Blogging

This particular bit of wood is off for a brief holiday in Ireland. Henry reported a while back that internet access isn’t great. So even if I wanted to, I probably couldn’t blog. With luck, I should meet up with Henry in Kerry somewhere – thereby doubling the number of Timberites I’ve encountered in “real life”.

I’d like to say that LanguageHat has a grouse post about Aussie slang for you bludgers to go have a perv at next smoko, but sadly a few of those words are neither in my idiolect nor the Officially Approved Idiolect of Crooked Timber.

I see that Norman Geras has joined the blogging community. Norm was involved in some of the early discussions around Crooked Timber and even suggested the name. He’s the author of many books on subjects as wide-ranging as Rosa Luxemburg, the holocaust, and cricket and he’s also been a contributor to one of my other collaborative projects, Imprints, which featured an interview with him recently (the current issue has his take on Polanski’s The Pianist). I’m sure that Norman’s blog will be one of my regular visits and I already see plenty to argue with, including his inclusion of Jules et Jim in his list of 20 best films when, as any fule kno, Les 400 Coups is superior. (Norman goes straight into the academic part of our blogroll under political science/political theory).

Thanks to Mick Fealty, who left a comment in the “Sources” thread below, for the pointer to David Steven’s piece on the blogging activities of Andrew Gilligan, the BBC journalist at the centre of the Kelly/sexed-up dossier affair.

Matt from _A Bright Cold Day in April_ has a long post up about how bad things can get when a post becomes the subject of a political blogfight. It’s a pretty messy tale, and also a warning or two for folks at political blogs.

To misquote Robert Solow, everything reminds some bloggers of their political disagreements; everything reminds me of sex but I try and keep it out of the blog posts. Mostly.

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Howard Dean’s guest spot on Lawrence Lessig’s blog has gotten off to a slow-ish start. Today’s post was pretty waffly campaign-speak and didn’t seem to answer any of the almost 200 questions posed yesterday. Fair enough, as Dean says he can’t get to every question, but I hope as the week continues he’ll get more of a feel for the give and take of blogging. I scanned today’s and yesterday’s comments and didn’t see responses from Dean amongst them, but there was one from his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, asking for some input to speed up their learning process. Perhaps a little unreasonably, Lessig’s readership were expecting a much more detailed treatment of IP and copyright issues. Myself, I’d just assumed this was a free for all for whatever issues the commenters posed. Anyway, as one of the comments pointed out, the very least this exercise has done is bring many Dean supporters to Lessig’s site where they’ll pick up a lot about the IP and copyright protection debate.

But if you’re after politicians who’ve already crested the blogging learning curve, Westminster is where you need to be. Huge thanks to Mick Fealty over at Slugger O’Toole for his account of an informal meeting about political blogging in the UK. Top of the class is Lib Dem Richard Allan. I’ve been following his blog for a while and, insofar as anyone actually does, he really gets it. He’s come up with an ‘adopt an MP’ idea for getting more MPs into blogging, and is the only person I can think of who could have made a genuinely amusing pun out of the phrase ‘peer to peer networking’. I’m with Mick Fealty, though, in wondering who and when will be the first Irish politician blogger. Probably a Sinn Fein-er. They’ve been several steps ahead on the communications front for a long old time.

Oh, one for the Irish readership. Lessig’s commenters had a long discussion yesterday about the whole FCC and alternative channels of media issue. It got me thinking of the old days of RTE a h-aon agus RTE a do. I think people of Henry’s and my generation are about the last cohort to refer to changing the tv channel as ‘turning it to the other side’.

Some of you out there, particularly users of Internet Explorer 5 for Windows, have complained that this page hasn’t been displaying properly for you. Now, if this were a more right-leaning blog we’d shrug our shoulders and tell you to go solve your own damn problems. But even though you use an old and broken browser, we’re a caring bunch here at CT and we don’t like seeing people get left behind. “To Each According To His Need, Even Though It Wouldn’t Kill You To Upgrade” is our motto. So thanks to the skills of John Yuda, we are experimenting with a new stylesheet that should fix things for IE5 users. Please let us know if this centralized solution improves things for you. Users who haven’t been having problems so far should of course see no changes in the usual high quality of service.

A couple of people have wondered whether all the contributors to this blog are big fans of Isaiah Berlin, given that we’ve used one of his favorite quotes from Kant as our title. Not necessarily, I’d say. On the topic of even having a favorite quote from Kant, I’m sorry that I’ve packed away my copy of Alan Bennett’s Writing Home. Somewhere in his diary he has an entry that goes like this (I’m paraphrasing from memory here):

In today’s Times:

“Although Ken Dodd has read Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Malcolm Muggeridge, Spinoza, Wilde and Wittgenstein on the subject of comedy, he is always careful not to appear a clever-clogs.”

I see he’s taking the Isaiah Berlin approach, then.

Conspicuously wearing your learning lightly is a venial rather than a mortal offence, but I think Berlin was guilty of it.

Incidentally, the singular of weetabix is of course “weetabic.” And while we’re making intra-blog comments, like Henry I am a fan of Nigel Molesworth, although — or because — like Henry (and probably also Patrick Neilsen Hayden) I’ve never been near an English Public School. You can’t fully understand Molesworth until you figure out the real name of his “grate friend Peason.”

The bringing of a new blog before the public is a practice now so common as scarce to need an apology. Nevertheless, such lists, assemblages, diaries, complaints, lamentations, polemics and records of triumph and disaster are now so common and so diverse that new entrants into the field must perforce struggle to be noticed. Notwithstanding such difficulties, we believe that our new enterprise – combining as it does the skills, talents and intelligences of personages of experience and distinction – will assuredly meet with the approval of readers of judgment and taste. Crooked Timber is a cabal of philosophers, politicians manque, would-be journalists, sociologues, financial gurus, dilletantes and flaneurs who have assembled to bring you the benefit of their practical and theoretical wisdom on matters historical, literary, political, philosophical, economic, sociological, cultural, sporting, artistic, cinematic, musical, operatic, comedic, tragic, poetic, televisual &c &c, all from perspectives somewhere between Guy Debord, Henry George and Dr Stephen Maturin. We hope you’ll enjoy the show.