Lance Mannion

The Puritan on Facebook or Help me self-aggrandize by following me on Twitter

Read this this morning in Alessandra Stanley’s review in the New York Times of Cinema Verite, an HBO movie about the making of An American Family, the 1973 PBS documentary that changed television forever or, you know, not.

Documentary storytelling was the Trojan horse in the age of hyper-self-consciousness, in which privacy is as antiquated as gaslight and people are the curators of their own lives on Facebook, Twitter and all those other forms of aggrandizing self-expression.

Ok, I don’t know about you, but I use Twitter and Facebook for shameless self-promotion. I’m trying to lure people into reading my blog, where I do my aggrandizing self-expressing.

It doesn’t work the way I want it to.  In fact, it tends to work the other way.  Most of my Facebook friends are longtime readers of the blog.  Or were.  Now a lot of them never leave Facebook to come read my posts. Oh well, never mind me, I’m just self-expressing aggrandizingly again.  The real point is, what is going on in Stanley’s Facebook and Twitter feeds that caused that Puritanical harrumph?

Probably not much.  Likely the paragraph’s nothing more than a former A-student’s reflex---Students, make sure everything you put in your essay supports your thesis.  An American Family aired just shy of 40 years ago.  Not exactly a fresh topic.  But here’s this HBO movie starring Tim Robbins, Diane Lane, and James Gandolfini.  There must be a reason to watch the movie besides the fact that it stars Tim Robbins, Diane Lane, and James Gandolfini.  It must have currency!  How about this?  An American Family was the beginning of the end of all that was good and decent in the American character?  Something like that anyway.  Once upon a time we knew to keep our dull, boring, sordid, mean little lives to ourselves.  Now we force Alessandra Stanley to look at pictures of our cats.

Warning to cat lovers.  Cats are going to be a metaphor for the rest of this post.

Some people do tend to overshare.  But that’s as true out in the analog world as it is here in Virtualland.  The difference between a Facebook friend who thinks you can’t look at enough pictures of their cats and the person ahead of you in the line at the grocery store who thinks the cashier needs to hear their long story about the funny thing their cat did the other day is that you can skim over the Facebook friend’s status update without hurting their feelings.  Anyway, I’d rather look at more pictures of your cat than have to watch yet another YouTube video of his favorite rock band from the 70s performing his favorite song from his freshman year when everybody else was listening to that other band but he and his friends knew what was really hip and happening.

My main gripe with Facebook and Twitter is they’re time-sinks.  I enjoy looking at pictures of your cat.  And your cat.  And your cat, and your cat, and your cat, and yours, and yours, and yours, and…

You get the point.  I’m sure you have the same problem.  By the time you’re done looking at pictures of my cats, and his, and hers, and theirs, and etc., an hour’s gone by and there are still more cat pictures showing up in your feed.

Another pitfall of social networks is that they can become an alternative to actually socializing.  All that time wasted staring at the computer screen could have been spent talking to live human beings.

My niece, Violet Mannion, who is finishing up her freshman year in college in Boston, was a Facebook virtuoso.  She knew just what to post and when to make her feed a happy mix of news, games, fun, and information, managing to keep the aggrandizing at a minimum while making the self-expression charming, lively, and always entertaining.  But she deactivated her account in January.  It was bothering her that Facebook was becoming the venue for interaction with college life.  Here she and her friends were, students in the greatest college town in America, and instead of meeting up nights to discuss their days and their classes over coffee or pizza in one of the thousand quirky dives and joints Boston offers, they were all retreating to their separate dorm rooms to type into the ether.  She declared that she’d had all she could stand.

Gosh darnit, she said---Violet shares the Mannion family inability to curse persuasively---If we’re going to make each other look at pictures of our cats, then we’re going to do it by handing each other actual prints, or at least our cell phones, back and forth across real wooden tables damp with bar sweat and sticky with half-dried tomato sauce and the spilled foam from our lattes and we’re going to have to yell over the music from a real live band that we’re all listening to together while we do it instead of while each of us is half-distracted by whatever is shuffling through the headphones on our iPods!

I didn’t watch An American Family and I can’t say I’ve been aware of its influence on television or life in these United States.  I can’t connect the dots between it and Facebook.  I’m not sure Stanley can either.  It’s not really her job to in her review.  So, like I said, I’m not sure that paragraph isn’t just a throwaway, like her references to Modern Family and Parks and Recreation, neither of which needs for An American Family to have existed to be what they are, unless Ricky Gervais could only have created The Office because when he was twelve he accidentally caught one episode and had been mulling it over ever since.

But I can’t help suspecting that Stanley means it, at least she means the indictments of Facebook and Twitter as blots on the national character.

Stanley has a Facebook page, but she maintains it with less of the assiduity of a Sarah Palin.  And she’s on Twitter, at least somebody named Alessandra Stanley claiming to work for the New York Times is on Twitter, but if it is her, she hasn’t posted a single Tweet.  For all I know she’s using aliases and twittering and Facebooking like a madwoman, but unless that’s the case it looks like she hasn’t found much use for either.  Maybe she’s resisting the temptation to self-express aggrandizingly.  Maybe she’s just too busy expressing herself professionally in the New York Times.

The reason I think she hates Twitter and Facebook, though, is that a lot of people do.

Mainstream media types, especially, seem to have a grudge against social networking.  It seems like a continuation of the grudge they had against blogs.  Stanley could have written that same paragraph on the night Mark Zuckerberg was inventing Facebook, substituting blogs for Twitter and Facebook but putting the same sneering spin on the word, and her colleagues would have nodded aggressively in agreement.  Lots of keyboards have been pounded without mercy as the sages and savants of the intertubes have tried to figure out the source of this animosity, with the consensus being that the olde media types are both afraid of the new media taking away their jobs and jealously protective of their own status and privileges---How dare you members of the great unwashed have opinions about the opinions we’ve decided you should hold!

But I’m not accusing Stanley of sharing either that fear or that arrogance.  I’m just saying that I think for one reason or another Facebook and Twitter appall and disgust her or at least make her mildly annoyed and a lot of people who aren’t mainstream media types feel the same way.

I used the word Puritanical to describe her tone.  You should know that I don’t think of the word as necessarily a pejorative. 

