A stretch of river LVII: "Something old folks do while waiting to croak"

Because you people are at least as cool as I am, I've decided to give you a little glimpse behind the scenes of that arranging, deepening, enchanting thing we do here. (Image found here.)

So. It's a snowy Monday morning here, I'm tromping about in the park with Scruffy in about five inches of new snow, there's been so little wind that even the thinnest tree branches have as much as two inches of snow on them, I'm kicking myself yet again for not having a camera to take some pictures to share here with my reader(s), I'm thinking Hmm--I haven't had a Stretch of River post in a while . . . and then I recall this from Nick Carr (via Andrew Sullivan:

I remember when it was kind of cool to be a blogger. You'd walk around with a swagger in your step, a twinkle in your eye. Now it's just humiliating. Blogging has become like mahjong or needlepoint or clipping coupons out of Walgreens circulars: something old folks do while waiting to croak.

[snip]

In 2006, 28% of teens were blogging [according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project]. Now, just three years later, the percentage has tumbled to 14%. Among twentysomethings, the percentage who write blogs has fallen from 24% to 15%. Writing comments on blogs is also down sharply among the young. It's only geezers - those over 30 - who are doing more blogging than they used to.

This past Friday, the geezer whose tinkling of the QWERTY-keys you're now reading rode his bicycle out to his weekly tutoring job, a round-trip of almost 36 miles. I'm a healthy geezer, but a geezer (I'll turn 48 in April). But I'm healthy!

And good old Blog Meridian is fast approaching blogospheric geezerdom as well--it will celebrate its 6th birthday on the 27th of this month. To paraphrase the Barbara Mandrell song, I was bloggin' when bloggin' was still cool.

I visited the survey to see if I could gain any insight as to why this dramatic, sudden demographic shift might be occurring. After all: aren't teenagers at least as self-absorbed as the baby-boomers and Gen-Xers who now comprise the majority of bloggers? Well, yes. But the rapid rise of Facebook among younger folks would seem to suggest that they are just as self-absorbed as they always have been--they just want to express that self-absorption more rapidly than blogs permit. No time to wallow. Now, a blog, on the other hand . . . but for the addition of the "L," it would read "bog": a really good place to wallow.

Carr's despair is rooted in his realization that "30 is the new 60," or something like that. I don't feel despair; it's really more like a puzzlement: Blogging brings me such regular enjoyment that it's hard for me to imagine more people, and younger people, don't find it equally enjoyable. Besides, I gave up deluding myself that I'm cool, or have or ever had a chance of becoming cool, a long time ago--back in high school, in fact. Now, it is true that I do ride a bike on a more-or-less regular basis, and here in Wichita that fact has the status of being so cool it's not yet cool. I'm actually cutting edge in something. Deal. But then again, all I have to do is dredge up this little missive and . . .

It's not hard, then, to find "cooless" suspect: maybe certain bands or writers, let's say, are unknown to all but a few initiates for a reason--they SUCK! And if your tastes in music run toward such bands/writers that suck, well, then, why should I buy into your anti-hype of "Nobody's heard of 'em!!"? But then again, I'm not cool, 'cause I'm, like, old, even if I do have a blog, so what do I know?

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"Look on my blog, ye mighty, and despair!": Slow-blogging and the (slow) death of irony

Image found here.

There have been times of late when I've wondered what my, um, tens of thousands of readers must be thinking when they visit these pages and click the Refresh button every, oh, 30 seconds or so, in hopes of seeing new content, only to have their souls crushed. Do they bitterly bewail their disappointment in not having been sustained by some new arranging, deepening, enchanting of the blogosphere? Well, truth be told, probably not. These past few weeks, when I've visited good old Blog Meridian, I have thought one thing and noticed another. The thing thought: Aside from posting that I have nothing to post, I have nothing to post. The thing noticed: Over the past month or so, close observation of the Feedburner chiclet has revealed to me that the number of subscribers to this blog's feed actually increases after I've not posted for a couple of days, and decreases the day after I post something. Case in point: yesterday--before posting--13 subscribers; today--after having posted yesterday--12.

I get it. I can take a hint.

Yet: here I go, risking driving yet a few more subscribers away.

How to rationalize all this in a way that will break my relative silence so as to explain it. Well, via my bloggy friend Belle Lettre of Law and Letters, here come two articles which she unironically(?--well, really: who knows?) posted one after the other, that help to show me the way. To begin, here we have a New York Times piece on something called Slow Blogging:

A Slow Blog Manifesto, written in 2006 by Todd Sieling, a technology consultant from Vancouver, British Columbia, laid out the movement’s tenets. “Slow Blogging is a rejection of immediacy,” he wrote. “It is an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly.” (Nor, because of a lack of traffic, is Mr. Sieling writing this blog at all these days.) [Barbara] Ganley, who recently left her job as a writing instructor at Middlebury College, compares slow blogging to meditation. It’s “being quiet for a moment before you write,” she said, “and not having what you write be the first thing that comes out of your head.”

