The whole blogging world seems to have been transformed since I last posted. Now the blog is in the culture; not an intriguing new thing, mainly of interest to geeks and sub-cultures and specialised political niches, but central to the communications machine, which it has transformed. We have a new form of social communication. Amazing. It's happened so quickly. What impact will it have?
For blogging itself, this involves a loss I think. As blogging moves into the centre, it becomes organized, professionalised, written for knowable readerships, taken over by the big money or those who can give it real time and energy. Amateurish pages loose their edge and interest. It's harder to strike that odd note between public and private, between the report and the diary, the trivial and the engaging that used to belong just to it and was so striking and fresh.
Me. If I am a blogger (and really I'm not), I'm old school.
Anyways.....just back from New Haven, where we went for the weekend to watch Nicholas play rugby at Wesleyan. In the pouring rain as it turned out, but fun. Not rugby as I knew it in NZ as a kid, a norm, a national obsession, but marginal, a kind of mild resistance to college liberalism.
And the New Haven I knew in 1976 has pretty much disappeared, at least down town, as I found out my last couple of times there. It's been bourgeoisified....bookshop cafes, gleaming restaurants, boutiques, the lot.
Even the Yale Centre for British Art seems to have joined the new exhibition world: not one but two shops, busy with gift-buyers. For all that its shows are wonderful: the Hodges show (the over exoticised images from Cook's voyages are less compelling than the Indian images, more sober, more tied to governmentality) and for me a more interesting one still on the British eighteenth-century landscape painter Richard Wilson. He, it turns out, combined 'historical' and topographical painting, to create a new genre which was badly received by the art establishment (mainly Reynolds) but pointed the way to the British romantic treatment of landscape in artists like Turner. What's interesting is that they display an unimaginable England; a cosmpolitan landscape that England never became.
Books bought
William Gardner Smith The Stone Face which I first read about in Kirsten Ross's imformative book on Paris 1968. Smith was an African American in Paris and the novel contains an account of the almost forgotten massacre of Algerian immigrants by the police there apparantly.
Auden's The Prolific and the Devourer, a document on his Christian-conservative turn which I hope will be instructive.
CD bought
John Zorn, Wadada Leo Smith and Susie Ibarra Live