10 they bite
9 they are stinky
8 they hook you with claws
7 they attack you in your sleep
6 they climb the curtains like a tree
5 they climb humans like a tree
4 the claw up the furniture
3 did I mention the claws?
3 they try to steal cheerios out of your bowl
2 they sit on your computer keyboard
1 they hack into your email and forward virus warnings
0 they give orders to osama bin laden
found this comment in my myspace inbox. It had been sent two weeks ago.
your shit is real rock n roll! no rules, no apologies, no prisoners, no shit!!
keep th faith…play it loud…never quit
XXX
Must have come from one of the three rock n’ roll fans left on the planet.
I haven’t played guitar in a long time. I’m lost with it, again.
I always wanted to play music with other people, but it’s so hard to get people to pull together in one direction. Trying to sit in with other musicians, I can’t play like that. Can I?
I’ve felt shut out of the music world for a long time, and a lot of it about being a girl. In those few times I could play original music with a band, it was the best thing ever. I got to experience that. But it never lasted very long at all. I watched the boys pull ahead of me. I learned I had no talent, even though I do.
When I hear someone like Albert King play, I have the most incredible longing. That longing I’ve had ever since I can remember, ever since I saw my dad play banjo on the porch when I was in preschool, the two songs he knew how to play. Ever since the Sears Catalog that came at Christmas time, thumbing through to the back pages, where the instruments were. Ever since Santa brought me my first guitar (from Sears) over 30 years ago.
It’s been such a heartbreaking journey, the opportunities wished for that never came, and those that were missed. The encouragement, and the discouragement. Disappointment upon disappointment. The disillusionment of what music is and means in this culture today, the inability to make it work for me. Thinking if I could only find a couple other people who could share a vision. But I’ve failed time and again and it feels like the biggest failure of my life. It always seemed so relatively easy for the boys behind the green door.
It feels like the most unfinished business, that if there is such a thing as reincarnation, if I die and come back again some how as a human being, this is the one thing I will need to finish, starting young, and not stopping this time.
My guitar embodies my greatest dreams, greatest battles, and greatest regrets. I wish I’d been better prepared for that journey and all it was going to serve me.
This morning I found a pretty songbird with a broken wing struggling in the middle of 34th street between Belmont and Hawthorne. Hit by a car, I suppose. I stopped, scooped it up, placed it in a soft spot beneath a tree, and concealed it with hydrangea foliage. It’s a hard thing to see such a delicate, beautiful creature struggling like that. Birds are the closest thing we have to angels.
I had an hour to kill during BB’s trumpet lesson so I walked six blocks over to Hawthorne Avenue, intending to look for the Chicago Manual of Style. On the way over I passed a guy in the street selling skateboard parts, DVD’s, and books. He looked to be young, in his 20s, but he was selling Gen-X stuff, like The Year Punk Broke on VHS, a book of Life in Hell comix, and a couple of Nirvana DVDs, and Nirvana coffee table book. I offered him $5 for Live Tonight Sold Out on DVD even though I’ve seen it at least three or four times on VHS. I might get a DVD player, and then I might want to watch it again. Maybe it has special features.
Outside of Powell’s this white kid was freestyle rapping nonstop, about nothing, on the sidewalk. I dug desperately for money for him. The reason is, I know how hard it is to perform on a sidewalk. I’ve busked for coins just across the street, and I had my guitar with me.. this guy had nothing but his voice and words pulled out of the atmosphere. I gave him $1.32.
At Powell’s I paged through the Slash autobiography. Tempting, but honestly I am not sure I’m up for six zillion pages of bad boy rock n’ roll war stories. I got my own friends for that. Then I considered Barack Obama’s biography, but I surprised myself by not being sure I cared that much about Barack Obama’s life story. I’m more interested in his opinions and policies.