Lots of liberals reflexively use the word Puritan to describe social and religious conservatives.  But they are thinking of the humorless, hypocritical, intolerant authoritarians who inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne and not the self-improving, self-questioning, self-doubting intellectuals who inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson.  There’s a strong Puritanical streak in contemporary liberalism.  Forms of witch-hunting and handing out scarlet A’s are popular American traditions handed down to us by the Puritans, but so are public schools.

American liberals are relentless self-improvers.  This has its good side as well as its bad, and that bad side is that it can make us judgmental and intolerant in our own way.  My review of T.C. Boyle’s new novel, When the Killing’s Done, was long enough without my getting into it, but both its main characters are liberals with strong Puritanical bents.  Alma Takesue and Dave LaJoy are driven self-improvers who can’t resist the temptation to improve others in the same ways they’ve improved themselves. 

You can see how a contemporary Puritan---like me.  I’m one, I confess.---would be wary of Twitter and Facebook.  What’s the benefit here, we ask ourselves, meaning, In what way will this make me a better person?   How is Twittering and Facebooking self-improving as opposed to self-indulging?  It might be ok if I’m using social networking to be social, if I’m using it to connect with people, to share information (of the self-improving, non-self-indulging kind), to learn about what other people are thinking and doing and what’s going on in the world outside my own garden and get ideas on how I can help make it a better place.  But what if all I’m doing is using it to show off?  What if I’m just aggrandizing myself by showing off?  (Puritans can make a big show of showing off their virtue, but they can also make a show of not showing off their virtues.  They show off by not showing off.)   What if I’m not using social networking to be social at all?  What if what I’m doing is closing myself off from the world by spending all my time alone at my computer screen reading things that confirm my smug self-satisfied opinions typed by strangers I’ve decided to befriend or follow just because they happen to think like I do and believe the same things I do and like the same movies I do and vote for the same liberal politicians I do.  Aren’t I limiting myself?  Aren’t I being a hypocrite?  Aren’t I wasting time I could and should be devoting to doing something productive?  (Puritans are very bad at loafing.)

Where we Puritans get into trouble, and start causing trouble, is when we decide it’s not enough for us to refrain from something, you need to refrain from it too.

When we’re not content to say, You know, I think I’d better cut back for my own good but have to add, and you should too because it’s contributing to the decline and fall of civilization.

And we can get worse.  We start to believe that anybody who doesn’t agree is a deliberate agent of that decline and fall.

Oh, I don’t own a television set.

Oh, I don’t let my children eat at McDonald’s.

Oh, I don’t follow sports.

Oh, I don’t have a Facebook account.

Implicit in all those statements is the question, And what is wrong with you that you do?

I’m pretty cool with Facebook.  Twitter is my downfall.  Like I said, where I get into trouble with both Facebook and Twitter is when I lose track of time.  But with Twitter I have another problem or, as a good Puritan I should say, I face another temptation.  Anger.  Twitter makes me mad.  Well, not Twitter itself.  It’s the fact that almost all the people I follow are liberals obsessed with politics and I wind up spending an hour I should be devoting to self-improvement growing angrier and angrier as I read tweet after tweet and follow link after link that tell me what I already know, the world is in terrible shape and it’s all their fault.  They being politicians and conservatives and any liberals who don’t agree with me about how it’s their fault or what to do about it.

It wouldn’t help if I started following some conservatives because I would still be following people who are as obsessed with politics and also believe it’s all their fault.

And on Twitter I fall into the habit---give into the temptation---of tweeting in kind, of obsessing over politics and passing along links to my followers that will reassure them that they’re right, and I’m right, it’s all their fault.

Twitter is not, for me, a social network.  On Twitter I am the opposite of social.  I’m anti-social.

If that’s the case, Lance, you may ask, Why do you have that Follow Me on Twitter widget in your sidebar?  Why do you routinely put links to your Twitter feed in your posts here on the blog?

Good questions.

Mainly because I can’t resist self-expressing aggrandizingly.

But also because I do try to make use of Twitter for good Puritanical reasons, to be informative and to take part in social networking, which is to say, to be sociable.

The fault isn’t with Twitter.  It’s what I do with it.  Posting my notes from my visit to the American Museum of Natural History last week is sociable, especially if it helped send some of my followers over to the Musuem’s twitter feed and even more especially if it led to anyone’s deciding to go visit the Museum themselves.  Being the six hundredth person to retweet a tweet about how Paul Ryan’s a big jerk?  Not so much.

I need to be a better person.

Your turn.  What do you like/dislike/love/hate about Twitter/Facebook?

Yippee-ay-ki-yay!

She's done the rodeo gamut: cattle roping, goat tying, you name it. But barrel racing is her passion; she has the bruised, scraped knees from hitting barrels to prove it.—from Tuesday’s Times Herald-Record story on local rodeo champ, Rachel Sameuls, age 17.

The world as it’s covered in Blogtopia (h/t Skippy) is a world defined by television news and the editorial pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.  It’s a gray, joyless world in which everything revolves around politics and politics is mixed up with a deracinated, sexless form of television celebrity, and everybody, pundits, politicians, and bloggers think, write, speak, and argue as if the next Presidential election is tomorrow, its results will decide everything, and its outcome hinges on proving that what the people you disagree with most are wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong again.

But in the world covered by my local paper Donald Trump isn’t running for President, Michelle Bachmann barely exists, the next Presidential election is still a year and a half away, and nobody’s going to see Sucker Punch or cares that anybody’s going to see Atlas Shrugged, Part I.

This isn’t to say that world covered by my local paper is a finer, braver, happier, smarter, or better world to live in.  There’s plenty of sorrow, heartache, and pain, not to mention madness, stupidity, cupidity, cruelty, meanness, and plain evil.  It just happens to be a world that people can and do live in.  Consequently, the news from that world tends to be about how people are going about living in it as opposed to being about what a bunch of millionaire journalists and their lobbyist friends argued about at lunch yesterday.

There’s much to get angry about, but more to make you if not thankful to be living in it, then at least feeling involved.  In the world according to my newspaper, individuals have some agency in their lives and don’t have to sit staring at their computer screens, wringing their hands and praying that some politician or journalist finally gets it  or a fellow blogger nails it in the hopes that somebody will finally fix things in order to feel like they matter.

It doesn’t make the news stories more important or necessarily truer to life as it really is, just more varied.  There are politicians in both worlds, but in Blogtopia (h/t Skippy) there aren’t many 17 year old rodeo champions:

Rachel's mother, Jae, rode horses until three weeks before giving birth to Rachel.

