Paul Theroux Loathes Blogs

Travel writer Paul Theroux in an interview at The Atlantic--pushing his new book--remarks:

I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look to me illiterate, they look hasty, like someone babbling. To me writing is a considered act. It's something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. A blog doesn't seem to have any literary merit at all. It's a chatty account of things that have happened to that particular person.

Ha! That's my blog, although surely there are blogs which do have "literary merit." Still, I'm a bit puzzled as to why blogs as he defines them should provoke such loathing. I rather like babbling and chatty accounts and of course that's what I have in mind for this post.

Daisy's post about the Facebook era still has me thinking round in circles and want to attempt to write more about that.

The picture comes from a National Park Service page, Mississippi River Facts. In case you've missed it big news in the USA is flooding along the Mississippi River. If you look at the right hand side of the map you'll notice the Ohio River. I live about three miles from the Ohio River and about twenty miles from where the Ohio begins at Pittsburgh. The Ohio River is no small river. With the record flooding it's a reminder that the Ohio is just a portion of the great Mississippi River Watershed.

It's wet here. I've got my rubber boots on. The paper today tells us to expect another two months of unusually wet weather. Yikes! In May the grass grows so fast, grass along with everything else. What I can mow now determines what areas I'm able to keep mown the rest of the summer. And there's always a crush because May is also the time for planting. The grass can't be mown when it's too wet, and the rain only makes the grass grow faster. And the ground can't be turned when it's too wet and seeds planted. When I go out to work it starts to rain and by the time it's not raining I'm inside doing something else. I'm not getting much done. Wet weather is part of my personal story right now, but I sure have it better than so many of my fellow Americans, some of them with homes under the water.

Theroux is right that such chatty excursions are outside the boundaries of literature. I'm not sure that blogs are an existential threat to literature, but there's no question media is changing and we are changing along with it.

When I started writing this blog I used a pseudonym. I was also visiting and writing at a social network called Tribe. Tribe was a pretty free-wheeling place at the time, lots of nudity, profanity and the like. Because it was popular with younger folks I was a bit concerned that some of my younger relatives might happen upon my goings on there. But ultimately with all the linking I did at Tribe it became clear to me that because I hadn't organized myself from the beginning for online anonymity the pseudonyms I was using online did little to make anonymous. Web searches clearly associated with my real name brought up links to stuff I put up under screen names, especially at Tribe for some reason.

After using Tribe for a while I discovered the Omidyar Network (ONet), which was sort of an online social network for dogooders. The charitable foundation called the Omidyar Network is alive and well, the social network has been defunct since 2007. The culture at ONet was for people to use their true names. While it's not 100% that's also the norm at Facebook. Anyhow I figured the easiest thing was just to accept that I wasn't anonymous online. There are, however, many good reasons why people publish anonymously online, not the least of which is some people are creepy.

Nowadays I participate at a forum where the convention is for people to participate using screen names. I hesitate to link to that forum because it isn't clear to me what the ripple effects not just to me, but to the users of the forum, might be to linking my pseudonym with my real name. Over at that forum for the last few weeks there's been a long thread on misogyny. The title of the thread seemed pretty generic, but I wondered if using the title links to the forum thread would come up high in search results. Of course they do, and in that search I discovered blog posts, anonymous of course, which were a sort of back channel to the thread.

Certain topics can be quite incendiary and misogyny is one of them. The thread has meandered between talking about misogyny and examples of misogyny, even if providing examples of was not explicitly the intent. Some of the talk was pretty bad but my default reaction was don't feed the trolls because some of the talk seemed pretty good. The problem with that approach was getting called out on the thread for not calling out the BS. I knew that there was some private discussion going on between members, even posting a few private messages myself. What I hadn't known before today was the commenting about the thread and nasty stuff about some of the posters on blogs. Jeez, people can be such dicks!

The xkcd comic pane Duty Calls with the line "Someone is wrong on the Internet" is so often passed around because we human beings seem easily obsessed with being right to the detriment of online comity. Sometimes people anonymously post online because it is unsafe for them to be exposed.

Drima at The Sudanese Thinker probably had danger in the back of his head when he started the blog five years ago. Probably more prosaic reasons along the lines of my not wanting young relatives to stumble upon my Tribe postings seemed more important. Recently Drima exposed his real name at Twitter and at his blog. He didn't offer a long explanation for why he did so, writing:

I have numerous personal reasons for and that I cannot explain adequately in a simple short blog post. Let’s just say the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, and the changes sweeping the region now have inspired me and forced me to come to a simple conclusion.

Screw anonymity.

