Wednesday 7/31/24
Problems, problems, problems.
The other day I alluded to some problems with this blog. Obviously this blog is important. It's important as a self-contained work and it's important with this war I am in. This is blog entry number 3060 and we're well over three millions words now, which makes this the longest single work, written as a work, in history. It's just over six years old.
To give you an idea of its length, Ralph Waldo Emerson's journal--which were very much the key work of his life--was not as long as this record is, and he wrote that journal over the course of sixty years. During these six years, I've written more with my actual work--the stories, the books, the pieces, essays, etc.--than I have in the pages of this journal, which means we're talking over six millions words.
But there are problems that need solving. Up until several minutes ago, those blog posts were displayed on pages that themselves featured twenty blog posts. There were more than 150 of these pages. If you go to the bottom of a page on the blog, before you click on an individual post, you'll see that counter at the bottom. Hit the arrow and you move to the next page. Hit the double arrow and you're supposed to be moved to the very first page, but that's not what happens.
This host site is so lacking--this is mind-boggling--that it stops displaying those pages featuring the list of blogs after 100 such pages. Those earlier blogs exist, but they're a devil to access unless you are specifically searching for something. For instance, I know the very first blog post on here from June 18, 2018--and this was before I wrote the day and date at the top of each entry I started doing long ago--has the word "vinyl" in the title, so I can locate it with a search.
A blog gets to the bottom of page 100, I put up a new blog like this one, and the host site knocks that blog at the bottom off the side of a cliff, in effect. I understand that no one writes as much, but this is such a basic design flaw, and there are people, I'm sure, who have more total blog posts with this host site, though they total a much lower amount of words. In other words, I can't be the only one affected by this.
But this blog is vital to my cause and getting out of the situation I'm in. Holding people accountable. And a lot more. So much more. I can't have any of not be perfectly accessible.
I've been trying to get this sorted out since last week, and today a specialist at the host site--because no one else could figure out what was happening--wrote me to say that there's no fix beyond changing the number of posts displayed on each page from twenty to twenty-four, which doesn't much help the problem, either now and certainly not going forward.
I have so much work to do on this site. There are a thousand links to go up in categories like the Music, Film, Literature writings, and Short fiction sections. When I first got started on here, back in spring 2018, I thought, right, get up a slew of links and we'll fill in later.
Well, it turns out that you can't--or at least you couldn't; I heard some rumbling that this had changed, which I'll check--change the order of the links once you put them up. I don't know how many links there are to music or film pieces. Hundreds. I was going to have to take down what I had put up and start over.
Look at the Film writings section. What are there, seventeen things there? Do you know the unholy amount of film-related pieces I've published? The books section isn't even up to date. Scrooge isn't on there. Not like anything by me has any chance right now given the situation, but it still should be up there.
I have this massive, massive Word doc of links to published pieces, and it omits like the first ten years of my career. It's huge. I've been trying to take that master list and create sublists by subjects. But knowing that I'd have to take everything down anyway, I never added to those sections I just mentioned really since this site launched six years ago. I had things to put up that predated what is there, and of course new things. This is, again, like a thousand pieces and this is the guy who has an entire industry against him. Imagine if he didn't? It is going to suck for a lot of those people when I'm out of this situation, and I promise you, if you're one of them, I will be.
The Op-ed section is up to date, the On air section, the Beatles writings section (Beatles-related op-eds, by the way, are in the Op-ed section), and the News section--which started with the launch of this site in spring 2018--is up to date, or at least through a part of May.
It's overwhelming, though. I'm in this war, I'm fighting for every last dollar to get food, I'm writing like 7,000 words a day, I have thousands of people in an industry against me, and then I have this site to fix and get up to speed. As I've said so many times, I hate lighting people up on the blog, and everyone, I think, knows that at this point. I do what I have to do, but very reluctantly, and I do delay with it. I know I have to produce so much blood on the deck, but I am such a kind--which I think is also very obvious--and non-confrontational person. But it's that, or let these bigots, these horrible, talentless, evil people own my life, everything about my life, and keep my work from the world--which is the single biggest thing--and me from what I deserve and have coming to me, and deserved a long, long, long time ago.
