1. I heard a DJ this morning say that Spoon sounds "like early Billy Joel." I am not making this up.
2. The mixed berry tart with pastry cream in Cook's is fantastic, as is my live-in pastry chef.
3. In two weeks we're going to see New Pornographers, which will require staying out late. Can we do it? Stay tuned.
4. I now have a lovely little office with a ca. 1960 terrazzo floor and a floor-to-ceiling window onto a courtyard. I feel very lucky, and not just because of its mid-century stylishness.
I'm realizing to my great amazement that people actually drop in and read what I write occasionally...which means I need to update my "about" blurb, which is no longer entirely accurate. Soon. Done.
What do you think of Tumblr? I've set up an account...should I start up over there? This is the first service I've seen that is cool enough that it could motivate me to stop using MT.
...
Ok, I've been silent for a long time, but I keep thinking of things to post. I just never get around to it, often because of some kind of self-censure: I want to make sure that I've thought about what I'm writing before I publish it and lately I just haven't had time to do that.
But I keep wanting to get something new on this old jalopy.
So here I am, with a new post by way of a confession by way of silliness. Why not. Ok, see, I never write anything about knitting, in part because somehow I originally wanted this to be a very narrowly-focused blog. But that didn't happen, so who cares. And anyhow, I do knit, and I do like to read my way through the great proliferation of smart knitter blogs.
Anyway, I'm late to the party on this one, but do check it out: Stitchy McYarnpants' Museum of Kitschy Stitches. Knitting mistakes of yesteryear! I love it. Especially this entry from last November, which made me laugh out loud--did anyone EVER make those things, let alone WEAR them? Like wrestling masks they look. Only ugly.
NB: at the end of the entry is a snapshot of some poor kid from my original neck of the woods actually wearing one. Yeesh.
Andrew found and installed (thanks!) a marvelous little script that allowed me to close TBs and comments on old entries without having to do so individually. Hurrah. I'm leaving comments open for 10 days, but no more TBs at all. Hopefully this will make keeping the blog clean a lot easier.
This is fun to flip through.
I've been busy. I'm teaching two classes this semester, one of which is brand new to me. I've agreed to write two features for Glasstire. I have two lengthy translations to edit (thank goodness I've at least finished the translations themselves). Then there's a conference paper to write and a panel proposal to finish. And oh yes, I have revisions of my own to do. So I've been lagging behind on the blog front.
I'm doing better keeping up with the reading, though. To get on track, I started by deleting a few things from my list of regular readings because, well, I wasn't reading them regularly. I felt so liberated when I got rid of the entire folder called "Art." I don't like to read art criticism. I know I should do it because it would be both instructive and useful in terms of staying in touch. But I just can't stand it. I don't really like to read it in print, and somehow the immediacy of the call-and-response aspect of blogging just heightens what I already find annoying about art writing. Lots of haw-haw-haw and you-got-that-right-dude. I realize that if I'm going to keep writing criticism myself I need to get a thicker skin. But right now just doesn't feel like the time.
Then I did the thing that feels like a cop-out: I hit "mark all as read." D'oh. The feeds I reset were the ones that are only peripherally interesting to me, anyway (because I keep up with the others), but I hope I didn't miss anything important. You'd tell me, right? And you'd let me know if I wrongfully deleted something I should still be keeping up with?
On Friday I found a few fun things. I was feeling all smart because I got nearly all of the references here, only to be made to feel clueless again by a similar exercise over at Craig's. I tell ya I like the original idea but my brain just goes all swimmy after a couple of those strings of names. They mean nothing to me.
What have you been doing for fun?
I just noticed that somehow my bloglines settings have been verdeutscht without my even noticing. I kept reading and rereading and wondering why it said "von Indri" below all of her posts...
Not sure how it happened. But given the fact that I haven't really been reading regularly (nor posting - I know - I'm working on it) it's not surprising that it slipped past. I've been so buried under work that there have been whole weeks! that I haven't looked at the blogs I normally read. So embarassing. But I promise things will change. Soon. The semester has begun, forcing a schedule on me, and once I get the hang of it I'm hoping it will be easier for me to write.
