Baby, I know what your nightmare is: the hot, hard horror of desiccation and despair. The death of the rivers of desire and birth, the dry and cracked banks. When I look into the truth of you, I know you need the juice, the jolt, the wet electric crackle and surge to stay alive. I know that without it, you crumble like limestone.I know you are a ravished lonely hunter and you that you have always intended to eat all that you kill, thoroughly and ethically, without waste.
I want only the best--only satin and dark rooms and syncopated music, only every little thing your have desired or were told you were forbidden from desiring--for you. My mission is to become strong enough to begrudge you nothing, your children, your lovers, your passions, even your disasters-- I want to stand back and let you beat.
Oh little heart, I remember how you felt that night in Monaco, when your lover stopped her motorcycle to show you the vines with tiny cone-shaped red buds growing on the stone walls. She said that the flowers were known to spontaneously combust as they decayed--unwilling to give up the light they had when growing. You've never known if she was telling you a scientific truth, but that has never mattered to you, dear heart, has it? The idea of those burning flowers, your lover's rapid collage of English and Italian, and her earnest desire for you to understand the importance of those vines on that day on this planet--all of that was much so more important to you than anything as useless as the truth.
I know my heart, I know. You are a messy, messy thing, but damn me, I love you. That's just how it is. Dear heart, I will follow you anywhere.
(This post is part of BlogHer's series "Letters to My Heart." Deb blogs at Deb on the Rocks.)
]]>Tina's acceptance speech began by acknowledging that she knows she has been fortunate to have an exceptional year and is grateful for the reception her work has received.
]]>Tina's acceptance speech began by acknowledging that she knows she has been fortunate to have an exceptional year and is grateful for the reception her work has received.
,p>Then, in order to further emphasize her humbleness, she essentially dedicated the award to internet critics. She cited the immense power that Internet writers hold by both humorously acknowledging by name and p0wning some of her detractors. According to the CBS news she said:
"If you ever start to feel too good about yourself, they have this thing called the Internet. And you can find a lot of people there who don't like you," she added, drawing laughs and applause from the celebrity-studded ballroom audience.
"I'd like to address some of them now," she continued. "Babs in La Crosse, you can suck it. Diane-fan, you can suck it. Cougar-letter, you can really suck it, 'cause all year you've been after me. All year."
In blogger/forum-speak, Tina Fey fed the trolls by commenting back.
The crowd laughed because are familiar with what the Internet is saying about them. The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Bloggers who are savvy with their visitor analytics have been intrigued by this possibility, too, especially when seeing hits from interesting destinations when they post about a well known person.
CBS actually got Tina's speech wrong: Tina's detractor isn't "Diane-fan", but is dlanefan, who apparently is devoted to Diane Lane. They were wrong about "Babs in Lacrosse, too: Babsonlacrosse posts at Idolforum. Dlanefan and Cougar-letter both post on The Envelope, which is a Los Angeles Times moderated forum about entertainment awards. (here's some insider Envelope gossip: some forum members suggest that Dlanefan and Cougar-letter are the same person.)
Of course The Envelope was pleased with the big attention, and in their blog post The Envelope posted video of Tina's backstage explanation about anonymity and the Internet. In the forum, a few posters, including Dlanefan, played with the idea that Tina not only reads their forum but also comments under a anonymous tag name. You have to LOL that.
I love how Tina used her comic dig against her detractors to actually call attention to them, and by inference to the bandwith devoted to Tina lurve online. To further her Geek Goddess stature, she showed us that even if they run it down or appear aloof and above it all, every person in that glamorous Golden Globe ballroom reads what we write. (Not that I think bloggers are the same as forum posters, but we are both in the same searchable network and are considered very similar outsiders.)
Of course she mentioned her detractors instead of her fans to highlight her humility and because they are funny to poke at, but she showed that even stars as fab as Tina Fey are out there looking for feedback from the new media. She showed with her words and with the audience's response that even having piles of accolades at your feet does not make you immune to a bit of vanity searching, Google name alerts and the lure of deep, dark comment trails.
Of course they read what the Internet publishes. We know that the Internet has reach and influence. When you post on the Internet, no matter where, regardless of whether you issue thoughful commentary, ripping snark or the random inelegant "suck it!" you publish with an powerful, searchable Sharpie. You really never know who could eventually read your words. It might even be that certain celebrity you are addressing--anyone from anywhere all across the Golden Globe, and they might even thank you in a backhanded sort of way in their next award speech.