With the events in Tunisia late last fall I began following events at Twitter. Andy Carvin (@acarvin) of PBS was curating tweets, he sort of vetted Tweets. I hadn't been following @SudaneseThinker at Twitter, but had read his blog over time. His tweets came up in Carvin's retweets and I promptly followed him at Twitter. Even though Drima is a pseudonym, I knew enough to have some confidence in him and his tweets. When he retweeted people's tweets, especially in re Egypt, it added to the authority of those tweets.

Dave Kenner at Foreign Policy Magazine recently posted an article Here's your reading list, Mr. President which consists mostly of a list of blogs about the Middle East. The premise of the post is that it's possible to get a realistic picture of political conversations going on in the region. Of course it would be great if the President of the United States sought to hear these views and so as not just to hear the inside Washington policy debate, but the larger point is any of us can be privy to it too.

The impetus for this blog was quite a simple idea of explaining to some of my friends why I was taking an interest in the life of a young Ugandan man. Quickly it became obvious that most of my friends had little interest in blogs, but plenty of Americans were turning attention to Africa often from quite stereotypical frames of reference. As a white middle-aged American the topic of "privilege" come up in many different contexts. It rankles me when it does, but on the other hand turning my attention towards Africa has demonstrated time and time again that there's potency in the construct of privilege.

Offline and online I was being asked about Darfur. In Pittsburgh there are some refugees from the North-South civil war in the Sudan. As I was also trying to find out more about Uganda it was hard for me to discuss Darfur without first making the North-South conflict part of the context. Very often I was sharply criticized for doing so. I'm a fairly incompetent activist in any case so pointing that out comes as no surprise to me. While Darfur was awful by anybody's standards opinions outside Sudan as to what to do sharply differed. Among people I like an admire, my views about US policy towards Sudan were often anathema. Being basically needy, I want very much for people to like me so Darfur was posed something of a dilemma for me.

I read and still read Alex De Waal's blog Making Sense of Sudan. It's really excellent. As far as online discussions about Darfur activism went, De Waal's analysis of the situation was an unpopular. I'm hardly an expert so I didn't spend much time trying to argue from a perspective which was already disparaged. Just in ordinary face to face conversations the sorts of perspectives that The Sudanese Thinker provided were more helpful than the academic perspectives at Making Sense of Sudan.

People wanted to talk about basic information like: Who are the Sudanese in our area? How close is the Sudan to Uganda and what are the relationships? Are Sudan and Somalia the same place? Who are the Somali-Bantu's in our community? The Italians, in Africa, you're kidding me! The tenor of such conversation might seems a little daft. Nobody really likes to be thought of as ignorant, but let's face it I like most Americans are ignorant about Africa. Much of the activism here around Darfur seemed to demand political commitment and such a demand rather pointed up a common ignorance of a large and populous continent.

Here's a post by Drima from early February 2007 entitled Sudan Arab or African? It's the sort of post probably of marginal interest to political scientists and political activists, I guess from an assumption"everybody knows that," but just the sort of post helpful to most of us who didn't know what we were supposed to. I can't remember once Drima writing anything to make it seem that not knowing something was tantamount to being stupid.

I do remember Drima talking about being a college student, hanging out with friends, getting a new CD, eating good food, being exhausted from studying from exams, all of the boring stuff Paul Theroux thinks has no place in literature. Perhaps blogs aren't literature because the boring stuff is important for lots of blogs.

As the events in Egypt unfolded on Twitter, I noted who the Sudanese Thinker was following and often followed those people. People were arrested, people died, sadly Egyptians still are being arrested and are dying. It's hard to have a very detached view of events when following people who know the people arrested and killed, post pictures of them and link to blogs by them.

It's so far fetched to think of Drima, whose real name is Ahmad, as a friend. Ha an Internet-friend, but there's real value in Internet friendships. I was moved when I read the post at his blog giving his name, Amir Ahmad, especially because he connected it to the experience of the the political events in Northern Africa, events which in a way I followed on Twitter along with him and others. I know saying revealing his name comes with some danger attached. I respect that saying his name publicly is to trump fear with love.

Amir Ahmad is writing a book, Islam: A Love Story – How Fundamentalism Stole My Mind, Broke My Heart, and Blogging Freed My Mystic Soul. It's sure to be carefully considered writing,as Theroux maintains literature ought to be. The irony is the book is at least in part about blogs. Ahmad writes:

Set in Sudan, Qatar, Malaysia, the United States and the new frontiers of the Arab and American political blogospheres, Islam: A Love Story is ultimately about my journey of spiritual awakening and why and how the internet will not only help reform the political landscape of the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also significantly shape the future of Islam as well.