Once again, Thoreau is way ahead of this particular curve. From chapter 2 of Walden:

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime.

Preach it, Hank! This is precisely why I've never understood the appeal of Twitter: even I'm not all that interested in the quotidiana of my life; how presumptuous to assume anyone else would be.

Keeping a blog going for almost four years is presumption enough, I figure.

One's own ironic moments are for other people to point out. It will most likely not be a Republican who points out to his Senate colleagues that it is, um, ironic to continue to be enamored with the filibuster when they recently expressed considerably less affection for it when, before 2006, they were the majority party. If the hip thing these days is to be self-aware, always cognizant of how one's professed beliefs (whether natural or super-) don't quite match up with the realities of one's lived life, the hip will inevitably notice a dearth (if not the complete absence) of irony among their kind. But even self-awareness has its blind spots--witness the CEOs of the Big Three automakers each flying in one of his several corporate jets to Washington to plead that his company is on its last financial legs; and there are plenty of un-hip folks out there, too. So, just because you despair for the health of irony in your own particular discourse community doesn't mean that it's not alive and well and just waiting for you to find examples of to snark about. this New York Times article in which its writer and his interviewees listen for the death-rattle of Irony:

[A]re ironic sensibilities like [Joan] Didion’s — the detachment of mind, the appreciation of the folly of taking things at face value — really disappearing?

Not according to the conservative humorist P. J. O’Rourke, who reported from his New Hampshire office on Wednesday that he was finishing a piece for The Weekly Standard with the working title, “Is It Too Soon to Start Talking About the Failed Obama Presidency Just Because He Isn’t President Yet?”

Not according to the thin black novelist Colson Whitehead, who wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times under the headline, “Finally, a Thin President.”

“Something bad happens, like 9/11, it’s the death of irony,” Mr. Whitehead said in an e-mail message on Thursday. “Something good happens, like Obama’s win, it’s the death of irony. When will someone proclaim the death of iceberg lettuce? I’m sick of it making my salads boring.”

This, Mr. Whitehead, is precisely why we elected Mr. Obama: Increased subsidies for farmers willing to grow arugula instead of iceberg lettuce. Change we can believe in, indeed.

But, curiously,

Ms. Didion might be on to something. A Nexis search found that the incidence of the words “irony,” “ironic” and “ironically” in major American newspapers during the two-week period beginning Nov. 6 slipped 19 percent from the same period last year.

In New York, Ms. Didion’s home city, irony has been steadily disappearing from daily newspapers for a decade, the analysis found. In those same two-week November periods from 2000 to 2008, appearances of “irony” and its cognates tumbled 56 percent. Some of the drop seems to be because of the shrinking of newspapers, but a similar Nexis search with a control word, “went,” showed a drop of only 32 percent, leaving an irony gap of 24 percentage points.

The analysis may have its flaws. For one thing, the search algorithm also, ironically, picked up phrases like “end of irony.” More significantly, no self-respecting ironist actually uses the word “ironic,” except, perhaps, ironically.

So. There's no irony in the fact that when I post something new here the number of subscribers to this blog drops. None. There is none because I perceive this trend. There's humor in it, perhaps, for the perverse among you, and even, among my myriad enemies in the blogosphere, more than a little schadenfreude. "Just you keep on posting," I fancy them muttering in blogospheric hugger-mugger. But I am no Ozymandias, no siree. I may be losing readers every time I post something new, but I'm aware that I am.

The solution is obvious, then: keep on posting less and less frequently, thus enhancing the importance of the posts when I do. "John B. deigns to post!" you will cry aloud when you see a new post from here appear in your RSS readers after a span of days (or longer) without seeing one. At some point, the fact of my posting, say, that I'll be getting a haircut (as, it happens, I'll be doing today) will acquire an importance roughly akin to that when the Pope speaks ex cathedra for my merely having decided to inform the blogosphere of this.

You lucky people. What distilled drips and drams of wisdom are in your future! The fewer the drips, the more distilled--and, thus, precious--they are. How could it be otherwise?

So, like, be ready and stuff. Who knows when the next post will appear? Keep those lamps filled.

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Your chance to help further my students' education!

I'll be away from "here" for a few days--reading/writing/grading call--but in the meantime . . .

A few days ago, I posted that I'd be requiring my students to keep blogs on the subjects of their research paper topics. Well: if you're interested in this at any level, here is a link to a list of their blogs that I have so far, along with brief descriptions of their subjects. As you'll see, there's quite a range of subject matter, and some are further along in their thinking and/or content than others. But I hope that those of you with time and inclination will go and have a look and maybe find a blog whose subject interests you enough to comment on it. As I say over there, it's my hope that my students become more self-conscious of themselves as writers if they know that someone other than their prof is reading their work.

