My Latest Meta Blog

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Headnote: Meta means “about,” especially about a “higher order.” A meta blog post, then, would be a post about blogs in general, or, going beyond my specific blog essay, being “about” my blog.

Hello Reader,

Got blogs?

Introduction

Implications

Doctor Who and Customers

Footnotes

Introduction

Remember what blogs used to be like? Many people were less into leisurely reading, and more into frantically clicking, fearful of they knew not what. Not me, I never enjoyed “frantic.” Right from the start I blogged for focused readers.

Here’s a quote from the long running Whatever blog of John Scalzi from September 6, 2002, when blogs were still new:

There’s also the problem with the format of blogs, in terms of justifying their status as paid content. Most blogs are essentially agglomerations of links with short, functional commentary added; one reads the commentary, but it’s usually dependent on the link for context; if you don’t link, you’re missing half (or more) of the story. 

In this way, blogs represent a new kind of content: Conduit Content, in which the primary idea of the content is to lead to you somewhere else. 

This is opposed to Destination Content, the much more traditional brand of content, in which the primary idea of the content is to keep you engaged with the material at hand 

(This site, incidentally, deals primarily in destination content, which is one of the reasons I’m deeply ambivalent about it being called a blog, or me a blogger).

… I get it, Scalzi, I’m ambivalent too. As I said in my third meta blog, back in June of 2010, I’d rather be called an essayist than a blogger.

Implications

Of course I don’t do links—because I have standards! “No links is good links” is the title of one of my “top ten” essays, by hit count, archived back in July 2012.

Yup, standards: I would have been peeved with myself if I had started my new blog site back in 2009 and (a) rushed to talk for a whole essay about me, or (b) if I had rushed to talk “about blogs” in higher, meta terms. Instead, I thought I needed to earn the rights to (a) and (b) by writing lots of real essays first. 

In 2018 I still don’t “self indulge” by talking about me or blogs except at clear intervals. Specifically, at intervals of filling my “web administrator’s page” of 25 titles. I get a kick out of how I crank out a new essay title every week. Writing is hard, commitment still harder.

Now it’s been another 25. Well, what can I say, this time around? Like other blog templates, the one I use, blogspot, hosted by google, has buttons at the bottom for readers to press, such as “like” (G+) and “links to social media.” That’s nice, eh? I don’t do social media myself, but I guess the buttons are nice for others.

The “missing button” is one for readers to “click below to subscribe” to get e-mail alerts every time I post another essay. I guess that would be nice, even though I post weekly.

(Note: I have recently added such a feature, although without buttons)

First question: Would I ever use an e-mail button myself? No, I prefer to crowd my desktop with“favorite buttons” like dials on a pilot’s console.

Next question: Would anyone else care? I think Minkee Robinson, a local published author, once told me she couldn’t find an e-mail button on my site, but no one else has mentioned it.

Last question: Would I care… about missing out on getting more viewers? This question gives me a beautiful chance to segue (slide) into a new part of this essay. 

(If you are reading this at your leisure, as I hope you are, you may feel free to go for a Second Cup (Registered Trademark) and then return here)

Doctor Who and Customers

Go to the Who Store, 30 minutes by tube out of Central London, and you may see a manager my age in pink futuristic clothing out of the 1970’s British TV show UFO. What you won’t see is a young clerk wearing black freaky disrespectful-to-others clothing. Why? Because if even five per cent of customers are turned off, well, that’s five per cent less profit, and if the profit margins are very slim, well… who needs to go into the red just to support a disrespectful young person’s freedom of expression?

As for the Doctor Who show, there must be more than five per cent of viewers who are not fans… —I know, that’s so hard to imagine!— 

And truly the BBC goes after those marginal viewers with a full effort, as in, for example, stupidly showing scenes from next week’s episode, so fans like me have to close their eyes, plug their ears and feel with their elbow for the mute button.

Speaking of buttons, either for muting… or for e-mail subscriptions for the sake of the “five per cent” of my viewers who barely like my blog… well let’s add a zero: Because those folks who “barely like” are in fact “50 per cent” at least: surely the “majority.” God bless them. 

It’s all good. I have never promoted my blog. No special buttons. No scenes of next week’s post, no gratuitous jokes, and no beach pictures of my young lovely baby sister, perhaps standing next to her blond 28 year old daughter.

Forget bells, whistles, and fish swimming across the page.

