Commentary on One to One Conversations

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got one on one conversations?

I wrote to Derek Sivers, commenting on his 44 hours of being interviewed. (link) Who is he? See the beginning of any interview.

Dear Derek,

Greetings from the best half of North America.

You liked conversing with an Olympian who said, “I do not hang out;” you very much preferred one on one conversations;  when a fellow would surprise you, at a scheduled get together for you and him, by showing up with friends, you would be so disappointed. I can relate.

Commentary

I’ve noticed that when a few people in conversation are interrupted, no one picks up the old conversation thread. I guess because they were merely “hanging out.”

The problem with small social groups? For me? I have to politely go by the “slowest ship in the convoy” regarding vocabulary, intimacy, frivolity and so forth.

As for good group socializing: A young lady confided to me that she despaired of talking too much in the bar. This would be—people varied from week to week—after our campus Toastmasters Club meetings. Despaired. 
I advised her that I secretly count heads, do division, and then only talk my fair share of the time. One day she looked so happy to tell me, "Your advice really worked!"

One afternoon, there I am in the bar with two not-so-young ladies. One has a fiance whom I had never met. The topic was so cool! Intimate and interesting! The fiance enters the bar, walks up, and —like something out of a feminist caricature— he abruptly speaks several flat sentences, as an oblivious centre of attention, hijacks the conversation, and the topic is gone like smoke. I lost a lot of respect for the man, and I was not surprised, when I met the lady only a few years later, to learn she had divorced.

To prevent hijacks, whenever one is late to bars, convention seminars or in everyday life, it helps to remember the old Chinese proverb: “When you go outdoors, look at the weather; when you go indoors, look at the faces.”

I can tell you who truly prefers to converse, as opposed to hanging out or relaxing: 
The social crowd of young 1930’s Paris intellectuals including 

(“but not limited to,” my lawyer hastens to add) 

Simone De Beauvoir and her boy friend, Jean Paul Sartre. I suppose sometimes the whole gang arrived in a group to a big cafe. Simone explains in her memoir something that amazed the cafe manager, given that her friends all knew each other: 

When a pair of people were talking, 

(Of course the pairs would mix and match from day to day) 

and another pair came in, the second pair would find their own table, as would the next pair too. Easily explained: They all relished one on one conversations.

As I found in Derek Siver's notes on the book Geography of Genius: “We’re not talking about conversation as a form of entertainment. We’re talking about conversation as the piling up of premises leading to a conclusion. We’re talking about conversation that takes an issue forward, conversation as a way of getting somewhere.”

I am writing to supportively say that you and I are not the only ones to seek Paris friends. I for one am still seeking.

Sean Crawford
Note: My new blog, at seanessay.com, has an expanded draft of this posted October 2020.

June 2020

Warm Fuzzy Comments

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got warm fuzzy comment?

Just as modern readers may enjoy a two page “flash fiction” as much as a normal short story, so too may I offer a careful web comment as if it were a “flash essay.” Hence my best writing is often my comments on other people’s blogs. Queerly, I never make copies for myself as souvenirs, instead, I let all my darlings rush away like sparkling salmon in the stream.

Recently another-commenter replied to my comment. This time with a difference: He took my words and made a poem!

The blog was by novelist John Scalzi, called Whatever. Scalzi’s post was entitled Behold My Drinks Fridge (August 29, 2019) It included a photograph of his second refrigerator being turned into a “beer cooler.” There were—get this—scores and scores of comments in the thread. My first comment is below. My second comment was a short one: “As of Saturday midmorning…” and then just before I hit the “post” button, I hit the “return” key to add:

“Strange: Nobody’s written a poem yet.”

As for ‘no poem,’ a couple comments later were my own words, sent back to me:

QUOTE

Kevin McLeod Bailey says:

AUGUST 31, 2019 AT 12:56 PM

Sean:

Are you sure?

As of

Saturday midmorning

I count

125 comments

about

a humble refrigerator

With all

due respect to world peace

sometimes

the simple pleasures

are what

we talk about.

UNQUOTE

Now, that’s a warm fuzzy.

Say, dear reader, as salmon swim away in the stream, in case you’re curious, my first comment was: 

QUOTE

Sean Crawford says:

AUGUST 29, 2019 AT 8:25 PM

Nostalgia: Only a few years ago, as a tourist, I visited a regional dump serving three towns, it was just like the dump of my childhood (In the city we use garbage cans) Chatting with the old gate shack guy, he explained that a fellow comes around with a rod to suck out the (R-14?) from all the refrigerators, as an environmental thing, protecting the ozone layer.

