feminist blogs

Some time ago, I had the displeasure of finding out that my site’s entire content was being republished, without my permission (and without any links back to my own website), by Blognetnews.com. Its editor, former (and apparently unashamed!) Dubya speechwriter Dave Mastio, who is also, somehow, gainfully employed by The Virginian-Pilot, was apparently scraping all feeds syndicated at RVABlogs.com, creating from this an entire Richmond, Virginia “channel” - again, with no links going back to the sites of origin (either RVABlogs, where various regional bloggers, myself included, are syndicated, or to the original authors’ sites).

Let’s be clear here, that Mastio’s actions do not constitute “fair use.” This is outright theft of content, for the sole purposes of driving traffic to his ad-heavy site. That’s something Jaelithe at The State of Discontent does a great job of explaining in detail. (Seriously, that woman did a ton of research on this matter; many of the links in this post, I first found on her site. Rad work, Jaelithe.)

Now I learn that, in addition to stealing content for his “Richmond channel” (and for many other regional “channels”; see link immediately above for recent material on his “St. Louis channel,” and here for info on his deeds in Iowa; this is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg); he has also created a “Parenting” channel, on which, tonight, one very righteous (and now righteously pissed off) mommyblogger, Erin Kotecki-Vest (a.k.a. QueenofSpain) found her own material being reproduced. (It is, indeed, in honor of Erin, who frequently issues rants about persons who can and should “suck it,” that I have given this blog post the above title.)

Since apparently this guy is still being a huge pain in the blogosphere’s collective ass (and is now specifically messing with bloggers I personally care about), and since I have learned that in some cases, even when contacted by individual blog owners to request removal of their content, Mastio has actually refused - leading another Virginia blogger to take the radical step of disabling all feeds - I feel compelled to reproduce, here, my own previous exchange with Mastio (in the course of which I did get him to not only stop swiping my content, but to delete all my previously swiped content from his database).

Meantime, Liza Sabater (per this message from QueenofSpain on Twitter), is apparently planning to post soon about tools bloggers can use, on a collective basis, to protest Blognetnews; I’m definitely looking forward to that post. Liza points out, also via Twitter, Blognet news obviously isn’t stealing feeds from prominent sites like the Huffington Post “because they have lawyers.” “You and I,” she adds, of individual and independent bloggers, “don’t.”

Here, then, is my exchange from last month with Mastio.

From: Victoria Marinelli
Date: Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 12:48 AM
Subject: Cease and Desist Immediately
To: editor@blognetnews.com

Dear Thief,

I am aware that you are stealing content for most if not all blogs syndicated by RVABlogs.com. My website at http://victoriamarinelli.com is one of those syndicated by RVABlogs; RVABlogs has my permission to reproduce excerpts of my content; YOU DO NOT.

Remove my feed and all content stolen from victoriamarinelli.com immediately. I look forward to your prompt attention to this matter.

This was his (incredibly condescending and insulting) response:

From: David Mastio
Date: Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 11:06 AM
Subject: re: Cease and Desist Immediately
To: Victoria Marinelli

Dear Victoria,

I am glad you are aware we are excerpting content from many Richmond blogs. When we built the site more than 8 months ago, we sent emails to every blogger in the system for which we could find an email. A number of Richmond bloggers wrote about it. If you didn’t learn about this until recently it is not from want of effort on our part.

Regardless, I don’t know what that that has to do with RVAblogs other than the rumor I have heard that they trash us behind our backs. Pretty much par for the course from a company that competes with us. We’ve built dozens of sites all over the country and have been aggregating Virginia blogs since 2006 and any claim we’ve taken anything from RVAblogs is a lie.

BNN sites are built on the same area of copyright law that allows Google and other web search engines to exist. It is called “fair use.” Fair use does not require anyone’s permission. It is what allows bloggers to quote hundreds of words from a news story or a book reviewer to quote passages that he or she criticizes.

We’re happy to remove your blog. All our site does is make it easier to find yours.