It's sure to be carefully considered writing,as Theroux maintains literature ought to be. The irony is the book is at least in part about blogs. Ahmad writes:

Set in Sudan, Qatar, Malaysia, the United States and the new frontiers of the Arab and American political blogospheres, Islam: A Love Story is ultimately about my journey of spiritual awakening and why and how the internet will not only help reform the political landscape of the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also significantly shape the future of Islam as well.

I've babbled on about the author Paul Theroux, about the wet spring where I live, about flooding in the American Midwest, about brutishness on Internet forums, and about a blogger named Ahmad, also known as Drima. Is there a thread that connects? I think there is, and imagining a thread is probably why unlike Theroux I rather love blogs instead of loathing them as he does. Love them or hate them, blogs and Internet communications in general are changing how we view and experience the world. Those changes are neither all good, nor all bad.

Riffing About Facebook

The image was lifted from here. If it's hard to read, it says:

Dear Senior,

Please be safe at the prom. I would like you to wear a condom when you are getting freaky.

Sincerely,

Emma C.

P.S. Here is a picture for you!

One of my favorite bloggers, Daisy at Daisy's Dead Air has a post ruminating about our Facebook era.

It's definitely worth reading the post and while you're at it reading her wonderful remembrance of Ben Masel* posted earlier. Masel was an old friend of Daisy's and they'd reconnected recently on Facebook, so news of Masel's death seemed to feel different. Feeling a difference led her to write a bit about how Facebook changes us. Among the observations she makes is that she's glad that "the various addled twists and turns of my life are not available for public consumption." That's a luxury today's digital natives probably won't have. Daisy writes:

And then again, there is Gatsby, the quintessential American character. We re-create ourselves throughout our lives, in numerous ways, large and small. Is Facebook making Gatsby more or less possible and is that a good thing?

It's a pretty straightforward question, but the Internet is a big honking question and my mind started circling in various directions when thinking about it.

The way that Facebook makes us aware of friends of friends is something that makes a big difference. I saw the picture of second grader Emma C. that I posted here over at Tumblr. I didn't actually see it originally at the link I posted for it. At Tumblr it's easy to reblog posts that come up in your own feed of people you follow. By the time I saw it it had been reblogged over 8,500 times. I didn't scroll down the list of 8,500 plus names of people who'd reblogged it, but simply that such data is viewable provides an ordinary example of how social networking data makes friends of friends visible to us. The visibility of extended networks seems strange to an old guy like me, but a matter of course for young people today. What stood out to me about Emma's school work wasn't so much a seven or eight year old writing about "getting freaky" so much as teachers nowadays thinking that what a second-grader has to say would influence a senior in high school to behave at the prom. I doubt that back in my high school days teachers would have thought a second grader could have much if any impact on what an older teenager does, now we assume she does.

It's been wet here. I looked at the 10-day weather forecast and rain is forecast for every day. Spring has sprung in these parts and growth is exuberant. The problem with that is both keeping all the growth beat back, in particular trying to keep lawn areas mown without contemplating taking in hay, while at the same time trying to work the soil to plant seeds. Behind the eight ball in the best of years, I'm quite in a muddle with all the rain this year. Yesterday I went down to a Pittsburgh suburb to help a friend with a gardening project of his. Miraculously the rain held off and we managed a complete makeover of his front yard.

My friend was in the music business for more than forty years. He's got a curious mind and is a good writer. Recently he's been talking about a Web site he's beginning to make. I'm very eager for him to launch it. Talking about the site with him it's clear I'm coming to it from a different perspective. My friend isn't being critical so much as incredulous when he says "People must spend hours on the Internet." I do spend hours on the Internet daily and it seems the comments and questions I pose about his Web site are incomprehensible because he does not.

For many people my age that younger people have their Facebook open in a tab and and some sort of chat client open during work seems immoral. I say that, but also since I'm on the Internet a lot I also read what people basically my age write sometimes while at work, so I know this sort of "immorality" isn't solely among younger folk. Closely coupled with this disdain for the sort of news streams online denizens depend on is the lament: "Why can't they just pick up the phone?" A running joke about a good friend is that the best way to get in touch is to write her a letter. In business and life in general what's the right way to get in touch with people is in flux.

Ethan Zuckerman recently wrote a post about the dilemma of not know what's the best way to contact people nowadays. He points to an experimental site called Protocol.by which is a Web site and an email signature which lets people know the best ways to get in touch with you. It seems a good idea, although so far as I can tell nobody has trouble contacting me. Some people do complain that I don't have a cell phone or message machine. It probably would horrify some of my friends to say that Facebook is probably a pretty good option if they want to contact me during the day.