For my blog I just want to write. No egotistically collecting viewer stats. (Hit counts) No paid content, or trying to impress potential advertisers, and no linking to fool search engines. Besides, every time I mention an archived essay, without linking, I know from my stats that very few will go and look. … It’s all good.

See you next week!

Sean Crawford

On the lone prairie,

2018

Footnotes: (Again, reading as a leisure activity, you may go grab a tea now)

~My previous 25th blog was A Blog Interview with Me archived August 2017

~Can I discern who visits my site? No, not unless they have a home made web site. Ordinary blog templates are anonymous.

~It’s a small world: Minkee (Hermine) Robinson and I both have short stories published in an anthology out of England, The Baby Shoes Project.

~Regarding that lady in UFO pink, I dwell on the casualties of time’s arrow and war, and the old show UFO where an outrider was killed, in my essay Outriders and UFOs archived October 2014

~I have a statistics (stats) feature, very crude because it’s free, showing the “top ten only” for post hits, sources, and nations: Recorded for the day, week, month, and “all time.” 

Hence I know that No Links is Good Links is in my top ten of all time. (July 2012) My most hits ever? The Death of Buffy, back in January 2012. My one on Anya, Friend of Buffy, only got a normal number of hits. (April 2014) Maybe to get hits I should have titled it The Death of Anya. (If you only want to see her death part, click on the last Youtube music video link in the essay)

Hey, I wasn’t “blabbing,” when I revealed Buffy dies. Her death is foreshadowed right from the first episode, and again when she overhears the only two grown men in her life discussing how her death is prophesied. She confronts them, right after she hears her fate, in this dramatic Youtube clip.

Similarly, when a certain young companion on Doctor Who dies she foreshadows it for us, “This is the day I died” in a voiceover at the very beginning of the episode. That way we would not be so shocked, even though her death scream was so loud. (They say you could hear her all through the BBC studio) She was sadly missed. You can find fan clips on Youtube of other characters referring to her down the years.

~More fun with stats: For my essay about a housewarming, where the three residents are a virtuous gay woman and a straight couple living in sin, (July 2011) I keep getting hits from India. I guess Indian students have a school assignment to write a composition on housewarming parties. So in the comments I noted that an important man with an Indian name, the Prime Minister of Ireland, is a homosexual. 

He came out “of the closet” casually during a radio talk show, six months before the election, and still got into power. Of interest to students? Maybe not. No student ever adds to the comments. And no student clicks on my label for “gay,” either.

Silicon Teenagers

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Preface quotes:

From memory, a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson from the age of steam trains: “A man ought to be able to spend three hours alone in an empty train station with nothing to read, and not be bored.”

A teenage girl in the age of mobile devices: “All they had was black-and-white TV, so they probably sat around and conversed all the time.” (p. 23, below)

Hello Reader

Recently I got through an entire novel without realizing it was written in present tense.

And I hate present tense!

I thought I would share this delightful book with you… if you have patience.

I was in my early twenties when I began going to a downtown used bookstore and buying young adult (YA) fiction about high school life. My own high school years were partly spent trying to understand the other kids; I don’t know if I ever got inside their heads. (I left home after 11^th grade, so “that was it” for knowing students) Compared to others I was too independent, reading beyond my years, and very poor. By poor I mean: Luckily, other kids would always leave pieces of soap in the locker room showers, as I couldn’t afford any of my own.

Sitting in class, I would hear announcements for the after school meetings of the “tab” and “scholastic book” club. The kids would meet to order YA books not available in stores, not in those days. Today I wonder, for an instant, what it would have been like for me, if I too had an allowance and could meet with fellow book-lovers? Of course the popular kids didn’t read, nor did the regular kids, nor did the unsafe black-clothed kids—the club would have been an oasis of pastel harmless kids. Never mind.

Can you guess what I missed, not being a scholastic club member? Easy: What I discovered, in the old bookstore, was how old YA books constantly had the same theme: It was OK to be an individual, instead of (unconsciously) busting a gut to conform. Yes! I had always thought so myself, but in my teen society, where there were no meetings for “consciousness raising,” I would have been a “minority of one” to say so out loud. How nice to feel validated, even if by writers who were grownups, after I was already a grownup too.

In my day we said, “The older generation just doesn’t understand!” We were unique, or so we thought.

“Adolescence is the same tragedy being performed again and again. The only things that change are the stage props.” (p. 284) The speaker is a grandmother in the YA book Going Vintage. I found it in hardcover at the library. (Copyright 2013) The end flap shows the author as a cheerful, young-looking Lindsey Levitt, who lives “in the quaint little hamlet of Las Vegas.” Her wit springs out on every page. The first person narrator is witty too, yet perfectly normal for her age group—OK, she’s almost smart like a teen that reads. A hilarious teen. 

