.

October 22, 2004

Tenure saga

I have cleared the first hurdle towards tenure and promotion.¹ Am today in receipt of the reports of my Chair and the Departmental Level One committee. Some excerpts vis-à-vis blogging and such: "innovative modes of course delivery"; "use of the web as an instrument of both community and pedagogy"; "participation in the teaching weblog Palimpsest, as author/editor of scribblingwoman, and as designer/manager of the English website and as co-designer/manager of the Gender Studies website were deemed worthy of particular commendation and indicative of ... dedication to the teaching profession." Notice was also taken of "the enormous time and energy in preparation and supervision this work necessarily involves."

My chair — who as I have mentioned before is a poet and playwright — noted "web publication" under the rubrics of both research and dissemination of knowledge (i.e. teaching), but the committee only mentioned it under teaching. So, while the recognition of the worth (and time committment!) of online work and blogging in particular is gratifying, no precedents were set in terms of its recognition as creative or scholarly endeavour. Though mine may not be the best case study; I imagine that it would be easier to make the argument for a poetry or a review blog.

Lucky for me I had a few articles and such hanging around.

¹ In our institution an application for T&P goes first to a committee within the department ("Level One"), then to a committee within the faculty ("Level Two"), and then up into the ether.

October 19, 2004

More bloggy links

An amazing list of links to articles and (mainly library-related) blogs from L. Anne Clyde at the University of Iceland (via wood s lot).

October 18, 2004

Resources

Clancy Ratliff at CultureCat posts Intellectual Property Links for Compositionists, a step towards building "a nice big portal of resources on authorship, intellectual property, copyright, public domain, open content, open source, and collaboration for people in composition."

Shelley Powers at Burningbird is organizing the IT Kitchen, to run for two weeks starting Oct. 25, and the IT Kitchen wiki:

The purpose behind the IT Kitchen was to provide an overview of weblogging, the nuances and the ins and outs and that sort of thing. Sort of like many of the handbooks about weblogging that have been published online by various people (see Rebecca Blood’s). However, instead of just providing static content, there’s an interactive element to it, a community participation, which allows people to ask questions as the material is published, or even provide their own material in support of a topic....

[T]he static book portion of the weblogging how-to is being done as essays on specific topics in the Kitchen weblog. The dynamic aspect to it is being managed in the wiki.

Lots of interesting reading in the next little while.

October 16, 2004

Knashing of keys

Having a helluva time trying to put together a page; I think I will give up on multiple pages/sections and do a more straightforward blog with lots of stuff on the sides. If anyone knows of some open-source templates for using MT for other sorts of content, nows the time to tell me, before I throw my laptop through a window.

October 12, 2004

Teaching/blogging

Clancy Ratliff has a great post called "Blogging and Writing Pedagogy" in which she lists some topics for an introductory workshop. Good comments and suggestions, too.

And Lilith (I thought I blogged this already but I don't see it. A "senior moment," as one of my friends would say, though frankly, in reference to my state of mind lately, that would be an insult to seniors) has a detailed and very useful post about the workshops she just finished. Lots of links, lots of food for thought.

October 09, 2004

Well, that worked like a charm

I just turned on my computer to find 132 really repulsive spam.

October 08, 2004

Just say no

Beautiful Stuff points towards a really useful post at Learning Movable Type, a wonderful site that I clearly don't check often enough because I missed this one. Most of the suggestions involve having access to your root directory, which I don't, but I did remove the immediate "publish" option from comments, on the assumption that spambots don't preview their handiwork. Sorry to add the extra step, but, well, there's a war on.

September 30, 2004

Slowly, slowly, putting

together a website for the Status of Women Committee for our union, who, I'm sure you will agree, really need one. I am mucking around with MT and hoping to combine access to the usual sorts of occasionally updated material (links; resources; who we are; contact info.) with a bloggy front page that can be used for news and updates. Liz Lawley, to whom I seem to be referring a lot today, recently posted on using MT to manage more traditional content and I am checking out her links with interest. This site will take me awhile, though; right now it's a royal mess and I don't have a lot of time to devote to it. I have been playing with the code of some of the examples to which Liz links, but I think I may drop that tack and try to adapt her courseware as I am already happily using it.

Wish me luck.

September 29, 2004

Academic blogging

Liz Lawley has a useful resource page called "Weblogs in Academia." Lot's of good links about using blogs, wikis, etc., for both teaching and research.

September 27, 2004

Server down

for most of yesterday: very frustrating, as I saw that my course blogs had been spammed with the most scurrilous porn sites yet but I could not get in to clean up.

Question: is it really "inc*st" if it’s a family pet?

Poor students.

We are looking at crime literature today in my prose fiction class — The Newgate Calendar, etc. — and I have to say, preparing for class while fighting with the server, at points I felt that some good old-fashioned facial branding might not be amiss: a very basic representation of a tin of spam, right in the middle of the forehead. And for the second offense ...

Perhaps it’s just as well I’m not in charge.

September 24, 2004

Academic blogging

Crooked Timber points towards a Guardian piece on academic blogging. Clancy also links, and notes her relief that the article debunks the worry about theft of ideas. The article ends by alluding to the potential for conflict between faculty and administration of issues of ownership and control. This may seem like a non-starter to those of us who blog but enough concerns have been raised about intellectual property, that I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sort of crackdown, somewhere.

Which makes me feel (admit it you retired activist), a little gleeful.

September 22, 2004

Creative Commons

I recently added Creative Commons licences to my various blogs (this and the course blogs). I have of course been aware of CC since I began to blog but I wasn't sure what I thought of it. It seemed too libertarian, too American in a fourth (or is it first?) amendment sort of way. I hate media monopolies and patenting DNA as much as the next person, but still I held back. Then I saw this post at accidentals and substantives, linking to Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants" (worth the admission for the title alone). I have used Robinson's "User Friendly" in my sf classes; it's really good on discussions of Canadian/US relations. Kari describes "Melancholy Elephants" thus:

It's set in a future society with no public domain to speak of, the dire consequence of which is artistic sterility. Musicians, in particular, are hamstrung by the fact that most of the finite (extremely large, but still finite) number of possible melodic permutations are already spoken for. Computers are pressed into service to search for the few remaining non-proprietary strings. It's a sobering premise, almost Borgesian at times in its treatment, and one that beautifully conveys the aridity of a world with no creative commons.

It has some nice touches but is utterly didactic. But thought-provoking. Then I started to think (you see?) about Bruce Sterling's stories and others of that ilk and, well, I crumbled and there on the left is the little icon for all to see. Boing Boing links to several related stories: to David Weinberger's recent speech on copyright; to a biography of Belgium published under a CC liscence; and to Cory Doctorow on digital rights management and why it's bad for all of us (here in cool PDF format).

Update (23/9): Wierd bloggy behaviour: one of the comments to this entry was up in place of the post for most of the day, I think; sorry for any confusion.

September 17, 2004

What I told the tenure committee

Here is a copy of a text I included among the myriad xeroxes and print-outs in my tenure file. I post it here for the edification of (or as a warning to) anyone else struggling with how, or if, to position their blogging within academe. I will post any updates if and when I receive feedback.

On the Value of Blogging for an Academic

During the process of preparing my tenure file I have thought long and hard about how (or even if) to position the work I do online. Course sites and weblogs (“blogs”) are obviously part of the dissemination of knowledge, while a weblog like Palimpsest, to which I contribute, seems pretty clearly some combination of service and professional development. But what about scribblingwoman, my weblog? I spend a lot of time on it; I run it from the UNB server; and on it, I identify myself professionally. But it does not feature traditional academic writing, or sometimes — I’m thinking of my penchant for links entries — any kind of traditional writing. And yet I remain convinced that keeping a weblog is becoming an increasingly important part of my persona as a scholar.

First, a quick definition of a blog. Blogging “A-lister” Meg Hourihan writes,

If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share — the format. The weblog format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social interactions we associate with blogging. Without it, there is no differentiation between the myriad content produced for the Web.

… Blog posts are short, informal, sometimes controversial, and sometimes deeply personal, no matter what topic they approach. They can be characterized by their conversational tone and unlike a more formal essay or speech, a blog post is often an opening to a discussion, rather than a full-fledged argument already arrived at.

… because it’s a weblog, formatted reverse-chronologically and time-stamped, a reader can expect it will be updated regularly. By placing our email addresses on our sites, or including features to allow readers to comment directly on a specific post, we allow our readers to join the conversation. Emails are often rapidly incorporated back into the site’s content, creating a nearly real-time communication channel between the blog’s primary author (its creator) and its secondary authors (the readers who email and comment).¹

Several weblog theorists (and yes, it is a vibrant and growing field, particularly in Scandinavia) have written about blog-writing as taking place at an earlier stage of the writing process; in other words, it is a place to work through material that may or may not appear in more polished, traditional form later. Jill Walker and Torill Mortensen write, in their foundational article “Blogging thoughts: personal publication as an online research tool”:

We are not positing that writing a weblog will change the articles we publish in scholarly journals. We do argue that blogging influences the way you think about thinking, and that it may change the process of research. To some extent it might even change the method.²

They go on to speculate about the parallels between the “blogosphere” and a Habermasian Public Realm comparable to coffeehouses and salons in the eighteenth century. I picked up on this idea — an idea which has a lot of play online, as one might imagine — for a workshop I recently gave called “Bloggers: the new public intellectuals” (UNBSJ, Sept. 1, 2004).

