blue sky, sunday morning, coffee and a computer

We spent a few hours last night at the Hitching Post, a dive bar on Troost near 55th, talking with artists, novelists, poets, filmmakers, students, and fellow academics. I revealed to a few people that I keep a blog, and suddenly they want the address.

Weez says my earlier post leaves her wanting more words. Why do I blog? Why do you read my blog? Look at the keywords below my name at the top of the page: literature, technology, culture, education, academia. Do I deliver on that promise? I feel like I don’t.

If all I do is tell you details about my life, I start to feel pretty selfish. Why should you care about my life? Some of you knew me before I started blogging. Some of you have met me since I started blogging. Some of you (most of you?) only know me through my blog. I can’t tell you everything. I usually leave the bad stuff out, so you’re not getting the whole story. Shouldn’t that frustrate you?

For a variety of reasons, my life has been turned upside down since about three days before September 11, 2001. But people I work with read this blog, and my family might one day stumble across it, and so I don’t reveal everything here. In this way, perhaps, I’m cheating you.

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i am trying to break your heart

I don’t mean to neglect you, dear reader, it’s just that I’m having one of those periods of blogging crisis. You know, “What’s it all about?” and “What’s a blog for?” That kind of thing. *sigh* I’m being a selfish reader, not leaving comments, not sending trackback pings to entries on others’ blogs.

Well, here are a few links for ya:

  • I highly recommend H. J. Jackson’s Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001).
  • I’m also finding the essays in Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London: Leicester UP, 2001) to be quite engaging.
  • This has to be the most bitter song I’ve ever heard (and yes, the radio edit is just about incomprehensible). Eamon is one angry guy. If you haven’t heard it, the most striking thing about the song is that if you didn’t listen to the lyrics, you would assume it’s a love song or a song about losing someone special.
  • I’m off to ASECS 2004, next week and any suggestions for things to do or see in Boston when I’m not at the conference are welcome.
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light the candle on the cake

I began this blog one year ago today, soon after–and largely inspired by–Matt.

No time for reflection right now, but perhaps later.

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mt-whitelist

Has it ever occurred to anyone to develop an “MT-Whitelist” as a different approach to comment spam than Jay Allen’s excellent MT-Blacklist? As the name suggests, MT-Whitelist would only allow approved URLs to be posted in the comments section of your blog. You could begin with a starter batch of okey-doke URLs and then, with each comment using a new URL, you could choose to add new ones to your list (or not). Given the relatively limited number of different commenters the vast majority of blogs attract, this might be a pretty simple answer to the comment spam problem.

(Yes, it’s Friday night, and I’m at home writing about comment spam solutions. But I can be wild and crazy, too: I just got home from a shopping spree at the book store. My life is a nonstop party.)

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