Even Less?

Your Bloguero notes that Andrew Sullivan has decided to quit blogging. He has two reasons:

The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash that burn-out does happen.

The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.

Sounds familiar. Your Bloguero has ruminated frequently on blog death. In fact, the demise of this blog. Would he just let the blog entries become further and further apart until one day there were no more? A fade out. Or would he write a farewell, a Good Bye Cruel World entry explaining himself and the end in detail? If only your Bloguero took himself and his output so seriously. Or his imagined significance to his readers.

And so this Blog limps along. Breathes shallowly. Seems to be sleeping. Or in a far deeper state of repose. Is it alive? Is it expiring? Will it stand up suddenly, Frankenstein like and bellow? That seems unlikely.

Meanwhile, your Bloguero has been listening to and thinking about winter night sounds. The sirens and the flashing blue and red lights. The car horns. The wind in the trees. And about radio signals, that invisible cloud in the sky. There is probably no more room for a novel or short story about that. David Foster Wallace, Daniel Alarcon having weighed in, there's not much left. Your Bloguero remembers how Jean Shepherd sounded half a century ago, but when he sits upright, awake in the dark, searching for the idea, your Bloguero cannot find it. Perhaps it will come.

Your Bloguero is working on a third novella. He can no more rush it than a cook can hurry a souffle.

Not Good Bye Cruel World

Maybe there are Bloggers who announce that they have come to the end and are retiring from posting, that the Blog is over. Maybe they write a last post summing everything up and saying farewell, but that seems rare. It seems that most just run out of steam, post more and more infrequently, and one day the post is their last. Most often, it probably doesn’t seem that a final post is one, when it goes up; it’s just that it turns into one. Something lets the air out of the tires. The battery dies. Things fall apart. The blog becomes a corpse. The blogger walks away.

There are by now probably millions of corpse blogs. Some might have a single brave entry announcing what is expected to come next, but didn’t. Others have thousands of entries, series of essays about various topics. The posting stops. The end. Corpse blogs are like ship wrecks on the bottom of the ocean: you can find them if you search, but nobody works on them any more. They’re visited only infrequently and then only by divers who like wrecks.

Is this blog about to join the under sea wreckage? Your Bloguero fears it’s so. He didn’t post for two months and didn’t miss it. He didn’t feel compelled to announce any of his opinions to his readership. What a surprise. Instead, he wrote many haikus and posted them on Facebook. That is fun. It will continue. But writing a blog post? Your Bloguero cannot give assurances. Sad. He wishes he could.

Your Bloguero notices a potential pattern here. In the old days, he wrote a listserv denouncing the death penalty. There was no last post. Eventually the listserv had no new original content written expressly for it, and was used only to transmit links your Bloguero’s blog posts on the topic on this blog. Then there was nothing. The last post there was in September, 2011. Your Bloguero posted frequently from March, 2002 until June, 2006, and only sporadically thereafter. Then he just stopped. It wasn’t because he stopped fighting state killing. No. It was something else.

This blog, The Dream Antilles, began in August, 2005 and has now had 1460 posts. But it’s been silent for 2 months. Your Bloguero hopes this isn’t the last post. But he can’t say it won’t be. Just in case, thanks for reading The Dream Antilles. Thanks for your comments. And thanks for being there.

Free Amina

MSNBC reports that Amina Araf, who under the nom de plume Amina Abdallah, wrote the blog, Gay Girl In Damascus, and was "an unlikely spokesperson for the largely anonymous anti-government protests sweeping Syria" has been seized (or is the word "kidnapped") and is missing:

American-Syrian Amina Araf... was walking with a friend when three men in their twenties grabbed her, someone claiming to be her cousin wrote. Being openly gay is very unusual and risky in the region.

"One of the men then put his hand over Amina's mouth and they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Basel Assad," a person identifying calling herself Rania O. Ismail wrote on the blog Monday night.

In other words, she is much like you, dear reader. She was just a blogger. She wrote about what she was experiencing in a Syria in flux. And she talked about her life. But in that corner of the world, her views, her life were both enough to bring serious reprisals. Like kidnapping. Like summary arrest. Like being disappeared.

