AKMA’s Random Thoughts

The 'truth' question wasn't originally mine--it's interesting, but not crucial to questions of literariness. For me, what really matters isn't "how literary blogs are", but "how blogs are literary", and that's what I'm trying address.

I agree about the uselessness (and destructive potential, even) of determining definitive attributes. That's why in seeking a 'definition' I'm concentrating on practices of reading, not writing: divorcing how a weblog is made (structurally, the aspect so many definitions have focused on--reverse chronology, etc.) and what it is made of (kinds of content), from how it is remade by the reader/co-author--a remaking that is itself always being remade. It's that last one that seems most important, and the most likely seat of anything that might provide even the most flexible classification.

I read blogs as a kind of ergodic literature, co-written by the primary and secondary authors through collaboration over time, creating infinite reorderings of the text with infinite entry and departure points to/from the text. If anything is shared across weblogs, it seems to be that, as non-binding and unpinnable as it is (an indiscrete, unpinnable definition seems entirely appropriate to an unpinnable, indiscrete text).

The question for me, then, isn't whether the vast diversity of content and form and style and intentions is blogs is literature--I assume that it is, because it is storytelling in all the sense of that word--but how we can begin to interpret it as such without seeking to confine the medium in all its glorious chaos.

Earlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.

Earlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.

A variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.