Tag: blogging

Long live the personal essay!

“…writers being encouraged to not simply mine personal feelings for a quick click, but to make connections between the personal and the political more explicit.”

For reasons currently lost on me, I have put up a profile on the Quora site. Quora is a user-based site that where questions are asked and answered.

As is the case in human interactions online, some are sincere queries, while others, usually political in nature, and often about Obama and that guy after him. “If liberals hate Trump so much, why don’t they just leave?” Some kind souls answered that one, but not me.

For some reason, maybe because I’ve been doing it for 12.5 years, I’ve answered questions about blogging. But not all of them. One directed to me that I ignored: “Which blog content would make more money, diet and exercise or drawing and graphic design?”

Some months ago the New Yorker noted that the personal essay boom is over. A key sentence: “Personal essays cry out for identification and connection; what their authors often got was distancing and shame.”

In response, Salon posted The “personal essay boom” is dead. Long live the personal essay! “What we are instead experiencing is an evolution — of writers being encouraged to not simply mine personal feelings for a quick click, but to make connections between the personal and the political more explicit.”

Both of these pieces talk about blogs from women, and describe posts that are far more high profile than mine. Still, the discussion made me want to continue to do whatever the heck that I do each day. I didn’t get into this for money or fame. And a good thing too, because then I’d be REALLY disappointed!

I do it because makes me feel just a little less powerless. It grounds my thought process by having to write it down in sentences than to just say, “Daylight Saving Times SUCKS!” (It does, BTW.)

My Quora pieces generally have said, “Write because you have to.” Every once in a while, I check in with myself and realize, “Yup, still need to do this thing.”

“Banned” in a functional sense

The Times Union may not have INTENDED to suppress Heather’s piece.

There was this blogpost that community, unpaid blogger Heather Rusaw-Fazio wrote for the Times Union site in the spirit of #MeToo. It became not visible and the site inaccessible to the blogger because the post did not meet whatever community standards the Times Union thought were being violated.

Which standards, exactly?

Ultimately, Chuck Miller posted the piece on his blog, and I on mine. I referred to it as a “banned” post.

Rex wrote to a friend of mine:

We did not, in fact, silence a woman’s voice. A woman who is the senior editor in charge of engagement – and thus the supervisor of community blogs – took the step of protecting Heather and the Times Union from a potential libel claim. (As publisher of the blog, we are susceptible to libel claims.) We are quite eager to publish Heather’s post, but we have suggestions to make it less likely that we – and Heather – might be vulnerable legally. Since we have a lot of experience in legal matters, we could advise her on this, but at this point she has chosen to remain silent rather than accept any such suggestion. It is very regrettable, but there is certainly no intent on our part to shut down conversation.

What does Heather have to say about this to Rex? This is pretty much the opposite of what Heather was told by TU folks:

There has been very little to no consistency on blogger standards from blogger to blogger or post to post for some, and I hope you take the time to read all of this and truly understand.

Is it the use of f**k? This is the first time I’ve actually censored myself in using the F word in this blog or the Books blog. I’ve said worse and have used the full word minus asterisks in the past with no shut out or removal of the blog. Not consistent.

Is it the word penis? Insertion?
How would you prefer I describe sexual assault? His “thing?”

Is it because it’s pornographic?
The definitions of sexual assault and pornographic content is vastly different. I’ve violated neither the contract I signed, which is valid, until another is presented.
Kristi wrote about mother/daughter porn and it’s still there. Readers have shared others. Not consistent.

Tena specifically mentions “graphic.”
The only correlation between the word graphic and the newly shared ToS to which we must also adhere, is to the word pornographic or child pornography. Show me differently where I’m in violation.

It has been eight or nine months since Huber left, yet he’s being blamed as the reason for no contact information? If you have his equipment or network access through AD, you have access to everything he had, specifically his Outlook contacts. Not one person there has made an effort (in 8 or 9 mos) to take a couple hours to organize your community of independent bloggers?

Let me just present you with the scenario. I was terrified while writing that blog. Every emotion came back to me as it usually does when I allow myself to recall the assaults. I was in tears. I was shaking. I felt like I was going to vomit. I felt like I was going to be dismissed – again. I published and then unpublished. I finally scheduled it for 6 a.m. when I knew my alarm would go off at 6:30 and it would be too late to change my mind.

