Silver Linings, Part Two
City life is full of chaos, karma, and cosmic coincidence. That's why I love going out in the morning and am equally happy to have a snug, safe place to come home to at night. You have to find your little estuaries of order in the rush and crush of the chaos.
The fourth turned out to be delightful. We paid for the perfect weekend with a month of rain, but I'm sure not gonna complain. I spent the morning in the garden and visiting with friends in the neighborhood, before meeting my Missed Connection, P., for a cookout in the Fenway.
Yes, you heard that right: my Missed Connection. A few weeks ago I mentioned a John Krasinski-ish bank teller I fancied had up and gone missing just when things between us were getting interesting. Well, I placed a Missed Connection, he answered, we've been hanging out, and it's been fun.
After the cookout we decided to take a walk along the Esplanade to scope out the scene. I left my bike in my garden, U-locked to my lilac in the mostly hidden back corner. We strolled from the Fenway to the Charles and had a look around. I took this shot of what Storrow Drive would be like every day if I were king:
We didn't stay for the fireworks. We took the train back to Davis, opting to make our own.
There was a woman in our subway car who made what to my mind was a very unconvincing plea for money, raising her voice as we pulled out of Charles/MGH to tell the whole car her backpack had been stolen ("as you's can see" she said — pointing to her missing backpack) and she was "twenny-six dollahs shawt" of what she needed to get a bus ticket back to wherever she was from (Revere, sounded like).
This shtick is a familiar one to city dwellers and subway riders the world over. I suppose we in Boston should count ourselves lucky the locals are too lazy to master the art of pickpocketry. It seems all but nonexistent on the T. If someone wants money, they either ask for it in this manner (which, for all its transparent deception, is at least asking), or they stick a knife in your face and just flat out demand it. Pickpocketing, like I said, is actually an ancient art, and I view its disappearance from our public transit system with a mixture of relief and nostalgia.
The artlessness of the woman's scam, her listless delivery, her unimaginative tale of woe, didn't, in my view, merit reward. I have been around the block a few times and have seen this done by masters, whose elaborate sob stories, rich with Dickensian details, were as entertaining as anything currently playing at the Huntington. If you didn't believe them, no matter, you were still willing to toss them a buck or two to support the arts.
This chick was strictly amateur in comparison. Still, two Asian girls, obviously tourists, took out their little Hello-Kitty hand bags and dug up two or three dollars and passed them down to her. This seemed to set a strange meme in flight. Several riders followed suit. P. and I were too busy debunking her story and embellishing it with our own gory details to give, but I won't begrudge anyone the right to part with their money for whatever cause they deem for whatever reason worthy.
Most people gave a buck, seemed like. The rider sitting next to us — a pretty, fashionably dressed young woman — gave a quarter, which got me to thinking about motives. I mean, a quarter? Did she feel pressured to give something, anything, for the sake of not being seen as cynical or stingy?
I sensed the car dividing into two camps — one, giving indiscriminately, the other, withholding incredulously. And I suspect my readers would split along similar lines: some arguing that the woman, whether her story held together or not, was in need, so why not toss her some spare change? The other side would agree that beggars and buskers are in stiff competition for our sympathies, and if we gave to every two-bit hustler who came along with a half-baked story, we'd all soon be joining them on skid row.
As Jean Anouilh has said, "one cannot weep for the whole world, it is beyond human strength. One must choose." The more self-righteous among us will always poo-poo our choices, but that, too, comes with the territory.
Back home, P. and I watched a bit of around-the-clock coverage of Michael Jackson's death — Newsflash! He's still dead! — had a delightful dinner (complete with crab rangoon and fortune cookies) and retired to the boudoir for aforesaid fireworks. It was a pleasant fourth, all in all. I do appreciate my freedom. Even second-class citizens have it pretty good these days.
In the morning, after brunch, I returned to the garden to find that a rash of break-ins had occurred overnight. Someone had stolen a rose bush from the Special Needs garden (which is about as low as you can go), and someone else had broken into my neighbor's garden to break into mine to take my bike, along with about a third of the lilac bush it had been chained to.
I searched myself for some anger but couldn't really muster any up. I was well aware of and had considered the risk when locking the bike up in the garden. I was sorry for my special needs neighbors, and a little sad that my lilac had been molested, but lilacs are mad resilient.
