Oh dear. A three column blog, (insert ominous sound clip). This is a very white page with a rather pleasant header in an attractive font, declaring that a Scribbling Woman writes here. Honestly though, about the three columns. Why squeeze your precious words into this narrow place? I don’t get it. And in the case of this blog, the narrow place is surrounded by a mind numbing plethora of links, including a new variety to me titled, “Referring Web Pages”. If I understand it correctly, this is a list of web pages that refer to her web page. I don’t think too much of it myself.
As I explore further, I find in the About section that our blogger is:
Miriam Jones is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Languages at the University of New Brunswick ,Saint John. She teaches courses in 18th-century British literature, women’s writing, and speculative fiction. And she is Co–coordinator / Webmanager for the Gender Studies Programme and Webmanager for the English Programme .
And that she describes her blog as:
Probably about books, c18, detritus, parenting, poaching, print, sf, or writing.
Which turns out to be fairly accurate.
I began to read the most recent entries and found her giving a travelogue of her recent trip to England. There are comments about jet lag and accounts of outings to literary points of interest and recalled phone conversations with her young son back home. (The phone conversations are my favorite entries).
I read further into the archives where I found she has been writing here since July of 2003. As I read the older entries I felt myself being drawn into a rather fragmented array of short posts that sometimes contained an excess of links to things that she had run across on the net. The topics include things literary, some trivia, some gender issues, some parenting, and are sprinkled liberally here and there with quiz results .. . (What Tarot card are you?). All in all it was rather disorienting. I finally realized this blog is on one hand a classic one (as I understand it) being a list of links to other sites of interest. Only thing is, there does not seem to be a central theme to these links. The subject matter is so broad as to be fractured in my opinion. On the other hand, it is a typical pop culture personal journal with discussions about movies, plus some references to daily family life.
She does address this tendency I think in one entry that talks about a certain novel in which the main character starts journaling in several different diaries and finds herself becoming too emotionally fragmented. She ends up going back to one journal at the conclusion of the story. This blog seems to follow in her footsteps.
In any event, this blog might appeal to you if you don’t mind changing gears often. I prefer a bit more coherency of purpose in my blog world. I myself, keep three different journals. Only one of them is online. This may explain a lot about my reaction to this blog! We certainly each bring a different perspective to the table, do we not?