I'm amazed and happy that someone actually checked in to see if I was still out there. Thanks man. I will not let you down! Witness: this post, which, by virtue of having words in it, technically counts as a blog entry. It's a start.
Sattva points out a list of anglophone Berlin blogs, including mine. Even though I'm only posing as a Berliner. I'm in good company there, so I think I'll keep mum (besides, they seem to realize that I'm not actually vor Ort).
[thanks for the pointer]
I'm switching my registration and I guess it's possible that the site might be down for a little while as that all gets worked out. Given how little has been going on around here it's not as if you'd notice. At the same time, I'd like to think that re-registering at all is a sign of good faith on my part, proof of my intention to get back to semi-regular blogging in the near future. Hold me to it.
I'm under a pile of obligations again that make writing for the blog completely impossible (did you notice? No posts!). My reading time has also been drastically reduced. This may be the status quo until the semester gets started and things fall into a rhythm. I'll do my best to keep up with you all and ask for some patience while I get myself organized. Whattaya say?
Seriously: the less time I spend writing here and reading at yours, the more I realize how much I value the connections I've made through blogging. I don't want to lose that (hope I haven't already) but Life is encroaching at the moment.
I haven't written anything here in some time and I feel like a bad, lapsed blogger. But there are two things that I've been tumbling around in my brain for a while, and I intend to get them out today or tomorrow. Honest. In the meantime, because I'm not proud, I direct you to my flickr page, which is newly full of Cat Content. [Cue snorts of derision.]
Ah. The search results are getting a little less raunchy around here, after what was, I hope, a temporary spike. No less weird, though. Darth and Bruce Nauman both made the top ten. Good for them.
What I like in these results is how the "hems" become increasingly urgent: hem? Hem? HEM?
Got a little overzealous in despamming just now, so I *might* have deleted some valid comments. If you find yours missing (sorry!), maybe you can recreate it? Right...
...so now the category shows up live under the entry. I did away with the author name because it was getting crowded under there and I figured, well, I'm the only author, so why bother with it? If you click through to either the category archive or the archived entry, it still says "posted by Heather," so it's not anonymous or anything. (Why am I defending this rewrite? Do I feel like I'm doing something wrong by removing my name? I swear it was only an aesthetic decision.)
Anyone know their MT well enough to help me get categories linked below my entries? I made them show up, but I want the category to be linked to its archive so they can be clicked through. I know this is probably pretty simple and just involves an a=href of some kind, but I don't know what the rest of that would look like. So many parentheses and number signs.
Inspired by a conversation with Michelle, I am introducing two new categories today: nostalgia and envy. Ta-daa! I expect these to be basically self-indulgent, uncritical catch-alls, but we'll see.
I recently commented elsewhere that most of the blogs that I read are not really personal journals, nor are they political. I think we're trying out the term "cultural criticism." (Yeah, you know, we're little Adornos).
But anyway: I've been thinking that for me, and probably for a lot of people, even a post that's just a link to someone else is revealing. I agonized at the beginning about even those little, meek posts, because they meant that I was allowing people to draw conclusions about me, Wildfremde Menschen out there in the world who will never get to see what a swell gal I am in person. This quickly passed, of course. But I still think writing and posting anything, anything at all, is a sensitive process which can leave you vulnerable (for some; I realize other people couldn't give a hoot one way or the other when they're posting stuff).
This is why [nods towards certain person in the readership] blogging can help you with other kinds of writing. Because it deadens you. No, seriously. Putting yourself out there, even if you don't know whether anyone's going to see it, can make you a stronger writer. Not necessarily a *better* writer, but a more confident one. Because hey, if you can survive the threat of weirdoes leaving you creepy comments, you can survive a colleague's (probably more well-founded) critique. [clarification: I've never gotten any creepy comments, but I did/still do worry about it.]
