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.