Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Reviews You Can Trust

or so the tag line reads at the bottom of every major entry (hotels, rentals, restaurants, things to do) at tripadvisor, a Newton, MA based web travel site, boasting 36 million monthly visitors. Reviews you can trust. And, er, perhaps, I do.

Someone's Making Money but...

that is, there are commercial tie-ins up the wazoo (links to Booking Buddy, Cruise Critic, Family Vacation Critic, Seat Guru, Flip Key, and on and on and on and on) on the site, and therefore you can in many ways consider this a travel portal (aggregator, linker); however--big however--they do seem to offer authentic traveler reviews about everything you can imagine that is even remotely associated with trips and tripping (no, not that kind). Among them:
On to Where the Land Runs Out

As some of you know, I'll be heading to Chile (according to the Chilean national consular site: "where the land runs out") for my sabbatical, on February 1, 2010. And so, as you can imagine, I've had to research the whole kit and caboodle. Enter: Trip Advisor.

While it would take me a month of Sundays to begin to describe the site, allow me to say here, dear Writing for New Media friendos, that I found a place to lodge based on reviews such as these:




Whether or not these or others like them were penned by shills, I cannot say. I can say, however, that it seemed tonally and substantively appropriate, and so I believe it. And, believing is all.




Polyglottal (sic?) Panorama

Reading it in many languages seems to help. And reading about the IT from those who are as far-flung as you can imagine helps, too. (True, I give more credence/put more stock/am willing to hear what anyone other than U.S. and A Americans have to say. My U.S. and A anti-bias flops out....). That is, it is not uncommon to find reviews penned in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese--from people based in countries around the globe. And I do love and respect anyone who ain't from around here...

Have an Expert, Will Travel

In addition to "User" reviews, I also found Destination Experts, who, according to the site:

...are the backbone of the TripAdvisor community. They are regular contributors who exemplify the best of our forums, giving helpful, friendly advice and welcoming new members. They are passionate about the destinations they represent. Whether resident locals or frequent visitors, they have up-to-date knowledge of what's going on in their destinations.

PS - Destination experts are volunteers, so don't be afraid to say "thanks" when they've provided you with helpful advice!

I've been hearing from one who lives in Valparaiso, the town I chose as my destination. He's willing to answer any questions and even to engage in some research. Can't say I take his advice without a grain or two of salt, though. Perhaps he is on the up and up. More likely, there's a little taste for him somewhere along the line. That's part and parcel of this, I think. Everyone's got to earn. Or, perhaps my cynicism takes center stage.

I'll let you know (in the form of a Trip Advisor review, of course) when I return.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Library Thing

As an English Professor, my reading list should be riddled with profound and transcendent titles, the stuff I'm supposed to pass on to my intellectually hungry sons or lurking students. Well, it turns out that those days are gone. My reading these days is typically, in a word, transactional (the anti-profound). Truth be told, like many others of my ilk, I spend most of my reading time reading (evaluating?) evolving student work.

When I do have a moment to read anything other than student work these days, I either read a Spanish language newspaper (part of my continuing, but painstakingly slow Jeff-hungers-for-a-meaningful-second-language project), a police procedural, or, if a new one has dropped from the James Lee Burke tree, a Dave Robicheaux mystery.

Unfortunately, I do tire of Spanish language news (not for the Spanish, but for the news), and prolific as he is, Burke's output isn't nearly enough to take care of even my part-time reading needs. So, I find myself asking: who next?

Who Next?

Sure, my wife is a voracious reader, and my department is full of colleagues who have the kind of life in which books rise to the top of their own honey-do lists. But, frankly, if I've found nothing else out over the years, I've found that my tastes are... just that. Mine. Mis propios sabores.

Still, I've thought there must be some Web 2.0 answer to scratching my who next itch.

The Social Book List

Enter Library Thing--a Web 2.0 social networking site that "with over 800,000 users and 40 million books" that "allows one to find some 'eerily similar' libraries and a Zeitgeist full of random information."


While you can take a tour on your own, allow me to offer a couple of highlights here.

Profile

Like many social networking sights, your profile facilitates your connection to those who share similar interests:

Groups


Knowing who you are and behind whom and what you stand is, of course, insufficient--and certainly not why I checked out and joined Library Thing. Groups are the reason. And, groups they've got, hundreds:



For now, you can find me trying to decide whether I'm more a Sofa Reads, a 75 Books Challenge for 2009, or a Build the Open Shelves kinda groupie.