But why blog? Russel Arben Fox writes, as a comment on someone else’s post,

Blogging fills [the] desire [for self expression] nicely exactly because it is so vague and open-ended, a weird mix of news and private memos and creative writing and confession and scholarship, with varying degrees of insularity and publicness. Perhaps academics and journalists have especially taken to blogs exactly because they have to do so much writing, but aren’t for the most part ever truly settled or comfortable with the sort of writing they may be professionally obliged to do. Hence, blogging as a way to fill in our personal, random gaps.³

I would agree about the “weird mix,” though I have never viewed blogging as an escape from academic writing (which for my sins, I quite enjoy doing), but as something else again. I do sometimes work through ideas in my blog, but not as often as some. I am more likely to write informal mini-reviews of books I am reading, or post collections of links to various other sites, some scholarly and some not. My weblog is also a place where I discuss some of the challenges of being a mother and an academic, which if one were to categorize would fall into some creative, political and/or therapeutic category. But the point is not to categorize; the technology of weblogging, with its hyperlinks to other texts and its participation in a fluid and extensive conversation, can do things that traditional texts cannot. Some webloggers write essays and some write journal entries, and while these can be worthwhile and nicely done, to my mind the interest in weblogging lies in its possibilities and in the ways in which the online environment shapes the text and allows for conversations. Links entries are a case in point: they are not merely a collection of resources (however useful that may be in and of itself); rather, when well done, they can develop their own narrative, their own connections, perhaps unforeseen before the linker placed them in juxtaposition. To my mind, at least as I try to practice it, weblogging is a new and developing amalgam of the scholarly and the creative.

The next question that arises, then, is how (or even if) blogging might be regarded by a tenure and promotion committee. I’m not sure I can say much more than I already have, except to add that it might be helpful to regard permanent links from other weblogs as some form of peer-review, in that they are evidence of acknowledgment of worth. (A permanent link is a link to the main page of another weblog; it is usually positioned in a “blogroll” on the main page of the referring weblog. Permanent links imply blogs that are recommended and/or frequently visited. They are distinguished from transitory links within individual posts, usually to individual entries, which are analogous to footnotes and as such do not necessarily imply approbation.) I have included with this package a list of bloggers who have blogrolled me, as well as comments that several others have made about scribblingwoman. My blog is read by a small but far-flung community; according to my server stats I have readers on all continents (though of course the vast majority are from North America) and have had over 17,000 separate visits since Dec. 12, 2003, when I put in a counter. Mine is by no means one of the bigger blogs, or even one of the medium-sized ones — it is, in fact, a very modest little blog — but even so it is a small part of an ongoing discussion, the future directions of which are being determined as we go. And this discussion has spread beyond academic circles, unlike most of my other professional endeavors.

The only other thing I can say here is respectfully to request that the members of the committee visit scribblingwoman at unbsj.ca/arts/english/jones/mt, look around, browse the archives, and be sure — and this is most important — to follow some of the links. I will be posting this text in the next day or two, and there may be some worthwhile comments …

¹ "What we’re doing when we blog" (13/06/02).

² Originally published in Researching ICTs in Context, ed. Andrew Morrison, InterMedia Report, 3/2002, Oslo 2002; available as a PDF file.

³ Part of a comment made in response to a post on 11D titled "Why Blog?." Fox blogs at In Medias Res.

September 14, 2004

Blogging for grades

Chuck links to a discussion about potential problems with classroom blogging. I have certainly seen the “vagueness” Steven Krause mentions and have taken to posting questions to help anyone who may be stalled. This year I am also emphasizing linking, to each other and to the wider world, so that posts aren’t just individual responses to the readings, not much different than a paper reading log, as some have been in the past. Just took my Prose Narrative Before 1800 class to the computer lab and got them all signed up with Blogger. A small but interested, and interesting, group; I am looking forward to seeing what they/we can do. It should be an interesting course: it’s all built around “conversations” between 18thc texts and writers, between 18thc and contemporary texts, and among the students themselves.

September 01, 2004

Workshop went well

After an introduction (definitions; some history; blogs in the academy and education), as an exercise, I pointed the participants toward some directories, asked them to find a blog that interested them, read some posts, follow some links, and make a comment. While they were all clicking away I circulated around the room and discovered one fellow in the back, a student, in the final stages of signing up with Blogger. Am I persuasive or what?

Final pre-workshop post

Our web gurus here at UNB have put together a useful and attractive page, Blogging @ UNB, which links to material of particular interest to academic bloggers and those interested in using weblogs in teaching, as well as to some foundational material about blogging itself. One of the links is to blogshop, an excellent resource for new bloggers.

Some other links:

blog research:
blogonblog: Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker's "blog about using blogs."
blogresearch: "a shared space for discussion of blog-related research"
Seb's OpenMind-Research Blogs

edublogging:
Edublog WebRing
English 515 — Advanced Professional Writing: excellent links!
Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom
PhDweblogs.net
Topic Exchange—Edblogging

August 31, 2004

More bloggy links

Hope Greenberg has collected links to some useful-looking articles on "the rhetoric of blogging."

Countdown

Preparing for my workshop tomorrow. Was thinking it would be a more artsy crowd than it in fact looks to be, so I have had to dig up some material on "b-blogs." Reading various articles, many popular but others academic. Had not read too many of the latter, and am drinking them in. Not that I will be delving into those waters tomorrow — it is an introductory workshop, designed for those with little or no familiarity with weblogs and how they can be used — but am enjoying them for their own sakes. I really like Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker's Blogging Thoughts (pdf), particulary what they say about blogs representing different, earlier stages of the thinking process than traditional academic texts, and the case they make for the validity of publishing something that could be regarded "in process":

Our question [about how writing style affects thought processes] assumes that weblogs are more than simple tools and that the way we write in a blog reveal something about how we think that would not be explicit in another medium. (253)

I also like the way they define blogging as an "element" rather than a "medium" (267), and the way they find interest and worth in what others decry as the fragmentation of digital media (with a resultant decline in our attention spans, etc. etc.).

How do I feel running a workshop on blogging in light of all the thoughtful research out there? I was on a panel once about heterosexuality. When one of the other panellists initially was invited she protested, "But I haven't theorized it. I'm just a practitioner."

Just so.

August 30, 2004

Workshop entry III: to help you blog

Blogging:
Blogger: popular weblog software. Easy to use and free. Can be hosted for free on BlogSpot, or on your own server.
Blog-city: free. Hosted.
Diaryland: free. Hosted.
Greymatter: opensource weblog/journal software. Need your own server.
iBlog: free weblog software for Mac OS/X. Beta version. For use with Blogger accounts.
LiveJournal: free and paid versions. Hosted.
Create a Manila Site. Software and Hosting. Paid service.
Movable Type: available on the UNB server to faculty and staff. For others: free and paid versions; need your own server.
Pitas: free software and hosting. "It's quick and fun, well mostly quick."
TextPattern: free, open-source. Used by the cool kids. Need your own server.
TypePad: by Six Apart. Hosted. Paid service.
Wordpress: free, open-source. Used by the other cool kids. Need your own server.
Xanga: free and paid versions. Hosted. Popular with younger users; active community.

Top Free Blog Software / Hosting for Bloggers: descriptions and links.
Free Blog Web Hosts

Comments:
Enatation offers free and paid services
Haloscan: free and easy to use. Now has trackback.
SquawkBox commenting application

And if you don't like any of these, there are a gazillion Google links

Update (749pm): Added information about hosting, as per SB's suggestion in the comments.

Workshop entry II: wider communities

Lists of academic bloggers:
Crooked Timber (group blog; excellent set of links)
Professors Who Blog: on Rhetorica
Scholars Who Blog: Alex Halavais' list

Library links:
Library Weblogs
Peter Scott's Library Blog
You could also check the sidebars at Collecting my Thoughts and/or Free Range Librarian, and go from there.

General:
Eatonweb: portal to thousands of weblogs. Searchable by category.
Google Directory - Computers > Internet > On the Web > Weblogs

Workshop entry I: about blogging

[This and the following few entries are for the workshop I'm doing in two days. Any comments, additions or suggestions would be welcome.]

Blog—definition, information, sites, articles. Start here.

10 Tips on Writing the Living Web by Mark Bernstein

Blogs by Jay Cross: "Learn to blog, blog to learn." From an instructor's perspective.

Rebecca Blood: weblogs: a history and perspective: good overview.

Here Come The Weblogs from Slashdot. "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."

Meg Hourihan: What We're Doing When We Blog

What the hell is a weblog? and why won't they leave me alone?: a personal opinion by Derek M. Powazek

What the hell is a weblog? You tell me: forum hosted by Derek M. Powazek.

Wired News: Blogs Make the Headline

Here is an entry from Klastrup's Cataclysms with links to various academic articles about blogging. Thanks to jill/txt for the link.

Blogging at UNB

Update (8:07pm): Link added.

August 23, 2004

Like I need more blogs to read

Just stumbled across an appealing webzine, Literary Mama (run on MT). Mothers of sons might want to have a look at Having A Boy? Better Luck Next Time: Mothers, Sons and Stereotypes by Alison Streit:

Then there are the perfect strangers who see fit to tell me things like "He'll eat you out of house and home." "You'll need a harness on him till he's ten." "Sometimes he'll just ram his head into the wall for no apparent reason, but he'll be fine. That's just how they are."

