Jon Garfunkel

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    • by Frank Paynter on September 27, 2024

    Jon has always been gracious and courteous to me, so a few years ago when he asked for my reflections on a lengthy series he did called “The New Gatekeepers,” I pretty much declined comment. (In truth, he may have winkled a reaction out of me, and if he did I hope the reaction was basically kind and non-committal). I thought the work was trivial, single faceted, not very well written and poorly edited. Editing in the blog world often involves little more than a quick read, a quick fix, and a run through the spell checker. Ain’t no big thing. Think of a mother, her tot, a tissue, a little saliva and a quick face wipe to get the grape jelly off before going into church.  Think of twenty posts in twenty minutes.

    { 2 comments… read them below or add one }

    Jon Garfunkel 09.28.07 at 1:05

    Well if my graciousness and courteousness moved you to silence all these years, what was it, pray tell, that caused you to break it?

    Frank Paynter 09.28.07 at 7:54

    Well, I needed this post in order to cheat in a twenty posts in twenty minutes contest with Jeneane. And I had it stashed in my drafts. I have always wanted to finish it properly, to acknowledge the content in your essays and to say something about how your web publishing presence would be lent a huge amount of authority if you only had an editor. I would have liked to acknowledge that this is a condition you as an author share with many other bloggers, a condition that dead tree writers avoid because of the editorial infrastructure in place in publishing houses. I would have liked to soften the affront of my observation with generalizations, and yet when one is engaged in crafting as many posts as possible in ten or twenty minutes, ya gotta go with what ya got… and I had this stash of half-baked good ideas that I have now cleared out. I feel much lighter because of it!

    It wasn’t so much your courtesy and grace that kept me quiet, as it was my cowardly inability to confront the truth as I see it.

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