Solomon's Blogging!
So already, my student Solomon Abrams is blogging -- this week, about blogging itself -- and also about the experience of being a high school senior doing the requisite college touring. The URL for his blog is <http://litwritlogblog.blogspot.com/>, and the blog itself is called Blogging on Blogging, Literature, and Writing.
Being Solomon, Solomon has predictably found a distinctive perspective from which to experience the college tours that he's taking. He's moved from paying attention to the tour guides (I'm not sure how much attention he's paying to the colleges themselves, but he may already know all about them from their web sites) to paying attention to his potential fellow applicants and their families -- and not just to their faces, smiles, reactions, personalities. I'm pretty sure that when I was on the college visit circuit forty-one years ago, there were far fewer of these big group tours than my current students seem to go on with regularity and intensity. As a matter of fact, I can't remember one. But maybe I'm blocking as well as blogging!! Solomon, meanwhile, has managed to find a way to take it all in stride. And striding generally requires shoes.
Hmmm . . . So I find that often when I type the word "blogging," I initially mistakenly type the word "blobbing." Solomon's other post in some ways is a defense of both blobbing and blogging. He's been doing some research about the role of blogs themselves, particularly blogs that offer opinions, interpretations, theories, and personal tastes and preferences related to literature. And he's been reading some blogs and articles about the importance of people's being able to publish blog posts and comments on blog posts, even if these people write without particular skill, discipline, grace, or beauty. A proliferation of voices, sincere voices (which can be very funny voices, we know from Vonnegut and others), seems to be what blogs have to offer. They communicate something of individual and communal value, even if they do so without literary verve. They hit singles rather than home runs, so they help the team as long as other hitters and runners are also contributing.
This has me wondering what Walt Whitman would have thought about blogs. "I hear America blogging"?
Hmmm . . . So I find that often when I type the word "blogging," I initially mistakenly type the word "blobbing." Solomon's other post in some ways is a defense of both blobbing and blogging. He's been doing some research about the role of blogs themselves, particularly blogs that offer opinions, interpretations, theories, and personal tastes and preferences related to literature. And he's been reading some blogs and articles about the importance of people's being able to publish blog posts and comments on blog posts, even if these people write without particular skill, discipline, grace, or beauty. A proliferation of voices, sincere voices (which can be very funny voices, we know from Vonnegut and others), seems to be what blogs have to offer. They communicate something of individual and communal value, even if they do so without literary verve. They hit singles rather than home runs, so they help the team as long as other hitters and runners are also contributing.
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