As for the bike. I had recently been contemplating getting a new, lighter hybrid to replace the heavy model I've been riding for the last couple of years, and I was almost relieved I now had the perfect excuse. I was a little bummed that I would not get to ride home — the weather was perfect — but other than that actually wasn't too worked up about the bike.
As I set about my gardening a feeling of pity came over me. When we community gardeners are confronted with break-ins, thefts, or mass crappings (as happened a couple of weeks ago all up and down our row), we're left sort of scratching our heads. That there are people who, when they look into a lovely garden, see only what they can steal from it — well, they are to be pitied. And whether we like it or not, we're the ones left to pity them, although it doesn't really do anybody any good. But anger doesn't do any good either, and does a good deal of harm besides.
You can't help but get a little philosophical about what people choose to do with what freedom they've got, especially on a day dedicated to it.
Why is this not being published in the New York Times and instead I have to sort through this drivel instead? Ugh.
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I should clarify. What I mean is I think your blog is great - well written, timely, insightful, amusing - and it seems to me the newspaper industry just continues to publish too many of the same old same old writers who haven't had a new idea in years. I think it's time for Maureen Dowd to hang it up. Jeff Jacoby has only 3 subjects - how great (his) religion is, how horrible homosexuals are, and why all liberals are corrupt.
Why aren't new writers being brought up through the industry? Have you ever submitted anything to the Globe? Even if they take your piece, they still send a stock email saying "We'll take a pass on this one," and they usually hit the "send" button more than once seemingly just out of spite. Like they have to do it just to show you that you are not all that.
I wish your stuff had a wider audience.
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You don't like the cozy, private club feel of my blog, Toby? I do get a gratifying bump whenever I get featured on UH, Bostonist, or Boston.com, but then I also get a lot of riff-raff checking in, and like fast-food tourists who bust into a charming bistro where the menu makes no sense and the delicacies fall flat on their primitive palates, they will eventually snap at the maître d', and stomp out when they see he’s unmoved by their outrage. No one will miss them when they’re gone, but it does take a while to air the place out.
I went to dinner with the Spaniard last week, and he mentioned a couple of comments to my Farrah Fawcett faux pas. (By the way: Farrah came to me in a dream and forgave me. I woke up sobbing, I was so grateful. True story. I have witnesses.) El Español said he thought I must enjoy getting people all riled up so they flame me. But I’m a lover, not a fighter. I certainly don’t get off on being flamed. Particularly by an “old flame,” as one flamer in this case was. (The other was some poor soul who had obviously followed the blog with a growing sense of confusion and dread, and the Farrah thing was just the last straw.)
I’ll admit I’m puzzled as to why certain people who don’t seem to enjoy my blog continue to read my blog. Unless you (a) like it, or (b) are being held down on a giant rubber fist by my burly henchmen and forced to read it, which sometimes happens, there’s no earthly reason that I can think of to keep at it, or to get too exercised about what’s in it.
That said, I'm actually not at all displeased with my numbers, considering all I do is post, and leave the rest to you. While I don’t obsess over it, I use a couple of different metrics to get a general picture of traffic on the site, neither of which is wholly accurate or reliable, I'm sure, but the more conservative of which specifically claims to exclude "web-crawling bots" and puts my total human/subhuman/household pets visits for the last six months at just under 100,000 (with about 70,000 entry views). According to the same, the blog clocked a quarter million hits in '08. Not bad for a personal blog with no social networking ties, no discernable demographic, and little or no marketing.
I think a big part of reaching a wider audience is definitely networking, but not just networking for the sake of networking. A lot of networking turns out to be a misery-loves-company-as-long-as-there’s-free-hors-d'œuvres type thing. And there’s nothing wrong with that, if misery and hors d'œuvres is your thing. I did what for me was pretty intensive networking last year, and while I did meet some interesting folks (I’m lying, I didn’t), I did not get laid that much more for all the extra energy I put into it. I still suspect that that’s really how things get done in the world. It’s not who you know, it’s who you blow.
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I guess what I am subconsciously fretting about is what is going to happen to the essay form when newspapers finally go under? What will be the forum for political and cultural commentary?
Will we all continue the trend of visiting websites that simply reaffirm our preconceived ideas about the world? That seems a bad result to me.
But even worse, I suppose, is being witness to the decline and fall of the newspaper and the general interest magazine. It's like watching a washed up entertainer act like they're still in their prime. All the diva-ness and none of the talent. And the bitterness.
