it could get the railroad for these workers

[black_dog]

Belated Poetry Month greetings to any friends still around!

I owe a couple of apologies to people who commented on my last post - I sort of disappeared due to a personal adventure and I’ve always had trouble resuming threads after a break. It was nice to hear from pauraque and shezan. Um, last fall

Comments

[black_dog]

Hey, you - I wanted to come back to this and give you a slightly less rushed reply, now that I have gotten through a crazy week and have a bit of time. No need to reply, I know you’re swamped too, but it was a treat to hear from you so I didn’t want to leave this crossing of paths behind, with just 2 minutes of facetiousness on my part. Also, you know, Email Debt Forgiveness Day. :) 

First, serious congratulations on the Vox thing. That is very, very cool and exciting. I did check in from time to time on the Daily Dot, because I am a nostalgia-oriented stalker. But now I have one more excuse to make Vox a more regular stop. I liked your piece on Hamilton, loved the way it used fannish experience to really get deeper into a piece of art and to clarify the point of the thing. I’ve always been a bit of a (historical) Hamilton fanboy (I actually tried to write Hamilton/Burr slash for Nancy once, back in the day) so getting to know the musical has been on my list for a while . . .

I admit I’ve been more oriented to the political side of online media than the broader cultural stuff. I liked the Emmett Rensin piece on smugness a week or so ago, though it probably pissed a lot of people off (did you think it was fair? I didn’t, entirely, but it was a thing worth thinking about.) I think Trump is one of those Beasts from the Id that Forbidden Planet warned us about. But it breaks my heart that the right-minded response to him and his supporters continues a 50-year pattern of basically patronizing the people who are being screwed over and totally dislocated by political choices about the economy. They protest in ways that are inarticulate and wrong-headed and we mock them for style-points rather than making their real issues more central. It sucks. (But don’t get me started on Bernie, whose shtick I don’t particularly buy . . .)

I don’t have a whole lot of news at my end - I’ve been doing some freelance/ghostwriting, mostly for former colleagues, since my company shut down its entire Social Responsibility department a couple of years ago (hooray for meeting Wall Street stock forecasts!). But I need to do something more adventurous (not to mention remunerative) and get the hell out of the rural hole (but a lovely rural hole) that I moved to a few years back. However, at the moment life is generally too pleasant, if routine, to truly motivate a change.

I did look at your recent tweets (did I say, “stalker”?) about LJ and the vain daydream of recovering a community. I think you got it exactly right. On the one hand, there’s a need to fight the way particular social media tools restructure and channel dialogue in trivializing ways - the fact that you had to break up your point into multiple tweets was a very funny way to validate that very point. But even if we make the effort to use these tools our way, to insist on deeper dialogue, there’s no guarantee that the community we want will actually form and flourish. It really is kind of serendipitous when it happens. LJ back in the day was an amazing thing, but the community formed and dissolved according to its own inscrutable rules.

Still, it did happen and I’m sort of permanently happy that it did. Every now and then I indulge in fandom nostalgia, and your reply set off another burst of it. One night last week, when the Yankees were losing, I spent too much of an evening poking around ancient, ancient Fiction Alley forums. I actually remembered my password! And right there, in my own account, were some Owl Posts I had never deleted, including the very first one from you about a review I did of DV9. At the time, your message came out of the blue and just astonished me and made me feel this fandom thing (really a mystery to me up to then) might be something to go deeper into, and might be a blast.

I was thinking about this the next day, and the person I was with said, “Why are you smiling?”