“And everything I ever learned about writing didn’t matter anymore. Everything I ever thought about writing went out the window as the breeze blew through my hair and the words poured out of me. I didn’t have to take writing seriously. I didn’t have to take words seriously. I didn’t have to sound like anyone else. I didn’t have to sound like The New Yorker — which weirdly, I sometimes sound like a little by NOT TRYING TO SOUND LIKE IT. So it showed me that I had a lot of hang-ups about writing and it showed me how to get over them fast. It showed me how to sound like myself. It gave me back my voice, which surprised people and surprised no one as much as it surprised me. Blogging was a place I could go and be me, completely, totally, unapologetically me. And if people didn’t like it, screw ’em. And I could write the hell out of the screen and if it blew up and disappeared, it didn’t matter anyway, because I could always come back and try something else again later. So despite all my inclinations towards bottles of ink and pads of paper, I started to blog and blog and blog and blog and there was no stopping me.”
Category Archives: Blogging
From William Gibson’s blog
William Gibson has a blog. I’d like to know if having a website (and blog) was something his publisher pushed or if he was enthusiastic about the idea. One interesting (and discouraging) item from his bio:
“I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.”
Halley Suitt: Table Watching
“Crash, heartache heading your way boy, when I look into her icy porcelain face. Pretty english girl looks — china shop white skin and black straight hair, but more than English, something mixed in there to make her more exotic, maybe half Japanese, and very beautiful. But may I tell you, kind eager guy, run for your life. She’s fine and special and complicated in ways you will be so sorry to learn about and she’ll do you serious damage dear. She leans back in her seat, stretched as far away from him as she can. Nothing on the menu is right. Something he did last night, brings a slightly sour expression to her face. Run now.”
Andrew Sullivan on blogging
“The one wonderful thing about blogging from your laptop is that you don’t have to deal with other people. You can broadcast alienated, disembodied, disassociated murmurings into a people-free void. You don’t have to run something past an editor, or frame your argument to an established group of subscribers. You just say what the hell you want.”
— Andrew Sullivan in Slate
Gnomedex: Conference blogging
I’ve been attending conventions, conferences and meetings of one sort or another for twenty-five years but this one is different. This one is wired. More to the point, it’s unwired. Many (most?) of the attendees have their notebook computers fired up and connected to the Internet via a wireless network. So, while the speakers were making their presentations, many of the people in the audience were “reporting” what was being said by posting (text and photos) to their personal blogs. Now, I don’t know if this is journalism or not. But I’m not sure it matters. Something is going on here. Steve Gibson is talking about Internet security and seconds later some guy in the audience hits the enter key and people all over the world can read about it (with photos). No networks. No editors. No filtering. How do we know that what we’re reading is accurate or fair? Well, there were probably a dozen people blogging today’s presentations. Pretty unlikely they’d all have the same ax to grind. Like I said… feels like something is happening here. [killed dead links in this post]
Everybody on the Web is famous to 15 people
In an interview on Tom Peters’ website, David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web and coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto, offers the following on Weblogs:
“If you browse randomly through these 500,000 to a million Weblogs, most of them that you come across will be uninteresting to you. But, so what? It’s not that everybody on the Web is famous for 15 minutes. It’s that everybody on the Web is famous to 15 people.”
Blogging life.
Reply
If I were 22 years old and making regular blog entries, what would it look like thirty or forty years later. Almost 11,000 entries. Your life online. True, a lot of the shit we put in our blogs hardly seems worth the keystrokes. But the idea intrigues me.
I think my mom would have been up for a blog. She kept journals during the latter years of her life. I can see her sitting at the kitchen table, writing in her tiny, perfect longhand. When we asked what she was writing she’d say, “Oh, things that happened yesterday… things I’m thinking about.”
One more scary thing for today’s teenagers to deal with. Mom blogging away the intimate details of her 13 year old daughter’s life. “Hey, Amber. Did you see your mom’s blog today? She said she thought you were getting your first period.” Not good. As George Costanza told his mom, “You can’t be out there. I’m out there, so you can’t be out there.”
Moon over Kennett
My original idea for a blog was to persuade half a dozen of the more interesting people I know to jot down a few lines every week or so and I’d post them here. It required more organization than I could muster.
Last week I received an email from one of The Six that perfectly captures my original idea. My friend had taken a photograph he had to share. Now, you either get butt-crack humor or you do not. I would have guessed there were lots of websites dedicated to this phenomenon but a Google search didn’t reveal much.
For me the best part is the image of my friend coming out of his office, spotting the photo-op, racing back in to find and load his camera, then dashing back to the street to take the picture. That requires a… joie de vivre that’s very rare, in my experience.
As I thought about my original concept I became mildly depressed that I could only come up with six interesting friends. After receiving the butt-crack photo, I consider myself fortunate to know that many.