Author Archives: ghw

writing & time

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This week I’m rereading Samuel Richardson’s blockbuster 1740 novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, and it’s got me thinking about temporality. Pamela is an epistolary novel, a story told in letters, narrated by characters who don’t know how the story is going to end. In their definitive biography of Richardson, T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel write that Richardson sought “to present events and emotions with the freshness and intensity only possible while they are still occurring or very recent” (98). Richardson called this “writing to the moment”; things happen to his characters, and almost immediately they are writing about them in their letters. They do not narrate a story from a temporal position months or years later, after they’ve had a chance to sort things out. This results, according to Eaves and Kimpel, in “a great gain in dramatic immediacy” (100).

Not everything reminds me of blogs, of course, but this does seem like an accurate description of blogging: “writing to the moment.” As we write our blogs, which tend to have a biographical quality to them, we don’t know how they are going to turn out. In what narrative do we imagine we’re participating? How does the importance of previous events change as later events occur?A novelist writing an epistolary novel probably has some idea of how things are going to turn out, even if the characters don’t, but an individual writing a blog doesn’t. In that way, we’re more like the characters than the novelist.

For example, I’ve been debating whether to write about the fact that I was turned down for the travel research grant I applied for. Let’s say that five years from now my research is going very well, and I’ve succeeded with other grant applications. What will this rejection look like? Alternately, what if five years from now I’ve been turned down for application after application? This particular rejection will then look very different than in the first scenario.

I think to some extent you have to imagine yourself in the middle of a narrative that has a positive ending. “After a brief setback, I was finally able to…” or “Although this was disappointing, I soon learned that…” or “In the years before I was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant …”

Eaves, T. C. Duncan, and Ben D. Kimpel. Samuel Richardson: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

controlling interest

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Well, it appears that Brandon Barr now owns more of my blog than I do. If this were real stock, he’d have a controlling interest. Does this mean that in place of my usual spastic entries on how I stumble through my professional and intellectual life we will now see eloquent ruminations on digital poetics and culture here as well as on Brandon’s site? Only time will tell.

limits of blogshares

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I got turned on to blogshares via Jill Walker’s entry on the subject. Jill quotes Phil Ringnalda describing the system as a “surprisingly good model,” one that will ecourage people to buy shares in inexpensive, because unread, blogs and then link to them in order to get their value to go up. As a result, formerly unread blogs gain more incoming links and gain more readers.

But here’s a potential kink: if users recognize that shares in your blog can be bought for little or nothing, then they are likely to buy a large number of shares. For example, I had bought 1,000 shares in andedam.org, which made me one of only five investors. The value of the blog will only go up if many people provide incoming links, but if only five of us link to the blog because of our self-interest, the value is not likely to go up very much. So I sold 900 shares of andedam.org in the hopes of attracting additional investors, which will ideally provide more links and thus more readers. All of my blog’s shares are sold, and it currently only has four investors, and as far as I can tell, only one of them actually links to me.

Furthermore, the blogshares bot that calculates how many incoming links your blog seems to be faulty. It claims there is only one incoming link to my blog, when I know there are at least four. This will, perhaps, eventually be worked out.

It doesn’t look like Phil’s prediction is quite coming true, yet. This raises an interesting question. Will blogshares institute some kind of artificial limit on the number shares one can own in an individual stock? Perhaps a limit on the number of shares you can buy at once, as this thread suggests? Or will the system instead be a model in which success requires moderation and generosity through self-discipline? In other words, if you’re motivated by greed — you want the blogs in which you own shares to rise in value — you must not be too greedy — if you buy up all the shares in a given blog, that blog is unlikely to rise in value. A diversity of investors is best: you have to share the wealth to make wealth.

Chuck suggests that “the arbitrariness of Blogshares points toward the more damaging arbitrariness of the NYSE and other stock markets that are based on the investment of ‘real’ money,” but this could be one significant difference.

ghw in the news

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Remember my earlier post about going to one of UMKC’s daily reflections on the war? Well, I ended up in the student newspaper. It’s a good article, except that I come off saying that I don’t believe democracy will work in Iraq. Yikes!

Luckily, they printed my letter clarifying things. It’s a brief letter, and I thought about going into a bit more detail about what I do believe. But then I thought that might just open myself up for more misinterpretation, and I decided that brevity was the prudent route to take.

Update. Since you have to register for a user account to actually view the links to the school newspaper, I’ve put the contents of both the article and my letter in the comments section of this entry.

i’ve gone public!

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I tend to find blog entries about blogging a bit too self-referential. Well, at least mine are. However, I thought I’d post a quick entry concerning Blogshares, which is “a fantasy stock market for blogs.” A number of people have written about it already, and I don’t have anything particularly scintillating to add. However, I’d like to draw your attention to my blog’s listing, and invite you to buy some stock. It’s a steal!

You can read the Blogshares faq for yourself to see how it works. Here are a few quick observations on my part:

  • The rules state that your blog must reach a valuation of $1,000 before it will go public. My blog is only valued at around $17, but it went public anyway. I half-thought this meant that I was special in some way, that perhaps someone recognized the obvious genius of my postings and decided, “Damn the rules! This simply must be listed publicly!” It turns out that there was just a bug in the system. Humility can be a good thing.
  • My friend Chuck bought 400 shares of my blog, which makes sense because he’s one of the 4 or 5 of you who appear to actually read my site. But then this afternoon I noticed that a user named Empty Pages, who owns a blog by the same name had bought 200 shares. Strangers are buying up my blog! What does this mean?
  • The links you create to other blogs from your homepage have value. My links are currently worth around $29. If I link to you, and blogshares tracks that link, then the value of your blog goes up by $29. I really don’t know what to make of this. If my blog’s only worth $17, then why is the link worth $29? The quantification {and commodification} of my importance in the blogosphere is as puzzling as the price of gas in the “real” world. I suspect, though, that if I were to read the rules a bit more carefully, things would make more sense to me. Update. This just in: reading the directions can prove to be a simple yet effective way to make sense of things. This explains how the link value is calculated: ($100 + Value of Blog) / (Total number of outgoing links). My blog is valued at $17.30. Add $100. Divide by 4, which is how many outgoing links blogshares think I have. The result? $29.35.

Oh, and I’ve added a list of blogshare blogs in the righthand column of the page. Some of these are blogs I read regularly. Some aren’t. {Hint: I don’t read Norwegian.} I bought ones I thought might be good investments in addition to ones that I like to read. Sometimes these two things coincide.