Leave the Money on the Table

The only way Meghan Daum could miss the point more is if she was Shaquille O'Neal at the free throw line.

I don't often start out these things with personal attacks, but sometimes I read something to inane and so wrong, I feel compelled, by volume and depth of my vitriol to respond. Today's case is Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum, writing about J.D. Salinger's attempts to block the U.S. publishing of an unauthorized sequel to Catcher in the Rye by a European resident called J.D. California via a lawsuit.

She sees this as "delusional", "over-protective" and "paranoid". I view it as "protecting one's intellectual property" and "not wanting shitty fan-fiction from the author of The Macho Man's (Bad) Joke Book and The 100 Best and Absolute Greatest Heavy Metal Bands in the World pubished".

She also calls J.D. Salinger "mercurial" and she might be right, but this isn't evidence of it. He's refused derivations (of all forms) of his books, including when the BBC wanted to do a stage adaptation, when Hollywood and everyone else came calling, so as the owner of the intellectual property that is Holden Caufield, it's not mercurial in the least for him to say no to someone else, who does not appear to be a serious author, using his character and the world that character inhaibts to tell a story.

Ms. Daum is correct in pointing out that Mr. California's book isn't going to do a lot of damage, but the point is that Mr. California never had and never will have the permission to write anything in the Catcher in the Rye universe or using the Catcher in the Rye characters and my guess is Mr. Salinger wants to assert that right while he's still alive. The point is not that "people wouldn't have heard of J.D. California's book before Salinger's lawsuit" but that J.D. California doesn't have the right to use the characters and make money off of them. The point is that, yes, it is easier to acquiese, but Salinger doesn't have to and he's within his bounds legally and morally to say no to an adaptation or an offer to flesh out the universe he has keys to.

Most striking, however, is that Ms. Daum returns to talking about Salinger's refusal to play along in terms of public relations, that it's bad, vaguely, for his image and she's right, but what she doesn't recognize is that Salinger doesn't care. He doesn't want the fame. He doesn't want the money. He doesn't want the attention. My guess is that it's baffling to a person who works in Los Angeles, a place where the economy and culture are based on fame, money and attention that someone would refuse the offer for more.

It seems like Daum doesn't understand that just because it's easier doesn't mean one ought to go along with it. Yes, Salinger is standing on principle here, but more than that, Salinger wants to choose how to define his universe, which is incredibly restricting, but the point, I believe, Salinger is making is that his works aren't for anyone else's to play with and it's not up for sale or discussion.

Salinger doesn't want reporters at his house. He doesn't want interviews. He doesn't want to play the game, so he dropped out of it when he wanted to, on his terms. It's odd, certainly and it's not what a lot of other authors do, but that doesn't make him paranoid, delusional or mercurial.

It makes him different. No wonder Meghan Daum doesn't get it.

In Which Subtle Bondage Undercurrents Swirl Menacingly.

Blogger dotcom has taken the time to rub Elevenname's lack of South By South Westery in our faces. It turns out that several! Bloggers! Will be there! BUT NOT US.

Salt in the wound, blogger.com. Salt in the wound.

Speaking of which, now that we are coming down off of the giddy thrill of Hedonism week (I assure you, we are all lying around in various states of repose and undress, like that one Fiona Apple video from a few years back), I would like to bring up the idea of pain, and how it relates to you, me, and all of us. Do not try to deny it, you kinky bastards - I am on to you.

Bear with me, this will be quick.

One of the greatest parts about modern society is that we have become a civilization that lives on the creation, and following subjugation, of pain. We value those who are able to give us pain and those who are, in turn, able to identify themselves as pained.

Self classification is the panacea of people adrift in the sea of meta-aristoi. Modern american life has produced, to the middle and upper-middle class, a crisis of quantification, where they do not know where they are. The children of the upper-middle class experience a sharp incline in mental health issues, whereas the children of the poor experience the fewest. Partially, of course, because of ready access to psychiatric professionals - Jung's famous line about curing a sane man - but also, I propose, because of a sudden lack of duty. Whereas the aristocracy emerged from the myths of pre-history in the European cultures on which America based the majority of it's social structures, modern america has no such entities. We have the scions of powerful families - the Kennedies, primarily - though few of them match up to the glorious history of whichever celebrity brought their name to public attention.

