Articles with the Tag Writing

Moon, June, There Is No Spoon

Blogs, Culture, Women
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spoons

June again, wedding season. I do love a good wedding, though it’s deeply unfashionable in a professed socialist.

But I don’t care; I love the whole hoohah, the sentimental tears at the first careless rapture of young love (or the umpteenth of mature love) the boggling at the hideous bridesmaid’s dresses and the style of the invitations and the colours of the ribbons on the cars. I like to see a wedding done well, but because they mostly aren’t weddings are a glorious opportunity to bitch to my heart’s content, behind a discreetly held service sheet. Ooh – have you seen her shoes? Vile. Not sure I would’ve chosen lilies for a wedding… oh my, her sister’s butt ugly.

But I’d never, ever do it in public and most certainly not in print or pixels. Despite the blog’s hunger for content I hardly ever write personal stuff on the blog. Why? I know what a cow I can be. No-one’d ever speak to me again if I did.

I don’t do over our friends or family for blog hits or – unlike Guardian lifestyle hack Tanya Gold – for money:

Three weeks I ago I received a wedding list from a friend. Let me be more accurate. She used to be a friend, but as her wedding looms she has been replaced by a shape-shifting, John Lewis-icking monster. She wants ice-crushers and cookbook holders and spoons. Give them to me, she squawks through her John Lewis proxy, because I am in love – and that means I get consumer durables for free! I demand a new kitchen – and you will pay for it!

Wedding lists were designed to help a young married couple build a home, in the days when everyone got married aged 12 and a half, and were totally spoonless. But today, you are not buying your friends a new life. They are 30 years old and rotting. wrinkles and Botox and they sag, like dying balloons. You are buying them an upgrade.

They don’t want a deep expression of your friendship, which you have chosen. The message is – your input is not required. Kill your imagination. Destroy your sensitivity. Give us the spoons. Or you will not be invited to the wedding and you will not get to eat lukewarm mini-pots of risotto

I bet getting the cheque for that felt good.

Awful to read that about yourself in the daily paper and worse still, written by someone you thought liked you. “They have wrinkles and Botox and they sag, like dying balloons”. Ow, nasty. Just sheer unwarranted bitchery. The key phrase seems to be “….- your input is not required”. Bitter at not being the centre of attention much, Tanya?

The former friend and future bride didn’t take it lying down and had the editors put this at the top of the comments:

joholland

10 Jun 09, 1:08pm

As the bride referred to in the piece I should point out that Tanya was invited to my wedding but no wedding list was included in her invitation because I know how much she hates them.

I do have a wedding list at John Lewis which I can appreciate is bourgeois but we decided that it would be practical, though by no means compulsory. The irony in all this is that I really, really don’t care about gifts and have never even brought the subject up with Tanya (my dress, I concede is another matter). It might sound trite but all I want is a happy unforgettable day surrounded by people I love. My wedding is less than a month away and frankly, Tanya I don’t want any spoons but I’m not sure that I want you at my wedding either.

And that’s the end of that friendship, which is why I don’t do personal stuff for public consumption.

I can remember my own and my sister’s and friend’s weddings and the enmities and angsts thereof, when all the sibling rivalry and buried family resentment came bubbling to the surface and rows abounded. It was horrible. My younger self would certainly have blogged about it had a blog been available – it would’ve helped vent the tension. Hah! That’s told her.

Getting paid for it by a national newspaper I would’ve seen as pure bonus. I’d’ve gone out and bought shoes with the money. Like Gold I would’ve thought nothing of the permanence of my words or considered they might follow me around for ever, souring potential future friendships.

My older self knows better. I’ve been asked occasionally why it is I rarely blog about anything personal, or keep a LiveJournal or Facebook page. I could and do waffle on about privacy, which is political. But the primary reason I won’t ever write about anyone I know is encapsulated in that bitter, sub-Bridget Jones-ish post. For Gold that’s a friend lost forever and a reputation as a journalist, such it was, sullied for the sake of a bit of paid bitchery about weddings and the chance to let off a little steam. Was it worth it?

No Use Crying For Mother

Women
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jane

Usually the big reveal’s at the end of the post, not at the start. Here it is. I admit it, I’ll be 50 later this year.