Two days after Rachel was born, she attended her first rodeo, in Massachusetts.

She got her first horse at age 3, competed in her first rodeo a year later. She played other sports, too, but gave them up.

Horses are better than boyfriends, she says — "they're more reliable, you can trust them more. They want to please you, they want to do their job."

Read all of Keith Goldberg’s story in my local newspaper.  Registration recommended but not required.

Photo by Tom Bushey of the Times Herald-Record.

The Mannionville Daily Gazette’s Favorite Blog of the Day

Writer George R.R. Martin’s blog which he insists is Not A Blog.

Because…well, you can guess why.

Game of Thrones Exclusive Preview

 

Here’s Matt Zoller Seitz’s review of Game of Thrones in Salon.

Your not so far-flung correspondent

Taking the A Train this morning.

Well, first I’m taking a Metro-North train.  Then I’m taking the A Train.  But not all the way to Harlem.  To the American Museum of Natural History.  I’m covering the opening of their newest exhibit, The World’s Largest Dinosaurs.

There’s a behind the scenes tour planned, so maybe I’ll get to talk to this guy---

The event starts at 10:30.  I’ll probably post notes as I go on Twitter.  Full post to follow later in the week.

At the end of the month I’ll be going back to the City to review another play at Classic Stage Company, The School for Lies.  As I’ve said, I’m hoping to do more of this in the future.  But with train fares, gas, parking, tolls, it’s going to add up.  If you can swing it and can kick in a small donation, I’d be much obliged and it would be a real help towards making this a better and stronger blog and more fun for the whole family.

Friends in need

Lambert and the gang at Corrente have come to the aid of many a struggling blogger (including yours truly) and now they can use some help themselves.

If you can swing it, please drop on by and make a donation.

The Mannionville Daily Gazette’s Favorite Blog of the Month

espirit de l’escalier.

Actually, Claire-Helene has been a longtime favorite of The Daily Gazettte’s editors, going way back to when she was a pup.

She’s still a pup, but this month she’s going to become a little less of a pup.  She’s turning thirty.

And she’s going to do it on the 30th.

Well, on the 27th really, but it won’t be declared official until the 30th because…

…to celebrate, since she’s turning 30 in a month that hath 30 days, Claire’s going to count down to the big day with a post a day.  That’s thirty posts in thirty days.

Yeah, I know, Andrew Sullivan can do thirty posts in thirty minutes, but he has a staff and no life.

The editors here at the Daily Gazette are looking forward to each and every one of Claire’s thirty, especially since many of them are bound to feature photographs by Claire, like this one from March Snow.

As far as I know, Andrew Sullivan doesn’t own a camera.

I love the theater, but I never come late. That’s why the blogger is a tramp.

Off to review Double Falsehood at the Classic Stage Company this afternoon.

As I’ve said, I’m planning on making play reviews a regular feature on the blog.  Means more trips to and from NYC, so if you can help make this happen by kicking in a small donation for gas and parking, I’d be much obliged.

Citation needed

Updated. Thursday, March 10, 2011.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia spoke on campus tonight.  I’m sure the gist of his speech has already been edited into and out of his Wikipedia entry several times already since he wrapped up.

Update.  I moved the notes I made on Twitter Tuesday night to their own page.

What he said I said

I was thinking I might Twitter my own presentation yesterday afternoon, the way James Franco Twittered his hosting gig on the Academy Awards, but unlike Franco I actually got caught up in what I was doing and kept forgetting to reach for my iPhone which I don’t have one of anyway.

So my next plan was to write a blog post summing up, but I forgot.

I was talking about blogging, right?  So who do you figure’s going to be in the audience?

Bloggers.

And bloggers gotta do what bloggers gotta do.

At least one blogger, at any rate.

Geoff G. of Text and Hubris.

I had the opportunity to attend an informal discussion/presentation by Lance Mannion with occasional comments from Stephen Kuusisto titled Literary Writing in the Second Digital Age. In it they discussed whether blogs deserve their still often-maligned status as the creation of narcissists screaming into the echo chamber or whether they were something more?

Read all of Geoff’s post Literary Blogging and the Author’s Journal.

And then check out what else is going on at Text and Hubris.

Meanwhile, I’ve got two events to attend today.

Larry Bissonette and Tracy Thresher, the two stars of Wretches & Jabberers are heading a panel discussion on the film this morning at ten o’clock central time.  If you’re here in Iowa City it’s being held in the Illinois Room in the Student Union.

And this afternoon, this:

A dramatic reading of Finding Our Voices by writers with autism will be held at 2:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 8, in the Rembolt Room of the Center for Disabilities and Development. Finding Our Voices, compiled and edited by Grinnell [High School] senior DJ Savarese, is a 25-minute collage of prose and poems by autists who type to communicate. The script, solicited by drama teacher Liz Hansen for the Iowa Large Group Speech competition, is read and performed by eight of DJ’s peers.

The reading will include writings by Tracy and Larrry. DJ Saverese, the producer and director, has just been accepted into Oberlin College, the first non-speaking autist to be accepted at Oberlin, according to his father, writer Ralph Savarese.

Links a-go-go

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.---John Rogers, screenwriter, comic book writer, television producer, and blogger at Kung Fu Monkey.

Some links to blogs and posts I mentioned or wanted to mention in my talk this afternoon.

From the New York Times: Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter.

From the London Review of Books: Smarter, Happier, More Productive.

James Wolcott, writer and journalist, Vanity Fair.

Roger Ebert, film critic and now blogger.

John Rogers, producer of Leverage.  Kung Fu Monkey.

Whatever. John Scalzi, science-fiction writer.

Farran Nahme Smith, the Self-Styled Siren, classic film blogger.

Steve Kuusisto, poet, professor, disabilities advocate.  Planet of the Blind.

In White Ink.  Stories from the life of a young psychiatrist.

Behind the Stick, observations from the other side of the bar by an ace mixologist

Nancy Nall, my hero, award-winning columnist who paved the way.

Maud Newton, writer, blogger, reviewer, linker extraordinaire.

Tim Dorsey, comic crime novelist.

Walter Kirn, novelist, author of Up In The Air.

Jenna McCarthy, author of The Parent Trip: From High Heels and Parties to High Chairs and Parties and other humorous writing about marriage and parenting.

Ken MacLeod, science fiction writer and thinker of deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you’ve got.

Sherry Chandler, poet.

