Metablogging

Walkley on blogs

John Quiggin58 Comments

The Walkley magazine (home of the Walkley awards for journalism – the nominees are in this issue), has a feature about blogging, including a bit from me. The money quote from the main article is

Daily Telegraph columnist Anita Quigley spoke for many journalists when she wrote on August 10, 2005: “Why some pimply-faced geek, sicko or average Joe Blow thinks someone else wants to read every random thought that crosses their mind is beyond me. Alongside the belief that we all have a novel in us – we haven’t – blogging is the ultimate form of narcissism.�

There’s also an online blogging forum, but it hasn’t really got started yet.

Also from the Telegraph, a piece by Malcom Farr, which I’ll link without comment. Hat tip, Surfdom

58 thoughts on “Walkley on blogs”

  3. Fyodor Says: October 27th, 2005 at 8:07 am

    Fyodor doesn’t know when he is beat by me. So I wont attempt to defend my thesis about AS’s satirical usage. A 2 min search on google reveals that have reached much the same conclusions as me in the appreciation of AS’s literary style:

    I had come to a view of Solzhenitsyn as a dour humourless right-wing dinosaur, but re-reading Gulag Archipelago, I find I’m quite wrong and he’s really very funny, if funny is something you can be about such a system. I guess he uses dry humour to point up the endless absurdities of the system.

    Stephen Cohen, probably the foremost Western expert on Soviet political affairs, also thought that much of the TGA’s effect was achieved through the use of humour against the authorities:

    The [stories] are assembled in a powerful narrative which combines the prose styles of epic novelist, partisan, historian and outraged moralist, interspersed with Russian proverbs, black humor, prison camp language and parodies of Soviet bureaucratese. The sardonically polemical tone throughout the book suits Solzhenitsyn’s subject and anger.

    It doesn’t get any better than that.

    So Fyodor is something of a lone voice in his literary interpretation. What you would expect coming from a solipsist.

    I’m still confused about Orwell but I insist on playing him both ways. That way I won’t be wrong about him either.

    Most people who like Orwell like him because he was not a simplistic ideologue. He contained within himself both Left wing and Right wing attitudes. Although Orwell was Leftwing in his political committments, much of his satire was directed at the Leftwing idols and Leftwing intellectuals:

    Orwell was an uncompromising individualist and political idealist…Both the Left and Right have utilized Orwell’s works in ideological debate.

    Fyodor should try and go beyond his simplistic one-dimensional view of political affairs. Perhaps he needs to get out more.

    That you find humour in the wrong places is not entirely surprising. You should take a look in the mirror sometime and enjoy Jack Strocchi the way the rest of us do.

    The notion of Fyodor and his associates lurking around my bathroom hoping to catch a glimpse of me in my mirror in order to get their kicks is funny enough, thanks all the same.

    Much of my blogging has been dedicated to the relentless criticism of the Soft Lefts cultural policies. I get enough grim satisfaction in being vindicated in this – by the Soft Left itself. So I am enjoying the last laugh – at Fyodor et als expense.

  4. Shorter Jack Strocchi: here are two blokes I think think like me. They don’t, of course, but if I imply they do it’ll make me look less like a lonely buffoon out on a limb. Now that I’ve dug my grave on Orwell, I’m going to keep digging until I come out in China.

    Ah, the inevitable Jackerstrocchi Appeal to Authority. Logic and the facts not on your side, you googled up two blokes who reckon Solzhenitsyn wrote some humour into The Gulag Archipelago. These comments in no way support your quixotic contention that TGA is a satire and Solzhenitsyn “probably the greatest satirist in modern European history�.

    What’s next? Your dad’s book review?

  5. At the Clemson University Primate Research Centre, in the late 1970s, chimps were read randomly selected left and right wing humour.

    Chimps exposed to right wing humour tended to act out their aggression on low-status cage mates.

    Chimps exposed to left wing humour tended to play with their genitals.

    In an extension of the project, chimps were read selections from the Gulag Archipelago. Some fingered the bars of their cages in a manner that researchers described as “pensive”. Lab assistants later noted that the chimps in the “Solzhenitsyn Study” “seemed happier with their condition of captivity than before the experiment.”

    However, this anecdotal evidence was not invetigated further.

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