Best,
Dave Mastio

BlogNetNews.com
We Serve Blogging

Remember to visit our advertisers

I replied as follows (note: where, below, I am quoting Mastio’s previous message, his words appear in italics).

From: Victoria Marinelli
Date: Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 4:06 PM
Subject: Re: Cease and Desist Immediately
To: editor@blognetnews.com

On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 10:06 AM, David Mastio wrote:

Dear Victoria,

I am glad you are aware we are excerpting content from many Richmond blogs. When we built the site more than 8 months ago, we sent emails to every blogger in the system for which we could find an email. A number of Richmond bloggers wrote about it. If you didn’t learn about this until recently it is not from want of effort on our part.

My email would not have been in any way difficult to find. I’ve always had a dedicated contact page with a published email address. So you’re either lying or incompetent or both.

Regardless, I don’t know what that that has to do with RVAblogs other than the rumor I have heard that they trash us behind our backs. Pretty much par for the course from a company that competes with us. We’ve built dozens of sites all over the country and have been aggregating Virginia blogs since 2006 and any claim we’ve taken anything from RVAblogs is a lie.

I didn’t overhear or read about anybody “trashing” you. I figured out you were a douchebag all on my own, thanks very much.

BNN sites are built on the same area of copyright law that allows Google and other web search engines to exist. It is called “fair use.”

What you are doing is not fair use and you know it. (Or else why would you bother to claim you had requested permission from those whose content you were stealing in the first place?)

We’re happy to remove your blog.

And I anticipate that I will never find any of my material reproduced on your site ever again.

Victoria Marinelli

P.S. The “remember to visit our advertisers” in your autosig is an especially asinine touch.

The bottom line? This asshole really needs to be confronted, collectively, by all bloggers whose material he is reproducing without permission and solely for his own profit. Rise up, fellow bloggers! And let’s give Mastio his due.

After publishing that last post, I saw that everything after the embedded YouTube link ends up center-justified (while also pushing sidebars and such to the bottom of the page). Needless to say this makes me cranky. Ideas welcome - right now I have to get kids up for school (yes, this means I wrote all night - again), will try to troubleshoot later.

Testing an issue with imported tag system.

1. Use ‘poetry’ tag in new, native-to-Wordpress window; see if it groups together with items tagged ‘poetry’ using Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Yesterday I wrote a long post about fragmentation in women’s lives, as magnified and, in some ways, healed through developing technologies. When I wanted to make an analogy concerning false assumptions that have been made about me based on some political and social justice work I’ve engaged in, I turned to the matter of sexual identity.

In retrospect, that section of the narrative would have fared better as a stand-alone post; in the post (where it was only intended as a reference for comparison) it gets a bit lost. And I realized earlier tonight it’s actually one of the clearer (and mercifully succinct) things I’ve written on the matter, addressing my irritation with people who:

assume that because I’ve had female partners in the past and am now married to a man that this:

• Means I consciously switched “teams” (no, I just happened to fall back in love with this one crazy guy, who is also the most loyal human being I’ve ever known), and/or
• Means I no longer care about or have a personal stake in GLBT rights issues (far from it, although it’s obviously true that I now benefit from heterosexual privilege, in the same way I also benefit from white privilege, that is to say, involuntarily and without condoning the systems that privilege some identities over others), and/or
• Means I am no longer attracted to women (this is certainly not the case, as might be evidenced in past blog entry titles such as There is Nothing Wrong With Me that a Few Shots of Tequila, a Slightly Darkened Room, and the Bass Player from the Butchies Couldn’t Fix), and/or
• Means that I embrace the “bisexual” identity without ambivalence or qualification (actually, I prefer the term “undeclared” - which is not the same thing as not having made up my mind; that - being “undeclared” - is my final answer to the question), and/or
• Means that my marriage is a sham and/or that I “swing” (Nope, we are 100% monogamous, so don’t even ask)

(This, in turn, had developed after articulating on Twitter last week, “It shouldn’t surprise me, but getting hit on via MySpace bc my profile says “bi” irritates the shit out of me. Do they not also see MARRIED?” - Which is one thing I appreciate about Twitter; through the articulation of what are, in themselves, mere fragments, one opens pathways to deeper considerations of the same material later.)

