Most recently, I ended an e-mail with "Piss off, Ty." It's rare that a Orionjej@aol.com type can piss me off, but they still can. We started this website how many years ago? Seven. Wow. And, yes, some idiots who e-mail can really piss me off.
Like that piece of work who wanted to whine about 'poor Judy Collins' and tell me about how offended she was by "Trapped in an AA meeting with Judy Collins (Ava and C.I.)" Let me start by telling all the whiners who e-mail to gripe that it's your responsibility to know what you're writing about. Not mine.
The aol dummy will get it right away. But moving on to the idiot's criticism, "hot little number" is calling Judy Collins a whore.
No, it's noting that in that book (which I have read), Judy's forever attesting to how great she thinks she is or was. It's as thoguh she recorded (and repeated) every compliment she'd ever received on her looks in her long, long life.
The writer wanted me to know that she was just like Judy and now she wasn't a hot number either and that was from stress that society put on you and it must be real sad to be so all alone and blah blah and blah and whine and blah and bitch and moan and whine. And for some reason, the idiot wanted to bring sexual assault into it and apparently insist that Judy Collins was sexually assaulted by a family member when she was a child. (Ava and C.I. say not only has Judy never written of that, she's never claimed it in conversations either.)
Apparently?
The e-mail was fragments of rants that were never fully developed as a thought or a sentence. Leading me to believe the writer was 'feeling no pain' when she wrote.
Judy Collins wrote a book. Ava and C.I. critiqued it. I've read the book, I've read some of the reviews. It's amazing but I believe the only ones to offer a serious critique of the book were Ava and C.I. The New York Times offered two supposed reviews. Those weren't reviews.
So AOL trash, I'm sorry that like America's educational system, your mind is in decay.
However, Ava and C.I. wrote a critique. You don't have to agree with it, you don't even have to read it. But don't pretend that they weren't describing what was in the book. They quote from the book, they often provide page numbers, they compare and contrast the book with earlier efforts of Judy Collins telling her own story in book form.
That's probably the strongest book review of that book and, I'd argue, it's probably the strongest book review I've read in years. It's also been read 187,651 times -- specifically read. That doesn't count the Sunday we published it and people read it just by scrolling through the edition. That only counts people specifically clicking on it.
This site turned seven-years-old last month. And, for the most part, e-mails like that roll off my back. But sometimes they still really get to me. Probably because they are so rare today. We've established a following online and I read the bulk of the e-mails to this site (thirdestatesundayreview@yahoo.com) and maybe I'm just not used to the negative attacks the way I once was?
What else has changed in the seven years?
I've laughed as other sites have briefly attempted to do what Ava and C.I. do. That's been fun to see. Since I'm reflecting, let me share the story longterm readers already know. It's the first writing edition. C.I. was speaking at our school. Jim dragged her back to meet us and told her that we had wanted to start a website (we were all Common Ills readers). So she comes back and meets us (she and Ava will later discover that she already knows Ava's aunt and mother). And Jim's like, help us out. So C.I. agrees to help with the first writing edition. Not realizing (no one did) that it would be an all nighter. And we're going over what needs to be covered and what doesn't -- we is Jim, Dona, Jess, Ava, C.I. and me -- and Jim is very adament that this weekly website, this online magazine, has to cover TV. Jim points out that most college students watch TV (and this started as a publication for college students). Ava and C.I. are the ones objecting. They don't want to take part.
And they'd never seen the show. (Joey.) But when the final draft wasn't working, C.I. came up with a recurring phrase for the piece that managed to hook the elements together. Ava rewrote the ending. She and C.I. had been suggesting things throughout. And it was their input that people quoted back in e-mails and in phone calls. And that was true of the second piece. And on the third, they really just take over. I don't mean that in a mean way. I mean we all want to write about Will & Grace but they're writing so fast and we're basically shut out. (That was the first piece they worked on about a show they actually watched.) They were creating dialogue for scenes that show should have. And getting it correct. And that review really turned the tide. We probably -- Dona, Jess, Jim and me -- contributed what amounted to a paragraph to that piece. And this was the most popular TV piece up to that point. And though they never read the e-mails nor their own writing, they were so jazzed on TV that they said, "We should cover Medium next week." "We" meaning all of us. So when the next Sunday rolled around and we'd read the 'reviews' (e-mails), we were all decided that Ava and C.I. were going to handle TV on their own. And their piece on Medium kicks that off. (Dona, Jess, Jim and my sole contribution is three sentences on the polling we did during the week.)
And it's Ava and C.I.'s writing that made us.
And they make it look so simple. They make it seem so easy. Which is why various outlets (including print magazines) think, "Oh, I can do that!" And then they try. For a month or two or an issue or two. And then they go back to their campaign coverage that they try to pass off as political coverage (yes, I agreed with Ava and C.I.'s point a few weeks back on that). Because it's not easy at all. It's really tough to write like they do.
Right now, they haven't started their latest piece. Right now, they have no idea which show they're going to cover even. They, like everyone else working on this edition, are in a mad rush to try to haul together new content and complete the edition.
In seven years, I've learned that the best writing often isn't planned at all. Often, it consists of nothing more than Jim saying, "We need a piece on ___. Go write it."
