I also have this first hand from my great uncle Bobby, who drank too much, and was supposedly in the State Department (he really was in the State Department) but was also CIA and would, after he’d had too much to drink, BRAG about how American Oil put the Shah back in power while he was there in Tehran. My cousin Mark was born there in 1952.

Can’t, she wrote back. I’m a journalist. Have to maintain my supposed ah ha ha journalistic neutrality.
Write for your own sake, I said. I’ll paraphrase. We’ll make a site, okay, & you & me and everyone we know can post to it & you can help me do it b/c I’m electronically inept but you’ll be Anon, all right? but you need to HELP me, Sara, okay? you have to help us b/c most Americans don’t GET Green from Yellow from Red and WE REALLY NEED TO understand this, ok?
Two seconds later I discover myself to be Administrator of an FB site called Condemn Iran’s Sham Elections to which, three seconds after that, people all over the world are posting in English, French, German, and in Persian. It’s really wonderful, I have to say, to see people swearing American curse words in sentences that are otherwise made up of transliterated Farsi.
And I am so at among the FB furious, the righteously indignant, that I naturally cut and paste a quote from one of them to use as my own status update: Natarseen natarseen, ma hame ba ham hasteem!” — “Don’t be scared, don’t be scared, we are all in this together!” I write this though I don’t speak a word of Farsi. I get to write this, I feel, because I am – in fact – a citizen of this brave new electronic world.
And we are, in fact — you and me and everyone we know –  using these fragile tools to carry the light to them, each in our own small way, and this light of truth and reason and it’s what leaks under the locked door the tyrants believed they had tightly sealed.
Then Sara had another idea: Could I ask my American friends — many of whom are writers and artists and poets to say a sentence or two — messages of hope from individuals, side-stepping the platitudes issued by governments and politicians, that would be directed to the students and young women and young men and gays and doctors and construction workers and the elderly, all those risking their lives and safety and good standing to walk silently in the street in larger and larger masses in defiance of a regime the horrors of which you and I have any clue?

Of course, I said, and the two of us then crafted the letter that I’ve sent to friends far and wide, who’ve then forwarded it on the bubble edge of this miracle that’s fragile but is expanding in that it enables these good wishes to shower down on me, as my email in-box dings to say here, here, here, more words of hope and encouragement for their bravery to all those out in the streets with their fingers up in what we called The Peace Sign, their green wrists wrapped, standing up to tyranny.
Then I forward these to Sara, who will translate them and beam them past the censors to those who need to hear them, Sara, whom I love and honor as a friend, a sister in this struggle, daughter of whom I am vastly proud, though she and I have never actually met.

At best this blog will let me process information about the subjects that interest me, that is (right now) birds, particularly black ones, the death by cat predation of songbirds, also the disappearance of the American newspaper.  I plan to organize my thoughts by blog posting on the subjects of Brevity (or how to say the most in the fewest words possible), Carry the Nine (which is a social experiment that I’m interested in organizing so I get to participate in it) and Ant Noise, the Real Way We Get the News.

I’m going to try to post more often and to make my posts shorter and see how that works, more like a Status Update on Facebook but limited (at the moment) to the topics described.

Meanwhile, we got word yesterday that our friend –and friend of book publishing — Heidi Benson has taken a buyout at the San Francisco Chronicle, which means she now will freelance for the Chron, without the benefits of regular and secure employment. Both Heidi and her partner work for the Chron so their household is, no doubt, in crisis mode. Each of them has an idea for a book project. We wish them well.

These are terrible times for our papers, in that their individual and individualistic personalities will be at least changed by their going to a ghosly and on-line only edition, which is the way it seems all this is trending. And the Alison Bechdel review, which was printed in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, has been picked up and is carried along by bloggers, who do evidently reach bookbuyers, if the Amazon numbers serve to illustrate anything. The response to that review — which was almost entirely positive and which was done by a woman with natural sympathies to my tale — is by far and away the most dramatic.  Sales figures are delayed by a week, but we’ll see numbers in the next ten days or so, which will begin to tell us something about how all this is actually going.

