Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Concerning the Blog Bog: What technology has done to writing
blog (noun)
to bog (verb)
~Intransitive
1. (often with down) to become mired or stuck (especially in mud).
2. bog off (slang) to go away.
3. to bog up - to make a mess of (col).
~Transitive
1. (often with down) to cause to become mired or stuck, especially in mud bog (noun)
2. An expanse of marshland.
3. (slang) A toilet.
Here I am stuck in the blog bog again.
Words on screen. Lightning-fast I type them. Spelling errors magically correct themselves before my eyes. Zip zip! Writing is faster than thought and thoughts appear bluntly in bleak cruel incomplete incoherence. There it is for all the world to see: My spelling is perfect, but my mind is all wrong! EEEK!
Whatever happened to the privacy of writing?
Think back 200 years: Writing, what joy! What freedom! Feather plume in hand, dip in ink and take flight! A feather carries lightly on the wind, the thoughts, dreams, fantasies and wild wanderings of the mind. For birds, feathers are hollow for effortless riding of the wind; for writers, hollow to form a reservoir for ink. When the ink line dwindles on the paper, pause briefly to re-dip, then it’s back to the air currents. Splatters and splashes may punctuate the rough draft, but don’t interfere with words spewing forth on vellum like buttons from a jar: Colorful and contrasting, a clattering array of silver, bone, wood, and shell, later to be sorted and organized.
Stop! Enough fantasy! It’s a pretty image, but feathers are meant for bird-flight. In truth, writing with feathers is earth-bound and laborious. Human thought is quicker than a pen governed by gravity. However, the push of pen nib across the paper’s surface has a physical quality to be enjoyed for its own sake, and the writer’s effort has a specific, usually formal, purpose. It ends with the painstaking production of the final document; the artist-writer crafts it with beauty and solemnity, creating a product suitable for viewing. It is as beautiful to behold as it is thought-provoking to read.
The room is still. No TV, no chatter from the radio. The dimness of the room, the golden lamp glow, are comforting, reassuring. There’s no awareness of the missing-ness of TV, radio, record player, CD player, computer or cell phone. You just write.
The twentieth century converts the plume to fountain pen. Fuel stops are greatly reduced. The ink well is relegated to the artist’s shelf, while the writer pauses pen scratches only long enough to change the cartridge. Soon writers have an array of writing tools at their literal fingertips: ballpoint pens, pencils, or a heavy black typewriter.
Imagine you are there, mid-20th century, let’s say, 1952. What are you writing? A journal? A letter? A newspaper article? A poem or story? Why are you writing? To record events or organize domestic needs? To express affection to someone who will receive your message a week or month later? To express an opinion to the community via typeset printing press?
Whatever the case, you know who is going to read this thing you wrote down. You may do some revision later, but your thoughts are coherent as you write, because time is vast, the pace of life in step with the pace of human thought. When you work, it’s between you and the paper. It’s personal. You spend time with it. You live with it; you interact with it in a physical way. This combination of processes mental, corporeal, and spiritual is to writing, as water, earth and sunshine are to growing plants.
Now we have computers in all their incarnations: laptops, palm pilots, digital-this and digital-that. We have illustrations and graphs at our fingertips, at the ready for insertion into our documents. Finally, there are no more ink spatters or scribbles and scratches. Revision takes place during creation. Best of all, everything we write can be shared with the world via weblog, AKA “blog.” This is better, right?
I saw a TV show recently, Dr. Phil or Oprah, where a woman was asking for help. She had too much stuff. She couldn’t throw anything away. She was depressed. The camera panned her home, stacked floor to ceiling with boxes, piles of papers, pathways so narrow they could barely navigate from the living room to the kitchen. The woman was bogged. She couldn’t pull herself out, couldn’t arise or lift even a finger to begin to sort or toss or make any sense of the mountainous gluttonous piles. The reporter picked up a single used sock, and suggested this was a good place to start – toss that in the trash can. “Oh, but I could find a use for that,” the woman said, “I could polish my dishes with it.” This is an actual psychological disorder, called Narcissistic Personality Disorder! A product of too-much-stuff-consumer-culture, an abnormal cell growth, a cancer. Humans survived for centuries on thrift. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a healthy adaptation gone awry.
