As Genevieve Tucker explains in this interview, her current literary weblog is
titled Reeling and Writhing, and subtitled "A weblog on books, media and writing." Which is pretty much all you need to know.
1. How would you describe your weblog to someone who wasn't at all sure what this blogging business is about?
I have done that a few times on the blog, courtesy of a small slideshow (which is a bit
ancient now) which I link to from the top of the homepage. It's usually not quite enough to tell people that it's an interest-based website where entries are posted backwards; it helps if they can get online and have a look for themselves. If I waffle on convincingly enough about who reads it and the opportunities it's afforded me in other writing, they're generally motivated enough to have a peep.
My brother was quite funny when he first saw it - I think he said, "who's written all this?"
2. Have there been any major changes in your weblog's direction, theme or subject since you started?
I don't think it's ever really had much of a direction - I started it while slowly dagging my
way through a Grad Dip in library studies and it has chewed through most of the interests I developed during those studies, as well as a few others (see my bloglists for details.) At one stage I had two blogs, but at present Library Sputnik (austlit.edublogs.org) is kinda lost in space. I changed the name of the litblog to Reeling and Writhing not long after the Google fairy tapped me on the head and I was invited to write reviews for The Australian's (then) new literary review in 2006. I did this mainly because the original name of my Blogger blog, You Cried For Night, with its direct reference to Beckett's Endgame, was a purely spontaneous choice arising out of an impulsive, unguarded, quite furious moment in my life which had very little to do with reading and writing at all. (The full quote is "You
cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness." You join the dots.)
Also I was a little nervous that the exposure I received from the excursion into MSM might lead to awkward questions about exactly how much Beckett I have read. (For the record - the plays, the early novels, the Knowlson bio. The Big Three await me in my life after blogging and Pynchon, I think.) Otherwise any other changes arise pretty much from playing with the tools, or from the influence of blog friends who have pretty toys I can steal.
3. Do you have more books in your house than you can possibly read? If so, why?
No, I don't think so. I use public libraries, the Victorian Writers' Centre library and the Baillieu at Melbourne to augment a small collection which has grown a bit in the last two
years. The home collection won't be growing much bigger because my home is pretty small and has quite a few people in it, and I don't believe in keeping books in plastic garbage bags in the roof like Gerald Murnane does. Also I get awfully upset when I haven't dusted them all and the pages start yellowing - do I blame old age, poor collection management, crappy paper or what? it's dispiriting. Small collections can also be beautiful.
4. If there were three things you'd like to include in your weblog if you had more time/money, what would they be? I can't manage a proper answer to this, so I'm going to digress.
I only really have one thing, you see. And really, not even that. What
I'm doing just now suits me just fine. I'd possibly write more book reviews if I had more time. I might also start a garden, though we have just had a water tank installed here. If only there were more times that could be spent listening to the water splashing into it...
I'd read more poetry, and explore more connections with the world of poetry, though whether anything arising from that would appear on the blog is another matter altogether.
The news service part of what I do has been fun, but that is not completely dependent on time - I would read those news services anyway, so a potted selection from them is what I do over a cup of coffee a couple of times a week, for a post or two. Hardly something you need a lot of time for, once you've got the skill-set. There are
some great resources to report from: MobyLives has just kicked back into the spin, and the Three Percent blog from the University of Rochester's translation program is a terrific site. These things are fun to read, and it doesn't take much time to share them. And I am getting appreciative comments regarding that service, which is lovely and keeps me motivated. Don't need dollars to do that.
What I do like to do, and will continue to do each summer, is to take January off to catch up with my delicious To:Read list of web-garnered articles. It usually hovers around the 230 mark. Maybe in future I will recruit some guests to assist with that gap, I'm going to think about that. If I had more money I doubt I'd be spending it on a weblog!! I did make a plug a while back on href="http://sarsaparillablog.net/?p=581">Sarsaparilla for a few extra husbands to work in the garden. A few of those would be great...shouldn't have to buy them though, should I. My blog is currently hosted on Typepad for which I pay a small sum - however I will probably put it over on Wordpress when I can be bothered to go into the whole domain-demesne.
5. How would you eat an elephant?
Never. I love and admire elephants too much to consider such a thing. C'est horrible.
