For some reason known only to the internal workings of WordPress, the last post – “Be happy” – was emailed to subscribers missing whole chunks of text. To read the full version (which hopefully will make a little more sense!) please follow the “read on blog” link in the email.
It seems to me that perhaps I may have been precipitate in switching back entirely to Blogger as a platform. It is hard, sometimes, to admit that one may have made a mistake; but possibly I have done just that.
Instead of my readership from the WordPress blog following me over to Blogger, I now seem to have two separate sets of readers – with a few honourable exceptions. Certainly my list of subscribers on WordPress remains constant; they do not appear to have resubscribed on Blogger en masse!
For the time being, then. it appears that I may have to run both plaforms in parallel until something settles out and I can continue on one or the other. That having been said, I shall post repost here the handful of posts from the last week on Blogger; for a while at least I shall publish any new posts on both platforms.
Needless to say, I shall be interested to hear from any of my followers – once the initial sense of nuisance has passed, perhaps – which of the two platforms you find most useful as a reader.
I’ve been becoming increasingly despondent about WordPress’ attempts to turn themselves from a blogging platform into a social medium, so I am reverting to good old Blogger. For future posts, please go to An Open Ground, using this link. You can request an email subscription by using the Contact Form in the right sidebar, below the RSS feed buttons. See you there!
I have just added a new permanent site page, Advice etc.
I hope the links here will give easy access to what little practical advice I have dared to give on this blog, not being in any sense a teacher!
Do click over and have a look – and let me know in the comments if there is any way in which you think it should be improved.
Not for the first time I’ve been reflecting on blogging as a medium, helped in this instance by a commenter on my post yesterday.
“A blog (a truncation of “weblog”) is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts)” (Wikipedia) A blog post, as I use the term, is a special kind of short-form essay, usually on a particular subject.
Blog posts have their limitations. Mine tend to be 700 words or so on average; anything over about 2000 seems to me to be unwieldy, and clunky in the way many long poems can tend to be. At their best they can be, as I suggested in my recent post ‘Road songs‘, a sort of literary form all their own. I wrote there,
At one point, and I honestly can’t remember when, it occurred to me that all these bits of (mainly) prose were something like my own road songs, much more than considered accounts of anything. Consequently, they’re not autobiographical as such; they don’t tell a connected story, but are more in the nature of snatches of music heard in passing.
Sometimes I’m guilty of biting off more than I can chew. In yesterday’s post ‘Atheism and contemplation‘ I attempted to introduce, by way of a few quotes from one of my favourite writers, Susan Blackmore, Daniel Dennett’s ‘multiple drafts’ model of consciousness. Now, I attempted to squeeze into a medium-length blog post something that takes Dennett – one of the great philosophers of our time – more than 450 pages (and two appendices) to set out (Consciousness Explained), using a few paragraphs lifted from the work of a psychologist, academic and memeticist. I am none of these things…
I am a contemplative, though, albeit an amateur, or freelance, one – being neither a monastic nor under any other sort of vows – and Dennett’s philosophy of mind is something that has spoken deeply to me. It put into words, and into careful argued thought, impressions that my own practice had already brought home. Reading Blackmore’s condensation of Dennett (Zen and the Art of Consciousness pp. 34ff.) was one of those, “Oh yes, of course!” moments for me – and it is this illumination I tried, rather than the theory itself, to squeeze into my post.
Does blogging work for these profound questions? Can it ever? I don’t know. I’m sure Daniel Dennett wouldn’t have written 450-odd pages (and two appendices) if he’d thought that 750 words would do. But to convey the immediacy of experience? Yes, I think it may – and that’s why, despite the perils and obvious difficulties, I do still go on blogging after all these years.
An Open Ground 