The View from Elsewhere

when was blogging?

As no doubt is becoming clear, I'm blogging less and less, partly because moving interstate along with everything else I do is making me that much more busy, partly because I'm, er, running out of things to say, in a certain sense. And the View was intended as an Alice-specific blog. 

I always wondered when I would want to finish this blog, and I thought I would know when the time came, much as how I thought I would know when to move on from Alice and where I would go next. Now it seems the time is a-coming. It's not a recent decision, but something I've been pondering over the last six months (so don't worry that you've said anything to put me off blogging).

I've pondered starting a Melbourne blog -- maybe titled 'Northcoto-philia', or 'too much information' or 'permanent wedgie' (my usual state of being) -- but I'm not sure that yet another Melbourne blog is needed, when there are so many already and so many that are well done. But when was a blog ever necessary?

 And besides, what would I say? 'Melbourne's getting big. Hoddle St's even busier. Brunswick's all joozied up these days.' All this small-town-girl-in-the-big-smoke-wonderment could get monotonous.

I do remember the days when blogging had a raffish edge, maybe back around 2005 when there was a lot of energy in the Australian blogosphere. Barista has suggested to me that it was because blogging afforded an avenue of comment during the dark Howard years, when mainstream journalism became increasingly conservative. I'm not entirely sure that I agree with this summation, as there's always been a strong, personal diaristic strand in the blogosphere as well as a political one. I've sometimes thought that blogging was a bit like the outburst of small presses in the seventies when self-publishing became easier: perhaps there are always wannabee writers and pamphleteers about, looking for a suitable platform.  Back in the good ol' days of the early noughties, blogging was a slightly eccentric thing to do; now it's been banalised to a 'tool' used regularly by journalists and management types (curses!) Facebook and Twitter have also no doubt leached bloggers and potential bloggers away, which is perhaps not such a bad thing: how much bad prose do we really need cluttering up the internet?  Laura and I have both commented that thoughts we would previously have given fuller expression in a blog post often just get a one-sentence wrap-up on FB these days.

more about me if you hadn't heard enough from this blog already

I have been tagged by craftydabbler for the

Some facts about me! meme

This might help me get back into blogging.  So here we go:

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning

2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.

3. At the end of the post, the player tags 5 people and posts their name, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they've been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

What was I doing 10 years ago?

Living in a one-bedroom flat in North Carlton, Melbourne, with three cats and working for someone who'd later be charged with rape on native title issues for an organisation I called the Titanic.

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:

Hmm, are we talking about snacks or meals?

1. An almond and chocolate magnum.

2. Sour dough bread with nutella.

3. That creme Lindt chocolate (can't remember what it's called).

4. Gelati.

5. Ummm, I'd better better with meals.  Possibly the Darrell Lea chocolate-coated ginger bar or maybe a Boost bar (my parents brought us up as though wartime rationing was still on.  I'm challenged when it comes to snack-consciousness).

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world: (or really my favorite snacks 6-10)

6. Natural confection lollies.

7. Castello blue vein cheese and rice crackers.

8. Apples. (It's getting boring, isn't it?)

9. Giant chocolate Freddo.

10. Wasabi-coated green peas (Lulu is into these, too) 

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

1. Stop working and travel the world, writing immersion type journalism stories and other stuff.

2. Stop cleaning forever.

3. Give money to my family and some of my cash-strapped artistic friends.

4. Set up a fund for writers...but then again, maybe not, as the wrong people often seem to get literary prizes and grants.

5. Buy a house close to the Eastside mountainbiking tracks in Alice.

Five jobs that I have had:

1. Native Title Officer.

2. Creative Writing teacher to Aboriginal students.

3. Sputum suctioner for a man in an iron lung.

4. SMAG Research and Evaluation Officer.

5. Senior / Policy Officer (X 4).

Three of my habits:

1. Denotape and wooden stick using.

2. Cat collecting.

3. Leaving the washing up for three days.

Five places I have lived:

1. The Terraces, the Springs.

2.  Yarralumla, Canberra.

3. Balmain, Sydney.

4. Brunswick, Melbourne.

5. Levenshulme, Manchester.

Five people I want to get to know better: (A nice way of saying TAG!)

1. http://pavlovblog.blogspot.com/ (I know her, but she likes doing these things.)