The blog bog is like that. Write think write thinkwritethinkwritethinkquestion . . . question? I have a question! I don’t have to wait for the answer! I don’t even have to get out of my chair, or reach out to the encyclopedia on the shelf next to my computer. Google! Down the Google Path! La la la la-la! What a merry trail I trod, wherever curiosity leads . . . but wait! What was the question? Oh yeah, I’m writing a paper about the blog bog! But it was very interesting to read so many experiences about too much stuff. So . . . copy paste copy paste copy paste . . . now I have a place to put it – so interesting, all this interesting stuff, I really don’t want to forget it, so I copy paste copy paste and it’s safely tucked away in a saved MSWord document called “Saved stuff for paper #4.” Now I feel better. I’ll have it forever – in case I need it – unless . . .
. . . computer crash, disc malfunction, file overload, mind overload, I forgot where I put it, lost it in an overzealous trash-purge!
But everything is fine, safe, protected. Just make a backup file. Put it on your thumb drive! Dragging files back and forth, saving saving saving, doubling and saving, backing up and saving – then the dreaded question:
‘This folder already contains a folder named ‘OWP’ If the files in the existing folder have the same name as files in the folder you are moving or copying, they will be replaced. Do you still want to move or copy the folder?’
The wrong answer could be FATAL! Precious files forever vaporized! Eeek! Stress! Fifteen files later, all labeled “OWP” or variations thereof, and I’m beginning to fear for my sanity! Perhaps someone has already named this version of mental illness. Bloggagooglebog Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I am NOT going to search for that. I AM GOING TO FINISH THIS PAPER.
I want to finish all my OWP assignments now, so I can read what everyone else has written. I want to have time to think about what they write, and send them comments. I want to do this before the end of the workshop. Also, I want to go further out into Blog World, travel abroad, read blogs from France, Canada, Africa. It’s like going inside the minds of people from every imaginable corner of the earth. No more wondering what other people are thinking. Now we know – at least the thoughts they want to blog at us.
And so, I’m done. This paper is over. I’m going to post it on the blog. Oh no. That means everyone can read it. EVERYONE. There it is. My crazy mixed up bogged up blogged up mind, exposed for all the world to see. Not to mention my sentence fragments, punctuation errors, and erroneous writing style in 2nd person P.O.V. Or is it 1st person?
Stuck. Wedged. Jammed. Lodged. Trapped. Having difficulties. Blocked. EEEK! If you’ve read this far, you know it all.
Here goes.
Originally posted July 12, 2005 at 07:04 AM - Oregon Writing Project
1. An online journal, typically comprising links to current news stories or other Web resources, and/or social and political commentary, and/or a personal diary, sometimes with replies from readers or RSS feeds.
to bog (verb)
~Intransitive
1. (often with down) to become mired or stuck (especially in mud).
2. bog off (slang) to go away.
3. to bog up - to make a mess of (col).
~Transitive
1. (often with down) to cause to become mired or stuck, especially in mud bog (noun)
2. An expanse of marshland.
3. (slang) A toilet.
Here I am stuck in the blog bog again.
Words on screen. Lightning-fast I type them. Spelling errors magically correct themselves before my eyes. Zip zip! Writing is faster than thought and thoughts appear bluntly in bleak cruel incomplete incoherence. There it is for all the world to see: My spelling is perfect, but my mind is all wrong! EEEK!
Whatever happened to the privacy of writing?
Think back 200 years: Writing, what joy! What freedom! Feather plume in hand, dip in ink and take flight! A feather carries lightly on the wind, the thoughts, dreams, fantasies and wild wanderings of the mind. For birds, feathers are hollow for effortless riding of the wind; for writers, hollow to form a reservoir for ink. When the ink line dwindles on the paper, pause briefly to re-dip, then it’s back to the air currents. Splatters and splashes may punctuate the rough draft, but don’t interfere with words spewing forth on vellum like buttons from a jar: Colorful and contrasting, a clattering array of silver, bone, wood, and shell, later to be sorted and organized.
Stop! Enough fantasy! It’s a pretty image, but feathers are meant for bird-flight. In truth, writing with feathers is earth-bound and laborious. Human thought is quicker than a pen governed by gravity. However, the push of pen nib across the paper’s surface has a physical quality to be enjoyed for its own sake, and the writer’s effort has a specific, usually formal, purpose. It ends with the painstaking production of the final document; the artist-writer crafts it with beauty and solemnity, creating a product suitable for viewing. It is as beautiful to behold as it is thought-provoking to read.