More--if I can ever make my way from the front page of this Library Thing to its last--anon.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

What's Wrong with Cave Life?

Anyone who knows me in any way knows that I spend more time on the web than I should. ("On the web"... sounded like quite a gramps there, huh.) Online. Better. Online. But what am I doing out there?

Belly Up, Lest You...
This and next and perhaps the week after, we are and will be dealing with the subject of "social networking" in my Writing for New Media class. Such got me to thinking about how I spend my time online. It got me to wondering if I could characterize my time online as social.

Yes, I have a Facebook account, and a Diigo account, and a Twitter account, and likely many other social networking accounts that I've forgotten about. But those were taster's choices. Given my line of work (love that expression... couldn't find a good link to explain its origin... but did find an interesting site during my search...), I feel compelled to belly up to the smorgasbord of the web with great frequency and appetite. But I am rarely there to do more than taste. I'm certainly not out there to establish or extend my community.

Groucho Marx and the Green Eyed Squirrel
Having spent my time at social networking sites (as I've already owned up to), and having been tracked down by more than one friend I never wanted to have in the first place, and having had to gaze rheumy-eyed at umpteen family trip albums to Albany and Albania, I can certainly conclude that as for social networking, I'm really a Groucho Marx ("I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members") and Foamy the Squirrel kind of guy:

(Skip this one, if you are mild of heart, ear, or eye; my Mother would consider it triple x....)



Wow, that sorta says it all. Thanks, Foamy. In addition to speaking my mind on social networking, you've filled the acute rodent gap I've felt since Rocky J left me in the cartoon lurch:

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

What's Mine Is...

In this unit, we are all about considering issues that can mostly simply be summarized (not given the fair, comprehensive, and nuanced treatment, of course, of course) under the banner of "ownership."

The Banner, The Questions
A few of a zillion questions you can find on this banner: Who owns what I create? Who should benefit--intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and, yes, monetarily--from my creations? (Me; my heirs in perpetuity; Columbia College Chicago; the corporation that produced my keyboard, my display, the font I've used; the corporation that provides the bandwidth that allows me to post my creation online?) How does what I create occupy the world? (Should a poem I wrote about the Holocaust, say, appear without my consent on a neo-Nazi web site? Should anyone be allowed to download a photograph I've taken and post it on their fridge?) What role do I play in the distribution of the stuff I've created? (Should I have a say in whether my class assignments are used in other classrooms? If I do receive royalties, should part of those be owed to my employer?) What role do I play in the re-conception, re-creation, re-purposing, re-directing, re-routing, etc. of the stuff I've produced? (Should I have final say over whether my creations are mixed and matched and mashed and?)

One Way In
How to get at this? Well, I produce stuff all of the time. I write poems. I create class assignments. I edit technical documents (please note: if you compare the final version of a document I was asked to edit with the original with which I worked, you'd have to agree that editing = creation.) I could discuss those. And likely I will if I continue in other posts. Here, though, I'd like to own up to the fact that I am an amateur photographer.

Like nearly everyone else with disposable income, I have a digital camera (okay, I have many), and use it, sure, to capture memories. But, too, I scratch a more profound itch. Let's call it art and be done for now.

Chiapan Art
Here's Chiapas from the window of a church tower in Aguacatenango (Chiapas, Mexico).



Here's another view:



So, now you know that despite my fear of heights, I climbed to the top of a church--up an incredibly narrow, chiseled stairwell (here's a mid-stair view)



and captured (made?) some art.

It's All Apparently in the Face
The reason I mention this is, on the same trip, I was fortunate enough to meet and spend the morning with a weaver's family, not a few hundred yards from the church. Whatever I can say about them here wouldn't do them justice, and, anyway, you can read about them in my two most recent copyrighted (Mammoth Press) publications (Burro Heart and Mixed Diction).

Drawn as I was to making art of the town, you can imagine how drawn I was to (making art of?) the family:







Given the price of digital film, I could go on. At any rate, here, as they say, is the rub. It seems that I am allowed without concern for the Spanish roof tiles, corn rows, or mottled main street cobbles to post the first three photos (the fruits of my creative loins) on a site such as iStock, "the internet's original member-generated image and design community." Where you can "Get easy, affordable inspiration with millions of safe, royalty-free photographs, vector illustrations, video footage, audio tracks and Flash files."

