Month: February 2003

Don’t Point that Cannon at Me

Bill Moyer’s Now continues to be “must-see” TV for me. Tonight’s show focused on proposals coming out of the the Justice Department, proposals that would make the measures enacted in the original USA Patriot Act mild by comparison.

Perhaps not unsurprisingly, these proposals have been kept under tight wraps. Only Republican House Majority Leader Dennis Hasert has received a copy of the new proposals. Now if the thought of an ex-gym teacher being the only member of Congress to have oversight over the Justice Department doesn’t scare you, you can probably stop reading this entry right now.

The scariest of these proposals is the ability to make “secret arrests,” something never before allowed in America. People would just suddenly disappear without any official notice. This might not be all bad if it could somehow make Attorney General Ashcroft or President Bush disappear, but it seems unlikely that such stalwarts of freedom would be affected by such laws.

Instead, it seems far more likely that those opposed to Bush and Ashcroft’s assault on the Constitution would be likely candidates of being disappeared. I’m surprised that Moyer and his guest from the obviously unpatriotic Center for Public Integrity weren’t disappeared before tonight’s show.

If political events continue in this vein, I may have to adopt Raye’s methods of dealing with the news.

Another Excuse for Not Writing

As if I didn’t have enough excuses for not keeping up with my own blog entries, while checking through my referrer log today I found two new links, one from a site that I’ve been admiring off and on for awhile now, and another from a blog I’d never read before.

The first of these is Sainteros, a blog I’ve read several times while following links from other blogs I’ve linked to. I must admit that he has been on my long list of blogs in URL Manager Pro for quite awhile, a list that I certainly can’t manage to read daily or anywhere near daily, but I haven’t added him to my list of links until today. I’m proud to have been added to his links.

Later I discovered Arete had added me to her links. I must admit that I usually read someone for weeks before adding them to my links. After all, I read all the blogs on my links nearly every day, and I don’t have an infinite amount of time. However, upon discovering that Krista had referred to Donald Murray, my favorite author on the art of writing, in her entry entitled bloggery, I am led to believe that she must be a soul mate and should be added immediately to my links.

Presenting a Public Persona

Shelley Powers’ blog entry Get Used to Disappointments and the discussion of how much we reveal of ourselves in our blogs and Whiskey River’s entry entitled “the I is a multifaceted character,’ particularly the part where he quotes Joyce McDougall as saying

Each of us harbors in our inner universe a number of "characters," parts of ourselves that frequently operate in complete contradiction to one another, causing conflict and mental pain to our conscious selves. For we are relatively unacquainted with these hidden players and their roles. Whether we will it or not, our inner characters are constantly seeking a stage on which to play out their tragedies and comedies.

got me thinking about my public persona versus my real self.

I suspect that it is impossible, even for me, to totally distinguish between my public persona and my real self, though the two certainly aren’t synonymous.

I know I began this blog as an attempt to present my personal views on political events that were taking place. At first, it seemed natural to use a few literary references to illustrate my own public views.

At some point, though, it appears that my old “teaching persona,” a persona I thought I had willingly abandoned some five years ago, started appearing in this blog. I suspect that persona, though it only reflected a part of my personality, did reflect an essential part of who I am. Or, perhaps, teaching for thirty years has actually helped to shape who I truly am.

On the other hand, part of what I really like about writing this blog is that I am free to explore topics I felt uncomfortable exploring in a classroom in a conservative school district. I doubt that I would have ever felt comfortable exploring Kerouac or Ginsberg in a high school classroom, but I thrive on doing so here. So, I have certainly moved outside my teaching persona to establish a new persona for this web site.

Hopefully the persona I present here is closer to my “true” self than the persona I presented in the classroom, but I’m sure that this public persona is not my “complete self.” For me, the very act of writing puts a distance between myself and my immediate feelings. At work, I’m noted for occasionally been frustrated enough to use the “F” word, but I can’t remember ever using it here. Given time to think, it’s not a world I find particularly enlightening or informative.

The truth is that I am both short fused and reflective. I can be totally pissed off at a person one moment, and sympathetic the next. In other words, I get angry quickly, but also get over it equally quickly. I doubt that most of my readers would have gotten that impression of me from this blog. It’s not that I intentionally have hidden it, but neither is it part of the public persona that I try to present.

I also suspect most readers see me as more intellectual than I truly am, ironic when you consider that I purposely rejected a scholarly life for a life more directly involved with young people. One of the reasons I prefer poetry to other forms of writing is that it seems immediate and emotionally engaged, rather than intellectual.

Truthfully, though, I am probably happier building and knocking down Lego towers with Gavin or Kel than I am reading a poetry book. I would certainly rather hike in the mountains than read poems by Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, or even David Wagoner. In the end, it’s the quality of life itself that is most important to me, and poetry simply helps me to enjoy life more fully.

The Less I Write…

I wonder if it says something about my writing that the less I write the more readers I seem to attract.

I’ve hit record numbers in the last few weeks, over 7000 visitors in January, and the first time I’ve had over 300 hits in a day, not to mention over 1,800 visitors in a single week.

Maybe if I quit writing entirely for the next few weeks I could double my readership.

Of course, looking at some of the recent searches makes me wonder exactly who is reading this page, and how many readers find their way here purely accidentally.

One suspects that high school teachers and college professors are going to have to do a better job of helping students to learn how to effectively search. I wonder if students even know how to use quotes, rather than +’s to narrow their search down.

It sometimes seems that the only ones who know how to do that are the programs that are looking for plagiarism, and some of them even seem unable to distinguish the quoting of an author’s passage from directly borrowing another writer’s ideas.

I sometimes expect that the sheer number of words in my site makes it more likely to receive hits. Given enough random words, you can find any combination of words can’t you? Does Google examine the quality of the writing, or does it just look for random combination of words?