2002-05-31 16:23

Calendar adjustments

By ancient custom in England both the first and last Mondays in May are Bank (i.e., public) Holidays.

This year a limited edition bonus holiday was issued, redeemable only next Monday, the 3rd of June, in honour of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II (hoorah hoorah Gawd bless yer yer majesty!) and so the second of the aforementioned Bank Holidays was moved to keep it company.

But when the last Monday in May follows the first Monday in June, is the first working day after that a Tuesday, or Wednesday, or still just a conceptually a Monday? And of which month? Still, whatever it chooses to call itself, that's when I shall be back.

Now for a refreshing glass of warm beer and a game of cricket.

2002-05-31 9:11

Bringing it all back home

Over at Leuschke's place (and it's now blogged at Tinka's place, too) I said:

It is, uh, intriguing that the debate on linkage as conversation is mostly taking place within the Walled Garden of Academia ("look Ma, no comment system!")

Which would leave us Little People in an almost Foucaultian state of aploplectic disempowerment if it wasn't for the .org.

With mature and sober hindsight (not our strong point at Desbladet, admittedly) this was more provocative than was strictly necessary, and I apologise for any offence caused. Especially since the guestbook here is a pretty half-hearted substitute for a comment system itself, much though I prefer it to nothing at all.

Now, while I love Leuschke as well as I love my brother (I don't have a brother), when I write chez lui I am not just, or even primarily, addressing him. I anticipate being overheard by his audience.

I also write at Distant Sun, and green gabbro, amongst other places. And while the Distant Sunners, the Leuschkeans and the Gabbristes overlap a fair bit, there are different faces and different voices and different preoccupations.

I grew up on Usenet, of course, so the idea of groups of people themed by their interests seems entirely natural to me. And then Slashdot introduced the idea of doing that on the web instead, and blogs, when I got to them, seemed like elegant and charming Slashdots-in-the-small. A kaleidoscope of contexts, again!

I mean, even at their most convergent, who could mistake Graham "Ludic" Leuschke's formalist phantasias for Ms Tinka's passionate paeans to apophatic post-structuralists? And who would not modulate their tone accordingly?

And all this could have been said elsewhere, by He Who Eats My Food as simply:

An apprenticeship on Usenet and Slashdot may have left me with a hypersensitive ear for the post-geographic sociolects of the net.

You know, I think he just makes that stuff up as he's going along.

Still, when Jill said in reply

I would much rather speak face to face with someone, blog to blog, woman to woman (or woman to man) than deal with a conversation that sneaks around in the corners.

it became clear just how far we were from singing from the same hymn-sheet.

I do have my own site, obviously, and one of the rights I exercise here is the right to decide that some things are better said elsewhere, or not at all. (The idea of being told how I should use this space by someone who patrols her own borders so fiercely has He Who Yearns To Use The Word Phallogocentric In Anger straining at the leash, but I have him yet, I have him.)

And I acknowledge that same right in others; yea even unto the gate-keepers of the Sacred Groves of Academe. My concern, like Foucault's, is with the exclusion of certain kinds of voices, rather than their "owners". Being told that I can have a say (if I scrub behind my ears and eat up all my greens, and write where and how I'm told) but that He Who Ululates Elsewhere With My Throat cannot isn't a solution. It's the definition of the problem.

Alex (He Who Mediates Between Tribes) Golub is at least acknowledging the problem and gesturing towards a possibility of harmony when he sings

I am writing this to you to share my world, to respond to what you have written. But sometimes the best way to respond to the words of others is not to include them in your response, to allude to them, put a brave face on your thoughts. If they share a horizon with you, they will realize this and understand.

while He Who Sleeps In My Skin trills a mournful descant:

If - fresh from my feral feline prowlings -
I were to lay upon your doorstep the
Freshly-killed sparrow of my warm regard,
Would you take it to show to all your friends?

A saucer of milk wouldn't go amiss, either.