What do you think? Did Tina slam Internet writers, or did she give a hat-tip to the power of pubishing?
P.S. Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, in case you are reading this: if you let me be your Scarlett Johansson, I will make you pancakes in the morning. "It's complicated!" Love you, mean it! --Deb
I often dream of escaping to a more progressive west coast or southwestern lifestyle, the cities of the east are incomparable, and the heart of the world lives in the Midwest. But as a reader and a writer, I have a deeply biased appreciation for the literary perspective that emerges from living in the American South. Nothing sings to me like the voices that have been tuned by Southern heat and hurricanes, by our complicated political struggles, by our scrappy harvests, by our current racial tensions on land that was very recently slave-tended land, and by our rich religion, family, and community traditions and expectations. I've lived other places, but I firmly believe that no place in this country is more complex than the South.
The southern written voice is not exclusive to books. Although it's true that anyone can have a cosmopolitan life online, even when a Southerner is blogging about business, technology or pop culture--and most certainly when she speaks of her family, passions, and new-found delights--if you are keyed to it you will hear a distinctive Southern sensibility, a certain sass, a dirty south kick and a down-home strength.
Southern women writers have always set forth a rich literary and interactive tradition despite our distance from New York, LA and San Francisco. Luminaries such as Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, Harper Lee, Zora Neil Hurston, Anne Tyler, Anne Rice, Fannie Flagg, and Molly Ivins have defined and amplified the many voices of our region. The list is bigger than Sunday supper: Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, Dori Sanders, Shirley Ann Grau and Carson McCuller paved the dirt road for Barbara Kingsolver, Kaye Gibbons, Lee Smith, Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni and Naomi Shihab Nye. We're proud of our homeboys, too. You can't walk in New Orleans without shouting Tennessee Williams monologues, or see the Mississippi river without thinking of Huck Finn. Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Tom Robbins and William Styron are only a few of our finest.
I can't stop thinking of the BlogHer Reach Out Tour as a train ride, because when the original stops were announced it reminded me of how in the 20s many weary authors, poets, publishers and editors from the eastern seaboard traveled south by train to meet the southern community of writers and to soak up the healing warmth of the southern sun. I myself love to visit Marjorie Kinnin Rawlings' homestead in Cross Creek, Florida, where Hemingway would stop on his way down to Key West, and I've also made pilgrimages to pet the descendants of his cats that are living at his old Key West home, where many writers of the Lost Generation visited. Rawlings herself traveled from Florida to meet F.Scott Fitzgerald while he recuperated from illness in a North Carolina hospital.
I wish we could have just had the Reach Out tour ON a train, and then we could have travelled together from D.C., on through the green Carolinas, the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee, down through the bayous of Louisiana, over the deepest winding dirt roads in Mississip, Bama and Georgia, and down to the beaches and palmetto bushes of the panhandle of Florida. Maybe that's what we'll have to do to get a load of us to the next Blogher Conference--charter a train with stops in Birmingham and Baton Rouge, Chattanooga and Memphis, Suwanee and Savannah, Montgomery and Hattiesburg. I know some other events have evolved to take the place of BlogHer meet-ups, and that is very exciting, too. More organizing and more networking is wonderful.
I hope that some southern bloggers find this post and shout-out their blog addresses and their neighbors', too, so that I can add to my own list of fantastic southern voices. My favorite contemporary southern blogging writers are diverse, innovative, hilarious, deep and wise. Each of us interprets the experience of living in today's South in our own way--and at the same time we are transforming the southern legacy of letters with our own voices, humor, perspectives, righteous rants and brilliant ideas. Southern women are hot, in every way. I'll look forward an event in the future when BlogHers will travel to see us and soak up some of the heat our laptops generate. Then, the only blues we'll be singing is that our time together flew by too fast.
Deb loves to take her laptop to sit on the porch with a gin & tonic in a mason jar to write her posts for Deb on the Rocks. After the Reach Out conference days she was planning to go to the IKEA in Atlanta and to practice her "Stella" yell while in full Brando drag in New Orleans, so those are the other reasons she's bummed about the cancellations. In fact, if you also feel bummed, she invites you to yell your best "Stelllll-lllla" plaintive cry, but replace it with "Bloggggg-hhhhher." There, that feels better, doesn't it?
]]>You would think that the esteemed leaders of this capitol city could figure out what to do with a localized gas shortage, but not yet. So the gas stations have blank signs. I'm on a quarter of a tank. There might be a few drops that I can suck out of my lawnmower, but other than that--or, you know, ripping off my neighbors, I'm stranded if we haven't resolved this depletion before the end of the week.