In my own big city dump, the young guy at the gate won’t let you in unless your vehicle has a load to drop off. Those are his orders.

As for refrigerators, sometimes, like Philip K. Dick reaching for a light bulb string that isn’t there, I wait for my refrigerator to go click when I close the door. But no, it’s all magnets now. As a boy our fridge had a round plastic handle on the inside, (cool!) so a trapped child could get back out.

Here on the Great Plains, nearly all my city’s streets were laid down after ice boxes were no longer needed. A fellow in my toastmasters club did a speech explaining the new fangled technology behind his modern “beer cooler.”

UNQUOTE

EPILOGUE 

Regarding comments being read, and being Noticed:

Recently (September 2019) I sent an e-mail to a world famous blogger, Derek Sivers.

You may wonder: 

If Derek gets hundreds of comments for most of his posts, (sometimes six or seven hundred) 

then is there any use in commenting? Would he ever notice little-old-me or you?

Sure he would. I e-mailed Derek, to warn that his mass mail out wasn’t reaching everyone. Part of his reply included:

“…Good to hear from you. Thanks again for your comments on the blog. I see and appreciate them all. :-)”

I guess the overall lesson for today’s post, coming from a poet-commenter and a big blogger, is that everything we do gets noticed, at some level. 

Sean Crawford

On the romantic rolling prairie,

September 2019,

Posted April 2020

How You Learn

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Have you seen JoJo Rabbit, the current Oscar-nominated movie about the boy in the Hitler Youth? Two men I knew separately here in town were in the Youth, and so was my favorite business writer—luckily he left Germany before the war broke out.

Hello Reader,

Got an idea how you learn?

Prologue 

As faithful readers know: Of course I like being self-indulgent by writing a post about me or my blog, but only after I have filled up a full page of 25 weekly essay titles. Well, today marks another 25.

How You Learn

So, how are you managing your life? Are you becoming ever better, ever learning more about yourself and your business or hobby? Let’s not expect too much. My old telephone answering machine went, “If you know what you are doing, leave a message. If not, join the club.” Every caller, laughing, was already in the club.

Originally, the word “managing” meant “coping.” If today the meaning has shifted, if today we instinctively put the word “business” in front of “management” then it’s because my favorite business writer of all time quit his job during the middle of the Great Depression. There he was, a successful Wall Street analyst, when he asked himself: “Do I want to be the richest man in the cemetery?” In other words, was he living his values? That man was Peter Drucker. 

He went on to make the “practise of management” something that could be learned and taught, and caused universities to start up a faculty of Commerce, (business) because his observations and writings fell between the domains of Economics and Sociology—a new faculty was needed. Drucker’s first book was The End of Economic Man, with a forward by a German friend who wanted to “burn his bridges” against the Nazis. Drucker’s first famous book was The Concept of the Corporation where he interpreted General Motors, with it’s separate divisions, as being unlike historical companies such as, say, Ford. (Apparently Henry Ford didn’t want maximum independence and leadership in his managers, instead seeing them as his helpers) 

I have read everything by Drucker I can get my hands on, including his memoirs. 

(Wherein I found a smoking gun from his compatriot Henry Kissinger documenting that the U.S. government was secretly causing inflation)

We can’t all be a Peter Drucker, but just as he did, each of us can live, look and learn.

If for today’s post I write about styles of learning then it’s not for my ego, but because I have something interesting things to say… and because, according to Drucker, I am learning the way Sir Winston Churchill did—I’ll get back to Churchill.

But first: Right now the local bookstore is carrying On Managing Yourself, as part of a Harvard Business School series of books, each book with ten top articles on a given topic. Unsurprisingly, the first article in the book was by Drucker, called—such a classic title—“Managing Oneself.” Everybody knows that a manager or Chief Executive Officer has to be—to quote a cliche—“a lifelong learner.” Where Drucker surprised me was when he said that many people “don’t know how they learn.”  But they should.

President John F. Kennedy learned by reading. He would have his agents prepare written reports for him: Think of the brilliant writers in Camelot, and of John Kenneth Galbraith writing letters (now published) back from foreign embassies to educate JFK. 

President Harry S Truman learned by hearing: Think of his cronies playing poker in the White House as part of his “kitchen cabinet.” 

Drucker reports about a CEO who “… was in the habit of calling his entire senior staff into his office once a week and then talking at them for two or three hours…he simply needed an audience to hear himself talk. That’s how he learned.” A successful CEO, I might add.

