Friday, August 05, 2005



To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity. You have to learn to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings; you have to develop a resourcefulness at pursuing a line of thought through pieces on miscellaneous and more or less fortuitous subjects; and you have to acquire a technique of slipping over on the routine of editors the deeper independent work which their over-anxious intentness on the fashions of the month or the week have conditioned them automatically to reject.
-Edmund Wilson (quoted in Louis Menand, “Missionary,” The New Yorker, Aug. 8 and15, 2005)

There are lunches with old mates and then there are parliamentary lunches so soulful they're beyond any description. One day I am at the Sydney Eye Hospital and the next day I am next door tasting oysters and getting sympathy from Caterina and Patricia ... I was lucky for over 8 years to be surrounded by French and Italian cultures on daily basis, however since the year of the Sydney Olympic Games our paths moved us into different directions. New York, Queensland and level 8 ;-) ‘Before Patricia peppered the parliamentary papers with useful reports’, Members of the PAC claim, ‘there was nothing.’ She even encouraged a former Chair to write a book. (coming soon) There was no pause, we just picked it right back up from where we were last time ... The almost empty restaurant itself had flawless sight lines. What a luxury to have one's own taste validated and explicated. Ach, this is where we are all going to end up living in the next artistic stage of our lives - Slow Way of Life

A blog, you see, is a little First Amendment machine. The people at the BlogHer conference saw that. Many of them saw it better than I did. For in addition to its glories they spoke of the terrors of free speech, which seems to me a more balanced picture Blogging is more fun to do than to talk about

Ach, blogging is supposed to be democratizing the world of information, empowering the individual The Feminine Blogstique

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Blogs and Bestsellers: One and the Same?
Is there anyone left who doesn’t have a blog?

From top corporate executives to indie rock stars, everyone seems to have a weblog chronicling his or her adventures. And now, as the publishing industry has taken notice, it feels as if all those bloggers have landed blockbuster book deals. In the past two years, Wonkette’s Ana Marie Cox, Julie Powell and Jessica Cutler (whose blog is now defunct) have parlayed their popular online ruminations/rants/reports into big-money contracts. And the deals keep coming


These bloggers have one thing in common: they're women [Licence to Roam Pure Google ; Sucking up to the A-list ; The New Gatekeepers in the blogosphere ]
• · Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005 ; The new world paradigm of blogging
• · · Jeremy Wright Unsubscribing from the A-List; Talk Digger; When it comes to hiring and firing, the boss traditionally gets the last word. But the tables may be set to turn as disgruntled ex-employees find a powerful new voice in community forums Fired bloggers' revenge against bosses
• · · · 31 days to building a Better Blog ; Comscore ranks Blogger on top for traffic
• · · · · Rupert Murdoch's dynastic dream is ever more likely to die with him Dusk falls on empire of the Sun King; Is failure a necessary part of success? Google hits the goggle-box
• · · · · · The SMH farewells Robert Whitehead ; Amy Gahran What's in a Name?