The friend for whom a paper letter isthe best way to reach her, likes to write everything in neat cursive handwriting. Everyone has preferences about writing and probably for most of us nothing seems quite perfect. QuiteWrite is an online text editor whose promise is to reduce the number of distractions. I can see it, but so far haven't actually used it. Right now I'm writing in the Blogger composer. I like to use it for blog posts because it's easy to handle links and certain formatting options. I asked my friend working to create a Web site how he writes. The question I posed really had to do with coping with HTML. His answer was that he writes using Word. It's been years since I've used Word, but I feel sure Word makes it easy to create an HTML document just like the LibreOffice Writer which I use. But he isn't thinking of HTML.

I looked at his Mac with the Safari Browser and wasn't smart enough to go to the View menu to show him the HTML of a Web page. He does get that there's something that has to happen to see a page on the Web, but so far that "what happens" is handled by sending copy to the guy making his Web site in the form of a Word Document. I don't think it's occurred to my friend yet that he's going to want to add links to his online text. As he gets online not only what makes for a comfortable writing will change but his ideas of what it means to write will change too.

All this is pretty far afield from Daisy's question about how Facebook may be altering our capacity for re-inventing ourselves. I'm not tech savvy, talking about things like HTML makes it sound as if I ought to know something technical. But when I talk with my friend about his Web site any technical matters seem so much less important than a shift in perspective which comes along with reading and writing on the Internet. Having Facebook open at work may seem immoral, but if it's a good way to contact people you need to at work, then how different is it from the phone on the desk? The point telling stories about pre-Internet folks like me is to show that the Internet makes a difference. The differences are both hard to see if you're not "swimming in it" and hard to see when you always are.

There's a sweet little YouTube video getting spread around It's Okay to Not Like Things. The punch line of the song is "But don't be a dick about it." It is embarrassing that not only are there pages online revealing me being a dick about things I don't like, but also that I know where to look for them. An example, perhaps not so much of being a dick but of being a total asshat, is that I used a picture of me wearing an Afro wig as my Blogger profile picture for a time. I have a thumbnail copy of the picture up now at Flickr with a link to The Jim Crow Museum. Once I had finally grokked how offensive the image is, it had been on the Internet for a while, and I felt it important to own up to my mistake by keeping it online in some form. I suppose that enough time has elapsed that it's probably alright now to delete the damn thing.

The fact that once something is on the Internet it's not easy to scrub it off has consequences. Everyone knows we ought to be careful and everyone whose been putting stuff on the Internet for any length of time knows some foolishness is inevitable. Often we can remember exactly where an example of our own foolishness lives online. It's not just about foolishness. The life of a thirteen year old seems eons away to the same person at sixteen. But that's only three years, and millions of sixteen year olds now can visit their thirteen year old selves online. Growing up really isn't quite the same as "reinventing" ourselves, it's just growing up. In a sense the Internet keeps a record of it all and that makes a difference.

I don't really know of a good way to go back an see my 2007 Facebook pages. It's quite possible that 13 year olds using Facebook now will still be using Facebook when they're 16. Facebook chronicles our lives, but it isn't so easy to go back and read from the beginning. Perhaps part of the current popularity of Tumblr has to do with blogs being much easier to travel backwards in than Facebook. But while it's hard for users to go back in time on Facebook, the Facebook corporation has been collecting data all along our use, for example keeping track of our "likes" over time.

I've already rambled on for too long, so in winding to a close will point to a much linked to quotation:

if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold

Most of us are content to Google, use Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. without giving much thought to who owns the data. People haven't stopped growing up or stopped re-inventing themselves. As we live more and more connected online, I suspect that more people will see the value in asserting ownership over their own data. Dave Winer has advocated that for a long time. If you're interested in a short snapshot of what Winer is up to in that regard this post by Scott Gilbertson is quite helpful. Tantek Çelik is all over that too.

The difference the Internet makes is a big subject. I like that Daisy is asking questions about how the Internet, and Facebook in particular, is changing our interior landscapes. I've rambled here and there about it only to get nowhere. After reading Daisy's post I left a comment. Marshall McLuhan came to mind. There are many super cogent thinkers about the Internet nowadays, and they're worth paying attention to. But I think McLuhan is important especially for older folks like me. Lots of American Baby Boomers read Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and many more with the gist of McLuhan's ideas about media.