The children of these semi-aristoi never quite match up. Who in their right mind would think of Ted Kennedy as a glorious man, after all? He's a man who, given his intelligence and positions in life, has done all the right things. Taking a similarly educated slob of similar ambition would likely make just as fine a representative of the people, just as I have no doubt in my mind that Ted Kennedy would make a fine truck driver, or convenience store clerk. His connection to the Kennedy name, that same connection which is being passed on in a very metaphysical way to Barack Obama, is his umbilical cord to greatness.

But we cannot help but wonder why? More intelligent (read: better in all ways) writers than I have observed and theorized about tribal structures, as modern man shambled into kingdoms and cities. I would go a similar route - that we worship and create an aristocracy around whomsoever we can tell the best stories around. Certainly, Kerouac was a great writer, but have you ever actually sat down and *read* On The Road? It's a terrible novel. Long, rambling, pointless. The same with Howl, as the best minds of the author's generation pat themselves on the back for their novelty, a great and aching groan of thigh as the beat generation's poets backsides meet their laurels.

No such luck with the people to follow. Modern authors must contend with publishing houses full of wooers, each one hoping to win over wise Penelope. It's an environment where having an amusing backstory, some kind of media coverage, maybe getting drunk at the Rivington Hotel and throwing a chair through a window, can only help. Books of quality are not hard to find, but amusing authors like the fabulist feculum peddler James Frey are a rare jewel to exploit - it's no wonder he's making money hand over fist for, basically, being a famous liar.

Much like old, self-flagellating saints, we can most easily focus on individuals who hurt us, or hurt themselves. No one *likes* paris hilton - no one in their right mind, anyway. But we identify with her, because she has become a powerful, and painful, totem in our society, a plague woman and an out-of-touch Disney princess.

Regardless, I am certain you are tired of my babble, so I'll cut it quick here. Suffice it to say, the methods of fascination, pain, and celebrity are all intimately tied up in the way that we understand modern culture. It's a heady brew, with no room for mercy or humility or ever, ever acknowledging the quiet aspects of life, where we may recoup. Whether this is because they aren't seksi enough or because we value them so much more, I daren't speculate. But nevertheless, culture moves onward, it's whirling gyre's center never having been held in place since the get-go, injuring us all, and yet, penurious, we stare onward, unable to look away.

I was playing some old Castlevania games the other day, and I couldn't help but wonder why, in at least one instance, they made Medusa look so attractive. I felt it to also be a rather elegant metaphor for how we approach the world.

Theme Week: Hedonism.

You're right.

This is a loaded theme week. Loaded in the sense of there are quite a few negative connotations with the word we're basing our writings on, and also in the sense of illicit substances, liquids and corporeal objects.

Devotion to pleasure as a way of life is what the Random House Dictionary of the English Language calls hedonism, though the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (roughly 1070 pages, and yes, you can bludgeon someone to death with it...) defines it quickly as the pleasure as the good and I can't really disagree. (After all, they did write the books.) I always got the idea that there was a connotation of opulence in the use of the word hedonism, so with that said, I shall continue.

Behind the scenes, there is a little mantra we have, and that is reveal as much about yourself as you please, but do allow other people to reveal themselves as they please. So, we'll have to eschew a little bit of background. I hope you don't mind.

I am not terribly hedonistic in the current (and perhaps classical?) sense. I have only recently started imbibing alcohol, I still haven't used other forms of recreational mind altering substances (recorded media aside) and my sexual palate is rather limited in both scope and variety.

Despite this, I get the idea that I can speak about hedonism fairly frankly and (perhaps!) with a bit of authority. Let us consider the United States. Despite the wide, wide gap between CEOs and the minimum wage earners in large companies, the United States still consumes the world's resources inequitably, a statement which should this point, be a fact.

Much of what is bought in America is not produced here, and much of what I eat, type on and wear has been imported from around the world. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, a wise man quipped, and we're the ones with the circlets of shrubbery on our heads...

Botch continues to be right, that America has a parallel to Mediterranean history, and it ain't the Athenians. All roads lead to Rome, and if I've learned anything from my experience it is that most of the talent and material in the world is shipped here to be consumed. Consider, for a moment, the object you're using to read this with. It could be a computer monitor, your iPhone/Blackberry/Sidekick screen, or whatever else science has come up with in between making new bombs and new TVs. It was probably compiled in China, the microchip sent in from elsewhere, then shipped back to wherever here is to be sold. This also goes for your jeans, my tshirts (ah, but they had silkscreens placed on them in America...) my hoodies, my watches and my cell phone.