I look forward to that stage.¹

Those working outside the house could read Amy Hudock's Mothering in the Ivory Tower. Here is an excerpt:

I must do this work, but I have to call it as I see it in my own life. I won't pretend that Sarah is not suffering. I won't pretend that her pain doesn't matter. I won't try to justify it in terms of her well being, as in claiming that "she is learning to be more independent" or "a happy mother makes a happy home." I won't be pacified by the nanny's comment that "she stops crying the minute you are out of sight." Does my pain at a loss hurt any less because I can reconcile myself to it? No, of course not. Then, should I disregard her pain because she is learning to deal with it? Because it is short-lived? Is my child's pain less important than mine? Even though she won't consciously remember this later, if therapy has taught me anything, it's that the unconscious forgets nothing.

I won't deny the obvious truth: I am rebuilding my career on the back of her grief.

This is hard to admit. When working mothers are on the defensive, we can't publicly admit the grief of our children. When we are fighting with each other and against those who demean us, we can't be fully honest about our own grief.

Since this morning with the Jinker Boy was particularly ... how shall I say? fraught, this got under my skin.

Perusing the about us section, discovered that a good proportion of the editorial staff blog, too (though the contributors are more inclined to have websites rather than blogs. Hmmm. See the quote from Nietzsche on the main page). A couple of these blogs I had already come across, but some were new to me, including Hudock's Mothering in the Ivory Tower and Libby Gruner's midlife mama, both of which appeal for obvious reasons. Maybe I should rename this blog. Or at least change the description. Something like, "Fat, forty, and huffing up the steps of the ivory tower. With a diaper bag."

¹ The Journal of The Association for Research on Mothering published an excellent issue on Mothers and Sons in 2000, and I believe that back issues are available. Also excellent: Andrea O'Reilly's edited book, Mothers and Sons: Feminism, Masculinity and the Struggle to Raise our Sons (Routledge, 2001).

August 22, 2004

All three course blogs

are set up — links on left — though I am still adding material to two. Liz originally wrote the courseware to take advantage of the SimpleComments plugin, but even though we have it installed on the server I was unable to make it work and so decided to replicate the way comments and trackbacks are organized in this blog. I like Liz's description of what SimpleComments does, but if I am reading her correctly one needs to mess around with perl code in order to get trackbacks to trigger entry rebuilds, and I'm happy with the way this blog works, so what the hey. Maybe I'll monkey around some more later, but at the moment I'm conscious of the clock ticking.

Tick tock.

August 21, 2004

Two helpful links

BugMeNot.com, the people who help you with all those pesky registrations, are now back up after some problems.

GmailStatus alerts Mac users when they have new gmail, without having to open up a browser to check.

Both from Boing Boing.

August 19, 2004

Another syllabus

And now for something completely slightly different...

Server down

from 5pm yesterday. Fine this morninging, as you see. Working on a second syllabus today so doubt I will post anything interesting. Until I post the link, of course.

August 17, 2004

Too busy

with my course syllabus to post.

But it's looking kinda nice, isn't it?

Thanks again to Liz.

Update (1:21am): Well I was proud, but the site seems to be broken in IE5.2 for Mac O/S X. Crap. Well, I'm too tired to deal with it right now. (It looks great in Safari, btw).

August 16, 2004

Adieu

One of the three students, of the many I have forced to blog, who kept up their blogging after the class ended has decided to pack it in. His final post outlines his reasons. The three of them, all from the same sf class, formed a real little community; it feels like the end of an era. Though the other two have spread out and are building wider online networks, so they should survive the rupture (you hear me, you two?). Classes starting soon, and a whole new group to suck into the vortex introduce to blogging. Though no-one could replace Zhengshu; we'll miss you.

August 15, 2004

Academic blogging

is dear to my heart right now, as it is the subject of an upcoming workshop I'm doing.

The other Miriam links to some current discussions, George links to a number of new and newish academic blogs — some of which I had already blogrolled but others which need visiting — and Cindy discusses having summers, er, off.

August 13, 2004

Courseware

Setting up Conversations, a new blog for my upcoming Prose Narrative Before 1800 course, with Liz's fabulous courseware. So far so good, and much easier to do than I had anticipated. Haven't added much in the way of content yet, and plan to tweak the look, add some graphics, etc. etc. But the bones are there, and they're good ones.

[Remember the Absolutely Fabulous episode where Germaine Greer, playing Eddy's fantasy mother, tells her, "Your entire body hangs off my cheekbones"?]

If I do upgrade I'll eventually port everything over, but classes start in three weeks so I have to be practical. And I'm embarrassed to say it, but I've never really minded the fiddly stuff, as long as I have time, so going through the same process for three courses isn't really that dreadful to contemplate.

In fact, I'm having a lot of fun.

August 11, 2004

(Horrendously ignorant) MT questions

I am using MT installed on my university server, which is fine (though it means that I need to ask to have any plugins, etc., installed). I have been trying to get the webteam to upgrade to MT3, but they don't seem interested (weird! I thought computer people always had to have the latest versions of everything, but our crew seem happy with MT2.64, I guess following the logic that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." But where is the fun in that?).

I have made a more recent plea on the basis of Liz Lawley's promised update of her courseware; perhaps this request will be the charm. But if not, my question is, would I be able to install MT3 myself on my office desktop yet still host my stuff on the university server? I don't have my own domain and don't pay for hosting, and while the former would be fun I would like to avoid the latter.¹ I have an ethernet connection in the office and could conceivably use my desktop as a server, but I have never done that and I'm hoping to avoid anything too time-consuming at this most hectic time of the year.²

I suppose these concerns would still apply if I decided to migrate to another platform. Which I don't really want to do just now, because of the time involved, and because I'd like to try Liz's courseware.

Any advice or directions to helpful websites³ would be most appreciated, particularly from those of you also torn between free and easy hosting, and full autonomy/responsibility.

¹ Because then I would have to think twice before I upload piles of stuff.

² Most hectic until December, anyway.

³ I find that there is a lot out there for advanced users, and some excellent, excellent stuff for relative neophytes, but I frequently find myself falling between two stools.

August 06, 2004

We're baaack!

I sat down to write an amusing post about taking the Jinker Boy to a theme park in P.E.I. but had five hundred (that is not a typo) spam comments, most of them offering various calming medications. Some of which I could have used this past week. But still.

July 30, 2004

You want to do a survey, don't you?

I just had a visit from one of our MBA students, Matthew (Yun) Lin, a very personable man who proclaimed himself a fan of this weblog. So how could I resist his request to publicize the survey he is working on with my colleague Gregory Fleet, "The Blog as a Meaningful Business Tool"? Matthew writes, in an email:

I am currently conducting a research on how weblogs are being used as business tools, and their particular implication for small and medium enterprises. I have designed a questionnaire in order to survey individuals who publish weblogs or can describe the reasoning behind their company’s weblog. The survey will be posted online for one month... Additional information about this project (e.g., objectives, hypotheses) are available upon request.

It's short and snappy; take it today!

This is how it starts

Yesterday was the first day in recent memory when I had internet access but did not post an entry. It's the thin edge of the wedge; soon I will only be posting when I actually have something to say. Then where will we be?

[Whew! Looks like I nipped that trend in the bud.]

July 19, 2004

Clubs

George and I met up this morning in a Starbucks on Euston Rd. opposite the British Library.

I couldn't bear to post the shot I took of both of us together,¹ as it is even worse of me — George looks fine despite his contention that he looks like a geek in photos — than my passport picture (which is saying something). George took a better one and I will direct you there when he posts it, no doubt sometime after his conference in France is over. Quite the jetsetters, both of us.

It was great to put a face to the name and chat a little, even if only briefly. We talked about feeling somehow invested in people from reading their blogs; about academic couples; about jobs and research; about where we live; about travelling. I was a little surprised to realize how much I already knew about him, and how much he knew about me. It's an odd sort of knowing/not knowing.

¹ At least, without some Photoshopping.

Update (24/7/04): George's address fixed. Sorry for any confusion!!

July 03, 2004

What about Starbucks?

Picking up from Laura's comparision of the blogosphere to a town hall meeting, Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber wonders if it is perhaps more like eighteenth-century coffeehouses in its diversity. Relative diversity, for as Henry points out, the rubbing of shoulders was limited to the male bourgeoise.

Last year Brian Micklethwait reproduced an article from The Economist which links coffeehouses to the internet.
My student's page on coffeehouses.

July 02, 2004

One year of blogging

Began this blog a year ago.

Since then:

503 posts,
10,649 hits (since 12/12/03),
22 silly quizzes plus sundry other games,
and lots of conversation.

Thanks, everyone!

June 29, 2004

Because I am a masochist,

as threatened earlier, I have offered to run a workshop sometime during the week before classes.

Bloggers: the new public intellectuals

This is a two-hour workshop designed to introduce interested faculty, staff, and students to the "blogosphere": the on-line community of weblogs, (or "blogs"). Many will be familiar with on-line personal journalling but may be unaware of the growing number of blogs among academics, librarians, and informational technology professionals. These blogs can be valuable resources, and one need not have one oneself to access them or participate in the ongoing discussions. Weblogs can also be set up among members of a group, for specific events such as conferences, or institutionally (many libraries have them, for example).