The short version of the 1964 book is that media extends our senses and as a sense is extended the ratios among the different senses are altered. For example with the invention of printed books sight became more important and hearing so important attenuated. So as sight is extended a portion of our hearing amputated. Clearly people didn't loose their ability to hear as books rolled off the presses. What's important is the ways in which the interrelationships between our sense are changed with the development of new media. While these changes are happening to the many, those of us who lived long before the Internet notice the change. Well, and a surprising number of old folks like me feel that resiting such changes is virtuous. McLuhan provides something of an accessible theory for what we fear to loose; for every extension is an amputation. But on the other hand fear without understanding creates moral and ethical confusion which perhaps on a trivial level gets expressed in outbursts of "These kids today!" Old folks would do well to put more effort into understanding rather than leap to ethical judgement. The changes that networked computers and widespread access of people to those networks create require ethical and moral judgments; it's good not to be a dick about them.

* I checked and there doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia article for Ben Masel. A Google search yields dozens and dozens of remembrances. Reading some of those is fun if you're in the mood. It may be helpful for understanding who Ben Masel was to read the Wikipedia article Youth International Party (YIPPIE).

Another Post About Blogging

Over the last week the leaves on the trees have begun to open and many blossoms burst forth. That has nothing to do with not posting here for months, except that my posts generally begin with an off topic remark and proceed to rambling from there.

This blog has been the place I've most consistently posted about what's happening in my day to day life.

I was surprised the other day looking for something I once posted that I've been posting here since 2005. Originally the idea for this blog was to encourage some of my friends to pay more attention to people in Africa along with a half-baked idea I had for alternative currency scheme to encourage that attention. Quickly it became apparent that very few of my friends pay any attention at all to blogs which exposed the premise of the blog as fairly useless. I posted anyway.

Generally when I comment other places I leave behind the URL for this blog, so it represents something of my online identity. Many who write online enjoy having a large following. I've been content being hardly visible knowing that my opinions tend to rub the wrong way and being fairly thin-skinned happy to have limited exposure. If the purpose of this blog is to somehow represent who I am online, it makes sense to make some changes here, but the revealing aspect about me is my voluminous capacity to shirk anything resembling work. So I just made a few easy changes now and will see what comes up as I go along.

Curious about Tumblr and knowing that the way learn best is to jump right in, I made a blog other there called Three Good Links. The idea was a simple link blog posting three short snippets from daily reading. The blog doesn't add much to the Internet ecology, but it's been enough to discover that Tumblr is fun. While a link blog reveals my interests to some extent, surely what I write offers more clue as to what I'm like than snippets of what others say.

Curious about Tumblr and knowing that the way learn best is to jump right in, I made a blog other there called Three Good Links. The idea was a simple link blog posting three short snippets from daily reading. The blog doesn't add much to the Internet ecology, but it's been enough to discover that Tumblr is fun. While a link blog reveals my interests to some extent my interests, surely why I write offers more clue as to what I'm like than snippets of what others say.

I do want to keep blogging here. Anyone whose read any of my posts knows they're rambling ones, mostly my stabs at trying to make sense of things. I hope that the changes made make the blog more transparent about what it's about.

Insert Caption

I saw this photo today and it made me laugh. Clearly it's been around for a long time, but it's a slice of Americana--like the Jackalope--that I hadn't run across before. Oh I had run across the Jackalope, even thinking they might exist when I was a kid, I had just never seen this big chicken. I put the obvious two-word caption into a Google image search and the photo was represented on dozens of Web sites. That's a pretty dodgy search term. There's a popular sporting goods store locally called Dick's. Hunting for their Web site is the stuff of legend around here. The key to a safe-search is to include the "sporting goods" along with Dick's.

Useless

‎"The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real." ~Marge Piercy

Photo: Some rights reserved by Mickipedia Photo by Alex Johnson in New York City subway. Micki Krimmel's wonderful Mickipedia site. Okay the message of the photo is: "Use less." But I've been feeling awfully useless lately and that's what's been on my mind.

I live with my elderly father. In the USA women are disproportionately the care givers. There are probably a quite a few people who think that because that's the case, men must really suck at being care givers. Alas, that stereotype probably hold true for me, but it's not for lack of trying. It's not an easy thing when someone who has always been strong is now frail.

Anyhow something my father and I do together several times a year is to attend Pittsburgh Symphony concerts. Several years ago he passed out at one of the concerts and left in an ambulance. Every time we go I try to figure out how to make the whole excursion as easy on him as I can. There are probably ways of making it much easier than we do, for example there is an elevator, but getting my father to use it is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. So I pause on the stair landings and point to the architecture. My father always gives me a look that says, "What the heck are you doing?" but I never mention what I'm doing is to let him catch his breath. Being out of breath is exactly the sort of thing a once strong man never notices or wants to be noticed.