Then I saw Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories—I used to treat myself to one of those books every year at Christmas—usually short stories or essays, cause poetry compilations are just too random for me. Nowadays they’ve added titles like Best American Travel Writing, Best American Sports Writing, Best American Spiritual Writing, etc. I looked at some of it briefly and somehow it all seemed overblown. Pompous. Boring. Writing for the sake of writing.
I found the The Chicago Manual of Style, but it only available in hardback and cost $55. Maybe I can find it used somewhere else.
Next thing I knew I had wandered into the Bukowski section. It brought back a lot of memories, the books of poetry, and “Notes of A Dirty Old Man” published by City Lights, and my first boyfriend who introduced me to Bukowski in the mid-80s. And there was Post Office, which I considered buying since I haven’t read it in at least twenty years… and Factotum. I’d lent my copy of Factotum to cabdriver/writer Randy Collenberg back in 1999. It was an original Black Sparrow Press copy, printed on that beautiful thick paper with rich color and textured like a Pringles potato chip. Randy said “Oh yeah, Bukowski… some people tell me I write like him.” As I handed the book to him I thought to myself “I never get back the books I lend, but that’s ok, because he’ll like it.” Randy was dead a week later and sure enough, failed to return Factotum.
There were Buk books I’d read and loved, books I hadn’t read, books of letters. I was tempted by all of it but I can’t be out blowing money on books. “Library,” I said to myself, “there are books at the library.” The used Buk books were cheaper but not that cheap, and there was a chapbook called “The Day it Snowed in Los Angeles,” with Buky-cute drawings ala Kenneth Patchen meets John Lennon going for $40. I was both amazed and frustrated with myself, in a whole big world of books, and here I am back at Bukowski. He’s been gone, what, fifteen years now? There must be other decent writers out there… wasn’t there a guy who just committed suicide recently… I just read a Rolling Stone feature on him… he had three names… why don’t I know this stuff? I’m supposed to know stuff like this. Why do I keep coming back, always, to Charles Bukowski, John Lennon, and Kurt Cobain?
I mean, there are a few artists I like a lot, and then there are a few, very few, of whom I could read every word, every letter,… John Lennon, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Cobain… I never get tired of those guys…. so wtf? wtff?
I left empty-handed and confused.
I like those pacific northwest days where moisture squeezes from every pore, lines every blade of grass, weighs down every rock and pine needle, clings to every molecule of sky; when rivers and streams and roads all run together as one silver ribbon, when the cloud-mists filter down through the treetops to mingle with gray woodsmoke as it rises over roofs and through evergreen needles. I like it wet, I like it green, I like it like that.
I write this report from captivity: my first experience in cubetopia. I
have been here not two months… yet it feels much longer. The walls of
the cube mimic the invisible walls around me. When I try to save a
document to a shared folder, permission is denied. When I surf offsite, a
notice pops up noting that I can expect to be spied upon. I click “ok.”
I always click “ok.”
Everyone goes to lunch at the same time. Meetings are called with a
device called “Outlook” which is run by a smarmy device known as “Clippy.”
Clippy embodies the very essence of the cube farm, micromanaging
everything in a persistently unhelpful way. Do not try too hard, or
Outlook will crash.
I have learned to write documents with a program called “Word.” Actually,
I write everything as a text file and save as Word. No one knows the
difference. I’ve bribed Clippy to keep his mouth shut.
Everything in the cube farm is “putty” colored – the phones, the walls,
the computer, the clocks, — and even the very air seems canned and
cream-colored.
Strategically placed machines devour money and return inferior coffee. You
can select “whitener” in your coffee. No one knows what “whitener” is.
But they know it is good for them.
Life is good in the cube farm. Perfect. Cubical. You should come.
Become one of us. We have benefits. Retirement. Every need will be
taken care off. You don’t need to think. ever. again.
Over, and out.
It is Thanksgiving week. If I worked in a cube farm, I would pin a cardboard turkey to my cube. I would decorate my cube with colored lights. Then The Man would make me take the lights down. “Fire code,” The Man would say. So I would have to settle for festive tinsel garlands, and photos of my kids. Perhaps a motivational poster.
