R. and I have been back at work this week after our weekend of picnics, and I’ve been attempting to knock some smallish tasks off the to-do list. The article that I was at work on last week is fully drafted, and is out to some folks for comment. I’ve been feeling a bit off my game this week, though, productivity-wise. At the beginning of the week, that was fine, as I was able to look back over the summer to that point and marvel a bit at what I’d managed to get done. And I still had three weeks left in Paris, so I knew there was more to come.

Somehow it feels different now; I’ve got just barely more than two weeks remaining, and time feels very, very pressing. Not least because the month of August is going to be sheer insanity: I get back home late on the night of the 7th, have two days to handle all the life stuff that needs handling, and then am on a plane headed to a conference in a major eastern metropolis, where I’ll be conducting interviews. (I decline to name this major eastern metropolis, as every moment of my time that will not be spent conducting interviews is already spoken for, and at the moment I cannot bear the guilt of having to say no to friendly social invitations.) I am currently scheduled to return home on the 14th (though it’s conceivable that a meeting will delay that return by a day), where I will have as much as a day to put life back in order again, before my mother shows up for a visit, on the 16th. She’ll be hanging out with me until the 19th, which will be great, as we have all manner of fun girly plans involving shopping and spas. Immediately after she takes off, though, I have a meeting that I have to fly off to, either back east or in NoCal, depending, and from which I’ll either get home on the 21st or the 22nd, depending. And then the 23rd is a Very Significant Day with a Big Round Number attached to it, and some portion of that weekend will be spent celebrating said event. And then the week of the 26th through the 30th, I have jury duty, which thank god, is of the phone-in kind, but knowing what needs to be accomplished that week, I’ll no doubt get called in and placed on the trial of the century. Because classes start the following Tuesday, and then summer will really be Over.

What this means, though, if you look back and add it all up, is that my summer effectively ends when I get in the cab here, taking me to CDG on my way home. Which means I’ve got just over two weeks to finish up the vast majority of the work I’d intended to do this summer. And given that, I’m not ecstatic about the progress I’ve made. I’ve drafted an article that I hadn’t really expected to write, which is great (assuming the article isn’t plagued by idiocy, which remains to be seen). And I’m on the cusp of finishing the last of the work for the second edition of the anthology of which I’m on the editorial board. And I’ve done a fair bit of research, and I’ve made some pretty significant (I think) advances in my thinking toward my New Big Project, which turns out to be further along than I thought it was (I think). And there have been some significant advances in the world of MediaCommons, which moves steadily toward a broader launch.

But there’s so much left undone: I have another article that I’d hoped to write, and I’d hoped to end the summer with a full-on outline of the New Big Project. I have a manifesto that I’m supposed to be writing with a colleague that’s made alarmingly little progress. I have two big events that I’m supposed to be planning for next academic year, one for my department for the spring, and one, alarmingly enough, for my program for the fall, and I’ve done very little on either, in no small part out of heel-dragging, both because I don’t want to be doing school-related administrative stuff during the very very few weeks of my one and only goddamned summer, and particularly the kind of administrative stuff I most despise (anything related to event planning, alas). One of my classes still needs some work before it’ll be ready to go. And, more than anything, I need to get myself into some kind of headspace where I’m willing to let go of this summer, willing to return to the office, willing to let meetings and other requirements intrude into what has been the blissfully empty calendar of my time here in Paris. And that project has not yet even begun.

I got sucked into a conversation last night over at Unfogged that started out with ogged’s annoyance over what he refers to as the “bitchy whine” at the Washington Post about how Harry Potter basically demonstrates the end of literacy as we know it. Ogged wisely noted that the general claim that no one reads anymore always masks a more specific claim that no one reads anything good anymore, but that because that “anything good” goes unspoken, we’re never required to have the conversation about what “good” means, and where those values come from, and why they should be supported, or undermined, as the case may be.

Wisely, I say, as this argument is at the heart both of my last project and the new one as well. But also wisely because ogged provoked the conversation, comment after comment about the value of literary reading, as compared with the value presented by other forms of reading (including that form of interpretation that one brings to bear on non-textual media such as television). It’s a fascinating conversation, and one that seems to me to demonstrate by example the utter wrongness of the sense that only texts written according to a particular set of conventions, printed on sheets of paper which are collected into signatures and then bound between covers, have cultural merit. The article I’ve just finished writing, which I’ll be posting for comment soon, claims at one point that the deep purpose of all publishing is conversation, of some variety or another, whether the casual discussion among a book group, the formal discussion of a class, or the slow and painstaking discussion (stretched out over decades) of scholars, though the institutional structures that have risen up around reading over the last five centuries have gradually attenuated that social purpose. Here’s a conversation, however, and a great one at that, provoked by a one-paragraph blog entry. So under what definitions would this not qualify as “good”?

