Blogorrhea Junior

Blogging, Aggregators & Copyright

Copyright issues: they just never go away. Remember that new blog I started, the one called Dowsing? Boy, what a headache that turned into. Don't get me wrong: I love writing the blog. It's fun to have a personal journal again, a place where I can write merely for the purpose of expressing my thoughts—with the usual writer's eye to mining those posts for use elsewhere, which is why I went to the trouble of putting a clear copyright statement on it. This blog only has a Collective Commons copyright, stating that people are free to use the content, unaltered, for non-commercial purposes. I'm happy to have people subscribe to the feed, link, quote, or use the content for educational purposes. What I almost always protest is people just posting my content to draw traffic to their site, which may or may not have anything to do with book arts. Write your own damn content then. Don't steal from others.

So Dowsing, simply by virtue of its name, has ended up in the aggregate feed for a site called "Life Technology™. They sell pseudo-scientific, New Agey crap like Tesla oscillation fields, alchemical compounds, and Atlantean crystals (!! No, seriously!). So it's rather ironic that they're using my content on their site, since what Dowsing is all about is freedom from bad science and superstition. I've got hardly any hits on Dowsing, which I really don't care about in that sense. People will find it and read it if they're interested. It's as much for me as it is a public endeavor. So when I found Life Technology™'s URL in my stats, I was curious, and then I was pissed off.  But I'll let you read the exchange; here's what I wrote to them yesterday:

I notice that the content on your site is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright act. Guess what? So is mine. Please stop lifting content from my blog, Dowsing (http://leekottner.typepad.com/dowsing/), to use on your website as its purpose is antithetical to everything on your site. You have no less than a dozen posts from my blog on your dowsing page (http://www.lifetechnology.org/dowsing.php). Please remove them now or I will be filing a complaint with your ISP and website host.

Sincerely,

Lee Kottner

And here's the nice little note I got in return this morning:

dear lee,
our news headlines at www.lifetechnology.org/dowsing.php are used according to fair use provisions and are intended to direct people to relevant sites.

you can read more about the fair use policy at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

we have not published your articles, only headings with links to your articles at your own blog.

if we were breaking copyright provisions as you claim then most sites on the web would also be breaking the rules but that is not the case.

this law has been tested in court many times and rulings have universally been in the favour of the blogger.

thank you
kirsty

Are you laughing yet? I was. Wikipedia, huh? Here's my reply:

First of all, Kirsty, this is a very flimsy and erroneous argument, and you have picked the wrong person to use it on. I've written a series of posts on copyright for artists on another blog, so I'm fairly well educated about it. Find yourself a better source than Wikipedia. Try the U.S. Government copyright office instead.

As one of the intellectual property lawyers I spoke to said, "fair use only earns you the right to go to court." Fair use is in the eye of the copyright holder, who is much more likely to be favored in a court case than the person in violation; there is no hard and fast rule about proportion or magic number of words that the user may interpret for their own purposes. You are not using just the "headlines" from my posts; you are using much of the introductory paragraph. The feed from yesterday's post (7/02 "It's Just That Simple") uses almost the entire post, since it was a short written introductory paragraph with a video attached. The fact that you have selections from more than half of my posts would probably count against you too. I've become a major source for that particular feed, simply because my blog is called "Dowsing." As of this date, there are only 30 posts on my blog. 13 of those posts appear in some form on your page. That's a high proportion of content.

 

Fair use usually holds up best in court when it is used for educational purposes, in a classroom, or by artists. Your site is clearly primarily a commercial endeavor, not a news and information aggregator, and you are using my content to draw commercial traffic to your commercial site. Either you offer me a fee for the use of my content in this way, since you are clearly using it in a commercial manner, or you are in violation of my copyright, which states that my content cannot be used for commercial purposes unless I agree to it. I have not agreed, so you're in violation.

 

If you'd like a clear run-down on "fair use" you can find it here, at the U.S. Government copyright office site: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html. It clearly states that commercial use has less protection than non-profit or educational uses. It also clearly states that the safest course is always to get permission, which you have not done. Here are some of the uses which have generally been considered "Fair use" in the past.