I am not, however, allowed to post the second three without express written permission from my Chiapan friends. Show a face, and you've got to cover your ass. Oy. Thanks, Canon, for making it possible for me to not bother with film, with chemical-based developing and enlargement. But what have I lost in the bargain? Guess it's all beer and skittles until money is involved.

In this instance, I did not want to sell those faces (as a Jewish grandmother I never had might have said, "who could sell such faces"?); rather, I wanted to post them on the site to get credits in exchange for the work of another photographer. I saw it as innocent trading. I still do. My art for yours.

Yikes, outside of a little lunch trading (my almond butter and fig jam sanGwitch for your Cheese Doodles), I guess nothing is innocent. What's mine is...

***

It Did Not Start

as the hand weaver

rose and shat in his pig

yard

nor as his wife knelt before

her glassed votives her executrix

her holy virgin idol

presiding

nor

on the swollen road risen

from the highland wash

nor during our talk

of freerange stallions

bolting through maize plots

morphed into monsoon lakes

not

as we grouped before the loom

to swig local beer

to distinguish between aniline

& beetle dyes

to hear

about a man’s warp

his indigenous woof

not

as we leaned from the bell tower

above the cathedral in Aguacatenango

not as the sweet

rains pelted

the cross-hatched cobbles

where mongrels and sots slept splayed—

a billion

motes of local light

baffling

our prodigal gaze


Copyright Jeff Schiff


Creative Commons License
"It Did Not Start" by Jeff Schiff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Pin Point Laser Guided Stray But Don't Stray and For God's Sake Tie Back to Your Raison d'Etre

And my blog critique rolls on. This week: some words about not straying from the IT you have designated as IT (after all, it is your it; no one forced that it on you)... and honoring the reason you created your blog in the first place

Pin Point
Long ago back in the day way back when, I used to call it "focus," and harp incessantly about its glory. I even had a focus cudgel made--with which to bang upside my student's meandering, peregrinating, fickle writings (most often formerly, painfully, inaccurately, and purposelessly referred to as "essays").

Keep your thing on track--no rhetorical bait and switch, unless you were angling (oops) for that in the first place. Don't begin discussing thing #1 only to drift aimlessly to thing #2.5 and on to thing #6.

That said, let me exemplify by using recent post on my feature blog: "The ZEN of the penis." Got wood?

Promised and Delivered
Anyway, wooded or not, one cannot help but notice how J. forecasts a subject in her post title, uses topic sentence-topped paragraphs, and--although she is given to parenthetical interjections now and again and again and again--treats the primary subject until her graceful, rounded, tied-back-to-the-beginning conclusion.

With These Words I Thee Wed
In addition to staying on track, this post certainly honors the founder's bloggy contract with us: to deliver "A blog about life, sports, cats and dogs, politics, sex, the joys and frustrations of working at home, and whatever else I feel like writing about." Not difficult here to honor such a conceptually generous mission, but, still, she's not writing about helicopter parts (at least I don't recall any such mentions) or entomology.


Estoric Hughes 500D Parts


Ah, A Buggy Life

Simple stuff, really, to stay focused--but easily lost in the pressure to post and post. I know. I know.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Keep Me Interested or I'm Gone

Now where was I?

Oh, yeah, there's gotta be some there there and some real draw (the definition of which I'll keep working at in this and subsequent posts) if you want me to keep coming back to your blog well, to drink your bloggy draft, etcetera etcetera. So, what's next. Well, let me keep at J-Two-O (plus, I get bonus points for knowing the blogmistress; or, for which I get issued familial demerits--but which I'm inured to and so don't so much mind).

Keep Your Tone Trimmed and Burning
There's cheek at J-Two-O. Sass. Sometimes there's a bit or a ton of burn. Pique. There's angled disgust. Just-this-side-of-healthy funny stuff. However. Whatever. Here I'll say "tone." J-Two-O is tony. Not tony (as in fashion and glitz and sophistication), of course, just full of tone. Tone-y. Take, for instance, the September 7th, 2009 post on "Mattress hoping." That's typical. "Yeah, right, yada, yada, yada" is written all over it. "Yeah, right, even though I'm talking about inconsequential stuff, it's oddly important in this twisted, irony-filled, dog-often-eats-dog world." A kind of someone-is-looking -over-your-shoulder-and-you-are-gonna-snap-them-one tone--just for the relief of it.... At any rate, it is obvious, repeatable, and, if it were any other kind of tone, you might could call it a comfortable at-the-bar tone. That is, you can expect it. Like Mickey Dee. Same taste across the country, the world. Same tone (voice) post to post.