Well, thank God for underage laborers for making everything on my body including my underwear. It allows me the free time to bemoan this, while also getting an education that costs more than half the world will ever get paid for a lifetime of their work. And yet, I continue to worry about girls more than my own work.

To include my own missteps into this week's lexicon of hedonism: There is hardly ever silence in my waking hours, and that's probably the most direct form of hedonism, since I far prefer to listen to music than people. If we're going for a textbook definition, then that is the best way I can show of pleasure as a way of life. I have more pleasure listening to music than interacting with people, and that's my hedonism. Pleasure ought to be pursued above all, right? Well, there you go.

To tie this back into the rest of the post, evaluative hedonism I think is the one that I (and most of America) are guilty of. Evaluative hedonism is defined as "pleasure is what we ought to desire or pursue". The pleasure, in this case, is the unknowing of...oh, to hell with it.

Ignorance is bliss, motherfuckers. Let's revel.

See, I can update about real things.

I recently purchased two pieces of vinyl and the reaction from my friends was “did you really buy vinyl?”, with a certain amount of disdain, as if I had just sunk myself into the pit of elitist, masturbatory self-congratulation of being a evangelizing vinyl owner. They’re right, though. There is a choking pretense and elitism that follows the format, for better or for worse.

But. The real question is contained in the question that comes to us at easiest to hand, which is “why did you buy vinyl, when you don’t even have a record player?"

The answer comes down, ultimately, to a discussion of format. Because of my work elsewhere, I am able to receive promotional copies of CDs, or the files that comprise them. Therefore, I have the files, and I have the portability the current formats are useful for. In other words, I can put the songs on my iPod and on my computer and I don’t need the CD again.

I don’t need a CD player, since I have an iPod, and so the CD, once the files that comprise it have been ripped to my computer, sits on my shelves and computer desk and only gets use when I want to flick through the CD jacket sleeve or look for lyrics.

This is to say that once I have ripped the files onto my computer, I have no use for the format I have purchased, aside from the art and packaging that goes with them. And this is where the vinyl comes in. There are two reasons, so I have heard, why one would buy vinyl. First, for the sound quality, (which ends up atrophying) and the art.

Since I don’t own a turntable, I can’t defend the sound quality argument. Art and packaging on the other hand, I can defend without issue. I have seen the packaging for the CD version of this release (Minus the Bear’s Planet Of Ice), and when I leafed through it, it was clear that while it looked awesome, it was missing a certain je ne sais quoi. Also, when I heard that a good friend of mine who was putting out the vinyl release had worked really hard on the jacket (that being the album artwork), I knew which format my purchase of the album was going to be in.

I view the double disc vinyl releases like this the same way my parents view coffee table books. They are meant to be looked at, and meant to be full color, glossy and exquisite. In this case, I paid for sumptuousness in a format, when I already have the music, so my question of which format to purchase is between $14 for a CD who’se art I don’t like or $10.50 for a double disc vinyl that one of my friends worked on who’se art I do.

That’s not much of a decision. But if you're going to call me an self-absorbed, arrogant prick, which is probably true, you're going to have to find some other way to do it instead of the fact that I'm now buying vinyl on the side.

A quick update before thanksgiving.

See, this is what happens when I tell Zach I'm not updating until he does.


Really. This was about a month ago, when the last blog I wrote was fairly fresh. I figured that it would get him typing into this screen on the couch as opposed to playing that flash game with ninjas going through a hazard course and getting killed.


I was wrong. Lord, was I wrong. What have I learned from this? Well, two things:


1) Zach doesn't write on anyone else's timetable.
2) Even when Zach wants to write, he doesn't. (His words, not mine.)


So much for that plan.

I'm only now listening to Major Nelson, which is, essentially the Xbox podcast, he's talking with J. Allard, who, is, from what I hear, a stand up guy. The real problem is that Mr. Nelson (pardon, Mr. Hryb...) gives himself the good microphone, whereas Mr. Allard's voice is harder to hear. If I was Mr. Hryb, I would have made Mr. Allard's voice more prominent, since he is being featured. (Also, Mr. Hryb is at this point getting so annoying and shill-like, I would pay money for someone else to ask the questions. Then again, this is a Microsoft blog, but you'd think someone would tell Mr. Hryb to tone it down a little...)