 

The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use:

quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.

 

None of these fit your case. In your reply, you state: "this law has been tested in court many times and rulings have universally been in the favour of the blogger." Guess what? You're not the blogger here. I am. You are the aggregator. The Associated Press has recently sued a news aggregator over just this issue. You can read about it here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071010-associated-press-sues-news-aggregator-for-licensing-failure.html

Secondly my site is not a "news" site nor is it relevant to your content; it is not about the paranormal, or dowsing, and is in fact, in part about real science, not the fake kind you're selling to gullible seekers. Now, if you'd like to see a totally scientific debunking about every one of your products appear in that "news" feed from my site, I'll be happy to oblige. It happens to fit my subject matter pretty tidily. I also happen to know a couple of well-respected science writers (and physicists) who'd be happy to pitch in, I'm sure.

Section 1204 sets out a hefty penalty for copyright infringement: 

§ 1204. Criminal offenses and penalties

(a) GENERAL  Any person who violates section 1201 or 1202 willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain

(1) shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both, for the first offense; and

(2) shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned for not more than 10 years, or both, for any subsequent offense.

I went to the trouble of clearly marking this site as copyrighted because I intend to use some of the posts in a non-fiction book. Your publication of them without my consent and without a fee injures me as an author and I think a court would side with me on this. Do you really want to risk a half-million dollar fine on this? And that's not counting the $100,000 for each infringement, i.e, each separate use of one of my posts. That's well over a million dollars in fines should it reach the maximum. Not to mention jail time.

Care to risk it?

Sincerely,

Lee Kottner

Oddly enough, within an hour of receiving this, the feed from the news pages disappeared from their site. I suspect there is some serious editing of the spider going on.

UPDATE: Then the feed came back, and I began plotting with Jen to do the debunking posts, but this morning, I got a little note from their "legal counsel":

Dear Lee,

Thank you for your bringing your DMCA related concerns to our attention.

 

Life Technology acts as a news aggregator to provide news stories for the purpose of disemmination [sic] of news in categories that are relevant to our website. Dowsing is one such area that we are involved in. You will find many bona fide articles about dowsing at our website and blog. Despite what you seem to believe, our news stories are offered for educational purposes.

 

We are not guilty of publishing your work for our commercial gain nor have we acted in bad faith.

 

From a legal perspective, an infringement case would be very weak. There is strong argument for a fair use defense here. The brief exerpts [sic] of your work posted by ourselves are not stifling demand for your work. We are actually creating demand, not decreasing demand by providing links to the original work. Further, posting excerpts of the articles and linking to the original facilitates and invites critical discussion of the content, one of the primary reasons for the fair use defense.

 

You could not use the argument that we are diminishing the value of your work by disseminating copyrighted work prior to the publication of a book if you are publishing these exerpts into the public domain yourself.

 

Links are the currency of the internet. Instead of harassing bloggers etc., you should be praising them for bringing people to your content. It's a very poor business decision to ask people not to facilitate access to your product.

 

We are aware of the recent filing where Associated Press is suing a news aggregator on the same grounds. We feel that this even marks an unfortunate event in the history of the internet and free speech.

 

We have temporarily removed the offending page dowsing.php pending the outcome of The Associated Press versus Moreover technologies lawsuit and further clarification of DMCA law.

 

Thank you.

Joshua Silverberg, Legal Counsel Life Technology

Here's my reply:

Dear Joshua,

You've got an interesting interpretation of "public domain" if you think that anything on the internet is in it and thus fair game. Despite how "educational" a service you think your links provide, there is no escaping the fact that LifeTechnology is a commercial site selling goods. Your "news" feeds are merely a service; they are part of your advertising strategy, one I've employed myself in designing websites. Calling yourselves "bloggers" is disingenous and untrue. When my site provides a large proportion of your content for one of those feeds, you should be paying to use my material. I don't work for free. The harm is not in the linking, it's in the amount of material used, and the fact that my content is thus associated with a non-scientific site which lessens the value of my work. But I'll keep in mind the "increasing critical discussion" part if you start posting my material again. You won't mind me debunking the products because that will be educational. Some of my real scientific blogging friends were very excited about the prospect.

