The New Yorker Winter Fiction Issue: Hot or Cold

6:08:27 PM      trackback [] 

Rudolph the Blue Line Reindeer

I saw the tail end (sorry) of this video on the Univision news a couple of nights ago, but I didn't get my español ears tuned in time to catch the story. Yahoo News picked it up from AP (AP photo below). Apparently a Metrorail video caught this deer "walking around the mezzanine at the Addison Road-Seat Pleasant station in Maryland, running down an escalator, then darting down the platform past a waiting train."

12:19:27 PM      trackback [] 

Listen to Me

Yesterday’s Boston Globe had an article on a Harvard neurologist who had a “writing problem” in the same way “Ernest Hemingway had a drinking problem and Fyodor Dostoevsky had a gambling problem.” That is, she was a compulsive writer. I wonder if there are also compulsive bloggers? Not me, of course. ;-)

I am currently reading Listen to Me: Writing Life into Meaning, by Lynn Lauber. Or I should say I am “using” it since it’s a book of writing exercises and prompts. Lauber writes about the power of personal writing that she witnessed while teaching a writing workshop at a senior center. I believe that Mark Salzman says some thing similar about the power of writing in True Notebooks (haven’t read it yet, but the review in the NY Times looked good). Salzman’s book is about his experience teaching creative writing to “high-risk” juvenile delinquents.

Maybe this is what drives bloggers as well. There’s great satisfaction in writing and sharing one’s writing with others. And now technology makes it possible for ordinary people to write and self-publish. Some more accomplished writers pooh-pooh the quality of writing on blogs. But just because ordinary people don’t always write well doesn’t mean it’s not valuable and meaningful both to the writer and to others. As Miguel at Laughing~Knees put it so eloquently, “…It’s fireside storytelling reborn. Where anyone round the fire can have a go. No hierarchies, no filters, no initiation process that stills the voices of those who don’t make it into some inner circle.”

8:57:53 AM      trackback [] 

Discovering new worlds

One of the great things about blogging is reading other people’s weblogs, the “listening” half of the conversation. It’s a way of discovering other worlds. It would be better, I suppose, if we could visit these places in person, but there isn’t enough time and money to go everywhere. So when bloggers post descriptions and photographs of their corner of the world, we get a little vicarious experience of other places – and other lives. It’s like flying across the country at night and seeing the lights of towns below. I always wonder who these people are and what their lives are like. With blogging it’s like being able to zero in on one household from a satellite, one signal sent up from one blogger pecking away at his or her keyboard in a corner of the spare room.

Yesterday I found Open Brackets via Twilight Café and discovered the blog of a translator living in the South of France (poor dear girl). Not only is what she has to say interesting, but she has links and a blogroll of connections into yet more people’s lives and interests. Then there is Laughing~Knees in Japan and A Year in Cornwall and dervala in Brooklyn or wherever her travels take her. And there are also many other people in not-so-exotic places who describe lives that feel both very familiar and yet completely unique.

8:53:39 AM      trackback []