Friday, September 03, 2010

My Life In The Aggrattoir

ProfessionalLeft
After almost 70 posts and the better part of a week, the "Driftglass" Blog now regresses back, back, back towards its smutty, little mean, while "The Driftington Post" is sent off to a blogger farm downstate where it can frolic in the sun with other blogs for ever and ever.

Although the setup and execution of "The Driftington Post" made me laugh several times (and maybe you too) this wasn't meant as a joke in the conventional sense. I'm an artist and a writer (among many other things) and this place is my studio and my workbench (among many other things) and I had arrived at a place where I needed some insights into my craft that I could get at only by putting the whole she-bang on the bench -- from links to labels -- and whanging away at it with a framing hammer until my curiosities were satisfied.

All while on public display and in real-time. (Lack of adult supervision it is one of the compensating liberties of being a single-shingle blogger :-)

For anyone who might be interested, in addition to our regular, weekly podcast (which will go up this evening) we at "The Professional Left" have put together the following special, bonus-podcast in which Blue Gal and I talk about my carefully-considered experiment WTF was I thinking smearing poo all over the walls!?

If you're bored to tears listening to writers talking about writing and like that, skip it; if not, you might enjoy the change of pace.

I certainly did.







“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.”

-- Don Delillo

12 comments:

Fran / Blue Gal said...

Welcome home.

Anonymous said...

terrific podcast this week - especially Blue Gal on Beck, Palin, Obama and Wolfowitz.

Frank H. said...

Welcome back! I kind of liked the change of pace ... I hope the driftington post will make occasional reappearances!

Batocchio said...

Good, I was hoping you'd make a separate blog to save all the Driftington stuff.

But what's up with the substantive content? Jeez, man, WTF is your social media strategy?

(I'll listen the bonus podcast later – busy day, but I'm listening to the normal one now.)

Comrade PhysioProf said...

Dude, nice job on the Driftington! I cracked me the fucke uppe!

BTW, I don't know if you know this dude Scott Berkun, who was a project manager at Microsoft and now is a professional author and public speaker. He has a lot of very interesting shitte to say about writing and speaking on his blogge:

http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/

In a recent poste about juste sacking the fucke uppe and starting writing, he said:

The only way to know if an idea is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is to do something with it.

And if you make it, and others don’t like it, you’re in good company. No author or artist has made something everyone likes. And for many authors and artists their friends were their only fans in their lifetimes.

Ideas can seem to tease us in our minds – they hover out of reach, too far for mere thinking to knock them on their ass. It’s only the act of making an idea real, through writing, drawing, filming or other manifested work that we pin ideas down long enough to discover what they can or cannot be in the world. Many will crumble. Some will disappoint. Some might need to linger again in our minds, for weeks or years. But the glory is that in every attempt there are new seeds to plant elsewhere. There is always more. People who never make anything don’t know this, but there is always more. You lose nothing by making. If your idea fades, before it disappears it will help you find others.

Dennky Smith said...

Whewww, for a minute there you had me worried......good to have you back.

darkblack said...

What a horribly dystopian future of blogging that you posit - 'add 5 words to link, lather rinse repeat' - such terrors would drive me from passively observing the medium, much less participating in it.

Certainly, no one but myself gives a damn about my opinion save that they may either agree or disagree, or not care at all...but unless I can cogently articulate it for my own illumination (if no one else's) and stand up for it in print, all the 'attaboy' aggregate posts in the world won't make up for my ultimate vapidity.

;>)

Rehctaw said...

I feel MUCH better now. Do I get bonus points for getting it by the 2nd post?

I will sleep better tonight.

Thank you!

steeve said...

I totally don't get it. Sure, I haven't made driftglass richer, but I sure as hell haven't made huffington richer either. Who are these people donating money to what is essentially progressive google?

Why can't these people who are giving money to search results notice when they like one of the content providers, and maybe point the money that way instead?

Normally when something is wrong you blame the powerful, but here, as with TV, the blame might go to the audience.

Batocchio said...

Good podcast. (More later.)

Also, too, from TBogg:

And when Megan extensively block-quotes Ezra Klein’s response to Will Wilkinson’s argument with Conor Friedersdorf over Matt Yglesisas’ critique of Dave Weigel’s contention that Julian Sanchez is totally wrong about Arcade Fire being the most awesomest band since Radiohead… do you ever thank Megan or send her the gift of frankincense, myrrh and pink Himalayan Salt? Oh course not, because you are a looter.

Anonymous said...

....or you could do a photoshop of the AZ gov., who apparently sees head-less people. What? Too on-the-nose?

-Mr. Obvious

zencomix said...

Great satire! Reminded me of the old April Fools Day parodies of Protein Wisdom, but without, you know, all the cockslapping and gratuitous use of Latin phrases.