Disqus - Friends of fncll

Re: Are you listening @BarackObama?

vmarinelli — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:24:30 -0000

FWIW, I actually did get a DM from @BarackObama - a campaign staffer thanking me for this blog post, and asking permission to use photographs. Dunno if they actually did end up using them, but it was nice of them to ask :)

Re: Are you listening @BarackObama?

vmarinelli — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:20:29 -0000

Quite welcome! And, no one could have been more surprised than me on getting that DM. I screamed like a schoolgirl. Yes, I realize I am ridiculous :)

Re: Melanie Bowers: Racism, Apologies, Re-Education?

vmarinelli — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:52:56 -0000

Damn girl, I was just about to do a blog post about this, and I did a Google blogsearch on the girl's name, and your post happened to be the first hit! (Figures you'd be on top of this.)

Anyway, I think I'm going to save the draft I had been working on and return to it after I've had at least a few hours sleep (go on and scold me, I just pulled another all-nighter). I might not have gone to the trouble of even starting the post (I have been griping about the constant intrusions of politics into every sphere of my existence, lately), but then, literally within hours of reading about this hoax, I shit you not, my local NBC affiliate aired the original story. As in, did not check the news feeds to learn that yesterday, it was already known that the kid (for whatever weird attention-seeking and/or specifically xenophobic reasons) made it all up.

Felt like I was in the damn Twilight Zone.

So I called the station, told them the story they'd just aired was a hoax, offered to send them the relevant news articles by email, and the dude I talked to pretty much dismissed me. (I followed up anyway, sending article links by email to the newsroom's general inbox.) Then I watched, bleary eyed, to see if they might, at any point in the remaining hour and a half of the broadcast, air even the most fleeting correction. But there was bupkis.

There are so many levels at which this incident pisses me off - but not least among them is the fact that the media is latching onto anything with the potential to exacerbate existing anti-immigrant fervor, and doing so in such an incredibly uncritical way, that stories like this (before being revealed as hoaxes) can get past all the supposed vetting mechanisms, make national news (oh the pearl-clutching white paranoia! Incite, incite!), and even the day after it's broadly revealed as a hoax, it's still being reported as straight-up news!

Anyway, thanks, as ever, for being a source of sanity. It's much appreciated. (And now I'm gonna nap. Then blog. Then maybe someday get back to writing my alleged book.)

Re: Fragments from 2008-04-09

vmarinelli — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:11:55 -0000

Naomi: I have been trying to concentrate for long enough to reply to your comment for two hours now, but it's your fault I couldn't; I ended up at your (brilliant! hilarious!) blog and got distracted as all get out. Then fell back into the social media sinkhole that is Twitter. Anyway, thanks for stopping by. If you ever find yourself in RVA, the ice cream sundae is on me :)

Re: Starting Over.

vmarinelli — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:26:03 -0000

Thank you kindly. And how lovely of you to comment... all things considered.

Re: Starting Over.

vmarinelli — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:53:05 -0000

Thanks for your understanding, caprice. Let me be clear that my taking this action should not be taken as a sign of ingratitude toward my previous (and especially long-time) readers; I just had to make a radical course change.

And if you or anyone else I cared about were to need to reference specific previous posts and/or comments, I have backed everything up, and I'm happy to make that material available by email. Just drop me a line w/ whatever you remember of the post(s) or comment(s) and I'll do what I can.

Re: Starting Over.

vmarinelli — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:06:13 -0000

That's very kind of you to say, and I dearly appreciate it. Again, it's all backed up if there's something you need... I know there have been some valuable conversations hosted here, and in some ways it was selfish of me to torpedo everything in this way, but after hours of trying to pick and choose between what to save and what to delete, I realized I was going to second-guess myself to death and end up worse off than I was feeling to begin with. Which was pretty bad.