This Sunday's program was quite interesting. The program was Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68; Concerto No1 in C major for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 15; and Leonore Overture No. 3, Op 72A. What really interested me in reading the program was the performances were dedicated to the memory of Vince Calloway the long serving doorman at the performance hall who had died this past October.

The write-up in the program notes seemed understated. Towards the end of it I read:

Born on Nov. 21, 1924 in Roberta, GA, Calloway was one of five children. He received an honorable discharge from the Navy in 1946 and received his bachelor's degree from Carnegie (Tech) Mellon. He worked at Westinghouse in West Mifflin for 42 years before retiring in 1992. He married his wife Marie in August 1951. They had five children.

Westinghouse has a storied history in Pittsburgh and as a corporation. The mention of "Westinghouse in West Mifflin" has a particular meaning, the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory. I turned to my father and read the paragraph to him, pointing out the guy was a nuclear engineer.

Vincent Calloway was a nuclear engineer for about as long as he was doorman at the Heinz Hall with a good many of the years overlapping. It's a nice thing he'll be long remembered by the Pittsburgh Symphony. But "nuclear engineer" seems on its face more prestigious than "doorman" and it's the latter he'll be most remembered for.

In 2001 the Pittsburgh Symphony gave Calloway a Customer Service Excellence Award, in fact they named the award after him. Here's a bio for one of the orchestra's violists. Her bio mentions that she received the Vince Calloway Award for her work using music with critically ill cancer patients. The Pittsburgh Symphony takes the award seriously.

I got the idea from the dedication of the program to him, and a little plaque the Pittsburgh Symphony unveiled this weekend, that they really loved the guy and miss him terribly. But the write-up left me a little unclear as to why he'd made such an impression: He will be remembered for "his good humor, kindness, independence, generosity and dedication" sounded a little bit canned, or just faint praise.

I had noticed Vincent Calloway at the door over the years. I'm afraid over the last few years when I saw him my mind was always racing trying to imagine if somehow I could convince my father to allow me to drop him off at the door while I parked the car. I wondered if that guy in the scarlet coat and cap could get my cranky father who doesn't want help from anybody through the door? I never tested it, but the Vince Calloway always had a nice smile on his face for us as he held the door for us, so I do remember smiling back at him. And the answer to my question was almost certainly, "Yes." Calloway was only a few years younger than my dad, and getting cranky old people through the door was exactly what he was especially good at. The vice president of the Symphony said:

He was someone patrons got to know and, as they got older, depended on him. He would always be there for them.

I was curious to see whether the newspaper had done a news obituary for him when he died. I didn't find one, but did see his online guestbook. He was known for giving away candy and food. One of the Heinz Hall ushers wrote that he probably didn't know it at the time but the food he gave her was so appreciated because it was a time she didn't have enough money to buy enough to eat. Another person remembered how she first met Calloway when she was in the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony and then how proud he was of her when she won a spot playing in the Pittsburgh Symphony. There were little vignettes about how he managed to make sure ushers found their way safely home after work. The picture emerges of a man who was kind to both grandees and humble workers alike.

We think that being kind is what we ought to be, so kindness often seems hardly noticed, or even an afterthought. What was so remarkable about Vincent Calloway was his kindness, but just saying he was kind doesn't quite capture the difference he made to quite a large number of people. Just as saying: "He was a real dignified gentleman." doesn't cut the mustard. But how else to describe someone exquisitely kind?

It's rare for the Pittsburgh Symphony to dedicate programs to people. Maybe I just haven't noticed, but in the many years of attending concerts I can only think of one other time the Pittsburgh Symphony has honored someone like this, and that was to honor one of the most generous patrons of the orchestra. Pittsburghers are very proud of our symphony. And I feel proud of the organization for honoring their long-time doorman.

I can only guess about the story from Calloway's perspective. Given the timing and knowing he had five kids, I suspect he started out just to earn a bit of cash to help out with the expenses of putting his kids through college. Somewhere along the line he made the job of doorman mean much more than anyone expected that job ought to mean. He made the job real by making sure others knew they were important. His job was to be kind and what a difference he made. Sometimes the most useful gestures are simple ones, a smile, a little treat, a sympathetic ear, or a ride home in the dark. Vincent Calloway's life is a lesson not so much about the dignity of work, but rather the importance of being of use. We all can be of use.

"We Are the Medium"

It's February and winter seems long during the shortest month. The photo is by Eddie~S published with a CC 2.0 license.