2. http://austlit.typepad.com/cfn/

3. http://donandcarol.blogspot.com/

4. http://melanieduckworth.blogspot.com/

5. http://jabberwockyonline.blogspot.com/

bloggiversary

It was, ahem, my third bloggiversary two months back on 28 April, so I thought I'd celebrate it today, when I had more time to put something together.  Actually, I procrastinated for a long time, because ideas of what I should do for my bloggiversary simply became grander and demanding of more obsessive labour than I had time. 

In the end, I decided to take a leaf from Third Cat's blook and celebrate with links to old posts, though even that got a little out of hand.  Originally, I was just going to select ten posts that reflected the general preoccupations of this blog but then I dumped in a whole lot and turned them into a word cloud:

death, gherkins, clouds, cycling,views, book reviews, feminist poetics, teh meme, day surgery, 6FU personality typology, catblogging, personal butler, Katrina, white goods, Kings Canyon Cruise, blogging, bumbledore, jamming in the pub, violence, smiling p*ssy, twelve-hour track, puppy, communities, tango, television, dhog, dogtown, sniffing, psychobabel, anti-social behaviour, rama rama, kitty litter, redbacks, vale ATSIC, wee wee girls, grog, public service, tsunamis, a town like Alice, swags, codgers, cycling again, the strange marching woman, the big heat, roo tails, shorts, the focus group, dagfests, the Titanic.

I never read more than about three links in a greatly-linked post; I don't really expect you to read all of the above tho perhaps you could humour me and hit on a couple of links.

These links read back in time chronologically.  For some reason, I couldn't scroll back any further than June 2004, so the first post ever, etc, is not there, tho the last post listed does refer to one of the original triggers for this blog: what was going down on the Titanic.  Browsing back through my blog was an interesting exercise because it made me realise how much time has passed, how much life I've forgotten... In the process, I discovered that I did take Leonard to the vet's 18 months ago about his dramatic weight loss, which she put down to behavioural causes (so I can hardly be accused of negligence).

I have also given serious thought since the beginning of the year as to whether I will continue to blog  -- whether I had anything left to say, whether it was just too time-consuming given my job and the number of projects I have on the go.  I thought of announcing my third birthday, then cutting and running from the blogosphere.  But then I thought again, I'd like to keep my end in, rather than find myself trying to do the Dame Nellie Melba thing.

In thinking about why I blogged and whether it was really worthwhile continuing to blog, I also decided that really it was just something I wanted to do for myself -- that I blogged mainly for my own personal satisfaction (I suspect this is true also for political bloggers) and that I should only stop when I no longer derived any pleasure from blogging. 

I've written much over the course of this blog about the nature of blogging (and the related subject -- in the Australian blogosphere, at least-- of why this is not a political blog).  I won't rehearse those speculations again, but to me, blogging is a spontaneous, rough-edged activity rather than an endeavour to produce finely-wrought, polished major work, but it is still useful -- for that very reason. The 'jamming in the pub' post above sums up the nature of blogging for me nicely.

Something I've pondered much about is whether I should have attempted to write more of a political blog, to focus more on, say, Aboriginal issues in the NT. Which could make for rather an interesting blog. There are various reasons for not having such a focus, such as not wanting to breach confidentialities (esp when I was a public servant) and just the simple fact that I didn't want to be restricted in what I wrote -- I wanted to write about basically whatever took my fancy at the time.  But scrolling back through this blog, I've been rather surprised by how often I have blogged on Aboriginal issues, tho I've felt rather hesitant about writing on this subject, because I don't get much response when I do -- i.e. no one seems very interested or they just don't know what to say.  Only very recently, I prevaricated about writing a Part 2 to my review of Louis Nowra, partly because I was time-impoverished, but also because no one seemed particularly interested, (tho it could also be that my own blogging on this subject is rather tawdry).

So it was interesting to see that once the Prime Minister had declared his national emergency, suddenly everyone in the Australian blogosphere was an expert on Indigenous affairs.  Which made me think two things: (I) political blogging really is parasitical -- i.e. dependent on mainstream journalism and (2) people were reacting to the Prime Minister, not to the Indigenous situation. So maybe everyone did need a boot up the arse on this matter (tho the more I hear about this particular boot, the more uncomfortable it makes me).