The upshot is is that you've removed the feed, and I'm happy with that.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

Lee Kottner

I'm not normally in favor of bullying people with the DMCA. Big corporations have made a bad habit of using it to intimidate perfectly legal uses of their content, so they can control all the money. I was happy to see The Naked Cowboy win the right to sue M&M Mars for misuse of his image for that reason. As a teacher, I'm all for fair use. But as a writer, I'm also all for being paid for your work and for having it appear only where you want it to. There's a thin and badly defined line between fair use and exploitation.

In this case, there's also the issue of guilt by association. As a writer, I do not want to be associated with any entity that sells the kind of pseudo-scientific crap this site sells. This is a list of their other "news" feeds, most of which I have a lot of objections to:

Kabbalah Radionics Magick Radiesthesia Homeopathy Alternative Health Mercola Jeff Sutherland PRWEB NLP Hypnosis Orgone Orgonite Rife Psychotronics Psionics Illuminati Alchemy Ormus Free Energy Alternative Science Spirituality Huna Metaphysics Occult Witchcraft Health Spirit Conspiracy Herbal Medicine Dowsing Healing Seduction Rosicrucian Paranormal Philosophy Technology Science Paganism Wicca Time Travel Feng Shui Atlantis UFO Scientology Zappers Cloudbusters Nikola Tesla Grimoires Chemtrails Manifesting Yoga Astrology Psychic Powers Xtrememind Forum

I hate to see yoga, spirituality, metaphysics, health, philosophy, technology, science, and Nikola Tesla lumped in with Atlantis, UFOs, Scientology, Orgone, Alchemy, and the Illuminati. Some of these things are not like the others.  I  suspect it was at least as much the threat of debunking as it was the legal talk that led to the sudden demise of the news feed. People have a right to believe whatever they like, but they also have a right not to be forced to associate or have their work associated with causes or ideas they don't condone. And control of your own intellectual work trumps, every time, the notion that information wants to be free.

[Cross posted at Dowsing]

Typography Meets Church Architecture

Every now and then my worlds collide, producing some really interesting mashups. I love cathedral and church architecture, especially the Gothic and neo-Gothic. I love typography, as you've probably gathered by now. I'm a big fan of poster art of all kinds, but especially letterpress. So I was in a little ecstasy of delight when I ran across this amazing, amazing piece of typographical design by Cameron Moll, via Veer's website (click the "Ideas" tab for more coolness from Veer).

This is only a detail of the whole 16"x24" print which is a rendering of the main Latter Day Saints Temple in Salt Lake City, though it was designed to advertise a design review independent of the church itself. You can see other pictures of it at Veer's website or order one for yourself. Half of them are gone already, at $50 a pop + postage and I just ordered one for myself, so if you love this kind of stuff, get on it now. I'll let you know how glorious it is and gloat a little when it arrives. Just the pictures have really knocked my socks off

[Click the photo for full size. Cross posted at Dowsing]

Word Clouds & Flipped Text

A fun new toy. Boy, am I in trouble. So I thought I'd share it: go over to Wordle and make your own word cloud. You can change the fonts, the color, the word orientation, print it to a PDF, then manipulate it and re-save it as a graphic file to print on T shirts or whatever. You can also link it to your blog, as I've done here. The really lovely thing is that it's completely copyright free, which means you make it, you own exclusively, unless you also save it to Wordle's gallery, in which case everyone else can use it too.

This would be a kind of a cool tool for generating covers or pages. It takes all the hassle out of doing it in a graphic arts or page design program and  you have a fair amount of control over how it comes out. The font selection is not too shabby and you can always change the colors later, once you've got it into a jpeg or tiff format. All you have to do is come up with the content.

[This is all Painting Speech's fault. Gee, thanks!]

