catch-up

Last week, I started relying on bloglines, an online news aggregator, to speed up and organize my blog reading. Unfortunately, it also turns catching-up into a regimented to-do list (22 unread posts at About Last Night, 10 at Gawker, 33 at The Elegant Variation [Mark, what the hell?]).

For those of you who lent me their sympathy yesterday, thank you. As most regular readers know, I'm on anti-depressants, and too often, when my dose is changed or a new drug's introduced to my system, my body becomes a print-out of side effects. This past week, the new drug was "Abilify," a dopamine regulator and SSRI-supplement. It's spelled like "Ability" with an "f" for the "t," but ends in a long i, like a metabolic catalyst. To be cheap, the drug metabolized my energy, fucking my ability to stand for more than a couple minutes. Even sitting was hard; my body's spine felt like syrup, and my body felt turgid, a sloshing, constant achiness.

So, I've stopped taking the drug, and I feel much better. Or, not well enough to read and critique classmates' stories for workshop, but well enough to read some blogs and write belated responses. If the posts I'm responding to have aready been the talk of the blogosphere for days, I apologize.

So, here, some responses and links:

on blogging etiquette
At Bookslut, Jessa's pissed off about Terry's post on crediting link sources. Jessa writes, "I dislike the blogging community, the in-jokes and the sly winking at one another." I don't want to further alienate Jessa, whose blog has always been a favorite, but I'm not sure I understand her objections to the post. Terry's posts on blogging always tread the line between a kind of selfless stepping-back (trying to ascertain the state of the blogosphere beyond his blog's borders) and a half-joking self-importance ("Repeat after me," "Here endeth the lesson," etc.).
However, as much as I agree with Terry's conclusion in his post -- "Giving credit to blogsources for borrowed links is good for everybody in the blogosphere" -- I disagree with the way he arrives there. "I don’t read Women’s Wear Daily, I read artsjournal.com, and it would have been implicitly dishonest for me to mention that WWD story without also mentioning how I found out about it in the first place." I don't think the ethics of blogging are that rigorous that terms like honesty or dishonesty need to be introduced. Terry's proposing a blogging etiquette based on the model of journalism, of proper sourcing, but it's just as easy to discuss blogging based on the more casual model of daily conversation, in which credit is rarely given to original sources.
Either way, my opinion is that, ethics aside, linking sources is a good idea. The more you link to other blogs, the more you show up in referral logs, and the more likely you are to gain larger recognition. And, as much as the hermit in me would like to deny it, blogging is a social activity, and links foster an atmosphere of friendliness, even -- though I understand why Jessa and others could be creeped out by this -- solidarity. But the solidarity is not idealogical, and requires few shared opinions; rather, it's a common understanding that blogging can be thankless (at least, financially), and a willingness to encourage other bloggers to keep at it.

on agents
I linked to Teresa Nielsen Hayden's post on book agents earlier today. Sarah has additional comments on the post: "What Nielsen Hayden doesn't bring up, which I find the most interesting, is what happens when a 'real' agent becomes a 'not very helpful' one."

on spontaneity
The cinetrex quotes a Wall Street Journal piece on the Oscars:

Marketing the show under the slogan "Expect the Unexpected," Mr. Roth says he hopes to foster the kind of spontaneity exhibited last year, when Best Actor winner Adrien Brody passionately embraced presenter Halle Berry on stage.

The cinetrix "can't remember a campaign this misguided since--well, she'd have to go back to the 1997 Super Bowl. NFL marketers had announced a plan to woo women to watch the telecast, branding the push as the 'year of the woman.'"

Posted by nchicha at February 23, 2004 06:38 PM