I'm still just trying this out. But I think it takes one step further the pro-blogging argument of "Blogging is good for your dissertation or other long-term writing process because it makes writing something every day fun." I'm trying to argue that it also makes you more courageous, even in a little way.
As recently as a few weeks ago, if you typed my name into google this blog would show up at the very top of the results. Today I checked again, just for kicks, and it now shows up on PAGE 12. Adding things like the city or state I live in doesn't change anything, though when I added "art," hem|mungen showed up on the second page of results. In the same search at yahoo and altavista the blog lands at the top spot. The mysteries of PageRank.
This new invisibility could be both good and bad...On the other hand, the first result using just my name (no middle initial) does return something of mine, so it's not all other people with my name who show up. It's just the blog that's at the bottom on google.
Did you know that (in MT) on the archive page of your most recent entry, one button in the navigation at the top leads to the previous post and the other takes you back to post number one? I had no idea. How bizarre to read that first, dinky entry.
Whew. "Gay Cowboys" (see this entry) and "Sex China" (this one) have finally been dislodged from the top spots in my search strings. The new number one search term? "Snow Car." Whuh? Who cares. I'll take it.
Well. That's finally taken care of. The other night when we decided to upgrade Moveable Type we had forgotten that our host was going to be migrating data all night, starting at juuust about when we were almost finished. Ugh. So that meant that because we had accessed my page (and Andrew's, as it happens) during the migration, our ISP somehow cached our sites during the period when our URLs were redirecting to the host's homepage. Thus all day long yesterday I Could. Not. See. My. Blog. Which in turn meant I couldn't do anything about the trouble we were having reformatting the new comment form. Luckily everything came back last night, Andrew fixed that template, and hey presto, new thingymajiggies.
So, as I mentioned Wednesday, you can sign in to TypeKey (get an i.d. quickly and easily here) to comment, or you can just use your email as usual. And I'll still be proofing comments before they post [update: unless you get TypeKey, as Andrew has pointed out in the comments].
I suppose it's just as well that I couldn't get to my blog yesteday, because I kept seeing things I wanted to write about but shouldn't because I had a lot of other work to do...and of course I couldn't bother, you know, making a TEXT doc and saving it for later or anything, because let's face it: it's the immediacy of this business that is so compelling. Think it, blog it! NOWNOWNOW! This is true even of those just starting out, am I right? (Of course there are those other things that sort of roll around in your head for a while before you feel they're right to post...I often find I forget those. Sadly.)
Naturally I don't remember what it was I want to write about yesterday, either. I'm sure it'll come back to me if you care to wait around...
Andrew upgraded my MT for me; then we spent some time fixing the "comment pending" page, and now he's going to try to update my comment forms to include TypeKey. Yes, you will now be able to register to leave comments here, but you don't have to; you can just use your email address like usual. Either way, though, I'm going to approve any comments. I wonder if you're registered if I can set them to post automatically? We'll see. Anyway, if anybody notices any funny stuff, please let me know.
(I hear Andrew in the other room saying it's going to be more complicated than he thought to add that new comments form. Huh. Maybe I won't have TypeKey afterall...)
Eszter has opened up a nice discussion on blogging and academia at CT.
Finally, a redesign, but sheesh! it's not finished yet. It always takes me a long time to figure out where things are and make sure everything matches. But I couldn't stand fiddling with the main page anymore... Tiny improvements will be ongoing.
>>Ok, most things are fixed. With a lot of help from Andrew, who helped me wrassle with IE until everything lined up properly. Thanks!
>>>And now that I've been able to look at the page in Windows I guess I'm really all done with it. All I can say is that IE is a big pain (it refuses to interpret the size of the banner properly). No surprise. Oh, and the fonts look a lot nicer on a Mac, also no surprise.
Over at Fistful of Euros a secondary discussion has sprung up in Edward's post about German outsourcing: where does "fair use" fit into blogging? I wonder about this often when I paraphrase or translate from other sources. I'm sure there are other, more fully-developed discussions of this somewhere online, any pointers?