Then there's this site, where you can flip your text around and paste it in wherever, ˙ooʇ uı ǝɯıʇ ǝlʇʇıl ɐ noʎ sǝʌɐs ɥɔıɥʍ though it does tend to make the punctuation a little confusing. And it doesn't have any font or color options.

[Blame this one on TJ Book Arts.  Cross-posted at Dowsing]

Catching up: Miscellania

I am, obviously, way behind on, well, everything right now. I can probably blame some of that on my new blog, which I've been compelled to write in just about every day. The class I'm teaching, even though it's only one section, is keeping me stepping looking for new material for them to read, because I've never taught journals or diaries as lit before. Plus, it's hot out (and inside since I don't have AC) and this is when my friends and I do a lot of catching up. Summer is for playing! I don't think I've ever really gotten away from that academic schedule in my head, despite years of corporate employment. And my energy level is kinda low right now, something I hope will fix itself in a couple of weeks. Anyway, that all combines to produce the benign neglect of my blog that you see here. So let me do a little catch-up today with some selections from people who aren't slackers like me.

First up, a fab video from Asheville bookbinder Annie Fain talking about sewing books, being an artist, making books. If it looks professionally done, that's because it's part of the series by Ursula Gullow, producer of Art Seen Asheville cable tv. Enjoy! Her blog is fantastic, too, so check it out.

• If you're in NYC and interested in stamping and other paper arts, The Ink Pad is having its third annual A*Muse*A*Palooza Stamp Extravaganza July 7-13th. "Seven days of fun with two classes, one Make-n-Take, and a card contest." The staff there are lovely, funny, helpful and very knowledgeable. I always drop way too much money there when I go in.
• Links! Lots of 'em! The Centre for Fine Print Research in the UK has a massive list of book arts links from all over the world that's definitely worth checking out. It's frequently updated and comes with handy little descriptions.
• Paper Sewing tutorial links, yet another technique (which includes paper quilting) for book and paper arts, over here at Silverspring Studios.
  
• Green Chair Press, one of my favorites, has an exquisite set of letterpress printed playing cards which I'm coveting like you would not believe. And I don't even play card games. But cards—they're kind of a passion of mine. I love unusual card sets. These are just gorgeous. If you missed my birthday . . . (hint, hint).
• Paper Dragon Books, a new(ish) bindery and printshop in Chelsea here in NYC. How did I miss this when it opened? (thanks to Moontree Arts for the heads up).
• Vroooom! This paper V12 engine blew me away. Engineers and architects make models like this all the time, but usually they're computer-rendered. This one wasn't rendered until it was hand-built first. Amazing.
• Calico Cat Press, who's doing some interesting books, lately.
• In case you missed it, the NYTimes had a nifty article on font design programs and some of the cool, free fonts that are coming out of them. Being a font junkie myself, this delighted me.One of these days, I'm going to get around to giving that a go, along with making my own paper and printing my books on letterpress. Yep, any day now.
• &rew Borloz (don't you love that use of the ampersand?) of Urban Paper Arts has been doing a beautiful and fascinating series on visual journaling over his blog. You'll have to scroll through to find the specific entries, but believe me, it won't be a hardship. &rew has some beautiful stuff on his blog.
• Amazing, amazing comic strips (though that seems entirely the wrong term) by Coco Wang about the May Chinese earthquake. Get a hanky before you click. (Thanks to Ampersand Duck and Arctic Oak for the heads up)
• Nice interview with Elissa Campbell of Blue Roof Designs with pictures of her and a great slideshow of her books.
• Beautiful paper objects, some under glass from Lyndie Dourthe. The site is in French, but just click through the links to see her anatomical doll illustrations, paper flowers, displays under glass and more pretty fabulous displays and installations. (Tip o' the hat to Double Happiness
  

George Carlin, 1937-2008, RIP

George Carlin, one of my heroes, has died at the age of 71—way too young for such a free spirit and incisive observer of the absurdities of life and language. Fitting that he was recently honored with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor; I can't think of anyone's style that reminds me so much of Twain: irreverent, sarcastic, disrespectful, and fearless. One routine he'll go down in history for was the Seven Words You Can't Say on TV:

"The original seven words were, shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Those are the ones that will curve your spine, grow hair on your hands and (laughter) maybe, even bring us, God help us, peace without honor (laughter) um, and a bourbon."