It takes a blogosphere to educate a class.

Thanks in advance, and I'll see you back "here" sometime next week.

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How blogging has changed my life

UPDATE: Now including Josh of Thoughts from Kansas, whom I've also had the pleasure of meeting and had simply forgotten to include earlier. Sorry, Josh.

You just think I've revealed my identity . . . you still don't know which one is Scruffy.

(Image found here.)

A while back, Bruce of It Seems to Me . . . has tagged me to address the matter posed in this post's title. Bruce, by the way, is someone I've been reading for some time now. He usually blogs on matters of Christian doctrine from a wry-but-respectful, slightly left-of-center perspective; if you're interested in these sorts of themes and like good, careful writing, Bruce is your guy.

Thanks for tagging me, Bruce. Here are the specifics of the meme:

1. Write about 5 specific ways blogging has affected you, either positively or negatively.

2. Link back to the person who tagged you.

3. Link back to the parent post (L.L. Barkat is not so much interested in generating links, but rather in tracking the meme so she can perhaps do a summary post later on that looks at patterns and interesting discoveries.)

4. Tag a few friends or five, or none at all

5. Post these rules — or just have fun breaking them

Well, all right. My responses are below the fold:

1) Through and because of this medium, I have met a diverse group of humane, decent, intelligent people I would never have met otherwise, some of them in person. Directly as a result of blogging, I have met, in person, a political philosopher, a freelance writer/church planter in Kansas City, a journalist, a lawyer from Missouri, a lefty science-and-education wonk, and a local cyclist who clerks at a liquor store--and next week the Mrs. and I will be meeting a writer/editor in Mexico City. That list of course expands exponentially and extends to three continents as I think about the people I've met virtually. And though I never personally met Winston of Nobody Asked . . . , the news of his death this summer genuinely saddened me.

Corollary: I find myself regularly visiting other blogs whose subjects I never would have imagined I'd otherwise be especially interested in. For me, the primary example is Pam's blog, Tales from the Microbial Laboratory. Pam's two big subjects are gardening and science (she studies microbes found in coral reef environments). But Pam is such a patient and skilled writer that she ends up confirming the truth of something I tell my students: that if you write about what you care about in such a way that it shows you care, people will find value in what you have to say. The upshot: Pam has told me that in her job as a researcher she does little actual teaching; but, speaking for myself, I have learned much from her through her blog . . . and I've gotten some pretty good ideas for blog posts from her, too.

2) I won't claim that my writing has improved as a result of blogging, but I can say that my awareness of my writing has improved--and usually, as these things go for those of us who can say the same, it's my awareness of what bothers me about my writing. I've said many times and in various ways that, while I'm grateful for those of you who visit regularly, all I can see when I reread my posts is what needs improving. Though that awareness is a good thing, it does drive me to distraction: no matter how long I've fiddled with a post, it's usually the case that, no sooner do I click on the Publish Post button and read it again, I'll go back into the Edit mode to fiddle with it yet again. But then again, that's the lot in life of any writer, not just bloggers.

3) Not that I claim to be any good at it, but I think I'm a more careful observer of those things that that pop up here as subjects. I'm not sure if it's unequivocally a good thing to have in the back of one's mind that "Il n'y a pas de hors-blog;" but one thing it does do that is good, from the perspective of wanting/needing to improve my writing, is focusing my attention, of seeing/reading/hearing something and, in that instant, finding myself already trying out phrases, wondering what about this whatever-it-is might be of interest to someone not here and how best to establish that connection, etc.

4) Jorge Luis Borges, in his piece "Kafka and His Precursors," makes the claim that a writer can never know who has influenced him or her until s/he begins to write, and I have found that to be true of my writing here. To take one brief example: My field in grad school was 20th-century American literature and, to be sure, I fairly regularly make reference to those folks here. But time and time again, as I sit down to blog about something or other--it really doesn't matter what--the writer whose work and whose approach to that work most readily comes to mind is Thoreau. I certainly like his work well enough when I read it, and I love teaching the bits of it that I get to teach nowadays; but while in college and grad school I never even wrote a paper on Thoreau, much less made him the subject of my life's work. Still, until I started blogging I never would have guessed just how deeply ingrained in me Thoreau's example is. I mean, better Thoreau for you and me both than, say, James Fenimore Cooper, but I can't tell you how strange that feeling is to be blogging along and rereading it and suddenly realize it is just very low-rent Thoreau's journal-type stuff and where the heck did that come from???.

5) A meta-comment: in rereading the above items, I see clearly how they interconnect with each other; in like fashion, blogging has made me more aware of, and better able to see, the at times surprising interconnectedness of events and the ideas they give rise to. I certainly find value in that as I try to make sense of this world--the operative word here being "try," of course.