Then the comments are coming all morning. I received about 30 private messages, 10 texts, couple phone calls, about 5 emails from women saying “me too” and sharing their story with me and saying thank you. I’m finally beginning to understand the impact one story can have. My stomach calms down and I stop shaking. I’m finally able to actually to get food in my stomach.

Then I get the email from Tena. I’m pretty sure I don’t have to explain what that did to me emotionally. I’m sure I don’t have to explain the impact that had on the women who follow me. I shouldn’t have to explain that once again I was shut down, silenced, and made to feel as if I had done something wrong by sharing sexual assault stories. Go to my Facebook page to find out. It’s all public.

Hundreds more are involved now and asking what I want them to do. I’ve been asked if you’ve apologized. No.

Rex, I appreciate your attempt to explain it was all a miscommunication, but it was absolutely wrong and in direct discord with what was agreed to after Chuck Miller’s situation until the “mysterious new Hearst blogger contracts” appear. Communication is supposed to happen prior to pulling a blog.

Shannon, you, and Tena have my email address and I can be reached on Facebook. There is no excuse, especially not Huber leaving you with nothing.

Unfortunately, it’s clear that no one on staff really cares about our little group – and that’s fine. It is what it is, right?

I will call XXXXX tomorrow to gain access so that I can simply delete the post.

Thank you…

Thus the disconnect.

Rex took exception to my term “banned,” and in a limited sense, he is correct. Heather herself had said that if the second overture made to her by the paper, from Rex himself, had taken place initially, and much earlier, the problem might have been resolved.

But I was thinking of “banned” as in what happens in Banned Book Week, when it celebrates items that were banned or challenged.

I was reading a September 28 Times Union editorial. Make absentee voting easy, and it actually explains an effective ban:

Eligible voters in New York may legally cast an absentee ballot only for certain reasons — sickness, disability, infirmity, or being out of town on Election Day. But those who juggle work and obligations like child care, or who lack transportation, or who simply have no time to get to the polls, are left with a choice: forfeit their democratic right, or falsely claim a legal excuse, as some admit they do.

This obstacle is likely a key reason why turnout to choose local, state and national leaders is so poor in the Empire State. This form of voter suppression — intentional or not — is fundamentally little different from strategies employed in states that purposely make it difficult for many people, especially low-income urban residents, to vote, from requiring photo IDs to having fewer polling sites or locating them out of the way for those without personal transportation.

Now, I happen to agree with the sentiment of the piece. But a literalist would argue that, since there was apparently no intentional bias against a class of people, there is no voter suppression, even if the vote is suppressed.

So the Times Union may not have INTENDED to suppress Heather’s piece. But by locking her out of her page, and being slow in communicating with her why, it effectively accomplished the same thing. And she’s going away, which is a shame.

Unsurprisingly, Chuck Miller has a take on this issue.

Blogging about blogging #37, approximately

“Makes me wonder about the accuracy of the rest of the information you provide.”

If blogging about blogging is a sin, then today I’m going to need a shot at redemption. (So does Arthur.)

The vast majority of the people who visit my blog are not from the Albany, NY area. As a result, when I’ve written something that was Capital District-specific, I tended to post that IN ADDITION to a post that might be of interest to a larger geographic swath.

After the deadline hit for turning in petitions to run for office locally, which was July 13, I contacted the Albany County Board of Elections to secure a list, from which two lists were generated, the Albany city Common Council folks (i.e., the city council) and everything else.

This took some time and the window of opportunity was fairly narrow. I also cross-posted this on my underutilized Times Union blog, which proved to be aggravating. In an answer to a question, not the article itself, I left off one word, which changed the meaning. This led someone to write, “Makes me wonder about the accuracy of the rest of the information you provide.”

Then when I demurred in doing the Common Council list, because it was laborious, I got, “Are you ‘late for lunch’?” I get the impression that, because I appeared on the Times Union site, I was getting paid or something. It reminds me that avoiding that venue is probably better for my mental health.

The real takeaway here, though, is that I need to stick to the one post per day, EVEN if it’s of interest only to folks around here, because time is not fungible.