Some time ago I said I wished my wordprocessing program had a "lapsing into polemic" check... and that wasn't a joke. None of my convictions have changed - at all - but I can't do the (overtly) political blogging thing anymore. Despite the tagline, Suspiciously tolerant of ambiguity that had accompanied the (unpronounceable and admittedly irritating) blog title, Anachroclysmic, I was painting myself into rigid ideological corners with everything I wrote, and in the meantime I wasn't getting anything done toward any of my books.

Re: Starting Over.

vmarinelli — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:41:53 -0000

Actually, I couldn't have gone on as I had been without hyperventilating. :)

Re: Starting Over.

vmarinelli — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:45:06 -0000

Yeah, sorry. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that future posts will cause you a lot less irritation. I do recall that you temporarily unfollowed me on Twitter when the quantity of my overtly political posts (or perhaps it was their quality? - hard to judge in 140 characters, perhaps) got to be too much.

In your place, I'd have done the same.

Re: Briefly, on my choice to commit blogicide

vmarinelli — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:26:01 -0000

Oh good, I can still make you laugh. That makes the entire blog-deletion-debacle (mine, anyhow) completely worth it.

Re: Starting Over.

vmarinelli — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:04:45 -0000

I'm glad I read your insightful posts about your ex, and your lives together, first.

Well, thank you. I think that was my laying down some formative groundwork for the book. I did back everything up, and please be assured that, in the scheme of things, this most recent blogospheric dustup played a relatively small role in the decision to go nuclear.

There were cracks in the foundations of what I had been trying to accomplish with this blog, and I could no longer either pretend those fissures weren't there, or continue to drain my life away with ineffectual efforts toward "repair."

Re: Twenty four years ago this week

vmarinelli — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:09:10 -0000

You sweet boy. I might have to start calling you Forrest.

Re: Starting Over.

vmarinelli — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:43:18 -0000

It's the whole thing about comment areas being a pseudo-publishing space that Link is always talking about. It's the risk you take investing time in something that you don't own that those things can disappear.

That is, indeed, the most vexing aspect of this for me. If you'd like, I'd be more than happy to extract from the backup any and all posts to which you made comments, and make those available to you, or anyone else who asks. (If they're nice!)

I think where we most diverge is in the need to remove a bunch of previous writing (including some really beautiful content) in order not to write about certain things anymore.

First, thank you. Second, part of it is, I need to look at the same material with fresh eyes. For example, I'd had material for my story Oklahoma Funeral strewn between two or three different posts (and miscellaneous comments, both here and elsewhere), and I desperately need to pull all that material together to write the story, the whole surreal thing from recognizable beginning to recognizable end. So don't look at it as throwing-away, but as recycling. Rather radical recycling, but recycling nonetheless. :)

Re: Twenty four years ago this week

vmarinelli — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:47:09 -0000

Isn't it though? Today I looked at it from above (Google Maps, not out of body experience, I should specify) and it was so weird, seeing it all so small like that. And your old house and Dawn's and the school, all within blocks of each other - our deceptively insulated world.

It means so much to me, Jeni (sorry, I know it's Jen now! of course, you can still call me Vikki), that you were there when it all went down, and that you are with me again all these years later, across the miles. I means more to me than you'll ever know.

Re: Starting Over.

vmarinelli — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:00:36 -0000

Thanks. I know this must be a little weird for you to be seeing from the sidelines, as we've only recently and then only barely become electronically acquainted. But I'm definitely not throwing it all away. I didn't sink more than four years of my life into blogging (longer than I've put up with lots of relationships!) for nothing. It's taught me a lot, even if a big part of that was learning what I didn't want to be doing anymore.

Re: Starting Over.

vmarinelli — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:01:46 -0000

Thanks for your support, as always. (And you know the "cleaning house" bit could stand to be literal as well as metaphorical!)

Re: Twenty four years ago this week

vmarinelli — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:20:19 -0000

I wish I could give some of mine to you.