On page one Mallory is “making out”—such a great way to hook a teen audience. Before the end of the chapter Mallory discovers her long-term boyfriend is cheating on her! With a cyber love interest! Whom he loves more than her! So she dumps him and “goes vintage.” This means that for the two weeks that pass in the novel—“only two weeks” is excellent: for a fast pace, for good comedy, and, perhaps, for the attention span of today’s young readers—Mallory cuts herself off from all electronic devices older than the 1960’s. She has enough self-preservation to know that her conformist peers wouldn’t understand, so she keeps her project confidential, getting lines like: Did you lose your phone? Did your dad cut you off, like mine did for over-texting?

Part of Mallory’s motivation for going vintage is rediscovering something that I have felt all my life: Nostalgia for the fifties and early nineteen sixties. I still remember the slogan at the bottom of the movie poster (the close up on two teens hugging) for American Graffiti. “Where were you in ’62?” Well, Mallory discovers a box of high school stuff from her grandmother, who was in school during that very year! Meaning she was “born in 1946,” meaning she was one of the much bigger kids when I was growing up. (As you know, the war ended in 1945—my dad didn’t have to stay to occupy Germany because he was one of the first to enlist, back in 1939) Nope, I don’t “feel old” at all—I just feel weird.

Today, of course, if a schoolteacher asked her class what it would be like for everyone to be without their cell phones, a howl of dismay would rise up: Unthinkable! I don’t suppose I quite understand, but Going Vintage has sure helped. Think of it as a sociology report from the inside. Of course the narrator is unreliable, but that’s half the fun. Here’s a world where the school rumor mill is online—even Mallory’s own mother thinks that he dumped her—and the social media comments can be ill-informed and downright beastly. Here, says Mallory, people “check their phone every three minutes,” can use their phone at lunch to check the on-line (!) Student Handbook, and they find computers to be a faster, easier better way to do reports than using library books.

You can do a lot with a phone:

“… so I lock up and wait the last half hour for Mom. If I had a phone, I could text her and tell her to come early. Or I could call a friend, play a game, look up information on my history paper. I could do something besides sit on a curb with absolutely nothing to do. Freak, I don’t even have music to listen to.”

Somehow, Mallory survives:

“… and the breeze holds the promise of fall. Sunrise this morning, sunset tonight. That’s twice in one day that I’m outside like this, just sitting, breathing, waiting, watching, without my fingers tapping out something on my phone.

Now if only I had some soap or wood to whittle. Super-vintage.”

A boy calls the landline of our unreliable narrator with her blind spots. “Actually, I was just kind of calling…I was just calling to talk,” Oliver says. “If you have time.”

Mallory thinks: “This is weird. No one just calls to talk. My friends and I don’t even talk on the phone much anymore, not unless it’s something that can’t be addressed by text.” (p. 210)

Like I said, unreliable. I can’t believe 21^st century teenagers don’t still burn up the virtual telephone line for hours. My friend Jack used to walk down to a payphone to get privacy for long calls to his girl …Come to think of it, my own long conversations were after I was in the real world, when my young peers were hard for me to meet up with in person.

Like all the good YA book of my youth, the topic of conformity is addressed:

“I step back from the cart, both embarrassed and enthralled. I thought Oliver was trying hard before, but now I realize it’s quite the opposite—he doesn’t try, he just is, makes up his mind and doesn’t check if it’s going to work for his image or come off wrong. Since the rest of us are being so self-aware, his presence seems calculated. No one can possibly be that breezy, saying what he thinks, feeling what he feels. I can see why people don’t like him for this very reason—it’s so much easier to call him a poser.

Because if he’s the real deal, then that makes the rest of us fakes.” (p. 180)

I can relate to the boy. For a few years I coped by having a binary view of the world: a) those who were real, and b) the majority where I chose to keep a low profile because I didn’t want to hurt their feelings, or be a spoil-sport for their conformist world-view. It took energy to have to know my own strength, which could be annoying for me; nevertheless I would strive to be kind. During my thirties, I noticed something: all my friends were former geeks. They were the interesting ones. Today, luckily, most people my age have relaxed into being real. Regrettably, some never will.