Reading Drucker, years ago, I wondered: Am I a reader or a listener? I only found out when I was middle aged at university. Around that time, my company Vice President told me I was an “oral learner.” One day in class it was my turn, for my small group, to teach us a seminar:  There I was, just talking away about Thomas Paine, when suddenly a lady burst out: “(I just realized) You’re an oral learner! My LD kids talk like you!” (Learning Disability) A useful mirror, since I can’t see myself. 

No wonder I would study in the student bar by "talking" to myself, pretending I was explaining something. I guess I’m like Drucker’s CEO. And of course my speeches for Toastmasters are composed not at a desk but while walking along talking. (silently) As I explained in my essay about Hacking Together a Speech, archived November 2018.

As for essays and speeches, Paul Graham, like me, enjoys doing both. Unlike me, he is a famous web essayist and keynote speaker. Graham believes a grown up’s essay, unlike the ones schoolboys write, does NOT start out with a topic sentence to be proved, but as something flowing along where you don’t know everything yet. You write the essay to find out something new.

I don’t know whether Winston Churchill composed his speeches by just flowing along the way I do. What I do know blows me away: According to Drucker, during his schoolboy days Winston got poor marks, as did others who shared his learning trait: Churchill learned in a way not recognized by the education system—not by reading, and not by listening in class. He learned by writing. And today? The boy who did so poorly in school now has his writing studied by students of composition. (I have yet to write as well as he)

Knowing this about Churchill sheds new light on some of my blog essays. For example, for my essay comparing Trust and Ugly Americans. (Archived September 2019) I didn’t realize how being an Ugly Americans meant not trusting the natives, (Such as Iraqis) nor truly understand the individual I wrote about, (even though I had worked with him) not until after I had left the job and then wrote my essay. How strange.

Epilogue: 

I see I have managed to work this essay around to me and my blog. How sweet.

During the next 25 weeks I’ll listen and read as always. And, if I truly want to learn, then I’ll also speak and write. At long last, after another 25 titles, I may be self indulgent by writing about me and my blog, reporting on what I’ve learned during those precious weeks.

Sean Crawford

Central London

February

2010

Note: 

My last meta-blog essay (following 25 posts) was Summer Blog Reflections, archived August 2019.

Reference:

On Managing Yourself, Harvard Business Review Press, Boston Massachusetts

The About the Contributors list has a line:

Peter Drucker was a professor of social science and management at Claremont Graduate University in California.

To my fellow writers: 

As a self-respecting adult, today I couldn’t bear to use a typical schoolboy “in conclusion” ending.

As for my seminar research about Thomas Paine, I repackaged it and sold it as a feature article to Falstaff's Table: We writers re-use everything we can. 

Paul Graham’s long list of essays includes three about writing essays.

The one I reference is Age of the Essay (link)

 (The other two are The list of n Things; Persuade xor Discover; plus one on Writing, briefly) 

For President Kennedy, his middle initial has a period because it stands for Fitzgerald.

For President Truman, his middle initial has no period because it doesn’t stand for anything.

I have copied a part of Churchill’s composition word for word, like an art student copying a master. Alas, I’m still a journeyman.

To my fellow readers:

I am so pleased to have collected various big volumes by Churchill from various antique stores. Not abridged! 

One of Churchill’s chapters is about his days among daring young men and their flying machines. Mechanical problems were common, forcing you to land at another aerodrome and motor your way back to the one where your young peers are wining and dining after their own harrowing flights. The best aviator of them all, one evening, wasn’t there. But there had been no reports of a crash on land. They waited, candles burned down, and at last they realized the truth… The abridged paperback ends: “He flew forever beyond mortal ken.”

Back-trail of Essays and Blogs

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Do you like broccoli? 

Here is an essay that, like the "broccoli movie" Ghandi, is "good for you."

Tis a nostalgia piece, a re-run, from back when blogs could be substantial like the articles in Sunday newspapers. Whatever happened to those days?

But first, a new headnote, from the blog of Seth Godin for October 26, 2019:

If we only forward the easy, short and funny things we read online, why are we surprised that our inbox is filled with nothing we’ll remember tomorrow?

What would happened if instead, we shared the most complex, useful and thoughtful things we discovered instead?

Here it is, my 75^th post. My astute readers will have noticed that for every 25 “postings” I do a piece explaining essays. I say “posting,” not “blog,” because hey, I’m not a blogger: I’m an essayist. But today I'll try to explain blogs too.