The room is still. No TV, no chatter from the radio. The dimness of the room, the golden lamp glow, are comforting, reassuring. There’s no awareness of the missing-ness of TV, radio, record player, CD player, computer or cell phone. You just write.
The twentieth century converts the plume to fountain pen. Fuel stops are greatly reduced. The ink well is relegated to the artist’s shelf, while the writer pauses pen scratches only long enough to change the cartridge. Soon writers have an array of writing tools at their literal fingertips: ballpoint pens, pencils, or a heavy black typewriter.
Imagine you are there, mid-20th century, let’s say, 1952. What are you writing? A journal? A letter? A newspaper article? A poem or story? Why are you writing? To record events or organize domestic needs? To express affection to someone who will receive your message a week or month later? To express an opinion to the community via typeset printing press?
Whatever the case, you know who is going to read this thing you wrote down. You may do some revision later, but your thoughts are coherent as you write, because time is vast, the pace of life in step with the pace of human thought. When you work, it’s between you and the paper. It’s personal. You spend time with it. You live with it; you interact with it in a physical way. This combination of processes mental, corporeal, and spiritual is to writing, as water, earth and sunshine are to growing plants.
Now we have computers in all their incarnations: laptops, palm pilots, digital-this and digital-that. We have illustrations and graphs at our fingertips, at the ready for insertion into our documents. Finally, there are no more ink spatters or scribbles and scratches. Revision takes place during creation. Best of all, everything we write can be shared with the world via weblog, AKA “blog.” This is better, right?
I saw a TV show recently, Dr. Phil or Oprah, where a woman was asking for help. She had too much stuff. She couldn’t throw anything away. She was depressed. The camera panned her home, stacked floor to ceiling with boxes, piles of papers, pathways so narrow they could barely navigate from the living room to the kitchen. The woman was bogged. She couldn’t pull herself out, couldn’t arise or lift even a finger to begin to sort or toss or make any sense of the mountainous gluttonous piles. The reporter picked up a single used sock, and suggested this was a good place to start – toss that in the trash can. “Oh, but I could find a use for that,” the woman said, “I could polish my dishes with it.” This is an actual psychological disorder, called Narcissistic Personality Disorder! A product of too-much-stuff-consumer-culture, an abnormal cell growth, a cancer. Humans survived for centuries on thrift. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a healthy adaptation gone awry.
The blog bog is like that. Write think write thinkwritethinkwritethinkquestion . . . question? I have a question! I don’t have to wait for the answer! I don’t even have to get out of my chair, or reach out to the encyclopedia on the shelf next to my computer. Google! Down the Google Path! La la la la-la! What a merry trail I trod, wherever curiosity leads . . . but wait! What was the question? Oh yeah, I’m writing a paper about the blog bog! But it was very interesting to read so many experiences about too much stuff. So . . . copy paste copy paste copy paste . . . now I have a place to put it – so interesting, all this interesting stuff, I really don’t want to forget it, so I copy paste copy paste and it’s safely tucked away in a saved MSWord document called “Saved stuff for paper #4.” Now I feel better. I’ll have it forever – in case I need it – unless . . .
. . . computer crash, disc malfunction, file overload, mind overload, I forgot where I put it, lost it in an overzealous trash-purge!
But everything is fine, safe, protected. Just make a backup file. Put it on your thumb drive! Dragging files back and forth, saving saving saving, doubling and saving, backing up and saving – then the dreaded question:
‘This folder already contains a folder named ‘OWP’ If the files in the existing folder have the same name as files in the folder you are moving or copying, they will be replaced. Do you still want to move or copy the folder?’
The wrong answer could be FATAL! Precious files forever vaporized! Eeek! Stress! Fifteen files later, all labeled “OWP” or variations thereof, and I’m beginning to fear for my sanity! Perhaps someone has already named this version of mental illness. Bloggagooglebog Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I am NOT going to search for that. I AM GOING TO FINISH THIS PAPER.