Anyway, now that I've said all these negative things about the blogosphere, I'd like to flag the fact that I will be in Melbourne towards the end of next week, for reasons I'll explain later.  So I'm wondering if any bloggers might be interested in catching up for a drink, maybe early Friday evening somewhere in the city.  (I can't promise to be particularly exciting, but then, I'm a blogger.)

the unbearable raffishness of blogging

Pavlov's Cat has an interesting, er, riposte today to some of the responses to this article. I'm joining in with my own two cents' worth...of sorts. (Personally, I fear that some of the heat generated by this debate may have been due to the slight cast on catblogging  -- the cruellest cut of all, surely.)

Actually, I think one of the things that appealed to me most about this article was reading that Lindsay Lohan had a blog, perhaps in the way that Paris Hilton has a dog.  I've always had a soft-spot for LL, which I fear has its basis in some quite superficial things: like, she has (a) freckles and (b) thunder thighs, and she can also (c) act and and and (d) she manages to be ex-childstar-bad in a supremely trashy way that few (Macaulay Culkin, Drew Barrymore, etc) can rival, according to my extensive Who Weekly and NW research.

So I feel myself to be in quite good company with Lindsay, apart from the ex-childstar bit. My over-riding impression, however, is that blogging has become more serious in the three years that I've been blogging (nothing to do with me, of course).  I base this rash claim on the increasing acceptability of weblog technology in the online media (another blurry distinction, given the shift from print to e-periodicals) and the emergence of specialist, often collaborative groups such as LP and Sars which provide serious sites of cultural and intellectual discussion in their respective areas (with the potential to rival similar print publications).  I don't think the actual quantity of blogs and bloggers matters in this regard, as the article quoted suggests: it's more about profile and quality.

That said, I think one of the most appealing things about blogging is its raffishness, the rough-edgedness of it, the sense of enterprise.  When I hear noyse of journo vs blogger stoushes, there's a part of me that wants to say, 'Pshaw, journalists, you haven't had to go out and get your own audience the hard way, you've had it done for you under the patronage of a newspaper!' (tho of course, they've had their own, other Hard Ways, I'm sure).  I feel that we bloggers belong to a noble, raffish tradition of wandering entertainers, like troubadours, jongleurs (sic?), buskers, stand-up comedians, etc, (tho there's no cash incentive for bloggers). Even if we do become a computing footnote, I'm sure we'll look back proudly to the days of whine and rage when, well, we bloggers blogged. (Clearly you're pissesd -- Ed.) If you're a blogging stayer, then your motivations in blogging are more varied and complex than the Warhol-esque fifteen minutes of fame this article suggests: 'Everyone thinks they have something to say until they're put on stage and asked to say it.'

There are almost seasonal attempts to cast around for corollaries for blogging -- is its antecedent in journalling, political pamphleteering, letter-writing, gonzo journalism, etc?  If there is another sneaking corollary I'd like to make, it's that blogging perhaps has some parallels to the grassroots offset print publishing of the late 60s, early 70s.  But as Third Cat has so eloquently said (and we all keep on quoting): Blogging isn't the new anything.  Exactly, which is why it annoys me so much when people suggest that it's a pale imitation of something else, like journalism or novel-writing, as if one day, you hope to get the training wheels off and ride the bike properly.  While I'm not under any illusions that blogging is a noble form, I do think it's a legitimate practice in itself (and where else could I have gotten the opportunity to showcase so many cat photos?)  One of the things I like about blogging is that you can be as serious or as flippant as you like about it as an activity at any given time, and you can increasingly do it in any place you choose -- airport lounges, the public library at Rawene, et al.  It's a highly convenient form of cultural production.  And you can choose to blog on whatever subject and in whatever style you like.

Okay, I think that was my two cents' worth of earnestness-about-blogging for the year...if it makes any sense, I'm pleased, after the amount of G &Ts I've had.  In other news -- I found out that I was accepted into this program today. (I think only 150 are accepted each year, so this is quite good, given that it's an American program.) See, this is what I mean about my extreme educability -- not content with three degrees, I go for a fourth.  The serious reasons for doing this degree include needing to upgrade my credentials for the area I teach in and wanting a bomb put under me to write the creative non-fiction book about Alice I've been wanting to write before I even came here. And just wanting to learn how to write better.  But speaking of pale imitations, the blog has been helpful in getting me into the practice of experimenting with creative non-fiction.  And keeping an account of my impressions of life in Alice -- in all its forms.

