BlogIt

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Every year around now, a large chunk of blogosphere real estate is turned over to posts, tweets, Facebook status updates, and Flickr albums about a gathering called BlogHer. As the conference title suggests, the focus in on women who blog — it’s apparently attended by a number of guys, as well — and for the several days of BlogHer, attendees take in workshops and panel discussions, attend parties, and go out with friends to take in the sights of that year’s city. (This year, earlier this month, it took place in New York City.)

I’ve never gone to BlogHer, and never expect to, although I follow and admire the bejeezus out of maybe a half-dozen of the BlogHerers (?) with wide name recognition (Maggie, The Bloggess, Kelly…) and make occasional trips through the takeout windows of another half-dozen or so.

There are a few reasons while I’ll probably never get there:

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Book Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

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My review of this book is now up over at The Book Book.

So is another reviewer’s, as of yesterday — and we’re just following on the heels of the first, from a year ago. Clearly a book that draws reviewers like flies!

I liked the book very much although (as you can see from the review) just why sort of escapes me. You’ve got to get out of the gate fast with a grabber of an opening, we’re told, or no one will buy your crime story/mystery/thriller (and probably your collection of baby names). This one doesn’t start that way; nor, throughout, does it share the sort of propulsive arc which the vast majority of such stories have.

In a way, it’s something like being at the ocean shore, watching the waves. Those six were sort of interesting, weren’t they? And then, oh boy, here comes the seventh!…

…and then suddenly you notice the water is being drawn away from you, towards the horizon, and waaaay out there is a narrow line growing gradually thicker, and then you remember what all these symptoms mean and you think:

Holy crap, a tsunami!

At which point you start looking around frantically for an exit which, alas, does not exist.

If you think you can get used to this rhythm, absolutely give Dragon Tattoo a try. Even if you think you can’t, well, if you’re comfortable with crime stories/thrillers/mysteries/baby-name books in general, it still might be worth a look. It might catch you by surprise, as it did me.

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What Takes You Back?

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Yesterday, Granta magazine kicked off a new collective-memory project called “Nostos Algos.” From a publicity release which just made its way to my Inbox:

The word ‘nostalgia’ comes from the Greek words nostos (‘a homecoming’) and algos (‘pain, grief, distress’). We have all known the desire to return to another place or time, and the feeling of being unable to truly go back. Nostos Algos is a collective exercise in bringing the past into the present and making it part of a shared experience with fellow users and the imaginations of Granta’s famed writers. After you post your memory, it will appear in a live feed and be matched to an extract from our Online Archive. Alongside your musings will appear words from Doris Lessing, Arthur Miller, Ryszard Kapuscinski and many other distinguished authors.

I have no idea, yet, if there’s some way to follow the project online in any ongoing way. You can pass individual posts to Twitter and Facebook; but I don’t see an RSS link there, and as far as I know the site doesn’t have its own social-networking presence. I’ll check on this and update this post as needed. (Note especially that the memories can be no longer than 500 characters; this means that for Twitter, at least — with its 140-character limit — some truncation will take place.)

Surely everyone reading this post has something to contribute. And how cool would it be to see your entry matched up with a selection from Granta‘s remarkable, wide-ranging past? Of its modern incarnation, the magazine’s “About” page says:

Since 1979, the year of its rebirth, Granta has published many of the world’s finest writers tackling some of the world’s most important subjects, from intimate human experiences to the large public and political events that have shaped our lives. Its contributors have included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Saul Bellow, Peter Carey, Raymond Carver, Angela Carter, Bruce Chatwin, James Fenton, Richard Ford, Martha Gellhorn, Nadine Gordimer, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jayne Anne Phillips, Salman Rushdie, George Steiner, Graham Swift, Paul Theroux, Edmund White, Jeanette Winterson and Tobias Wolff. Every issue since 1979 is still in print. In the pages of Granta, readers met for the first time the narrative prose of writers such as Bill Bryson, Romesh Gunesekera, Blake Morrison, Arundhati Roy and Zadie Smith; and have encountered events and topics as diverse as the fall of Saigon, the mythology of the Titanic, adultery, psychotherapy and Chinese cricket fighting.

Whoa, hmm?

See the dozen or so most recent entries which others have posted to Nostos Algos, and tack on your own to the stream, here.

For more details about the project, see the publicity release (139KB) itself.

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Hits and Misses

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Complicated here, during the last week. Not bad, just… complicated. Thought I’d sort of summarize a couple of points of potential interest, but first, a question for regular visitors:

Have you had problems accessing RAMH recently? One of your number has reported getting repeated “the connection was reset by the server” errors. It’s prevented her from even seeing the site, apparently. (I got the information via a Facebook message.) I haven’t been able to reproduce it from any of various locations, using various browsers and operating systems. But I wanted to check before proceeding to see if anything like that has cropped up for the rest of you. (Of course — ha! — if it has, then you won’t be able to read this post.)

Okay, now onto “real” matters…

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You Spoke from Midnight

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From whiskey river:

Moonrise

And who has seen the moon, who has not seen
Her rise from out the chamber of the deep,
Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber
Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw
Confession of delight upon the wave,
Littering the waves with her own superscription
Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards us
Spread out and known at last, and we are sure
That beauty is a thing beyond the grave,
That perfect, bright experience never falls
To nothingness, and time will dim the moon
Sooner than our full consummation here
In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.

(D. H. Lawrence [source])

…and, from whiskey river‘s archives (the commonplace book):

Our existence is finite. The self that we have created through so many years of effort and suffering will die. And sustained though we may be by the idea, the hope, the certainty that some portion of us will eternally endure, we also must acknowledge that this “I” who breathes and loves and works and knows itself will be forever and ever and ever… obliterated.