…And now, twenty-four hours later, I’m cleaning out the comment spam from the Askimet filter, and lo! There was the following item (relevant link removed)

As a member of LGBT, I always keep my eyes on the matter of gay and lesbian. “There is no difference between LBGT and straight people when it comes to true love. We know how to love and cherish a person.”It is what we all bisexual get after the discusssin at [STUPID SPAMMY SITE] . And all these words is what we would like to let others know for the bottom of our heart. We only hope don’t make it special for us LGBT. We do love others as you straight do.

Now I know that no one from the website that attempted to place the above spam on my blog didn’t actually read what I wrote (actually, the quality of their prose - and spelling - suggests that improved literacy could do much to improve their marketing prospects) - their processes, such as they are, are automated and rely on keywords in the text of the attacked site, but fuck all, y’all, this is exactly the kind of stupidity I was railing against in the first place. (I held my nose and briefly visited the site; it was, of course, not about the lofty ideas and community dialogue suggested in their scrambled spam-text; it’s a porn/dating site.)

Oh, but they did say it was from (oh wait, for - for?!) “the bottom of our heart.” Well I guess that makes it all just dandy, and I should allow their links to appear here out of dedication to “the matter of gay and lesbian.” “We all bisexual” “love others as you straight do.” Sheesh.

Or: Not to worry, I’m as sick to death of my blog posts in the “Fragments” category as are you.

Or: An answer to the question, “Just what in the hell is this thing called Twitter?” (A feminist literary mama’s excavations of this technology’s relative merits.)

__

Hi there, I’ve been ensconced in the realm of Twitter for a while now (wherein users exchange messages of no more than 140 characters); if you know of what I speak, then you do (feel free to follow); if you don’t, go read Clive Thompson’s article in Wired, which will give you the gist.

Still with me? Cool.

__

Recently I characterized Twitter as being “like the alternately idealized & never-good-enough lover you can’t help but be infatuated with at all times.” On one level (I’ll get to the other level shortly), it’s genius: social media at its best, connecting people in variously casual and profound ways across all sorts of divisions of geography, politics, lifestyle, and identity. One thing I’ve been amazed by is the prevalence of moms on Twitter, which seems particularly apt. In the course of a day, a mama has to deal with a lot of crazy, inherently fragmenting stuff. That cliché about a woman’s work never being done? Well, it’s not a cliché; that shit is real.

So what are a mama’s options for staying in touch with the world, between the phone ringing and the baby crying and the husband whining and every other damn thing? (Note: sadly, this may apply almost as often to moms who work outside the home as to stay-at-home moms, given the unequal sharing of domestic duties between male and female partners, which persists despite the necessary gains of feminism and even when both partners have paid employment.) Maybe you don’t have the luxury of Virginia Woolf’s rightly-recommended “Room of One’s Own”; or maybe you had that room once, but then the baby came along and you had to make a nursery somewhere.

Now, it’s not impossible for a woman writer who is also a mother and who lacks certain resources (time, solitude, individual space, money, etc.) to develop engaged, sustained narrative; Ariel Gore, founder of hipMama, nails that truth in the first three sentences from How to be a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead:

Everybody knows it because Virginia Woolf said it: you need money and a room of your own if you’re going to write. But I’ve written five books, edited three anthologies, published hundreds of articles and short stories, and put out thirty-five issues of my zine without either one. If I’d waited for money and a room, I’d still be an unpublished welfare mom…”

So: not impossible, except in the existential, miraculous sense that for us mamas, everything can be pretty impossible, but we figure out ways to pull it off anyway. And we do it, every day.