When telling people I have a hobby of writing, I merely say I write “nonacademic” essays, and leave it at that. I couldn’t begin to explain in just a sound bite how the essays school kids learn to write are—ahem!— for kids. In the wider world essays start out with different goals and functions, and of course follow different forms. Open any magazine and see: An adult essay never ends with “in conclusion;” it very seldom begins with a topic sentence as a thesis to be “proven.” Such writing would be “bad form.”

I’ve heard that essays in The New Yorker will begin by meandering along and then finally, at the bottom of the first page, announce the topic. This form allows busy New Yorkers, in their fast-paced city, a nice chance to stop rushing… and fix on something that rewards an adult attention span. I wish internet blogs were simularly aimed at adults.

It was a guy with a decent attention span, Paul Graham, who inspired me to do my own internet essays. Graham noted, in his Age of the Essay, that the internet had existed for a few years before people figured out they could use it for blogs. (web log or public diary, with people's comments) His hope was that soon people would figure out they could use it for essays too. This hasn’t happened yet, and I’m losing hope it ever will. So far, no one else writes wide ranging essays like Graham, while my number of bookmarked essayists I can count on the fingers of one hand—not including my thumb. 

I was at university when personal computers arrived for the public—but not for the university, not yet. Computers weren’t quite an everyday topic of conversation for people, not nearly as often as when color TVs or 10-speeds arrived, but still there was a trace of the old “left out” feeling if you didn’t have one. Naturally, among us starving students, only the nerds were motivated enough to get one. After all, a computer cost more than a used car.

I remember, back then, being at a seminar of people from Strategic Studies. Some one asked why armies still had those big expensive all-too-vulnerable tanks. I quipped, “Tanks are like personal computers: Everyone knows you should have them… but no one knows quite what to do with them.” As for computers, what we did with them was do household accounts, write letters, address envelopes and, uh… mostly guys resorted to playing computer games like Space Invaders.

At last came the World Wide Web. Meanwhile, at the university, at this time, there was a very long hallway, enclosed from the elements, running along the entire back length of the physical education building. I was probably the only one to notice that, on a campus of eager helpful opinionated young scholars, no one had posted anything at all. And of course no one posted “comment threads” of replies. 

Soon the nerds began “surfing” and their word entered our vocabulary. But many students still preferred to put their money on a car. At this time the student radio station magazine, Vox, ran a skeptical editorial. The editor noted that guys who wouldn’t be comfortable in a bathing suit were preaching the joy of surfing to find out, say, how to fix their bicycle. From his cozy music hangout amidst a crowded friendly campus the editor’s question was: Can’t I reach out to living people to ask how to fix a bike?

Today, when everyone knows computers are a Good Thing, the reply to that music-loving editor would be, “Yes but—…there’s so much stuff out there.” 

“Yes, I know I should get out and mingle with people, but…” 

“Yes, I know I have all the social skills of a zombie, but that’s why I honestly prefer to stay at the computer playing zombie wars.”

I have sympathy but no answers. I have no idea as to when the line is crossed: When does being in a cybernetic community of bloggers, with words on my cold backlit screen, become an escape from my real local community? I am reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s image of a dog stopping by a sidewalk vending machine so a cybernetic arm could come out and pet him. 

As for me, I too like to escape. Sometimes I escape away from reading stuff I will long remember, away from essays or that zombie book World War Z, (which I recommend) into reading fluffy forget-me-right-away blogs. “Yes, but— why do blogs seem to outnumber essays by a zillion to one?”

Because: Essays take more effort. I think of that long phys ed hallway. I guess it follows logically that people who wouldn’t make the effort to post with real paper onto a big hallway won’t make any effort for essays even when they finally have access to a computer. Contrawise, the non-college folks who wouldn’t normally write anything, the folks who, before telephone rates were de-regulated, (lowered) would rather make awfully expensive long-distance-phone-calls than write letters, will now write a blog.

* * *

I like young university students. At the same time, being middle-aged, and having been raised working class, I have an old blue-collar perspective. I’m aware that during the 1950’s the “slicks” were fast disappearing. These were the magazines with slick pages giving the world such things as True Romance and True Confessions. My waitress Sue, who reads pretty slowly when she reads aloud, would have liked them. She loves her Stephen King, but the other stuff? She can get it from television.

Yes, TV killed the slicks, and it killed the pulps too. Sue doesn’t blog herself, by the way, but it seems to me that a lot of her friends who type madly onto the blogosphere are literate but not readers. Not of books. They are typists, but not writers. Not for abstract thought. Naturally they wouldn’t care for essays.

