So today as you go about your normal business, take a second to remember those who have suffered this ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment that violates the right to life. It is irrevocable and can be inflicted on the innocent and has never been shown to deter crime more effectively than other punishments
Thanks for that. We need to be reminded about this issue and it’s often hard to know what to do that might be in anyway effective.
I don’t know if I should mention this public-ally, but I will: I just googled you and it seems you are some sort of HR activist. I’m kind of interested in the fact that you don’t blog about these issues all that often. (Not that you’re under any obligation to.) Was it a deliberate choice to be a mainly personal blogger? (Not that I don’t think the personal and the domestic aren’t political.)
Oh. I don’t think anyone has ever googled me before.
I think the focus of my blogging is all to do with what was happening at the time I started blogging. First thing: I was on the board then which is a different kind of activism, and I was very aware of grey and/or blurry lines, so it just felt easier not to blog about HR stuff. That way, I couldn’t say the wrong thing at the wrong time. Plus, there is a lot of good political blogging and I think I’d suck at it.
Second thing: I’d just finished writing an enormous (for me) piece of fiction, and I was still in that rhythmic way of thinking, so the blog became the place to put those thoughts and rhythms I had while I was out on my walks. Not that non-fiction doesn’t have rythym and so on, just that I was still looking at the world in that kind of personal way. That sounds pretty wanky, doesn’t it? But you did ask. And yes, I reckon blogging is getting in the way of getting anything new started.
Third thing: I was going to have a much stronger focus just on Adelaide, and make witty politically-tinged observations about living here. But the only thing that remains of that is the muddle I’ve got myself in over whether I’m using first or third person and who the goodness I am. But then, that’s reasonably true to my life over the last year anyway.
Oh, that’s all really interesting — to me, anyway, because my background is a little similar. I was a public servant working on HR stuff so not really able to do much writing about the issues that came up through work. Even when I worked in the community sector, it created similar conflicts of interest, and now it still does really. I hear lots of interesting stories but I’m too close to the sources to write about them, it being a country town here and all.
Your opinion pieces seemed fine to me…I’m actually a little bored by that kind of writing (it’s easy to write a mini-essay on something you feel passionately about, and I’ve down a lot of it under other people’s names). I’m much more interested in trying to mix the personal and the political together, and for that reason, I’ve probably ended up trying to fictionalise some of the stuff I’ve come across in a novel (goodness knows if I’ll ever finish it).
The other thing is, like you, I love the idea of writing about a town or a location, the kind oif life it generates — and Adelaide, if you’ll forgive me for saying this, like Alice is probably small and idiosyncratic enough to do that.
(You will have been googled, esp if you know any lawyers. It seems to be something they do to people they’ve just met.)
Yeah, what you said about opinion writing. I used to think it was what I really wanted to do, but then I had a couple published in newspapers and it left me a bit empty. Like I hadn\’t really tried to do anything new with my thoughts. Again, a bit wanky I know (edited to add: and if anyone ever wants to ask me about MSM versus blogs, opinion writing is where blogs have it all over newspapers, especially the ones with good comments moderation – although yes, I know censorship and so on – because for me, anyway publishing opinion online and in newspapers was a whole nother experience).
And re Adelaide, you\’re right, it would make a great blog and I keep writing down these little pieces of Adelaide, but I\’m never sure whether to use everything here or keep it for things I might like to write elsewhere (ooh, a joke).
It was being railroaded by MadDads Inc and RWDBs that got me down.
It does make a good blog — quite a unique one. The little bits and pieces thing is hard because sometimes blogging brings up good stuff for me, and then I wish I’d kept it for something else.
I’m just looking on it as a big aide-memoire of my time in Alice.
Better do some work now!