And of course, we struggle. And much of what we struggle with is the matter of fragmentation. For the same reason that many women gravitate to poetry over prose, many of us, these days, gravitate toward mediums in which we can express ourselves (and connect with other mamas) even in the milliseconds between erupting crises - whether those crises are deemed “domestic,” e.g., involving the material needs of the bodies of those with whom we cohabit, and/or if they concern our broader engagements with the Body Politic. And Twitter is rapidly becoming that medium, to an even more influential extent than blogs individually.

This is true not least because, in Twitter, one may exchange not only individual, succinct observations, but one can also share links to more sustained narratives elsewhere: whether in blogs, online news media, or audio, video and photo sharing sites (not to mention “mashup” venues which braid such forms together, into fresh amalgamations which, when successful, are worth more in value, by far, than the face-value sums of their parts).

What Twitter does, for many of us, is create the possibility of an alternative to silence. People who have been reading this blog over the years, in its numerous incarnations (from “My So-Called Writer’s Life” in 2003 through “Perpetual Exile,” “Southern Discomfort,” “Vortex(t)” and now this most recent inscrutable moniker “Anachroclysmic“), through its umpteen template overhauls, usually only 25% realized (often with disclaimers posted about the run-down state of the thing, the ever-borked blogrolls and so forth): you know how I struggle with silence.

I might stay up for a few nights in a row, posting stuff that’s incredibly difficult, complex, huge.

Then I’ll shut down, and I won’t post anything for days, weeks, or even months.

Twitter is the technology that has been helping me to stay connected (and keep my sense of humor, which, if you only read my Deep and Serious posts here, you might not know I had) between those rare days of effusive, often brutally honest communiqués. Because, of course, life doesn’t stop just because one is (whether for internal or external reasons, or some combination of both) unable to write about it.

And the feature of the WordPress plugin I use - Twitter Tools - enables me to post a digest of each day’s Twitter entries (”tweets”) in the form of a bulleted list.

The good news: This does, indeed, fill in significant gaps between my other writings here. And, perhaps, gives you a fuller sense of who I am. I’ve had my share of miserable fuckwits take a passing glance at some of the very volatile issues I write about (particularly those pertinent to the sex trade) and make flabbergastingly inaccurate and bizarre assumptions about me which, depending on the extent of their fuckwittedness, they otherwise might not be quite so quick to make. That is, if they understood that the woman here who writes, occasionally, about pimps who are richly deserving of some very swift comeuppance (if not in the form of a prostituted woman personally dispensing righteous justice, then courtesy of the perpetually-imperfect Law), is the same woman who writes joyously and unapologetically about what is, after all, her absolutely marvelous sex life. (Or, alternately, complains bitterly if she’s not getting any.)

Which is not to say that I owe anybody - least of all the pro-sexcapitalism fuckwits - any explanation.

But, just as I am driven apeshit by people who, for example, assume that because I’ve had female partners in the past and am now married to a man that this:

• Means I consciously switched “teams” (no, I just happened to fall back in love with this one crazy guy, who is also the most loyal human being I’ve ever known), and/or
• Means I no longer care about or have a personal stake in GLBT rights issues (far from it, although it’s obviously true that I now benefit from heterosexual privilege, in the same way I also benefit from white privilege, that is to say, involuntarily and without condoning the systems that privilege some identities over others), and/or
• Means I am no longer attracted to women (this is certainly not the case, as might be evidenced in past blog entry titles such as There is Nothing Wrong With Me that a Few Shots of Tequila, a Slightly Darkened Room, and the Bass Player from the Butchies Couldn’t Fix*), and/or
• Means that I embrace the “bisexual” identity without ambivalence or qualification (actually, I prefer the term “undeclared” - which is not the same thing as not having made up my mind; that - being “undeclared” - is my final answer to the question), and/or
• Means that my marriage is a sham and/or that I “swing” (Nope, we are 100% monogamous, so don’t even ask)

…So to am I driven apeshit by people who make other sorts of baseless (sometimes quite innocent, but at other times quite malicious and misogynist) assumptions about me.

