Tuning in to the blogosphere after what feels like a long absence. Is it my imagination or are the blogspot sites not coming up as quickly as they used to? Ron seems to be loosening up a bit in this post, trying to make his blog a little more bloglike perhaps. It's a little strange to see—kind of like Don Ameche breakdancing in Cocoon. I'm also following the back-and-forth on Flaubert and rigor and blogging that Steve Evans started: he's summarized other bloggers' responses here. I kind of like the blogging as party analogy—coats on the bed, everybody drinking in the kitchen and talking too loud, with the occasional couple sneaking off to be by themselves. Though clearly there's room for more thoughtful analysis (provided most reliably by the likes of Ron and Kasey and Tim) the bloggers who seem closest to the spirit of blogging ("If there is such a thing," as Agent Smith sniffed in the first Matrix [The Matrix Reloaded completely sucked for its first forty-five minutes but nearly redeemed itself in the last forty-five minutes]) are those who artfully (the seeming artlessness of it is the art) provide a certain amount of autobiographical context for their posts (Stephanie and Jordan leap most immediately to mind). I guess I lean more toward the Kasey/Tim model myself, having discovered poetry blogging ass-backwardly (is that tmesis?) by reading Ron before I discovered anybody else. Who knows what this blog would have looked like if Equanimity had been my model?

Nothing like a little meta-blogging to get back in the blogging habit. I'll get to Veronica Forrest-Thomson (so many typos in my last post!) a little later on, I swear.

Go Richard! (as they liked to say back at Montana). I wish I could have been there. Or anywhere it isn't raining, for that matter.