Michael Berube, professor, writer, father, hockey fan.

Beatrice, Ron Hogan’s blog, literary connections made easy.

Diary of a Heretic.  A short-short story a day by Kathleen Maher.

Cory Doctorow.

Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert.

The Blog of Henry David Thoreau.

Bridget Callahan is Your Best Friend.

From the Wayback Machine: The Midnight Blog of Paul Revere

I’ll be talking with Steve Kuusisto about blogging as a literary form at One this afternoon, March 7, in the University of Iowa’s English-Philosophy Building.  I’m reposting this old post from my very first month of blogging and the one below, A whole passel of swoopers, because they touch on some of the points I hope I’ll get to make today.  So, by way of an introduction to this afternoon’s event…

Longfellow had a blog.

Really.

Somewhat cut off from everyday German student life, Longfellow and [his pal Edward Deering] Prebble diverted themselves by producing their own four-page, quarto-sized, handwritten newspaper...Mildly ribald in tone and full of student jokes, it was intended not for their families but for a small circle of male Portland intimates.  Longfellow did most of the writing and drew the many illustrations, and Preble added comments or filled in the blank spots...

...Much of the text---snippets from their reading in several languages, allusions to politics back home, odds and ends of student lore---has lost its bite, but illustrations reveal Longfellow's unsuspected gift for caricature.---From Longellow:  A Rediscovered Life.  Charles C. Calhoun.

Snippets from their reading.  Allusions to politics.  Odds and ends.  Small circle of readers.  Sounds like a blog to me.

Calhoun goes on to describe the tone of Longfellow and Preble's newpaper.

"The satire is coarse, the humor sophomoric, the anger real."

Yep.  Definitely a blog.

The New York Times Magazine has a piece on the rise of The Blogs.  I'm not going to link to it because everyone of the blogs I'm linking to below links to it.  The focus of the piece is on liberal political blogs, which is what you'd expect from the Times.  If the Times can find a way it will convert its Sports section to politics, the way it has its Books section.  But the celebrification of left (sort of left, anyway) bloggers has right wing bloggers hopping mad, according to Jesse over at Pendagon.

These are people who think that Al Gore thinks he invented the Internet and that proves Gore is crazy who now think that they both invented the blogosphere and simultaneously destroyed the Death Star known as the old Liberal Media, blowing it up with Grand Moff Rather still aboard.

Darth Koppel escaped but they'll track him down and rescue him from the dark side in Episode VI.

Michael Berube, whose humor is not sophomoric, whose satire is not coarse, but whose anger is real but productively sublimated into one of the most enjoyable and intelligent blogs in this or any other virtual reality, makes hay with the Times and with a dour, sour grapes throwing op-ed in the LA Times.

(I suspect Berube of being an android constructed by a super-intelligent alien race who've sent him to earth to humiliate all Earthling academics, writers, and would-be satirists, as well as fathers who think they're doing a good job, and middle-aged weekend jocks, with his preternatural brilliance, energy, good humor, devotion, and hockey prowess.  But my friend Steve Kuusisto has met the guy and says he appears to be human, just way smarter and more productive and energetic than the rest of us, which makes him even more insufferable.)

Kevin Drum, as usual, has the most thoughtful take.

But my favorite response has been Matt Yglesias', naturally, because his opinion comes closest to my own.

...one good thing about the piece [sez Matt] is that it starts to bring out the extent to which there isn't much to say about blogs per se. It's a kind of technology that's used in wildly variant ways, as demonstrated by the enormous differences between Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and Wonkette. These sites are united, more or less, only in virtue of being produced by blogging software and by being popular. But we understand that a bestselling cookbook, a National Book Award winning novel, and Lies and The Lying Liars Who Tell Them don't have a great deal to do with each other all in virtue of being books.

The implicit by-the-by here is that blogs aren't anything but a content delivery system.  That is, they're a way for people with a lot on their minds, and the arrogance to think that lots of other people want to hear it, to get the words out.

There's been a lot of breathlessness about the revolutionary nature of the internet, of the web, of personal webpages, of blogs.

(Or to put it the way it might appear on Typepad or Yahoo:

Internet>World Wide Web>Personal Web Page>Blog>Lance Mannion)

But little of the panting commentary takes into account that what we're talking about here is a lot of flashy new technology built around a component that's a result of a very old technology.  There's a human being at every keyboard, doing what human beings have been doing from the beginning, buttonholing their neighbor and shouting into his ear, "Hey, pay attention to me when I'm talking!"

Longfellow and his friend's newspaper used the technology of the day to deliver content to their friends back home.   Printing presses and packet boats and human beings working for the post office.   I think what Ben Franklin and his brother were doing with their printing press was producing a blog.  Poor Richard's Webpage.  If the technology had been available in the 18th Century Hamilton and company would have produced the Federalist Blog.  And St Paul was blogging to the Ephesians and the Colossians and the other ians.

In the beginning was the word.

And the word became pixels and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

The delivery system is a million times faster and the interface a lot prettier, of course.  But I'm not sure that blogs are all that more efficient than broadsheets.  In fact, there are times, when I'm staring glumly at my traffic stats, when I think that I'd be better off printing these entries on my Inkjet, going downtown to stand on a busy street corner, and handing them out to everyone passing by.   At least some of them might read them before throwing them away.

From the Way Back Machine: A whole passel of swoopers

Originally posted May 16, 2006.

In Timequake, the book by Kurt Vonnegut I'm just finishing up reading, Vonnegut says there are two kinds of writers.

Swoopers and bashers.

He's a basher, he says.

"Swoopers write a story quickly," Vonnegut says, "higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way.  Then they go over it painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work.  Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one.  When they're done, they're done."

"Writers who are swoopers," he says, "find it wonderful that people are funny or tragic or whatever, worth reporting, without wondering why or how people are alive in the first place.

"Bashers, while ostensibly making sentence after sentence as efficient as possible, may actually be breaking down seeming doors and fences, cutting their way through seeming barbed-wire entanglements, under fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to the eternal questions: 'What in heck should we be doing?  What in heck is really going on?'"

Vonnegut says that in his experience most bashers are men and most swoopers are women.

I like the words.  They strike me as useful and apt.  Vonnegut doesn't explain their etymology, but it sounds to me as though swoopers are writers who like to get things done in one fell swoop, while bashers spend their working days bashing their heads against imaginary brick walls trying to shake loose one decent thought or one perfect word.