So, with these accumulated “tweets,” whoever is still reading this blog (all 4 of you, I think it is) have some opportunity to have a clearer sense of where I’m coming from.

And here’s another merit: It’s a wonderful, fun, geeky challenge to see just how much meaning one can pack into 140 characters. Indeed, a game called “Twooshing” has developed among the particularly hardcore Twitter users, wherein the challenge is to express oneself in precisely 140 characters; yours truly is, at this moment, at the top of the Twoosh Boards. There is levity and, of course, significant triviality being indulged with this activity, but the compressing challenge of the form - as with strict poetry forms - can also lend itself, sometimes, to art. (No, really! I’m completely serious.)

And, it’s good practice; one becomes extremely proficient in cutting away whatever is extraneous in narrative, so that even when one is writing something of more length and complexity, it has a better chance of packing a nice, walloping punch. (And then, whatever adjectives you do choose are like precious delicacies, distributed with care throughout one’s prose which has already been trimmed down enough to convey descriptions well.)

And sometimes the 140-character form is just wonderfully pragmatic. For instance, I recently went to see Cloverfield. I wouldn’t have been emotionally invested enough afterward to write a substantive review of the film - but I did want to weigh in with something, given its present popularity. So, while still in the theater (using my cell phone), I did:

Shorter Cloverfield: Post-9/11 anxiety + generalized fear of unknown + patriotic iconography + fuzzy dialogue/ barf-inducing film technique.

(And really, that’s about all you need to know about that film, in my humble opinion.)

And now, the bad news: (the above-referenced other level): If you’re not on Twitter, some of what gets posted (particularly the items beginning with @[username]) in this manner isn’t going to make a lick of sense to you. (And if you are on Twitter, then you’d probably rather follow all that stuff via Twitter’s own UI, and reading anything here is a bit redundant.) And of course, because individually these “tweets” can only pack in so much in the way of nuanced communication, I do run the risk of being seen as suddenly trivial and light (me!) when I’m writing about certain issues. Do I wish, for example, I’d had more time to develop a fully-realized essay on why I’m supporting Barack Obama’s candidacy for the Democratic Party’s nomination? Of course. But if you were reading here and trying to ferret out the basis of that support, you might not be particularly moved by 140-character crystallizations that, necessarily, can only communicate so much.

So that’s it, my imperfect system du jour. (Which I may well turn upside-down tomorrow.)

Tweetcha l8r.

__

*This was on a short-lived blog called Queen of the Bean; someday I’ll recover and make some substantive use of the old posts.