I like Sue; I had her over to my housewarming party. She likes me too, yet obviously I would never expect her, let alone her friends, to read my essays. However, when it comes to ignoring my stuff, what is my excuse for any surfer with a university degree, let alone a degree in something considered extra smart like Computer Science? Of course I wouldn’t expect them to literally read my stuff, but I am surprised to find they don’t read anyone’s essays at all. 

Some of the computer “guys”—they don’t merit the honorific “nerds”—are like Sue: they seemingly can’t read or write. How bizarre. As it happens, I already knew there was such a thing as a university graduate who doesn’t read books. Now I am finding that some of them can barely even read a longer blog.

I say this after reading the comments on the blog of one of my four bookmarked essayists, Stevey, who writes for computer programmers. I like Stevey’s humor. For me, a nonprogrammer, half of his stuff I can tell is real good but it’s like trying to read The Jabberwocky. Happily, the other half I get. In Stevey’s post of January 7^th, 2008, Blogging Theory 201: Size Does Matter, he explains how he decides on his blog length. He looks at reading duration

“… and some folks like to read slowly. Heck, some don’t even read at all. It’s one of the amazing miracles of the internet: write-only people. They won’t read but they somehow find a way to write. You see them comment in all the time in my blogs: ‘I didn’t actually read your entry, but allow me to comment on it all the same…’ Lovely.”

I know what he means. I have read too many such comments for Stevey, complaints that his pieces (A) are too long or (B) … should be written as a sound bite. My reaction: “WTF?” They don’t get it that Stevey writes “long,” by their standards, to serve a purpose. Part of their problem is their expectations for “blogs” as being “short.” What’s a man to do… put up a headline “Essays by Stevey?” They’d still complain.

Never mind. All I can do is mutter that quote from Mark Twain. (~)

Expectations by readers are one thing. What are the expectations of the actual bloggers?

* * *

By “bloggers” I exclude the good folks of LiveJournal, as they seem to live in a nice sunny world of their own. Many other bloggers, though, seem to live in a grayer more competitive sphere… As a man from Tennessee says, “our grandparents lived in a troop of monkeys,” with a hierarchy, and therefore people tend to do a lot of comparing. In the real world some people genuinely believe in having a “mono-value,” a simplistic judgmental one-dimension criterion of “money.”

In the blog world a good many truly believe in the value of statistics: simplistically counting the “hits” on their site, or even hits on specific posts. I have even read where a few people were nasty and competitive for who has the best “stats.” Happily, I’ve also read many postings of generous advice on how to increase page hits. For some folks it might be healthier to ignore stats and simply see their blog as a chance for an ephemeral conversation. In other words, as being simply social.

But if a blogger, similar to an essayist, is striving for posts of lasting value, then I doubt the wisdom of choosing to have a mono-value of “stats.” Or, for that matter, having any mono-value in one's life. It’s too easy to be trapped. Graham once reported in an essay that after he received stock in his tech company he suddenly just couldn’t help evaluating his every action by “how it would affect the stock,” rather than “how it would affect the work.” And I once read on a U.S. waiter’s blog where every day, all day, he kept up a mental cost-benefit of how each customer was doing, value-wise, as a tipper. (In fairness, U.S. waiters are paid very little compared to waiters here)

It is money, I am sure, that is the root of some of the competitiveness, as certain bloggers desperately need to advertise their small business or generate funding from running advertisements on their blog. As for me, in my everyday job, as a “professional,” I am legally constrained from having a mono-value of money.

As a "blogger," I could simply type a one-sentence essay, “When you’re hot, you’re hot; when you’re not, you’re not.” After I gave it a catchy title, All I know about sex I could hit the “post” button and watch it get more hits than any other page I wrote. So much for stats.

Lately I’ve been following blogger Penelope Trunk (her pen name) who has a background as a business columnist. She writes on life and careers in a blog that includes lessons from her own life, even some awfully personal stuff. I should expect her blog to include archives. And I’m right, it does. I should also expect that she would write with pride, with substance, with a belief that her pieces have some lasting value. And I do. But her fans don’t. If they comment on a post that is any older than the food in my fridge, then they apologize. My reaction: WTF? I don’t expect a column post to be as lasting as an essay post, but still, I expect that Penelope put a modicum of tender loving care into her baby with hope for its future. And then to have people apologize…

When I am writing or public speaking I know I have made a connection when someone’s eyes light up and they say, “Yes! Let me tell you what happened to me!” In other words, when they feel moved to comment. So don’t apologize.

