To fill out: And what are we seeing in new ways of writing?

At what point does the blog itself become a work: part essay, part poem, part chronologue, part frame?

So here I am following my own assignment: blogging from my past (the house I grew up in), on a Windows machine, at 10:00 at night with Channel 2 (PBS - but it was always called "Channel 2" when I was living in this room) on in the background.

So much stuff gets in the way in writing: I'm not used to this 2-bit keyboard, copy and paste don't work as I expect them to, I have to carefully think about minimizing windows - where on my own computer it's second nature. I so I read jing tong's posting about writing a sonnet and think, "She's got it right. Those incovenient rhyme schemes get in the damn way just like clunky keyboards - until you begin to think in sonnets.

I'm glad to see that Renee stayed at home, watched all the right TV, and got her groove back - and I'm waiting until Monday to find out who was archiving her postings and helped her restore them.

And I read Ayleen's Friday postings. Well-packed comments, and well focused on the site blogged rather than being about the blogger. I don't have Blood with me, but I know chapter 4 has something to say about this: Get out of the way and let the thing you're writing about show. Don't stand in the light. You appear in the perspective you take. Offer the perspective on the thing seen.

Andrea writes (between reports from the liquor store and missing D&D):

I guess it could be said that I like filter sites. I want other people to do all the work for me and find those funny/interesting/thought provoking web sites.

Whew. Pretty soon, you have people thinking of blogging as therapy: studied reflection.

But I'm also seeing how commenting on blogs is getting intermingled with all the other postings: sandwiched between stories of Walmart and the cold, between Jeremy's "half diatribe, half information" on D&D and Chad's fear of stagnation, and there, sparked by a visit to Chrystal's blog comes Eudeikis's mention of a couple of blogs in the course of his posting about music, It's personal life fusing - or tangling - with academic commentary - and I'm not sure what to make of it yet, but it sure is interesting.

Think in sonnets.

moving from the mundane to the observation

I keep seeing a figure in blog postings that warms my heart:

Postings might start with a quick and pedestrian observation of the ordinary, the immediate, but they seem to move towards, end in, an insight, an assignment of meaning (epiphany is too strong... need a word for this...). It shouldn't surprise me: people write towards meaning, but writing on the blog seems to crank up the occasion of this happening.

See, for instance, the Monday to Tuesday sequence on Faith's cold comfort blog: Tuesday's entry comments on the Monday postings. An example of knowledge building from the bottom up.

[And I had another example but lost it for now...] [it was Chrystal's about a justaposition in a classroom.

And another from Renee Loud counterposing a ring around the moon at 6:00 am with Walmart.

immediacy

I'm often struck by the sense of immediacy blogging tempts and that bloggers engage: they write from the moment and so write *of* the moment. The observations are observations of what is happening now, here, in this locale. There is even software that will report what the writer is listening to at the moment (Queens of the Stone Age), what her mood (anticipating dinner, mellow) is at the moment.

I remarked on this in class: that in some cases bloggers use the act of writing to join the moment of writing, in the manner of Pamela. In one sense, an individual's blog might be read - or composed as - an epistolary autobiography. Now, this is nothing new. Ask Pepys, or Richardson, or Fielding, or Defoe. They understood the immediacy of the form: the sense that the writing is happening in the here and now of reading, an illusion that the reading public must have enjoyed as we enjoy it.

But the paradox that needs some exploration is not the immediacy so much as the *illusion* it creates: because the writing is so close to the acts/observations it deals with, it gives the sense of not being mediated but of coming right from the fingertips to the screen - and so gains some authenticity in its immediacy.

Not sure what to make of this -

And a reminder to myself: consoldate this entry with the other blog when it goes up.