Just listening to Mr. Allard, how gracious he is, he can barely accept a compliment without saying, well, I had help from Eric over in this department, and by comparison, Mr. Hryb sounds like a glad handing corporate stooge. To be fair, the program is to promote Microsoft products and Xbox Live, so the declarations of Xbox Live to be a revolutionary gift from an unspecified diety, presumably above make sense in their context, but it gets grating quickly.

But there's an interview with one of the guys from Harmonix about Rock Band...so very tempting.

For whatever reason, Zach is stoked six ways till sunday about Rock Band. I'm less excited about it, but I can understand why Zach is. The interaction (sorry, are we calling it interactivity now?) hopefully, will be amazing, but there's going to be something missing when the game is going to penalize the singer for letting the other band members scream out I Fought the Law hoarsely. (Sigh, I don't want this to be Rock Band, I want it to be Punk Band. I know. I know.)

So. I'd leave on a happy note, but it ruins my evening when I see that in Saudi Arabia, a woman can get dragged out of a car and gang raped by seven men and it is the woman that gets 200 lashes and six months in prison for driving in a car with a male friend.

In case you're wondering, three of the rapists weren't charged with anything, and the other four were convicted of kidnapping. The male friend that was also raped? 90 lashes for illegal mingling.

What was it about justice? That the punishment had to fit the crime?

Trance

So it's like 2 a.m. where I am now, and it occurs to me, I am listening to trance. This is probably something a friend of mine, who is my source for all this, Alex, predicted would happen sooner or later.

If angry, spiteful hardcore is one side of the coin, then absurdly shiny and pretty trance and J-pop is the other, darker side of the coin, which lands face down far more often than not. Anger and rage have been a big part of my life, and trance, while an addictive substance in its own right, just doesn't have the same place in my head. I don't ask myself "How do you keep your arms raised?" for nothing. Sandstorm wasn't the song that saw me through, it was Malt Liquor Tastes Better When You've Got Problems, which I still haven't seen the band play yet, and probably should talk to Vinnie about that. I'd call him by his last name and Mr. (out of respect), but the band doesn't want that part of their lives out there. Surnames be damned!

To change gears quickly, the Escapist feature Zero Punctuation has, within a matter of hours gone from unknown to me to "must digest", the same way I feel about, say, Penny-Arcade. There's at least a couple points where the two sites intersect, most notably for videogames, but also for the way they speak about videogames. Both games have a way of speaking about videogames with a clarity and obscenity that gets to the point quickly while also being savagely funny. Sadly, ZP videos take far longer to put together than a comic and newsposts. As the title suggests, Zero Punctuation doesn't have periods. That is to say, the narrator goes a kilometer (he's English, now living in the Outback) an hour and doesn't appear to release a breath between thoughts, and the animation is in the Wii style and executed with...flair, for lack of a better term.

Also, there have been no updates for a while because I have been vomiting words out of my fingers for a week or two now elsewhere, in between games of D&D, reading, studying and catnapping.

I, too am watching Baccano now, and while I'm only 15 minutes into the first episode, the only humor I've seen is a train called the Flying Pussyfoot, the happenings on which, got conveniently swept under the rug, and the opening sequence. So far, it's mafia guys shooting each other with tommy guns and beating the stuffing out of low level thugs. I was promised hilarious robberies, douchebag! Instead, I get some guy reading Poe in a bookstore and then being shot, some guy riding a train and getting shot, some guy in a liquor store and getting shot, and I think you all can tell where this is going...

Zach, you promised me heists filled with frivolity and humor! I expected inept gangsters bumbling around scheming up epic heists! I did not expect a body count of over 15 in the first episode, that is, if anyone in this series would stay dead for more than 30 seconds...

A Clam before the Storm

So, I made a stealth update the other day, buried below others. It's a few posts down, or here if you like clicking things.

In it, I lay out a rough itinerary that will either guide my next few posts, or, more likely, fade into the sands of the internet like a statue of Ozymandias, taunting me all the while with the fact that I failed to live up to its promises.

I am finally recovered from what my ex-girlfriend mockingly called my "once-a-year vacation into manual labor," and have had a couple days of inactivity to make my muscles forget that they exist. In it, I have spent practically no time at all looking back on the tangle of awesome that was Folk Festival, and nearly all of it looking forward at the last few days before I am swept back to school by tides of necessity.

That said, some of you may be curious, so, without further ado:

For me, Folk Festival is an opportunity to feel good about working hard, see people who I don't get to see anywhere else, perhaps engage in some light partying, and did I mention working really hard? Did I mention that I pay the Folk Song Society for the privilege of working really hard? It's truly an amazing deal.