Which brings me to another subject -- I'm interested in the whole subject of writing about place and about a town -- this town -- in particular. (There actually has been what could be classified as a creative non-fiction book written about Alice by an Aboriginal person already). Recently, when I read Caleb Crain's article about the Mass-Observation Group, I was reminded of Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier and James Agee's book about Alabama as examples of writing about place which also focus on social issues.  If you can think of any similar examples you think I should have a look at (not Another Country), do tell. 

Pages from the Goncourt Journal

A few weeks ago, whenever I was asked, 'so what are you reading at the moment?', I was able to reply, 'I'm reading Pages from the Goncourt Journal.'  People would look at me with absolute mystification, uncertain of how to respond.  It didn't sound quite as though I was reading One of the Books You're Meant to Be Reading nor One of the Books You're Not Meant to Be Reading not yet again One of the Books You're Not Meant to Be Reading But Are Because of Their Perceived Relevance to Cultural Studies.  At best it was possibly a case Almost One of the Books You're Meant to Be Reading But Not Really, Because it's Too Bloody Obscure to Be Considered of Either High-Brow Interest or of Cultural Studies Relevance.

Anyway, my dear friend Simoney gave me Pages from the Goncourt Journal for Christmas, saying that it was the original blogging.  I felt this couldn't quite be the case, as one of the book's blurbs read: 'It surely ranks as the most entertaining work of literary gossip of the nineteenth century -- Spectator.'

I said to Simoney, 'Some would claim that political pamphleteering in the eighteenth century was the original blogging, a form of hard-copy, even collaborative, political blogging.

'And still others would look to the letter or to the diary for the derivations of blogging.'

But of course, when one looks for an Ur-blogger or for a practice of Ur-bloggerie or begins to hope that blogging might be the return of the old something, one is likely to be thwarted. As Third Cat once said: 'Blogging's not the new anything.'  And in the words of Lulu Irigarati, 'One goes to say...that's it...and then it's that...only to find it's not that at all.'

However, after immersing myself in the Pages from the Goncourt Journal, I found myself quite taken by Simoney's suggestion that it provided a significant precedent in the genealogy of blogging.  The brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt kept a joint journal of their life in Paris, perhaps not unlike couple-bloggers such as the Symposiasts or John and Belle have a blog.  Edmond writes in the Preface:

This journal is our nightly confession, the confession of two lives never separated in pleasure, in work or in pain, the confession of two twin spirits, two minds receiving from the contact of men and things impressions so alike, so identifical, so homogeneous, that his confession may be considered the effusion of a single ego, of a single I. (xix)

Jules writes: 'Never has there been such a case of one soul placed in two bodies.' (42)

The entire journal spans the period 1851 to 1896, although writing almost ceased younger Goncourt died from syphilis in 1870. The older Goncourt contemplated bowing out after his brother's death then made a come-back as a political diarist, recounting the events surrounding the Siege of Paris and the Commune.  While Edmond did not originally intend the journals to be published till twenty years after his death, he caved on seeing their potential interest value after sharing some extracts with the Daudets over lunch:

I read them a few extracts from my Memoirs; they seemed to be truly amazed by the life of these pages which spoke of the dead past.

The first volume was published in 1887; a further ten followed.  The older Goncourt records some of his friends' responses (perhaps the equivalent of edited comments):

This literary portraiture of one's contemporaries really is disastrous for the author; thus in return for all the pleasant things I have said about people, I have received a solitary card from Scholl, while for the rest, which is mild enough, I have had three almost abusive letters.  The result is that at the moment I cannot open a single letter without expecting to be insulted. (393)

And in response to Daudet's later indignation on seeing himself portrayed in print:

I confessed that I had been led by my love of the truth and my desire for sincerity to be perhaps unconsciously indiscreet and to portray others as I portrayed myself... (393-4)

The Goncourts also wrote plays and novels, none of which seem to have survived as well in literary memory as their journal.  Indeed, responses to their other literary productions seem to have been somewhat negative, from what they record in the journal. Here for example, are the brothers on the publication of their first novel:

We dreamt dreams.  We built castles in Spain.  We already saw ourselves as great men, knighted by Janin with the flat of his pen.  Bending over our illusions amd pricking up our ears, we waited for he drum-roll of the newspapers.  And along came an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, fierce, ferocious, well-nigh ill-mannered, signed Pontmartin, which angirly rejected us out of hand, put dunces' caps on our heads, and dismissed us as 'smoke-room pedants'.  'At least,' we told each other, 'we aren't going to have any lukewarm enemies.' (4)

One of their plays was taken off the stage after a few days for political reasons.  Without having read any of their other work, I'm tempted to wonder whether their lack of literary success might relate to a failure to keep the spontaneity of voice they capture in their journal -- something which is often difficult to sustain in a longer narrative.  The younger Goncourt in particular has a lively, playful style and a good ear for dialogue, and the later journal seems to suffer from his absence, becoming a much more dour and serious affair.