So I just go around and around in this circular, helpless circle of anxiety about the demise of newspapers and magazines, and of the quality of commentary, and of writing in general. I follow your blog regularly, and I enjoy it and feel better after reading a new entry, but the feeling soon passes and I go right back to wallowing in my unhappiness, especially about the Globe and the Herald's unseemly race to the bottom.
Sorry to be so glum. I think the weather in getting to me.
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I feel your pain, Toby, but I think it’s likely that whatever new media treats await us, they’ll have to be better than what print media has become in its dotage. Perfect case in point: The Old Gray Lady let the Daily Show in a couple of weeks ago – if you need any further proof that print media’s totally lost its edge, watch the video:
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Print media, which is cumbersome and costly to produce, is on its way out. It’s a revolutionary change as significant as the Gutenberg Press. And there are definite drawbacks – once print is dead, our history is much more fragile. The book is an organic object. It too will disappear, but it requires no additional technology to access its content. An iphone or a Kindle requires electricity and wireless networks to get at what’s inside. I think the grand irony of our age when viewed from a thousand years hence will be that we were awash in information, very little of which will be interesting, and likely none of which will be accessible to future generations. The Google mainframe will be our Library of Alexandria. Our culture will be as much a mystery as the Incas or Aztecs are to us.
Still, whether this is comic or tragic on the cosmic scale is entirely dependent on your disposition.
It’s really more a failure of imagination than anything at this point. And the revenge of the marketers. I can’t get through an article in the Globe without feeling patronized or condescended to. They’re straining to court new readers with quirky blog-like content that’s available at equal or higher quality on, um, blogs. And the editing of newspapers nowadays runs the gamut from atrocious to nonexistent.
What old media resents is having its nose rubbed in its own obsolescence. But instead of thinking outside the box at the possibilities of providing more news, information, and experiences, it's clinging to the past and kvetching about the future passing it by. What will happen when print media disappears? Hand-held devices will pick up where newspapers left off. In ten years electronic paper and ink will be as common as ordinary paper and ink are today. And news-gathering organizations will have to hybridize – utilizing mixed media – words and moving pictures – to bring us the news. This could be a brilliant moment, full of possibility, but all this hand-wringing and blatant nostalgia over the death of old media is spoiling it.
The ugly truth is, if they can’t outsmart the new media set, they deserve to die.
There will always be journalism, and all the scare tactics of old media titans is a prelude to justifying charging more than you would ever have paid for a newspaper for the same information they will be providing with a much lower overhead. And that’s really what we have to fear. In the next five years, as print shrivels up and dies, old media will be finding new ways to charge more for less content. Look for article downloads, like mp3s, and similarly priced. Remember when you could read a whole paper for 50 cents? A single article will cost twice that. This will very likely hinder bloggers from linking freely to newspaper content, a significant roadblock to the kind of open society the internet and particularly the blogosphere has promised to be.
The internet is really ground zero in this constant skirmish between free speech and pay-to-say. Capitalism and democracy are battling it out, and I think we know who’ll win in the end.
As for the voices of reason, writers we love and trust -- they’ll be out there, and accessible – more accessible than at any time in the past. I think a lot of people fear that those voices will be drowned out by Perez Hilton and Matt Drudge. And that fear is justified. But its roots are in the illusion of consensus. In the old days we had the three networks and PBS. There was at least the illusion of a clear, concise consensus on what mattered. Nowadays that illusion has gone up in smoke. Which means a cacophony of voices often without a conductor to make some music out of it.
In this way, it’s a lot like life.
The artificiality of “news” is indeed giving way to something radically different – open-sourced and dissensual . The revolution in Iran is a perfect example. But twittering is not reporting. We still need skilled journalists, experts and thinkers who can conduct that cacophony of voices and turn it into something as profoundly meaningful for posterity as it was in the moment. Those layers of voices will emerge. It’s organic. And they’ll find our way to us, if we don’t find them first.
I like the idea that we find each other this way. Like I said – it’s a lot like life. But it does require a leap. Because just as the Gutenberg press was not only a revolution but an evolution of the species, we are at the threshold of another stupendous advance in not only how we encounter ideas and communicate them, but, more profoundly, in who and what we are at our core as a species. It’s a lot scarier, and a lot more exciting than anything you’ll read in the Globe today, I'll give you that.
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