Of course many blogs, like those of Sue’s dear friends, are expected to be social, with easy social comments. As ephemeral as flowers, they are supposed to be for persons who are attention-span-challenged. Fine by me. I guess. Sure… but I admit I lose patience when I see this blog after blog … After blog. Perhaps this relates to the common wisdom that to be a “success,” as in have “successful” stats, you must blog several times per week, preferably daily. My reaction? (Besides WTF?): You can forget any lasting value.

Maybe that 20^th century Chicago columnist Johnny Deadline can be smart every day, but no one else can. As it happens, the competitive bloggers have proven, in black and white, based on their stats, that their readers will desert them in droves if their blog frequency falls off to (horrors!) once a week. My reaction: What the—! Who are these readers? And why would I “give a care” about them? So I can compete for stats? I’m no dog at a vending machine.

* * *

…What I find hard to wrap my head around is how people can leave a negative comment when they have only skimmed a piece, and have thereby badly misinterpreted things. If it is morally wrong to comment to censor a novel, without first carefully reading the novel, then it is also wrong to write in to censure a writer unless you first carefully read his piece.

This I believe: You have no right to injure the feelings of the writer, and to injure the community of readers, unless you are willing to take responsibility to read. To do otherwise is a vice. As you know, a “vice” is self-gratification at the expense of the community.

Essayist Scott Berkun takes a gentler view. Last week, for his June 16essay-blog on Why you are not an Artist he added to the comments: 

The fascinating thing so far in this post is how many people seem to have skimmed it. It’s very hard to defend myself against things I didn’t quite say : ) 

I see Scott added a smiley emoticon. Before I totally lose my sense of smiley face humor, tossing around words like vice, I had best leave today’s subject of fluffy Blogs to return to today’s other solid subject: Essays. Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to go from fluffy cotton candy to solid potatoes. Especially when I’m feeling uninterested in explaining essays these days. You see, I’ve recently overdosed on explanations. I discovered in a used bookstore, while passing through Kamloops, a decade’s worth of annuals of The Best American Essays. That’s a decade’s worth of introductions regarding: What is an Essay?

Here is a sentence by Joseph Epstein from his forward to the 1993 volume:

"I prefer it when the essay takes a small, very particular subject and, through the force of the essayist’s artistically controlled maunderings, touches on unpredictably large general matters, makes hitherto unexpected connections, tells me things I hadn’t hitherto known, or reminds me of other things I had already known but never thought to formulate so well as has the essayist I am reading at the moment."

After spitting the cotton candy out of my teeth for such solid food, I have nothing left to say.

Sean Crawford

In Cyberspace 

(Hello Lain!)

And in Calgary

June 2010,  February 2020

Footnotes
~A look at the blog world as of 2003 by writer John Scalzi
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2003/06/16/reader-request-2-life-online/ 

~Speaking of statistics, I am surprised that people are skipping from my home page to this page, but not my to my more recent Polite Blogs one. How strange.

Update: Comedian George Carlin changed his life and career when—lightbulb!—he stopped having laughter as his mono stat for the success of his stage comedy, as he explained in his autobiography.

~For my blog website I am the "administrators" of the site. I have a lined accountant's page, where page titles older than the food in my freezer can be seen at a glance. Any new comments there show up in vivid colored ink. 

Update: I can click on "comments" to read them all, listed in reverse order.

~Real writers, when it comes to old pieces, find satisfaction in (ongoing royalties and) comments.

~Mark Twain said, “A person who won’t read has no advantage over the person who can’t read.”

Sad and Gay URLs

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Cheerful Note: This is the closest I’ve ever come to a “Merry Christmas!” gift post.

Note on links: For this post, in my mellow mundane life, I surely have plenty of time to place super-quick (for you) colored links, but no-o-o-o. I have NO desire to offer links on a silver platter, and no felt need to encourage search engines (SEO) to find me. 

(As explained in No Links is Good Links archived July 2012)

Hello Reader,

Got gay links?

I once did an essay on bringing “brights” into work and play, such as sneaking a rubber fish into the water cooler, called Brights in a Grey Life, archived December 2013.

Similarly, sometimes I like to brighten my posts at the end by footnoting a link. Most of my foot-links are gay, some are grey. 

In order to easily find my links again, I have slowly gathered most of them to this one blog page, trying to group similar links together. I thought you might like this post, so I have added some partial explanations. 