Sean Crawford

City of Chestermere

June

2017

Footnotes:

~I’ve noticed the kids in YA books overwhelmingly tend to be middle class (summer camps, Disney land) but I’m not about to be some politically correct crybaby over it.

~I first stumbled onto my favorite web-essayist while I was lurking among a circle of Live Journal bloggers after one of them linked for the others: Paul Graham did an essay on teen conformity while pondering Why nerds are unpopular.

~I hope one-day people will link to an essay of mine, too. Actually, one week thousands linked to my essay on The Death of Buffy. (Archived January 2012) But that hasn’t happened again, not even to my recent, (experimental-with-Youtube-videos) essay on Anya, Friend of Buffy. (April 2017) Well, in the last couple years I haven’t been translated, either: perhaps because social media has long superseded the popularity of blogs.

~In my adult life I have known a few folks who couldn’t do a guided meditation exercise without giggling. Their laughter was a reflex. What I didn’t quite grasp back in high school was how so many of us used laughter as an instant reflex to cope with any sort of tenseness. Now I truly get it. Incidentally, I yawn as I do stretching exercises for modern dance or drama: no doubt my own “reflex” from trying to stay relaxed into my stretches back when I was first truly learning how.

I’m not the only writer to have pondered laughter: Going Vintage has an insightful paragraph on p. 105, but I won’t quote it out of context: Some suspense is good for you!

Anya, Friend of Buffy

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello reader,

Got a past?

Got time for music videos?

I composed this hoping you would view each video link as I present it.

Youtube note: For Youtube, by clicking on the open square in the bottom right of the little picture (it appears when you move your cursor) you can expand it to take up your entire screen. You may press the “esc” (escape) key to go back to normal.

Spoiler warning: It’s been 20 years since Buffy the Vampire Slayer first aired, but if you still plan to finally watch it someday then be warned: This essay is like the forward to an English literature book—revealing Anya’s story.

Yesterday I was musing; for some reason I thought of Anya, a pretty blond who joins the gang partway through the Buffy series… Wha—? Truth hit me like a blow. Suddenly I understood Anya in a way I hadn’t before, not even after seeing that entire TV series twice.

Tonight I’m thinking sadly of Anya. She always wears nice, bright cotton clothing. Never hiding behind clothing too-sexy, or clothing too-big, or clothing matte black. If you have come across Anya on Youtube, it’s probably for her tearful monologue from trying to understand the death of Joyce. Of course Anya is troubled: Although born human, for over a thousand years Anya lived among “vengeance demons,” as a demon herself. After so long she has even forgotten her last name, she’s forgotten about mortality. How innocent she is. Here’s the link. 

Anya is newly human—a naïve human. At the TV script level, I mistakenly thought she was a comic relief, the person to state the obvious, to see the elephant in the room that everyone else was closing their eyes to. An “elephant,” as you know, is a metaphor for something people “agree” not to face, such as, say, the addiction of a scary father. Buffy, of course, is a show where monsters are often metaphors for scary people in real life. Anya, over a thousand years ago, survived a relationship, but at the price, I’m sure, of becoming a vengeance demon. 

Anya's story, I now realize, represents people who don’t recover. Not everybody makes it.  

Until feminism came along during my youth, domestic horror was often an elephant: Sometimes it still is, along with child abuse and photographing undressed children. Sometimes, as if the elephant has turned invisible, it’s not unknown for powerless women and children to “go into denial.” Back in the 1970’s, our whole society was in denial. That’s when believers in women’s liberation began their kitchen “consciousness raising” meetings. Remember? They strove to help each other discover “unbelievable” things they and their society hadn’t been ready to face. They de-cloaked words like “sexism.” At the same time, even after their consciousness raising, according to someone who was at those meetings, child pornography rings were not on anyone’s kitchen radar screen…

While Anya would not have called herself a feminist, for over a thousand years she protected women, granting their wishes for something bad to happen to their powerful abusers. Heads chopped off? Entrails pulled out? A vengeance demon can do that for you.

Being newly human, Anya can be as self-absorbed as a child, innocently hurting people’s feelings—but never on purpose. Buffy Summers and the rest of the nerdy “Scooby Gang” accept her as a friend who, like them, is never mean to anybody.

Anya has a queer flaw: a morbid fear of bunnies. For example, she’s tearfully upset one day when “some twisted person” has left a stuffed bunny in the old basement. One Halloween, when her friends dress scary, Anya costumes in a furry baggy onesie as a rabbit, complete with big ears. A friend sits beside her: “That’s scary?” She answers softly, “It’s scary to me.”

