Thursday, December 13, 2007

So much to blog about, so little time

Here are some of the things I wish I had time to blog about:

1) Hot on the heels of extended blogospheric and other discussion about excessive banging on in the meeja and elsewhere regarding the Acting Prime Minster's looks, hair, voice etc, we now have a huge kerfuffle about the new Member for Bennelong's skirt length.

2) Helen Garner has a new novel coming out next year. It will be her first book of fiction for over fifteen years.

3) Kangaroo Island is on fire.

4) December is impossible.

5) Having gone off Patricia Cornwell quite a while ago and therefore having missed the last two or three books, I liked the look of her new(ish) novel Book of the Dead enough to finally give in and buy it the other day. If I have read the first half aright, it is among other things an extremely damning commentary on the US presence in Iraq, with specific reference to Abu Ghraib. It's very heartening that such a widely read writer can reach her millions of readers with the grisly image of what can happen to a soldier's psyche, especially in such a dubious war.

6) There seems to be yet another uprush of nonsense in various op eds around the place along well-marked 'Why feminism has failed' lines. I plan a longish blog post entitled 'Why feminism has succeeded' and a very short one entitled 'Why all attempts to educate the public as to the correct meaning of the term "begging the question" have failed.'

7) I have a new Christmas Tree ornament:

22 comments:

Link said...

Heard you on radio this mornin'. You came across very well.

Suspect interviewer fell into that group of people who can't understand why anyone would bother writing or reading blog posts. I was also idly musing, how many bloggers who write posts, aren't writers? Good writers, one and all definitely not, but I would have thought one need not necessarily be a good writer or a paid writer to be a writer? Which, um . .. er, begs the question,(geez I hope I've got that right). What's a writer?

Perhaps segment would have been more correctly titled, Professional Writers who also have blogs.

I'll look forward to your post on feminism. Odd, those feminism has failed notions. As if it were some sort of social experiment that has run its course. FWIW I don't think it has either succeeded or failed. It is a work in progress and there is much much much more to do.

JahTeh said...

I didn't mind the last Kathy Reichs book, 'Break no Bones'. She starts off well but lately seems to run out of steam before the last chapters. 'Bones' is back on tele for the summer and I do enjoy that.

Anonymous said...

Re: (3) Wow! That's exciting news. Will she be launching it at Adelaide Writer's Week?

Anonymous said...

Sorry, I meant (2). I knew about (3).

Carol Omer said...

I agree that the interviewer has not had a blogconversion (yet).

As this is obviously a Cat lovers blog...I thought you might find my "She's not ugly she is just scared" story of interest:
http://carolom.wordpress.com/2006/12/22/she-is-not-uglyshe-is-scared/

And the "Magical Child in Exile" is what the naysayer may be!

http://carolom.wordpress.com/2007/01/02/the-magical-child-in-exile/

To blog or not to blog...THAT is the Quest~I~On!

Ampersand Duck said...

This is the virtual extension of that common Christmas malaise 'SMTDSLT' that I am struck with.

Very excited about [2].

[1] shits me immeasurably. I can see the media deliberately taking crotch shots of any female in power who dares to wear something higher than her ankle. Enormous and juvenile fun for media photographers everywhere. GAH. This connects with [6], of course.

[7] is gorgeous.

Since I've been under a rock for the last week, could I ask 'Which radio show?' Is it podcasted?

meggie said...

I am not a Christmas ornament person.
But I WANT yours!!

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

It was The Book Show (audible here), on which Peter Mares from The World Today was standing in for Ramona who is on hols. Nobody is allowed to be mean about Peter Mares because (a) he is fantastic at what he does, (b) his father taught me 18th century literature back in the mists of undergraduate time, and (c) he looks like David Hobson.

(&D, re some of my fave bloggers, I was actually talking about -- meaning to talk about -- you and Zoe, without specifically identifying you, and why I called you a printmaker is one of those mysteries of our time. I wasn't expecting the question, for a start. That question was fraught with pitfalls and I was trying to get away from it as fast as I could.)

That said, yes, it was clear to me that I was talking from behind the eight-ball, and that is not the first time I have been at cross-purposes with some cultural intermediary who feels perfectly fine about dismissing blogging without knowing anything about it (example: if you blog something you later think better of, it is in fact possible to take it down. Peter seemed not to know this), and is positioning him/herself firmly within the rah-rah-high-culture lookamoy-I'm-in-it camp. (And some of them are quite young, so Mark D*vis can take his interminable gangland thesis somewhere else and use that good brain for something interesting for a change. Have I alienated enough people yet, do you think?)

Re radio conversation, I was actually trying very hard not to get, and sound, irritated and impatient, partly because I do that so very easily anyway and partly because I am very, very sick of having those conversations where the ignorant-of-blogs interlocutor seems to be talking based on a pre-existing assumption that the onus is on me to 'defend' blogging, and frankly it's like discussing feminism with a hostile man who knows nothing about it (or unionism with my sisters) -- it makes you want to shove bamboo splinters under your own fingernails and yet at the same time, strangely, you are also bored out of your skull.

One reason that Stephanie from Humanities Researcher and I had such a very good time at this gig was that not one of the people there was like that. Even those who didn't yet know very much about blogging, like Prof Ivor Indyk who's in charge of the program, were completely open to suggestion and interested in everything we said. But then, Ivor is the publisher who published Brian Castro's Shanghai Dancing and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria when nobody else would dare. Stands to reason he's not going to be closed-minded about blogging, eh.

lucy tartan said...

I didn't think you sounded anything other than enviably unflappable. And it was the after-midnight repeat I heard, and even through the mists of sleep I heard you call &D a printmaker -- and felt a flush of compasison, since I've described her that way myself without having a clue why.

genevieve said...

I came perilously close to defending blogging against one of the partners at my daughter's firm on Tuesday - would have been bad form to pick a fight, as he was taking us out to lunch :) and youngest son was listening, but I do understand how damn annoying that is now. Haven't come across it before really.
Looking forward to listening to your podcast now PC.
BTW one of the high culture camp who was put up to attack online criticism at MWF, Norman Lebrecht, is in the poo for inaccuracies in his latest book (which I bought, dammit, and quite enjoyed) and it has been/is to be pulped. So authority is as authority does, I suppose.

genevieve said...

Righto, heard it now.
Well, if he looks like David Hobson, what's he on teh RADIO for, heh?
I think you and the Monash person did brilliantly and made him sound ignorant. So elegant in your explications and occasional rebuttal - making bloggers proud :-)

Anonymous said...

At the risk of increasing your irritation...

It certainly didn't do much for mine.

Repeat after me, you testosterone-addled nongs: Blogging. Is. not. about. "breaking nooz". It. Is. about. writing.

Of many different kinds.

Gah!! and again gah!!

Meredith Jones said...

I look forward greatly to the "Why Feminism has Succeeded" post. I've always remembered a gender studies class I was in at Sydney uni, taken by the formidable Professor Elspeth Probyn. She said, "Rather than asking 'what's feminism ever done for me?', women should be asking 'what have I ever done for feminism?'"

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