In Defense of Web Diaries was published on the A List Apart website December 20, 1999. It was lost (or perhaps just misplaced) when ALA redesigned a few years ago. This essay came out about the same time that blogger
software was released, and before the term blog
was commonly used, but well after blogging was a common activity. I dug this essay out of archive.org’s wayback machine, and updated some of the HTML. For archival purposes, I left the links as is
even though many are no longer current. Enjoy!
December 1999
From time to time, certain Web authors have seen fit to make digs at Web diaries,
those sites that chronicle their creator’s daily (or periodic) activities, opinions, feelings, or obsessions.
In his recent satire, If the Great Movies Had Been Websites,
Jeffrey Zeldman refers to Web diaries as substitutes for content.
An earlier article entitled “ Directions of the Independent WWW” at beatthief.com explains that they don’t publish much “‘personal’ first person content,” because, “the music and writing is what people come for. And not journal writing either.
There is the current flood of
beatthief continues, my feelings
sites,…The content is mainly text about
literature.my real emotional experiences
…These sites often pass themselves off as art
or
Upon reading these critiques, I felt emotion welling from deep within. It’s easy (too easy) to poke fun at personal writing, but there’s another way of looking at Web diaries, and this alternative viewpoint has not been given its due. I am here to share it with you now.
The World Wide Web and the Internet are not linear, they are holistic.Leonard Schlain The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
The Web is a new medium. We know that, right? It’s a different medium. We know that, too. So why do we judge Web-writing by “old media” standards?
Perhaps a brief history of the world would provide useful background.
A long, long time ago, in an era known as pre-history,
we did not have an alphabet. We did not have writing. We did not have books or even stone tablets. We did however, have art and literature. We created cookware and sculptures made of clay. We wove baskets. We painted. We sat around the fire singing songs and telling stories. Communication was interactive. When we spoke of the web
we were talking about what spiders make.
Eventually we learned to write. We created an alphabet. We became literate, and literacy revolutionized society. We could capture words now, and set them into stone, clay, or paper. Words could now assume an existence separate from their creator. The spoken word had been a dynamic formation of voice and breath, while the written word became a tangible product.
Empires could now be created based on a written code of law. Records could be kept. Propaganda could be spread. And works of literature could be preserved in print. It was nothing short of a revolution.
Written word became king, and remained king. Put it in writing
we say, when we want to make it real. Hinc quam sic calamus saevior ense, patet
wrote Robert Burton in the early seventeenth century: The pen is worse than the sword.
This saying was repeated and rephrased over the next three centuries.
Suddenly the twentieth century screeched in, bringing with it a pile of new media. Suddenly we had photography, audio recordings, telephones, moving pictures, radio, television, the Internet, the Web. All at once, we could preserve an image on paper, record a voice on tape, talk to someone in another time zone, watch the world through a programmed screen, share information rapidly and at low cost, show the whole world pictures of our dog.
It’s nothing short of a revolution. Revolution means change, and one thing that has been changing is the way we use writing. Writing Web content is very different than writing for print.
Web writing is different at its very core. Words (and for that matter, images) on the Web are not set in stone, clay, paper, ink, or any other long-lasting material. On the Web, words are made of pixels – of electricity – of light. How could words made of light behave anything like words made of stone?<
Back in the days of paper and ink, publishing was a complicated process. It involved creating a manuscript, editing the manuscript, and then creating a mechanical product known as a book.
To be a published author – to have your words preserved in print – was (and still is) quite an accomplishment. It is nothing less than a step toward immortality.
On the Web, however, self-publishing can be as simple as typing some text and uploading a file. Rather than toiling for years in obscurity to achieve a perfection of technique, young writers can publish themselves immediately.
This, of course, leads to a proliferation of inferior work. The other side of the coin is that it allows authors to experiment, to communicate, and to take risks.
What better format for experimental writing than the journal or diary?
