Happy Belated Birthday to Us!

In our grand Darwinian tradition of being late to everything, we failed to notice that our seven-year blog-iversary was last month. So, seven years and forty days since Darwin wrote his kick-off post, we'd like to thank our dear readers for sticking around. Every time we bat around the idea of shutting the blog down, whether from over-work (Darwin) or sheer sloth (me), we consider the good friends we've made over the years through blogging, and decide to keep the place open a bit longer.

To our many internet friends: God bless you. You're often in our thoughts and prayers.

But Will it Play in Peoria?

So. Let's blog. We'll start with a generality. Funny thing about the internet: it fosters connections between people who might never have met otherwise, but it's no substitute for the in-person interactions these friends eventually crave. Now let's work in a personal anecdote: Last October, when Darwin and I were riding down to New Orleans with Betty Duffy to hang out at the Walker Percy Symposium with The Korrectiv gang, we had to ride on the spare all the way from Indy to Nashville because we couldn't get anyone out to the Duffy homestead to repair a flat tire (just inspected the day before!) at 5 am. In Nashville we spent a congenial hour with Jordana while Betty's car was attended to. Turns out nothing was actually wrong with the tire, but if it hadn't chosen to act up that morning, we would have missed connecting with an online friend.

Are you tired of the meta-blogging yet? I am, but the mechanics of writing a blog post are on my mind because I'm off this weekend to Peoria, famously middle-American territory, to attend the Behold Conference and to sit in on the Meet the Bloggers session on Friday night. "New Media" is a hot topic these days. Everyone, it seems, wants to write the next big blog, and I am here with my big bad seven years of blogging experience to share the secrets of blogging success (not mine, but someone's) with you.

Write well about interesting things. Often.

Meet the new media, same as the old media. No matter what pretty templates the aspirational blogger uses or how riddled a page is with bullet points, one will not attract or maintain faithful readership (large or small) without being able to meet these criteria. No amount of highlighting or money quotes in bold font will compensate for poor writing, or a dull topic, or for a posting schedule so sporadic that readers stop tracking after a while (though Google Reader may take care of that, but since I don't use Reader we'll call that point irrelevant to our discussion).

Now Behold is a Catholic women's conference, and my feelings on "lady conferences" have been eloquently summarized by Betty Duffy, but in this case it's Betty I'm going to see.  She and Sarah Reinhard and I are carpooling out to Peoria, where the big draw is not the conference, though I'm sure it's very nice, but the chance to hang out once again with Jennifer Fulwiler and Hallie Lord. Those ladies have come a long way from when the three of us used to visit each other's living rooms in Texas and resolutely ignore the antic screams of our combined children: Hallie has just edited a book called Style, Sex, and Substance: 10 Catholic Women Consider the Things that Really Matter, and Jennifer and Betty are two of those ten women. And the reason I'm making the midwinter trek to Illinois is that people I know but don't get to see often (or people I'm meeting for the first time in person, such as Jamie who invited me to come in the first place) are taking the same journey. The internet giveth friendships and it sustains them long-distance, but nothing beats sneaking out of a talk so that Duffy can take a cigarette break while the girls pass the flask down the line and exchange erudite and profane banter.

That's my blogging cue to embed a YouTube video exemplifying erudite and profane banter:



This did not play in Peoria.

Here's my last blogging tip for the New Media crew: know when to stop writing. When you look at the clock and it's almost 1 am, that's a pretty good sign you ought to pack it in.

UPDATE: Registration for the Behold Conference has been extended to Friday morning, so it's not too late to sign up and attend.

New Orleans -- First Draft

One of the things I said to Betty Duffy, during one of our thirteen-hour car rides, was that I didn't post often because it takes me so damn long to write anything. "I have to write a finished post, and it takes forever," I said eloquently. And Betty talked about drafts and polishing, but I say, never mind the polishing. What you see is what I'm pouring out -- the first draft.

I am in love with New Orleans. I love the architecture, the huge mansions on St. Charles Ave. which still manage to maintain a dainty Southern charm despite being built on massive foundations of money. I love the cobblestones peeking out from under a threadbare blanket of asphalt. I love the American vernacular of the city: not quite mediterranean, not quite French. Given its age and history, it's one of the few American cities that has never tried to imitate New York City.

We were there, of course, for the Walker Percy Conference at Loyola University, which was just perfect. I have been to but one academic conference, and this was it. I am told that academic conferences can be quite insular, but this one, being in its the first year, in fact), was open to all comers, both attending and speaking. Academics and amateurs spoke on the same panels and hobnobbed most collegially. Darwin and I probably had the most fun of anyone attending: we came with a built-in social set, and we didn't have the stress of presenting a paper. I asked questions and started discussions at panels, and no one told me that I didn't have the standing to comment, or that I didn't know what I was talking about. It was like having all the fun of college with none of the bother.  I discussed some of my areas of interest with the director of the conference, and she urged us to present our own paper at the next conference. Mark your calendars in two years' time, for MrsDarwin's academic debut, entitled (what else?) An Actor Prepares: Binx Bolling channels Stanislavski, complete with staged scenes.

But the fun started with car trip. 5:45 am is a bad time to discover a flat tire, but the drama was minimal. If Betty was agitated, she didn't show it, and the spare was applied with no casualties and little mess. We made it down to Tennessee driving well over the car manual's cautionary estimate of no more than 50 mph while Driving With Spare. In Nashville, while the car sat at the tire shop, we were hosted by Jordana, who has the most gracious bungalow and the bluest eyes, and whose children showed to absolutely best advantage in their mix of erudition and goofing off, and all this on a few short hours' notice.

One of the best elements of the weekend was rediscovering how well online friendship translates into real life. This was a theme repeated all weekend. Betty and Darwin and Jordana and I sat in the living room and talked like people who'd known each other for years. In New Orleans, I embraced Dorian like a lost sister -- we'd met before, which made the reunion even more delightful, but our friendship began online.  Our group was kicked out of the hotel courtyard one night (and given a warning the second night) for being too raucous, a by-product of being too vinous. I'm not sure that any virtual conversation could top navigating down Bourbon Street with Matthew Lickona and his wife on our way to dinner, or toasting each other in the ancient brick-paved courtyard of the prestigious restaurant in the French Quarter, the ambiance of which was only slightly marred by the boldness of the rats who anticipated closing time by making brazen forays out of the foliage. And what could be more memorable, and less comfortable, than jouncing across Lake Pontchartrain in the back of a schoolbus with Potter and Jobe and the other cool kids after a foray to Walker Percy's grave? We didn't drink in the back of the bus (the spirit was willing, but the liquor laws weren't) but that was the exception. In front of the computer you drink alone; in New Orleans you drink with Lickona.

And then it was time to go. Betty noted that we drove thirteen hours with nary a fart between us, but even more notable was that we went thirteen hours without a silence. The talk was varied and ranging, from rearing savvy but innocent children to inside blog baseball. It was like conversational heaven, only in heaven you don't have to bounce for ten miles driving through deepest Mississippi looking for a bathroom. Then we were staggering back into our house at 2am, having delivered Grandma from five days' custody of her energetic grandchildren (who were more than ready to transfer that combined energy force back against their parents). Party was over, and the warmth of New Orleans was only a pleasant memory which fluttered weakly against the Ohio chill.

And I'm not going to sit here with a first draft and shake my brain until some clever bit of summation falls out. I could sit and polish this thing, or I could go to bed and dream of New Orleans. Nighty-night, ya'll.