(Complete explanations would be found in the original essays)

Of course, the comforting moon has a dark side, and some of the links are darkly sad. An example would be this top link, 

(I assume you know to copy and paste into your search or website header)

a lengthy news article, complete with photographs, about an award-winning teen hero, who is bullied

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-norfolk-48065405

Homeland Songs

Charlotte Church sings I Vow to Thee My Country

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yxUp08IK_g

The Pogues sing Dirty Old Town

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK99y22uLv8

Billy Bragg sings Jerusalem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMC08TyvGNk

Billy Bragg sings A Full English Brexit song (a pun on ‘full English breakfast,’ as distinguished from a ‘small continental breakfast’)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07X_yk1v8S4

At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 

Pictures of Road Signs, hacked by an artist

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-46139025

Doctor Who, three songs without a chorus

In a tune, the purpose for having a chorus is like why the 6 o’clock TV news has an anchor: For the comfort of returning to something known. Mornings while shaving, I like to hear three lyrical videos in succession. Because these songs don’t have a “proper” chorus, and are repetitive too, they might seem boring to you. 

But not to me, not when I am deeply moved by the episodes the songs are from.

1. Abigail’s Song, a live stage version by an opera singer
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGilpd0e4s

(… And for my preferred version of Abigail’s Song that does show the plot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Radrh60tAUk. )

(2) in Latin, here’s the song the gentle Ood sing for the tenth doctor to “sing him to sleep” at the end of his story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs_isWP71FE

(3) “The Long Song” with still photos from the episode where religious people sing. Their song had been constantly sung for generations…

The sad, defiant words on screen at the end were by the doctor, “nothing left, only me,” as the last of his kind. He’s “the last” because he killed his entire home planet—men, women and children—to save the universe from the Daleks. Hence he is not quite sane. He often tries to have human companions with him so he doesn’t go totally mad… and also to make sure he doesn’t become emotionally closed off and dead to the universe. Song link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPisDzhYrCg

Songs On Stage

On stage, a seasoned Jonie Mitchel (Companion of the Order of Canada) sings Both Sides Now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKQSlH-LLTQ

At the proms, Dame Judy Dench sings Send in the Clowns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvZex3Qf7QQ

At the proms, from War of the Worlds, two very powerful songs, with some narration by Sir Richard Burton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kvm7HgkNL7E

*** *** Start Doctor Who *** ***

Context for award-worthy Speech clip:

War is grim: Earlier in space and time is the War Doctor, played by John Hurt. In his life where he destroys his home planet, he is never given a number because his later incarnations want to forget they were ever him. He once met Doctors 10 and 11 together: “the one who regrets and the one who forgets” (the number of children present on that final day)

Speech clip, four minutes, (filmed in one take)

With his war doctor background, one of the most powerful speeches is by the 12th doctor, the “Zygon Inversion speech,” where the Zygon in human guise, Bonnie, symbolizes all sorts of violent revolutionaries… including Quebec FLQ “pure wool” separatists who won’t admit (according to former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau) 

that other Quebecers, not “pure wool,” would some day want to separate from Quebec in turn. 

I grew up hearing periodic tests of atomic air raid sirens: During the speech clip, two horrible opposing boxes, set up by the doctor, symbolize the “The Button” of the cold war, as well as symbolizing every “go/no go” point of “peace/or war.” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJP9o4BEziI

Regarding the episode and the speech:

Giovanni Magnus

2 years ago

I think this episode was broadcast at just the right time; following the Paris Attacks and on the day before Remembrance Sunday. With so much talk of revolution and vengeance, something like this hits home.

*** *** End Doctor Who *** ***

Youtube songs

England swings. The song that starts, “Pendulum swings like a pendulum do, bobbies on bicycles two by two,”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip6pHbAmjiU

Music Video by Winnipeg’s Crash Test Dummies

Mmm mmm mmm mmm 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTeg1txDv8w

Music video, Superman’s Song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeyhKWjQaKk

For isolation, a Simon and Garfunkel song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6iFNk60xP0

 

One-page funeral article on a very small service for a writer once very well known, Eric Nicol

https://bcbooklook.com/2012/09/16/authors-remembering-eric-nicol/

Speech, impromptu, with music, by Robert (Bobby) Kennedy, on the night Martin Luther King was murdered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoKzCff8Zbs

Special note: Even in our 21st century, I can still feel sad from knowing that if Senator Robert Kennedy had lived, and become president, then he would have got us out of Vietnam. Swiftly. Without any patience for stupid well-meaning excuses about how hard and lengthy it would be to extricate such a mass of men and material.

