Pedestrian Thinking

I guess the speed of travel most of us have experienced these days has led to the negative connotations of the word 'pedestrian'.  Slow, pedantic, plodding, unadventurous.

I remain a very keen walker.  I still like public transport for long journeys, of course, I don't want to remain restricted to how far I can walk in a day.   So trains and boats and planes have figured in my own travel, and now I have a bus pass I often don't walk to work.

And yet, and yet...  Walking speed still seems like a great way to explore a new city, an excellent way to think and mull over ideas, an excellent way to calm down when angry or sad.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.      Friedrich Nietzsche

I often come across references, in biographies of composers, poets, and other artists, to the joys of walking.

Of course, many of them predate the car, so the options of horse-riding, or carriages, were rather more limited, and perhaps less conducive to thinking.   When walking the dog I can't drift off in thought, as I need to remain alert to his mood, and to his interactions with other dogs and people. The bumpy ride of a carriage might equally well prevent thinking clearly.
Even in terms of health, walking remains the best option.  Fads come and go, like jogging (but then you get shin splints), or running, or cycling, but the truly primitive exercise, as old as the upright gait, remains walking.   You might run after game, or run away from danger, but I consider running as an exception, whereas walking seems so basic.  You can do it briskly, or strolling, but you can go for hours without stress to the body.
 
I deliberately abstained from driving, to allow myself day-dreaming. Having said that, proficient drivers seem perfectly able to think while the autopilot drives.  I don't know. Never tried.  All I know is, a mistake when walking into a lamp-post doesn't seem to have such serious consequences as driving into one!

I decided to check out when 'pedestrian' came to acquire negative connotations.  Surprisingly I found references in the OED going as far back as the 18th century. Bang goes the car theory.  :-)

Diddling with the ephemeral

One of the main reasons for not getting on with writing books is still the number of words that I throw into the ephemeral, the passing show of Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.

At least blogs and emails hang around as some kind of diary or notebook, that can be referred to later, or discovered (all in good time) by others.

The thousands of words that just fade into the void of social networking, however, might just as well be spoken out loud...a famously transient way of communicating...the rest is silence...

Maybe I should think podcasting (the spoken word that stays).

Women writing

I seem to have found myself reading women authors in the last few days.

I don't know if I should make that distinction any more (just as 'actress' has mostly become replaced by 'actor' for all - although I still fail to see how using the masculine version for both can really prove liberating. When I asked a woman she said that 'actress' seemed like a qualification, somehow implying 'a lesser version of', but I don't fully understand. But hey, I'm only a bloke).  Maybe male actors should be called actresses instead?

Ahem.  Anyway, I found a copy of The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy, and what a delightful read!  A fictionalised account of her years in Paris in the 50s, as an adventurous, modern and bohemian woman.

I also discovered that The Stacks at the library had a copy of Slouching Towards Bethelem by Joan Didion, a series of essays about the USA in the early and late 60s.  A fairly harsh eye on various sub-cultures, but a touch of nostalgia, too (for her family background).  Her portrait of the Haight, however, offers little joy.  Not that I intend to romance the late 60s, as methedrine and other harder drugs screwed up the London scene, too.  And when I ran off to explore the US in 1970 I spent a long time in San Francisco and deliberately never went to explore Haight-Ashbury, as the whole scene sounded over the hill.  Sad.

Finally, I am browsing and skimming through Marina Warner's book about story-telling: From the beast to the blonde : on fairy tales and their tellers, which has some fascinating content, and may earn a more close reading.

Option: Opt In or Opt Out?

I have played with blogs as diaries and notebooks (i.e. mostly for my own use) that it has never occurred to me that I should try to gather fans or make money from them.  Most internet monetizing seem like variations of spamming forums with unwanted and semi-literate posts - not even trolling, heckling or finding some other motivated glee.

It seems too sad a life to get involved in, like 'addressing envelopes' in the old days (pyramid-selling, multi-level marketing, chain letters, and all that).

Of course, I have never shown any ability to take money seriously, because of my fundamental perception of it as a rigged game, and one whose rules I don't understand, even if I couldn't detect any cheating. The banker wins, so far as I could see, whether playing Pontoon or Monopoly, as a child.

So, I opted out, as far as that was possible.   It turned out impossible (for me) to avoid the money game completely - I'd have settled for Buddhist monk, maybe, but couldn't face Christian monk.

We all make choices.  My choice meant that I basically lived in cash and kind - but avoided credit and debt (two sides of the same coin, of course). Further consequences of living in cash?  No house/mortgage.  Not running a car.  Few holidays.  Clothes from charity shops.

That doesn't make me a complete freak (I meet other people who don't drive, for instance).  After all, some people opt out of wearing watches, and I can't even imagine surviving in a world where I had to depend on other people to know the time!

Car drivers can't imagine depending on public transport, or simply living a more limited and local life.

I don't opt out of everything.  In some areas I feel like an early up-taker, or even ground-breaker.

Which leads me back to blogs, and a website I hardly tweaked in the last decade, and all that.

Should I leave this detritus floating around neglected, or decisively remove it (leaving only a trace, maybe, in the WayBack machine, and a scatter of broken links?   It all remains some kind of archive.  Perhaps it may prove useful to someone, just as we may one day start mining city rubbish heaps for aluminium (say).

Anyway, for the time being - and failing any attempt to centralize all this stuff into some integrated nodal point - I have started this blog to try to at least consider the scale of the problem.

That I have still decided to use Blogger (who apparently only have 3% of the market these days) instead of something cool and new) either demonstrates my tendency to fall off the pace, or some kind of brand loyalty, or...hey, I don't know.

How could I possibly make money out of chatting to myself, when I should (apparently) be trying to create 'product', or saleable 'content'?    My niche seems so small, that it only has room for me!

I think not...

I love the internet. I work in a library. So much of the internet relates to information gathering, and to story-telling.

In over a decade online, and with a job that involved assessing online tools, I have tried all kinds of optional gizmos and methods.

I invented blogs for sub-personalities. I contributed to Wikis (and started a couple of my own). I used MySpace a bit, Facebook a lot, Twitter rather diffidently.

I have studied online, and have taught online.

So it seems a bit silly, perhaps, to start another blog - but I have several Gmail accounts, and each one offers a blog and website option - so the temptation remains.

I find it hard to let things go. Especially now I am working on writing. Anything I have put online might prove useful raw material. But so many of us have put our lives online that sorting through it all, or retrieving anything, has become difficult.

I suspect I will simply use this as a kind of index of material already published.