The blog reports:

I have been on the telephone with both her parents and all that we can say right now is that she is missing. Her father is desperately trying to find out where she is and who has taken her.

Unfortunately, there are at least 18 different police formations in Syria as well as multiple different party militias and gangs. We do not know who took her so we do not know who to ask to get her back. It is possible that they are forcibly deporting her.

From other family members who have been imprisoned there, we believe that she is likely to be released fairly soon. If they wanted to kill her, they would have done so.

That is what we are all praying for.

What an extremely scary story. She is someone other bloggers should immediately stand up for. We should be demanding her immediate release.

Please contact the Syrian Embassy in Washington and demand that Amina be freed. Please broadcast this request widely.

The Five Year Blogaversary: 8/7/10

Boy is this ever weird.

August 7, 2010, is the fifth anniversary of this blog. This is the 794th post. I have no clue how many people have visited here. I have no idea who has read what. I imagine that only I have read it all.

I have enhanced my own ignorance about the readership. Who is reading and what. You may recall that in a moment of clarity I proclaimed that I wasn't going to keep track of statistics any more, and I then took down all the counters. The counters, truth be told, didn't work very well anyway. It wasn't a big deal. I made believe it was.

Come to think of it, there have been a lot of quirky things in the five years. One of them is that the readership has been surprisingly quiet. The other is that nobody tells me that I've jumped the shark. I am far more ignored than scolded.

So here I am. I'm five years older than when I started. This is my Polonius moment. I probably write faster. Do I write any better? Doubtful. I have aphorisms, though: Writing fast is a virtue, editing fast is an important skill. Persistence has some value. Neither a borrower nor a curmudgeon be.

There are five years of writing piled up behind me. And the open road ahead. I guess I'll continue so long as this is still fun.

As ever, thanks for reading. And while we're at it, do you think you could order my book?

Testimonials

Perdon, but how can this be? Nezua over at The Unapolgetic Mexican has a box on the front page with scrolling testimonials about him and his blog. Not just one testimonial or two, but many. It's a great blog, and I read it all the time, so it doesn't surprise me that others read it and like it, too. He has testimonials from famous or at least people well known to me. Fine. But I don't have any testimonials. At least not that I know of. So I'm wondering, asking myself, "Like dude, how can it be that you don't have any testimonials? I mean: does nobody dig your blog? Are there no bloguer@s who appreciate your act? And how come they don't write testimonials. Is it because you didn't ask them?" In my head these thoughts sound like utterances by Strong Bad.

There's only one problem. If I had testimonials, what would I do with them? I know. I'd write essays about how brilliant and perceptive the bloguer@s were who wrote the testimonials. This might appear to be a new genre, except purists would claim it was one of the oldest ones, self indulgence. As you may have noticed, I have no problem with that genre.

My Story Lives. Really.

Readers of this blog would enjoy visiting My Story Lives, a blog that has some wonderful writing (even if I say so myself and link you to the piece I wrote for it). Seriously. If you haven't read My Story Lives, you ought to drop in there. You'll like it. And if you have writing you think should be put up there, please send it to Claudia, who is My Story Lives' Bloguera.

Please Don't Worry About Me. I'm Fine. Really.

Oh boy. The New York Times has done it again. This time it's a story about how paid bloggers are, well, killing themselves:

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

The rest of the story outlines the pajamas wearing sweat shop: writers who cannot sleep, eat, or live a life because they don't want to miss a story and have to write. Constantly.

This, my dear readers, is not my life. It's not my problem. It's not something that's happening to me. First, I don't get paid for writing the Dream Antilles. And most folks act like they're allergic to clicking the "donate" button om the right hand side of this page. Second, I'm not trying to beat anybody to anything. I post what I think when I can think about it. I'm not in a race with anyone or anything. If I don't post, well, I just don't post. Third, I have a real life, a job, a family, children, pets. Fourth, there's enough competition at dailyKos and even docuDharma for readership. I don't need to bring it here, and I won't.

So, my dear readers, please don't worry about me. I'm fine. Really. But would it kill you to donate to the Dream Antilles? That would ease my "stress." Just asking.