New York radio station WBAI let him say them on the air in the early 70's and in 1978, the obscenity case went to the Supreme Court, where the censuring and censoring was upheld, perpetuating stupidity like the fines for the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction." Carlin was particularly good at pointing out societal hypocrisy, which is probably one of the reasons I loved him so: "The word shit, uh, is an interesting kind of word in that the middle class has never really accepted it and approved it. They use it like, crazy but it's not really okay. It's still a rude, dirty, old kind of gushy word. (laughter) They don't like that, but they say it, like, they say it like, a lady now in a middle-class home, you'll hear most of the time she says it as an expletive, you know, it's out of her mouth before she knows. She says, Oh shit oh shit, (laughter) oh shit. If she drops something, Oh, the shit hurt the broccoli. Shit."

I also loved his language consciousness. He did an entire routine on what he called "soft language" that's worthy of George Orwell's 1984. You can see it here. He's so un-PC that it's wonderful, fearlessly pointing out that those nice comfortable words like "pre-owned" have simpler meanings, like "used": "It's getting so bad now that any day I expect to hear a rape victim referred to as an 'unwilling sperm recipient.'" Language like this doesn't just distort truth, it's us bullshitting ourselves. Carlin had the same horror of  of euphemism that I do. In this routine, in fact, he rails against the use of the terms "pass away" and "expire" ("like a magazine subscription") for "died."

And now that he has, the language police have won a little victory.

[Cross-posted at Dowsing]

Consoli-datin'

Once again, I've spent most of a day updating and fiddling with my various web presences. You may notice I've dropped a couple of things out of this blog's sidebar, and that the sidebars of Dowsing have grown exponentially, or at least geometrically. You do the math. One blog, the long-neglected Perfidy Report, has disappeared entirely. This is both a hopeful thing and a necessity. Perfidy Report was a blog of fear and outrage at what the Bush administration was perpetrating on the Constitution. I hope we've seen the last of his ilk for a while, and that he lives out his lame-duckness without quacking too much, instead of crapping up things even more. It doesn't seem likely, given his latest behavior, but I live in hope it's not too big a mess to be cleaned up by a half-way honest agent of change and his minions (at least one of whom I hope will be a certain woman). The necessity part is just that I can fit it into the "real me" part of my life now, so why not?

So, Perfidy Report: Pfffft! I have kept some of the sidebar stuff from it, but they've either migrated to Dowsing, or been consolidated into other already-existing sidebar items. And all of the sidebar stuff across both remaining blogs has gotten a thorough housecleaning. Dowsing also got a little bit of a design redo: I went with three columns instead of two, to accommodate all my interests and give myself room for what's going to be a lengthy book list. This is the first time since I've started blogging that I've had a blog that truly reflects my personality, instead of just my art, my current obsessions or my business. Dowsing feels entirely different to me than any other blog I've been writing, including the first one I started.

This means some of the topics I've been writing about here will also migrate to Dowsing. I'll leave the categories, intact so you can find earlier posts, but I'll probably confine my blogging about science, current affairs, feminism, grief studies, personal strangeness, and "Life, the Universe and Everything" to Dowsing, and the other topics only as they relate somehow to books, book arts, and writing. Needless to say, there will probably be some cross-posting, but I aim to keep that to a minimum.

Two big topics I'm moving over to Dowsing are "The City" and travel. Again, not entirely, but for the most part. The Barcelona posts will remain here, but all future travelogues will be at Dowsing unless there are book arts elements. I love writing about New York and its inhabitants and visitors, and it offers extremely fertile ground for writing topics. Ditto with travel. I'm glad to have a place where I can pull out the stops on both topics. Henceforth, this blog will mostly deal with books, book arts, doing art, and writing.

Oh, and the website got a new set of links, and some news updates, too.

