My Blog Goes Broadsheet

What an odd thing to open up the Sunday Age and find myself in it yesterday! Not that it was a surprise, of course, but it did still feel odd.

Amanda had asked me to write something about having breast cancer, and I decided to write about the Humanities Researcher blog. I can link to the online text here but unfortunately this is a garbled version. Several paragraphs and parts of paragraphs in the middle have been jumbled around, and various parts are in roman type that should be in italics. I'll see what I can do about getting this sorted out, or arranging some other kind of e-print access over the next few days.

Once I had written the essay, it was then time for the hilarious one-hour session with the photographer on Wednesday. I said come to the house, thinking a garden shot would be the thing, but he spent most of the time in my study (because that's where a blogger writes, of course), trying to balance the interior and exterior light on a Melbourne winter's day. In the end, they have used one of the very first shots he took, while I thought he was still taking light readings, and before we thought about rolling out the rug that is rolled up to protect it from the dust and grit of the building going on in the roof (note the scaffolding outside the window). In the paper the photograph has a rather nice sepia effect, but it still looks a bit odd to me. Oh well. I can count on the fingers of one hand the photographs of myself I like.

It's been fantastic, yesterday and today, to hear from people in the comments box and by email and by phone. Lovely voices from the past; colleagues and students; other cancer patients and carers.

We've also had a fairly sociable Queen's birthday weekend, which has meant talking about blogging with people who don't normally read or write them. At one point Geoff and I were discussing the difference between blogging and diaries. I like Maria's explanation ('like a journal... but public... on the internet...no, not a person! etc), but what an odd space a blog occupies, somewhere in between private and public. Writing about blogging in a newspaper, and quoting from the blog, was something else again, and represents yet another shift of space. I feel very protective of the blog entries that I quoted as part of the article (and perhaps this is one reason why it disturbs me that the typographic distinction between blog entry and essay isn't always clear in the online version). And now that I have blogged about publishing about blogging, have I closed the self-referential loop, or just started a spiral?