Old School Blogging ...

"Democracy without the 4th estate is like having lungs without air."

How media ‘fluff’ helped Hitler rise to power Hitler as country gentleman

Media Dragon * @ Deepblog.Com

Writers have flocked to cafés for some years now. Do they go to write or to be distracted? 17th-century London offers some clues ...

Will Wilkinson laments the decline of “old school blogging,” the original style of blogging—before the media outlets launched their group blogs and bought up the first-generation “personal bloggers”—in which the blogger composed a self, day by day, “put[ting] things out there, broadcast[ing] bits of [his] mind,” and in return finding a place for himself “as a node in the social world.”

What Wilkinson has to say about the self is provocative and largely true, I think. The self is a convergence of loyalties and enthusiasms and beliefs and habits. That there is a “stable” self, which persists through the flux of illness and health and better and worse, is an “illusion.” Wilkinson’s best line is that the “self is more like a URL,” an “address in a web of obligation and social expectation.”

Much of the recent debate around Tax Morality – as opposed to Tax Legality – has been driven and prolonged by Social Media commentary Social media — the tax morality battleground

Timeline: Democracy in Recession New York Times

30 Pieces Of Silver - Unlike Judas, I Judge That I Rightly Earned This Money

The matter is 30 pieces of silver. Or 30 American dollars. The invoice for that, sent via PayPal, was unpaid, despite repeated requests.

The non-payer is Jonathan Daniel Muzlera, a realtor with RE/MAX Reatron Realty, Toronto, Canada. I had researched and created a blog post on what made Toronto unique.

In an email Muzlera agreed to accept it. There was no payment. When I contacted him, he notified me via SKYPE he had changed his mind and wasn't using it.

The tone seemed derisive of my concern. Unlike how Judas felt about his 30 pieces of silver, I perceived mine as well-earned. Of course, I preserved all the communications as evidence.

Among the powers-that-be in Canada I asked for help in collection has been the Real Estate Council of Ontario (RECO). Very professional, they explained that trade of real estate was within their jurisdiction, only. My option could be to take legal action. I may or may not do that.

The good news is that if I do and if there is a court judgment in my favor against Muzlera or a failure to pay that judgment, then RECO would be interested. That is because the issue would then impinge on the suitability of this real-estate professional for registration. Justice, or how I perceive how that abstraction could play out in real life, could be achieved on a number of levels.

Why my intense concern? I experienced this business transaction as extreme disrespect for an American, for a woman, and for a writer. Fortunately, a decade of legal blogging has given me a global voice.

I had no practical solutions, beyond repeating the naïve ’sixties slogan “If you do the right thing money will come” and telling about the novelist Roland Merullo, who worked as a carpenter while writing his first novels. Complete editorial freedom is available for perhaps the first time in the history of journalism, I told the students—but only if they were willing (God help me) to become “entrepreneurs of the spirit” and not employees Entrepreneurs of Spirit

Hunger and Poetry in action Winter of 2015

“It can not be that I monopolize / The making of the songs that give you praise / Or that such pools as are your dearest eyes / Have just one bather through the unclear days. / Then, let me take my place amid the pack, / If I so pack my songs with your rare worth / There were no quality they then should lack / But they were bettered by that happy death.” A previously unpublished Ezra Pound sonnet selling at auction is always newsworthy–especially when it fetches nearly $12,000. Here is a related Millions piece about the difficult poetry of Ezra Pound, John Berryman, and Ted Berrigan.

Bottle Brush in soft Pink Winter 2015

and maintaining a social media "presence." Should writers aid and abet this process by voluntarily enabling the system in the name of literary citizenship? As Becky Tuch has  written on this subject, "Today’s writers are expected to do more marketing work than ever before while not expecting much in the way of compensation or benefits. It’s what we are being 'trained' to do."' Readers on steroids

Walls of Surprises Winter 2015

“On the level of narrative possibility, I was really drawn to the sense of aloneness that rose from so many of these images—the terrifying possibility of being the last person left on earth, or even the last person left in a neighborhood, a swamp, a freeway. That stark haunting irony of living in a world of excess that has eventually collapsed on itself, emptied out.” Guernica interviews Leslie Jamison andRyan Spencer for their new collaboration, Such Mean Estate

In the "Interchapter: A Manifesto," included in The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom asserts that "True poetic history is the story of how poets as poets have suffered other poets, just as any true biography is the story of how anyone suffered his own family--or his own displacement of family into lovers and friends." Easy idealism

Are You Talking to Me?

Is the practice of using writing as a metaphor for birth, or birth as a metaphor for writing, in need of an overhaul? Stephanie Feldman for Electric Literature has some strong opinions on the subject. Motherhood on the brain, now? Check out this moving essay for The Millions on mothers and sons by Rachel Basch.

“You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.”
 New Balance in the New School of blogging 

Here is one advantage bloggers have in the struggle for reputation– for the user’s trust. They are closer to the transaction where trust gets built up on the Web. There’s a big difference between tapping a built-up asset, like the St. Pete Times ‘brand,’ and creating it from scratch Bloggers v pros


Who is Joan Didion? We talk of her as an essayist and grief memoirist, as a political writer, and as a novelist. There must be a connection»