i’m in addy’s kitchen, sitting at the high wooden table, drinking gyokuro and catching up on my RSS feeds. there are 1639 unread articles on my feedly in just a few days of neglect, and it isn’t as if i subscribe to any news, only blogs. more startling: 118 of them are tagged paleography or book arts: come now, i love manuscripts to death but there can’t be that many articles on paleography in just a few days away!! there’s a stillness (and the gentle background hum of household electronics), addy’s gone out for a run at the botanic gardens, and there’s a comforting stillness in the apartment, though her wifi keeps flickering on and off — i am considering poaching her neighbour’s unsecured wi-fi, there is one just barely in range.(to be fair, there are also about 392 articles under “book reviews”, which are reviews associated with the book section of the TLS, NYT and so on (separate from book bloggers - 37 only: personal blogs of independent reviewers and critics or simply people who talk about what they’ve read) and 202 under “neuro/cog” most of which i don’t actually read. i just keep that feed so that i can annoy julian by forwarding him the occasional sensational headline and accuse him of doing dastardly things, like depriving one of one’s freewill or sizzling brains.
a partial anatomy of my feedly categories (literary topics only):
academics-humanities: blogs by academics in the humanities on the vicissitudes of (american) academia
books arts / paleography: book arts, special collection library blogs, antiquarian booksellers, manuscript digitalisation projects, manuscripts.
book bloggers: individual blogs of independent reviewers and lit critics
book reviews: book sections of the TLS, NYT, Complete Review, etc.
publishers/university presses: every major academic publisher’s blog, plus a few publishing houses one must bend the devoted nob to (new directions!!).
litty fun: frivolous literature-related items — bookshelf porn, mcsweeney’s, book riot, bookish paraphanalia
literature and new writing: new writings, interviews, the paris review &c
libraries and librarians: what it says, excluding those that fall under “specs coll”
commonplace books: letters of note, jot101, laudator temporis acti, and others of this ilk
med/ren; and greek/latin: these two separate category above speak for themselves.
linguistics: surprisingly for me, sociolinguistic blogs not philological ones
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