I want to finish all my OWP assignments now, so I can read what everyone else has written. I want to have time to think about what they write, and send them comments. I want to do this before the end of the workshop. Also, I want to go further out into Blog World, travel abroad, read blogs from France, Canada, Africa. It’s like going inside the minds of people from every imaginable corner of the earth. No more wondering what other people are thinking. Now we know – at least the thoughts they want to blog at us.
And so, I’m done. This paper is over. I’m going to post it on the blog. Oh no. That means everyone can read it. EVERYONE. There it is. My crazy mixed up bogged up blogged up mind, exposed for all the world to see. Not to mention my sentence fragments, punctuation errors, and erroneous writing style in 2nd person P.O.V. Or is it 1st person?
Stuck. Wedged. Jammed. Lodged. Trapped. Having difficulties. Blocked. EEEK! If you’ve read this far, you know it all.
Here goes.
Originally posted July 12, 2005 at 07:04 AM - Oregon Writing Project
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Driveway Philosophers
Garrison Keillor’s column this morning so moved me that I want to share it. Yesterday my dad stopped by to drop off some produce from his garden. We stood in the sunshine at the front door to chat. The sun was warming my pajama-clad legs and Dad leaned against the house. He’s 81 years old, and this summer kept two community gardens, supplying our family with fresh produce all summer long. And his garden is still producing. He’s going to give up one of the gardens next summer. But before he leaves it, he will plant a cover crop, being a good shepherd of the land he’s passing to someone else’s hands.
Here’s what Garrison Keillor has to say about men like my dad:
“Bright chill October days of sweet dry smells, smoke and apples and pigskin, memories of touch football games on grassy fields strewn with dry leaves. “You go deep,” our QB said, thinking that a big lanky kid like me must be a good receiver, so I galloped deep looking back over my shoulder, but I was not, in fact, all that terribly interested in actually fighting for possession of the ball. I was brought up to share, not to snatch things away from other people.
“Aggressiveness was not a prime value in my family. Only two of my 15 uncles played football and not one of them was a hunter. They were gardeners, not warriors. Gentle godly men with husky voices who leaned against cars and talked quietly about manly things which, for them, included:
1. Cheap Things That Are Better Than Expensive Ones
2. The Peculiarities of Neighbors
3. The Relative Merits of Makes of Cars
4. Amazing Coincidences in Everyday Life
5. The Art of Raising Strawberries
6. The Absurdities of Urban Life
7. Road Trips, Past and Future
“Sports and politics didn’t loom large in their world. So when I tune in to talk radio and hear guys ratcheting on and on about the home team betraying them or how much they hate Hillary, it has an exotic tinge for me, like hearing space alien dialogue in a movie. My male role models didn’t raise their voices. They stood with their backs to a 1947 Ford and looked off across the field and murmured.
- So what’s going on in your neck of the woods?
- Oh, not so much. Keeping busy.
- How’s that car of yours running?
- Got us to Idaho and back.
- So how was that?
- Well, she burned a little oil but she was getting almost 20 miles to the gallon.
“Gas mileage: they lied about that, though they were Christians and all. It was a main bragging point. And now oil is $93 a barrel and I hear owners of hybrid cars brag about gas mileage - they can read it right off the instrument panel. My uncles would’ve loved that, and also the GPS map on the dashboard - my dad would’ve driven around and around in circles, just to watch that blue dot moving along the street plan of Minneapolis.
“The radical feminists of my day did not grow up with men like my uncles, or perhaps they forgot, and other intellectuals who explore maleness do not include the Men Leaning Against The Car Murmuring archetype, but I remember them well, especially on these golden Saturdays in late fall, the gentle voices of the philosophers of the driveway.
“What they say is that life is made up of a richness of small things and you need to keep them all in perspective. Read the Bible but don’t forget to cover your strawberry beds or change your oil. Go places, see things. Don’t get carried away. Moderation. Don’t get mad. Don’t make things more complicated than they are. If you’re too busy to stand around and talk, you’re not living right.
“Some of us veered away from their example and galloped into the stone canyons of careerism, which has warped us somewhat. We are expected to give up our lives for work. We have a tendency to obsess and orate and that is something the driveway philosophers didn’t go in for. They were a chorus, not an audience, and they spoke softly and contrapuntally of the wonders of the world, the benefits of pruning and mulching, the qualities of apples, the science of forecasting winter by observing woolly caterpillars, the plans for flooding the backyard to make a hockey rink, the difficulties of growing roses, the trials and tribulations of plumbing.