But as catch-all categories they don't work for easy sorting of the writers of my acquaintance.  For one thing, my swoopers and bashers don't divide along gender lines.  For another, the bashers I have known and loved have seemed more intent on bashing their way toward an ideal of poetic beauty than on discovering the answers to any eternal questions.

Vonnegut, of course, has known more writers, and more great writers than I have.  He can talk off-handedly about a casual conversation he had with his old cronies and colleagues Nelson Algren and Jose Donoso

I have known some talented writers, but I can't claim that any of them are in a league with Algren and Donoso.

Still.

My old crony and once-upon-a-time colleague Tom Bailey has recently published a very fine novel calledThe Grace That Keeps This World.

I would say Tom is a basher.

My friend Steve Kuusisto, the poet and memoirist, has a new collection of essays coming out this fall.  It's called Eavesdropping.  The cover photograph alone is going to sell a lot of copies.

Steve's a swooper.

On the other hand, because he's legally blind, Steve has to work very slowly, dictating his poems and essays to his computer, which gives him plenty of time to bash his head against imaginary brick walls.

Tom, however, is a human dynamo, and does everything at six times normal speed.  I pity any brick walls he bashes up against, imaginary or solid.  He must do a fair amount of swooping just because he can't put the brakes on quick enough to give himself time to bash.

As Vonnegut himself might say, and does say, often, in Timequake, whatever.

The point is that if Vonnegut hadn't told me what category he put himself into I'd have called him a swooper.

I've been a fan of Vonnegut's writing since I graduated from the Hardy Boys.  Vonnegut, Mark Twain, and Allistair MacLean were my first grown-up writing heroes.  Yes, Allistair MacLean.  The Guns of Navarone Allistair MacLean.  Come on.  I was 14.  So I've been reading Kurt Vonnegut since the dawn of time and I thought I knew my man.

Apparently not.

Timequake, though, however much bashing Vonnegut had been doing up until 1996 when he wrote it, strikes me very much as a swooper's book.  It is written higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way, except that Vonnegut doesn't seem to have gone back over it quite as painstakingly as he might have.  There's a lot in it that is just plain awful and doesn't work.

It's not been dull or felt like a waste of time to read, I have to give it that.

Vonnegut calls Timequake his farewell to writing novels.  It's a strange confection, made up of pieces salvaged from what would have been his last novel if he could have forced himself to finish it, a book put out of its misery in mid-progress that Vonnegut refers to throughout Timequake as Timequake I, the pieces connected by snatches of autobiography, musings on contemporary events and art and culture, political opinionizings, brief sermons, jokes, summaries of imaginary stories by Vonnegut's alter-ego the imaginary science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, bits of literary criticism, reminiscences about writers and normal people he has known, random observations about life, the universe, and everything, and the occasional attempt to answer the eternal questions:  What in heck should we be doing?  What in heck is really going on?

Thinking about this the other day, after suffering another case of intellectual whiplash brought on by Vonnegut's suddenly dropping his pursuit of one idea and making a sharp turn around a corner in his brain to speed off after another new thought, I asked myself if I'd ever read anything so determinedly, maddeningly, and enjoyably higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum before.

And it hit me.

I read stuff like that every day.  Online.  They're called blogs.

Timequake is a blog.

A decade ago, back when even the pioneers of the wide-open cyberspaces hadn't heard the word---they called what they were doing e-journals or, simply, webpages---Vonnegut had come up with a blog that he had mistakenly written with a typewriter on paper instead of on a computer keyboard with bytes of code.

Yep, I decided, it's a blog.

I thought about this a little more.

Wait a minute.

It's my blog!

Some of you may have heard that Michael Berube has asked Amanda and I to fill in for him while he's on vacation.  When Michael asked, I jumped at the chance.  I've been looking for more opportunities to demonstrate to the world what a blockhead I can be.  Plus I thought it would be fun to share blogging space with Amanda.  It would be almost, kind of, sort of, well, not really at all like but let a guy have his dreams, can't you, going out drinking and dancing with her.  This post is my hello to Michael's readers, and I've cross-posted it over at his place, which is why what follows is going to sound to you folks redundant and oddly addressed, as if I'm looking at you but not speaking to you, as if I'm talking to an invisible party guest standing just off to your left

In his going-away post last week, in which he announced his upcoming holiday from blogging and warned you that Amanda Marcotte and I would be taking over this space for the couple weeks he plans to be away re-charging his batteries, Michael wrote about the hostility some toilers in the traditional media feel toward blogs and bloggers.  He speculated that their ill-will and spite are motivated by fear.  They see bloggers doing what they do, faster and in many cases smarter than they do it, stealing their readers while subjecting them to a kind of criticism they've never had to face in their careers.

Michael listed some bloggers he thought could do, and in fact are doing, a better job of political writing than many of the celebrity pundits and journalists bobbing their heads on the Sunday morning talk shows and wasting ink and paper for the likes of the New York Times and Washington Post.

Graciously and too generously Michael put me on the list.

While it is true that I am smarter about politics than, say, Joe Klein or Richard Cohen, I am smarter the way I am smarter about baseball than some particularly boneheaded managers.  But that doesn't mean the Yankees should put me in the dugout and let me run the team day in and day out.

But even if I was smart enough to write for the Times or the Post day in and day out, that wouldn't be what I'd want to do, and it isn't something I try to pretend I'm doing on my page.

One of the mistakes critics of blogs in the traditional media make is that they judge blogs as if they were all one type of thing, and that one thing is what they themselves do in print and on the tube.

Some bloggers are trying to be pundits and journalists, and doing an excellent job of it.  Ezra Klein andJosh Marshall, to name two of the obvious and best examples.

But most of the bloggers I like and admire are doing something else, something more along the lines of what Vonnegut is up to in Timequake.

In A Scream Goes Through the House, Arnold Weinstein writes, "My view of art is quite at odds also with the electronic network that stamps our age, because the Internet culture, however capacious it might be, is also largely soulless and solipsistic---informational rathar than experiential---when contrastred with our engagement with art."

Weinstein, being a professor of literature, recommends literature, and the arts in general, as the antidote to the soullessness and solipsism of the Internet culture.  But I think that the bloggers I read most often are the ones who use their blogs to write their way through the informational to the experiential, who try to turn what is impersonal and overwhelming in the constant wave of information that comes to us through our computer screens into something intimate, coherent, comphrehensible, human.  It sounds too high-flying to call them artists.  But it is accurate to call them writers.

