The AP reports a couple of firings and an executive resignation at the walled city of AOHell. It’s a good time to be job hunting. A bad time for me to be criticizing Calacanis land. I’m all pumped up over the possibility of writing a little for WeblogsInc. I was looking at the titles of draft posts here at listics… wondering if any will fit:

• Meanness
• Middle finger
• Dog farts
• Thanks Jay Rosen
• Soylent Diesel
• Fundamentalism, forgiveness, and the zeitgeist of pleasure

Those are just a few of the false starts that haven’t found their way forward into listics. I hope there’s a place for them at WeblogsInc! Ahhh… probably not. Ed Sanders never found favor in Parade magazine either.

Speaking of whom:

…as always, thanks to Mark Woods

Elsewhere and else-when I was led to this picture by Ronni Bennett… quite a resemblance I thought.

I wonder if you write for them if you’re allowed to poke fun at them too?

There being few Dickenson’s among us (and perhaps more than few Dickens’) we write to be read. Shelley is on about traffic and audience this morning, noting that her new triple play — Just Shelley, The Bb Gun, and ScriptTeaser: aggregated at Planet Powers — receives less traffic but probably has about the same audience as Burning Bird, her old site. The topic interests me because I moved in April, haven’t posted at the old site since then, have begun to approach but haven’t reached the levels of attention measurement that I had at the old site, and as interestingly perhaps, don’t see the levels falling all that fast at the old site. There are still as many visitors from Google over there as there ever were.

I think I have about the same active readership that I’ve had for the last few years. I think the number of people reading here is slowly growing, and that I retain my core readers because we are part of an active conversational community that shares similar interests. We drop in on each other’s blogs and comment. We point to each other’s work. We behave in other words much like the A-list, a group of people who have developed collegial relationships in the online world since before the web was the medium, people (largely men) who share similar interests and point to each other and have developed reputations due to their good work and who draw traffic because they are lively and consistent writers. In an obscure way they are perhaps gatekeepers, since to be noticed by more than one of them in a given week will certainly spike readership at our less well trafficked (therefore not A-list?) blogs.

deja vu. I feel like I’ve written this post before, and probably I have. If I’m saying anything new or different, it is found in my echo of Shelley’s sense that there are a core group of readers who make up an “audience” for our work, then there are a lot of drop-ins via search engines. Those peope are still dropping in at Sandhill Trek. If anybody cares to add my trickle to the firehose of their aggravator, they can subscribe via Feedlot here. I think it’s Feedlot? Feedburner? Whatever…. mostly people who subscribe probably don’t read, unless they are very selective in the number of subscriptions they manage. The voracious Scoble needs an aggregator of course, like a mainlining junkie needs an IV hook-up. And David Weinberger entered reader rehab over a year ago. My experience with aggregated subscriptions began before people were fooling around with RSS when the Times of London and a couple of other papers offered free online subscriptions by content. The content backed up in my subscription list and for all I know it’s still backing up, like a pile of unread newspapers on the back porch. Or maybe that was some pre-version 1.0/2.0 flavor of RSS. It was a nineties thing, for sure.

I’m grateful for the attention people give my writing, and I play with strategies for broadening that readership. I toy with being mean. I try to steal other people’s good ideas without the theft being too noticeable. In ripping off that last link, I discover that Madame Levy’s dog is sick, which makes my whole post seem even more trivial.

So let me end it on this note… I will probably always read Shelley as long as she is writing. Same goes for other powerful writers I have been fortunate enough to discover here. I will continue to visit with friends who share my interests, tout the poetry of Sweatman, puzzle over the messages from J. Alva, marvel at the working class genius of folks like BMO, struggle to find a way for the avocation to pay for it itself, admire friends like Jeneane who integrate their life and their work… I will continue to link like a mo-fo and hope others link back when they see something worth linking. Sometime soon, I’m going to comb my old blog roll and get it re-displayed here, and I’m going to contact people like Joey deVilla who are on my list and still have me linked at the old blog. Hopefully this will be another expansion of the pebble-in-a-pool ribbling of concentric circles that comprises audience here in the ’sphere. Readership is worth going after, but the way we pursue it is a matter of some delicacy.