LADY IZUMI SHIKIBU corresponds charmingly, but her behavior is improper indeed. She writes with grace and ease and with a flashing wit. There is fragrance even in her smallest words. Her poems are attractive, but they are only improvisations which drop from her mouth spontaneously.
– Muraski Shikibu, commenting on fellow court lady and diarist Izumi Shikibu. From The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu AD. 1007-1010
Back in the days of paper-and-ink, diaries were not generally considered to be publishable, much less literature. This attitude began to change in the 20th century.
In the 1920s, a collection called The Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan was published.
Composed in the early years of this millenium (AD 1000-1050) The Diary of Izumi Shikibu,
The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu,
and The Sarashina Diary,
gave modern men and women an insiders view on the color, the poetry, the love and disappointments of the Heian era, an era famous for its refinement of art and culture. Murasaki Shikibu went on to compose the world’s first novel: The Tale of Genji.
Probably the best known 20th Century diary to be published was Anne Frank’s. This diary showed a face of the war that could not be seen from newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, or newsreels.
Anaïs Nin published her diaries in the 1960s. Many who knew her considered the diaries to be fiction, disparagingly referring to them as liaries.
Diary writing has traditionally been a feminine activity. Women who don’t write articles or books may be prolific diary and/or letter writers. Perhaps this is because women are attracted to more personal forms. Perhaps it is because women’s writing had been considered unpublishable
for so long, that women naturally took to these private forms, forms which enabled them to communicate at least with themselves, and with friends and family.
Whatever the reason, the tendency of women authors to gravitate toward the diary form seems to have continued on the Web. Unlike other Web genres, the Web diary
may in fact, be dominated by female authors.
This is good. The Web needs to become more diverse, and an increase in female authors and feminine
writing is a step in that direction.
The diary or journal is naturally suited to Web publishing. The journal is a flexible container into which we can pour content of any and all types, whether it be a daily record of events, an exploration of our deepest emotions, or experiments with language, image, even sound.
Web journals are essentially different than the journals we keep locked and hidden under our beds. Web diaries are personal, but not private. We know our Web diaries will be read by others. Yet the diary format is casual enough that we can include whatever moves us at any moment.
The ability to be casual is important to a developing writer. It helps us let go of inhibitions, of fears, of the “internal editor” who insists nothing is good enough.
You have to give yourself the space to write a lot without a destination,
says author Natalie Goldberg. I’ve had students who said they decided they were going to write the great American novel and haven’t written a line since.
Journal writing is also good for Web sites because it is a natural vehicle for daily content. The Web is alive and in a constant state of growth and development. Daily content helps keep a Web site fresh. Even Webmonkey has changed its format to highlight daily content bites.
While experimenting with my own Web site, I discovered that adding small tidbits of daily content was far simpler than trying to refresh the entire site on a less frequent basis. And as a Web viewer, when I find a site I enjoy, I’m far more likely to become a regular visitor if I know that something changes daily.
The diary format is good for Web sites also because it is flexible. I think that authors of personal Web sites should do whatever they can to avoid being hemmed in or constricted by format. The Web is too new, too strange. We aren’t accustomed to it, quite.
We must continue to open and trust in our own voice and process. Ultimately, if the process is good, the end will be good. You will get good writing.
Natalie Goldberg, from Writing Down the Bones
We are still learning the Web. We know we are dealing with something powerful, we just aren’t sure how to use that power fully. So we experiment. We fail. We learn from our mistakes, and continue on. The diary format enables us to try, to fail, and to try again. No one is born an expert. It’s a process of learning and growth.
Perhaps we’ve forgotten about that: the process. Perhaps when we removed all the “under construction” signs from our sites, we forgot that the Web, like all of us, is a work in progress. We are still thinking in terms of paper and ink,
with the attitude that work should not be published until it achieves a state of completion.
Phooey. The Web is alive, imperfect, and beautiful in every way – just like each one of us. Experiment, I say. Every day. Explore your feelings. Embrace the process. Take risks. Don’t be safe. Your words are light. Let them shine!
ERIKA MEYER