Hi, there are some books you have to buy this week.
Travel from Olympia (where everyone’s the same) to the Mychygan Wymyn’s Music Festival to the Spice Girls reunion concert via Marisa Meltzer’s revolutionary and engrossing book about how music changed the world for women in the 90s.
Then go on a series of bad dates with Julie Klausner, who is one of the funniest people currently living in the world and on the Internet. I am just flipping through this book right now in search of the line that best sums up its wonderfulness but there’s one on every page. It is funny, duh, but also angry and sad and wordly-wised-up in a way that every woman in the world will find irresistibly easy to relate to, but probably especially the women who live in New York, where surveys show that men are 40 times more likely to send all-lowercase emails and texts that say things like, for example, “hi julie. so sorry i’ve been out of touch. the other thing is that i’ve started seeing somebody. anyway, i have your stuff, just let me know where i can drop it off, xo jonathan.”
!!!
“Knowing that someone — at least one person — is guaranteed to read what I have written is the only thing that gives me the ability to structure my thoughts in a certain specific way.” As far as the process of writing is concerned, I think writing for an audience, either actual or anticipated, causes one to strive for that tight perfection which is the halmark of good writing. Imaging an audience helps us critique our own narratives as they are materializing – like, we might imagine a reader saying to herself: hey, this sentence contradicts the sentence that came 3 sentences before it.
This type of perfect structuring of syntax also translates to thoughts. If we can become adept and skilled at putting words in a certain order, pretty soon by extension we learn how to arrange details and information in a way so that we’re telling a compelling story or anecdote.
I think blogging is a lot like stand-up comedy: you are putting yourself out there in a semi-professional/semi-lazy way. There is an element of risk involved in the whole thing, but if it’s done right and you can pull it off, people will really enjoy following you and – who knows – you might even get rich and/or famous doing it.
I’m convinced that there are talent scouts out there in the blogosphere, but this is not why I blog. I blog because I like to write, and blogging is a form of self-publishing. Someday I’d like to pen books, screenplays and articles for the NY Times, but in the meantime there’s blogging.
lahv lahv lahv
Maybe New York men wouldn’t write messages like that if all the local women weren’t surrounded by an emotional barricade made of cats and abandoned knitting projects.
Darn, the”Death and Blogging” thread got closed just as I was about to comment! So I’ll call a rebound and make a simple observation here, and anyone who wants to know what it’s about can go one “older post” back.
I would propose that it’s virtually impossible for someone who is trying to make themselves heard almost exclusively through the written word to be guilty of any kind of “media whoreishness.”
Yeah, there are some people who might credibly be tarred with that feather. Lady GaGa…Perez (is Perez a writer? I don’t think so…)…that socialite with the sex videos (remember her?) those guys with the kid in the runaway balloon…some weird creature called a “Gosselin”…
But Emily? Naahhh…can’t be.
Love her or hate her, there’s nothing whoreish about what she does. She’s not standing in the middle of Times Square exposing her breasts. She’s not having John Edwards’ love child. She’s not going public about her addiction to plastic surgery.
She’s just…writing. Sharing her thoughts. She knows (better than anyone, I’d say) that if her stories aren’t engaging, then guess what? No one will read her. End of story.
What in the world is “whoreish” about that?