This workshop will assume little or no experience on the part of the attendees. We will first seek to define what a weblog is, how it works, and what it can do. Then we will do some hands-on work and get introduced to weblogs in our individual fields or areas of interest.

This workshop is designed mainly for employees and graduate students of UNB, though undergraduate students are certainly welcome. It will be facilitated by Dr. Miriam Jones, who blogs at [well, you know that part].

If there is sufficient interest, there will be a follow-up workshop for those who might like to join the discussion by starting their own weblogs.

If anyone has any suggestions, comments or warnings: I'm listening.

June 26, 2004

Bloggers elsewhere

Maud Newton has a story in Swink that gets under the skin.

Liz Lawley writes about the problems, and the possibilities, of blog research.

Nalo Hopkinson notes a review of her edited anthology So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy. I will order this for the UNBSJ library. And check out all her other books.

Update (28/6/04):

This isn't literally "elsewhere," but here is a short piece by the Rake (via Tingle Alley).

June 19, 2004

Is this too much?

Was inspired by an entry at Learning Movable Type and here we are. This is "Faces" by Chris Joseph, found at Kaliber 10000. I like this one because it isn't as obviously geometric as most of the patterns one sees out there, and it looks like scribbling (god, I've got a literal mind). I don't like the way it loads, though... Maybe I need to pare down, rather than load up. Be honest.

Update (21/6/04): I lost my nerve. You may ignore this entry.

Things Early Modern

Instead of just silently bookmarking them, I would like to draw attention to two new weblogs: 17th century, an exciting group blog which seems to be written by mainly youngish scholars in the UK, and Early Modern Resources, Sharon Howard's blog which grows from her site. She also has a page focused on British and Welsh history, the history of crime, and women's history. And, Claire from 17th century has set up an early modern topic exchange.

June 16, 2004

And the prize for best nom de keyboard

goes to Ophelia Payne at the new group blog, XX, as in chromosomes (link from Laura at Apt. 11D). Now watch that be her real name!

June 15, 2004

Various follow-ups

More LotR pastiches. Some of these are really clever. At Making Light.

Women voting: from a UK perspective. Check out the suffrage board game! (via misbehaving).

A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step: blogging Ulysses (via Edward Champion). This guy is gonna get sued.

On comics: two posts from Edward Champion: Comics as Literature — Some Starting Points and Someone Cuts Through the Swath. Next, manga is encroaching on US bestseller lists. And, Weirdwriter thinks much the same as I do about comics, but argues the point better. Finally, talk about Art! Isadora Duncan, eat your heart out.

Some bookish stuff

wood s lot has some links about the passing of Canadian publishing legend Jack McClelland (here's the CBC story).

More on comics, something practical this time: From James Sime: "Listen up, Mr. and Mrs. Comic Industry Professional, your comic book covers are killing your books" (via Bookslut).

Making rejection public: Everyone Who's Anyone, Gerard Jones' site, and Deb Central, a new site from Deb Schwarz, both chock full of rejection letters and cheeky responses (via MoorishGirl). These two are clearly on a roll.

The Official Eric Carle Web Site (via Plep).

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

4000 Years of Miniature Books (also via Plep).

AbeCedarium: An Exhibit of Alphabet Books (via Plep).

OneZeroZero: A Virtual Library of English Canadian Small Press and Atlantic-Poetry Pages (via wood s lot).

Canadian spammers more polite

Read the whole heartening tale (via Slashdot). Please.

June 12, 2004

Increments

Along the same lines as the Diary of Samuel Pepys, one can now read The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci one page at a time through an RSS feed, courtesy of Matt Webb (thanks, wood s lot). And weren't there some people working their way through Proust? (though damned if I can find the link and I know I bookmarked it). Then there is the Latin fellow, though he is translating rather than just reading.

I have blogrolled Pepys but have not found it satisfying to read him in such small doses. Apparently, though, this way of organizing reading works for some. Any other projects out there like these? Anyone reading along with Pepys or any of the others? (Anyone got a link to the Proustians?)

What other texts would work? Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, perhaps. Anyone's diaries: Virginia Woolf's, Anaïs Nin's (which I have read, by the way. All of them, at much too young an age). Though neither of these is public demain. Letters, too. I think it would only work for me if I was doing it with at least one other, so we could discuss as we went. Otherwise, I'd just plow on ahead.

June 01, 2004

Messing around

with this site. Serif fonts seem to look pretty crappy on IE for Windows, so I toyed with changing them but like the look on the Mac, so ... And, this site breaks Netscape in Windows: the columns don't render. Should I worry? Do many people use Netscape? Over 30% according to my server stats, but I don't know if that is Windows or on the Mac. I think I will leave things for now, and wait for any complaints.

Oh, and I expanded the centre column a little more...

May 31, 2004

Let me know

if this new layout is wonky. I haven't tried it in too many browsers.

After I iron things out a little, I will change the look. After all, what else is there to do?

Update (10:17): Camino 0.8b was a little wonky, so was I.E 5.2 (and the fonts are ugly); Netscape 7.1 and Opera 7.5 were fine; and OmniWeb 4.5 looks good. But Safari is best. I'll check out the world o' Windows tomorrow; apologies to anyone who is having trouble. Please let me know.

May 30, 2004

Templates, templates everywhere

I am extremely frustrated; I would like to rejigger my weblog but my skills are pretty rudimentary. Which means, I would like the templates to fall into my lap. I'm good to tinker with colours, graphics, and fonts, but not the basic shape of the thing. I'd like three columns, fixed width, space for a title. But even when I go to a site that does it for you, like this one, I still manage to bugger it up.

And in the middle of all this gnashing of teeth, I got spammed again.

Sigh.

The Sopranos is on later. That should cheer me up.

Update (10:17): The Sopranos is not on. What gives? Was last week the season finale? I have to have that image of Tony kicking Christopher in my mind's eye until who-knows-when? Thanks a lot!

No, I just checked; two more episodes, one of which was to have been tonight.

!!!

May 29, 2004

Okay, now I'm really mad!

As if yesterday's unpleasantness were not enough, I just got thirty comments all about bestiality. And after a hard day struggling with templates, too (That's right, readers, watch this space and if we all live long enough, you may see some changes).

May 28, 2004

Must ... control ... fist ... of death!

I just had to delete thirty comments all from some porn site promoting more varieties of rape than I would have thought possible. And, I'm very bitter for having now been made to think about them. So, here are some light-hearted links. Go on, chuckle!

Finally — American politics explained.

The 100 Worst Porn Movie Titles (from the Rake, living up to his name). I'm trying to decide between May the Foreskin Be With You, Ass-Hole O Mio, and Yank My Doodle, It's A Dandy. Okay, you may not want to visit this page. But at least there's nothing about rape there.

Gawker says that Soul Plane is "the Citizen Kane of blacksploitation airline industry films." Shatnerian says that this is "The Movie Blurb of the Day. I say, they are both right.

Stephany Aulenback's Beckett for Babies project continues apace. I regret not having sent in a photo of the Jinker Boy, but he is just so purposeful.

Check out The Blog of Death, a blog of obituaries (link from Portage). Okay, that one's not funny. But now I feel better.

Thanks for being there.

May 25, 2004

Blogging software

Via George, from slashdot: more on Movable Type 3.0, the importance of free software, and a useful comparison of blogging software, just like I plaintively asked for in the comments to this earlier post (it's a miracle).

May 22, 2004

Gender resources

Mary Robinson's "A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination": A Hypertext Edition (via wood s lot).

African American Women Writers of the 19th-Century.

The History of Rape: A Bibliography compiled by Stefan Blaschke (via wood s lot).

E-books by Women Writers, from Louisa May Alcott to Zitkala-S.

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility: Women and Computing.

Renaissance Women Online.

The Center for Women and Change: Women's Resources.

Women Online Worldwide.

"Trashing the Hallmark card mom" by Katy Read at Salon, with links to various mothers' organizations (via feministing.com).

May 21, 2004

Borges as he was meant to be read

"The Book of Sand." A hypertext/puzzle, written by Jorge Luis Borges. Maximus Clarke writes, of the project:

Welcome! This web site contains, in eight randomly numbered pages, the text of Jorge Luis Borges' story "The Book of Sand" (as translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni), with pictures and animations based on old engravings and photographs....

The Book of Sand site is a hypertext, with a nonlinear structure and dynamic images.... But the site is also a puzzle — because only you, the reader, can decide in what order to view the pages. Borges' original story provides an authoritative ordering of the text, but that authority has been removed from this version.

Postmodern critics are fond of saying that the reader imposes his or her own order upon the text; here at least this literary idea has been made a literal truth. But here there is also a chance to rediscover the original unity intended by the author....

In closing, it is strange how many of Borges' stories seem like prophetic references to the dense, mazelike, abstract universe of the World Wide Web.

(Via Plep).

May 20, 2004

Blogging for tenure II

I am starting to think about putting together my portfolio, as I am up for tenure and promotion this coming year. Awhile ago I posted some links to do with institutional recognition — or not — of blogging. Just ran across an interesting post by Brayden King, "Sociologist bloggers and public sociology," to add to the list. In terms of T&P strategy, I'm thinking of a (substantial) paragraph about weblogs in my covering letter, and some supporting material: some particularly pithy posts (aka off-prints), comments by others about my blog (aka reviews), and a list of people who have bloggrolled me (aka peer reviews). So far, the various posts and comments I have read on the subject indicate that even getting a weblog recognized as service might be a stretch, but I think King has identified a crucial aspect of blogging, one that seems self-evident to us, and that will no doubt become more acceptable as time goes on.

