blog business

Well, with any luck today I might finish up a post that began as listening notes on JGB 10/17/75 at Concord Pavilion.

It began with a simple listen.

Based on Nicky's banter, I took a long and deep Nicky Hopkins detour. This had many permutations. His records (and recording contracts), transcribing my reading notes from the Dawson biography, more listening (12/20/75), reflections on Edward's Impossible Dilemma, the Session Man's Dilemma, of how to be a star without having to publicly represent as one (sound familiar?), or how to live without the stardom when your creative drive compels you to pursue it.

I think I will have revised my opinion of what Nicky meant pretty substantially by the time I am done.

As part of all of this, I undertook some more investigation into Round Records.

I think as a palate-cleanser, I undertook some more listening, thinking and writing around Jerry and the Jeffersons, but none of it is suitable for the blog.

I understand Corry's term prosopography better and better every day. He has found a way of slicing and packaging (into the Lost Live Dead, Hooterollin, Archaeology, etc. containers) that seems to work, though I doubt it satisfies him. I am close to needing to move into a book format in order to bound and channel some of all of this.

The blog format is great, but when thoughts by several obsessives get scattered over our collective blogs, it becomes really hard for me to draw the fragments back together. It's a data management problem. I have been trying to tag more thoroughly in order to leave more breadcrumbs.

It's also an attempt to give credit where credit is due. Many academics believe that, in their fields, there are ideas floating around that are researchable; the same discovery is ripe for independent discovery by any number of people at any given time. Indeed, the history of science is replete with cases of pairs or groups of scientists independently hitting the same thought at the same time. But at least citation standards are clear, and they work reasonably well. Credit is the coin of the realm, and we built a system to incentivize credit-giving (and, less attractively, credit-claiming).

Blogging, by contrast, is a bear. Because we are all leaving bits and fragments more or less arbitrarily packaged, and because there's a very large volume of material, it's really tough for me to trace back where my thinking begins and, say, Corry and LIA's ends. Certainly the book will have a blanket caveat to that effect.

Anyway, I hope to get that 10/17/75 post done. I have done some good work this holiday season, we'll have to see what other snatches of time might open up between next week and summer 2014.