The Daily Babble

It's All About ME!

Mostly it's early in the morning-late at night, I'm tired, no energy to do anything requiring effort, usually after completing some goofy writing project or another. And I do what I KNOW you do, too: I google myself.

It's more than a little odd to look for some sense of permanence in the ether of cyberspace but some kind of a mark is made out there, and sometimes this is the only evidence. It's also some indication of my place in the world as others perceive it, which is pretty much always a surprise to me, one way or the other.

The newest thing I found was a transcript of a Australian public radio program on Wal-Mart--I did an interview for it shortly after my review of two books on Wal-Mart was published in the San Francisco Chronicle. Apart from the bit with me (and I've done enough of these to be pleased when the ten seconds they select doesn't make me sound like a complete moron), it's an exceptionally well done program.

A big chunk of what's out there consists of references to my book, The Malling of America. Despite the fact that it was originally published in 1985 and finally in a paperback edition in 2002, people continue to remember or discover it.

I usually find these new comments on these searches, even the one that was in Newsweek in November that referred to me as "author and famous mall-basher." Really? You mean I slept through my Opra moment? Unfortunately it was because I couldn't be marketed as either a mall-basher or mall apologist that made my publisher's marketing department so apathetic--although I believe it's the balance in my book which led to its long life. Mall supporters and doubters both still quote it.

Today I found a mall story in The Scotsman that referred to me as "a cheery dystopian with a few hippie tendencies," which may be a little closer to the mark. Some unusual references have shown up recently, like a 28 year old blond in L.A. who mentions my book in her My Place profile. Or a complimentary reference on a blog by a young woman in Tokyo ("master of bad-good puns"--I can live with that, too.)

It's also flattering to see my work referred to in other languages, like Italian, Spanish, French (in Le Monde, no less), and--well, I think it might be Russian. (There have been other languages at other times, including Japanese and Chinese.) It's perhaps especially flattering in that I don't understand what they say, but I do like reading the Italian, French and Spanish aloud.

There are also many references to pieces of my book that are reprinted in literally dozens of anthologies for students, and therefore are assigned for student essays. So many times apparently, that in the past I've found at least two term papers for sale on them, from a couple of outfits that specialize in that particular product. I don't often read these essays, partly because often I have no idea how I would answer the teacher's questions. "What did the author intend when..." You know, I'm not sure. But hosting one of only a few questions in the Ministerial Examination in English (in Quebec) is a little daunting. Maybe they wanted to provide a little break with my "lighthearted" prose.

Things last forever on the web and almost as long in academia, which I am not complaining about, because every time there's a new edition of one of those textbook anthologies, I get paid. I never got paid at all when Adbusters and I gave permission to Canadian educators to use a column I wrote for that magazine in the early 90s, concerning the brohaha that led to the end of my regular column for a Pittsburgh alternative weekly. The issue that led to my resignation was censorship, but not in a familiar guise. I was told I couldn't write anything about smoking and health---a topic I had written about--- and certainly nothing about the wave of new cigarette ad campaigns aimed at young people-- because it was a condition of a major tobacco company advertising account the paper had just landed.

It was a humbling episode when my popular column disappeared and I got little visible support for my action. I did get a lot of criticism for biting the hand that fed me. So the fact that the issues I tried to raise has been part of a program of study in Canada for about a decade, is some comfort when I run across this link.

There is some embarrassing criticism (which you can find yourself if you're so interested) and some misinformation that lives on forever, like the amount of my North Coast Cultural Trust grant of a few years ago: the figure stated is double what I actually got.

And while it's great to find references to my work and people writing enthusiastically about it, the risks of that are also evident in posts like this one in which one of my SF Chronicle essays (on this year's alien invasion TV shows) is summarized with some accuracy, only to be told I missed the point. The problem it turns out isn't our unfocused fears. It's Lucifer. Wish I'd realized that.

I do the goggling thing with purpose sometimes too, usually after something's been published and I'm interested in who has picked up on it. There are a lot of special interest groups for everything, and they preserve at least the titles of things, though some steal whole texts off the net. I'm curious about who gloms onto what. Often I've never heard of the group, like Psychoanalysts Oppose War or Yerba Buena gardening organization.

Or I check out which publishers are using pieces of my reviews (published or just online) to advertise their books. A lot do--especially the university presses, like Yale, Harvard, M.I.T., but also authors and bookstores. I'm glad, actually. So many worthy books are ignored, and as far as I'm concerned, the university presses are the last line of defense.

I am always amused to find myself quoted as an authority, for example in a U.S. government document (though they steal my title and even book cover design) or official Commonwealth of PA site (on Pennsylvania forests) and the United Nations. But I only have to try to figure out how I can pay for a new headlight on my ancient Volvo to put that in perspetive.


But frankly it is something of a tonic to find articles for which I was maybe not paid all that much and/or were available to the public for less time than it took to write them, showing up in places like a Native American Studies program, an interesting book about larger trends of our times, a Museum of Civilization bibliography, a cultural studies tome (on film), the Mind and Life Institute, Urban Dharma , etc.

As for my writing on the blogs, I see some evidence of comment about it on other blogs, though chiefly from Soul of Star Trek. All in all, the google search is not a sure fire morale booster or antidote to last gasp loneliness, but it is intriguing.

As for why the spacing is so weird on this post, I have no idea. I've spent a good 20 minutes trying to fix it. Maybe it's all those links. Or because it's cold, and it's lightning and thundering out there.