As I was writing this I had a brainstorm (or possibly a mini-stroke), and broke off to email our webmanager and our Instructional Tech consultant offering to organize two workshops this summer: "Bloggers: the new public intellectuals" (thanks Brayden!) and "Joining the Conversation." In the first session I would present an overview, but most of the time would be taken up by the participants looking up blogs in their own fields and getting familiar with what's going on out there. Then, after they have had time to explore a little on their own, we could have a second session for those interested in setting up their own blogs.

Am I a crazywoman?

May 14, 2004

An Atkins bar and 3 cups of decaf

A few people who know I blog asked me last Wednesday if I had heard the story about blogging on the CBC. I hadn't. One of them proceeded to sneer about people posting about what they'd had for breakfast. Just read Jim Elve's post, "What I Did After Breakfast Today" (good one!), and so finally know what she was on about. From what Elve writes, the idea that the blogosphere is full of "the toast was burnt this morning" sort of posts was debunked, but I suppose one hears what one listens for ... Elitism? Technophobia? Some proud amalgam of the two, peculiar to certain literary types? (I had better hope she doesn't overcome her aversion to blogs and read this ... )

Caterina, one of the other guests, also posts.

Movable Type 3.0

Just before I went to bed last night I read a post at Burning Bird about changes in Movable Type, the software I use for this blog. Specifically, MT, formerly free, is instituting a steep licensing/payment scheme. I didn't post, perhaps hoping it would all go away by the morning, but I did send an email to our campus webmaster asking what it meant for us (me!), but have not yet heard back.

There are lots of issues here. Free software is the utopian ideal (free everything is the utopian ideal), but we live here in the belly of the beast and no doubt the MT designers would like to eat like everyone else. And no-one would appear to deny them that, though there is a flood of complaints about the lack of warning, steepness of the fee schedule, and crippling restrictions and perceived second-class status of the new free version, both as comments to the MT announcement, and elsewhere.

I really like MT, though some of the alternatives, TextPattern and Wordpress, sound appealing. But either would no doubt involve a learning curve, which I don't have time for this pre-tenure and promotion summer.

Another wrinkle: had been planning to use Liz Lawley's MT courseware for all my courses next year, and I doubt there are (yet?) such elegant adaptations of other programmes.

People are dividing into two camps, it seems; those who are migrating, and those who will stick with earlier versions of MT. It will be interesting to see how it all unfolds, personally of course, but also across the blogosphere.

May 12, 2004

Googlebomb update

Alex Halavais points out that the recent googlebombing of the word "jew" was only successful in the short term, questions the efficacy of the whole strategy, and links to yesterday's Wired article. Google's arguments seem solid, but as Wired notes, it is interesting that no other search engines turn up the white supremicist site. Couple this with Google's anti-porn option, and where is the free speech argument?

Blogging and Pepys

One of our Honours students is thinking of writing an honours thesis on Pepys. He expressed interest in some sort of comparison between what Pepys did, and blogging. Obviously he wouldn't be the first to see the connection: there is Phil Gyford's on-line Pepys diary project, and the Pepys Projects link directories (I and now II). He hasn't got too far with it yet (and may in fact go in another direction altogether), but if he did do Pepys I would be involved, as the resident Restoration/18th-c person and sole blogger. We have a program in Information and Communication Studies here, and they would no doubt prove a resource. He (the student) has already done a webpage on Pepys. He seems interested in self-representation in life writing, online and on paper, and authorial negotiation of public and private. I mentioned to him that there are a plethora of academics in the area working on some of these very questions. I would welcome any suggestions for possible directions in which to point him to help him focus and narrow his project.

April 27, 2004

In Academic News

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story on the late, lamented Invisible Adjunct. And here is Henry Farrell's thoughtful take on the Calvinist free market of academe.

Jill points towards the blog of Steve Stanzak, an NYU student who couldn't afford to pay board after his tuition, and so lived in the basement of the Bobst Library and blogged the experience. The server must be overloaded as I can't get through, but here is the link, and here is the New York Times story. NYU is really working the spin:

"NYU doesn't attract just smart students, it attracts smart, eclectic students," said [John] Beckman, the university spokesman. "We had a film student who wanted to film a couple performing a live sex act in front of a class. We had students who set up a swimming pool in their dorm room. Now we have this fellow."

At least they have now given him a dorm room. No word on whether or not it has a pool.

April 16, 2004

What would Richardson think?

Stephany Aulenback points towards Eric Brown's Digital Epistolary Novel, Intimacies (beware seizure-inducing intro). The plot:

Two young professionals "meet" through a mis-sent e-mail. They become "attracted" in cyber-space and tentatively agree to a "real" meeting. A brutal assault follows. The obvious suspect is the e-mail partner, but one person is unconvinced. A series of surprises and revelations follows — all delivered in digital form, all entirely possible, and all representing ways we now learn of events in our world where virtual reality constantly fights its counterpart.

Brown, "a former English professor who teaches executives how to write," says in a NYTimes interview that the plot is based on Pamela, but it sounds more like a modern-day, hyper violent Clarissa, at least from the description above. Not to mention the photograph of the mascara-stained woman on the site.

April 13, 2004

More Googlebombing

Why type Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew?

Addendum (12:22am): Times of India article about why Google won't pull the offensive listing.

Update (14/4/04): Just typed in "Jew" in Amazon.com's new search engine, A9.com, and the notorious site is nowhere to be seen.

April 12, 2004

Yet more tinkering

I want the world to know that Amit Karmakar was generous and patient with some troubles I was having yesterday with his monthly archives drop-down menu.

And, found Elise Bauer's fabulous site, Learning Movable Type — and her entry on creating an about page — which led me to Jay Allen's site, and in particular, his entry on fixing MT bookmarklets in Safari.

All three of you just earned some good Karma.

April 11, 2004

More tinkering

Just found some code for drop-down monthly archive menus at Karmakars.com, via ETC. Indulging my inner geek. Can't figure out how to change the font colour, though I seem to be able to change the size... At any rate, I like the menu and it saves on real estate! Thanks, Amit.

April 08, 2004

Steve Jobs: "Who writes software in French!?"

Plep links to "Resisting Cyber-English" by Joe Lockard (Bad Subjects 24 [Feb. 1996]), an article that is no doubt even more pertinent eight years on. Lockard concludes,

...the overwhelming predominance of cyber-english establishes, through language/class, a monologic and declamatory relationship with the other-than-anglophone world rather than a dialogic and supple relationship. Maintenance of online language/class structures recapitulates offline English-only monologism, which has encountered historic resistance. For those seeking alterity, the character of trans-language software has been configured by marketability rather than communicative needs. Grassroots non-anglophone cyber-access and empowerment hover temptingly at the horizon, but remain vastly distant.

He does offer a sliver of hope, however, in the final paragraph:

In practical terms, English rejectionism in cyberspace without any acceptable substitute is a self-defeating exercise in purposeless autonomy. That leaves anglophones pursuing Gramscian 'badness' in the paradoxical binds of a double consciousness, an awareness of the repressive effects of cyber-english even as we benefit from its use. Double consciousness, fortunately, is a very productive site of practice.

"Domestic blogs"

Laura at Apt. 11D writes about to Brayden King's recent post in praise of what he calls "domestic blogs" (less cutesy and more inclusive than "mommy blogs," I'll admit).

King links to a recent Times article, "The New Family Album: More parents are using online blogs to share photos, memories, gripes and advice with friends — and strangers." The article, while generally upbeat, has some exceptionable language:¹

Mommy blogs often take navel gazing to new and uninhibited depths, recording every aspect of parenthood, from the pregnancy blood test through the umbilical-cord clipping to the latest triumph in toilet training — complete with photographs, video clips and message boards.

"Navel gazing"??!!? Well, perhaps, but not at one's own navel. The article goes on,

Nobody tracks the number of family-oriented blogs, and estimates of the blogging universe range from 300,000 to 3 million sites, but by all indications, baby blogs are becoming more common. According to an October 2002 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, parents are more likely to be online than nonparents, and 53% of online parents say the Internet has improved the way they connect with family; 61% say it has boosted relations with friends. At Lycos, which is host to two blog sites, moms are regarded as the future. "The new blogging world skews female," explains Michael Sikillian, marketing manager for Lycos Web Publishing. "One day," he predicts, "every family will have a blog. Instead of putting drawings up on the refrigerator, you'll scan them into your computer and upload."

I like the idea of the blogging world "skewing female," though I would question the absolute correlation implied here between "female" and "domestic/family/baby." There are certainly lots of men who blog blog blog about their children, and many, many more women who blog about something else entirely. I would hope that the blogging world "skews" female—though skewing implies going off-course, when any right-thinking person can see that what is meant is moving on-course—because more and more women feel blogging holds something for them.

All of which brings me to the question of the categorization of this blog. I think scribblingwoman is pretty mixed. It's written by an academic with wide interests and a pre-schooler. It's not a "domestic blog," or a book blog, or an sf blog, and it's not always an academic blog. Every now and then I think of putting divisions in my blogroll, but just as I can't categorize this blog, I don't want to diminish others. Certainly some blogs are extremely focused, but many are not. King writes,

I prefer to think that although blogs may offer distinct kinds of content, domestic blogs can be just as intelligently-written and analytically precise as any other kind of blog. For a good example see Laura at Apt. 11D.