This was the weekend of picnics — first Saturday’s explosion-filled French-speaking one, and then Sunday’s, which was a bit more peaceful and overwhelmingly more Anglophone. We met Marcus and a few of his fellow American ex-pats, plus a few French amis, on the Pont des Arts for some wine and some food and some conversation. It was quite a lovely evening, if a bit too hot for my taste; everyone here had changed their weather-based small talk to say “summer is finally here!” with a glee that I simply could not muster, knowing full well that when I get home August 7, I’ve still got two full months of summer to go. The up-side of the heat, though, was that it kept the crowds away long enough for us to claim a good spot; by the time the sun started setting, the bridge began to fill with folks sitting and drinking and singing and so forth. It was quite fabulous — the setting, the wine, the food, the conversation — but by the time we got home, I was completely wrung out. Sun does that to me.

Happily, the weather took a turn yesterday; the high of 90 degrees on Sunday became a high of 75ish yesterday, and the clouds came back, and about 5 pm yesterday it started raining. Gloriously. By about 8.30, it was absolutely pissing, in a way that had me making comparisons to Thailand, or even to Louisiana. Viewed through southern Californian eyes, it was positively profligate; I wanted to rush around with barrels and collect it all for safekeeping. I mean, really: there was water falling from the sky. How can anyone not find that miraculous?

As I remarked to R. midway through dinner last night, as we sat in the courtyard of the house of a friend of a friend of a friend up in the 20th, listening to sporadic pétards exploding in the surrounding streets, it’s good to know that the French also have the national holiday of blowing shit up. We celebrated with a picnic, which was originally intended to be held in a park high above Paris, from which one could have seen the official fireworks had one gotten there early enough, but we decided we didn’t want to dine while being shoved around by la foule, and so ate and chatted in the calm of the courtyard, and then attempted to go out to see the feu d’artifice around 9.30 pm. This was, alas, impossible, as tout le monde had had the same brilliant idea, but about an hour sooner. After a panicky half hour or so (panicky on my part; I do not like crowds, not in the slightest, which I attribute to the story of my mother at Woodstock, which, remind me to tell you sometime), we wound up back at the friend-of-friend-of-friend’s house, but by that point, I was so exhausted that my ability to follow a rapid-fire French conversation had roughly disappeared. So R. and I headed home and slept in relative peace, interrupted only by the occasional minor explosion, which really was less annoying, actually, than the sewing machine engined scooters that seem to circle our block.

This morning, the streets are covered with the remnants of bottle rockets and other firecrackers, but aside from that, it’s just a quiet Sunday.

This was originally going to be another comment on the previous post, which I’ve been thinking about a bunch. Partially because meg seems to have gotten the idea that I’ve got something more substantive to say. And partially because my responses to Jason’s and her comments on the previous post have been sounding increasingly dismissive, when I was the one who raised the issue in the first place. How annoying: raise a question and then say to all responders, “that’s not what I meant, and it’s not terribly important anyway.” What I meant to say, of course, was “thanks; good point!”

Though I’m being all functionalist about the question of blogging and its relationship to web-based publishing right now — just trying to figure out how to make a small point in an in-process argument — meg and Jason have nonetheless raised an interesting set of questions: what would it mean, really, if blogs were “first”? What are the stakes of such “firstness”? And what does it mean that, as meg indicates, the history of Usenet has been pretty much entirely erased by the web?

What does it mean, for instance, that I discovered yesterday here, in a post that purports to ask whether blogging is dead, that Marc Andreessen, who has ostensibly begotten this entire thing, just started blogging five weeks ago? Andreessen points out the relationship between blogging and Usenet in his post on the “eleven lessons” he’s learned thus far, but the comparison isn’t terrifically flattering:

Those of us who have been on the Internet for a long time recall the heydey of Usenet — a world in which hundreds or thousands of conversations, most of them unmoderated, flourished among the lucky few who had Internet access prior to 1994. One of the clear negative consequences to the “great opening” of the Internet from 1994 on was the influx of spam and abuse that substantially damaged those discussions, and shut down many of them.

Blogging is clearly the second coming of high-quality Internet conversations, but it is also clear that comments on blogs run the same risk of being damaged by spam and abuse, and that new approaches to maintaining a high quality of discourse are required.

I find it fascinating that while so many folks define blogging entirely by the possibility of commenting (search around; it’s not hard to find someone who’ll say “it’s not really a blog if comments aren’t enabled”), Andreessen has turned off commenting and is relying on trackbacks and tagging (via Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, etc) for feedback. This strikes me as odd primarily because I find trackbacks, as I’ve nattered on about before, to be much more spam-prone (because radically insecure) and much less effective (because of the failures of different blogging systems to ping one another automatically) than comments; and while tagging is interesting as a metric by which one can get a sense of the zeitgeist (and thus might be useful, as we’ve discussed over at MediaCommons, as one facet in the development of a complex web-native peer-to-peer-review system), tagging doesn’t really create conversation.

But then, nor does shouting down everyone who comments by saying “that’s not right at all!”

(This semi-rambly and quite inconclusive post brought to you by my need to get back to my article already. The post title, by the way, was meant to be a play on the “MySpace: Threat or Menace?” type stories that litter the mainstream media, but I don’t quite have the spare processor cycles available to figure out how to pull that off.)

