The revamped Blogger

The Blogger platform, which has served me well since I was a beginner blogger in 2005 with no clue at all about what I was doing, has undergone a major revamp and one of the things it now offers is an array of stats -- daily numbers of page views, sources of traffic, search terms and so on. I was able to find out most of these things before from a different stats counter but the Blogger stats are available at one click instead of six plus password so I tend to look at them more often.

One of the numbers I like a lot is the one you'll see if you scroll down to the bottom of this page. I didn't think I'd make 200,000 visitors (I don't think they're unique visitors; the stats counter, which is very basic, doesn't differentiate and I don't care enough to find out, and am in any case more interested in the people who like the blog enough to read it regularly and visit it often) by Sept 13, the third anniversary of this blog, but we're there with two days to spare. It also reminds me that I've been blogging for just short of six years; those stats don't include the previous blog, Pavlov's Cat.

More charming to me still, however, are some of the search terms that have led people, via search engines, to this blog. This week's list includes 'tiny white spider', 'yellow things', 'cat priest', 'sifting sugar' and 'Dumbledore's brother'.

I'm also astonished to see that there have been eleven page views this week of 'Christmas Eve cake post' for December 24 (der) 2009, and can only conclude that Spring must be the time of year when persons better-organised than I start harbouring thoughts of ceremonially whipping up a Christmas cake, to be wrapped in brown paper, put in a tin in the back of the cupboard, and ceremonially brought out and unwrapped once a week from now till Christmas for its regular injection of brandy.

Culture, various

Since last Thursday I've seen Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, gone to hear my friends D and M sing in the Mozart Requiem at St Peter's Cathedral (in Adelaide), and listened to an utterly delightful conversation on the radio between those two stalwarts of Melbourne intellectual life, Professor Stuart Macintyre and Dr Michael Cathcart.

All of these have been snuck into the cracks between the work, and I am determined to blog about all of them. Just as soon as the marking's done.

More on Grog's Gamut

 Margaret Simons has a must-read post up at The Content Makers on the ethics of journalist James Massola's outing in The Australian of the blogger formerly known as Grog's Gamut, including a crystalline bit of analysis by Swinburne lecturer in media ethics Denis Muller.

Among other excellent points, he makes this one:

... there is another public-interest consideration to be taken into account here, and that is the public interest in having a plurality of voices in the public space or, as John Milton called it, the marketplace of ideas.  If, as a result of the outing, Mr Jericho withdraws from the public space, the Australian polity will be the poorer; it will have been harmed.  The harm would be negligible, certainly, but the principle is not negligible.  Ethical reporting requires that such possible consequences be identified and an honest rationale be developed to justify causing them.

Read, Think, Write -- new post

Because I'm going to get this blog going properly if it kills me.

Read, Think, Write

There's some new stuff at the new blog.

Another day, another blog

Loth to let the litblog thing go altogether, though one has tried and failed to keep it up at more than one site, one is having yet another go. Now that I've learned to export and import on Blogger, this newish blog incorporates all of Australian Literature Diary (2005-2010 on and off) and all (three whole months but gee it was fun while it lasted) of Ask the Brontë Sisters (May-July, 2007).

I originally called it 'Read, Write, Think' but on reflection decided that sends a terrible message, as one should think before one writes. It might be better entitled 'Read, Think, Write, Draft, Edit, Proof-read, Argue With Editor, Review, Fisk [which we of literary academe used to call 'close reading' before it began to be frowned on as ideologically unsound, and were taught, compulsorily and unrelentingly, to do many years before blogging was born or thought of, harumph, you kids get off my lawn, etc], Rave About Writers You Like and Whinge and Bitch About Other People's Terrible Ideas and Excruciating Spelling, Grammar and Style', but this should do to be going on with.

It's meant to be a sort of journal, in which track is kept of what I read and write from day to day, what I notice in the reviews pages, little magazines, trade journals and lit gossip columns, and what I hear from my mates. Much like this blog, in fact, except without the cooking and cats and gardening and Tony Abbott and so on. Whenever there's a new post over there, I'll put up a link from here.