I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, I started to read Apt. 11D when I found it listed somewhere as an academic blog, and I know that many others position it in that way.

I think I will stick to my alphabetized blogroll.

Why do we have to keep reinventing the wheel, anyway? Has everyone forgotten Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, in which the protagonist kept differently coloured notebooks about the various aspects of her life? Disintegration ensued, until she realized what was happening and reintegrated her life, symbolized by her decision to use one notebook. (It's a very long novel so I'm sure I'm leaving something out. But you see my point. And without the trouble and expense of analysis.)

Anyway, the very name of this blog evokes the dismissal of early women writers as dilettantes, ignorant of learned and literary culture, dragging down the noble profession of "author" by their inclusion of the personal, the domestic, and the trivial. So you see, I have a mission.

¹ Dawn Friedman, who blogs at This Woman's Work and who was interviewed for the Times article, offers a quick correction to the way her remarks are reported.

Update (8/2/05): Well, I knucked under and introduced categories into my blogroll. But I agonized over it, I really did.

April 06, 2004

Tinkering.

Can you tell?

(Complaints will be dealt with promptly. Or not.)

April 05, 2004

Googlebomb against fascism

This in from Crooked Timber: apparently the first site that comes up when one does a Google search for "Jew" is an anti-semitic hate site. Help correct this by including the word Jew on your blog or website, linked to the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew.

Addendum (2:48): Liz at mamamusings suggests links to "Who is a Jew" in addition to/instead of the Wikipedia link.

April 02, 2004

web zen

Strange and wonderful links blog. The museum zen entry links to xerox art, the "gallery of forgotten girlie magazines," and on-line museums: "collections and exhibits covering a vast array of interests and obsessions."

[Link from Boing Boing]

New (to me) blog/women's writing

Check out Notes in the Margin. How could I not blogroll a blog which quotes from Peter Høeg's Smila's Sense of Snow, one of my favourite books?:

You can learn something about your fellow human beings from what they write in the margin.

Some interesting links right up: an 86 years old woman self-publishes a novel about her life in the depression (23/3/04), and the Feminist Press has reissued three pulp novels by women (13/2/04).

From the Feminist Press: The suggestively named Dix Steele is an ex-airman, an isolated, tough-talking drifter.

Lynn is innocently flattered by what seems to be his fatherly interest in her, which includes invitations to stylish parties and to his spectacular country estate. But fatherly interest is not what David Dwight has in mind, and he usually gets what he wants.

The Girls in 3-B reveals in heart-breaking detail the hidden world of mid-century America, where women live on their own in seedy apartments, have premarital sex, get illegal abortions, yearn to be artists, experiment with drugs, and, if they are so inclined, discover a mannered, thriving lesbian underworld.

I can hardly wait.

Link entry of little substance

Pandagon has a generic blog entry; read this and you can stop reading blogs right now. Be sure to check out all the comments, too; they pretty much cover it. Nothing more to see here. Via feministe.

March 31, 2004

I love engravings,

and so does the author of the beautiful Giornale Nuovo (link from Long story; short pier).

March 29, 2004

Kids on the internet

Liz Lawley at mamamusings writes about negotiating between trust and safety when one's children use the internet. Tracy Kennedy at Netwoman and Fiona Romeo pick up the discussion. Romeo writes about

facilitating a type of parental involvement that leaves space for children's privacy. Much of our recent work has been directed towards learning where the boundaries lie: when does parental monitoring cross the line from being something that makes children feel looked-after and safe, to something that feels like having their pockets searched? This is a very difficult balance to strike, and I think we need to learn from some of the ways parents mediate their children’s contacts and communications in everyday – mostly offline – life.

This sounds commonsensical. Of course, many parents don't manage very well off-line, either. But is the internet substantially different from the rest of life? Do we need to invent new modes of parenting for new technologies? Is our job as parents qualitatively different from that of previous generations? I am inclined to think that it is, but not just because of something as relatively clear-cut as the internet, or more specifically, danger on the internet. Sure, that's part of it, along with globalization, global warming, advanced monopoly capitalism ... the twenty-first century, in fact. We have to find new ways of parenting in so many ways.

Addendum (1:44pm):

Here is a barely-there image of a drawing Harry G. Peter did for Wonder Woman comics: it depicts a little boy shaking his fist at a retreating man and saying, "Scared o'me, huh?" while Wonder Woman twirls her lasso in the background. It is meant to indicate my idealized protective relationship with my child. The question is, I suppose, what does the lasso represent? More than software.

March 25, 2004

Noam Chomsky has started a blog

here.

Link from Crooked Timber.

Memory

Boing Boing links to a story about various technological "external memories," none quite as elegant as the idea of cyber-punk implants, but getting there. I was just going to note it, but then read this beautiful poem at Watermark, and the two seemed somehow to go together. Or not.

journals, notebooks, diaries, poems

laying the mind out
on a white sheet
sometimes in modest bedclothes

sometimes naked
flabby and flatulent
sometimes in a dark shroud

look at it there
pennies on the eyes
breasts nuzzling the armpits

waiting to be washed

I think that the technology will take awhile.

March 23, 2004

Honestly

Was just reading Clive Thompson's article, "The Honesty Virus," in The New York Times Magazine (21/3/04), available on-line here. He cites a study that indicates that people are more honest on-line than either in person or on the phone, because, as he blogged at collision detection, "we know that online, it's easy to get busted; our words are usually being saved and recorded. The online world is tough on liars, because machines don't forget." He does go on to mention the lack of inhibition many feel on-line, but the gist of his argument seems to be that we are only honest because we have to be. While the idea of the internet as "the unlikely conscience of the world" is intriguing, it is depressing to think that it may only be so because of fear of exposure. But surely all the pseudonymous bloggers, who if Thompson is correct could say what they like, shield their identities to enable honesty. I don't think I feel the impulse to reveal or be truthful because I may get busted later; I think it stems from the anonymity of the fingers on the keyboard. But that may just be a lack of forethought.

March 21, 2004

Gendered comments

So far, no comments on Netwoman's post about comments and gender. Under what circumstances ought one to delete a comment? Are comments from men treated differently from comments by women?

Addendum (22/3/04): feministe picks up the thread and describes how an overtly feminist site can become a lightening rod.

March 16, 2004

The big questions

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber asks academics to comment on why they started (or haven't started) blogs. The conversation is getting interesting, and will be worth following. In the comments, Ghost of a Flea (not his real name) asks about bloggers who use pseudonyms: "Is blogging an onanistic shame? Or are academics worried their politics, taste, television viewing habits and so forth could adversely influence a tenure committee?" And a followup question: conversely, are some of us wilfully ignoring those realities?

March 14, 2004

Gender and blogging

A post from Laura over at Apt. 11D on whether or not it's true that women don't write political blogs, and how can we define politics. Laura links to "The Blogosphere: Boys 'n' Their Toys," an article by Brian Montopoli that provides some history of the development of the blogosphere from its "origins in the male-dominated tech world." The article quotes an estimate that only 4% of political blogs are written by women, but I tend to think, along with Laura, that this indicates a very narrow definition of "political."

March 13, 2004

Gender and voice

Here, via feministe, is an intriguing post from PinkDreamPoppies at Alas, a Blog, about the gendering of written language: the ways in which we gender it, as readers; the ways in which it is shaped by the gender of the writer. Pop quiz: What gender is PinkDreamPoppies? If you answered, "female," why, you'd be wrong. The post also mentions that gender-in-writing test that I mentioned sometime ago; a number of other women also report being identified as male. Be sure to read the comments, too.

March 11, 2004

Whew! This could never happen here

Birmingham University has become embroiled in a controversy because of plans to ban personal websites on university servers. Story from Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber.

March 10, 2004

Last of the reading week posts

5/3/04/9:44pm

Playgrounds of NYC

In partial fulfillment of my promise:

Here is the Jinker boy in Union Square playground while Mummy and Daddy are spelling each other off to make book-buying runs to nearby Barnes and Noble:

Here he is in Juniper Park in Queens:

Here he is in one of those oversized hamster runs, where he was taken as a birthday treat by his aunt and uncle. He loved it, of course; we could only extract him with the promise of cake and presents waiting at home and even then he howled like a monkey:

And here is a shot on the promenade at Brooklyn Heights,

(me, Jinker boy, our friends Jeremy and Danielle) on the way to the playground,

just before a downpour.

6/3/04/12:10am

This going without web access, cold turkey, is rough! I could make more of an effort to get some access, I suppose, but time is tight. We'll be out tomorrow; perhaps I can finagle an hour at an internet cafe from Joe, in exchange for ... what? Being so wonderful to all his family? Yeah, that's it! For being so wonderful!

[Never did, of course. But then, wasn't all that wonderful.]

February 22, 2004

And I have to say

the MT-Textile 2.0 plugin from Brad Choate is pretty cool. It makes coding on the fly a lot easier. Highly recommended for anyone who finds that tripping over HTML impedes their flow.

February 17, 2004

Introducing...

Three former students who blogged for my sf class last term have not only kept up their blogs, but recently refurbished them. If you would like to see what three of UNBSJ's best and brightest are up to, check out (in alphabetical order) A Ratboy's Notebook, blogging it, and Zhengshu's New Book (brand new; Consumption of Cacti contains previous posts).