There is so much work to do right now that I almost don't know what to do or where I might begin. In the meanwhile, I will put things up on here, but I need a fix. I've looked into Substack. The issue would be whether I can import the full contents of this blog--all three million plus words, in individual posts--over to there, which is not what I want.
Part of the thinking all along was that everything was in one place. Not everything everything, but you know what I mean. This is a writer, an artist, unlike any other there's ever been or will be. I'm here to do different things than any writer or artist has ever been here to do, or any person, for that matter.
It is very hard to understand what I am right now for some people. Because this person who is the best at this shouldn't be able to be the best at that and all of these other things. It is hard to process and hard to believe, save that there it is. This site allows for some of that to be decently represented in one place. Later it won't matter as much, when people are saying what they say because it's passed into common knowledge. But that's not right now.
So little with this host site makes any sense. I've mentioned this many times before, but there are always people who don't know or didn't see whatever; if someone signs up for notifications that there's a new blog post, they automatically get unsubscribed--I have nothing to do with that--if they go three email notifications without clicking on one and visiting. In other words, there were people this morning who would have been automatically unsubscribed because of what I posted before they woke up. I sometimes start work at midnight or even the day before. When there are seven posts going up on here, that's not the bulk of what I'm doing. It's what I'm doing in between what I'm doing. Those unsubscribed people are unlikely to check back save every now and again.
It doesn't matter if someone knows that this guy is the most productive person ever and there is very likely a lot of new content on his blog every day. People need to be told. It can be the biggest given ever, and they need to be told. They have to be taken to the water. There are people who hate reading this journal. Publishing people, obviously. Envious people. People who can't stop from measuring themselves against me, what I know, what I do, what I achieve, the artist I am, the person I am. They don't want to see it after a while and they'll unsubscribe on their own. People hate that before six in the morning I've had this piece come out here and written these four thousand words for these five different things and ran 5000 stairs. The more I achieve, the more publishing people have tried to stand in my way. It became just about impossible to publish a story after I had fiction in Harper's. It was revenge for things I had not done to anyone save be what I am and be able to do what I can do and write as I can write and no one else can. That this guy, who is not like us at all--in all the good ways--did that.
It says a lot, though, about the tech of a hosting site--or the policy, or the rules they implemented--whatever the term may be, that a person can be unsubscribed without their consent. What on earth is up with that?
But regarding publishing and the "I'll punish him for achieving that, or writing that well" mentality: It's like that with everything. If you look at the News section, you'll se that I don't even mention a lot of it in this blog. It's because of this mentality, though, and this extreme form of discrimination, that this this blog is so important and why this problem has to be fixed. This blog can document, prove, expose. Look at the prose offs There's nothing like a prose off, is there? Do you think there's anyone in publishing, any writer in the world, who has seen my work and wants theirs put next to it for comparison? Hell no. And wait until you see some of the ones upcoming. Somewhere, anyway.
But then there are just other people out there and this blog makes some of them feel horrible about themselves. We've talked about this. Seeing what Roxane Gay is, for example, what she does, how bad she is as a writer (I mean, honestly, look at this), what she stands for, what she models, makes people feel good about themselves by comparison. No no one feels dumb, lacking, worse about themselves physically.
As we've said time and again, people want comfort. Mediocrity, and worse, provides it. But it's not my fault that such a person might feel bad about themselves here. Rally, rise up. They can do their version of what I do. Let's all get better, be better, try harder, offer more, and receive more from others who are offering more, too. Let's not settle. Whomever any of us are. And no one is going to stop me from trying to be all that I might be and do all that I can do. And it's important. It's important, I believe, for the world. What I do, what I offer. It's a matter of getting to the world, not what I can do for the world. I can do a hell of a lot for this world. And I'm going to.
The specialist, by the way, added a section to my site today. On their own. It said "New Page." What the hell, man? I'm not good at this. To say the least. I don't know how to make that go away. I had to restore an earlier version of the site from this morning instead from before I went to run stairs in the Monument so i can keep fighting this war and not have a heart attack.
But that's what's going on and a kind of rundown of some of what has to be figured out and fixed.
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