Isn't It Cool?

Isn’t it cool when you get clicks on your blog?

I left a comment at Andrew Seal’s Blographia Literaria and today I have five clicks (only one of them my husband)! Over the weekend, I had . . . zero. Yesterday, I had three, and at least one of them was me testing something or other. My lifetime maximum so far is fourteen, on December 17.

I was commenting on his New Year’s resolution to read no novels by white American males in the coming year. In a reply to my comment, Andrew mentions Richard Powers as a novelist he will forgo. I agree that no harm will be done to anyone if he skips The Echo Maker for another twelve months (I hope not, because I haven’t been able to get to the second chapter), but if he hasn’t read any Powers, I’d recommend Ploughing the Dark and Galatea 2.2 to begin with. I’d actually be interested to see what someone with more knowledge of literary theory and current literary study makes of the latter. And Powers’ depictions of female characters generally aren’t at all bad.

Isn’t it cool when you find people who’ve been on the Internet since the 1980s?

Dan Tobias, a computer programmer, has had a web page since 1995, and ran a BBS before that. Read his essay on the danger of software monocultures. In the terms used by Geoffrey Moore, this is the danger that a single “gorilla“ will crowd out all the other players. (Moore points out that IT departments don’t like monocultures because it restricts their leverage: they like there to be two or three gorillas around between which they can choose, but in the decentralized world we’re in now, IT departments have too little leverage to maintain their own leverage, so that might no longer apply.)

I haven’t had much time to post, unfortunately, and few good ideas for short posts. I’m working on more lengthy posts on Doris Lessing’s feminist science fiction novel The Cleft, and The Valve’s group read of Dickens’ Christmas story “The Chimes,” though.