Lunar lights

Beyond the fact that s/he appears to hail from Sydney I have not yet (not that I've tried very hard so far) found a clue to who the Loon Pond blogger actually is. It's clearly only one person but s/he signs him/herself Dorothy Parker so that's really not much help is it. Whoever s/he may be, the prolific and very sharp and funny Dorothy P. of Loon Pond is now on the blogroll here at Still Life With Cat and here's a sample that has already given me a larf on this demanding morning:

Meanwhile, the Liberals shed the likes of Petro Georgiou and keep the likes of Julie Bishop. It's a funny old world ...

Six figures!

Some time in the last few hours, the visitor stats here (not unique visits, of course -- my freebie basic-level counter doesn't do anything that sophisticated) went over 100,000, counting since I started this blog on September 13th, 2008, as you can see if you scroll right down to the bottom of the page. I don't pay all that much attention to stats, but I do think 100,000 is a nice number. If only it were my income.

Blog post of the week

Go and have a look at this lovely piece by Tim Dunlop for the ABC's The Drum on the achievements of Tony Abbott, including discussion of the Budgie's 'unconventional approach to policy' and his 'malleable approach to straightforwardness'.

The comments thread, featuring character analyses of Kevin 'Mugabe' Rudd and Tim 'Red to the Core' Dunlop himself, is also good for a laugh, but is not for the faint-hearted.

Unbloggability

Sometimes it's because someone else will be hurt, sometimes it's because someone else will be humiliated, sometimes it's because someone else will be enraged, sometimes it's because you'll permanently alienate at least three people important to you, sometimes it's because you don't trust your own motives, sometimes it's because you'll get done like a dinner for defamation and sometimes it's because it's against all the rules of civilised life to tell what you know.

But oh dearie me, I don't think it's ever been all of those at once before. No wonder I can't concentrate.

Typo schmypo

It's been a long and painful process and even now I occasionally succumb to temptation, but I've learned over four years of blogging that there are certain fora in which you can be as rude, abusive and profane as you like, but the moment that -- having finally snapped at some online wanker's rudeness, aggression or abuse -- you mock someone's grammar, spelling, transcription, typing skills, or any other manifestation of ignorance or carelessness with language, you will be roundly abused for pointing out a 'typo'.

In the book of netiquette, mockery of a so-called 'typo' is somewhere well beyond defamation in the catalogue of sins and even further beyond plagiarism, which isn't considered a sin at all. The word 'typo' is short for 'typographical error' which (while technically a misnomer since it harks back to the days of lead type) is, or used to be, used in media and publishing to refer to any alphabetical or other character misplaced by mechanical accident, formerly as when one misplaced the little metal letters and now as when one tingles up one's fangers in the typing process. But the netizens to whom I refer here, who clearly don't know this and don't care, use 'typo' to mean all manner of error committed through ignorance and carelessness.

They are welcome, of course, but it is sad for them that, since they are not alert to these things, they miss so much unintended online humour. Like this most wonderful comment, comment #3, at this excellent piece on Julie & Julia: 'Stop trying to analize everything.'

That, folks, is not a 'typo'. That is a truly magnificent spelling error and an even more magnificent, if entirely unintentional, pun. It's the sort of thing that makes you hope there's an afterlife, just so that Freud can have a giggle.

NUMB3RS

So, will my Visitor stats hit 60,000 today? And if they do, will I get a special cookie?

UPDATE, 6.30 pm: Yes! All ur numberz are belong to us!

Trip trap, trip trap

Sorry folks, I have a new troll -- some free-market worshipper behaving the way such types usually behave online, with the emphasis on anonymous, gratuitous, aggressive pig-rudeness to total strangers -- and therefore comment moderation has been enabled until she or he gets bored and goes away. I know it's annoying, but it won't be for long.

For some reason, every blogiversary I've ever had (4th tomorrow) seems to be marked by some unpleasantness of this nature. Perhaps it is merely the blog gods reminding one that blogging is not all Veuve Clicquot and free kittens.