February 2nd is Groundhog's Day here in the USA. One of our silly customs takes place not so far from where I live in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. A group of men in waistcoats and top hats get together to determine whether a groundhog, named Punxsutawney Phil, who is kept in a little zoo there, sees his shadow or doesn't at the dawn's early light. The outcome is supposed to predict an early spring or whether winter will be long. This year Punxsutawney Phil failed to see his shadow meaning an early spring.

It's a silly custom, yet oddly cheering, if for no other reason that people can all say aloud that winter is hard. February 2nd is also the day Christians celebrate Candelmas. I don't have the story straight but our own little pageant involving a groundhog is thought to be some adaptation of German custom. There aren't groundhogs in Germany, and the animal in question there is a badger. There are plenty of groundhogs around here. They're burrowing animals that hibernate, so are snug in their burrows now.

David Weinberg wrote a blog post a few days ago and I took his title. Here's a bit of what he wrote:

I mean by “We are the medium” something I think we all understand, although the old way of thinking keeps intruding. “We are the medium” means that, quite literally, we are the ones through whom information, messages, news, ideas, videos, and links of every sort move — and they move through this “channel” because we decide to move them. Someone sends me a link to a funny video. I tweet about it. You see it. You send a Facebook message to your friends. One of them (presumably an ancient) emails it to more friends. The video moves through us. Without us, the transport medium — the Internet — is a hyperlinked collection of inert bits. We are the medium.

With the events in Tunisia and now in Egypt I've been glued to the Internet. I don't really think of the links I post at Facebook as being particularly political, or controversial. I think of them more as "human interest" stories. Oh and lots of Youtube music videos. But people still read into my posts certain assumptions about my politics. Clearly the major social networking sites all have algorithms to peg me to, for example Twitter is happy to provide a list of people like me and their recommendations make a lot of sense.

Anyhow at Facebook I put up a half dozen or so link in re Egypt. It seemed as though I got quite a lot of pushback, essentially the message to the effect that I was awfully naive and perhaps stupid in my opinions. What struck me as strange was I hadn't really imagined that I was expressing opinions, but rather pointing to sites aggregating news and to a few posts by people with informed comments--yes including Juan Cole.

Meanwhile I was also posting the normal sort of "feature" articles. I posted a video of Orlando Napier singing Yesterday. I hadn't heard Napier before I read a blog post recounting a speaking engagement by Daniel Dennett in front of a gathering of Irish athesist. I linked to the post because a few of my Facebook friends are atheists and Dennett is a star player on their team. However the main reason for including the blog link along with the video link was I thought it interesting that Dennett had played recordings of Napier singing as an example of "secular Gospel" music. I thought it interesting that Dennett was apparently a fan of Napier's work. The whole notion of Dennett thinking "secular Gospel" music important and the the Irish crowd didn't like the sound much seemed a bit funny to me; a joke I thought might amuse some of my other American friends.

I'm reluctant to copy an old friend's comment here, or to name him. The comment itself is carefully couched, but I took the gist of it as a negative stereotype about Muslims. Later, the next day, I linked to a moving video of an Egyptian in England protesting outside the Egyptian consulate in London. My friend left a comment "Be careful what you wish for." that comment lead some more back and forth in re Egypt.

I's still trying to find some conservatives to love. It seems a useful exercise, but is slow going. There was lengthy report released recently by The Pew Center for People & the Press. One factoid from that is about 18% of Americans think of themselves as liberal. "Liberal" in American parlance has all sorts of meanings, some of which I would distance myself from. But in most contexts I cop to the term. Probably overall my views, which I hardly consider far left, are left of the views many American liberals hold. So I'm out there on the fringe, and sometimes I forget that.

Before the American invasion of Iraq I was at a party and the same friend who commented on my Facebook links and I had a somewhat contentious conversation about it. Now I was out, and I'm sure I was trying to be on my best behavior. I can rant on obscenely and my poor father has has endured those, although even then I do try to retrain myself. Anyhow it seems to me the way that discussion is remembered by other friends at the party is that I was fighting, and being impolite. And in the Facebook thread my friend warned me to stay "just this side of a fist fight."

I like that some friends my age are using Facebook now. It's something new, and the culture of Facebook is pretty nice. That's nice. But I think it a little strange that my old friends seem to have any idea how heated conversations on the Internet can be. Yes, I think they've heard of flame wars, but don't know. Good grief, I surely do disagree with my friend, but his standards of politeness seem awfully fragile to me.

It's very strange to think how people imagine me, especially based on links, based on what I point to on the Internet. Ah, but of course I'm th3e same way. I follow people on Twitter for example and construct some sense about them, however the more important thing seems to be whether what they say and point to seems interesting to me. All this rambling to make the banal point: if we are the message the old chestnut "Don't blame the messenger" really isn't such an obvious distinction nowadays.