Judged as strings of editorials and op-ed pieces, a great many blogs make absolutely no sense, and it's no wonder traditional media types are contemptuous.  But judged as works in progress akin to what's happening in Timequake, it's easy to see what bloggers like Shakespeare Sister, Nancy Nall, Neddie Jingo, Amanda, The Heretik, and Michael are up to.  They're writing.

Most bloggers are swoopers because they have to be.  The demands of the space and time and their readers' limited opportunities for paying attention make them have to write short and write quick, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way, but without much chance to go back and take out what is just plain awful or doesn't work.

They all have to do some bashing along the way, though, because while it's wonderful how funny or tragic or whatever---worth reporting---the doings of our fellow human beings are, everybody has to ask from time to time, just what in heck is really going on.  But some bloggers among the passel of us swoopers are more basher-like than others.

I'm kind of a swooper's swooper.  This means that I tend to move from one subject to the next, higgledy-piggledy, etc.  I don't often know what I'm going to post about when I sit down to write.  I write a lot about politics, but I write as often, or more often, about movies or what I just watched on TV or what happened to me when I went to get a cup of coffee the other morning.

At any rate, I'm very grateful to Michael for asking me to sub for him, but I can't make you any promises about what you're going to find here from day to day.

I can warn you about a couple of things though.

I have a bad habit of multiple-part postings.  In fact, I've already got a follow up to this one in mind, although I'll try to keep the meta-blogging down to a minimum.

And---and I know this is going to come as a big disappointment to a lot of you---there will be no hockey blogging.

Wretches and Jabberers

Monday night, I’ll be attending a screening of a new documentary, Wretches & Jabberers.  It’s sort of a travelogue.  But with an unlikely pair of guides.

Larry Bissonette and Tracy Thresher don’t speak.  They type.  That’s not a gimmick.  It’s how they communicate.  They grew up not speaking.  Which is not unusual for people with autism:

In Wretches & Jabberers, two men with autism embark on aglobal quest to change attitudes about disability and intelligence. Determined to put a new face on autism, Tracy Thresher, 42, and Larry Bissonnette, 52, travel to Sri Lanka, Japan and Finland. At each stop, they dissect public attitudes about autism and issue a hopeful challenge to reconsider competency and the future.

Growing up, Thresher and Bissonnette were presumed “retarded” and excluded from normal schooling. With limited speech, they both faced lives of social isolation in mental institutions or adult disability centers. When they learned as adults to communicate by typing, their lives changed dramatically. Their world tour message is that the same possibility exists for others like themselves.

Regular readers will know why Wretches & Jabberers is right up my alley.  I have a personal stake in understanding as much about autism as I can in order, though, to better understand and explain the difference between autism and Asperger’s.

But I’m not going to the movie as the father of a young man with Asperger’s.

I’m going as a guy with a blog.

Did I mention that the screening is in Iowa?

Long way to go to watch a movie,

Lance Mannion, that guy with a blog, has been invited to give a talk at the University of Iowa.

My topic is Literary Blogging in the Second Digital Age.

That’s Steve Kuusisto’s idea.

I wanted to call it Blogging for Fun and Very Little Profit.

Actually, the question I’ll be trying to address is if the internet, and specifically a blog, is a place where serious writing---good writing, literary writing, writing with real and lasting artistic and intellectual value---can be done.

Steve says I should say something more than, “Sure, why not?”

So, what I think I’ll say will be something along the lines of, "I think so, but mainly only incidentally.  What I’m pretty sure of, however, is that a blog can be a place where serious writing, good writing, literary writing with real and lasting artistic and intellectual value can start.

The finished piece of writing, the literary work that arises from blogging doesn’t have to be by the blogger.

It ought to be.  It could be.  It just doesn’t have to be.

What I hope to do is to give the writers, intellectuals, and academics from the Department of English and the Creative Writing Program and the International Writers Workshop an idea of how they can do what I try to do here and take it to places I haven’t yet been able to take it.

Usually I think of my blog as notebook I leave open for people passing by to read.

But I also think of it as being as much an artist’s sketchpad as a writer’s notebook. 

What I mean is that it isn’t just full of things I want to remember and think I might use in a proper essay or short story someday.

And it isn’t just a collection of rough sketches and first drafts.

It’s the record of the first and---Tom Wolfe and any number of other writers and artists would say---the most important step in the process that ends with a finished piece of writing or a painting.

The artist’s engagement with the world.

First you go out and find out what’s going on out there.  Then you come back and sort it all out and figure out how it fits with what’s in here---in your head and heart---and finally you turn it into whatever you need to turn it into.

My little talk is only the beginning of what I’ve been invited out to do.

I’m going to be there to watch the film, meet the filmmakers, attend their panel discussion, and then attend a staged reading of a short play.

All of this is will be blogged and twittered and Facebooked.

It’s a demonstration of what can be done with a blog beyond writing about the neat idea you had while you were feeding the cat this morning or how mad that damn Scott Walker up in Wisconsin is making you.

Of course, both things are worthwhile subjects for blog posts.

Depending.

I’ve written more than my fair share of those.

But what I think makes the Mannionville Daily Gazette and Mail Order Catalog a little different from a lot of blogs, even much better blogs, is the degree of engagement with the world outside the blogger’s head.

There are a few political blogs that are written by people actually engaging with the world.  The bloggers are  reporting first-hand on the subject they’re blogging about.

But most of them, the best of them included, are about what the blogger has read somewhere else, quite often another blog where that blogger has written about something they’ve read on another website.

And most of the arts and culture blogs I know feature posts that are short or shortish reviews of other people’s work, which is to say reviews of the results of other people’s first-hand engagement with the world.

And, really, that describes most of what I do here.

Or would appear to be doing, judging most of my posts as discrete pieces of writing.

Judged as little chapters in an ongoing project, however, something a little different is going on.

I like to think it is anyway.

In order to understand what I’m trying to say, you have to know that I think that the best and most important posts I write are the ones about the conversations I overhear and the people I spy on in the video store or the cafe at Barnes and Noble or on the street in New York City.

I didn’t write about my unfortunate encounter with some deer as an interlude or a distraction from posts about more serious subjects.

The “serious” posts, the political rants, the movie reviews, the pretentious meditations of life, the universe, and everything are connected to the deer posts.

