Category Archives: Great blogs

Blog readjustment

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It’s been bothering me that writing a book seems to demand I hold back the best ideas and insights gained by talking to people being leaders in the world until some as-yet-mythical publication date. If my book is published by a publisher, it may be years before it is published. If I publish it myself, it may be years before it reaches the audience I want it to reach.

In the meantime, as Goethe said, life is sweeping by, and all the while, remarkable people are living remarkable lives, transforming themselves and the most unpromising of circumstances into pure gold, while another group starves for want of joy and power and meaning in the world, the kind of joy and power and meaning available to them too if only they could know it was possible.

It’s seemed to me for some time that another type of book publication is needed. Something that allows instalments to be published and content to be written on the fly, as in the time of Dickens. Or something like the literary or political pamphlets that were previously a staple of publishing.

For these reasons, I’m choosing to take a different approach to this blog. From now on, I’ll be sharing more of the content I have previously been reserving for the book. I’ll also be using, with their permission, the real names of leaders and their organisations I’m writing about.

This might mean some content in the book will have been first published on this blog. I don’t foresee this will be a bar to book publication because the paradigm of book publishing is being entirely re-written, and it’s becoming routine for content to exist in a blog form and then a book form. I don’t foresee it will be a problem for potential book readers because the material will be integrated in a different way and there will be plenty of new material.

I’m also creating it that the book material will occur as entirely fresh and compelling, regardless of whether it’s been previously referred to in some other form.

As for the potential hazard of people borrowing ideas or stories, I choose to follow Seth Godin’s line on this. He is great in many ways, and his renunciation of the stance of proprietorialism is one of them. It’s never much interested me if someone were to copy or plagiarise my thoughts. For one, it’s a matter of integrity between the person and themself, and secondly, they’re welcome to it, for as George Gershwin reportedly said when he lost a song he was working on,

There’s plenty more where that came from.

Besides, it’s not as if I’m originating this stuff. I’m just a conduit for writing that wants to be written. I’m shepherding into words material that already exists, even if it hasn’t yet been said.

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Image: Farmer sitting at the fireside and reading; by the glorious, inimitable Vincent van Gogh, courtesy of biblioklept

The Liebster Blog Award

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I’ve just received a Liebster Blog Award from Mrs Daffodil of The Painting Gardener. Mrs Daffodil is a talented artist of great warmth and thoughtfulness. Plus, she has the world’s most smile-inducing username!

“Liebster”, to quote Mrs Daffodil, “is a German word, meaning dearest or beloved, but it can also mean favourite. The Liebster Blog is to be given to bloggers who have less than 200 followers in order to spotlight these wonderful blogs.”

Rules for giving the award

These are the rules:

  1. Thank the giver and link back to the blogger who gave it to you (thank you, Mrs Daffodil!)
  2. Reveal the five blogs you have chosen and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog
  3. Copy and paste the award onto your blog (see above)
  4. Request the people you have chosen to receive the award pass it on to their favourite bloggers.

Mrs Daffodil’s other award-winners

The other four bloggers to whom Mrs Daffodil has given her award are (I’ve subscribed to some already):

My award-winners

The bloggers to whom I’m giving this award are (in random order):

Thomas Stazyk: A leader in the world AND exquisitely house-trained … where’s that cloning machine?; made a big difference to me in a time of grief

Notes from around the block: A woman hitting her stride and keeping it real in the face of the slings and arrows from those who haven’t yet tasted freedom

Hansi’s Hallucinations: World’s favourite Probation Officer and Hallucinator; plus, all you’ve ever wanted to know about the birds and bees but were too afraid to ask

Totsymae: A woman working it, even with a booger in her nose; also, an artist of power and superb colour sense. And I jus love it when she talks Southern to me

Exuvia: Makes a difference whenever she/he alights on your page. A blessing.

Enjoy!

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Blogging every day: Done!

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Done. Done. Done. Two weeks of posting to this blog every week day. I declared to a friend that I would, and I have.

I didn’t plan it in advance or choose a particular period. It was just a standard two weeks. I was certainly less busy at work than I have been recently, but much busier socially.

And I didn’t write any posts in advance; just one a day.

Here’s what I discovered.

Continue reading →

An experiment

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This blogging thing often gets me down. The lack of readers on some days, the lack of comments on most, hurts.

Actually, it’s the comparison that hurts. Seeing others get readers and comments with what looks like little effort, and to my jealous yellow eyes, little wit.

Continue reading →

The It’s Progress

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Whenever George W. Bush would appear on TV, my father would sit bolt upright, grab the sides of the armchair and whisper insistently at passersby,

Look at its eyes …

Never once in the eight years of Bush’s presidency did my father ever make the mistake of calling him he.

My father would have appreciated his fellow devotees of the “it”, the writers at the very popular Australian blog – now book – Things Bogans Like. Continue reading →

Hola, lovers!