The very idea of siphoning brings a petrol hit to my mouth from my teen years, and I have to say that as repulsive and unethical as it is, I remember feeling absolute mastery over the physics of the land when my brave tugs on the tubing turned into a waterfall of gasoline flowing against gravity. Though that feeling of science experiment exuberance may have also been the experience of brain cells dying from a huff high. I'm too old now for such youthful pursuits. I prefer to buy my gas the traditional way--by turning a trick for the fifty bucks I need to fill up.
Either that, or we need to become teams of renegades with higher goals that just siphoning a tank. Remember in the film Tank Girl they had Brita-like weapon devices that they poked into people to kill them by extracting all of the water out of their bodies? We need something like similar, only with a filter that converts body fluids to gas. Bands of renegades can whack some Baby Boomers off of the Social Security drain to net us fuel to use until we can convert everything to solar. All of this is their fault, after all. Damn ineffective consuming Yuppies. Either them or the government. Probably both.
So what I'm saying is if this gas thing keeps up, I want to form a rebel group to fight The Man. Luxury and abundance, that is definitely my preference. But being a dystopian renegade is a pretty doable second. You are guided by sense of justice against corruption, feed on the adrenal purity of surviving challenges, and get the rush of bad behavior. The best part, however, has to be the fashion. I'm ready to rock it in my post-apocalyptic steampunk found art neo-savage creations. Rawr!
Or, I'm ready to pay $6 a gallon to continue to live my cushy life in denial. Either one.
(Deb believes when life gives you hard times and lemons, you should turn them into hard lemonade. and then bring her a jug and come talk bad about stuff at Deb on the Rocks.)
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I have a better plan. If you want to throw good money after bad, throw
it me. Help me pay down my debt. I'm calling upon all bloggers with more readers than me--so that means all of you--to send me money that you have earned. Even if I've made fun of
you before or called you names or said you remind me of high school and don't deserve your readers and that I would never give you link love-- you could give
me money now and make it all better.
You have a chance, today, to be like Obama. Donate to my debt relief.
You will
have my undying gratitude and willingness to serve as your Secretary of
State.
Your donation is a profound political and spiritual act
towards reconciliation and progress. Like Obama, by donating to me instead of Hillary, you are a visionary, a missionary, and a steamy-hot
attractive person.
You can be like Obama. Make history. Obama:Hillary as You:Me. It's as easy as SAT. Have people give me money, and I will be your friend forever!
Open your Paypal account now and take it over to www.Debontherocks.com. Yes We Can!
]]>But I'm also all for breaking commitments. Life happens. Things change. Hedonists revert to our true nature despite best intentions. Reality interupts fantasy. Commmitments imply that we can see into the future and control it with our will, and life always straightens us out on that one.
]]>But I'm also all for breaking commitments. Life happens. Things change. Hedonists revert to our true nature despite best intentions. Reality interupts fantasy. Commmitments imply that we can see into the future and control it with our will, and life always straightens us out on that one.
Women flock to commitments like money rolls toward the gas station. Our culture trained us to behave this way with good attendance certificates. And writers have a long history of self-flagulation and complex rituals about how and when to write. Together, we put the M into the S/M, the control in mission control.
Look at us in November. A busy month, with huge holiday pressures looming, and over 6,000 of us decide to try to NaBloMoPo ourselves by posting every day. Countless more are trying to knock out a novel this month. A novel. In November. WTF?
Admirable, maybe, but also a set up. I feel bad enough about my lack of abilities to fashion a homemade fall bouquet to grace my Teflon Chef holiday spread--and now I feel like a failure for falling down on the NaBloMoPo job. Others feel the same way, or feel like a loser because their posts have devolved into guttural noises.
Salt in the wound--no prizes for NaBloPoMo dropouts. Hedonists like me love prizes. And the folks who just couldn't do it, or had hard life things happen--these are just the women who need prizes. It's like being at a birthday party, pinning the donkey tail on the bottom of the kid's mom, and then having her exclude you from the goodie bags! I want my freaking goodie bag, lady!
So I'm throwing a giveaway at my blog in celebration of Failure. Of Broken Promises. Of Just Not Getting It All Done. Of Letting Life Interupt Your Plans. Of the freedom that comes from saying I'm Not Perfect. Bite Me. Are you a Failure? Welcome!
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