If you still don't catch my drift on tone, check out grammar.edu on the subject. Bottom line, have a recognizable tone or risk the loneliness of the long distance blogger.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

A Beacon in the Forest of Blogs; or, Why Should I Belly Up to Yours and do more than Engage in a Perfunctory Scan?

Yes, they are easily conceived and nearly as easily executed, de rigueur in a world gone sharingly mad, part and parcel of one’s membership in the 21st century communication club, and therefore there are too many of them out there, and we are forced to pick and choose (still waiting for pick to differentiate itself from choose). So, other than the usual affinity draw (for me: Yankees stuff, middle-aged Jewish man living away from New York stuff, Grateful Dead stuff, best thin crust pizza stuff, etc.), which ones do you befriend? (That’s, after all, what you do with a blog. You “befriend” it—and hope it befriends you.)

Say you stumble upon one, though… what makes you stay long enough to rub against it for a while (that befriending metaphor can go a punishingly long way.) Well, let me use one blog (J-Two-O) to reveal what I look for… For you, yes, for you things might could be different.

Endo or Exoskeleton, I Need Some Scaffolding, Fella
I am harried guy. I’ve got six plates, two cups, and a knife or two or three in the air above by spinning hands and dizzied head. I want to be able to know within seconds what a blog is about. Take J-Two-O; although I may quarrel with the blog’s breadthy purview, I know straight off what I am (speaking ballpark here) in for: “A blog about life, sports, cats and dogs, politics, sex, the joys and frustrations of working at home, and whatever else I feel like writing about.”







Is There a You Behind the It
I also want to get a sense (real or invented) of who’s churning out these posts. In the case of J-Two-O that’s “J.” (J, followed by a period….)


Tasty Treats: for the Mind and for the Eye
Perhaps it’s the business writing teacher in me. Perhaps it’s the harried dude. Whomever is doing the talking, that person says: “give me headings or give me death.” And give me headings that zing or tingle or pang me or cause intestinal distress or crinkle me at the crow’s feet.

Here are some J-Two-O headings that did the trick:






•    Are people who use twitter twits?
•    Does size really matter
•    For god and underwear
•    How to lint roll a cat
•    Just say no to men in speedos

Okay, that’s a wrap for this morning. You’ve got better things to do. I’ve got…

Monday, September 21, 2009

Which I is I; or, Does it Really Matter Who Gets Credit?

I've been considering authorship here... especially in the new media world of aggregators and aggregation, mashups, bricolage, social and other forms of Web 2.0 collaboration.

While definitions abound, most of them seem to be old school--informed by and addressing antiquated realities. For instance, I ran into the following Harvard University "Authorship Guidelines"--aimed ostensibly at insuring integrity in the promotion process, but used in other ways to validate the relationship between content and creator. Original research is a giant issue here. (Such, however, seems less important to a poet, though.)

Old school, yes, but what strikes me is the document evidences a contentious battle, instigated, likely, by a cultural shift regarding authorship (and probably copyright, intellectual property, and ownership) even in the Harvard Medical School:

The (can you say, "irony"?) anonymous author here, writes:

"In practice, various inducements have fostered authorship practices that fall short of these standards... Disputes sometimes arise about who should be listed as authors of an intellectual product.."

Seems like some not so hidden thievery is afoot. Seems like even at Harvard Medical School there are many political dimensions to authorship--even when they are not impacted by Web 2.0.

Next, how to consider and/or value authorship alongside:  content and communication (re)directors, producers, managers, sifters, mixers, samplers, and the like.

Check out this Keynote Address on "Mass Collaboration and the Future of Higher Education." If you don't have all the time in the world, move the time slider to 32 minutes, or so, and begin.

***

“Web 2.0 is all about remixing, not about designing. The best metaphor for web 2.0 is the DJ, not the composer. Web 2.0 is a product of remix culture.” Jonathan Boutelle

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Back to Materiality: The Poetry of Tight Places and Small Screens

So, how shall we begin our class discussion regarding materiality? I've got a Twitter account, and that's a good place to start. If you don't know Twitter, you should--at least for this class of ours.