I like to think they’re all being read in context, and the context is this: they are all part of the ongoing record of a particular person engaging with the world, and that particular person is a guy who will happily spend more time thinking about---and writing about---the pretty hands of the barista who served him his coffee at the bookstore than about the book or magazine he read after he took his coffee back to his table.

The posts here are written by a guy who’s convinced there is a connection between the barista’s hands and the book, although he can’t necessarily articulate what that connection is.

It may simply be that it’s the writing.

This is a blog about a guy trying to describe the world as he stumbles about in it.

What this blog needs is more stumbling about.

I don’t get out into the world as often as I need to.

Which is why I’m so excited about this trip.

For the next few days I’m going to get to do what I’d do all the time if I could figure out how to make it pay.

Go out into the world, meet and talk with and spy on a lot of different people in a place I haven’t been in a long, long, long, long time and then report on what I saw, heard, felt, and thought about it all.

My talk is scheduled to begin at one o’clock Monday afternoon in the lounge of the English-Philosophy Building on the University of Iowa campus and finish up by three.

But you could say that it will actually begin when I get on the plane tomorrow and end when I get back home Wednesday night and write a wrap-up post about the trip.

You could also say that it’s already begun, right here and now, with this post, since it’s obvious that what I’m doing here is making notes for points I’m planning to make Monday.

But I can’t help thinking that the talk began a hundred years ago now when I arrived in Iowa to begin my time as a student at the Writers Workshop and my first blog post was the letter I wrote home my first night there.

____________

Visit the official website for Wretches & Jabberers.

And read Steve Kuusisto’s post on his conversation with Larry Bissonette and Tracy Thresher, From the Journal of an Honorary Wretch.

Drama critics only come out at night, up to no good

Lots of Oscar related movie reviewing below, but something new is being added soon.

Theatre reviews.

I’m going to start reviewing plays.

First up will be Double Falsehood, which is being produced by The Classic Stage Company where the acclaimed production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters is finishing it up its run this week.

I’ll be attending the show Sunday, March 20, and, I hope, post my review the next day.

Once upon a time I used to do this on deadline and could see a play that dropped its curtain at 11 and fly back to the newspaper office and have my review written and filed by midnight.

This is one of the reasons I like blogging.

Room for procrastination.

At any rate, if the plan comes together, I’ll be doing these once a month.  I’m very excited about it.  I think it’ll be good news for the blog and its reader, expanding the scope and interests of the one and adding lots more company to the other. 

More variety.  More fun.

Of course, it’s an added expense, so…you know…

If you enjoy what goes on here and are glad we’re back and would like to help keep the blog going strong and you can swing it, please consider making a donation.

Thanks to one and all for your encouragement and support, with extra thanks today to Jim Wolcott and Matt Zoller Seitz.

Artists, writers, professionals, business owners! Sell your work on this blog!

Just another reminder, if you’re an artist, a writer, a small business owner, or anyone else with a work, a book, a product, or a service to sell, advertising on LanceMannion.com is an effective and affordable way to reach an audience made up of the many of my readers who are also readers of Vanity Fair, the New York Times, New York Magazine, and many other mainstream publications, not to mention the high-profile liberal political blogs who find their way here from the websites of those publications and blogs.

I offer great rates on text links and small banner ads plus discounts to regular readers.  If you’re interested, drop me a note at lance (at sign) lancemannion (you know what goes here) com, and we can discuss details.

Meanwhile, thanks very much to all my current advertisers.  I hope everybody who visits this blog takes the time to look at their ads and take advantage of their products and services.

Why I ought to be the most popular blogger going

Still too sick to write.  Almost too sick to read.  But read this just now:

“I save the little stuff for Twitter and blog only when I have something big to say,” as blogger Anil Dash put it. It turns out readers prefer this: One survey found that the most popular blog posts today are the longest ones, 1,600 words on average.

That’s good news for me.  I can’t type my own name without at least 1598 words of preface.

You’re more impressed with this blog than you ever were, aren’t you.

The quote’s from a post by Anil Dash.  He’s quoting himself being quoted in a post by Clive Thompson at Wired.

Dash’s post is called If You Didn’t Blog It, It Didn’t Happen.

Thompson’s is titled How Tweets and Texts Nuture In-Depth Analysis.

Both posts are about how the very short take postings at Twitter and Facebook have actually been conducive to the writing of long takes on blogs.  Who’d a thunk it?

Both posts ought to be popular.  They’re long takes, after all.

Not as popular as anything I write, though.

Sick leave

Sick today.  Up all night.  Tired.  Worried.  In a foul mood.  But I’m plugging away at a new post.  Please look for it later this afternoon.

Bloggers pay tribute to Jon Swift by boosting themselves

Our late and much missed comrade in blogging, journalist and writer Al Weisel, revered and admired across the bandwidth as the “reasonable conservative” blogger Modest Jon Swift, was a champion of the lesser known and little known bloggers working tirelessly in the shadows of the Great Blue and Orange Satans and their petted favorites and familiars.

It made Al fume that the big kahunas of the progressive blogosphere didn’t do more to nurture and promote new and different voices on our side and he was determined to make-up for that neglect by focusing effort and attention of his own on them.

One of his projects was a year-end Blogger Round Up.  Al/Jon asked bloggers far and wide, famous and in- and not at all, to submit a link to their favorite post of the past twelve months and then he sorted, compiled, blurbed, hyperlinked and posted them on his popular blog.  His round-ups presented readers with a huge banquet table of links to work many of has had missed the first time around and brought those bloggers traffic and, more important, new readers they wouldn’t have otherwise enjoyed.

It may not have been the most heroic endeavor, but it was kind and generous and a lot of us owe our continued presence in the blogging biz to Al.

Al died last February.  Batocchio, the Vagabond Scholar, is honoring Al/Jon’s memory and spirit by bringing back the Round-up for at least one more year.

Here's the link:

Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2010  (The Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves)

Please go visit and be prepared to bookmark.  There’s a lot of good stuff to read, some by bloggers you already know and love (Yep. I’m there.), much by bloggers you may not know and love yet but soon will.

Do it for Jon who did it for us.

________________________

If you missed Batocchio’s call for links, he asks that you still contribute by posting a link to your own favorite post, along with a one sentence intro, in his comments section.  You can also post them here in mine and I’ll see they get posted over at the Vagabond Scholar too.