So why would you want to read the Goncourt journal?  For the same reasons you might want to read blogs: for the excellent gossip, here about nineteenth century literary personalities such as Flaubert, George Sand and Zola, the humorous descriptions of their desultory sexual encounters, the earnest philosophising, and sharp-eyed observations on daily life. (And of course, details of the Siege of Paris and the Commune, if you like political blogging.) Like the best bloggers, they were able to blend a quite remarkable range of subjects.  I have a bad habit of dog-earring pages, and I almost dog-earred every page in this book, there were that many nuggets to be found. 

Venn diagram

Everyone interested in blogging, knitting and cats must look at this superb Venn diagram on Uccellina's blog right away.

(It's funny but whenever Uccellina starts talking about knitting groups in LA, I immediately think of Ruth Fisher.)

towards a feminist poetics of catblogging

It has come to our attention at the View that there are absolutely no catblogging categories in this year's Australian Homecoming Blog-Queen Awards.

To discuss this absence, we asked several famous cat bloggers to contribute to our regular Friday Cat Salon.  The cats met in Paris in the wintergarden of l'Ecole Feline Freudienne at Sorbonne 19.  First to arrive was Lulu Irigarati, eminent psycho-catanalyst and writer of Je, Tu, Miaou: Towards a Feminist Poetics of Cat-blogging and I Lick Myself: Voyages in Feline Jouissance. She looked fresh and chic after a morning of scrabbling between the stairs in search of imaginary mites.

She was soon joined by Leonard Bloom, a raffish, older gent in a pin-striped suit with a black-spotted yellow underbelly.  Bloom is Professor of the Center for Contemporary Comparative Cat Studies at Catskills University. He is also the veteran of a thousand undergraduate cat-on-a-hot-tin-rootaramas, and is renowned for his incisive close readings of Dogs in Love and the discovery and publication of the fourth version of Lady Catterly's Lover.

The discussion opened with a debate about the definition of cat-blogging.

And now with some pleasure...

And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven, and must cook dinner.  Haddock and sausage meat.  I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.

And there you go -- Vegemite Woolf's haddock and sausage preserved for all time!

I'm pondering a class I'll teach in a couple of weeks' time on blogging/diary-writing/journalling. I've been reading Tristine Rainer's The New Diary, which is touted as being The or One of The Only books on above subject though I doubt this somehow.  The above extract from Woolf which Rainer quotes touches on one of the pleasures of blogging -- the capture of passing minutiae with the accompanying illusion of it being for all time.

I'm much more a personal blogger than a political one, as is evident... Which is kind of odd, really, given that I've worked in a political area until very recently and written various political or policy thangs but not kind of odd, on the other hand, given that I have a PhD in women's writing... Which is a dangerous thing to say, as it might suggest that women are naturally less politically oriented in their interests.  I also find that my response to political blogs is quite different to personal ones...I generally just scan political blogs and say to myself, 'oh yeah, well that's happening in the world (oops, Australia!) today' whereas my magpie mind tends to gravitate towards and take pleasure in obscure details generally (but not always) to be found in personal blogging, like the Dalai Lama saying it's wrong for anyone to 'use the other two holes', Jude's dragonfruit, the activities of other people's pets or Adelaide's husband's bon mots.  (Should I be worried about this pervy interest in other people's lives?  Perhaps it's something to do with my current location!)

I feel perhaps the teeniest pressure not to be such a girly blogger and to write political stuff, especially when it's right on my doorstep...like the almost 30 % increase in murders here over the last year...but I'm just not that interested (perhaps it's possible to reach your saturation point with this, esp when it's up close and personal). Whatever happened to the 'personal is political' anyway (now there's an excuse!) 