“The driveway philosophers are still with us. Whenever I escape from my stone canyon, I find them here and there, talking uncle talk. They constitute a large invisible bloc that looks at candidates for public office and gets an intuitive sense of who is real and who is not. They know that politicians live in stone canyons and hire smart designers to create their personas, but they check out Hillary and Obama and Giuliani and Romney and they wonder who knows about gas mileage, who has a normal relationship with children, who can truly appreciate a really good apple. And that’s why Iowa is important. It’s a major of driveway philosophers.”
Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.
Here’s what Garrison Keillor has to say about men like my dad:
“Bright chill October days of sweet dry smells, smoke and apples and pigskin, memories of touch football games on grassy fields strewn with dry leaves. “You go deep,” our QB said, thinking that a big lanky kid like me must be a good receiver, so I galloped deep looking back over my shoulder, but I was not, in fact, all that terribly interested in actually fighting for possession of the ball. I was brought up to share, not to snatch things away from other people.
“Aggressiveness was not a prime value in my family. Only two of my 15 uncles played football and not one of them was a hunter. They were gardeners, not warriors. Gentle godly men with husky voices who leaned against cars and talked quietly about manly things which, for them, included:
1. Cheap Things That Are Better Than Expensive Ones
2. The Peculiarities of Neighbors
3. The Relative Merits of Makes of Cars
4. Amazing Coincidences in Everyday Life
5. The Art of Raising Strawberries
6. The Absurdities of Urban Life
7. Road Trips, Past and Future
“Sports and politics didn’t loom large in their world. So when I tune in to talk radio and hear guys ratcheting on and on about the home team betraying them or how much they hate Hillary, it has an exotic tinge for me, like hearing space alien dialogue in a movie. My male role models didn’t raise their voices. They stood with their backs to a 1947 Ford and looked off across the field and murmured.
- So what’s going on in your neck of the woods?
- Oh, not so much. Keeping busy.
- How’s that car of yours running?
- Got us to Idaho and back.
- So how was that?
- Well, she burned a little oil but she was getting almost 20 miles to the gallon.
“Gas mileage: they lied about that, though they were Christians and all. It was a main bragging point. And now oil is $93 a barrel and I hear owners of hybrid cars brag about gas mileage - they can read it right off the instrument panel. My uncles would’ve loved that, and also the GPS map on the dashboard - my dad would’ve driven around and around in circles, just to watch that blue dot moving along the street plan of Minneapolis.
“The radical feminists of my day did not grow up with men like my uncles, or perhaps they forgot, and other intellectuals who explore maleness do not include the Men Leaning Against The Car Murmuring archetype, but I remember them well, especially on these golden Saturdays in late fall, the gentle voices of the philosophers of the driveway.
“What they say is that life is made up of a richness of small things and you need to keep them all in perspective. Read the Bible but don’t forget to cover your strawberry beds or change your oil. Go places, see things. Don’t get carried away. Moderation. Don’t get mad. Don’t make things more complicated than they are. If you’re too busy to stand around and talk, you’re not living right.
“Some of us veered away from their example and galloped into the stone canyons of careerism, which has warped us somewhat. We are expected to give up our lives for work. We have a tendency to obsess and orate and that is something the driveway philosophers didn’t go in for. They were a chorus, not an audience, and they spoke softly and contrapuntally of the wonders of the world, the benefits of pruning and mulching, the qualities of apples, the science of forecasting winter by observing woolly caterpillars, the plans for flooding the backyard to make a hockey rink, the difficulties of growing roses, the trials and tribulations of plumbing.
“The driveway philosophers are still with us. Whenever I escape from my stone canyon, I find them here and there, talking uncle talk. They constitute a large invisible bloc that looks at candidates for public office and gets an intuitive sense of who is real and who is not. They know that politicians live in stone canyons and hire smart designers to create their personas, but they check out Hillary and Obama and Giuliani and Romney and they wonder who knows about gas mileage, who has a normal relationship with children, who can truly appreciate a really good apple. And that’s why Iowa is important. It’s a major of driveway philosophers.”
Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.
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