Such is my ingrained cultural conditioning that this is the first time I’ve had the courage to publicly admit to no longer being a perennial 42 (I had my children young so I could get away with it for quite a long time). When age discrimination against women starts at around 30, why would I? Having a much younger partner than you makes the pressure even more intense.

But dammit, I don’t want to be 42 any more: trying to keep up a front that insists on sagging and being its age despite your best, most time-consuming and expensive efforts is just too much damn work, and life’s too bloody short as it is. Who am I competing with anyway? Under-fifties? Teenagers? What for, exactly?

I’ve come to the conclusion that I just don’t care any more, even though admitting to being 50 and someone’s mother, for a woman, is tantamount to declaring that you’re just another perimenopausal, invisible has-been. But I’m 50 – well, not quite, I’ll be 49 for a while yet – and to hell with it.

That said you’d think that this frivolous filler piece lauding the overfifties female from G2 would have struck a chord with me:

They blazed in like a hockey team: gung-ho, no-nonsense, determined to win. First came Joanna Lumley (63), campaigning for the Gurkhas; hot on her heels was Gloria Hunniford (69), lobbying for grandparents’ rights to see their grandchildren. And then came Esther Rantzen (68), speaking out about dry rot and corruption, and contemplating the idea of standing for parliament. Behind her stood Helen Alexander (52), the first female chair of the CBI.

Clearly, the opinions of women who have strayed over the age of 50 have been overlooked for too long. At a time when our TV shows are presented by silver foxes and buxom young blondes, when we’ve no Moira Stuart, no Anna Ford, when we don’t hear enough from Joan Bakewell or Kate Adie, there is something glorious about the arrival on the political scene of these women. They have caught the national mood, underlining the feeling that we have had quite enough of all those silly little boys running the show, ballsing up the banks and pratting about in politics. “Right!” they seem to say, rolling up their sleeves, getting out some elbow grease (and perhaps a bottle of gin). “Let’s do this properly, shall we?”

But no chord struck. For a start, Lumley, Hunniford and Rantzen, haven’t just strayed over fifty – they’re all well into their sixties. That’s not just straying, that’s invading and taking possession. I get the impression the author was in a hurry, Alexander’s name happened to be on the news and it fit. She’s just over 50, true, but she’s only the chair of the CBI, not the chief executive, and she’s female, which are distinctions much more likely to affect her potential power than her age might.

But that’s just sloppiness; more to the point, what utter crap. Or to put it more politely, I disagree with the author’s entire premise. You only have to look at prominent women who are actually over fifty to immediately refute the idea that women over fifty innately have more sense. Take politicians – Condoleeza Rice is 55; Hazel Blears, 53. They’re wise? Or political pundits – Maureen Dowd is 58 or thereabouts, Melanie Phillips is 59. We should listen to them more, just because they’re over 50? I don’t think so. Just because you’ve done a lot or seen a lot or have a platform to spout from doesn’t mean you learned anything at all from anything.

So many journalists recently seem to be unconsciously or even consciously wisting for 1940, when the Women’s Institute was the last redoubt against fascism and capable, strongarmed women in floury pinnies kept the nation going while simultaneously riveting, breastfeeding baby, stirring the porridge and aiming the antiaircraft batteries.

Maybe it’s just another facet of the general nostalgia for the war, this desire for someone capable to to take stern measures and lay down some rules and some discipline. The Americans call for the Cavalry, we want to give the reins of power to the Women’s Institute and have Ann Widdecombe for Speaker. Ooh, strict Nanny…

But even if they were willing, the women who survived the War are mostly now in their eighties and nineties and increasingly fewer in number, and they’d probably deny they were special anyway. The women named in the article grew up in the sixties; the mothers of this current generation of journalists will have been brought up the seventies. The mythical women they’re yearning for don’t exist any more, if they ever did. Sorry, guys – she’s not coming to make it all all right and kiss the nasty booboo better so it’s no use crying for Mummy. There are no eggy soldiers for tea.

We can argue all day about responsibility for the current political chaos and as conscience-relieving and satisfying as it might be for women to put the blame entirely on men, we all of us messed up, if only from inaction. Equally everyone, of whatever gender, whether under fifty or well over, must have input into the shape of any new economic and political realities that result.