• Sorry, @VioletheVerbose, I won’t lie. Younger children ARE disease vectors, but in time, issues emerge that make one nostalgic for snotnoses #
• @QueenofSpain HU - FUCKIN - RAH! #
• Giant screaming happy dance w/ teenager on news of Obama win in Virginia. Way to rock the muthafuckin vote, oh benevolent state of my birth! #
• I’d turned off news earlier while updating iPod… So, yes, Virginia (as it were!) - I learned of Obama win via Twitter (thx2 @QueenofSpain) #
• @ajfortin - Happy to oblige. Now do your part for Hawaii and we’ll have a virtual party in the ether betwixt us after Obama wins nomination! #
• @acomputerpro - Never underestimate the twooshing powers of a woman high on election season and caffeine. This too shall pass, I promise! #
• Never underestimate the racebaiting powers of some Clinton allies: http://tinyurl.com/2ev2vb (With friends like these, HRC needs no enemies) #
• Napped after the news of Maryland, woke up, had to pinch myself. Did Obama really just sweep VA/ MD/ DC? Why yes he did! Freakin’ brilliant. #
• @CurtMonash - Yeah, there’s no excuse for that misogyny. Just bc I support Obama doesn’t mean I think HRC’s not brilliant & capable - she is #
• @girlinblack - You’ve quite a nerdy quandary there - hilarious! Oddly, I also tweeted today on library karma matters: http://snurl.com/1zmck #
• @QueenofSpain - Fuck the hatas. I commented there for first time tonight - thought your post was good, but can see how it’d be misconstrued. #
• RVABlogs.com has option to pick 3 “most hated” blogs to NOT show up in feed (when you’re logged in); I SO wish feministblogs.org had that… #
• When I hear about the WGA people being back on the job (yay!), my first thought is cynical: “Now they’ll all come down with writer’s block.” #
• @valeriedoucette - No suprise the chefs of Veganomigon thanked whoever dealt w/ Post Punk Kitchen, deleting threads on honey & dating omnis! #
• @valeriedoucette - (BTW, that was Tweeted as a vegetarian, maybe eventually going vegan, who does not plan to divorce my omnivorous husband) #
• I’m delighted to note that some peeps I know (IRL friends here in Richmond and elsewhere) are migrating from MySpace to Facebook. Thank God. #
• @phaedral - I would most likely never be on MySpace but lots of our friends are in bands and such, and MySpace is geared to that. Sucky tho. #
• Call me crazy, but I’m more interested in watching news on the war, the CIA and torture policy, hell even ELECTIONS than I am in baseball… #
• @VioletheVerbose - Oh shit, Valentines Day. I totally forgot. Damn elections! Must get some cards tonight (I’m not ambitious enough to make) #
• Curious as to what @gapingvoid could possibly be referring to here: http://twitter.com/gapingvoid/statuses/708761702. Spill those beans, plz #
• Nothing more reassuring than hearing crashing sound from kitchen, followed by eight year old daughter hollering, “It’s okay, nothing broke!” #
• @phaedral - Dunno that adding ME is going to enhance your MySpace coolness (to whatever extent there is such a thing), but knock yerself out #
• @phaedral - Also, there’s a greasemonkey script for Firefox that enables one to turn off most “noise” from MySpace pages - it’s quite handy! #
• It shouldn’t surprise me, but getting hit on via MySpace bc my profile says “bi” irritates the shit out of me. Do they not also see MARRIED? #
• @phaedral - Actually that look’s somewhere between apathetic & grumpy. I didn’t want to smile (& I don’t list “hooking up” under “here for”) #
• @bip0larbear - That’s hilarious. The Coop! I got followed by him after posting some snarkage about MSNBC (tho I’m still not sure that’s why) #
• @QueenofSpain - At risk of becoming a certifiable Erin Kotecki Vest minion, I dugg ya. (Which sounds kinda wrong. But you know what I mean.) #

• Mad Science Center birthday party was a mad, raging success. Never again will I set foot in a Chuck E. Cheese or similar establishment. Yay! #
• Crashed early, & didn’t answer phone when a call came in which, based on area code, was either my mother, or a long-lost high school friend. #
• ( & Now, the lack of voicemail or clues from a reverse-directory search is going to drive me up a goddamn wall until I find out. Seriously.) #
• So zonked last might I crashed in my clothes. In profound need of caffeine (coffee percolating as I tweet). Sweet husband let me sleep in. #
• “It’s my friend!” says the huz, pointing to a cartoon penguin. Turns out he means Brian Posehn (on Surf’s Up) whom he’s friended on MySpace. #
• It’s some measure of my housekeeping skillz that I just pried a cup off table, stuck there courtesy of an adhesive known as “dried ketchup.” #
• I can’t figure out how to set up Twitter notifications for web-only to save my life. Good thing I have unlimited text messaging on our plan. #
• Walking dog in almost criminally gorgeous weather. Hopefully this won’t lead to unlikely, somewhat cheesy poems about Democratic Primaries. #
• @phaedral - It’s hardly a source of lighthearted cheer, but there is a new haiku @beanqueen: http://twitter.com/beanqueen/statuses/694136212 #
• My “Obama Mama” shirt still hasn’t arrived in mail, so I’m wearing my “NAACP National Voter Fund” shirt (says “Vote 2000″ on back) instead. #
• (This is, of course, to recall the most FUBAR election ever, my volunteering for which was apparently in vain. Obama AND Clinton in town…) #
• Shamelessly eavesdropped on elderly lady & young college-age woman in parking lot who were talking excitedly about voting for Obama Tuesday! #
• Teenager informs me that she’s been getting into fiery political debates with Jerry Kilgore’s son, with whom she has science class. Awesome! #
• Unsurprising number of unclaimed Clinton signs at Democratic event. Got Annalisa one of her buttons though… she’s our one Clinton holdout. # Edited from automatically posted Twitter feed to add: See the pics of my awesome daughters with their respective Obama & Clinton schwag here.
• [utterz] http://tinyurl.com/3bzkcb: Massive Obama rally in Richmond Virginia! #
• Kind of feel like throwing up at having posted my cell number due to a technical glitch w/ Utterz. Nothing I can do about it until I’m home. #

