Sorry I’ve been away. I’m working on the next set of LitKicks reviews as well as getting distracted by the nice weather. I should be back tomorrow, but till then I thought you might enjoy:
1. Catching up with Harper Lee.
2. Checking out Nasdijj’s blog, which focuses on the plight of children with AIDS. Tim Barrus is trying to put his recent identity scandal behind him and is now openly juggling both his real and presumed identities, which sounds fair enough to me. He’s still a fascinating but frustrasting writer; I wish he’d turn down the volume a bit and cut the length a lot. But, the man can write.
3. Getting drippy with Jackson Pollock. Make sure you click frequently to change colors, and pay equal attention to the edges as to the center for the full Pollock effect. As a software developer, I’m impressed by this clean and wordless implementation.
I’ll be back with some book reviews, I hope, very soon.
7 Responses
love the dripThis is
love the drip
This is brilliant! And totally unexpected.
So is Harper Lee. Good old Oprah – another feather in her dream catcher.
And you have a point, Levi. How does ‘Tim’ manage to write so much?
A blog needs to have stop points, does it not? What’s a blog without catchy titles and space for comments? This is more a mono-blog.
Yet, you’re right – it is intriguing.
SimplifySometimes the simple
Simplify
Sometimes the simple things are enough.
I hope Oprah, or somebody, can finally snag tha elusive interview with Harper Lee. That would be awesome.
I agree with you about the Nasdijj blog. A little too heavy… makes me wish he still had an editor, ha! But his visceral writing is pretty impossible not to read. I just have to set aside too much time to read it and end up only skimming it. Oh well.
NasdijjContext, conflict, and
Nasdijj
Context, conflict, and convention. That piece is so well-stated it could be in a textbook. I really like reading Nasdijj.
Why the BlogVinaros, SpainWhy
Why the Blog
Vinaros, Spain
Why a blog.
I am conflicted about the world of blogs. It is not a crime or a sin. To be conflicted. It only is. I am not sure why my critics often scream: You are conflicted!
I know that. Why is that news or even relevant to anyone other than myself.
I am trying to figure out some other way to do the blog versus the way I did it before where everything I said was taken out of context by the media and other things I supposedly wrote were complete fabrications by the people who reported it.
A thing is picked up by one media source and presented as fact by another with no effort whatsoever to check it out. People who claimed that I had produced a great collection of correspondence with them are people I have NEVER even HEARD of let alone taken the TIME to produce some massive (and mythical) correspondence. It was shocking to read words and sentiments you supposedly wrote but never did.
One of the things about “Web Journalism” that confuses me is the lack of any kind of “Spirit of Disclosure.”
Many of the people on the Web who were denouncing me in very bitter and downright hateful terms were people who had been involved in the process of acquiring movie rights to my nine published books. But this was not disclosed in anything they wrote.
My reputation for “Being Difficult” is an attribute that can be slapped on someone in an attempt to manipulate such negotiations that relate to exactly and contractually how such an entity as a film production studio can deviate from a story I have written. The pressure that can be applied on an author to agree to allow fundamental changes in one’s work absolutely and unequivocally blows my mind right out of the water. My reputation for being hostile and intransigent is undeserved. I do try to hold peripheral rights to work hard to what the work was about. But that is my right as a writer.
When NBC does a report on a business development at General Electric, NBC news ALWAYS (as an example) informs the public in a spirit of disclosure that NBC is owned by General Electric and the public may infer whatever it wants from a news report reporting on itself.
But on the Web it’s different.
A writer may or may not tell you that the author he is writing about is a person the writer had a business relationship with.
I was far too communicative about the details of my life on my last blog which I took down. The consequences actually affected me less than it did members of my family and people who are involved intimately in my life.
The fact that I used to write porn was a fact I disclosed and talked about rather extensively in my books, but it was greeted by the media as: AHA, WE GOTCHA.
My response was: So. Like. Duuhh…
This is not news.
There was a moral agenda and outrage that I personally totally underestimated.
I will definitely write about gay issues and gay people again and my critics need to get over it and get a life.
I will definitely write about AIDS and issues in HIV/AIDS and my critics need to get over it and get a life.
However. This time around I am not going to identify or even approximate the identity of people or children I know or am close to who have HIV. I will write that work upfront as fiction because the radioactive fallout and the consequences of even coming close to disclosure has enormous impact on the lives of people who are not me. We definitely do not live in a world where tolerance is the norm. Intolerance and ignorance is the norm. I lost sight of that.