In the Buffy musical episode where something has is enspelled everyone into singing, and while the Scooby Gang is theorizing about who or what that something is, Anya rocks out, “Bunnies! It must be bunnies!” Funny to us, not to Anya. Here’s the link. 

What Anya (no maiden name) wants is what any young lady would want: to settle down with the love of a good man. She is happy to be engaged to her live-in lover. She and him sing about their relationship having things that “I’ll never tell.”  Here’s the link. 

To understand Anya, I think of alcoholics. Many addicts in Alcoholics Anonymous, AA, believe they are only one day away from relapsing into the “stinkin’ thinkin’” that leads to the “drinkin’.” Meaning: their denial and addiction. As I understand it, addicts don’t go straight until they perceive their insanity, accept responsibility, and atone. Every issue of the monthly AA Grapevine begins with a person’s story of the drinking years, presumably to remind herself of “how it was.” So readers won’t forget their insanity.

But Anya has forgotten. As for Buffy and the others, nobody around Anya notices how queer her innocence is. I saw a brief scene—unknown to her friends—from long ago when Anya was first human, back in her Viking days, a scene where bunny rabbits rested and gently hopped on the shelves of her thatched cottage: She picked one up and kissed it. I thought quietly: “That doesn’t make sense.” But moving pictures allow no time for reflection; I brushed aside my doubts as the scene changed to another day.

How can a person have been a vengeance killer, and then NOT have remorse, take responsibility, and atone? Atonement is what addicts call “making amends.” The show Buffy the Vampire Slayer understands this: Offstage, a former vampire slayer named Faith has recovered from her ego-filled darkness. She’s a convict in the state prison. Even though Faith has the super-power to leap over her prison wall, she won’t. Faith accepts “doing time” as part of accepting her responsibility. Supporting her is a vampire named Angel, with a new soul, who is himself atoning for his previous two centuries of soulless evil. He is, in Faith’s words from AA, her “sponsor,” meaning: the person further along “in recovery,” who helps her stay on the path.

Anya is different. She doesn’t go “straight and clean,” not really. Because she stays in denial, untouched by her centuries of vengeance. How? By fleeing from truth into innocence… The terrifying bunnies? Here’s what I now understand: They are her distraction, her substance abuse, her mental defence—Better to fear bunnies than face her bloody past.

Again, the Buffy show is a metaphor for how people may react in real life. I know. For I know my own fearful dear Anya.  

Anya loses her lover—she cries to heaven from her gut. Her friends try to sympathize, but none of them have walked in her darkness. None know how to be her sponsor—and Anya doesn’t even realize she needs one.

In time, she relapses to her dark side. Vengeance. Anya just can’t stop herself from reaching for a sword and stabbing abusers again… and so someone else has to stop her— her friend Buffy. They meet; they fight. A lost girl sings her last song. Here’s the link. 

It’s sad… how I obviously have my own dark blots of denial, since it took me so long, right up until a moment of musing, to understand the bunnies—I forgot my own Anya. Tonight I shall pour a glass of red wine, I shall grieve for her and me and all the lost children.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

April

2017

Footnotes:

~ Part of addressing the gender “power imbalance” was feminists teaching traditional ladies how they could avoid the horrid label of being “aggressive,” while being something new under the sun: “assertive.” Remember?

~If a former abuser is having trouble turning over a new leaf, if he or she is baffled as somehow they keep reverting to saying not-nice things, then a mantra for a new lifestyle is: “If it’s not nurturing, then it’s abusive.” Seldom is there a neutral middle ground.

~Andrew Vachss, the writer with the eye patch, has a book series about an ex-convict who fights child abuse. If the first book in the series seems a little dated, that’s because it is. Vasch couldn’t get published for years because no editor would believe there could be such a thing as a child abuse ring of grown men and women, secretly living among us.

~I like TV nerds. I wrote Silence and Three Nerd Heroes, archived May 2013. Also, I wrote about two fictional screen characters in my essay Two Imaginary People archived December 2012.

~Today I linked to Youtube—but not to improve my SEO, (Search Engine Optimization) and not from any ignoble motivation to increase my web traffic: Traffic? Who cares?

Part of the reason I seldom present Web links on a silver platter, not even to my own essays, is that I once, by request —but not a “polite proper sentence” request, only a “stupid sentence fragment” instead— made some links for fans of the (Joss) Whedonesque site, only to realize too late I was casting pearls before swine.  Je regrete. (Archived January 2012)