{I feel like I have to do this, I don't want to, I've got the edge of some nasty threatening flu-like thing, foggy and not at all sharp-minded. but it's been building up inside of me for oh I don't know how long. I'll probably have to add to this piece over time, I can't see myself catching the whole thought in one pass.
the points I want to hit are:
but I read that porn clerk person's exit from her frontline position, and she mentioned plagiarism as a negative part of her experience journalizing her worklife, and I caught myself wondering if I'd put up a link to her stuff in the usual way for me which is to copy/paste a significant chunk of somebody's writing pull a key phrase as html, blog and go.
ok.
sort of off to the side of this is a recurring sensation I can only ascribe to psychic receptivity. I can feel people thinking about me. not everyone, not all the time, but some people sometimes. one time I made a passing reference to a blogging person named 'megnut' it was a disparaging something, I don't remember much about it, some piece of hers I read that seemed preening, unintense, sheltered, and elitist in that innocent rich white kid way so familiar to so many non-rich-white kids. though I think in these times the racial/financial distinctions are shifted into something less dramatically visible. anyway. I dissed it. later I felt, this is the psychic part, a hit, brief, a little ..I don't know disconnective, something, that I think was her coming back through the pipe on my link. I really don't know, that's the big premise there. but I think that's waht happened and I think the world of this was smaller then than I thought, and that the ripples of whatever that was spread further into it than I thought. though here I must say as I will later, I don't give a tiny poop about that reputational stuff, while liking praise as much as any other dog, I've learned where my real joy originates.
the important points, not to me, but to what this is aimed at, are the commodification and competition. people, if they hear you play well on an instrument, mostly say things relating to the business of music. stripped bare, that you could sell that. it's the same with literary things. the price tag trumps. this has resulted after a few decades in the absolutely unquestioned acceptance of the commodification of virtually everything. did I say that already? and that has resulted in an insane hyper-competition among the young. fallout from that is the dereliction of the elderly. the traditional paths of social wisdom are vanished, excavated really, and the old are progressively more useless, disrespected, tolerated at best, cared for out of guilt and projective fear. that sense of competitive striving has given the very young an alertness to the constantly shifting edge of attainment, the passwords and accoutrements of the immediate moment are of supreme importance, because it is so plainly obvious that survival depends almost solely on recognizing and attaining the most recently fetishized objects.
the brief version at this point would be that most of the people at the social forefront of blogging (if there is one) are over 20 and under 40. raised in a time that had no remnants of the old ways still functioning. even their parents had grown up in houses with televisions. I'm not alone in insisting that TV usurped the role and position of the grandparent in American households sometime in the late 50's.
this stuff all ties together eventually, though I have to pause for a while, for a few reasons, primary being I have to sleep so I can work tomorrow, which is not writerly, but this is not writing, and that's really the simplest expression of what I'm trying to say. this is something new. and that freshness makes it prey. and in need of defending.}
{{still too busy to take on the resumption, but in the interim I would like it plain and clear that the things I'm saying about this megnut person specifically are not specifically personal. I'm sure by reading her stuff that she is an intelligent and decent person within the scope of her conscious engagement with the things of the moment. I've instituted a practice which seems obvious and should be universal, if you don't like something don't read it, don't link to it, ignore it. especially in this (blog) context that works. so I ended up mentioning her in another post a long time ago as described above and got sort of stuck in that. and even now and here am having a hard time extricating this. I permanently bailed on metafilter because they purport to be a moderated forum, and certainly there is evidence of that, the absence of whole subclasses of stuff, consistent minimum levels of articulation, and degrees of grammatical proficiency, but they ran a post that used the Hensley twins as objects of derision and for me that is permanently unforgivable. and it's a pretty accurate display of what remains hidden in most of the 'privileged' writing that is the bulk of the current forefront of all this. people who entered this realm from the safety of middle-class environments, mostly, with the softness of that. anyway. it's all huge, way bigger than my view of it, and it seems more and more the responsible position is to further the positive and let the negative wither from inattention. except and unless a direct challenge is called for, which in the case of (I can't stop mentioning her) Ms. H. it's not. so this is kind of an apology. sort of.
also a lot of my need for explaining my non-plagiaristic intent is the unbelievable amount of negative critical pressure that attends every move I make anywhere but especially here, and my illiteracy vis a vis html. so that in order to differentiate quotes from authorial comment I had to do massive amounts of non-fun typing, that and using opera and mozilla both requiring complete spell outs of address tags for linking.
but now I've learned to indent.so it should get easier to indicate who's doing what. and briefly, again, my pride is such that plagiarism would never interest me. pride in the thing itself, the praise of others means a lot, but it's nothing compared to the pleasure of reading a well-wrought self-turned phrase.}}}
{and, just for the hell of it: there's a story by Lionel Trilling called 'Of This Time of That Place' with which the surface of my presence in a lot of 'normal' environments has key metaphorical parallels, or, it resembles that remark, somewhat. but the difference is mostly self-consciousness on my part. like the moments in the 60's when the particular subgroup became conscious as a subgroup that they were being surveillanced upon by whoever, there was a shift in the overheard material, often unbeknownst to the fudds. so there's that. and I'm developing a voice, or aligning what voice I do have with a new medium, or something. it's evolving. but I'm aware of the wider circumference a little. though I try not to be, and wish it wasn't there.}