Somewhere, not terribly long ago, I heard or read someone make the argument that blogging was the first genuinely internet-native mode of publishing. I’ve been searching around for such a statement, and am coming up a bit dry. My fear is that this was just said to me in casual conversation, just someone opining. But, in the event that it wasn’t, have you come across anyone arguing something such as that, in, say, a citeable forum? I’d like to be able to use that point in the argument I’m trying to make right now, but right now it’s sitting there in that “arguably, blogs are the first…” mode that raises more questions than it answers.

[UPDATE, 11.00 am, CET: Interestingly, I've now found several sources that make the point exactly as I do, saying that blogs are "arguably the first" blah blah blah. Is there some magical point at which enough people suggesting-without-proving a point like that becomes convincing enough a part of the conventional wisdom that we can stop qualifying it with "arguably"? Or are such bits of hearsay precisely those that most demand questioning?]

It astonishes me how frequently I say to myself, I’m going to write an article about x, and then realize that in order to make the argument about x that I really want to make, I must set up a whole series of background issues, such that on or about page 17 I look up and realize that now, finally, I’m about to turn to x. I can’t decide whether this means that I’m setting up my arguments badly or that I’m constantly writing the scholarly version of a novella.

An email correspondent has asked about — nay, demanded — that post about the meal. I feel honor-bound to comply:

Last week, R. took me back to the 1er, to the hotel we stayed in back in January (which, not incidentally, owns the category of Best Hotel Ever, in my book), so that we could return to Pinxo. Pinxo is, shall we say, not your average hotel restaurant. Created by super-chef Alain Dutournier as a relatively more economical alternative to his Carré des Feuillants (and when I say “relatively more economical,” I mean to contrast 20-25 € mains at Pinxo with 55-70 € at Carré des Feuillants), Pinxo presents a super-stylish but down-to-earth atmosphere. The menu updates some French classics with a tapas-style approach to service; all dishes, from starters to desserts, are served divided into three small portions, intended for sharing.

Our meal started with a carafe of a wonderful and relatively inexpensive rosé, whose name I wish I could remember, and a small amuse-bouche from the chef, paper-thin slices of foie gras on perfect house-made melba toasts.

R. followed this with a marinated salmon appetizer, while I had a Vietnamese-inspired king crab roll, each of which were excellent (though if you ask me, mine won; the combination of mint leaves and peanuts and lightly tangy nước chấm-like sauce was perfect).

We were then brought two small cups of the best vegetable soup I’ve ever been given — a very simple, clear broth filled with a gorgeous variety of vegetables, enoki mushrooms, and a whole grain that I think may have been wheat berries.

My main presented, in each of three portions, two enormous spicy shrimp atop rice cooked with red and green bell peppers and coconut milk. Just to die for. R. had the golden goose fillet; each of his portions had several small slices of goose on top of two small mushroom-filled cannelloni. (His, again, was great, but I think mine won.)

Finally, dessert: we shared an order of the spicy bitter chocolate cake, which was not only dense and perfect, but which the chef also kindly provided us four of, so as to avoid domestic discord.

I honestly don’t think I’d have done anything any differently; it was one of the best meals I’ve had in recent memory, from start to finish. And as sad as it was that we weren’t staying in the hotel this time out, the meal was made only that much better by the lovely walk we had back to the 9ème. We’re hoping to make it back there once again before we leave the city…

Everyone here has been complaining about the weather non-stop, or, when not complaining about it, apologizing for it. “The weather,” they say, shrugging in that French way, “has not been so nice.”

The validity of that statement depends very heavily on your definition of “nice.” I’ve had to buy a sweater, and R. and I both bought jackets, and it seems like they’re all going to get a lot of wear. And we’ve learned the hard way, no matter how sunny it is out, never to go anywhere without an umbrella. In the last slightly-less-than-four-weeks, I could count the number of days when it hasn’t rained at all on one hand; the same could be said for the number of days with a high of over 75. So summery, no — it has not been that. But nice? Ask my friends in Claremont right now how 65-and-rainy would be received.

We decided to take a nap this afternoon, but instead of sleeping I stared out the window as a thunderstorm rolled in — black clouds, lightning, pelting rain. It didn’t last long, like most of the rain here, but it was gorgeous, dramatic and boomy, with big bolts of lightning flashing sideways across the sky. When we got up, R. said that he had been sure that attempting to nap would be the ideal way to conjure the delivery guy we’d been waiting for. In response, I just opened our bedroom door: while we lay there, and while the storm boomed away outside, I’d heard one of our flatmates come home, putter around a bit, leave, come right back in, and then leave again. And while I wasn’t positive, I was pretty sure that he’d left something for us.

The box of books has arrived, bearing easily twice as much as I can accomplish in the half of the trip still ahead of me. Still, between the presence of the books and the gorgeous thunderstorm, I’m left with an overwhelming sense of gratitude. I’m going to make some tea and curl up with my reading, the perfect conclusion to a lovely afternoon.

Simply marking the moment. Carry on.