All above is azure bright, usually*

Recent events have inspired me to have another go at reviving my dedicated Aust Lit blog, Australian Literature Diary, which has been lying dormant (or, as my mum would have said, lying doggo) since I began this one in September last year. There is a place for such a blog, and a potential readership for it, and many uses for it. So I've prettied it up a bit and cross-posted all the posts from here that belong there as well, and have several posts in mind for it over the next few days.

*I do believe that in some states the Song of Australia isn't very well known, but most South Australians would have preferred it as a national anthem to Advance Australia Fair. At coffee this morning we were trying to remember when Australia's national anthem moved on from God Save the Queen; I thought under Hawke, but D said Fraser, while M, who wasn't born till 1987, just looked bemused. I had a vague memory that what everyone really wanted was Waltzing Matilda but couldn't remember why, if that was the case, it didn't get up. I seem to remember someone pointing out that it was a song about a sheep-stealing suicide and an incompetent police force and as such a tad inappropriate for a national anthem, but I may be making that up. Does anybody know?

Unfortunately, Alexander McCall Smith is already married

From Corduroy Mansions:

7. Proustian-Jungian Soup

Caroline thought: It's odd, sitting here, letting one's mind wander, and who should come into it but Tim Something, of all people. Strange.

She had not seen him for two years; her photograph had appeared in Rural Living during her last year at Oxford Brookes and then there had been a gap year in New Zealand looking after the children of a family who lived in Auckland (whose fifteen-year-old son had made a pass at her; fifteen!) Now here she was doing her Master's in Fine Art, sitting in a lecture on seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and a photographer whom she barely knew -- and rather disliked -- suddenly came into her mind. It was odd, but that was how the human mind was: a Proustian-Jungian soup of memories and associations.

Proustian-Jungian; she rather liked the term, and might use it in one of her essays.

Still alive ...

... but only just. For all of this week and half of next week, I attend all-day meetings by day, do the reading and note-taking for said meetings in the early evening, and attend to my real job and one of my side income projects (now badly overdue) after dinner, which is currently a can of soup and a piece of toast.

Today, a day 'off', I'm sitting at home in my dressing gown catching up on some of this stuff before I go on an urgent supermarket run. Once this mad fortnight (which culminates in a trip to Sydney for the various functions associated with this book) is finished, the weekend after next, I will report back on the vice-regal do and then write a post I've been planning ever since veteran gold-class blog commenter Nabs linked to a stunning Youtube in the comments a few posts ago and Helen of the Cast Iron Balcony picked it up and posted it -- you can watch it here -- about pianos.

Googlememe: needs

It always bemuses me a bit when people start talking about their needs, as though the mere act of declaring them were some kind of claim to entitlement. (Two real examples, that I have heard with my own ears from people who were not joking, to make the point: 'But I need to have four or five women in my life.' 'But I need to be adored.' Look on the bright side though, at least they didn't come from the same person.)

Needs are relative to situation. If you are bleeding to death, you could probably say with justification that you need a blood transfusion, sharpish. But otherwise, shelter, water and food are needs, and not much else. Maybe a bit of love, of some kind or another. But pretty much everything else isn't a need, it's just a want.

I have pinched this 'needs' meme straight from Deborah Strange Land. I've seen it before, but I was quite taken with Deborah's little annotations, which spark it up no end. The rules are that you google your name followed by the word 'needs' and then list the first ten that have come up, but my results have been skewed by the presence in some "reality" TV show or other of a Kerryn about whom many brainless opinions have been passed online, some of them very unkind, so I have substituted the ten I like best, thus:

1) Kerryn needs a housekeeper for her room.
No, she needs a housekeeper for her house.

2) Kerryn needs to be remembered.
Depends. With regard to certain people, situations and events, what Kerryn needs is to be forgotten.

3) Kerryn needs a holiday.
You have no idea.

4) Kerryn needs a thought bubble above her head.
Au contraire; her mother always said she was far too open a book.

5) Kerryn needs to start shooting.
Well, not quite, not yet. But give her time.