To continue on the bullet train summary: I work on the Lighting and Electric crew. We handle everything even slightly to do with electricity. When we arrive at the site, weeks before the festival itself, it is several fields and some woodlands covered in permanent and temporary buildings that were nailed together by even more hardcore volunteers of the Grounds crew. They have pagan rituals and totems, and you shall know them by their bells.

In any case, it is our job to turn this collection of buildings and fields into a place where people can see at night, watch concerts, prepare food and be pampered in air conditioned trailers. This requires running a lot of cables. Every year, we get a little smarter and find another couple places where we can leave things installed all year, and every year some random punk kids come along and destroy a few of our installations.

We also truck in various generators, put up street lights, dig trenches and nail things together. There is a fair amount of sweat, as it tends to be hot outside as August rolls around.

As festival draws near, we assemble mighty scaffolds and hang high the lights of the stage, trimming them with the most colorful of gels and tweaking their aim to perfection. We beseech the machine spirit of the boards not to fail, and we bribe the tiny robots that inhabit the moving lights with cubes of energon.

And then the Festival itself is upon us, and the hippies blot out the sun. More about this stage will probably make its way into another post someday, but suffice it to say that everyone suddenly wants more lightbulbs, crafters always manage to trip their circuit breakers somehow, and the campgrounds fill up incredibly quickly and start looking like something out of a postapocalyptic film on day two.

Festival lasts from (arguably) Thursday night through Sunday evening.

Sunday night, we begin working immediately after the concert to tear down the lights.

And on Monday morning, on whatever hours of sleep remain to us, we begin the teardown. In one day, we disassemble everything we have created over the past six weeks or so. It is thoughtless work at its purest. This year I rode around for approximately nine hours in the back of a pickup truck, in pouring rain and bitingly cold wind, and accomplished many tasks. I disassembled things with a hammer, vigorously. I hauled and coiled wires, and packed and unpacked the machinery necessary for such.

I was tangentially helpful in nearly dropping a heavy light assembly on the head of one of my co-workers, and narrowly missed killing the lad. As it is, he'll have bruises and a story, both impressive.

The details of the incident are... difficult to summarize, annoying, and could perhaps be, in some parallel universe, litigious. Suffice it to say that it wasn't my fault, and that apparently in no one else's universe does shouting "Woah woah woah woah!" as loud as you possibly can indicate that heavy things are falling and everyone should flee and/or dive for cover. I wish I had been capable of doing more than that, in the instant I had to act, but that was the sum of my contribution.

By the end of the day I was exhausted, soaked, shivering and guilty.

It was still my favorite day of the Festival by far.

As a self-professed lazy man, it worries me sometimes how much I enjoy really working.

Before the fury of ten thousand English majors descends upon me.

Tom (and everyone else reading this):

I haven't actually read Kerouac, so saying I hate him or for that matter, the work for which he is known is...premature. There are certainly fans of his work I have a certain amount of loathing for. Perhaps I flatter myself by saying I think I'd get along with him. At least in the abstract. It's the aesthetic of his fan base that irks me. (Did I really use irks? I never use irks, at least when writing.)


I find it hard to believe that the internet is bad for ideas. Really. If we're really mourning the loss of gatekeepers, then that's a pity party I never attended. This stab at objectivity from media outlets is horribly recent in the timeline of information dissemination. Christ, only until recently were events written down to be reviewed, consumed and hopefully understood by people not in the social elite. So now that information can come from someone other than the king and the king's opposition and now that there are more conduits for it, becoming infitessimally more specialized and growing exponentially in number, the idea of going backwards, towards a mentality that worked a couple decades ago seems silly.


Will it take more digging to find what you believe to be an accruate report and criticism of events? Yes. But I'd rather have more choices, ones which are meaningful in terms of editorial slant than fewer that are variations on a theme.

Like Zach, I am watching summer plummet to the earth, and am waiting the inevitably rising of her more colder, but no less colorful relative, fall. Fuck. What am I saying? School starts soon, and brings with it a practicular set of worries and tribulations as opposed to others. (See: No really, are we letting him into the house? and will I ever get my work done, oh God, oh God, vs. oh God oh God, I need to get a job and No really, can't I stay out till 3 am with people you guys don't know?)

See you soon, space cowboy.

