Writing Slowly

My little struggle with editing text directly in Wordpress has highlighted a distaste for the term ‘content’, as in ‘content block’, and ‘content provider’. Others have also questioned this terminology. Is all this effort really just content?

But what other collective noun is there? Online platforms are in the container industry. They provide containers for other peoples' stuff. YouTube , TikTok, Instagram, Wordpress, Substack, Spotify, Etsy, Facebook Marketplace, The New York Times. They’re all containers. And what do you call the contents of a container, if not ‘content’?

The rise of neoliberal economic ideology turned everyone into a ‘customer’. It eroded all other forms and structures of personhood. It became hard to argue that you were more that just a customer, because the extra something had already been devalued.

Now, the ideology of the container economy is turning everyone into content creators, with a similar flattening impact.

So what’s the creative alternative?

Finished reading: Farsighted by Steven Johnson 📚
Wrote 17 notes in 2 hours, and enjoyed doing it by hand. Realised this book is as much about novels - especially Middlemarch - as it is about making decisions. And that a good novel is a decision-making simulator. #Zettelkasten #Notemaking

Yet more good vibes in Sydney: Glebe Point Road closed to traffic means it’s open for a weekend street party! Watch and learn, city authorities 🎉📷

#ReclaimTheStreets #SafeStreets #BetterStreets #Sydney

Good things in Sydney, continued… the brand new accessible entrance to Redfern Station. Bollards in the foreground show Aboriginal art, recognising Redfern’s vital Indigenous culture. This needs to be more than a token move, but embedded in every Australian place. (Also… lifts!)

#Sydney

Linda Burney, Minister for Indigenous Australians, at our local polling centre this morning for the #VoiceToParliament referendum. I had a few good conversations with people who hadn’t made up their mind. Whatever the result, Australia needs better ways forward to #CloseTheGap #AusPol

When I was a child, my mother loved nothing better than to visit ‘Bronte country ‘, or ‘Hardy’s Wessex’, or Beatrix Potter’s, Ruskin’s and Wordsworth’s houses in the Lake District.

This made a deep impression.
I still think of the world in this way: there are literary places, with gaps in between. I wonder if anyone else shares this kind of personal geography.

I’m remembering this because I finished reading: Why Women Read Fiction by Helen Taylor. 📚 This surveys the field from many angles.
I particularly liked the author’s take on literary festivals. There could even have been more on literary pilgrimages.

Currently reading: Why Women Read Fiction by Helen Taylor 📚 Bought this at the National Library bookshop. Reading it sitting in the shade of an oak tree, on the lawns by the lake. A cokatoo visits and a magpie swoops proprietarily. Spring really suits Canberra.

📷 Day 30: treasure #mbsept

The final day of the photoblog challenge, and a treasured memory of my son’s seventh birthday.

📷Day 29: Contrast #mbsept

The Glowworm Tunnel in the Wolgan Valley, NSW. I couldn’t see the glow worms, then realised I was still wearing my sun glasses 👓

📷 Day 23: a day in the life #mbsept

Deeply into our residency in Portland NSW. Please come to the open rehearsal on 1 October. And you can even support this project.

📷 Day 22: road (Dan, aka @jomalo) #mbsept

Hairpin bends at Kamay National Park, Sydney