There is, I think, a sense of the blogging elite in the Australian blogosphere, with political bloggers being the upper strata, so to speak, and personal bloggers mushing around together in the substratum below, generally being better known if they're connected to the upper stratum in some ways.  I wonder if this is an extension of the current trend amongst the Australian culturati to privilege the political: this is a bit of a caricature but there seems to be a prevailing notion at present that something is good art (or it's the best kind of art around at the moment) if it's about refuges, reconciliation or some other left-liberal theme, and more or less obviously so that people will 'get the message' (i.e. mimetic), tho only the faithful are likely to read/see it anyway.  I would agree that all art ultimately has a political dimension but I'm bemused by the implication that politics=culture, and then only the left-liberal variety (sounds like something from the Eastern block).  I wonder if this trend is part of a fortress mentality, an offshoot of the pressure on the 'chattering classes' from the Howard government to dig their heels in and maintain their turf (of which I am of course in my own way a part and support.)

But this is way off track from my subject...and am I starting to sound like Paddy White and his eschewal of dun-coloured realism? I wouldn't want to be making a corresponding suggestion that personal blogging is an art-form or that a higher cultural value attaches to personal blogs.  (Difficult to write critically without it sounding like sour grapes of some sort, anyway.)  I was interested to see that Mark from LP is running a survey of bloggers and their motivations in blogging (he's asked other bloggers to promote it) but that he's made a cut already between political/social/cultural bloggers and personal and academic bloggers.  I can understand why he's made this cut, particularly in terms of a manageable research project and his own background and areas of interest, but I do wonder if it presupposes a kind of 'true' boyo political path to blogging. (And what will he do with blogs like 'personal political' that are a mixture of both?)  It's also put the thought in my mind that I could do a sister (ha ha!) research project into personal blogging (which would probably be far less sociological, because I find social science research methods boring).

But back to Tristine Rainer...she reckons that:

...the first diaries that were not essentially historical records were written by Japanese women in the tenth century.  These ladies of the royal court developed the diary into a form of personal expression that explored subjective fantasies and fiction, not just external realities.

In other words, not the battle diaries (er, histories) written by hangers-on of the Roman Emperors, etc.  So there's that idea of the personal, introspective, feminine diary-writing tradition again.  Rainer gives some delightful quotations from the courtesans' diaries, such as the following: acc to Lady Murasaki, one writes when some experience:

...has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.  Again and again something in his own life or in that around him will seem to the writer so important he cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion.

(Note use of third person masc pronoun, despite being writing in private woman's diary.)

cheers

So it seems the blog ballots are in and counted…I have visions of the Australian Blog Awards one day being hosted by Anthony Green with his laptop on ABC TV, crossing live to various bloggers round the country while they wait anxiously for the results.  I’m wondering what sort of collegiate bloggy thing I can say here to my fellow bloggers: how about, ‘You’ve all done very well!’  If I had more stamina, I would probably say specifically kind things to some bloggers (but these compliments are all a bit like my comments, fitful and sporadic). I did throw in a few nominations for blogs that are perhaps less well-known in certain quarters of the blogosphere; that’s probably been my main contribution to the whole thing.  But congrats to some of the newcomers (Laura and Pavlov) for doing well and boo sucks to Samuel whatsit for pipping the Canberran grrls at the post.

One of the nice things about being in the Best NT Blog category (thanks to whoever nominated me) is that it’s a bit like being in the Alice Masters Games: it’s very difficult not to get a place, as long as you compete.  But I’m pleased to note that here at Elsewhere, it seems we’re closing the gap on our classy fellow contenders at Troppo (whom in my opinion produced one of the best posts of the year by Ken Parish on his father).  So thanks to all who voted!  I’m also very pleased to acknowledge the compliments paid to this blog by the charming Mr Tiley of Barista, winner of the Best Overall Australia Blog, who’s given me my third trackback – thanks!  (I originally thought Barista might be a blog written by a Melbourne barrister who liked making coffee.)  Praise and flattery are always welcome at Elsewhere, much more so than numbers and statistics.

meme-ology

I've been musing about the predeliction for memes in the blogosphere at the moment, and how some people leap at the first possible sign of a meme in the ether but how others are more circumspect -- 'er thanks, but no thanks.'

So I've come up with some potential signage that bloggers could post on their sites to indicate their position on memes in advance:

...for the true meme-afficionadoes,

...for recovering meme-aholics,

...for those virulently opposed to memes,

... and 'meme wiya' for Centralians, (something I expect only Tjilpi to get).