blog be my bog

It is perhaps not useful to think of a weblog as a site of publication but that's how it always seems to me. Not a notebook or a diary because those forms do not assume an immediate readership of more than one. On the other hand, I also feel a kind of pressure to post regularly here even when there is nothing urgent to say. When a week goes by, as it has, and I post nothing, I start to feel as if some essential activity has lapsed even though that's probably not so. It's a dilemma that could be resolved I suppose if I could learn to think differently about this site. So, in the interests of that resolve, what have I been doing apart from not blogging? A list, perhaps?

... totally absorbed by Peter Russell's Prince Henry 'The Navigator', A Life which I read a chapter of most mornings;

... listening to Cesaria Evora while studying the atlas so as to place the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries and the Cape Verde islands with respect both to Portugal and the West African coast;

... trying to work out who the indigenes of the Canaries were: Berbers? Germanic peoples left there by the Phoenicians or the Romans? Some entirely other tribe?;

... getting my thoughts in order to redraft portions of my still untitled screenplay, which needs to be 'completed' by Christmas;

... spending much of the past month in intense email confab with a friend and colleague in NZ as we try to elucidate the mysteries and depths of Alan Brunton's book length poem Moonshine; re-reading Jessie L. Weston's epochal From Ritual to Romance as a part of that inquiry;

... feeling anxious about my publisher's request for a subtitle for Luca Antara but unable to resolve the anxiety with a magic phrase;

... wondering why the critics have been so kind about the half dozen Australian movies I have been to this year, all of which, with one exception only - Look Both Ways - are more or less bad; walked out of Wolf Creek, the most successful of them, the other night feeling sick and disgusted about two thirds of the way through;

... feeling anxious that my screenplay, if it gets made, will also produce a movie that is more or less bad;

... making random notes for the book I want to write next year; feeling anxious in case it dies on me;

... reading Robert Burns;

... reading a history of the Kings & Queens of England, because I've never quite figured out the succession;

... becoming more and more interested in the island of Halmahera, which, according to genetic studies of the Pacific rat, may be the point of origin for the Lapita dispersal;

... wondering how I might arrange to go up there sometime in the second half of next year;

... speculating about the possibility that a funding body will support my application for money to write a psychological thriller about cab driving next year (they will, I just got the phone-call; now feeling anxious about my ability to write it);

... smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo;

... feeling anxious about not blogging ...

I'm not really an anxious person - or am I? - but anxiety of the kind I mention is certainly an engine of my writing, ie the only way to dispel this anxiety is to write. It's a form of expectation perhaps. Once I post this - if I post it - I know I'll feel better at least about this bog, I mean, blog.