Just now (October) learning that you decided to close your Comments Section, something, given what must be absolutely unbearable stress caused by the infinite cranks you must have had to deal with. I fully empathize with and admire your decision. Let the dick-fucks go find some other venue where they can act out their obvious and exhausting anti-social compulsions. And should also encourage/force the rest of us to spend more of our time “creating,” less attaching ourselves parasitically to others’ venues/projects (like yours) because we neglect to actualize realities coming from our own centers.
Although I wasn’t reading, much less “hanging out at,” your Silliman’s Blog a whole lot the last couple of years (doubt that I even visited it for more than a yearly total of 300 minutes these last 12 months – seriously, so much else to do in life and so little time to get things done in life), hell it was a great ride while it lasted. Then of course more and more, like any other hot spot on the planet, the cranks must have started gathering there in droves, as they do any place where things are “free” and don’t require any responsibility on their part (like getting their own fucking blogs and earning their own reasons for deserving attention).
The fucking cranks… They’re all over the culture these days, aren’t they. Reality TV, the Internet, everyplace… Needing their “attention” to something that they refuse to create or actualize from within themselves. Or simply can’t, being so “damaged” or underdeveloped inside, psycho-dynamically, and all – so they go out and impose their insatiable hunger for attention on others who ARE fully developed and functional human beings possessing authentic centers (R.S., for example). We need to create more poetries that assist these invalids and schizoids to seek genuine self-actualization and the development of fully functioning personalities. The therapists and therapies are out there. Waiting for them. Silliman’s is yet another half-way house that got over-run by them, couldn’t feed and shelter them any longer, too many, and they were starting to harm and harass all the others who were more deserving. Which of course is criminal. Hooray for R.S. finally shutting the doors on them. We should all work to find out who they are so that we can get them the real help that they need (or at least keep them from acting out their psycho aggression and harming those of us who never invited them into our homes in the first place).
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3 comments:
Hi Steve.
You say you weren't paying too much attention to S.'s blog in the last years, but "the cranks must have started hanging out there in droves". But why make that speculation, if you don't know that it is true, that the cranks became more numerous, and implicitly more obnoxious.
I myself cannot say whether that is so. I wasn't paying as much attention myself to the comments as I once did--there were other things on my mind. But I thought that whenever I was ready again I could re-enter the vigorous world of debate on the Sillblog. Wow, the way people sometimes sparked each other into exciting or funny insights as they con-versed, TURNED together towards topics, as etymology suggests.
I'll say it again and again till I'm hoarse, there was no reason for Silliman to obliterate the archive of old comments, even if he was tired of the moderation process involved in permitting new ones, and thus gave himself an early birthday present (he closed down the comment stream a day or before).
A great moment on the SillBlog was when someone re-named Ron's "School of Quietude vs. PostAvant" dichotomy as 'I Was Walking My Dog' vs. 'apple-toytruck-fascism!'
I loved it when some commenter mentioned that Harold Bloom can recite all of _Paradise Lost_ from memory, and Ron replied that "that's becuase its HIS story!" (i.e., Bloom's nostalgia for previous academic formations).
It might be easier for ME to commit _Paradise Lost_ to memory these days :(, what with the loss of the Silliman comment field, the Poetics List's vibrancy, and others of My Favorite Things.
Sorry to hog this place, but I want to say, Steve (1) watch out about diagnosing people from a distance as needing 'help', and (maybe especially) groups of people acting in certain ways, however clear their 'problems' may seem.
(2) I am wondering how you and others reading this will react to an example I will now give of what I consider a rude-but-thought-provoking post to Silliman's blog.
One of the last posts before it all ended (I think it was by a person who hadn't posted before) spoke of Silliman as an "anti-hippie Marxist robot cog". But he said it in sort of an amiable way, if one considered the entire post, and it led to some interesting follow-up by Ian Keenan and others regarding the nature of hippie-ism. OK. But the real rude statement by this poster, I think, in the same post or perhaps a follow-up, referred to the way he thought the practice of Yoga had become less meaningful over the years in the United States. He said that it had now become largely "a feminine hygeine product". OK, that's snarky in a way that borders on misogyny, right? But is it actually over the border? And does it have no truth-value whatsoever--for it does tell of yoga & various other 'mind/body/spirit' disciplines becoming predominantly female pursuits, at the same time that they become too much about feelings of comfort and safey, and not enough about presence in the Cosmos? I'm curiously what you and others have to say, Steve.
And as others have said, thanks so much for blogging again.
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