Well. There they are, for what they're worth. As for tagging folks, I'll let you select yourselves. I hope some of you will take it up; a little introspection every once in a while rarely hurts.

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Housekeeping; more shameless self-promotion

Mali Monday will come a day late--today, that is.

I've been away from "here" due to my doing a bit of research at the library and posting content over at my academic blog, Domestic Issue. Of interest to some visitors here may be a question I ask about Melville's term "isolatoes" (a term he uses to describe the crew members of the Pequod); a discussion of a poem by a Brazilian writer, along with a defense of why I read it in that way; and an initial rationale for why I use the term miscegenation, as opposed to, say, "interracial mixing" or some other, less-charged equivalent term. That last post has the additional merit of being a response to another blogger's question; thus, the new place is beginning to engender discussion, as I had hoped it would.

Back tonight with a Mali "Monday" post.

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Some good news

It's official now: I've been approved for a sabbatical for the fall by my college's sabbatical committee. While I'm off, I'll do some writing and research, finish up and prepare a book manuscript--or at least come close to getting all that done. I'll be in Wichita most of the time, but there will also be a couple of quick trips to research libraries in there, too, including a week or so in Mexico and a trip to Denver to have a look at the Denver Art Museum's Latin American collection--especially their casta paintings. I'll also be preparing and giving a couple of lectures at the college about all this.

Starting this summer, good old Blog Meridian will see some occasional posting, but most of it will probably be in some way connected to boring old academic stuff. Over at my other blog, Domestic Issue, though, I'll be posting lots and lots of boring old academic stuff. You've been warned.

I think it's fair to say that I'm really, really happy about this.

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A couple of announcements

Some bloggy things some of you might be interested in . . .

First of all: Over the past couple of days, I've been corresponding with a Kansas City blogger named Pete Thomas, who is organizing something called BarCampKC for May 9-10. BarCamps, I've learned, started out as techie-oriented meet-and-greets that involve idea-swapping. Pete has in mind some of that sort of thing, too, but he's also interested in having those of us less-adept in IT things--you know, those of us who'd be lost without Blogger's standard templates--to talk about the thrills and chills of writing for tens of people whom we'll most likely meet very few of in real life but who loyally visit our sites anyway. In other words, if it were up to me to characterize it, it sounds like a more-formal version of a blog-meet. Potentially fun, in other words.

I can't make it for this BarCamp (I'll be about chest-high in Finals Week then), but I've taken the liberty of passing a couple of names on to Pete. If any other KC-ish folks want to know more, follow the first link or e-mail Pete at "pete AT pollensystems DOT com."

And now, a returning blog and a new one. Tom of A Dancing Star! (a Nietzsche reference) has roused himself from a lengthy silence. Tom is in Singapore; he writes elegantly about culture and books and, in this post, the dilemma of choosing between watching soccer and watching a new film.

The new blog is Arieljvan.com, kept by Ariel of Bittersweet Life. Ariel's readers know him to be a committed Christian who feels called to establish a church in downtown Kansas City, and Arieljvan.com's focus will be that dimension of his life. Bittersweet Life will be focused on more secular concerns, coffee and basketball and pop-culture among them (though, Jayhawks fan that he is, I may have just blasphemed in his eyes for listing basketball as a secular concern). Anyway, I refer the curious to "Redeeming Alcohol for the Glory of God" and, especially, to the post it links to: a serious post whose concerns are larger than alcohol consumption per se. But: that said, if you don't laugh at "Jesus: King of the Brews" (the title of another post referred to), there's something seriously wrong with you.

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Mysteries of the Internets

I don't often share with my reader(s) advice for increasing traffic to blogs, mostly because, for a while now, that's not been a preoccupation of mine, but also because all those things bloggers used to be told about such things never seemed to make much difference here. (I will say, though, that while those methods didn't increase the quantity of traffic, they did improve the quality: some of you regular visitors first found your way here due to those link exchanges (Remember those days? he says, rocking in his virtual rocking chair in his creakiest old-man-of-the-blogosphere voice)), so clearly they did good old Blog Meridian some good.

But. Some of you might be looking for a sure-fire way to bring some readers to your site, so here's one that, to my complete surprise, has brought more traffic here over the past couple of weeks than, even, my recent posts on Mr. Obama or the men's basketball tournament. Europeans--Scandinavian and Germanic types in particular--seem especially enamored of it, for some reason. It is the image chosen for this post.

Post that image with any/all of your posts, regardless of its/their content, and watch your traffic climb.

You can thank me later.

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"Web-cams out of words": Four years ago today . . .

Would that my blog were as cool as this graphic. Image found here.

On February 27, 2004, in its earlier incarnation on LiveJournal, I unleashed this on an unsuspecting blogosphere:

This is the maiden entry for Blog Meridian. I have no idea where this thing will go. I'm starting this (seriously) in part because I'm taking a break from folding laundry, in part because Beethoven's 9th Symphony is playing [this version, in case you're curious] and something about the 4th movement (the "Ode to Joy" movement) says, "Now. BLOG!" Well, okay.

