Electronic Writer

If you are a word junkie, like me, check out these links. There is a free dictionary, thesaurus, as well as a few specialty dictionaries (medical, computer, etc.).

Try it out–it’s fun.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/

When I read that Lawrence Ferlinghetti was coming to Moe’s Books in Berkeley to read from his new work, I cleared the calendar. My first thought was, “this guy is still alive?” And, then, I thought, “AND, he is still writing?” In reality, Ferlighetti’s activities have been quite public for quite some time.

It really started when he opened his the first all paperback bookstore–City Lights in San Francisco. His partner left within a few years, and he opened the publishing wing of the business–to publish his own poems, as well as the work of Allen Ginsberg (including “Howl,” the famous poem that forced a showdown with the Federal government about free speech and just exactly what we, as a society, would do with “offensive” art), Kenneth Rexroth, Denise Levertov, and William Carlos Williams to name a few.

Today, Ferlinghetti presses on with his City Lights Bookstore and Press–even at the wise age of 88. But, at the reading, he seemed tired. Not surprising for an 88-year old man, right? Well, it wasn’t exactly the tired from lack of sleep. It seemed to be something closer to boredom than exhaustion–boredom from the heaping piles of praise that people unloaded upon him. He was eager to talk about politics and to engage the crowd–to start something. But, instead, he was told personal anecdote after personal anecdote about how someone was touched by a poem he wrote 40 years ago, what an honor it was to hear him read his work, and when was he coming to Boston again.

The now old man’s beard was full, and clean. His speech was articulate and poignant. His diction was precise. And, his piercing eyes were more piercing than I ever imagined. This is a man with a bone to pick–and, no one is willing to engage him any longer out of respect for his age.

He came to pick a fight, and instead, all we gave him were lousy hugs.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s new book is titled “Poetry as Insurgent Art” and is available from City Lights Bookstore in-person, or online.

Pictures of books in some of the finest libraries around the world. Not pictures of sex in books, just pictures of the books. Spline shots. Some are in racks. Some are leather-bound. If you are a book nerd, you will love this . . . .

http://thenonist.com/index.php/thenonist/permalink/hot_library_smut/

I have had a business in some form or another since 1995, and overall, I am pretty tolerant about marketing. We live in a Market-driven economy, and advertising is part of the game.

When Spam comes into the Inbox, I chalk it up to aggressive marketing, tweak the Spam software a bit, and move on. When the advertisment post cards are sitting on my car on Sunday morning, I read them and move on.

From the earliest days of MySpace, I remember watching the advertisements surface within the interface. I remember actually being excited that Tom’s good idea was making money for him. And, dabbling with Google Ads myself, I certainly was not complaining.

When Fox bought MySpace, however, I was curious how things would change. What advertisers would pay to get their banners into the rotation, and who would opt out . . . or would be priced out of that marketplace.

The most noticeable changes after the ownership change were the addition of movie-trailers on the home page–including some temporary home page re-designs coordinated with a particular movie release.

The worst change, however, has been the addition of the STUPID True advertisements. They might actually be the most annoying banners ads in the history of the internet. And, if you are listening TRUE, let me tell you how your ads affect me. I am NOT compelled to click on the link of the pretend chat camera that has some poorly-acting woman pretending to be a stereo-typical “bimbo-blond” who has forgotten that the chat cam is on–while she just happens to be in her bath towel in the slightest way. I am, however, compelled to tell every single person I meet about your demeaning campaign–and encourage them to use your competitor’s services. If that is the effect you wanted, you scored a direct hit!

The newest generation of these advertisements are absolutely the worst. They show a camera angle looking up a woman’s skirt, down another woman’s shirt, looking at someone’s butt at the gym, and staring at a woman’s thighs under a dinner table, etc. In each of the advertisements, the “camera angle” gets caught by the girl, and there is some link that says “click to turn on the audio” while she is supposedly yelling at the Peeping Tom (sorry Tom, it is a colloquialism, nothing personal).