February 15, 2004

MT Textile 2

So now one can add footnotes¹.

¹ And I love footnotes.

Time keeps on slippin

A recent post from Chuck Tryon about the birthday of his elderly aunt really resonates for me. Both my grandmothers died in the 1990s, one at the age of 99 and one at 100. They both lived in the UK so I didn't see them very often, but I regret that I didn't find out more from them when I did have the chance. Most of what I know about them is filtered through my parents, which is only a fraction of the picture I'm sure. I don't want to make the same mistake with my parents, who are getting on themselves, but I often find that they don't want to talk about the past too much. Or at least, they only want to remember what they want to remember. And more than once I have asked about something significant that they themselves told me, and recently, and they have no recollection. Quicksand.

And then I think, isn't this some sort of Proustian hubris on my part? I have all-too-frequent proof that I can't even remember, or I misremember, events from my own life, so isn't it a fool's errand to run after my parents and grandparents? Don't we just have to accept that most of the sand falls outside the hourglass? One can try and keep journals or somesuch, but in my experience, one writes the least when things are most eventful. And blogging — the kind of blogging I am doing, anyway, as distinct from the more personal sort — is a way of capturing some types of things, but I don't know how helpful all my Barbie posts are going to be, if I ever look back here in an attempt to reconstruct my own past.

It's a Zeitgeist thing: Memento, that new comedy, 50 First Dates (with Adam Sandler! I can't even imagine one). I'm almost finished the 20th annual collection of the Year's Best Science Fiction edited by by Gardner Dozois (review forthcoming; watch this space), and it strikes me — and no doubt this says something about the demographics of successful sf writers — that a disproportionate number of the stories are about Alzheimer's. More on this soon.

February 04, 2004

Carrie, eat your heart out.

Here, via the amazing Plep, is a blog about shoes. All about shoes.

I visited the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto the last time I was there. They have some lovely 18thc shoes,

and I was delighted to find a magnet with a picture of them in the giftshop. (If they set up a shoe shop, they would make a killing!)

Joe and I visited the Ellis Island Museum shortly after it reopened—a few years back now—and the thing I remember most strongly is a single, tiny leather bootie, lost by someone (and where are they now?), sitting in a glass display case.

What is it about shoes?

February 03, 2004

Unelectable reprise

Those of you who were following the unelectable meme—and you know who you are—may be interested in the following exchange taking place on H-Mac. It started with some poor fellow from France, who probably didn't know what he was stepping into, posting a message about miserable failure. I followed up with a post mentioning someone unelectable. These two messages were promptly followed by two others, both rather tetchy. A non-polical forum, tricks are for kids, crypto-politics, yada yada yada. Both respondents freely, one might even say obliviously, admit to more egregious actions themselves. My response is a model of wit and restraint. I am shocked, shocked at this lack of civility among Mac users.

No word yet from France.

Gifts of web art

Jill at jill/txt has an interesting post on web art; check it out and follow the links. And here is a link to the Whitney Museum portal to net art. Here is hope for anyone worrying that the net is loosing the ethos of free exchange.

January 31, 2004

If a blogger posted in the forest and nobody read it...

Joseph Duemer at Reading and Writing has a thoughtful post on blogging and audience. He writes, “When I began the first version of this weblog I had little sense of audience.” I have also recently been thinking of readership. When I began this blog last summer I was mainly writing for myself: doodling on the keyboard, noting things I wanted to remember. The only person who seemed to be reading was my significant other. I was gob-smacked when one of my colleagues mentioned that he had also been reading. Shortly thereafter I asked my sf class to start blogging, and began blogging to them, including the teacherly tone and excess of explanation. Guess it showed: Don at Revolutionary Moderation read the blog during that time and commented, “I get the feeling, looking around, that the blog is primarily meant to be read by her students, but you know, funny thing about the internet...” And he was right. I am only a Flippery Fish—one link or so away from a Slimy Mollusk—but a modest number of complete strangers have visited, and some have come back. And yet they don’t always feel like complete strangers, either; many are academics of one sort of another, and there is something refreshing about discussing our work mediated by the screen and keyboard, not having to worry about institutional relationships. Then there is the newborn Palimpsest, a new group blog spearheaded by George H. Williams, set up to explore applying the open source model to teaching materials.

Some of my students from that first class are still reading, and a couple are keeping up their own blogs (here, and here), and now there’s the new women’s writing class, so my students will remain an important part of my projected audience. But knowing that there are others out there, strangers, has given me a wider sense of scope and potential for something that started out as a mole-blind experiment.

And then, as Joseph also comments, the technology itself is fun.

January 29, 2004

Feed me, Seymour

I LOVE Jennifer! (With some left over for Liz Lawley who pointed in her direction.) Etc. Indulging my inner geek is the first site that made sense to me about why I should care about RSS feeds and, more importantly, how to do them.

So. Two nice new little buttons at the bottom of the sidebar.

Now maybe I can go and do some other work.

January 26, 2004

Spam and chips, spam and sausages

How exciting! After reading of other bloggers' irritation with comment spam (here and here and here, for starters), I have finally arrived: I had my first one today. Promptly saw about getting MT-Blacklist installed (had to go higher up the food chain, but it's now in place).

The message read "can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars," which gave me pause. Thought it was from one of my students until I noticed the word "penis" in the URL. They wouldn't dare.

January 25, 2004

Daddy's turn to put baby to bed

Have been mucking around for hours with the links to the various blog directories, etc. from this page. Bless Taylor McKnight and his lovely, uniform badges which prevent the whole thing from looking like a dog's breakfast. Had removed all the buttons in imitation of Liz Lawley's clean, uncluttered sidebar, but then I thought, what the heck, I'm always posting graphics anyway. So, there they are. Until I take them away.

January 22, 2004

Evolving at the speed of light

I am now a Slippery, no, sorry, a Flippery Fish. Much more appealing than a Slimy Mollusc.

This is all getting very heady.

Have to go; Alex is crumbling bread onto my keyboard.

January 20, 2004

Just add lemon

Not much to choose between them, I suppose, but on balance I think that I would prefer to be a Lowly Insect than a Slimy Mollusc.

And no doubt I will be again.

January 19, 2004

What I've been doing

Had a surprise birthday party for Joe on Friday, which wasn't, as it turned out, a surprise, though he was very gracious and played along. I'm now exhausted and broke, but it was a good party.

Have a migraine today and spent it in bed with my trusty ice-packs. Awake now at this ungodly hour but back to bed soon. Cancelled class tomorrow; it's for their own good.

My laptop has died. Enough said. How to get a new one? Sigh.

The new blog for the women's writing class is percolating nicely.

January 14, 2004

100th Post!

January 09, 2004

On-line Teaching Resources

George H. Williams has started to explore the idea of some sort of on-line mechanism to share teaching resources (a blog, or a wiki [whatever that is!!]?). Judging by the comments to his post, many others would be interested in joining in. I know that I would, and will keep an eye on developments. I feel the same dissatisfaction with password-protected courseware, like our own WebCT here at UNBSJ, that is expressed here. In fact I, like many others, am in the process of shifting away from WebCT; I still have it set up this term, but I have also set up a course blog for one class, which is a much more elegant option. I doubt I would abandon WebCT completely, but I wouldn't be sorry to avoid its clunky discussion function. I suppose there are security and privacy issues for the students; I will look forward to hearing what GHW et al. have to say about that. I seem to remember a discussion some months ago now at mamamusings about the ethics involved in blogging for students and asking students to blog. These issues would all come to the fore again if one moved completely away from courseware. But the idea of sharing resources is tantalizing, and is anyway a separate issue from the briar-patch of students' on-line participation.

Postscript: here are some excellent posts from mamamusings last summer: what's wrong with courseware (it's closed); mt as courseware (scarily technical but I am getting closer to biting the bullet); and professorial ethics and boundaries (blogging and students; this one generated some very interesting discussion. And—full circle—an entry by George W. Williams seems to have acted as catalyst. And a post from Weez Blog).

Spam and eggs, spam and cheese, spam and rhymes

Have you noticed lately that spam headers have changed? This phenomenon has been noted at neuromantics.net/bunker—

My spam has been getting quite strange recently, all caught thanks to Spamsieve, and bordering on the oddly beautiful...

beebread ameliorate mow sunfish impropriety promethean create del candid episcopalian ideolect antagonism athenian

cocksure crane furious
who tunnel cherry wreck
zoroaster malfunction bonfire
weren't fricative hiram corrugate

patchwork mastodon theta dung
adieu sawfly
stockpile aesthete advance
altimeter antony cecil

There was another post on the same subject a week or so back by Bruce Sterling (also noted by mamamusings):

Spam is now forced to mutter eerie magic charms as it routes its way past the growing host of armed spam guards to my mailbox. 'No, no kill me, I am not spaaaaam... Would spam speak of "Orinoco Apocrypha"? Would mere spam muse on "brutal Prussia," "discernable Petersburg" and an "Acapulco assault"? I do these cultured, verbally elaborate things in my "Pillsbury showboat," and hence I cannot be spam! Let me through with my "hierarchic bronchiole", do not extinguish me o router and repeater!'

December 27, 2003

Note to Jason/aka Theory Slut:

Re. your latest post about the pomo quiz: Well, I chose Johnny Depp as well (the first time; Angelina Jolie the second) and look how I turned out!