[snip]

I have not read many blogs, but most of the ones I have read either are filled with entries like, Well, I farted around AGAIN today, and we readers are supposed to celebrate that person's conquering of a new day, or they are filled with way too much angst-ridden navel-gazing that assumes that total strangers out there in cyber-land are gonna relate to those who say, There's nothing new left to feel. Hard to connect with that sentiment, too. In the case of both examples above, I wonder what motivates the blogger to blog. But then again, the same question can be extended to each of us. I suppose it's the strange combination of private diary and open book that the blog presents us with. So: we're cyber-exhibitionists building web-cams out of words. The words reveal spaces, actual or imagined (and always filtered by the conscience that produces them)--and then there are the spaces between, the things not said. Two different dimensions, touching on each other, but each its own space. But there's also a kind of intimacy this medium creates, too, that perhaps many of you have found seductive in various ways (if not, then what ARE you doing here?).

And here I am, four years later. Believe me when I say that I've had more than one occasion to wonder what I'm doing here. There were a couple of times when I gave serious thought to quitting this blogging thing . . . but then something would come along that, for better or for worse, would revive the spark. As of tonight, that spark is burning as brightly as it ever has.

What shines even more brightly about good old Blog Meridian is the fact that early on it somehow attracted readers much smarter (and more loyal) than it deserved--and, even more extraordinary to me, they still visit. Fearful Syzygy and Raminagrobis have visited and commented since the LiveJournal days; once I moved over to Blogger, more of you found your way here, or I to your blogs, via the old link-exchanges I used to participate in. And your blogs led me to those of still others . . . The only point is that, even given the writer's desire to blog, readers and commenters help sustain that desire. It takes a blogosphere to nurture a blog, and this particular blog has benefited immensely from some excellent nurturers.

Anyway. We made it to four. Thanks. I think I'll keep it going for a while longer.

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40,000 Headmen (and -women)

Traffic are kind enough to reunite and provide the soundtrack. Image originally found here.

How very appropriate: a British band to play in honor of a British visitor, my 40,000th, who arrived on this virtual shore from Bristol late this morning. He stayed for 31 seconds--a short stay because, alas, a Google search for "films about depression" brought him to this post, which is about film but isn't terribly depressing. Ah, well. Sorry, gents.

Readership has increased dramatically here of late, due mostly to those posts about Barack Obama; but folks have found their way here while searching for Huckleberry Finn, Vermeer, Angus MacGyver. Velázquez, Odysseus, Cormac McCarthy (specifically, his interview with Oprah Winfrey), John Henry, Ali Farka Touré, "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," and, yes (your correspondent is at least semi-hip, in case you had your doubts) Gorillaz. And, oh yes, lots and lots of disappointed visitors looking for a Meridian of very different sort. Ah, well.

I know most of those visitors flit past, see that what they're looking for isn't quite here, and move on. But it's been this blog's good fortune that some smart readers have stuck around and commented on occasion and, even better, returned, linked, and returned again and again. I write to please myself, still, but it's more than a little flattering that others find pleasure in what I write, too. Thank you.

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Helpful blogging advice from great works of literature

Plato gives Socrates instruction in what to say in one of the dialogues, which, you know, isn't quite how things happened . . . Originally found here.

A while back, my bloggy friend Debra of Reflecting lamented that not only had she nothing to say that day, she didn't seem entirely certain she should have a blog. She since seems to have gotten past that existential crisis; still, her dilemma is one which affects most, if not all, bloggers from time to time.

It's for that reason that I'm posting this excerpt from Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual (which I posted on here). Substitute "words" and "blog" and "blog post" in the appropriate spots and, well, you can thank me later:

For some months Hutting [a painter] used a method which, he said, had been revealed to him for three rounds of gin by a half-caste beggar he had met in a scruffy bar on Long Island but who wouldn't reveal its origin despite all Huting's insistence. It involved selecting the colours for a portrait from an inalterable sequence of 11 hues by use of three key numbers, one provided by the date and time of the painting's "birth", "birth" meaning the first sitting for the painting, the second by the phase of the moon at the painting's "conception", "conception" meaning the circumstances which had initiated the portrait, for instance a telephone call asking for it to be done, and the third by the price.

The system's impersonality was the kind of thing to captivate Hutting. But perhaps because he applied it too rigidly, he obtained results more disconcerting than captivating. To be sure, his Countess of Berlingue with Red Eyes earned a deserved success, but several other portraits left critics and clients in the air, and above all Hutting had the confused and awkward feeling that he was using without any spark of genius a formula which someone else before him had obviously managed to bend to his own artistic requirements.