These advertisements are demeaning–to everyone involved. The women reinforce dangerously stereotypical and negative traits–in addition to objectifying themselves as simply legs, a butt, breasts . . . . I guess TRUE is paying the actresses enough money to demean themselves in front of millions of people on the internet.

It is also demeaning to me–your intended audience. It reinforces that women ARE objects, or at least that our civilization believes that to be correct. The women have no voices (figuratively, and literally). And, it demonstrates that it is acceptable social behavior to look up a woman’s skirt–when she isn’t looking.

The pretend web-cam concept also underestimates your audience. Do you really think the most web-savvy generation to date doesn’t understand that it is fake? There is NOTHING that I love more than being treated like an idiot. So, thanks again for breaking new ground on this one, TRUE.

Most importantly, your advertising campaign tells me something about the TRUE online dating service. Your campaign tells me that everything about your organization values Quantity over Quality–cash, rather than values.

It also tells me that if you are really producing content for your target audience, and your current campaign is built upon demographic research, I can infer that you have a bunch of idiots using your service who do not mind being demeaned, and that fools who click on demeaning advertisements are padding your membership numbers. Sounds like EXACTLY the place where I want to look for my mate . . . .

One word of advice: FIRE your advertising team.

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to an article published on the Atlantic Online in March of 2003. It was titled, “Caring for Your Introvert: The habits and needs of a little-understood group,” and written by Jonathan Rauch.

The article was filled with all sorts of great quotes like this one:

Maybe she was trying to tell me something?

• The Link: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch

Knowledge should be free, right? The lovely inventors of the Wikipedia believe that it should be . . . . But, there are others out there that may not agree.

In this article, Microsoft was caught hiring a writer to edit the Wikipedia because they are forbidden to do so themselves.

Shame!

Read the article at CNN for youself.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/internet/01/24/microsoft.wikipedia.ap/index.html

In an article today, “Club Gulag: tourists are offered prison camp experience,” published in The Independent Online Edition, there are details about a the Mayor of a small town in Russia who is actively seeking investors for an alternative project.

The Mayor wants to RE-OPEN the Russian Stalin-era prisons known as “gulags” for tourists who want to experience them first-hand. He thinks that the experience is worth $120 – $150 per day.

Before you sign the waver, and as part of the Terms and Conditions, “The Gulag Archipelago,” by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn should be required reading . . . .

This, apparently, is the new buzzword for a brand of new, non-corporate journalism that has blossomed over the last several years.

To quote Nicholas Lemann, in his recent article “AMATEUR HOUR: Journalism without journalists” (The New Yorker), “Citizen journalists are supposedly inspired amateurs who find out what’s going on in the places where they live and work, and who bring us a fuller, richer picture of the world than we get from familiar news organizations, while sparing us the pomposity and preening that journalists often display.”

ohmynews.com

What do you think?

There is a really interesting Convergence/Divergence article about the Middle East at McSweeney’s today. It was written by Lawrence Weschler, and compares the situation in Beirut with the situation of Warsaw, Poland as portrayed in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist.”

It is worth the time.

So, I was having a little bout with insomnia. And, rather than lay there in bed and try all of my usual tricks again, I decided to get up and work on some of the projects that are keeping me awake at night. For a brief reprieve, I found myself wandering through my images of Paris from last year, and in particular, this image of Samuel Beckett’s grave.

I loved how the old and the new co-mingle in French culture. This cememtary was in the middle of a well-to-do neighborhood, was a couple of hundred years old, housed a great number of famous artists (Cesar, Rodin, Simone de Beuvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Balzac, etc.), and was overshadowed by the tallest building in continental Europe. The old and the new.

Many of the graves had flowers, or some other tribute paid to the artist or the dead. And, because of the number of famous people, many of these tributes exceeded your typical flower arrangement. Out of all the graves, however, Samuel Beckett’s had the most attention. Perhaps it was not the most ostentatious, but it was definitely the most.

Scattered on the ground around his grave were hundreds of the little purple tickets. They were the very tickets that those hundreds of visitors purchased to ride the Metro across Paris to see the grave of the famous playwrite–Samuel Beckett.