Deleriously long post, AHOY!

I've had a lot of time to naval gaze lately, if only because finding out that the cool kids are all hanging out roughly a block from where I'm living has driven me into a misanthropic spiral from which there may be no return. Omg Jay Mccarroll! Do you think he saw me? Omg!

Anyway, I realize that my last post (about bums, and not the kind that you sit on... I mean, not the kind that you throw money at so they go away... I mean, not the kind that are made of you ass) was a little grim, but it was a pretty grim time. I've had a decent sum of time to naval gaze since then, and I've wasted most of it thinking about Blogging as a cultural phenomenon. I posted a lengthy rough draft of my ideas on my dusty old Livejournal some days ago, and I've realized that 95% of what I think is entirely different from worthwhile deduction, so whatevs. Anyway. One of the reasons why I like Elevennames is because it is, at least nominally, of more professional quality than livejournal. We have a title! Dammit! And neat backgrounds! In the end, I suppose I'm really just trying to justify some kind of imagined gentrification of the effing internets. Like the myspace vs. Facebook conflict that's older than the internet (roughly two months ago), the distinction is entirely arbitrary, yet I cannot deny the sheer potency of it's subconscious tidal pull. I am driven to think that one is better than the other, because my brain is, on a very fundamental level, broken.

Or, if you'd like, it's because I'm an all-or-nothing 'Merican.

Anyway. I basically approve of blogs, provided they are the children of effort and desire, and not just something that information is thrown at every so often. Note that these two things can look remarkably similar sometimes. But blogging is nothing more than publishing a Zine for the lazy - there's nothing more inherintly shameful or Harmful To Culture about the activity than there is in, say, posting that you want to sell your couch on myspace. Or that you are looking for someone to do nasty things to your orifices. Whatever floats your particularly sticky boat. The thing that old people don't like about it is the sheer rapidity that it takes culture to. Instant accessibility to any and everyone means that things accelerate at a truly ludicrous pace, and that, like all truly doomed temporal paradox experiments*, the slower paced participants are going to be passed by the faster ones.

*Wherein a number of creatures, initially the same species, eventually evolve into entirely different species based upon their personal predilections, including one that wants nothing more than TO HUNT MAN.

This is not really an apt metaphor. My own mandibles have woefully underdeveloped venomous pouches, so it is all entirely theoretical. Actually, this was a dream I had last night, and it had vampires in it, too! So wait, what?

In the end, it's not a matter of evolution at all - like all things* it's just an illusion, a matter of perception. To say that culture has a speed is to imply that it's something that can be measured, or that one can consciously see culture falling apart, when the entire proposition is basically madness. The only reason pissy Victorians didn't spend all their time posting images of themselves at Jenny's 21st birthday bash is because of a lack of resources.

*So sayeth Buddha.

It's not a matter, in other words, of us being the maintainers of society at large - rather, it's about our participation in it. To say that it's simply materialistic and shallow and that you don't want to participate in it is basically admitting that this thing of ours, our cosha nostra of the Halo set, has become something that you don't identify yourself with. Hence, it's something that, while you are intrinsically a part of it, you refuse to do anything to help it out, other than, say, level a bundle of pointlessly litiginous lawsuits or protest some chubby, overly pale fellows who make games about guns and aliens.

The natural (and sometimes good! Though often not!) narratives that accompany these games of alien ge-no-ciide are handily ignored, as are the blogs which encompass the full range of human emotion and experience, dealing with all of our pettiness and nobility, our wit and our grief. Of course no one wants to read On The Road anymore - it's superfluous (didn't I already use that word?) to our understanding. There are a hundred different author who interpret events in different ways. Certainly, Kerouac is to be praised for being at least a decent writer, but the parts about only liking the mad ones, the people burn through the sky like brilliant white spiders etc. etc.? Poignant poetry, but who's he kidding? There's no one around anymore who spends equal amounts of time in the library and in jail - it's a dead breed, like the Tazmanian devil, hunted to death by our parent's generation. Just like gentleman explorers or vikings, society changes.

And wearing suits and swing dancing every night does not make you evocative of a more refined age, it makes you look like a jerk.

Blogging is, in one form or another, incorporated into society, in the same way we've adapted ourselves to mass transit and television cameras - it's a young art, as is everything that we do as part of society, and they need work and study before their objective value can be determined, and what's successful is discernable from what's pointless and trite. But until then, it's a great rush, yes?