But honey, you already have. Almost everything good about my experience in California, from hanging out at your place (I so wanted to adopt your mom) to you and me working on the literary magazine, revolves specifically around you.

Remember this, from my haiku profile?

Jeni, in 8th grade/
was the one good thing about/
1984

I meant it. Your friendship didn't just make the whole situation survivable, it gave me genuine joy. Thank you.

Re: Starting Over.

vmarinelli — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:53:23 -0000

I meant to mention another impetus for the blog-nukage: this. (And I laughed when I read this apt comment from you.) While McLeod kept his blog but nuked his twitter account (though I see he has since restored it for archival purposes), I went the other way, because, oddly enough, my twitter usage felt more congruent with my artistic needs than my blog usage.

I'd been reading him for a long time. Every now and then I'd come back to his How To Be Creative post and mull over the matter of just what in the hell I'd been doing with my blog, anyhow. How I'd managed to stray so far from my original intent, back in 2003 or 04 or whenever it was I first started "blogging." (I started using Blogger in 2004, but for a while before then I was doing my own craptastic thing with FrontPage. It looked like shit but the content was in lots of ways better than much of the material that followed.)

So all that was already weighing heavily on my mind, when yet another damned episode of feminist intrablogwarfare erupted, which helped to push things over the edge.

Re: Starting Over.

vmarinelli — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 03:11:37 -0000

Um... just in case anyone is planning to give me some well-deserved crap for taking as credible the above-referenced bit about Hugh MacLeod's killing his Twitter account (whether it was all a joke, or he simply changed his mind, as this seems to imply), I am aware that he's back. (And glad of this. Welcome back, sir!)

But the premise - that one's choice to withdraw from processes that may be serving as much to distract from, as to strengthen one's artistic intentions - remains valid, and, for me, applicable.

Re: Briefly, on my choice to commit blogicide

vmarinelli — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 02:20:47 -0000

For true. Don't go there. Save yourself, young feminist blogger! :)

Re: Twenty four years ago this week

vmarinelli — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:35:19 -0000

You! What an unexpected pleasure to read your kind comment.

And if you felt okay commenting here again (I still remember, acutely, the circumstances that drove you away before), post- the torpedoing of the previous blog, then it was probably the right thing to do.

Thanks again.

Re: If the Discovery Channel played nothing except this commercial

vmarinelli — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:09:19 -0000

My understanding is that they're moving some channels to digital to make room (not actually taking channels away), but I could be wrong. Alas, my caveat about not necessarily having cable at some point in the near future is due to my husband being laid off. As a Comcast employee, free cable (& heavily discounted internet and phone) was part of his benefits package, which is due to expire (along with the more relevant bennies like health insurance) at the end of this month.

Ah well, it was fun while it lasted. And, yeah, should the Discovery Channel become invisible to me (and I still have internet access, ahem) I'll be replaying this video myself from time to time. :)

Re: Flying without instruments, or why I disabled Sitemeter

vmarinelli — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:14:40 -0000

Man, you are a stronger person than me! (the going weeks part...)

Re: Flying without instruments, or why I disabled Sitemeter

vmarinelli — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:17:46 -0000

The funny thing here of course is that I was so hoping you'd be paying attention to your site stats when I linked to you in the post. 'Cause dude, I miss you! And it's always a brilliant and lovely thing to hear from you :)

That said, maybe you could consider a less radical, but still helpful approach - like a one-week Sitemeter Amnesty period. Take the code out of your page so you're not even tempted to look. Then see if it changes how or what you write. You can always go back!

Re: Flying without instruments, or why I disabled Sitemeter

vmarinelli — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:20:20 -0000

Dude, two weeks now and my ass will be on that train. (Provided husband doesn't break his foot again or something like that.) Miss you much and so looking forward to seeing you and writing with you. Hugs to your honey and the pooches too. (Do you suppose Amtrak would just ignore their policies this once and let me bring Lynyrd?)