wondering

The Anton Chekhov home page

I always seem to get to Today in Literature a few days late. Well, it was First Seagull a flop story of the 18th that caught boynton's eye. This sent boynton on a bit of an old style surf - that blind quest for the serendipitous - the info route we follow when we don't know exactly what we want. This theme is discussed in this w-ful article on Robot Wisdom's Jorn Barger (via the Presurfer)

...it’s also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.
A Web log really, then, is a Wunderkammer. That is to say, the genealogy of Web logs points not to the world of letters but to the early history of museums -- to the "cabinet of wonders," or Wunderkammer...
the passage from Wunderkammer to museum may have been a triumph for Western science, but it was a mixed bag for the Western soul. Wonder isn’t easily replaced once mastery disperses it...

Footnote I wonder if like boynton other bloggers have noticed that one's old surfing habits have been gradually modified by the purposefulness of a blog? Maybe that's another bullet point in boynton's potential list of 10 tips and things about blogging. Turn off the blog this button and go for a surf

Coincidentally, I had thought that Anton Chekhov might be up for a banana slug - a serendipitous search engine that I had first seen on JWalk
BananaSlug was designed to promote serendipitous surfing: finding the unexpected in the 3,083,324,652 web pages indexed by Google

The s word and the wonder theme again feature in their Further Reading.
We were supposed to travel the Web. Get lost in it. See what we could find. Be amazed. If we were lucky, we'd bring back something useful. The splendor of the Web was in serendipity Hurry-up searches bypass Web wonder

Anyway here are some writerly AC links courtesy of google and banana.

Anton Chekhov on writing
Steven Wood essay What Chekhov meant by life - includes lines from notebooks
201 stories
monologues
Letters

This last was a great return from banana - as it pointed us to the wonderful Adelaide Uni Electronic Text Collection - and the etc wandering round the links.
But the My name is Anton Chekhov and I am a Borzoi page at the top of the post was not found through banana slug but through google's own rather slippery variant, the image search. boynton has often followed the odd tangents there...

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Comments: wondering

Turn of the blog button & go for a surf

It's the web version of stopping to smell the daisies, isn't it!

Stories of early failure are sooo inspiring, aren't they (Chekhov's, I mean...)
Posted by wen at October 22, 2003 08:35 AM

Yes the 'early failure' one is quite useful on occasion, as is the 'each to their own trajectory' story.
Posted by boynton at October 22, 2003 12:31 PM