today i did a bit of gardening. must get some new azaleas. the mailman is late – normally presents at 10.30am each morning. is it crazy that i briefly imagine him dead in a ditch? maybe i should get some new hobbies. i’ll start right away.
i’ve been going through the archives of adam fieled’s blog. i don’t care if he knows it. i’m writing a paper on blogging & using his blog as material. the unsual thing though is how much i feel like i’m getting inside his head – his personality & the way he thinks about poetics. it’s interesting, but also not an entirely comfortable feeling.
angela meyer has just posted her talk on cultural blogging. while commenting, a number of things intervened (none related to gardening; more than one related to the demands of a child; exactly one related to the delivery of mail). the point is though, that by the time i left a comment someone else already had. luckily his comment didn’t bring up anything i should have referred to. but if it had of, i would have felt quite the fool. is it crazy that i am analysing this potential embarrassment, now situated firmly in the past, publicly? maybe i should get some new hobbies. i’ll start right now.
this – as suggested by sarah (founder of the ‘fair-shake-of-the-sauce bottle fanclub’) – is a baby hedgehog.
What a cute hedgehog. Angela’s post is very comprehensive. The beauty of blogs is that they can be anything and there is no definition of success. I’m afraid Adam Fieled’d blog is tiny white font on a black background and as such gets the big veto for aesthetic reasons. No capitals today? Did I say that is a very cute hedgehog, if you hold them by the tail you don’t get burnt when you dip them in the deep frier, hmm crunchy.
I really feel like a beer.
yeah me too. & i’m gonna drink it while lying down.
wow, adam fieled’s blog is dense.
that not entirely comfortable feeeling seems to be a by-product of any engaged criticism on one persons’s work – as a feeling i’m not really sure what it means or what you do with it. just put it aside and look at it, is my answer, i guess, after worrying about it many times. the homunculus inside adam fieled’s head is a slightly more charitable metaphor than ‘critic as parasite’, or easier to live with, so i think i’ll steal it from you.
by the way how does your blog know that ‘i know when you click the links’ is a possibly related post to this? i mean, i know it must scan the text and match keywords or something, but there didn’t seem to anything recognisably similar (to a computer) between the posts. yet it was right.
yep, density seems to be a key element. it’s why i’m contrasting him with myself.
i’d be interested to know what you think of the whole ‘regularity’ thing with blogging tim, seeing as you’re also a writer that doesn’t keep up a once-a-day posting record either.
& yeah, i don’t know how the ‘related posts’ thing works. but i think it tries to find relations right across wordpress (i once had a post that was somehow related to an american doctor’s blog – a kind of dr. phil persona). which is interesting, because most of the time my posts are only related to my own posts. am i that unique? surely someone else on wordpress’ public site is blogging about the things i am…
and are they different each time? the possibly related post to ‘homunculus’ is ‘Your mind will become stronger by accident!’ intriguing.
it’s tempting to try and maintain some kind of regularity. one of the reasons i haven’t signed up to twitter is because when my friend fiona joined she wrote on one of her posts something like, ‘i’ve been thinking in twitter-style updates all day and i can’t stop’. i know that would happen to me and i don’t want it to.
so, i try to resist the pull towards regular posts because they’re often stupid. i have heaps of ‘draft’ posts saved, and i often write things and then rethink and take them down. i was going to post something a friend said at a party the other night which i enjoyed thinking about, but then, what if the friend and the person referred to read it, etc. so there’s that reason too – i often want to post about things that are personal.