You know, you really must add a comments function. You use Blogger, right? Go here.

December 06, 2003

Come here, boy!

Check out this entry at Crooked Timber about marrying ones pets. Not a sexual thing, she hastens to add, don't worry, more of a commitment ceremony designed to deepen the interspecies relationship with that special furry-faced someone.

I check out Crooked Timber often, but this entry tips the balance and I will add them to my list on the right, there.

Lucky readers!

Term is over and the blog entries are getting longer, as are the nights.

December 05, 2003

Crash test dummy

Two weeks ago I had my sf class read J.G. Ballard's Crash. (For anyone unfamiliar with the novel, here is the blurb from the back cover:

In this hallucinatory novel, an automobile provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a 'TV scientist' turned 'nightmare angel of the highways,' experiments with erotic atrocities among auto crash victims, each more sinister than the last. James Ballard, his friend and fellow obsessive, tells the story of this twisted visionary as he careens rapidly toward his own demise in an internationally orchestrated car crash with Elizabeth Taylor. A classic work of cutting-edge fiction, Crash explores both the disturbing implications and horrific possibilities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.

A little overblown, but you get the idea.)

This is the second class I have asked to read this novel, and while the previous one uniformly disliked it, they did so with none of the vehemence of the current group (see here, here and here [26/11/03:9am]). Of course they are two different groups of people, but I wonder if asking this year’s bunch to blog might have increased their comfort levels with me, and each other, and allowed them to be more forthright.

One aspect of the whole discussion has given me real pause: two students told me that the novel had made them extremely uncomfortable due to events in their own pasts. I had not considered this possibility with this particular text; certainly it’s full of graphic descriptions of sex and physical injuries, but the sex is consensual and the injuries are from car crashes: it lacks the sort of coercion, abuse of power, or interpersonal violence that would have automatically impelled me to issue a content warning. Actually, I have only once ever put something on a course that I thought warranted such a warning: I showed Boys Don’t Cry last year in my intro. to gender studies class, because the subject was important enough to override considerations of comfort (here is the official page from Fox, which manages not to mention that Brandon Teena was transgendered). I put Crash on this year’s course as part of a section on technology interfacing with sexuality (we also read William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome” and Candas Jane Dorsey’s “(Learning About) Machine Sex”), but while it is an early example of the treatment of this theme, because of the reactions this year I doubt I will assign the whole novel again. Perhaps just an excerpt; there is one published in the RE/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition that I have, that would work.

Anyway, apart from anything else, I realized that I don’t want to read it again, so how can I teach it?

The whole discussion was an interesting exercise, however. The students questioned whether it is sf at all, and I have to agree that it is only in the broadest sense. It seems to be set at the time of the writing (pub. 1971), but it is strangely prophetic in its evocation of a world where individuals are disassociated from any sense of community by the impersonality of their surroundings; to whatever extent that was true thirty years ago, it must be even more so now. And even though that last may be arguable, the novel is prescient in terms of sf trends.

One of my students wrote a somewhat more appreciative blog entry than most of his classmates, and I think it’s worth quoting at length:

Seeing the reaction of the class towards James Ballard's Crash, I felt inclined to say a few things about it that I think I left unsaid. When we were on our break i was explaining to Krystal how i had felt about this novel. I told her about when I had visited England when i was about 13 and my parents and I were at the Piccadilly train station and somehow i got seperated from my parents and I ended up getting up close to the actual platform of the tracks, eventually the train had come and it whizzed by me and it just caught me offguard. It didn't scare me neither did it fascinate me, for me those 30 seconds of the train whizzing by me with all the lights, sounds and wind will always be a memory. This is how I felt about Crash. The whole novel seemed to me as just a plethora of sexual images. To the point where I had just become numb. And this is where I maybe understood where Ballard was coming from. Media in the contemporary world seems to forcefeed society with images of violence and sex and more imporatantly death, to the point where we take it for granted. In my opinion technology has amost numbed us to these aspects of society. We watch violence and death on the news and it does not seem to affect us anymore. The abundance of sex and our continued interactions in everything that we come in contact whether it's advertisements, movies, sitcoms whatever, we take sex and it's societal implications for granted. Maybe Ballard believes that we shouldn't.

To an extent, I had to justify choosing the novel, and that made me think about it beyond the obvious human/technological interface idea. It is, above all, a novel of ideas. A concept novel. I think that Ballard had this neato idea about people who got off on car crashes as emblems of what he saw as dangerous social and cultural trends, but instead of writing a story, as one of my students wished on his Crash webpage, he sat down and wrote a whole novel. I have to say it: that sort of unremitting focus in spite of all other considerations: it’s such a guy thing. But that being said, and as I remarked to my students, they may have hated it but I doubt that they will forget having read it. They may forget characters or incidents, but they won’t forget the queasy feeling they had as they read it, or the central linkage of sex, twisted metal, and wounds. And how long do they think they would have remembered, in comparison, an earnest editorial, say, on over-dependence on technology? And really, how else can we measure the success of a piece of writing but by the strength of its impact? One of my students wrote :

There's a saying I've heard once or thrice that every personal library should have one book that can offend anybody. Well, now my library has such a book, and it's name is Crash.... it's staying in my library as that book that can offend anyone. A trophy, if you will, to a literary war-wound received during my university days.

It is a fascinating novel; it must be practically unique in being so full of sex, from cover to cover, yet in utterly failing to titillate. It is the most unsexy dirty book that one can imagine, and that can hardly be unintentional in a writer of Ballard’s talent. (That is one reason why the Cronenberg film is so irritating: it could not, by virtue of being a visual medium, never mind the beautiful actors, achieve the almost ascetic quality that the novel has. Perversely ascetic—degradedly and begrimedly ascetic—or do I mean passionless? Or just enervated?). No-one in it to like, or sympathize with. Or, to even understand. Ballard makes us feel the same disassociation, the same anomie, as his characters. I suspect that that is the real reason for the strong reactions from many readers, myself included.

I can’t help thinking that Ballard must have had in mind the old comparison between being compelled by something, and not being able to look away from an accident. “You know. It was like a car crash; I couldn’t look away.”

December 02, 2003

We're making art, people

Found this: "A project to create a comprehensive graphical representation of the internet in just one day and using only a single computer has already produced some eye-catching images":

The different colours represent different geographical areas (North America is blue; the Pacific Rim is red, etc.).

A question: is the web really developing, then, like William Gibson et al. envisioned, an interconnected, global community, beyond political boundaries, etc. etc. Or, have those sorts of visions so shaped our understanding that we can conceive of it in no other way? Is science (this project, in particular) shaped to such an extent, even determined, by aesthetics and culture?

But gosh, it's pretty.

September 28, 2003

More on Pope

To add to the discussion of Pope mentioned below: I owe to him the title of this blog, as he was grinding his teeth about scribbling women long before Hawthorne made his famous comment in 1855 that "America is now wholly given over to a d—ned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash — and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed."

Pope's infamous attack on Eliza Haywood in The Dunciad
(published in 1728 and expanded in 1744)

See in the circle next, Eliza placed,
Two babes of love close clinging
To her waist.

was supplemented by a note, in case anyone missed the point: "In this game, is expos'd in the most contemptuous manner, the profligate licentiousness of those Shameless Scribblers (for the most part of that Sex, which ought least to be capable of such malice or imprudence) who in libellous Memoirs and Novels reveal the faults and misfortune of both sexes, to the ruin or disturbance, of public fame or private happiness." Haywood is offered as the prize in a urinating competition: ‘Who best can send on high/ The salient spout, fairstreaming to the sky,’ (II, 15.3-5). The second prize was a chamber pot. Jonathan Swift used similar language when he wrote, "I have heard of [her] as a stupid, infamous scribbling woman, but have not seen any of her productions."

Alas, I cannot claim to the be first (or even the fiftieth, I am sure) to attempt to reclaim this slur and refashion it into a badge of honour, for there is Scribbling Women, a project of the Public Media Foundation which dramatizes stories by American women writers for national radio broadcast in the U.S.A.; Scribbling Women: Short Stories by 19th-Century American Women (1997), a book edited by Elaine Showalter; Style and the "Scribbling Women": An Empirical Analysis of Nineteenth-Century American Fiction by Mary P. Hiatt; Domestic Goddess, a.k.a. "scribbling mobs of women," a moderated E-journal, devoted to women writers, beginning in the 19th century, who wrote domestic fiction; a proposed collection called Scribbling Women: The Form of the Short Story, 1850-present; and many individual references. Clearly I cannot claim originality, though I would point out that all these other references are without exception to American women writers via the Hawthorne quote, while I of course, as an eighteenth–centuryist and a reader of British literature, prefer to be insulted by Swift and Pope.

July 03, 2003

Up and running

Things seem to be going smoothly with Movable Type. Now to tinker a little with the template, add some links, etc. etc. Then maybe—just maybe—I'll have some time to read and so will be able to get to the business of this blog.

But before that, I have to finish some overdue reviews; will post a link to the one for H-Net when it appears, of Carolyn Kitch's The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

July 02, 2003

more birth pangs

After several frustrating days, I managed to get Blogger more or less talking to my web server. Then I discovered that UNB has an interface with Movable Type, which seems like a more flexible programme, so I will now convert over to MT before going any further.