The Blog I'm Not Writing

Department Of Ultimate Definitions

Something I came across recently on social media.  With the right addition (* courtesy of moiself *) IMO it is is the best ever – as in most straightforward – definition of a complicated concept:

If you’ve never had a Supreme Court case *or a constitutional amendment*
decide if you have the same rights as others, you have privilege.

 

 

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Department Of Motivational Speaking… Make That, Walking

Dateline: Tuesday morning; 7:45 AM-ish; morning walk; rounding a corner on the way back to my neighborhood.  Even with my earbuds in and listening to a podcast,   [1]   I hear a voice from behind to the side of me.  When I look to the right of me I see a woman in aSubaru Outback; she gives me a thumbs up as she drives past, and yells something out of her rolled-down driver’s window about how…well, the only word I catch is,  motivational.  I give her a thumbs in return, and think,

Thanks!… uh, I guess?

From the glimpse I caught of her, I would’ve guessed her to be slightly older than moiself, and so I wondered, just what is so motivational about seeing someone who is out for a morning walk?  Is it that she thinks *she* should be outside, walking instead of riding in a car?  Or is it the dreaded patronization of,  “Oh, look, isn’t that sweet – that woman is, my gosh, ambulatory, at her age!!”   I mean, hell, this is the week of the Olympic Games, and I’m just walking – cruising along, listening to a podcast – I’m not running or hurdling or swimming marathons.  I’m keeping up a good pace, but it’s just….walking

Perhaps I’m overthinking this.

 

 

Anyway, for the rest of the day (read: two hours) I decided to be happy (read: smug) over the fact that someone looked at what I was doing, and the concept of motivation came to their mind. Now, the rest of y’all, get off your asses, shut down your screens, drop to the floor and give me 50.

 

 

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Department Of It’s Still A Milestone Even If He’s Dead

Yesterday would have been my father’s 100^th  (!) birthday.

He was less than half that age in the summer of ’67 when he showed off posed for my mother, who took this picture of him lifting his two youngest children.

 

 

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Department Of The Good News Just Keeps Rolling In….

Moiself  refers to that wacky world o’ publishing, with yet another development that confirms my notion that had I known then what I know now I would have chosen another field, artistic or otherwise, in which to waste devote my time and finite brain matter.

Small Press Distribution Closes its Doors
“Small Press Distribution (SPD), a crucial distributor for independent publishers and authors, has abruptly closed after 55 years, leaving small presses and writers facing uncertainty.  Publishers must retrieve their inventory from SPD’s partners and seek alternative distribution channels. The closure poses financial challenges for small presses… Authors may experience delays in royalties and book distribution due to the disruption….”
( The Author’s Guild Bulletin Spring-Summer 2024 )

 

 

“Last week, Diane Goettel was on vacation in Florida when she saw an alarming email on her phone. After 55 years, Small Press Distribution (SPD)—one of the last remaining independent book distributors in the US—was shutting down immediately, with no advance notice or transitional support. Its website went dark, its Twitter account was deleted, and no one was answering calls.

‘The small press world is about to fall apart,’ Goettel remembers thinking. She’s the executive editor of Black Lawrence Press, one of more than 400 publishers that relied on SPD to fulfill online orders and make copies available to bookstores and libraries…

On the other side of the country, the executive editor of Noemi Press, Sarah Gzemski…received a text about SPD. ‘We were shocked, [though] some of the fulfillment issues we encountered over the past few months began to make more sense,’ Gzemski says. ‘We’re already working on shoestring budgets, so for our distributor to close abruptly, without warning, while not paying us our earned income, is devastating.’

Distributors are perhaps the most opaque and byzantine part of the publishing industry. When you buy a book on Amazon or Bookshop.org, it’s usually the distributor—not the publisher—who ships you a copy from its warehouse. When bookstores, libraries, and schools order books for their brick-and-mortar locations, they use online catalogs populated by distributors….

Without a distributor, presses like Black Lawrence and Noemi are completely cut off from their main sources of income….

‘I don’t know where else these presses can go,’ says Meg Reid, executive director of the Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg, SC. ‘Larger distributors are going to have sales minimums that might not be financially viable, and self-distribution basically takes them out of the system in terms of getting reviewed in major publications or public radio.’

To make matters worse, many small presses say SPD owes them money. ‘We’re owed upwards of $8,000,’ says Gzemski. ‘We just released three books [at Noemi], and all of the preorder and event order revenue from those books has disappeared.’….

Goettel is optimistic about Black Lawrence Press, but anxious about the situation more broadly. ‘I’m not panicking at this point, but I would not be surprised if some small presses completely close because of this.’….
(  excerpts from Lit Hub, The Small Press World is About to Fall Apart:
On the Collapse of Small Press Distribution , my emphases  )

 

 

Prediction: small/independent presses will soon have to close or merge, as will the larger presses, which will morph into one or two monoliths of literature and employ technology to let them cut out those pesky middle men and women,aka, authors:

( “Let’s just plug in a story outline and let our AI run with it” ).

 

 

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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week     [2]

“A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace
with his pants down….  If it is a  good book nothing can hurt him.
It if is a bad book, nothing can help.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

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Parting Shot:  I love it when/I hate it when…

I love it when I’m guaranteed a laugh at the end of a yoga class, but I’ve forgotten when that opportunity will be, until it is there, once again.  Example:  Wednesday morning; finishing up a yoga class that I stream from yoga international.com.  I do a variety of classes from that site; this particular class is one of the ones I do about once every three or four weeks. The teacher is knowledgeable and amiable, a little too into the “woo” for me, but all is forgiven near end of the class when, after leading the student yogi she is instructing into   [3]   a twist and hip-opening session, she explains what the student is doing in a forward learning pose from a seated position: “…cascading over, connecting her little S-self to her big S- self; connecting your little S-self to your big S- self….”

The first time I heard the teacher’s narration, moiself  of course thought the teacher was advising that I should be “… connecting your little-ass self to your big-ass self….”

 

 

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Department Of I Love It Even More…

…when I fantasize about how the PR handlers of a certain VEEP candidate, concerned with his condescending smearing of a sizeable percent of the voting population, arrange for him to visit a local animal shelter, and when they attempt a photo op of him trying to make peace with its feline residents….

 

 

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May you cherish the rights no court has had to bestow upon you;
May you have fond memories of someone’s milestone birthday;
May you find peace connecting with your little-ass self;

…and may the hijinks ensue.

Thanks for stopping by.  Au Vendredi!

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[1] I always have the volume low enough to be able to hear what’s around me – passing or approaching cars; friendly neighbors, attack squirrels….

[2] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists.  No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.”  Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org

[3] Some of the yoga classes on the site are filmed with the teacher and a “model” student/yogi or two, some with a class of yogis.