Review 2007: Home

Introduction

Over the next month, up until the end of the festive season, a range of guest bloggers from throughout the world will be writing about the most significant thing which has happened in the place where they live this year. In setting the challenge, I tried to make it as wide ranging as possible. They could in essence write about anything, so long as it reflected the place where they live and its effects on themselves and perhaps their fellow locals.

What I hoped was that people would want to let the rest of the world (or at least the readership of the blog) know about something dramatic that had happened in the place where they live which we almost certainly wouldn’t have heard about. It’s also just possible that it could be something that on first glance appears small but affecting far more people than you might expect.

It is surprisingly difficult to write about the place where you live. If you visit a different town or city, there’s always something to talk about because you can make comparisons with what you know. That’s why the infamous scene in the car between Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction works so well – he’s extrapolating one culture onto another and noting how it’s been changed and we laugh because we’ve had that same conversation ourselves.

The problem is that unless we’re new to the city or town or village, it is so familiar and we’re so used to the rhythms of the place and its people that it’s difficult to put into words what the essence of the place is for someone else. Yet, it’s still something some of us feel the need to articulate – why do we live here and what does that say about me?

The feeling listless blog’s review 2007 is still looking for contributions so if you feel like you have something to say, send it to feelinglistless@btopenworld.com.

Here are the contributions so far:

Annette Arrigucci on El Paso
Angshuman Das on Mumbai
Jennyfer Star on Stockholm
Kat Herzog on Baltimore
Andrew Boyd on Canberra
Andrea Dowling on Liverpool
Kat Herzog on Minnesota
Jacque Baptiste on Sables d’Olonne
O. Dear on the Chicago Suburbs
Ian Jackson on Liverpool
Me on Liverpool