Note: a John Denver song includes the lines, “and your mother called last Friday, Sunshine made her cry;” the music from the movie Sunshine is used under the above speech. I think the film was first shown on TV, but I forget, it was all so long ago. I read the book, back in the day.

Song, of Abraham, Martin and John

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlxAFq_9Mak

Lengthy blog page about a lonely “digital nomad” world traveler, to which I linked for the sake of a small quote about belonging, near the end.

https://www.fluentin3months.com/vagabond/

Anya, with no last name:

The four video links here are in my essay, Anya, Friend of Buffy 

(But I should have called it Death of Anya to get hits and match my Death of Buffy piece) 

where I explain WHY Anya fears bunnies, and why that fear leads to her friend Buffy fighting her with a sword.

Note: Anya was born human, and is finally human again, but after being a vengeance demon for about a millennium, she has forgotten mortality, hence her monologue:

Anya, ‘death of Joyce’ monologue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ96c7IOIPQ 

Very short light Song, of Anya’s paranoia of bunnies

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLMaSII_URU

Light Duet, by Anya and her live-in fiance “I’ll never tell”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooD4mmmYrTg

Anya’s cheery upbeat death song, from living with her fiancé, reminding us that after many horrible centuries, she finally had a happy life, with dreams.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k2QYSvca40

Drama clip, 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from just outside the doorway, overhears the two grown men in her life, her librarian father-figure and her vampire boyfriend-figure, state the grim, iron prophecy that she is to be killed. So she goes into shock, laughing an unnatural laugh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcCOZSMpILQ

(Incidentally, my most popular essay, by hit count, is Death of Buffy from January 2012

https://essaysbysean.blogspot.com/2012/01/the-death-of-buffy.html )

Youtube

Bonnie Rae, with Bruce Hornsby

I can’t make you love me, if you don’t

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTIu4UbkK94

Sting, from a few years before the Berlin Wall ‘came a-tumbling down’:

Russians (“What can I do to save my boy, from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?”)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHylQRVN2Qs

(Note for nonChristian readers: The “tumbling down” phrase comes from a rousing spiritual song, which I memorized as a boy, where “fought” is pronounced as “fit”: Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the wall came a-tumbling down.)

Lengthy essay with photographs. A writer who has been to Dachau takes his daughter to see an empty old missile silo and talks to her on the drive back, without meaning to scare her.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2007/12/21/a-month-of-writers-day-seventeen-jay-lake/

News Story, interview on television

London Marathon staff being abusive to slower runners

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-48130690/london-marathon-pacesetter-says-slower-runners-abused-on-course

Trailhead for news stories, where a pretty young actress, who has lived all her life in her dear mother country of Taiwan, on the island of Formosa, hopes her country would never be annexed by big China, not like how big Germany did an Anschluss of Austria.  

(The annex was during the Third Reich; Austria, with its German-speaking culture, regained independence after WWII) 

The link was made regarding ideology in an essay on how to hack together a speech.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46250674

Prose, read aloud 

British Actor David Tennant, in his own voice, reads his forward to the autobiography of actress Elizabeth Sladen, better known worldwide as Sarah Jane Smith. Takes six minutes and has lots of stills. “She inspired absolute devotion from everyone who worked with her.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUNDkw3KBVM

Lengthy Open Letter to Brazil, calling on Brazilians to reform because of shortcomings including

(—but my lawyer insists I add ‘but not limited to’ because he says you might not know what the word “including” means—)

the sort of “amoral familism” we see (or once saw) in southern Italy, but not in northern Italy.

https://markmanson.net/brazil

Youtube of a lengthy memorial at my club for Michael Cody DTM

For ease of download by dial-up, my blog has no bells or whistles, no photographs of me. But as for what I look like: Near the end that’s me on camera asking about Michael’s belt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGLC5VizmSk&feature=em-upload_owner

Sean Crawford

Calgary,

Merry Christmas readers,

2019

Footnotes:

~Today’s blog has a lighter page of URL’s. You may have seen the “heavier, darker” sequel to this post which was archived back in September 2019.

~How queer, to think the “new, exciting” World Wide Web is no longer “new.” In fact, social media-wise, I have heard that Facebook is now only for the “older generation.” (People over 30) 

Back when the web was exotic, newspapers would feature reviews of URLs. 

(And I suppose even the folks with computers would have FOMO) 

It’s been years since they reviewed Internet sites. Now they only review video games.