So, what are the material concerns of writing in tweets? Are they similar to, say, writing haiku? Is there an art to them? a form (other than character limitation)? a governing rhetorical principle? Or, are tweets governed by the same principles I've trotted out in our Rhetorical Analysis wiki page?

And, oh, as you are thinking about thinking about that, don't forget to consider the broadcast and filter engines Twitter uses--how you can aim a tweet at a particular individual or group and how you can filter what you read. These, too, surely impact or issue from the material reality of Twitter.

BTW: as an English professor, the very notion of getting my word on in 140 characters should pain me--shouldn't it? Instead, it delights me. It delights the poet in me. It delights the 21st century me--the one who is tugged in ten thousand directions every day.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Literacy: Too Steep a Hill?


The whole shooting match of "literacy" daunts. So much to know in an ever-expanding world. Visual literacy. Technical literacy. Linguistic literacy. On and on. What to know? Where to search for the baseline?

It can all seem so Sisyphean. Push the rock. Push it. Wake the next morning and push it again.

Back in the day, literacy seemed a simpler thing. You learned the three Rs--reading, riting, rithmatic. If you were born in this America, and you read from a primer; you read books everyone else considered the cornerstones of literacy (The Scarlet Letter, Huck Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, and on), you learned how to spell; you learned to use words to form paragraphs to form sentences to form chunks to create descriptions, comparisons/contrasts, arguments; you didn't feel like you had to know everything.

Literacy, too, did not in those days seem synonymous with "expertise." You could have been an expert cabinet maker, expert farmer, expert milliner, expert chef--and still be illiterate. You knew a thing. You could have learned its vocabulary, its nuance, its practical and theoretical nooks and crannies. You could have "mastered" it. You could have been, in fact, a master carpenter. A master plumber. Etc. Still, you could have been illiterate. You could have been hard-pressed to read, to write a sentence, to carry on a conversation that involved anything beyond your world.

Now, we seem to use the word as a station on the expertise ladder. Literacy. You can... No, you should have multiple literacies. You should be a literate writer, a literate participant in the world of computing, a literate dresser, a... Perhaps "fluency" is a better word? You should be fluent in many areas. You should be able to talk/think/analyze computer-related matters; fashion-related matters; travel-related matters; cooking-related matters. But, how many is many enough? Shall we all strive to be Renaissance men/women, da Vincis? Or, is it enough to buy the Hirsch formula (literacy in a list)?

I'm tired here. I'm trying to know some stuff. I'm reading. I'm watching. I'm listening. I'm doing. Again and again, it seems like the rock thing, the Sisyphus thing. Up the hill. Up.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Web 2.0 Storytelling


Still hammering at the course calendar for New Media and stumbled on a bunch of very potent (what we used to call mixed media, and now I believe multimodal) communication sites. Many photo essays. (Those won't work for me in this language hybrid class...) And then, voila: an Educause piece by Alexander and Levine on the genre, The Center for Digital Storytelling, The Official War Diary of the 9th Battalion of York & Lancaster Regiment, Twistori, and I realized how small and traditionally academic I was thinking--that I needed to follow this snake into the high grass.

Slither first: I was reminded of found poetry...



and then to the nonsense of pictorial


Bosch ("The Temptation of Saint Anthony...')

and language-centered dada... which landed me at a language engine at poemofquotes--where I entered the following sentence in the dada engine (try it yourself)...

"I have wandered over the fishes for there is power in not eating with your mouth" (clearly infused with the spirit of the Bosch painting I had appropriated for use above).

and was rewarded with the following "poem" (which I must wrap in quotations, because it isn't what I have come to buy as poetry, but is, in fact, Web 2.0 Storytelling, verdad?):

wandered fishes for is not
I over for there is
wandered fishes for is your
wandered for power in not
wandered the there is in
the fishes for is power

All of which brought back to wondering if the most (only?) valuable thing that can come of basking in control-less communication or allowing such in class is feeling gleefully postmodern (also read as: feeling less anal)?

Slither next: ?

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Forestalling Premature Closure

Wrestling with the Writing for New Media syllabus here. I have assembled all of the front matter--the stuff that precedes the calendar of assignments--which is the actual biscuit of the thing in many ways. The biscuit. Knowing what and when we'll discuss the thing. And: what I expect my students to be working on to create the right time/space/psychological locus.