Of course, you know what having a new blog means, don't you?  I get to make new icons! Bwahahahaha!

Working, for a Change

Hey peeps, sorry I've been AWOL for a while. I've actually been working in one form or another and moonlighting on my other blog for a bit. So between writing lessons plans for a new class I've never taught before and reading tons of published journals and diaries for it, taking care of some health problems (don't ask; believe me, you don't want to know, though it's nothing serious, just embarrassing), looking for other money-making endeavors, having a birthday, catching up with friends, and . . . you get the idea. Life: it interferes with work so often (but in a good way). I have, however, gotten up to no good, too.

I'm happy to report that I have the mock-up of the body is as solid as the thought that holds it in place, the collection of Carlos Schröder's poems that I've been working on possibly forever. The mock up is currently in Argentina, where Carlos is spending the summer (those lucky profs), and apparently he will have to pry it out of his mother's hands to bring it back. She lets him "borrow" it when he's wanted to take it to his editor and book-selling friends down there. Moms, they're just like that. Pics of that, when it comes back from vacation.

So in the meanwhile, I've been practicing making more blank books and giving them away. Well, the making part, anyway. I'm pretty good at the giving away part. Here's two of them, with more to come as soon as the others are out of the press and I can take pictures. (Click thumbnails for larger pics.)

I'm off to buy more paper tomorrow at Blick's sale. I want more of these fun hot chocolate paper, since I screwed this one up and had to use that pretty watered paper for the back cover on this one. It makes cute books. I've made some sort of happy mistakes with this and decided imperfection is just an excuse for crafty improvisation. I had the most fun pasting up little cut-outs of the cover paper on the inside of the books though. Some of the crayon ones came out fun. And my sewing is getting better, but I've decided I need more thread now, of course. Especially after I went fabric shopping with Gretl on Sunday and found some beautiful silky polyester in a faint lilac color with an oriental plum blossom print on it. The next experiment will be making book cloth. So, yeah, purple thread is definitely in the works. And guess what? Volcano Arts is having a sale on it! Yay!

In Dreams Begin . . . Mashups

I remarked earlier that I'm a vivid dreamer, and a lot of my story ideas come from dreams. Like most people, my most lucid ones, the ones I remember most often, are the ones I have in the morning, right before I wake up. I had a doozy this morning, and thank God I had the luxury of staying in bed to follow where it led. If you stick with them and think them out, there's almost always the kernel of a story in them or, if you're lucky, the whole magilla. That's what I got today.

One of the fun things about literally dreaming up story ideas is realizing in retrospect where all the elements have come from. One character (who was never on-stage in the dream, just implied) is patterned after a friend of a friend whom I've only heard described (in lengthy detail). One character is a guy I know from a former job. One character is a composite of several women I've worked with. The settings are every starving artist den of iniquity I've ever been in (or lived in myself) and Lew's & Jim's amazing library I saw at Christmas up in Maine. Combined with these real elements are all the archetypes of characters and all the myths I've ever read about and stored away. I love the way dreams play Mixmaster with everything you take in when you're conscious and then spit out something new with it in. It's the original form of mashups. Keep you posted on how this turns out. I'm kinda excited about it. But then, I always am, at first. It's the nose to the grindstone that gets it finished, though.

I Can Has New Blog

I've spent much of this hot stinking day setting up a new blog, called Dowsing: Finding a New Way to Believe. I'll let it explain itself, but Rob and I had an interesting discussion about spinning off another blog for a different facet of my life. He's been blogging for a while now, too, first from Guam and now from Maine and they're just so fun to read. Rob blogs about his daily life, his students, the areas he lives in, the local culture, the native food (yes, even Maine has native food: the Whoopie Pie), gardening, teaching, singing, church, books he's reading, his car, trips he's taking—you get the idea. It's like his own personal newspaper. I love reading them the same way I love reading his evil twin's blog: The Affected Provincial. They're both smart, funny, general interest blogs. The Affected Provincial's reads like a Victorian country squire's, with his esoteric interests in bog flora, dandyism, art, and natural history oddities. Rob's reads more like the Victorian country vicar's.

