The Blog Influence

by Sarah Marine



The latter part of 2008 was an ongoing conscious incorporation of more and more technology in my life. For starters, I started watching TV. Secondly, the online presence of our bookshop became a cornerstone for immediate conversation and anticipated reviews from co-workers. I feel that the Inside Flap has worked to create a shop vibe in which we all know what we’re losing our minds over, what we’re lukewarm about and created more frequent avenues for excited discussion. It has also inspired in us the desire to explore the greater possibilities for booktalk online. We’ve discussed an online lit mag.(which I predict may be forever doomed to idea stage), expanded onto Facebook and developed relationships with others who have found the blog medium to be a revolutionary tool for cross-country networking and reading recommendations. Overall, we may have been late to the scene, but nonetheless are embracing it. With all that’s going on in the publishing world, in the economy, it has added a dimension to the bookshop that has pumped SUPERBOOKLOVE into every day.



The blog has also influenced some interesting reading of my own- including the fantastic Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being by Brian Rotman- inspiring some personal lit-quilting ventures- which explores the invention of the alphabet, the suppression of gestural communication and the rise of internet communication as parallel in the ongoing evolution of communication. This in turn led to a sturdy throwback: Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double which cries for the abandonment of language and the assumption of our irrational natural selves. Next came the X-Men extravaganza, heaving me into the abstract obsession with Warlock from the New Mutants. What most attracted me were his unique techno origins and his mutation, which made him more human as opposed to unhuman. In becoming aware of his mutation refers to fellow New Mutants as “self-friend”.



I have now begun a new thread of reading which deals specifically with early childhood reading and comprehension. John Holt’s Learning All the Time discusses how children learn to read and understand numbers without instruction and the Opie’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren has become an obsession with its sobering objectivity in analyzing the origins and purpose of children’s sayings, songs and rhymes. It is also complete with regional maps of The United Kingdom wherein boundaries are layed out to illustrate the distinct difference in popularity of phrases geographically. The most interesting factor in the evolution of these schoolyard sayings is how they mirror the wars and economic climates of the times. For example, they sure sang more about ice cream during peacetime.

I’m down with robots and computers and reading and stuff.