My the argument I was pursing about the events in Egypt very roughly was to make the point that neo-liberalism was hitting the wall. Of course it may be the roughness of my argument, but it made little sense to my friend. This post by Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is polished and makes some points well that I only attempted to make. I doubt my friend would read it, but if you've gotten this far along in this post, I recommend it to you.

February is also Black History Month in the USA, another of our quaint customs. Cornell West tweeted on the first day of February:

Black people's struggle for freedom is the key to the moral and political history of the democratic experiment called America.

. Yep, that's why I don't think Black History Month silly at all; many Americans do think it silly.

Anyhow, tonight an Arab American tweeted that this video, a portion of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. last speech with a photo montage, was being shared widely by his Egyptian friends on Facebook this morning (The night was very violent in Egypt. And the Internet after being cut off in Egypt was just being restored.) "We Shall Overcome" moves me. Here's part of what King said used in the video, but the whole speech is worth reading:

I can still sing "We Shall Overcome."

We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

We shall overcome because Carlyle is right—"No lie can live forever."

We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right—"Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again."

We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right—as we were singing earlier today,

Truth forever on the scaffold,

Wrong forever on the throne.

Yet that scaffold sways the future.

And behind the dim unknown stands God,

Within the shadow keeping watch above his own.

With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair the stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

Irish atheists may not know what to make of "secular Gospel" music, but I think it's charming such a hard-headed atheist like Daniel Dennett thinks such a category is worthwhile. I suspect his relationship to this speech and others where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. refers to Gospel songs is one reason why. It's very moving that Egyptians after such hardship would rush to post the video this morning. "We Shall Overcome."

Steelers

Steelerbaby.com

I'm not sure how it happened, but I'm not a sports fan, and never was one. Nonetheless the local football franchise the Pittsburgh Steelers are headed into a big game on Sunday. It's a game against the New York Jets to determine the Conferencre Champion and who will go to the Super Bowl. It's sad that I'm so lost when it comes to football because the excitement around here is palpable.

Seven or eight years ago I went regularly to the African Student Association meetings at the University of Pittsburgh. A few of the friends I made there have stuck around this area but most have moved on. But it's fun to see on Facebook what big Steeler fans some of them are.

John Michael Greer has a recent post, The Onset of Catabolic Collapse. Catobolism is the breakdown of molecules, it's also the name used for wasting to death. Greer uses the notion of catabolic collapse to describe the process of empires falling, especially in connection to peak oil. Greer provides a very readable account of the process in the post and then makes a good point:

That being the case, the question is simply when to place the first wave of catabolism in America – the point at which crises bring a temporary end to business as usual, access to real wealth becomes a much more challenging thing for a large fraction of the population, and significant amounts of the national infrastructure are abandoned or stripped for salvage. It’s not a difficult question to answer, either.

The date in question is 1974.

Wow, he hits the nail on the head for people in the Pittsburgh area. The collapse of the steel industry here was huge and began right about then. More than two hundred thousand people were directly employed in the industry in the early 1970's in Allegheny County--where the city of Pittsburgh is--by 1980 there were less than five thousand employed. One of the results is there are Pittsburghers all over the country, they moved away to find employment. Lots of them are Steeler's fans to this day.

One of my brother's daughters is a huge Steeler fan. She's never lived in Pittsburgh and I bet that most of her school chums are Miami Dolphin fans. It's hard to account for it. My brother has a more normal interest in sports than I have, but he was never a rabid Steelers fan. My little niece could qualify as one though.

I was looking for a picture for this post and one way I was searching was to search photos marked as Creative Commons at Flickr. It was fun looking at the results, but I didn't find just the right picture. Lots of the pictures seemed related to particular people's experience. There were many pictures of new born babies dressed in Steeler branded clothing. We're maniacs around here for the Steelers. Wherever I've gone this week there have been folks dressed in Steeler clothing. The baby pictures at Flickr reminded me of Steeler Baby. It's a fun site to get the flavor of our town.

I have been reading up on conservatives. Nothing really to report yet, except my heart's not in it. One nice thing about enthusiasm for sports is that it seems to infect liberals and conservatives alike. Ha! And there's a certain working-class sensibility about the Steelers. People all over the USA are Steeler fans--probably many more loathe them. Still, tell someone anywhere in the USA you're a fan and it means something solid, maybe even a bit stodgy.

Go Steelers!

Update: The Pittsburgh Steelers defeat the New York Jets to become the 2011 American Football Conference Champions. The Steelers will face NFC Champions the Green Bay Packers in the 45th Super Bowl February 6, 2011 in Arlington, Texas.