i sometimes wonder why i keep doing it when i post so little; i used to worry about it more. i like this blog keri linked to once – uncomplicatedly.wordpress.com/ – and thought i might try and emulate it by posting great essays every few months, but that hasn’t worked out. i do enjoy seeing what i’ve written up there, in a different space to microsoft word. i think it’s the additive format of blogging i’ve have trouble with in the past – that it just keeps growing with no end in sight. what happens to all those old posts? i guess they’re all still “there” waiting to be reactivated. lucas made a book out of his petersham zine and that was nice to flick through…
If you want to get into Adam’s head remember that people often reveal themselves more honestly when they are improvising in their comment section than in their posts. In the last two days he has called one person who disagreed with him a ’smartarse’ and another one an ‘imbecile’. If you are writing a paper on blogging you might want to avoid a bunch of arrogant second rate academics who are chronically incapable of writing with any clarity or precision and whose arrogance rests on the shakiest of foundations. Don’t be sucked in by their aura of importance, it is entirely self-generated. No-one except the so called post-avantists themselves takes ‘post-avant’ for anything but a deluded wank-fest. And have a wonderful day, Mr Motion,
yeah, it’s an interesting thing – i think he enjoys that sort of passionate attack, whereas i don’t think it’s that valuable. his post on ‘flame wars’ is revealing, in that he thinks there can (occasionally) be some intellectual benefit in public irate debate. i tend to think it’s nearly always a waste of time. having said that though i do admire the way he writes his posts. there’s a density & intelligence i find compelling, even though i don’t really aim to emulate it. maybe some of his work is a good example of the possible pitfalls involved in posting in this way, in public? i remember todd swift linked to post of his once – some rant about being a post-avant poet, wanting to change the poetic landscape – & title it ’silly poet’. you share everything deeply & people are liable to think, wow, he’s silly…
you’re right though about comments, & i am including references to a few different comments, although mainly ones on my blog. one of yours may pop in paul. there’s also one by a friend of mine (a non-poetry type) who jokingly refers to my online work as ‘deluded ramblings’, before finishing with ‘P.S. You’re rubbish.’ i’m mainly including it for the anticipated audience laughs…
i had some cold chisel fan drop in a while back (possibly searching around for web-material on his favourite band of all time) who felt compelled to call me an ignorant wanker. responding with fervor probably would have only made me look bad. so i wrote my stock line: ‘thanks for commenting!’
Yes, I agree. But Agnes is a friend of mine. Commenting is one of the hardest and wierdest of all aspects of blogging. I have had trouble with it since I started years ago. Almost everything you can do is wrong to someone. If I write supportive encouraging comments I am accused of schmoozing for attention and audience. If I write comments which engage and disagree I am accused of being a ‘troll’ or of attacking for attention. I have been one of the most disliked poetry bloggers and one of the most loved at the same time. I’ve had a thousand readers in a day drop to twenty overnight when I posted piece titled “fucking Americans”. If I hadn’t changed from .wordpress to .com and lost all my technorati and google juice I would be in the top five bloggers on the list you make fun of because you are too cool to care. But in the end, Mr Motion, commenting is what makes blogging happen. It is the engagement that takes poetry out of the hands of the gatekeepers (intellectuals and editors) and makes it once again, and gloriously, a direct connection between the poet and the audience.
i don’t know who is agnes is…
& yes, i did advertise the fact on facebook etc that i made it onto that ‘list’. in fact the only reason i made it on is because i logged on at technorati, with the express purpose of seeing if i made it in. i had a hunch that my site is a bit more active than many of the sites on the list…
but i’ll also make fun of it because i’m not to sure what it all means. i never really thought poetry blogging would be something that would generate a ranked list. it’s funny. & i still think it is funny. i scanned the ‘genre’ column, & lo & behold, after you & peter minter, there’s my name for poetry. so don’t be offended if you see me at some lit-event wearing a ‘3rd best poetry-blogger in the country’ t-shirt, cashing in on both the implicit honesty and sarcasm of it all. it indicates a fence-sitting position, mr squires.
Which is always uncomfortable on the bum, Mr Motion. I have a joke for you. It is very unpoetic.
From Adam’s latest post, “Where a movement is concerned, there is only so much that one man can do.”
How tempted I was to comment, “Yeah, wipe and flush.” Hahaha.
How’s the blogging article going?
Ah ha. So this is why my ears have been ringing. Interesting series. I’m gonna go read the third installment now. Then maybe I’ll go buy a personality without an anus in the middle of its forehead…
are those peronalities on the market yet? maybe there’s an iphone ap…