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The Fuggers were in their element at the Golden Globes this week. And they’re never more so than when it’s Jennifer Lopez on the red carpet. Here she is in her poncho …

and here they are in their pomp. Go on. Have a laugh …

http://gofugyourself.com/golden-globes-fug-carpet-jennifer-lopez-01-2011

*****

Ghosts of Old London Town rise again

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On a sunny Monday morning about 16 years ago, I loitered on Clerkenwell Green, London waiting for the company I was doing business with to open. As I waited, I looked around at my little triangular slice of London, near Leather Lane, near the ditch carved by Farringdon Road, and suddenly the ghosts of the past rose up.  The prostitutes of Old Street, the washerwomen, the families three to a room, the pickpockets, the eel-eaters, the rag and bone men, the dying inmates of the subterranean Middlesex prison, the poorhouse, the workhouse, all of it was with me in that little square, and for a brief 10 minutes before I hurried, gratefully, into the meeting, I lived with the certain knowledge that modernity was but the thinnest veneer.

On that day I was standing only metres from where Dickens had worked as a reporter, Sessions House in Clerkenwell Green.  And it was Dickens’s world that suddenly leaked into mine.  It was the London of the 1880s, the London of The Ripper, the London whose ghosts walk again in a series of photographs featured on one of the most amazing blogs I’ve ever come across, Spitalfields Life.

For anyone who’s wandered the streets of London, down Threadneedle Street and Cheapside, Poultry and Cloth Fair, Throgmorton and Old Jewry, these are photos to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

Click here to enjoy, A Room to Let in Old Aldgate.

Many thanks to James Bradley for the link.

*****

A tree in the Land of the Long White Cloud

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Thomas Stazyk, whom you would have read commenting here — and, I do declare, the king, the prince, the veritable emperor of funny posts — is the creator of a wonderful project called CUE Haven on his property at Araparera on New Zealand’s north island.

Thomas and his wife, Mahrukh, bought the 60 acre property in 2003 with the intention of establishing it as a retreat where people could

… come together to relax and rejuvenate their minds by sharing ideas and ideologies, and learning from each other in a personal and substantive way.

Cue enlightenment

They decided to call it CUE Haven, a place for Cultivating Understanding and Enlightenment.  And the common meaning of “cue” – a signal to begin or enter, a stimulus that guides behaviour – fitted perfectly.

So CUE Haven it was.  As the years passed, and more and more of the neighbouring farms were subdivided for “lifestyle blocks and property development”, Thomas and Mahrukh decided a change of plan was in order.  Rather than build a centre for a retreat, they decided to convert the farm back to native forest.

As Thomas says,

Approximately 24% of the property was already covered in native forest and wetlands and we thought that it would be wonderful if we could create a sustainable forest ecosystem by restoring the connectivity between the forest remnants.

In perpetuity

There are numerous benefits of the revegetation project including:

  • providing a wetland/forest reserve the community can “enjoy for generations”
  • enhancing biodiversity and wildlife
  • preserving the waters that flow into the nearby harbour.

Thomas and Mahrukh are also establishing a covenant over the land so the forest will exist in perpetuity, and be protected from logging.

Remade and remembered

CUE Haven provides many opportunities for people to contribute to creating the forest.  One of them is to plant a tree to remember a loved one.

The memorial planting program is such a happy idea: the forest is remade as the person is remembered.

Presently, CUE Haven is planting Dacrycarpus Dacrydioides, also known as Kahikatea, as memorial trees.  Thomas says,

The Kahikatea are the tallest NZ native trees, growing to 50 metres or more, and they live several hundred years, so these trees will live on long after we have all gone.

The memorial trees are planted at random so as to assist in recreating the forest.  They can be planted by the family and friends of the person being remembered.  Thomas assures prospective planters that digging the hole “takes less than 10 minutes.”

Alternatively, CUE Haven can plant the tree on your behalf and email you a photo.

Speaking to the listening heaven

When my father died recently Thomas asked me whether I’d like a tree planted in his memory.  I said, yes, very much.  So this weekend Thomas will plant a tree for my father, and from time to time I will think of the tree growing in a forest in the Land of the Long White Cloud.

Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

~ Rabindranath Tagore (from the CUE Haven website)

For more information …

To plant a memorial tree, or more information on CUE Haven, go to the website here.


Writing vs Blogging

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It’s just struck me.  Two years of blogging now, and this morning I finally got why it is that blogging still mystifies and wrongfoots me.

Because I still think of it as writing.

Sure, I make a few concessions to the medium – short paragraphs, fewer qualifications, a single line here and there – but, essentially, it’s still writing.  Writing transferred to a screen, and squished and trimmed to fit between virtual covers.

Not writing, blogging

What I’ve missed is that blogging is not writing.  Blogging is marketing.  Even when the blogger is not selling something.