The relative failure of these trials did not discourage him overmuch, but led him to refine further what his appointed panegyrist, the art critic Elzéar Nahum, felicitously called his "personal equations": they allowed him to define a style lying somewhere between a genre painting, a genuine portrait, pure fantasy, and historical mythology, which he baptised "the imaginary portrait"[.] (279)

That final paragraph describes a lot of my own posts, come to think of it . . .

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The Interview Meme lives!

Once upon a time and a very good time it was, I asked someone to send me some questions and I agreed to a) post the questions and my answers to them on my blog; and b) to ask for volunteer interviewees. Here is that post. I didn't have high expectations as to the number of requests I'd receive; as it turned out, though, a total of 7 people asked me to interview them; if anyone interested can find links to all their responses here. Flattered to receive even one request, I was overwhelmed that so many did.

Well. Now you can make that 8 people. The lovely Belle Lettre of the esteemed "blawg" Law & Letters, a long-time friend of this space, recently asked to be interviewed, too, and her replies to the questions I sent her are here.

And while I'm here, I'll extend the invitation again. Just let me know, either in comments or via e-mail, that you'd like for me to send you 5 questions that you'll post the answers to on your blog, and then extend the same invitation to your readers. Perhaps this meme, instead of being extinct, is in fact a lazarus taxon (though, to be clear, not A Lazarus Taxon).

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Something is rotten in the land of Blogger

I and at least one other blogger I know of have had this problem with comments: the commenter had thought s/he successfully posted a comment but returns later to find that the comment is not, in fact, there. I know about the other blogger because this very thing happened to me this morning at that other blog.

This sucks for all sorts of technical and, even more importantly, social reasons, and I sincerely apologize to each and all if you find this has happened to you. I assure you I don't know what the problem is.

For the time being, I've disabled the notorious Word Verification function, which is (I know, I know) an oh-so-royal pain in the posterior under the best of circumstances. My hope is that doing that will fix things. I'll just have to take my chances with spammers until a) the problem gets fixed or b) pack up my little old blog and head over to WordPress or Typepad.

I'm going on about this because I am exceedingly grateful to those of you who take the time to post a comment, and the last thing I want is for anyone to presume that I have deleted comments without explanation. I'd rather spend some time deleting spam than have to spend time repairing relationships threatened by misunderstandings over stuff like this.

If you have or have had trouble recently posting comments here, please inform me so I can make some further noise over at the Blogger forum. You may reach me at blogmeridian (at) sbcglobal (dot) net.

Thanks in advance for your patience and understanding.

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Asked and answered IV

The interview meme¹ lives again.

Recently, yet another regular visitor here, Jimmy Sligh of The New York Minute (one of those many blogs out there that deserves many more readers than it has), surprised and flattered me by volunteering to be interviewed and then posting his responses over at his place. Fortunately for me, I had just attended my college's commencement and saw some things there that, to my mind, would be the sorts of things that Jimmy would turn into a blog post; and, well, voilà. I hope you'll go there--and that you've allowed yourself some time to read around a bit. Jim's writing is the real deal.

My particular thread of this blogospheric genome and some further yammering are below the fold.

¹Said meme got its start when I volunteered to be interviewed by Randall Sherman of Musings from the Hinterland; here is the result of that. As the meme asks, I asked for volunteers to be interviewed, thinking (I thought, realistically), no one is going to ask me to interview them. I was mistaken--many times over, and happily so.

If this meme appeals to any of you, just know that I'm still looking for volunteers. You let me know in comments or via e-mail that you're interested, and I'll send you five questions and the request that you ask for volunteers as well. For me, at least, this is more interesting than the standard meme because the participants select themselves--it actually comes closer to modeling, I think, what Richard Dawkins had in mind when he coined the term. Without meaning to slight anyone who's chosen not to volunteer, I'll just say that I've been most pleased with the people who have volunteered and the quality of their responses. This is one memetic expression that merits preservation.

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A stretch of river XXXVII: Distracted

Most days, our twice-daily walks create a space within which I can focus on one idea, or at least on a related set of ideas. Or, something I see on the walks leads directly to one of these posts. But today, as Scruffy, his attention divided between a cat bounding away from us on our right and, on our left, a male mallard moving in as stately a manner as a mallard is ever going to move, threatened via his lunging to pull one of my arm muscles, it struck me that his behavior was analogous to my state of mind this morning.

Here, in order of later recollection, is a list of the things I thought about more than fleetingly this morning, at least some of which (be forewarned) are likely to appear here sooner or later this summer:

My brother, who, along with his Army Reserve unit, is somewhere north of Baghdad.

The text of the historical plaque and that, yes, I still wanted to tease out some things hidden in between the lines of those few words.

The complicated "text" presented by the Velázquez painting I recently posted over at my newish blog.

Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat, which I've blogged about before and which I'll be writing about more this summer.