I had people show up on my front porch with more hatred than you want to know about and demands that I get out of Dodge and stop doing the work I do. Especially in AIDS. NIMBY goes deep.
I did get out of Dodge because the threats of violence were not a joke and I am not going to put other people’s lives on the line.
To get to me the lives of the people I love were threatened and in very serious ways.
I remember back when Anita Bryant was creating an atmosphere of cultural hate in which violence was not only facilitated but it was accepted by the culture at large mainly because the violence and hate was directed at individuals and groups who were powerless to confront it. There was a lot of talk back then about how hate is engendered and then taken out of context and magnified by media attention.
There is no awareness on the Internet around hate that is created in the minds of people who are receptive to what is being articulated but are not a part of that discussion because they themselves are not articulate. Often, they seem to read what gets said and they have no understanding that what they are reading might not be true and it could be opinion based on facts that have been represented as being facts but are simply fabrications designed to manipulate. They don’t GET IT. If it’s on the computer it has to be true. There is no awareness on the Internet that there is an enormous audience out there that is not a part of the dialogue but they are consumers of whatever it is that is being sold. It was astounding to me that so many blogs and media sites that were being written were being written TO ME — personally — and I could not come away from that without feeling that these people doing the writing honestly do not think they even have an audience of readers when they do. But what they had to say was being directed to me and not at the people who read them because they do not seem to be aware of those people. They are playing to a choir that does not sing and when confronted with hate what this choir acts with is hate. It isn’t rational. Hate begets hate. The extent to the hatred does not necessarily end at the conclusion of your post. What you print and publish definitely has an audience and they definitely act on what they feel and are facilitated to act on.
So, for my part, what I write has to be far more considered that anything I have done before. I am responsible for that. It is on me not my readers. This is an editorial dynamic I have quite frankly never understood before but I understand it now. Within the context of my writing I have allowed other voices to be heard and sometimes those voices were the voices of the innocent. I allowed this because I saw the Web as another tool that could be used to teach such things as reading and writing. I will definitely not do that again. You live and learn. I am.
So my blog is going to be dramatically different. Even if I am writing it not necessarily for you as much as I am writing it for me. This kind of work allows me to perceive what I am doing and what new directions I might want my art to take. I am very much interested in what identity is — is it something the self constructs or is it something imposed by culture — these are legitimate areas of exploration and discovery, and I need to know what sort of impact this journey has on art and writing and how my conflicts with it shape what I paint and what I write. That is what I DO and the people who hate that simply should spare themselves the pain and I wish fervently they would read someone else.
I can’t function on the Web in a atmosphere of reciprocity. How can I live my life, do my work, create photography, create painting, attend to such things as relationships and parenting when there are literally over a hundred people a day screaming that I tend to them.
Where the Web used to be very interactive for me, that has ended.
People have focused tightly on the issue of identity but for me it’s only a small part of it. I am mainly concerned with what I find to be beautiful (or not) and I am compelled to explore that in what I make.
For me the blog is not unlike walking through a gallery that has put my paintings on the walls. I can look at the totality of it (as a traveler and wanderer I don’t have permanent walls to use) and I can point to this image or say let’s go over here and look at this and I wonder what it means. I may find that meaning or I may not. Conflict
only is. It’s resolution that is ephemeral. Making ART is why I am alive. I am not going to apologize for that. You look at art and it either moves you or it doesn’t and it either causes you to think and question or it doesn’t or it touches you or it doesn’t or it’s relevant to you in some way or it isn’t or it’s compelling to you or it’s not. And then you move on…
Vivre ce n’est pas respirer c’est agir.
Timothee aka Nasdijj and other names too numerous to mention.
I, too, am interested in the
I, too, am interested in the concept of identity. As you say, “is it something the self constructs or is it something imposed by culture”?
Barrus Drip Pollack
Barrus Drip Pollack Scream
Agreed, he is yelling so loud I can’t hear what he is saying.
I’m still grappling with the answer about which is more important: art or truth?
“…The truth.
We must use it.”
by Nasdijj
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P.S.
Hey, Levi, the Pollock drip was a SCREAM.
Yes, Levi, the Pollock thing
Yes, Levi, the Pollock thing is fun. Good find!