shelley

For sometime I have become an avid reader of Shelley's blog, burningbird.

She writes clearly and is not afraid to think through on-line whatever interests her at the moment. The result is her generous sharing with us well written essays on a variety of topics that fascinate her, often illustrated by her very good photographs.

Curiosity and intelligence are very attractive traits, and she displays both at her blog.

poeticgeek wrote that he doubted her humanity, since she writes so much, so well. He concluded:

There is no way a human being can consistently produce witty, helpful, and well-written articles. I swear that women like Shelley make me question the benefits of being gay.

While I never much thought about the benefits of my being gay, I agree at poeticgeek's praise. Her blog reminds me of what I enjoy most about this period of blogging we are experiencing.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, we have ample records of what it meant to live in those times through letters and journals.

Somewhere in the mid 20th century, we lost the habit of writing to each other what we thought about life, about experience, about people around us. We quit reflecting. And we quit listening to what we thought about anything. Or reading what others thought, not about grand topics that hardly touch our lives, but about life. The common stuff and details, the uncommon experiences, books, art, commerce.

Among all the words and chatter on the internet, there are places where the tradition of folk thinking, writing and discussing with others is starting to happen again.

I am unsure how long this will last, but I am grateful that it is happening. I started this post because I came across her link to wood s lot's link to the New Yorker's on-line interview from 2001 of German-British writer G.W. Sebald.

Sebald provides a vivid metaphor for how he thinks and writes:

But I never liked doing things systematically. Not even my Ph.D. research was done systematically. It was done in a random, haphazard fashion. The more I got on, the more I felt that, really, one can find something only in that way—in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through a field. If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he is looking for. I think that, as I've always had dogs, I've learned from them how to do this. So you then have a small amount of material and you accumulate things, and it grows, and one thing takes you to another, and you make something out of these haphazardly assembled materials. And, as they have been assembled in this random fashion, you have to strain your imagination in order to create a connection between the two things. If you look for things that are like the things that you have looked for before, then, obviously, they'll connect up. But they'll only connect up in an obvious sort of way, which actually isn't, in terms of writing something new, very productive. You have to take heterogeneous materials in order to get your mind to do something that it hasn't done before. That's how I thought about it. Then, of course, curiosity gets the better of you.