So, whether or not we live with images of continuity — of immortality — we also will have to live with a sense of transience, aware that no matter how passionately we love whatever we love, we don’t have the power to make either it, or us, stay.

(Judith Viorst, Necessary Losses [source])

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Remotely Running After My Hat

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[Image of 18th-century dowser from Wikipedia… Wonder if it’s sized to fit?]

I’m going to be computerless much of this week. Which presents me with a convenient dilemma — to wit, how to do a whiskey river Friday post?

You may be thinking: How, exactly, will this be “convenient”? Sounds rather like a pain, in fact. (Also a bit presumptuous. There can’t be that many people who know this Friday series even exists!)

Nonetheless, I’m curious to know how easily this will be accomplished. Options considered and rejected so far:

  • Emailing a post via WordPress’s own built-in feature (limited features)
  • Installing and using the Postie WordPress plugin (not working from Blackberry email address)
  • Posting via Posterous.com (ditto)

Finally, I guess I’ll try what I’m doing now: using the Blackberry WordPress app. Tedious entering mass quantities of text, but I guess since the Friday posts are mostly copy-n-paste anyway…

Here’s a test, using the poem in last year’s edition of the Poetry Daily e-newsletter for today’s date:

How to Find Water

Easier if there are springs.

Before sunrise, lie down flat where the
search is to be made. Place
chin on the earth, so that your
sight will not range
higher than it ought. Then
dig.

Valleys receive rains most
abundantly and snow is squirreled by forests. Springs
run underground and
burst forth in the middle of
plains, protected
by the shade of trees.

Melting, it filters through
fissures in the ground and this
reaches the foot of the
mountain, from which gushing
springs come belching out. The earth
gives moisture under the influence
of heat, as a body emits sweat.

Taste.

(Keith Waldrop, from Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy)

How’d that look? ‘Twas a bear to enter, even with copy-n-paste: the (highly idiosyncratic!) line breaks went missing and had to be entered manually, toggling back and forth into email and the WP app to check and correct them.

…And I still won’t know if it’s right until I can see it in a real browser!

Have a feeling Friday’s post will be very short, ha ha.

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Admin: Had This Been an Actual Alert…

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Over the weekend, don’t be surprised or disgruntled or appalled or whatever if you find posts appearing and disappearing seemingly at random. I’m testing out some “blog posting by email” options and may be generating these things in bursts of multiple posts over the course of a single minute or two as I tinker with settings, do resends, and so on. I’ll try to delete the ringers as they show up — unless, of course, I happen to post something so eye-bleedingly profound that it demands preservation.

(Note: I’m trying to ensure that these emailed posts get assigned simple Draft status, and not go up fully published. So if that part of the experiment works, you may never have to contend with the flotsam — or jetsam, as the case may be — of my sailing by with my eyes on the gauges.)

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Buh-Bye, Book-Buying Guilt!

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The Missus has a refrigerator magnet which features a head-and-shoulders hand-tinted photo of a wealthy, hoity-toity society-matron sort of woman; the text alongside says, “‘Frugal’ is such an ugly word.” (Ha!)

Like many people, I suppose, I have great ambivalence about acquiring ever more Stuff. Examined closely, expressions like Wow, that would be so cool! so often seem like merely sublimated versions of I want! I want! I want! So I’ve learned to be suspicious of my own greedy motives, especially when “wanting” something which I clearly don’t need.

All of that moral second-guessing, I’m afraid, has gone by the board since I opened my birthday present from The Missus over the weekend: an Amazon Kindle 2.

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Paying Attention (or Not) to Word Count

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So, bottom line: yes, at around 12:30 this afternoon I bounded across the 3,000-word mark in the 2010 Write Your A** Off Write-a-Thon.

I’d gotten up around 6:30am, heated water in the teakettle, sat down at my desk and by 7:30 — after incidental stuff like selecting the day’s background music — begun to write. Took a break of about ten minutes at around 9:00 or so (cup of tea ), and another (#3) around 10:30. Did a word-count check at 12:30, and found that I’d indeed written just over the 3K target. Afterwards I tidied things up a bit, including bringing the current passage to a conclusion.

And then finally opened up the old blogging dashboard.

Because my morning writing time is pretty much the same length every weekday (90 minutes to two hours), there’s usually — usually — a fairly consistent word count each day, depending on how much revision I do. So I don’t really like to rely on word count as a measure of “success.” For one thing, good or ill, I tend to write very fast — not “write” meaning “…in a publishable sense,” obviously. But the words do pour forth. And although I’ve never had a single typing lesson, just from years and years of working with keyboards (both as a computer guy and a writer) I do type very fast, too.

(Against this latter speed you have to weigh, however, my neurotic hyper-awareness of typos and awkwardness as I commit them, causing me to back up and overtype quite a bit. (Just then, I typed wuite, braked, threw it into reverse, and replaced the w with a q before moving on.))

Still, in light of my creative frozen-ness of recent weeks, I really welcomed the WYAO Write-a-Thon’s 3K Challenge. So when I took my first break and did a quick word-count check, and saw that the odometer had rolled over to four digits, I exulted.

You take what you can get, hmm?

Anyway, if you’d like to see what I accomplished today — the start of (presumably) a short story, or possibly something longer — the first third of it is posted here. And if you want to see all the 3,100-some words, you can find them in this (74KB) PDF.

(Thanks, everyone, for your good wishes as I embarked on this mini-project!)

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