Thinking bloggers meme

Hey, I got tagged! Thanks, Meli, for my



It's taken me a while to get around to responding, but I am now doing so on my NEW COMPUTER! I'm sure there are faster ways of going through the university system to purchase a laptop, but at any rate, I now have this pristine, pearly white object sitting on my desk, full of promise like a big oyster shell, just waiting to channel my books and essays into life. I haven't connected it up to the big screen and the mouse and keyboard yet, since I thought I would trial out its clicky little keyboard first. I find I haven't loaded up my files yet, either. I'm making all kind of resolutions about managing files, emails and back-ups better, and am just going to wait till I'm confident I can do this properly.

But what blogs make me think?

First up, Pavlov's Cat, though I think I've actually seen her tagged by this meme before, so she doesn't have to respond. [Actually, no one has to: I think in the end a meme looks a bit like chain mail: I'm probably not following all the meme rules, and .... I don't care.] The Cat is brave and tough, and has the capacity to push me into uncomfortable territory. We have so much in common, but she can still often surprise and shock me.

Liz Conor Liz's blog is rather formal, for a blog, in that all the entries are like feature essays or articles. I love her take on aboriginal and feminist issues; and on bringing up children, especially on bringing up girls. When I was young, I always imagined a child of mine would be a girl, and was completely — and pleasantly — surprised to find myself the mother of a boy. Though perhaps I am now conflating Liz the blogger with Liz my friend. Still, the blog is great, too!

In the Middle This blog makes me think too hard! It's a marvellous group blog co-ordinated by a leading scholar in my field. Sometimes the discussions test the limits of blogspeak in that they are so detailed and rich they can't be read as quickly as other blogs, but you know that you can always go back to it. It's like overhearing a serious conversation at a conference that you're too shy to join in, and having the luxury of replaying it again later.

And a collective thinking bloggers award to Ancrene Wiseass, Quod She, and Sorrow at Sills Bend. These are three early career women academics whose energy, inspirations and struggles remind me how hard it is to establish an academic career, but also just what a wonderful job teaching literature is.

And the blogger I think about most often? As the Tumor Turns because as much as I tell myself I know I'm conscious of my relative prosperity and the excellence of the health care I receive for breast cancer, this blog makes me think — angrily — about the dreadful inequities of health care and the shocking distribution of resources in our two countries. And that's not to mention the Third World.

Well, these are the blogs I would tag if I were to pass on the meme as the instructions Meli links us to suggest I should. Dreadfully unpublically spirited of me, I know, not to pass it on, by actually tagging these other bloggers. One of the chief motivations from the original blog post was to see how far the meme would travel. And... I think I'm just too boringly old to want to play by those rules. So I'm not going to pass on the meme, though I thank Meli warmly for tagging me, and giving me a reason to think about these terrific blogs. I know a blog meme isn't really like chain mail, but even so, sometimes it's ok not to play by the rules.