Easy to say, but much harder to do. For the time being we women will have to muddle through, frowning at our wrinkles, being capable, making the best of things and finding what little scraps of peace and contentment wherever and however we can. None of us is getting any younger, after all.

I Almost Wish I Had A Bloodsucker Too

Blogs, Meta
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biteme

Following Josh Marshall’s exposure of New York Times’ high profile columnistMaureen Dowd’s copying of his blogpost (and her subsequent ‘apology for her error’: where have we heard that one recently?), Salon’s Glenn Greenwald describes how mainstream papers and unscrupulous paid journalists prey on the work of mostly unpaid bloggers:

…now that online traffic is such an important part of the business model of newspapers and print magazines, traffic generated by links from online venues and bloggers is of great value to them. That’s why they engage in substantial promotional activities to encourage bloggers to link to and write about what they produce. Beyond that, it is also very common — as the Dowd/Marshall episode illustrates — for traditional media outlets and establishment journalists to use and even copy content produced online and then present it as their own, typically without credit. Many, many reporters, television news producers and the like read online political commentary and blogs and routinely take things they find there.

Typically, the uncredited use of online commentary doesn’t rise to the level of blatant copying — plagiarism — that Maureen Dowd engaged in. It’s often not even an ethical breach at all. Instead, traditional media outlets simply take stories, ideas and research they find online and pass it off as their own. In other words — to use their phraseology — they act parasitically on blogs by taking content and exploiting it for their benefit.

Exactly. A number of times I’ve thought I’ve seen ideas or things from this blog pop up in altered form in the Guardian’s comment pieces. But any similarity is usually too slight to pin down and most probably coincidental, anyhow. Think of the sheer volume of words that are written and published in English online just in the course of one day. There must be constant concurrences of ideas and the subject itself often suggests the tone and words used, so similarities are inevitable. ]

But I did notice it was usually dated in the vicinity of a visit by a particular IP address – we have few enough readers that I do notice that – but again it means little, if anything at all. Though they’re few, we get visits from all over. For all I know the journalist is based in Moldova or Yorkshire, not using a particular network in the City.

Though an unscrupulous hack looking for story ideas to vampire might well trawl low traffic blogs rather than popular ones – because there’s less chance of anyone spotting likenesses, there’s no real way to ever really pin something so slight down.

It’s probably sheer chance, a zeitgeistian thing and the sensible voice in my head tells me I’m being egotistical and paranoid. I should stop being so silly. It’s all very nebulous, and as nice as it would be to think anybody actually read this blog rather than came across it accidentally looking for dancing kitten .gifs, who on earth would want to copy my stuff? It’s just me ranting and there are millions of better bloggers to steal ideas from.

What could I do about it, anyhow? Complain? It’s hardly plagiarism, it’s impossible to prove and probably just my ego anyway.

So there I’ve left it.

However, one TPM blogger was inspired by Maureen Dowd’s plagiarism to go further. Unexpectedly he found he too had a vampire – so he dragged him smoking into the sunlight.

… I started using teh Google on some of my older blog titles. About five minutes later, I found a case of out-and-out, wholesale plagiarism of one of my own pieces.

I wrote the blog entry “Michele Bachmann – Unstable AND Unable” here on TPM on February 20, 2009.

A writer on Salem-News.com, Dorsett Bennett, wrote this article on February 27. To conserve space, I won’t quote it here.

The first half of Bennett’s article is, well, my blog.

More…

You know I really run some of my text or post headers through google too. I wonder what would turn up?

Nothing at all, most likely.

There’s my problem. Any similarity’s entirely in my head. That’s why I haven’t googled and I won’t google any of my writing. I couldn’t take the disappointment. I’ll stick with my nebulous suspicions while leaving the possibility that someone actually read something and liked it enough to steal it it still that, a possibility.

UPDATE:

Soopercali’s comment to Glenn’s post hits the target I was circling around spot-on:

What I’ve seen happen again and again is that the corporate media rips off the context in which bloggers place a story.

Bloggers will take a mainstream story and contrast it with something the original author missed. That’s when the rest of the media (most often, cable news talk shows) lifts the story and acts as if they thought of it themselves. It happens far too often to count.

That’s exactly it.