Every writer, every figurative artist, I know has a problem with the Home & Away aspect of her or his artistic life. Each of us needs the world to pay attention to us, or rather, to this art of ours, in order that it find its audience. It’s part of the compact. We make the work, then we need — things being what they are — to promote our work. We want the world to invite us to come out. Our job, when invited, is to show up on time, as Jack says, and to not be a pain in the ass.

For a writer this means traveling as an Author on Tour, doing readings in towns where you may well know just about no one. All you can to is hope for some media stuff to do that will encourage folks to come to your reading.   On my recent tour in the Pacific Northwest, I was lucky to have friends and family at every stop along the way — otherwise it can get a little lonely. And the crowds in different places are remarkably different and what is funny in one place isn’t funny at all the next. We are a really interesting species and I’m really just endlessly fascinated by the ways in which we do and do not communicate.

There’s a lot of gloom and doom in the book business lately, but it’s nothing compared to what’s happening to newspapers, in which the paper part is simply going away. Serious readers are lately watching in horrified fascination as newspapers stop printing hard copy, trim staffs and retreat to their online editions. Something about the Placeness of the transaction is lost when a newspaper goes on-line, in that the necessity of knowing the local idiom, who it is who’s receiving those bundles on Sunday morning is being irretrievably lost. As I’ve been traveling for my book, the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor have stopped printing papers altogether. Both Detroit papers have gone to four days a week. The only stand-alone Sunday book section is now  the New York Times, as the Boston Globe and the L.A.Times having folded their book sections into the rest of their every shorter papers. The Chronicle has recently laid off 125 workers, those remaining forced to take salary concessions.  The Oregonian has just asked its workers to take a 10 percent pay cut, the New York Times a 5 percent pay cut, terms non negotiable.

What’s happened in that Americans no longer read a daily paper, whose fault this will be forever debated but it’s a fact. I reference the available sample: our kids, none of whom takes a local daily paper, having noticed that they don’t have time to read it and that it isn’t a particularly green thing to even do. They have grown up to prefer to get their news differently, more on-line and instantly. It was important during our recent election to be pluggede into what I think of as Ant Noise.  Ant Noise is my term for the way we share the important news with our intimates with wild gesticulations of our antennae as we come upon one another. We text, we post, we blog, we Friend one another, we email links, we copy everyone who might be remotely interested.

But I’m a newspaper reader to the core of my soul, and mourn the lost of the paper in my hands. Jack and I still get two: the daily NY Times and the most local of local papers, the Contra Costa Times.  I grew up on a great city paper, the L.A. Times. It was owned by the Chandler family– an identifiable family used to always own the town paper — in San Francisco it was famously the Hearsts and the DeYoung, Thierots. The Times was, by every estimation, a huge big deal: great columnists, great features, great reporting. It had the the usual Republican bias, which you’d be able to ignore because it was identifiable. The Times, editorially, came down always on the wrong side of causes and during the Vietnam War, there was a once-a-week “news story” that printed in the upper left side of the front page that used the purported body count of the Viet Cong to illustrate the myriad ways in which the U.S. was winning, except that folks were keeping track (and spreading word of that B.S. by Ant Noise) so it was obvious that these facts were not facts, since the body count meant that we’d already killed every man, woman and child two and three times over. Still  you knew by its placement on the page, that the story was crap and specious.

Which is the trouble with getting your news online: if you’re used to understanding the importance of a story by its placement — first page or third?  above or below the fold? — then the rapid fire rotation of news stories in an on-line edition as they make their way to prominence then just as quickly fade can be bewildering for the reader. Mark Danner’s recent piece on the American Red Cross’s torture findings is a case in point. The piece carefully documents and supports the argument that Bush, Cheney, John Yoo, the whole lot of them (six have just been indicted for war crimes in Spain) absolutely knew what was transpiring in Dark Ops as a matter of policy, appeared in its original length in the New York Review of Books, then, shortened, in the New York Times, but it was on page one, but by the time it was digested to appear in the Chronicle, it was on page five, and shortened almost to the point of insignificance.

But people began to immediately send the link to the NYRB article or the NYT around by email in order to be sure that the word gets out.  See? it’s Ant Noise