Publishing a Blog

 

The development of the internet blogging on a weblog preceded Social Media. Before the arrival of Smartphones and Tablets, using the early Personal Computers (PC) the techie’s started blogging using the native HTML (hypertext mark-up language) to create their web sites. With Social Media now hosted in the cloud using it has become non- technical and very easy. Just a case of simple posts. Unfortunately using social media to blog has its inherent risks. Using the dedicated blogging sites with some morphed into content management systems is a much safer option. But the only problem is they don’t offer the level of readership that Social Media generates. So bloggers tend to want to play to the largest possible audience. So bloggers are increasingly putting their blogs into Social Media.

Once again it was the purchase of a book at a Second hand bookshop (Oxfam) in Harborne, Birmingham that stimulated me to think in greater depth on this subject of blogging. The book was simply called “note book” by Jeff Nunokawa published in 2015 by the Princeton University Press, America and Oxford, United Kingdom. Jeff Nunokawa was a Professor of English at Princeton University. The book had a tagline by Rebecca Mead of “A work of strange and enduring wonder”. The book had a profound impact on me because it was just so different to anything else I had read. It was different in that it often described thoughts I had never had and I was never likely to have whilst in some cases managing to hit the spot. It was this difference in his normal thought processes in relation to mine  that captured my interest. To this day this applies to his continuing Facebook page posts. Before we analyse the book just consider this reviewer’s comment below which says it all in a way I could never express.

“Born in the digital medium, Nunokawa’s extraordinary literacy experiment fuses many forms – journal, essay, criticism, aphorism, anecdote, letter, commonplace book – into what he calls “notes”, which are not so much supreme fictions as they are the humbler fictions that sustain the true heroism of everyday life.”

John Gullory. New York University.

So what is this book? It is a transcription of a small selection of the daily posts that Jeff Nunokawa made in the “Notes” option of his Facebook page. Written every day at the rate of one per day from August 2007 to July 2014. He numbered everyone sequentially. So like many bloggers this set a pattern that he required to complete one everyday. Importantly he developed a structure to what he termed his small essay’s. They begin with a quotation typically literary or philosophical in nature. They are from a variety of sources some old and some more up to date. He then follows the quote with some of his thoughts about the quote which is really his essay. This in itself can be at odds to what you would expect. He may elaborate on the quote using his own experience but it may just trigger a totally disconnected set of thoughts. The quote triggering something else in his consciousness that he chooses to record. Being a logical thinker it is this disconnection that I find so stimulating as a reader. You think where is his mind going now ? Thoughout his writings you become aware of the very strong influence his mother has had on his thinking. Then following the body of the essay narrative he includes a footnote. These are really examples of very oblique thinking sometimes a quote from another book or song or something completely different. Then finally in his later notes he includes a photograph that looks to offer a visual metaphor or symbol that represents the thoughts and feeling in the written text. Personally I like some imagery. It could just be a photograph of the desk top or a view out of the window. Just something the author is experiencing or thinking about at the time of his writing. His latest Facebook posts (2020) include video but I find video can be a distraction preferring text and photographs. But that maybe just a generational thing. The current younger generation no doubt prefer the video experience. Having written about these essay’s it may be best to see two examples below so you can appreciate how they work. Firstly a page out of the book followed by a written up example from the book.

5281 Then I Don’t Feel So Bad (June 2014)

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon the upward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils

 

Wordsworth. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”

 

You know those days when all you want to do is to lie on the couch and make it go away-you’re not even really sure what it is, you just know that it makes you too tired to do anything but lie on the couch. (It doesn’t even bring you to tears, although things seem like they’re headed that way.) All you can think about is how all you can think about is lying on that couch and dreading the next time you have to be around anyone else. So there you are, lying on that couch, and suddenly the sound of some stupid pretty song or the sight of some stupid pretty scene will pass your way as if it’s come for you. And then you think maybe it really has come for you – only not just you: it’s come for everybody else on that couch, too. (It’s a big couch, though you only see your own small section of it.). You suddenly know in a flash they’re not as stupid as they seem. (For one thing they know we’re sad.). And once you know they’re not stupid, you know you can take it from there.”

Note: “And then I don’t feel so bad” (Oscar Hammerstein, “My Favourite Things”).

 

 

 

Copyright. “note book” by Jeff Nunokawa. Princeton University Press. (ISBN 9780691166490)

 

This example illustrates what an excellent piece of philosophical thought on feeling depressed was recorded real time. Jeff Nunokawa’s daily blogs benefit by being written “in the moment” without any difficult barriers being put in place by the software between the thought processes and the recording of the narrative. The Facebook “Notes” option being just a very basic text editor. But unfortunately from a publishing perspective that is where the severe limitations then arise. Readers do not tend to go back over older blogs. It is all about moving forward and not backwards. To me the real value of his work does not come to light until you see it presented in a book format. This being a format you can easily pick up and put down dipping into different parts and sampling the thought of the day. So DMB Publishing has an interest in the development of techniques that take blogs and automatically convert them into book formats both printed and digital. This needs to be an automated process so the “writer” can concentrate on the writing rather than the production aspects.

This will amount to experimentation with publishing packages using the blog adigitalthought.blogspot.com to explore this particular genre. This blog is about getting my thoughts on everything recorded. With me being more of a scientific person it is my attempt to engage with a culture of literacy. It will have no defined schedule of production. In this respect I have several author heroes to try and emulate whilst lacking their academic superiority. These are A.C.Grayling and Yuval Noah Harari who paint very big historical and philosophical landscapes that I can lose myself within at anytime. Whilst Kevin Kelly, William Sims Bainbridge, David M. Berry and Ted Nelson are the authors who get it, that is the impact of technology, in ways that never stop ceasing to enlighten me.