Rob was puzzled by why I'd decided to spin off all the different kinds of blogs I've got (fanfic, politics, 9/11, book arts and now one on finding my way to a new spirituality). Blogs ought to, he feels, reflect the multifacetedness of their writers. Fair enough.

Me, I don't think they "ought" to do anything except what I want them to. I'm funny about my tools that way. So here's what I wrote back to Rob about my blogging habits:

Blogs are much more than just journals, which are almost always intended to be private and all-encompassing. Blogs serve varied purposes precisely because they're public documents. I've split so many of them off for a number of reasons.

I have a fanfic blog on Live Journal because that's where all the fanficcers are and we can "friend" each other to read our fic in a little community.

The 9/11 journals I look at more as a historic record, though they're also intimately tied with my love of NYC and my evolving politics—the latter of which I didn't acknowledge for a number of years precisely because of my religious affiliation. Ditto with the Perfidy Report, which I've stopped writing on and will probably delete.

And Blogorrhea is slowly morphing into the marketing tool for my artist's books, hence my desire to make it more about art and writing than about my personal shtuff. So what I think of as my "main" blog, Blogorrhea, is really a marketing medium.  Eventually, when Maelstrom House is really up and running, that blog is going to get a name change to reflect that. The truth is that my readers who are interested in book arts stop coming back when I write about personal stuff. They're looking for book arts news. Those copyright posts I wrote got me more hits than anything—and that's what I want for that blog. It's a source of information, not just personal expression.

Dowsing, however is more personal than any of them, more like a true journal. And I will probably talk about art and books on it as well, but with a completely different slant than I use on Blogorrhea. I will, as a result, have far fewer readers. Journals, after all, are pretty navel gazing. (Secretly, I think I'm hoping I can turn this into a book, eventually.)

I have to disagree with you that blogs have anything they "should" do beyond that they should do what the writer wants them to. But that's the writer's problem. It's a bit like saying paper should only be used a certain way. Blogs are just another tool. I don't think you can treat them as a separate genre with rules. Just by virtue of being on the internet, they are boundaryless.

So anyway, this is why I have a new blog. If you're interested in reading about my personal journey through the realms of science, spirituality, and philosophy to some new kind of faith, come on over. Bring your water wings. It's pretty deep water.

Conspiracy Theory: The NYT Book Review Version

I don't know why I keep reading the NYTimes Book Review with its crappy record of ignoring women's writing (when it's not outright belittling it). I guess I keep hoping that, magically, one day that will change. Then I remind myself that one of the definitions of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who feels this way about the male literary world though. One of my favorite book blogs, Fade Theory, has a link to an interview with Spanish author Lucia Etxebarria in cafebabel. (I haven't read any of her books as they're currently only available in her native Spanish and in French translations), Etxebarria has been a "journalist, translator, script-writer and has worked in advertising" in addition to writing novels and non-fiction books about pop culture. About male writers, she says,

‘Male artists are artists, female artists are women. That’s the way things work, and they have always been this way. Literature is an even more macho art than others. There’s a border between sentimental literature and virile literature, which should be kept in mind. Male writers are very embedded into their virility, and it’s a threat if we women sell more books than them.’ The former professor at the University of Aberdeen is jokingly blunt. ‘My books sell well and the best part is that I’m blunt, so people categorise me as a lesbian, or in the best case, as an emasculator.’

If it's a given that women writers ≠ artists, and I think it's safe to say that's true, then in that light, you can see the Times's exclusion of women as part of a conspiracy to erase our words. This is especially true with their high toned and highbrow attitude, though they've now condescended to review (gasp!) mass market fiction (and funny how much of that is written by women!), because in trade fiction, women dominate and on the non-fiction best seller list, the proportion of women to men is almost even, too. And yet, this week's perfidy reviews in the Book Review (Sunday, May 25, 2008): books by men: 11/13. 12/13 if you count the one that's co-authored with a woman, even though her name comes first.

Some things never change. But it's good to have somebody say it out loud.