Blogging from a small place, an experience in triplicate.

My colleague, the intrepid traveler, Nina Camic, is spending a lot of time on the little Scottish Isle of Islay, with lots of photographs, including plenty of stuff about whisky, which wasn't a particular passion of hers as I assume it is for most travelers who hop over to the isle for a day or 2. Go here and keep scrolling and scrolling, and when you get to the bottom, click "older posts" and scroll some more, and click "older posts" again. And if you're up for more intense attention to a Scottish island, here's the 2009 set of blog posts from the Isle of Skye.

I like this approach of really settling into a small place and needing to find more than the hot spots you'd tick off if you followed one of those New York Times "36 Hours in [Wherever]" articles.

It might be quite challenging, and you might get bored — especially if you're the sort of person who goes traveling because you get bored at home. But if you have a blog and the right Spirit of the Blogger, everything you see is triplicated: 1. The basic living-through-the-experience observation that all travelers have, 2. The recognition of bloggability that involves you in taking photographs and making mental notes and fluidly imagining how these things might later take form in a post, and 3. The experience relived as you discover the contents of your camera on your computer screen and compose the writing that will surround it with narrative. With this amplification of experience, a very minor experience like a couple sheep in the road becomes mythic.

Writing point #3 above made me want to quote William Wordsworth's "Preface to Lyrical Ballads"(1800):

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on; but the emotion, of whatever kind, and in whatever degree, from various causes, is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of enjoyment.