I've learned that accidents are often miracles if you take a minute to breathe.
I've learned not to panic when I'm trying to open the last Lays Stax cannister and the plastic covering comes off all around the rim leaving nothing else to pull it off with. As I was in a panic one weekend, Dona grabbed an ink pen, slammed it down on the plastic covering and then pulled it up. When you've been up for over 24 hours and are trying to write, you can get punch drunk and miss the obvious.
I've learned that trusting your own instincts matter. It was Jess (though Jim will disagree) who first suggest our now popular feature "From TESR Test Kitchen." Jess suggested it because he was already surprised to discover there is an entry on "TESR" that comes back to us online. Ava and C.I. use that phrase in their CSI pieces (for the main show, the Miami show and the NYC show). Ava and C.I. came up with the phrase just for the CSI pieces. We tend to shorthand the site as "Third" here and that comes from Betty who has a relative who is a III and is called "Third" by his friends and family. So Jess had been on us to think of some way to use TESR since a web entry existed that explained TESR was us, The Third Estate Sunday Review. And Trina had sent something back with Ava and C.I. for us to eat and Jess just seized on "From the TESR Test Kitchen!" Jim then asked what it would be about and Jess said "this" referring to the conversation Jim and Dona had been having for at least 15 minutes about some candy (I think it was Junior Mints) and whether they tasted the same as they always did (Dona) or were actually sweeter a few years back (Jim). It had nothing to do with anything related to writing but it was consuming a large amount of time. Jess had a point. And he repeatedly brought it up until we finally made it a regular feature. Once it was a success Jim started with: "Well whoever created it . . ." But it was Jess. And it's been a huge success.
I've learned that when you're tired of something, stop doing it.
During the time Bully Boy Bush occupied the White House, one of our regular features, at least once a month, sometimes more, was a collage. We'd do a comedic piece with one paragraph to describe the visual we'd come up with. And it was political and it was funny and Kat does collages and that's where we got the idea. But it was too popular and too much pressure and when Barack got into the White House I believe we tried it initially and then just stopped. How it originally worked was we would have a ton of newspapers and magazines ready to go through and we'd offer different ideas for features for this week -- it was our bull session. Ava and C.I. would take notes and the rest of us would go through and clip and clip and clip. And soon we even had files of clipped photos we wanted to work in at later dates. But around the time that the Bush folder was two inches thick, we were bored to death.
We could have kept on until the readers were bored to death. Fortunately, the feature was still popular when we discontinued it.
And that really underscores that one day we're going to shut this site down. We do want to go out when we've still got an audience. And we're lucky that, thus far, it just keeps growing.
But when we started, there really was a community type feeling about the online world. And people e-mailed you and stuff. (I'm talking about other websites and about bloggers.) And a lot of those people were run off by the Cult of St. Barack. A lot of really great writers are no more because of that Cult. That's especially true of women writers online. The sexism and the violence ran off a number of political women. I know because I've heard from them. Usually e-mails that say, "I just couldn't take it anymore." And I do understand that.
Equally true the Cult includes a large number of 'professionals' -- they're the ones who started the purging of blogrolls. The online community was a community in 2005. In 2012, it's really not. You've got a group of professionals who write ad copy for the Democratic Party and try to pretend they're a community or about reporting or some other b.s. But they're nothing but ad men (and I use "men" intentionally) eager to turn readers into suckers so that they can fatten their wallets.
I keep waiting for a remergence, a rebirth of the internet. I don't think that's possible while Barack's in office. He instills group think and kills individuality.
I like Joe Biden. But last week, he made a fool of himself. And I bring that up because that's how a number of websites lose credit with me. Wally and Cedric called Biden on it in "THIS JUST IN! FINGER POINTING JOE!" and "Joe's the last one to talk." Joe decided that the easiest way to kill off his critics was to paint them as racists. In 2007, Joe was painted as a racist for the way he complimented Barack. By the same token, after Barack entered the White House, I lost a lot of respect for a number of websites (The Confluence, for example) that felt the need to insist others were racists. They seemed to think they'd ride that back into the Boyz Club. I found it hilarious. There are few sites that even have a right to talk about racism in others as far as I'm concerned. The Confluence? Did they even have one Black voice? Here at Third, you've got me and countless others. And we have serious conversations about race. We don't just bring it up when we want to attack someone. As I write this, I've got an ear on the piece Jess is doing, he's doing a discussion with C.I. and Elaine and they're bringing up racism, a pattern of racism. That's what we do here. We don't just cry, "Racist!" and move on. And yet a lot of people seem to do that online. Some to shut down discussions, some to try to tar and feather others to make themselves look better.
Want to prove you're not racist? Create a community that empowers all. All the websites in this community followed The Common Ills. That's the community C.I. created and she did it by being smart and being aware. We've got Betty with a site, Cedric with a site, Marcia with a site, Stan with a site and Ann with a site. That's five African-American sites that sprang up because of this community.
But what I've learned in seven years is that people don't want to help out Black bloggers, they don't want to assist them. They just don't want to be called a racist. That's why so much of the web communities remain segregated today.