I have a pretty good sense of what I'd like to cover during the course of the semester, but in concretizing such, I'll likely close the door on the authentic eruptions and sidewindings and purposeful lollygaggings that might could take place if I left the calendar door open--which I am also convinced is the way I want to go, and the way this class could unfold.

This trepidation comes from a deeply rooted hate of egg-on-the-face, which is part and parcel of the expert syndrome. I know. You don't. Therefore, you've assembled before me.



Too easy, of course. Too pat. The stuff of yesteryear. Stuff is swirling around. The new media stuff in particular. Fragments. As is this blog. Fragmentary. To be seen mostly for what it is after the fact. Or, factless and inductive. And gathering. Not gathered.

Deep breath. Om.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Conquering the Anal Impulse & Honoring My Mixed Diction


Backgrounding Stream

I live a bifurcated life. Oh, hell, actually I live many lives. Or, I live in many lives. Or, I can't be sure about being sure about any damned life.

Early on, I started to write. What it was, I couldn't say. I could say... I can say... what it was was what it was, and it inhabited me, and so I went with it. And, a bit later, I--and others--called it poetry.

At the same time, or course, of course, I was attempting to imagine myself for the long run. I was trying to figure out how and what to monetize. (I hadn't thought about that word until I found it on one of the tabs above this blog entry editor. Still, that's what I was trying to do. Or, I was trying to figure out what I could stand to do for a long while that would pay me to do what I wanted to do. Or, I was trying to figure out what I did NOT want to do or could NOT do. More about that later, perhaps.)

Anyway, long story short not really, I ended up getting a doctorate in poetry (invention of the modern diploma mill and the desire of others like me sort of to try and make a living with their minds but not as fact merchants or engineers or racketeers--rather as associative souls). However (and, yes, I was taught by someone I thought was way smart at the time that no one owing to how it went in Latin should in English begin a sentence with "however"--reserving that for the clause that appears after a semicolon--hence, in part, my fascination with punctuation in general and with the semicolon in particular).

That poetry thing didn't work out. Well, actually, it worked out just fine in a roundabout way, but back then anyway I was one at times interesting but most of the time just another poet type; so (semicolon love), I decided to add a layer or create a parallel track for my own self--to help monetize my life, don't you know. And, so, I pushed myself on an ex nun who happened to have traded Jesus for the study of rhetoric, and ended up doing post doctoral work in how to write the non poetry stuff and how to write about those writing and delivering just about anything. Definitions: rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric: and on (ad nauseam). And, it turned out, I could play that game a bit. And, anyway, the marketplace was hungry for anyone with official and verifiable backgrounds in the reemergent field of rhetoric and composition. I could monetize! And, I did.

All of which resulted in me having had one leg (if two are all you get) in the poetry world and one in the rhetoric/composition world (which morphed or massaged its way, too, into the business and technical communication world). Two legs, two worlds. How different. How, now, converging upon each other, though.

The Poet Noosed by the Academic (or, how THEIR rules blessed and killed me)

For at least the past 25 years, I've been helping students find their way toward correctness. Hey, it was/is a living. Learn the genre. Teach others where they fail the genre. Find a template. Love a template. Bang the template loudly. Pretend for long enough that there is a narrow bandwidth, and you can prosper there. Small territory of the mind.

Now, however, I find that limitation, well, limiting. And, so, I've decided on visiting convergence town in the form of a Writing for New Media class. Hell, it turns out, that my first wife (calculated in terms of time spent, depth of snuggling, plans for the future) is the net. Ooops. You know what I mean. So, if I'm out there in the www ether for 80, 10, 12 hours a day, why wouldn't I be good at guiding (posing the questions) a class in the matter of writing for new media. So, I begin. After all, I am a living incarnation of mixed diction, anyway.

***

Self-Portrait with Forecast

You have a wife an appealing babe adjusting to the face of corporeal treachery still no one’s afterthought two children: one rasping at those outskirts that fail now to fascinate or lure & another whose penance (when generous you call it succor) is common distance: a furlong for every indigestible antipathy & a mutt-Dalmatian who trotted recently into the dangling biscuit of your kindness & kinged you by utter mistake There is a job: yada yada: trespasses tortured diplomacies all the piddliness and rigmarole you’d expect from insufficient recompense but there are laurel saplings too: strivers oily green & sun-fuddled & quirky hedges that demand your focus or deliberation or depth of faith or some such amalgamated pretense multiplying as they do at some encroaching edge