6) Kerryn needs to replace the one she sold by mistake.
Nah, she needs to replace the one she bought by mistake. White streaks of undissolved washing powder on the "clean" black clothes, pffft.

7) Kerryn needs an understudy.
She certainly thinks it would be very reassuring to know there was someone who could come on and take over if she had swine flu or something, yes.

8) Kerryn needs makeup like 24/7, honestly.
This is doubtless true, but luckily she is too old to care.

9) Kerryn needs work.
She already has more work than can be managed, unless this was meant in the sense of 'This proposal needs work', in which case, quite.

10) Kerryn needs to bite some chumps.
Now that is what I call a need.

I wondered whether he'd be able to stay away ...

From today's edition of Crikey:

Next week Crikey launches a new music blog from on-line legend Tim Dunlop.

Music reviews, gig reviews and the neverending search for the perfect song.
Music for grown-ups who remember when they weren't ... You know the deal, s-x and drugs and rock n' roll, and jazz, and lieder, and disco, and Gospel, and s-x, and drugs, and country, and western, and whatever else takes our fancy ...

A new addition to what is quite possibly the country's niftiest blog network.

Lookin' forward to it.

To be had, and srown away

There's no time to look it up, for there are chocolate bunnies and assorted hot cross buns to be bought, Aged Ps to visit and yet more Australia Post bags of books to open and sort, but somewhere in one of Helen Garner's essays (I think) is a discussion of how important it is, when planning to write or make something, to have a plan -- but how easy it then becomes for you to be ensnared by the plan, and to be unable to see beyond it to different possibilities. She once had a Polish friend, said Garner, whose opinion of plan-making was as follows: 'A plan is to be had, and srown away.'

I think of this dictum often, and in many different situations. It has been of particular help to me in the cut and thrust of blog thread discussions, especially on big group blogs. For there are some regular commenters whom one knows by now to be a bit bonkers, and engaging in protracted debate with them is never a good idea.

Lately I have been trying harder and harder to avoid getting into it with certain of these people, even when they post comments into which one is truly desperate to sink one's teeth. What works in this situation is exactly the same technique as the letter or email that you write and do not send. Writing it is not only cathartic, but it forces you to articulate clearly what it is that you actually think, and sometimes it even turns out that it was that act of articulation -- rather than the fight itself -- that you were longing for.

And I've written three different blog comments this morning that I've then deleted without posting, either because I've resisted engaging unproductively with someone, or because I know that what I have to say will bring down dreadful abuse upon my head. But that's fine. They were comments to be had, and srown away.

Tribal

Since the bride and Ampersand Duck between them have already provided lovely accounts, in one case lavishly illustrated, of Laura and Dorian's wedding on Saturday, I don't have much to add except to agree about the total gorgeousness of the entire affair. Highlights included a ceremony that combined a substantial amount of traditional wedding text with some carefully-chosen and beautifully-read Australian love poems by, if I remember rightly, Kevin Hart, Bruce Dawe and Lesbia Harford, plus C.P. Cavafy's classic 'Ithaka', in which a finely judged mixture of feeling, philosophy and Homer goes into the proposition that what matters most is not the arrival but the journey.

Poems were read and vows were taken to the accompaniment of a faint but symphonic soundtrack: the gentle crooning of the chooks, the distant popping of the pre-toast corks, and the occasional sniffling noises of the various female guests. The bride was radiant, the ceremony was a wonderful family affair, the garden looked gorgeous, the weather obliged, and the only real disappointment was the bridesmaids, who apparently spent most of the day underneath the house next door getting their collars, bows and faces covered in cobwebs and dust.

Once I'd decided to go to the wedding and had sent Laura my RSVP, I began to make arrangements to catch up with the various Melbourne friends I've stayed in regular touch with since I moved to Adelaide eleven years ago, and by the time I finally arrived at my Lygon Street hotel, I'd lined up three reunions around the wedding.