Dustbury noted that he gets messages from folks who want to write for his blog. I get them too, a lot. But from one entity, who I’ve linked to in the past, I’m going to actually post a quiz on this blog, sometimes in August, in lieu of content from me. I’ll do that sort of thing very rarely, but it is in part because I like the organization, and partly because it will alleviate my time crunch.

The intrinsic value of blogging

That pale gray box looks slightly sad.

For Ask Roger Anything, Arthur the AmeriNZ asks a couple meta questions on blogging:

I sense that (like me) you also believe that writing has intrinsic value for the writer, even without any financial reward. What’s your take on those who dismiss blogging (for example) done without any pay? Similarly, why do some people also have to belittle bloggers who DO make money from their blogs? Is there any validity to those criticisms in your opinion?

Some people dismiss those who write without pay as fools. But there are very many well-known folk who blog either for nothing or for PayPal tips. Initially, I blogged to write about the Daughter and JEOPARDY! But it was also a sense of addressing my feeling of powerlessness in the midst of a Republican administration engaging in a war of choice that I thought was unjustifiable. I wasn’t sure I would actually write about it, but I COULD. I could also get Fast WordPress Hosting.

Now I blog because I pretty much have to. It’s therapy. All the crap going on and I can vent a little. At the same time, I have found it a useful reference tool for my own existence that I’M likely to forget. AND it is my vehicle to have dialogue, in a way Facebook simply cannot be for me. Something I wrote about my grandfather or Spaulding Krullers I can find again. Moreover, OTHER people find it and comment on them, occasionally years after I wrote the pieces. This gives the exercise a sense of being less ephemeral.

Bloggers who get money are considered as not “pure” by some, not of the “tortured artist”. But in that piece you linked to about New Zealand, it mentions a professional travel blogger with thousands of hits. Do I wish I had thousands of followers? Some days, yes.

But my reach blogging on the Times Union newspaper site was far greater than it is here; guess which one I all but gave up? It was too much grief, too many schmucks; it wasn’t worth it.

I’ve gotten offers to do advertisements, and I’ve resisted, so far. If something is really in my wheelhouse, I might change my mind, but I’m not cashing the check just yet.

Why do you provide links to YouTube videos, but not embed the videos themselves?

Initially, I was afraid that it might be taking up too much bandwidth and would load too slowly. But mostly, it’s pure aesthetics.

This is an odd phenomenon I’ve only seen on Blogspot/Blogger blogs (yours, Mark Evanier’s), sometimes, the videos appear to be under the wrong description. If I reload, it rectifies the situation, but it’s distracting.

Also, the videos make the posts appear too long for my taste. And when a video, almost inevitably, goes offline, it leaves that pale gray box that I always find looks slightly sad.

Incidentally, I was looking at a post on SamuraiFrog’s Blogspot website on my tablet, and a post for which he merely provided the link, rather than the embedded video, the video showed up anyway. Doesn’t always happen, but it interested me.

Navel-gazing about blogging

I’m the guy who is looking around to find the latch that opens the hood

For me, this graphic is mostly fiction. I mean, it has happened to me with songs, book passages, interesting news stories that people did not appreciate what I liked, or embraced what I loathed. But I recall someone named Arthur having some sort of law – what did he call it? – that says:

“Everything you love, someone else hates; everything you hate, someone else loves. So, relax and like what you like and forget about everyone else.”

Since I started blogging, I’ve given up the notion of “guilty pleasures”. It may be pleasure, but I don’t have the need to feel guilty. I may have swiped that idea from SamuraiFrog.

In fact, I steal a lot of ideas in this blog from other places, some so long ago I don’t remember. I had been linking to articles that I didn’t have enough of an angle/time/interest to write about them. I had been doing that twice a month. But two people I know In Real Life suggested that the posts were too long, though they’re no lengthier than my usual posts. Still, as a result of being out of sync from changing servers, I did it three times in April. I may do so thrice in May. Or twice. Or four times, I dunno.

All of this technical drama on the blog was frustrating because it’s not what interests me about blogging. I’m like the guy who likes driving but he doesn’t care to look under the hood. I’m the guy who is looking around to find the latch that opens the hood – “it must be here SOMEwhere.”

I have been actively trying to write shorter pieces that are still worth your time AND my interest. I have this SEO thingy that tells me that if I don’t hit 300 words, it won’t be as popular, or something that. Guess what? I don’t care.

Enough navel-gazing for now.

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