That led me to think about visiting the libraries at Wichita State University and at the U. of Kansas at least a few times this summer.

How I feel no particular sadness (or joy, for that matter) regarding the passing of Jerry Falwell, and how this piece on NPR today--not disrespectful but in which Falwell freely admits that he would seek (and gain) media attention via his occasional remarks that, most would agree, bordered on the obscene--just confirmed for me today the appropriateness of my absence of sadness.

But how, on the other hand, I feel considerable sadness on behalf of Mrs. Meridian, whose high school debate teacher died a few days ago. They were the co-members of a mutual admiration society, so this has hit Mrs. M. very hard. Death is at its most unfair when those of us left feel we haven't fulfilled the promise the person who has died saw in us.

How I really must impose some semblance of order on my office at school. But not today. The birds are singing, dammit!

Why I, a Texan of Norwegian and German heritage, should be so drawn to music from Africa--and that, now that I know of the existence of Museke, I can move toward a deeper understanding of what's going on in this music that speaks to me more deeply than oompah-bands and Ah-ha ever will.

Speaking of music: Last.fm and the playlist widget over in the right gutter. Yes: You want to know what my musical tastes are . . . you just don't know you want to. There are about 50 full-length tracks there, a little of everything, from the sublime (Arvo Pärt, "Tabula Rasa") to the Guilty Pleasure (Bon Jovi, "You Give Love a Bad Name"). The especially-obsessed can click on the icon in the lower-right corner to convert it into a pop-up so that if you happen to leave that page the radio won't shut off.

And how, if I made a list of all this stuff, something in it might actually interest someone.

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Asked and answered III

Once upon a time, I volunteered to be interviewed by Randall Sherman, and this is what resulted. Part of the deal with this interviewing meme is that you are supposed to ask for volunteers to be interviewed by others. I did, and some people volunteered. And then still more did. I've now interviewed 5 volunteers.

Um . . . Gwynne of The Shallow End makes six.

If this seems like your idea of fun, just let me know, and I'll send some questions your way, too.

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A stretch of river XXXVI: On good old Corot, and Places to Go

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Ville-d'Avray, 1870

It's a misty, grey morning here in Wichita, and/but today there is something about today's light that reminds me of the Corot that hangs at the Nelson-Atkins (NB: the one you see here hangs in the Met but is quite similar in terms of both the scene depicted and, in particular, the quality of its light). Over the years, I've grown more and more appreciative of the Nelson's collection of 19th-century French paintings--it's taught me, for example, that Pisarro's work, more than others', is better appreciated in person. Even so--even though I know those other painters are "better"--it's the Corot I linger and linger in front of, every visit, and for the same reason I wanted to linger this morning and gaze across the river even as Scruffy wanted to chase the squirrel on the fence--a dog's catnip--separating the path from the apartment's pool: not anything remarkable in the scene itself, but the pearlescence of the light illuminating it--no, more like glazing it.

John Berger, whose socialist's sense that art and its appreciation can and should be something that you don't have to wear black and stroke your chin significantly in order to do, writes about Corot with a combination of, on the one hand, disappointment in what Corot might have accomplished but chose not to and, on the other, the value in what he most assuredly does accomplish, for me at least, whenever I stand in front of that landscape in Kansas City:

Corot remained a petit-bourgeois. Matching, pinning, sewing, he was never quite able to shake off the effect of his father's drapery business and his mother's dress-shop.

[snip]

[But h]e was a petit-bourgeois only in his refusal to speculate on how the world could be changed. This explains why he was timid without being a coward. Instead of questioning, he set out to make his own peace, to avoid all contradictions. He knew it himself: 'Delacroix is an eagle and I'm only a lark. I sing little songs in my grey clouds.' He reveals it unconsciously when he says: 'Charity is a still more beautiful thing than talent. Besides, one benefits the other. If you have a kind heart, your work will show it.' How comfortably without contradictions that 'Besides' is!

[snip]

Corot was a lovable man. At his best he was an artist of minor genius, comparable to, say, Manet. And let me add--with the due modesty that ought to precede such a statement--that Corot has contributed to many people's happiness. (208-209)

Yes indeed. The Nelson's Van Goghs, the early (and late) Monets, the Manet, they challenge me in various ways with their assertiveness. The Corot "just" makes me happy.

In the meantime, though, Scruffy is tugging at his leash . . . which brings me to the "Places to Go" part of this post. We're on the cusp of finals week here, which means that I can't say when my next post here will appear. So, below the fold, I want to recommend some places worth your visits--assuming, that is, that you have plenty of time, as several of these places will require that of you.

(Aside: I can't decide just now, as the duties of finals week command my attention, whether the blog is analogous to Corot or to the squirrel Scruffy wants to chase. Both are pleasurable, so that doesn't enter into deciding.)