After a blindingly stressful day of cat-wrangling and ominous airport delays and announcements and closures and rumours of lightning-struck planes, Friday night once I'd finally arrived was homemade gourmet pizza with P and S and the kids, two of whom are now at high school and none of whom was born yet when, already old friends, their parents and I and two other friends spent a week in a villa in Tuscany in 1993. Now we sat round talking, eating and drinking in much the same spirit, except with P and S now happily surrounded by kids, cats and dogs. (Only one dog, actually, but he is so big he could make eight or nine Maltese terriers.)

Saturday night was dinner out with L, who heroically came to fetch me and then took me out for seriously good Italian food and some in-depth catching-up in matters of love and work. Sunday was lunch with J in an old Carlton haunt, after which we strolled up to Melbourne University's Ian Potter Gallery to see a wonderful exhibition of Louis Kahan's portraits of Australian, and particularly Melbourne, literati ('Let's go and look at the intelligentsia,' said J).

Many of these portraits were drawn to illustrate particular articles, poems and stories in Meanjin over several decades; both of us knew (or had known) a number of the people in the portraits and had read the work of most of the others, and I was reminded again that galleries and museums are a lot like computers in that what you get out of them depends heavily on what you put in; both of us had brought a lot of history with us to the gallery, possibly too much. (What with J a former editor, the exhibition's portraits of the two editors before her, the presence of the current editor at the wedding and a screening at the exhibition of a 1961 episode of Panorama exclusively dedicated to the magazine, it was a fairly Meanjin-themed visit altogether.)

We know ourselves by the tribes to which we belong, and I hadn't properly thought through the fact that on this weekend I would be rejoining several of mine. Still, I knew that the wedding would be a monster blogmeet and that I would catch up with bloggers of all kinds: some I'd known for years pre-blogging but mainly in professional capacities (Elsewhere, Sophie); others I'd met recently as a direct or indirect result of blogging (the Baron, and of course the bride herself); and yet others whom I'd never met at all, including two in particular whom I felt I knew very well but had never actually laid eyes on, namely the lovely Zoe and the equally lovely Ampersand Duck. If I'd been able to summon just a little more energy or will, I would have kicked on to the Standard Hotel after dinner on Friday night in order to experience the blogtribe even more extensively, and with hindsight I wish I had, but alas one is not as young as one was.

Stephanie of Humanities Researcher is the only person who is a member of all my non-Adelaide tribes (blogging, Aust lit, old-friends network), and Stephanie has thoughtlessly naffed off to Philadelphia. But there was still one point of overlap: the other S is one of the still-in-touch old Melbourne mates and, though not a blogger, is now a work colleague of Laura's and was at the wedding with her husband and their kids. They have had an extremely hairy time of it lately and the prospect of seeing them all safe and well was one of the factors that tipped the scales when I was thinking about making the trip. And for this weekend they were the hinge, for me, between one reality and another.

Mooching down Lygon Street late the next morning took me even further back, back to the first time I'd ever been on it, one day in the winter of 1980 -- my first year of living away from Adelaide, and Melbourne still a total mystery to me; Sydney was my 'other city' in early life -- when I'd travelled up from Geelong with a man to whom I was in thrall in every possible way, something that had never happened before and has never, I'm glad to say, happened since. So Melbourne-centric was he, so tightly wound and swaddled in the cocoon of his own reality at the expense of anyone else's, that he'd said to me 'I'll meet you in Tamani's' and I had desperately wandered up and down Lygon Street at least a dozen times before I thought to ask someone, and discovered that Tamani's had changed its name to Ti Amo (!) some time beforehand and he just assumed I'd know. (Nor was he apologetic afterwards. Yes yes, I know.)

And over that, layers and layers of other memories, all variously plotted along that spectrum whose bad end is the one where you want to curl up into a foetal ball in the gutter and die of shame. Ah dear me, almost thirty years of Lygon Street, as bittersweet to me as the best of its own imported gourmet wares, and a great deal older than most of them. It was a relief to spot J's familiar back in Readings, and to wander off with her to find some lunch and get each other back up to date on life's important developments since last we met. Why it should be a surprise to us here in our fifties that fate keeps on happening, and not just to us but to such of our parents as still survive, I really have no idea.