Now that the Galle Literary Festival is over and done with for this time, we have a plethora of posts on the subject, which makes for interesting reading – particularly for such folk like Java and yours truly, who didn’t make the event for one reason or another. Checking out some of the bloggers commenting on the Festival, it seems like the event eliciting the most attention was the one about whether bloggers should be taken seriously – and for good reason of course, as all of us are in that boat. Could it also be assumed that most of us do want to be ‘taken seriously’ – whether we post on ‘serious’ topics or do some ‘off the wall stream of consciousness’ shit?

We posted a couple of pieces on Should bloggers be taken seriously? , and And what about the panels – should they be taken seriously?, well before the Festival got underway, and it seems to us that a lot of the observations and comments resulting from the blogs referred to what the observers considered to be the inadequacy of the panel. At least that’s how Java and I interpreted what we saw on kottu.

David Blacker’s Snapshots of the Galle Lit: #1 Bloggers Take Themselves Way Too Seriously had some extremely incisive observations, among which I thought his statement, “Blogs are to me everything that the blog session at the Galle Lit wasn’t. Stilted, boring, one-sided, and in the end, a waste of time, is not how I would describe the Sri Lankan blogosphere”, said a mouthful. And his suggestion of convening the event in an atmosphere more conducive to being loose and relaxed and ‘letting it all hang out’ – as a lot of us do in our blogging, certainly merits consideration next time around. As Java pointed out:

Sheet maan, wit all dat drinkin, smokin and sheet, even I would’ve hauled ass dere to get down wit dem fellow-bloggers an shoot da sheet.

David’s observation on the makeup of the panel is also pertinent and begs the question we asked in that earlier post And what about the panels – should they be taken seriously? . Apparently this one could not – be taken seriously – that is, according to David and some of the other commenters as well.

Rajpal Abeynaike’s piece in   Lakbima News was a pretty scathing attack on the entire proceedings, which RD’s Can We Be Taken Seriously? – Part 27 put down to what he considered to be a serious case of sour grapes due to the farcical goings on sometime ago when Abeynaike was caught pilfering posts off kottu and publishing them in Lakbima.

Indi’s post on the subject covered a whole lotta shit and ended up with the analogy (I think) that writing something like he did felt like ‘taking a satisfying dump’ and perhaps that was why ‘blogs are not serious at all’. Get it? We didn’t either!!

There’s a whole load more on the particular panel and subject that needs no further comment, but from the results of the bloggers’ views, it does appear that the event itself had much to be desired in terms of content, venue and participants. And so hopefully, next time around these defects will be rectified and we could look forward to a comfy bar (smoking allowed), a good representation of kottu bloggers (and others too, of course), a panel that perhaps may be ‘voted’ in by the bloggers themselves and reasonable time allowed for cleaning up any of that shit that may hit the fan.

Are we to be taken seriously? I guess in the end (as we postulated in that earlier post) it would depend on the reader.