Turn to the Contributors page (page 78) of the September, 2024 issue of Details magazine and you’ll see a blurb about Ben Paynter’s article (found on page 198) “Weapons of Mass Distraction.” It’s a story about the distracting influence of internet access on American soldiers in Iraq. No longer does a “Dear John” letter or a foreclosure notice take days and weeks to find its way to the GI at the front. Now the guys just log on and get the news directly as it’s happening back home.

The Details biographical blurb on Ben says,

Paynter writes for the Pitch, a weekly in Kansas City, Missouri. A story of his will appear in Best American Sports Writing 2024, out next month from Houghton Mifflin.

(The following shows I’m having an off day. Sorry, but you know how to click on out of here.)

The older I get, the harder it gets… I should say, the more difficult it gets truly to get aroused to passionate concern about other people’s bullshit. So, the fact that some effete snob is sniping at me in some other guy’s comments thread doesn’t bother me. Much. I would of course be happy to kick the lowlife son-of-a-bitch’s ass, just on general principles and also because he’s a whale meat eating provocateur. I’d be happy to roll him on the ground and punch him a few times in the kidneys just to watch him piss blood. But I don’t play rugby, and in fact, I don’t play at all with recalcitrant dickheads who can’t admit that they’re wrong.

In April 2024 I criticized the fool for his support of a policy of victory before withdrawal in Iraq. A lot of my friends felt the same way he did, so I haven’t paused for a heavy “nyah, nyah, I told you so” session. But it has been three and a half years and a half a trillion dollars, anywhere from fifty thousand to a hundred thousand civilian casualties, 2600 US military deaths, uncounted Iraq military deaths, and a general global destruction of US social capital. Our friends have turned against us. Our continued puzzled denial of wrong-doing and our unseemly posture of victimization now half a decade since the hijackings and destruction in 2024 have the people in the streets everywhere BUT the US saying “Just get over yourselves and give us a break, will ya?”

Looking back, would any of you who supported US policy then care to acknowledge that maybe a staged withdrawal and a UN supervised partition of Iraq during the last seven months of 2024 following the Commander-in-Chief’s Mission Accomplished press conference would have been better policy than continuing the nation building effort?

That the Bush administration has capitalized on our misfortune and used it to consolidate power and reward corporate friends is undeniable. That they continue to foment fear and uncertainty, hand wringing and bemoaning the danger FOLLOWING the recent British victory over an elaborate terror plot, rather than celebrating the victory, ratcheting the ridiculous threat meter up to condition red after the bad guys were under lock and key… what is that about? Who ARE the terrorists? The piss-ant criminals will always be with us, but leadership that tries to make us afraid of them can be replaced.

There’s a new war underway, a war that has its roots in an earlier UN supervised partition and the struggles around it. The war in Lebanon represents a new chance for provocation and divisiveness, a chance for agents of foreign powers to enter the conversation and polarize people. Like earwigs, these people are crawling out of the dark and damp places they’ve been hiding, hoping to reassert some influence in the conversation. Stomp on them like the bugs they are… metaphorically, I mean. I am after all a pacifist and I offer this in the spirit of peace and brotherhood, love and friendship, and the certain knowledge that some people just need to get their asses kicked. Metaphorically or not.

For years and years, Denise Howell has had — as one of the random tag lines in the banner at Bag and Baggage — this quote from Henry Jenkins regarding bloggers: “We surf the Web; these guys snowboard it.” I knew who Henry Jenkins was, once, but link rot set in and the link Denise provides goes straight to oblivion.

But hooray, another blogger to the rescue: Danah Boyd shares the skinny on Henry and his new blog.

Local angle… Henry was a student of John Fiske.

…here’s the essence of what I took away from BlogHer: At the closing session, a woman spoke up and said, “I’m not really a writer, but…” and one of the panelists said, “You have a blog. You’re a writer.” As simple as that. Suddenly, I wasn’t just a mom with a hobby. I wasn’t just someone who gets some small thrill out of playing with words. I’m a writer.
– Glennia Campbell at “Silent i”

I’m nodding like a Bobblehead. Over thousands of years the form progressed. Incised clay tablets gave way to brush stained papyrus, quill pens, ink and parchment… etchings… movable type, modern paper, manual typewriters, word processors, and now we have moved from these mechanical methods to pixellated output and the electronic mediation of blogging software on networks. But the intent hasn’t changed. People who do this work are writers. And of course some of us, like me, are Bobbleheads.