For those who care to know, I’m posting micro-updates at my new Twitter profile here:

• http://twitter.com/vmarinelli

For now, updates are public. Later I might decide to limit them to friends only (quick account setup free, but required), but since I only set the thing up last night, I’m not sure yet.

In case you didn’t know, Twitter is a service that enables microblogging and social networking among subscribers. Wikipedia explains further here; Chris Lott provided his take back in February at Ruminate, where he also wrote this in an initial review:

I’m fascinated– despite myself– by Twitter, which allows groups of friends to keep up with what each is doing through simple text messages that are propagated to cell phones, IM clients, and web pages/badges.

As usual, Chris explains this stuff a lot better than I can. He also sees potential for this in educational technology.

In any event, I’ve got too much going on to blog here for at least another couple of weeks, so if you want even extremely minimalist clues as to what’s up in my life right now, here’s where to find me.

(In case y’all were wondering, What’s up with the new header graphic?)

After weeks of teeth-gnashing in an effort to get my installation of the K2 theme to work, I’m almost happy with the result, including the addition of the graphic you are now seeing above this text (unless of course you’re reading this via the feed, in which case, go ahead and click through, I won’t bite).

The picture is of the pond at Kate Millett’s art colony for women in Poughkeepsie, New York. It was taken on or around September 11, 1992 (always a red-letter day for me), right before I had to leave Poughkeepsie, to return to Seattle and to an incredibly uncertain future.

This is why the ‘nonfiction novel’ in progress is called After Poughkeepsie (subtitled: The Patty Hearst Years). The moment captured in the picture above was one of my last before entering the first in a series of hell-rings that would nearly cost me my life.

The yellow notepad contains a journal entry from that day, which I may eventually transcribe and post. The book below is my own copy of Kate’s book, The Loony Bin Trip. (Would that this detail were not material to the stories that followed… alas, it’s all too apt.)

Here, then, is another picture from that summer. I was helping to paint the farmhouse, when asked by another resident, the late, great Janet Melvin, to stop what I was doing and act fabulous.

It was a charmed summer, in its way.

From Poughkeepsie

Ultimately, everything I write is an effort to get back to this, the state of grace I once found natural. From there, my task is to do what Kafka recommends, using one hand to ward off despair, while with the other hand noting all that is still visible amid the ruins.

I’m going off radar for a bit, though any of you subscribed to feeds for this blog may be confused to see possibly dozens of new entries showing up. That’s because I’m going to be (ever so tediously) migrating old blog entries (those from Blogger that didn’t get migrated to TypePad, and/or from there to WordPress for whatever reasons) to this client, since it looks like I’ll be sticking around here for good. (What a concept.)

I’m also going to be doing some troubleshooting with the template. God knows I’m incapable of leaving well enough alone/ refraining from “fixing” things that ain’t necessarily broke.

Meantime, feel free to check out items from the blogroll (note: if you’re viewing this entry on its own, outside of the main page, you’ll have to go back there to view it or almost anything else in the sidebar, which is one thing that peeves me about this otherwise satisfactory template). I’ll be visiting all my usual haunts (albeit on something of a delay), and responding eventually to comments here, so I’ll see y’all around.