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Thursday, May 26, 2005
On Lit blogging, and blogfriends
Jai Arjun Singh writes about "one of the areas where blogging can be so therapeutic":
Jai's post is also about meeting my friend and Middle Stage co-blogger, Chandrahas Choudhury. I've been lucky enough to meet a few blogfriends in my few months of blogging, and it's quite a thrill. For weeks and months you get to know someone through reading their blog, perhaps have email conversations with them, and when you meet face to face, there's both familiarity and newness. It puts you in a comfort zone immediately, which is great for someone like me, who is otherwise reserved and uneasy around strangers. It's great what blogging can do.
Quite often these days I don’t feel up to writing a comprehensive review of a book or a film; making definitive statements, describing the plot, supplying character capsules. I find it more rewarding to just home in on some passages/scenes that hold importance for me, mull over them, try to convey to others what I saw in them, perhaps use them to make larger points about the book or the writer’s style. It’s not easy to do something like this when you’re reviewing for mainstream publications, which require a holistic approach, but blogging does permit it, as readers of some of my posts on films and books will know.Indeed. The few times that I've written about a book or a film on my blogs, I've felt the same freedom, to not worry about the conventional structure of a review, but to get straight to the areas that I want to discuss. This kind of writing serves a purpose supplementary to the traditional MSM review, and is not meant to replace it.And this applies not just to reviews, but to any journalistic writing one does on blogs.
Jai's post is also about meeting my friend and Middle Stage co-blogger, Chandrahas Choudhury. I've been lucky enough to meet a few blogfriends in my few months of blogging, and it's quite a thrill. For weeks and months you get to know someone through reading their blog, perhaps have email conversations with them, and when you meet face to face, there's both familiarity and newness. It puts you in a comfort zone immediately, which is great for someone like me, who is otherwise reserved and uneasy around strangers. It's great what blogging can do.