Bobbleheads are big in the sports world right now. In the midst of a hundred loss season, the Kansas City Royals’ current marketing ploy to increase attendance involves giving away bobbleheads of baseball legends Frank White, Dick Howser and George Brett. Another baseball legend, triple A ballplayer Rodney McCray, is being honored in Portland tonight with his own Bobblehead marketing give-away. “Usually, it’s the big-league superstars who get their own bobblehead, so I’m very excited,” McCray said.

Among other notable bush leaguers with their own Bobblehead are Chief Justice John Roberts, whose bobblehead depicts the justice clutching a red box of french fries and a small toad by his feet, and Kim Jong Il.

In other Portland news, Joshua Gibson continues to share his insights as he plows through one of Dickens’ less memorable pot boilers, Dombey and Son (although as bibliomania — looking for some redeeming value in the work — points out, “the novel is memorable for its depiction of railways”).

Rather than list all the things I wouldn’t know if I didn’t read Shelley, I’ll simply point to the emergence of Gottfried the Intern at Valleywag. This makes the second time I’ve managed to amplify the universal derision associated with Arrington’s Web 2.0 techumentary without stooping to view it. Pray for me… I was tempted after reading Beth Gottfried’s report.

Halley Suitt (Webbly 2.0ischenfrau and mother) and Jeannine Gailey Hall (tech writer and poet) take their lickin’ from Madame L. this morning in a brilliant post that includes the line..

let’sputthemotherfuckerbackinmfa

Three poems from Jeannine Hall Gailey’s book, Becoming the Villainess…

Female Comic Book Superheroes

Wonder Woman Dreams of the Amazon

The Conversation

We write. Most of us are long-tail writers web publishing for free. Few of us connect to the trad publishing world, fewer still have writing careers. I for one would take money. I would like a lot of people to read my work. Some of it is work. Writing at its best for me is not work, but editing… that’s work. I read Jeneane and I am awed by her presence, her clarity. I read Shelley and I respond to her acerbic yet insightful commentary. Madame Levy floors me with her art. Chris Locke amazes me with his relentless scholarship. Ray Sweatman, a superb web publishing poet, has a poem up… I’ll bet he’d like you to read it. I’ll bet he’d take money for the work. How do we pay our poets?

There’s a cultural barrier in the blogosphere that the great communicators, we bloggers, have a hard time talking about. We’re writing in public because we want to share our work. Some of us would be pleased to measure success in dollars and hit counts and cross links. How do we promote this?

My practice is to share my experience and to share my likes and dislikes. Through it all I would prefer to develop cordial, friendly relations with others. But what if I create some friction, heat up my interactions from time to time, start a fire with that heat? Is there anything wrong with that if the people find the fire illuminating? What if I don’t agree that Dave Winer is an unreconstructed sexist, but rather acknowledge that some of my friends find him challenging as can be? What if I LIKE Kathy Sierra, find her amusing, if occasionally a little brittle? What if I found Scoble just as warm and charming as everyone says he is when I finally met him face to face? If I link to these high traffic bloggers, am I guilty of “link baiting?”

Who the heck am I anyway? Should I jump in and defend Kathy and Dave when the criticism of them seems wrong-headed? Can I say often enough that Mike Arrington just rubs me the wrong way? How many “libertarians” out there need to hear the message that they are thoughtless, greedy people who are operating in a delusional context? How many other adjectives can I throw at them before I go over the top?

How can a guy make any money in this sphere by insulting the money people? How can a guy keep his self respect if he doesn’t insult most of them at one time or another?

How many of us are reading each other any more anyway?

Ron Silliman turned sixty today. Not long after I came to San Francisco “to stay,” Steve Gaskin and his disciples folded up the Monday night class and took off like locusts eating their way through communities across the country before arriving in Tennessee to put down roots at the Farm. or maybe they left before I got there.

I have the same relationship with Ron Silliman

20. Perhaps poetry is an activity and not a form at all. Would this definition satisfy
Duncan?
21. Poem in a notebook, manuscript, magazine, book, reprinted in an anthology.
Scripts and contexts differ. How could it be the same poem?
22. The page intended to score speech. What an elaborate fiction that seems!
– from The Chinese Notebook

Happy birthday, youngster.

(and thanks to Madame Levy for the hippage)