The Ideal Editor – Writer Relationship: A Chat Log

July 29th, 2009 § 0

12:57 PM me: happy birthday honger
Are you still in the savage lands?

12:58 PM Joe: No, back in NYC.
How goes it?

me: Compared to what?

12:59 PM Joe: I don’t know. Penury, disgrace?

me: Not bad at all.
I learned a new word while writing a small story for Texas Observer and then didn’t get the chance to use it in the story
1:00 PM Yonic: describing or alluding to the vaginal, the womb. Counterpoint to phallic.

Joe: Lousy word. No onomatopoeia.

me: hahaha

1:01 PM Joe: Only William Buckley could pull that word off.
And he’s dead.

me: That sounds like a challenge.
I got away with ’surfeit’.

1:02 PM Joe: Surfeit is a good word.

me: “Sudden surfeit of earthquakes,” no less

1:03 PM Joe: Thats no good. Too many S’s, for one. Plus it’s not like you can have an accumulation of earthquakes. They’re not like pies. You can have a surfeit of pies.
 Spate of earthquakes? Series? String?
1:04 PM Surge?

1:06 PM me: I think, considering surfeit’s root and usage to mean overabundance, you can have a surfeit of earthquakes in some cases, like 5 over seven days centered on a town that had never had seismic activity at all prior to those

Joe: It’s wrong and you know it.

me: and since when is alliteration undesirable? I think it is a lost art
goddammit

Joe: You can’t have an overabundance of earthquakes. One is too much.
One earthquake is an overabundance.

1:07 PM me: But they are tiny adorable earthquakes!

Joe: And earthquakes don’t abound.
I don’t think you can have an overabundance of anything that isn’t a physical thing.
Can you have a surfeit of wind?
ANSWER ME THAT MOTHERFUCKER

1:08 PM me: The crab fishermen on the Bering Sea would say yes
Do you hate America now?

Joe: If they’re illiterate they would.

me: <— lolz
okay fine, I’ll change it

Joe: You went to college so you wouldn’t have to be a crab fisherman.

1:09 PM me: I dislike overabundances of wind

Joe: String of earthquakes works.
Use that.

me: no, I’m going to use spate

Joe: String of intensifying earthquakes? That “ten” sound in the middle really propels it.

me: so you know how emasculated I am

Joe: Feel that rhythm.
1:10 PMAnd there’s a hint of alliteration.
Don’t be emasculated. Just don’t use words incorrectly.
fucker

1:12 PM me: fair enough.

On The Inauguration Trail, Part 3

July 10th, 2009 § 0

(The last in a series I did for Quorum Report in January.)

On Wednesday we turned south and headed for Georgia. When we were planning our trip we figured that if we were driving all the way to Washington, we should not come straight back if we did not have to. I wanted a different experience on the way home than I had on the way up.
» Read the rest of this entry «

On The Inauguration Trail, Part 2

July 5th, 2009 § 0

After a long time on the road we finally reached Ashburn, Virginia on Monday afternoon. We had made lunch plans with our friends who flew in from Texas and would be staying with us during the inauguration, but that was before being waylaid by weather in Wytheville, Virginia. What happened instead was that they made it to our lunch reservation and my wife and I dragged ourselves to the Metro stop in a late-day attempt to actually get into Washington, DC.

In the weeks running up to Obama’s inauguration, every front page carried at least one or two stories a day about how many people would Be There on January 20. I had assumed that these stories might actually serve to drive that number down a bit as people thought of standing in the freezing cold for eleven hours with strangers and no food and decided, instead, to witness history from the august environs of the couch. I was wrong.

At 3:00PM the day before the inauguration, the line to buy a ticket at the Vienna Orange Line Metro station in Virginia was about three hours long. After having had to engage in Mad Max-style road combat to get a parking spot, the only immediately apparent choice was to wait in a line that extended out of the station and almost to the highway. » Read the rest of this entry «

On The Inauguration Trail, Part 1

June 23rd, 2009 § 0

(As long promised, so now delivered: The first of a three-parter I did for Quorum Report in late January.)

The night Barack Obama was elected, my wife and I decided to go to his inauguration.  I had a romantic notion that taking a road trip across the heartland from Texas to Washington, D.C. would be the best way to go. The idea of this trip became fixed in my mind as a necessary pilgrimage to my nation’s capital. I had never seen it.

As I write this, America exists in a fluid present at the crossroads of history and on the precipice of total disaster. Economically, domestically, and internationally we have plates brimming with misery.  As a counterbalance the American people elected the first African-American president.  Everyone that has not already decided to hate Barack Obama has placed all of the world’s troubles at his feet for him to bear on strength of what thus far is little more than potential.

I voted for Barack Obama – it would be dishonest for me to conceal that – but I don’t know that he can save my country, let alone the world.

I love my country but I also readily admit to pessimism concerning its condition. I wonder if my countrymen feel the same way.  That is the most accurate explanation I can produce, and I hope it sufficiently illustrates the origin of my need to drive across the United States in a bitter winter, and to ask people how they feel about America, and to be one of millions on the National Mall on an Inauguration Day during what will be, for good or ill, a turning point in history.
» Read the rest of this entry «

The Iran Elections, Raw Intelligence, and the Rat List

June 17th, 2009 § 0

(cross posted at http://ratlist.tumblr.com)

We have all watched over the last few days as Twitter went from being a hot social networking tool to being used by brave Iranians to change the world. With media restrictions in place from the Iranian government, the main source of news coming out of Iran was, especially in the first few days, the tweets of students and protestors and supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

As the protest has grown and the days have worn on, the nature of the intelligence one could glean from certain twitter feeds – #IranElection and #GR88, in particular – changed. In the first few days it was a heavy but seemingly pure stream of raw intelligence, dispatches that contained up to the minute updates on everything from events personally observed by the twitters to rumors to video and pictures of the ongoing clash between protestors and government forces.

In the last 48 hours, the main tagged feeds have become diluted: innocently, by western twitterers who have been captivated and motivated by what they’ve read; and more troublingly, by people who are quite obviously disseminating incorrect, inflammatory, or misleading information. The latter is incredibly problematic, as Twitter is not only being used as a source of information for the outside world. It is also being used by activists in separate parts of the country to communicate information about what is happening where they are. So not only does the misinformation dilute the message and news coming from the Iranian people fighting for freedom, it also is detrimental to their efforts, and could very well have life or death consequences.

That is why I’m starting The Rat List – a collection of Twitter users disseminating incorrect or blatantly propagandistic information. Many of these users have new accounts, have no history of accurate updates, and are not trusted sources. They could be Iranian intelligence agents organizing to thwart the efforts of the activists and put down what is becoming a vibrant and viable uprising. They could also just be assholes who think they are being funny. Either way, I am mostly doing this for my own edification, to record some small part of what is happening in a way that I know something about, by analyzing raw intelligence. If it helps out, I’m glad for that too.

Visit http://ratlist.tumblr.com for updates.

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