Anyway:

For better or for worse, many of the blogs I visit are kept by people with lots of things to say and who are not shy about taking their time in saying them. I'm as appreciative of the pithy observation as the next guy, but I know as well that some things simply take a longer time to say in order to say them well . . . and I am just as appreciative of that.

Gawain of Heaven Tree, whose blog's post's leisurely pace on leisurely subjects exudes "Man of Leisure," has a wonderful post on one of my very favorite American painters, John Singer Sargent, that is ostensibly about an exhibition of Sargent's paintings done in Venice or on Venetian subjects currently on exhibit in Venice. But it turns into, as well, meditations on technique, on seeking out the proper viewing distance for paintings, "and, as always, love." Reading it, it occurred to me that I like Sargent for the same reason I like Corot: he makes me happy.

Gawain meditates; Hank of A Lake County Point of View does not meditate so much as forays. Hank writes like he's in a hurry, but you can't be when you read him. The title of his most recent post, "Lupins, Wolves, Chinese Romans, Peaches and the Unforgettable Cream," does not quite cover everything that he ends up writing on. It starts out as simple homesickness for Texas Bluebonnets, which, I can attest to, are especially abundant this spring and so are deserving of being homesick over; like Proust's madeleine, though, that homesickness leads to, um, all sorts of other things, places, people, across time and space and cultures. Fully referenced and complete with footnotes-within-footnotes (which are as much a part of the show as the rest of the post and thus are not to be missed), reading this post (and others . . . it's interesting how the color blue seems to inspire these posts of his . . . ) is like reading some hyper-texted cross of Montaigne, the afore-mentioned Proust, David Foster Wallace, and a coy Henry Miller. No one else I've yet run across is doing what Hank is doing--which is a very good thing, seeing as I have enough to read as it is . . . but sad in its way, too.

Also: I gotta get me some sort of footnotes-within-footnotes hack for Blogger . . . or move to Typepad . . .

Hank's longer posts are strange knowledge-maps that reveal the sometimes-odd and -unexpected interconnectedness of things; in a recent post, though, Conrad of Varieties of Unreligious Experience writes about another kind of map: ones all but unreadable except by the person who made it. We tend to think of maps as being objective visual descriptions of places that anyone is able to use with success. But these maps are expressions of a kind of knowledge, as I noted in comments over there, that cannot be taught but only learned.

My long-time blogging compadre Raminagrobis, over at his eponymously-named blog, has up "In Praise of Bathos," a patient discussion of meter and its connection to whatever "bad poetry" might be.

Finally, Randall of Musings from the Hinterland has initiated what this reader, at least, fervently hopes will be an ongoing series called "You Be the Jury" (a more interactive take on The People's Court--or like a "Take Your Blog's Audience to Court" kind of thing). Judging from this first installment, it promises to be both a celebration of the Weird Stuff that People Sue Over and the extent to which the law helps (or hinders) us in thinking about said Weird Stuff.

Still not enough? Then be sure to have a look at the other folks in the "Daily (B)reads" section of the right gutter. They too are worthy of your attention.

As always, thanks for visiting and reading and deigning to come back every once in a while. I'll see you around.

UPDATE: As a bonus to those of you who read this far, I give you the (two) last word(s) in gloriously-vulgar but dead-on movie reviewing, Neil Cumpston.

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Asked and answered II

(For the curious, the first Asked and Answered post is here)

Two more people have asked me to interview them, and one, Camille of 327 Market, has completed hers in a series of posts: in order, here are her (illustrated!) responses to 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

I have been mightily impressed by the length and care of the responses Camille, Josh and Debra gave the questions I sent them. I hope you'll go visit their posts . . . but be mindful that you have a pretty lengthy stretch of reading ahead of you.

Be sure to keep an eye on this space for the link to Paul Decelles's responses to the questions I've sent him. (UPDATE: Here is his respone--and thanks for volunteering, Paul.)

UPDATED UPDATE: Intrepid political blogger J.D. of Evolution also volunteered to be interviewed; here are his responses to my questions to him.

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20,000!

Whoever you were, you're a mere 28 miles away from me and you were here all of 0:00. I hope your visit provided you with a feast for the intellect.

You count as number 20,000.

So, you'll be happy to know I'm wrapping up a virtual snow-dome to send to you as your gift.

And, as always, thanks to all of you, especially those who keep visiting and who have linked to this blog. You and your visits and comments have made this fun. For my part, it's (still) most flattering that you find it worthwhile to keep visiting and even link to things you find here. So thank you in particular for that.

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Asked and answered

At the end of this recent post, I asked for volunteers to be "interviewed" by me (that offer still stands, by the way, in case anyone is interested). Two readers were gracious enough to do so, and this weekend they let me know that they've posted their responses. Debra of Reflecting responded here, and Josh of Thoughts from Kansas posted his responses here. I must say that I'm most impressed by their thorough and thoughtful responses.

Go have a look.

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