If you’re not a blogger yourself, feel free to contribute a link to one of your favorite posts by some blogger you love who’s not featured in the post.  The invitation to post was general not specific.  Al wanted everybody’s work to be read.

A knack for making vintage film sexy

BlackBook has an interview with Farran Smith Nahme, known around these parts and on her blog as The Self-Styled Siren:

As Hollywood rushes to embrace every futuristic device from 3-D to CGI, Farran Smith Nehme has her sights set squarely on the past. The classic film blogger focuses on cinema’s golden age, from about 1930 to 1960, when romantic idols smoldered and heroes hung from the edges of cliffs. Nehme has a knack for making vintage cinema sexy to younger viewers because she is a younger viewer, having grown up watching old black-and-white films while other kids were riveted by the adventures of Scooby-Doo. She launched her website, the Self-Styled Siren, in 2005, initially writing about her favorite classic movies for a small but appreciative audience in a “sleepy little corner of the web.” Over time, her encyclopedic knowledge of film - coupled with her razor-sharp wit - earned her a much larger readership, including high-profile fans such as Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott and Tom Carson of GQ.

And don’t forget me!  I’m a fan too!  As you probably are as well.  If you aren’t, you will be.  Read the whole interview, The Self-Styled Siren of Cinema’s Golden Age.

And don’t forget to visit the Siren at her blog.

Shakesville loses a voice, Wev McEwan says goodbye to a friend

Wev, over at Shakesville, on her friend and blogging comrade-in-pixels, Mary Quinn, better known as Maud:

Between all of that were serious discussions about treatment plans devised by gynecological oncologists and sorting out transportation to medical appointments and other minutiae of navigating illness. And we had very frank discussions of how much our friendship meant to one another, because the reality was that Maud was dying, and it was really only a matter of when.

But these are not things Maud would want me to talk about. She would tell me I'm being boring and burdensome.
And then she would tell me: "No, you're a grown woman. Talk about whatever you want to talk about." Because that's how Maud rolled…

Once she was in hospice, she wanted to write about the experience of living in a nursing home, and the business of dying. She didn't want to just disappear from Shakesville. And she wanted to leave a record of her experience, this most important and horrible and universal experience, in the space that meant so much to her. They would have been amazing posts. But those posts would never get written.

Last week, her emails, always fastidiously correct in every way, began to arrive with misspellings and odd spacing. Maud was slipping away.

Read all of Melissa’s post.

Their advertising dollars at work

In perusing the sidebars around here, you may have noticed that the Mannionville Daily Gazette has picked up some new advertisers recently.

I hope you’ve noticed!

I’m very lucky that these folks have thought it worthwhile to sponsor this program and I hope you’re all helping to make it worth their while by clicking on their links and banners, visiting their websites, and buying their products and using their services.  They and I are much obliged.

Whenever I do a fundraiser---and, heads up, there’s another one on the way at the beginning of December---I get email from people apologizing for not being able to afford to make a donation or being able to give more.  Believe me, I understand and here’s the thing.  If you can’t swing it, you can’t swing it, and that’s ok.  I don’t feel owed anything for pushing my way onto your computer screen and I sure don’t want you to feel obligated to reward me for my pushiness.  I’m very grateful for whatever anyone sends my way, but please don’t even give it a second thought if you can’t donate or don’t want to.

There is, however, a free and easy way to help support the blog and that is to visit my advertisers’ websites and see what they have to offer.

That’s what I try to do whenever I visit other blogs that have advertisers.

Now…

As grateful as I am for the ads I have already, there’s always room for more.

If you would like to advertise on a blog and are looking to reach an audience of well-educated professionals from around the world who find their way to LanceMannion.com from the websites of mainstream publications like Vanity Fair, the New York Times, New York Magazine, and others, as well as the A-list political blogs, we offer very reasonable rates on text links and small banner ads.  If you’re interested, drop me a note at lance (at sign) lancemannion (dot) com and we can work out the details.

But, wait!  There’s more.

If you’re a regular reader, and you have a business, a product, a book, a band, a cause, or anything you’d like to advertise, I’m happy to be able to offer you big savings on the usual rates.

Again, drop me a note if you’re interested.

Thanks to everyone for your support and patience and for reading the blog.

Hullaballo!

Welcome to all of you sent over here by digby and thanks for stopping by.  The post digby quoted is down below.  You can scroll a bit or just click here.

Romper Stomper

Interesting.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve gotten linked to by some high profile sites, Memorandum, Crooks and Liars, Vanity Fair (Thanks B. Thanks, Jim) and as usual there’s been a spike in traffic for a couple of days after each one. Which is great. Welcome, new readers!

But by far the greater uptick in traffic is coming from links from email platforms.  Almost all of it linking to the Model of a Modern U.S. President video.  The traffic has been constant for well over a week.  I’ve never seen anything like it in all my years blogging.

I’m not sure what’s going on, but I think it’s something other than just lots of people are enjoying the video.  When I posted it I suggested that it needed to go viral and I think it has.

I don’t think it’s a result of my suggestion.  I think what I’m seeing is a demonstration of how things go viral.

Email is more effective than blogs for passing things along.

I’m sure people on our side know this.  It’s how the Right communicates with itself.  And it makes sense.  Far more people read their own email than read blogs.

My question is, are we doing it too?

We’d better be.

At any rate, the blonde has been in a fury about the Rand Paul goon who stomped on a woman’s head while his fellow Rand Paul goons held her down.  She wants the whole world to know who and what these Right Wingers are and she asked me to post the video.

Now, the video is all over the liberal blogs and on Twitter and on Facebook.  But has it gone viral via email yet?

Let’s try to help it make it out there.

I’m giving it its own post below so anyone you email it to doesn’t have suffer through my commentary.

No use crying over spilled netbooks

Broke the screen on my netbook last night.

Broke my heart along with it.  This laptop works all right.  But I love my netbook.  I don't go anywhere without it.

I ordered a new screen online and I think I can do the replacement job myself.  I think I can.  Can I?  It's an HP Mini 110 and it looks like I might have trouble getting the bezel off and back on.  No screws.  

Anyway.  Donations to the Save the Netbook Fund would be much appreciated.

Bookslut | Sex at Dawn (and at Noon, Dusk, and Midnight)

If ever you’re asked to provide a two-word Latin summary of Sex at Dawn, try this: Homo hypersexualensis. Though not deployed by authors Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, this phrase points acutely to their central theses...Read the rest of Barbara J. King's review at Bookslut.