Tumblarity*

A little while ago I asked what I should do with my tumblelog.  I’d given up on the limited formatting and code mismatches that came with syndicating its poems and idle frippery to these pages and decided to keep all my musings in a single source.  Since then, tumblr itself has continued developing its particular character as a perpetual scroll of site-themed scraps, images, small reflections and aggregates.  In this, I’ve started to go with the flow once again, aggregating there my links from delicious, digg, and flickr, along with this site and the White Mist, and also occasionally using the “reblog” option to circulate what I like elsewhere within the tumbled network.  The last of these activities relies on reading more widely the tumbled sites of others, and this is proving a further strand of leisured amusement (not least the prevalence of sites that, following on from this one, including “fuck yeah” in their title).

I find it hard to explain why I focus so much on aggregating and archiving what I read and write online, not least because offline I am a relatively untidy person and keep filing systems that are operable mostly only to me.  I think Giovanni in writing about the archive and technology has done much to heighten my awareness of what it might mean to leave little digital trace, and the emotional and moral importance therefore of mapping a route through one’s digital activities.  The spectre of the surveilling employer contributes, I think, to low-key reading as a default position, but I am fortunate in that I have flexibility of work and the trust of my managers to allow a more public aggregation (thus far).  Most things, I would argue, come out in my teaching somewhere.

I remember some years ago hearing a radio interview with an author whose identity I can’t remember (it might have been Fiona Kidman, but I could be wrong) talking about the importance for writers of keeping a diary, since when she had come in a novel to write a character who was twenty-nine, she could remember so little of her thoughts, feelings and experiences at that time, and had to strive rather harder imaginatively as a consequence.  I have little trouble remembering my thoughts and my emotional states going back many years (possibly as a consequence of the therapeutic wringers through which I was pushed at various times in my twenties), but to recall what I was thinking — what were my key ideas? — is much harder.  It would be grandiose to say that this is what I’m using tumblr for at the moment, but it’s something on that path.  These days I’m much more interested in my memories as a series of intellectual and aesthetic reactions than as raw emotions per se, the reasons for which the reader can no doubt gaily infer at will.

* It’s a thing, really.