Good grief! I have triple AARGGHHHEed and I know better. (See Comments from last post.) I should have written and have now corrected: ANTI-oxidant-filled blueberries. Again: ANTI-oxidant-filled blueberries. And just to be sure: ANTI-oxidant-filled blueberries. With a gaffe like that, I should be in Congress or maybe running for President–if I weren’t already doomed from too many oxidants. (My chemistry might be fuzzy, but never my politics.)
This give and take of blog-based comments and responses suggests writing for and with others made possible and better by technology. (See Cathy N. Davidson in her “galvanic” new book, Now You See It.) I love this many-mindedness, as my writing efforts are — on rare occasions — flawed. More important and, building on this digital competence (!), is the quality of and easy access to the sources I use to make whatever is the point. Charlie says that if I am to be with it as a blogger, I need to drop the footnotes and start linking. It’s harsh criticism, but certainly easier to check and maybe prescient advice. Wikipedia, another digital writing tool of sorts, was recently in the middle of a discussion about the dimming importance of conventional footnotes and the research resources they append.
Wharves of a fishing village with nine-foot tides. Is it Tenants Harbor?
But if new technologies make new kinds of source material more and more easily available, e.g. through linking, what happens if linking to some sources isn’t possible? Manning Marable’s “brilliant” Malcolm X Multimedia Study Project illustrates some of the problems, especially copyright and changing technology, as he critiques the book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley. I don’t know if the biggest problem with the Project is it’s slow disintegration into “total bit-rot“ or that you have to travel to Columbia University to see it, but I do know that I loved the whole idea. Professor Marable’s new book, The Reinvention of Malcolm X, based on the sources thus gathered but cited conventionally, was published days after he died last Spring and with good sense on the part of some publisher will one day be available in paperback, at which time, Roseledge Books will have it.
A good day today — cloudy, breezy, cool and dry, with emphasis on the dry. Not many boats or Roseledge Bookies about. Garbage on way from Roseledge garage to Transfer Station. Suspect friends are keeping me from public disgrace. I may have to crack David Baldacci’s latest paperback thriller, Hell’s Corner, to provoke some page-turning excitement in between the mellower entertainments of Larry McMurtry’s Books and Helen Simonton’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. And it is fun to visit — albeit digitally — with you all who are there instead of here.