Blogging is marketing on a few grounds.  One of them is the unmediated relationship between blogger and potential readers.  The “unmediated” is crucial because it means the authority and trust which precedes and underwrites the relationship between, say, book and reader, has to be negotiated neverendingly and “on the fly”, as it were.

It’s also why it’s always potential readers.

In fact, it’s far more accurate to say that blogs don’t have readers so much as consumers.  Yet here’s me still thinking unconsciously I’m dealing with readers.  No wonder I’ve resisted the word blogosphere.

I still think of writing and readers because that’s how I think of myself.  I consider myself a reader first, and a writer, second.  And I consider myself a writer even I’m not writing, or haven’t written anything for months, much like the character in a novel by Vita Sackville-West, unpromisingly titled All Passion Spent, who considers herself an artist even though she’s never painted anything in her life.

Can you imagine a blogger calling himself a blogger if he didn’t blog?

“The rules”

I do so many things that ignore all the blogging “rules” I should call this a non-blog, and I would if iconoclast were not the second most popular persona in the blogosphere (the most popular being guru, of course).

I regularly express doubt, use big words and — fatal sin — indulge my love of satire and irony.

So I don’t stand a chance in the market.  Luckily, however, I get enough from this writing to satisfy me.  And I’d much rather contend with the “anxiety of influence” good old Harold Bloom attributed to aspiring writers, than the “anxiety of consumers” true bloggers bear.

To have written

Below are some of the posts I’ve most enjoyed writing in the last year, with some commentary on each.

But first a word about this matter of enjoyment in writing, or better still, plain fun.  What makes it fun to write?  What makes it fun to have written?  The answer is something Andreas Kluth was debating, as productively as ever, on his blog the other day.

What makes it fun to have written is that the words written were those one intended to write, and only those one intended to write.

W G Sebald, a writer’s writer, puts the matter beautifully:

That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created.  It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread. (1)

The five posts below were among those I most enjoyed writing because I didn’t get hold of the wrong thread.

The post on blogging (yep, can’t leave subject alone)

In December, stupefied after a few too many wines at Christmas and 10 minutes too long on Copyblogger, I said my piece in a post titled 9 ways to become a popular blogger (Or, how to suck your readers’ brains out).

It’s tickled me ever since that Copyblogger displays a prominent link to my satirical post under the post in question; like a fly in the ointment, a worm in the dream.

I tossed this off in a couple of minutes, and it was fun.  If I were going to write it today, I’d add:

10. Advise readers not to take any advice (be sure to include this in every “how-to” post you write).

11. Only write about the topic “how to become a popular blogger.”

Click here to read 9 ways to become a popular blogger (or, How to suck your readers’ brains out).

The post on a “story that has everything”

The aforementioned Andreas Kluth commenting on this post got it in one.

The story of Etheldreda, a Saxon princess, who established a monastery on the Isle of Ely in England in 672, has everything that makes a good story:

- Danes, Angles, Saxons etc
- sex (including the lack of it)
- Plague
- tawdriness
- legacy

It’s also a story that’s been close to my heart for years, and I was pleased to be able to do it some justice.

Click here to read Last redoubt of a Saxon princess.

The post about transformation, no less

In September I wrote about the difference between change and transformation.  It’s been one of my most popular posts, and I assume it’s not just because the title has one of these simplified oppositions that work well in the blogosphere.

I felt inspired and moved writing this post, and I am still moved reading it today.

Click here to read Change vs Transformation.

The post that broke my heart

For years I’d cherished the excerpts from the notebooks Gustave Flaubert wrote while sailing down the Nile in 1849.  Then, earlier this year, I read that Florence Nightingale had been on the same boat for part of the trip.

I was amazed, and thought it time to share some of my cherished excerpts.  Unfortunately, the post sank without trace (though it was saluted at by Thomas as it slid under). This broke my heart, and had me pondering afresh my taste for earthiness and vulgarity.

It also had me pondering if that photo really did suggest arseholes.

Click here to read Adventures on the Nile with Gustave and Florence.

The post about knitting (of course!)

If you’re still reading, no fear.  This last one is a list.  What is it about us and lists? And what is it about me and knitting socks?  This post explains it. A little. And I managed to squeeze in Hercule Poirot, a personal hero.

Click here to read On not fondling one’s moustaches.

*****

So, that’s it for this year’s roundup.

Here’s to more fun writing, and remember, dear readers, may your socks always be handknitted!

Notes

1. W G Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

Images: W G Sebald (top); Ely Cathedral (middle); Flaubert in fez (bottom)


Tattoo chic(ks)

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Scott over at The Sartorialist is in his pomp at the moment.  It’s Paris, it’s Milan and it’s summer!  Check out the two photos of the women with tattoos.  One all cool and white in her suit and black straps (June 28); the other, a direct descendant of every screen siren to have thrown a coin in the Trevi (June 29).

To see the photos, click here.

*****