IMPLODE OR EXPLODE : IS IT ME OR IS IT THE WORLD?

I'm trying to remember how it is that I got addicted to reading DAILY MAIL UK. It's been a while now since I started reading it.  It might have been about the time I was having withdrawal from the end of Art Bell's second or  third incarnation, his long awaited but brief MIDNIGHT IN THE DESERT show. I believe it had to do with trying to read around EDWARD SNOWDEN and JULIAN ASSANGE. These men and those like them are important to the question we need to ask, and that is the role of journalists and journalism in society, in a time of fake news (sorry to say there really is a lot of it) and skepticism. Though sometimes DAILY MAIL UK gets it wrong, more often they get it right and their news breaks across the ocean first, meaning that by the time you get up to listen to KFI and the obnoxiously funny BILL HANDLE well, you will already know what news they are going to be mentioning on the radio as you sit in traffic on the freeway because it sounds to be right out of DAILY MAIL UK!  You know that because you checked when you got up to pee at 3 am.

Currently I barely read about Snowden, who I actually feel has had his Andy Warhol Fifteen Minutes of fame over and over again and will live out his life in Russia. He raised his finger in that ayatollah kind of way and I thought, this is not good!  I suspect Assange and WikiLeaks is going to be story for a long long time, unless he dies, and I think he might.  He's being made an example of. Got to give Snowden credit for years of faithfulness to his pole dancing exhibitionist girlfriend; there's someone for everyone? 

I don't feel so bad about the way I have to hit the DAILY MAIL UK site at least twice a day - sometimes more - sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night - yesterday every hour - when I hear that it's the second most read news media site in the world. 

I don't know what media site is supposed to be number one. I kind of hope The New York Times. I read the San Jose Mercury News... I read The Guardian... I read Vanity Fair.

I currently make dog poo bags from the LA TIMES though yes, it does have some good coverage.  I hear it's printed with soy based ink and I'm just so eco. I have respect for journalist Steve Lopez there, who I feel sure already has his private island estate in heaven being built by the angels.

LINK HERE TO A JOURNALIST I RESPECT STEVE LOPEZ  He will not quit writing about our housing and homeless crisis.

So, about DAILY MAIL UK; I know some of you are disappointed in me for this, but I'm not alone in making my way past the Kardashians, who I knew nothing about when I started reading it, and so many other desperate-for-attention women showing off their bodies in swim suits, if you can identify these strained patches of fabric as such, who take pouty selfies of themselves using mirrors to look down their own pants, to some terrific coverage of what we used to call HARD NEWS, such as the hideous Jeffery Epstein Sex Trafficking scandal. And the Miley Cyrus scandal, a trivial bisexual fling of a scandal which, when it comes right down to it, has not an iota of impact compared to what the now dead sex addict Epstein's scandal will.

I really CAN be LITERARY and also be into POP CULTURE.

DAILY MAIL UK also promises daily coverage of VIOLENCE, from gross pimple popper videos to mass shootings, mothers who put babies they just gave birth to in dumpsters and people who put their dogs in freezers, innocent people wrongly convicted and criminals running free, boating and helicopter accidents, riots in front of movie theaters and more seriously in Hong Kong, wackos gone crazy and crazies gone wacko, every form of violence.  

I'M OVEREXPOSED TO VIOLENCE.  
I don't want to be ill informed or ignorant.  
I want to understand. 
I feel stress.
I am anxious.
I feel overloaded.
It feels hopeless.

WE NEED HELP.  

Can the Republicans find ANYONE to run against TRUMP?  Can the Democrats who refused to eat some form of Pig in IOWA or who actually do not have a realistic PLAN for how this Reparations thing will work (I suggest national DNA tests) please step out of the race for the Presidency. 

Go Bernie Go!

Sometimes I feel like imploding or exploding.

You might too.

Just don't do it all over my blog.


C 2019  Christine Trzyna  All Rights Reserved.  Internet and International Rights Included. 

RUTH LILLY THE GREAT PHILANTHROPIST OF POETRY

Ruth Lilly, the only living heir of the Eli Lilly fortune pledged $100 million (have heard $200,000 million also) in 2002 to the Poetry Foundation to publish Poetry Magazine and more. She also provided that every year one poet receive the Lilly award which is $100,000! Linking to the New York Times article from 2007 which reveals the lack of appreciation some have shown for this amazing bequest.

(I can't think of any other philanthropist who gives/gave a rats ass for poets or poetry. It's difficult to get a free space to run a nonprofit writing group as is.)

(IS THIS ATTITUDE ONE MORE EXAMPLE OF THE NOTORIOUS POETS' DEVOTION TO BELOVED POVERTY? Aren't some of us a bit tired of the notion that poverty is always honorable or the natural state of poets and poetry? I used to know people who posed that they were poor to be accepted in certain Los Angeles poetry circles!)

I'll be linking to more about LILLY scholarships, awards, and so on...)

FROM PETER NEWCOMB in VANITY FAIR AUGUST 2010

Q

"Which moves more units; a BILLBOARD Number One album or a NEW YORK TIMES Number One best seller?

A

"It wasn't long ago when music labels could release almost any kind of pablum and watch it move more than 15 million copies... These days just selling a million copies is seem as a major victory.... Chart toppers sell 100,000 to 300,000 units a week.

Book sales are less predictable... According to Nielson Book Scan, the best selling adult fiction and non-fiction titles of 2010's first 18 weeks sold between 40,000 to 200,000 copies."

Peter Newcomb/ Vanity Fair - August 2010

From ONE DROP by BLISS BROYARD

ONE DROP My Father's Hidden Life - A Story of Race and Family Secrets by Bliss Broyard C 2007 Little Brown and Co New York 

Bliss' father was Anatole Paul Broyard, a literary critic for the New York Times, who had been born in New Orleans and had decided to "pass" as White when he began to work. 

Page 366 about Greenwich Village. "In the Village, a cold-water flat could be had cheaply. Barkeepers let a person sit for as long as he could nurse a beer. A ten-cent plate of spaghetti and meatballs from the Waldorf Cafeteria on Sixth Avenue could fend off hunger for most of the day. Among the artists and writers who hung out in the San Remo Bar, the Cedar Bar, and the Minetta and White Horse taverns, conversation was the only currency that mattered. "Nobody cared where a person was from; nobody asked about your family. They wanted to know what you thought --- about Freud, Surrealism, The Modernists. Had you been to Paris?...Were you in analysis?...What did you make of the Stevens poem in the latest Partisan Review? Everyone in the Village had run away---from conventional backgrounds and burdensome family histories, from petty lives short on grandeur and futures that would leave them as normal and discontented as everyone else. It was in Greenwich Village that my father could figure out the person he most felt himself to be... 

Page 387 "Onto this unexplored frontier a new cultural hero appeared --the hispter. Famously portrayed by Norman Mailer in his 1957 essay "The White Negro," this latest incarnation of the American individualist rejected all pressures to conform, ignored society's expectations and traditions, and lived only for the moment and according to the "rebellious imperatives of the self." Found in New Orleans, San Francisco, Chicago, and especially Greenwich Village, Mailer's hipster too inspiration for "Negros," particularity those associated with jazz...