Burningbird

Wearing a Polite and Conciliatory Mask

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date November 27, 2003

I woke this morning at 3:30 and I was determined that at least for the next four days, I was not going to make anyone angry, or hurt, or disappointed. While most of my fellow webloggers from the USA were stuffing themselves on turducken, I was, instead, going to regale my readers with delicious bon mots of wit, poetry, a little bit of technology as enticement, maybe even a tad bit of sex — verbal flashing of my breasts if you will. But I was not, in any circumstances going to engage in battle or respond to any other writing except in a complimentary sense. I was, in effect, going to put on a conciliatory mask, like these Japanese photo masks.

Well, thankfully, a couple of comments and a trackback cured me of such foolishness.

I wrote about Steve Gillmor’s response to Dvorak and the fact that he listed several ‘big time bloggers’, nine to be exact, without once mentioning a women blogger. Gina at misbehaving.net also wrote on this, which made me feel pretty good — my position on issues such as this usually doesn’t land me in a crowd. Donna Wentworth agreed in comments that it was pretty depressing, but I think Meg made the most telling comment:

He doesn’t realize that he just did a good ‘ol boys network thing yet. He’s just a dude writing about his favorite blogs, at least they weren’t all football related.

Football aside, Meg’s comment about the ‘network thing’ again, was dead on. Steve is interested in weblogs by technologists, geeks as it were. But there are weblogs by women who write about geek stuff — why is it that when people rattle a list of tech bloggers off the top of their head, they never mention a women tech blogger?

One comment, was that, Female bloggers can’t or won’t produce content that is interesting to men, which of course was an obvious troll. And yes, I did respond to it — the devil made me do it. The tone was troll, but what about the words — is that it? We don’t produce content that’s interesting to men, at least in technical venues? Or is it because when we are in this venue, we don’t speak the same language as the guys, and therefore are just plain not heard?

Still, this was a virtually anonymous troll and I wasn’t going to respond — that conciliatory mask thing, remember? I was going to be a good little girl and not bore the nice people with writing on this topic, at least for four days. I wasn’t that is, until I got a trackback from Richard this morning, bright and early. Richard wrote a post starting out with:

Okay, it’s getting stupid when you can’t even state a preference for one thing over another without being pecked to death by everyone who disagrees or finds your opinion not good enoug for public consumption.

Richard, what do you think weblogging is? We peck everything to death. If we didn’t, I’d have left this scene years ago out of boredom. If you put your opinion online, especially in a major publication, we are going to be crawling all over that thing like ants at a picnic. What do you think Steve’s response of John, you ignorant slut to Dvorak is?

There was little that Richard wrote I wanted to respond to except for a tiny bit he made in comments, when he wrote:

Of the people he did mention, there is an senior editor for Linux Journal, a person who was part of bringing us Groupware and who helped port Visicalc – the first spreadsheet. The co-inventer of the spreadsheet is there, as is one of the people mentioned in any discussion of the history of the XML spec. These are big time geeks, and people that Steve chooses to read.

If you know of GEEK blogs that are female authored, feel free to send them to Steve – steve_gillmor@ziffdavis.com.

Leaving aside the fact that some of those bigtime names mentioned have been blogging a year or less, Richard’s point about knowing of any GEEK blogs that are female authored, and sending them to Steve Gillmor is ironic considering he made the comment at misbehaving.net with a complete sidebar filled with women associated with technology.

However, he has a good point, and I’m sending a copy of this weblog posting with a link to my various GEEK writings to Mr. Gillmor — just to make sure that he knows that sometimes pocket protectors stick out.

Men have long used oppressive techniques to get women to stop talking, including labeling us shrill, unfeminine, making the word ‘feminist’ into an insult, deriding us when we do talk, and rewarding us when we don’t. They even encourage us to turn against each other, because if women teamed up, truly teamed up, all hell would break lose.

We also add our own problems to the mix. We are brought up to be ‘polite’, never pointing out that a man’s fly is open in the figurative sense. Sheila Lennon wrote about finding out her permalinks had been accidentally put behind a paywall from a comment in JD Lasica’s blog, pointed out by Tom Mangan. I knew this was so from linking to her the week before, but I was too polite to point this out, not wanting to give Sheila a hard time about it. Even between two strong women, the silence of politeness holds sway.

However, the most effective technique for silencing a woman is to not hear her speak — even when she’s shouting in your face. There’s no greater wound to a writer than to have her words bounced against a wall of indifference.

I came so close to shutting down all my technical writing this year. I have been battering at the gates of the tech weblogs and the tech publications for years now and just didn’t seem to be making any dents. Three years of weblogging about technical stuff, twelve books about computer technology, and a couple of dozen articles in major publications, and it seemed like I was standing still in my career. It was so nice to get positive comments on the photographs and the other writing, and I found myself drifting that way more and more. But though I am a writer, and a poetry lover, and a hiker, and a politically active person, and a photographer, I am still a GEEK; I’m not going to be abandon this aspect of myself because I haven’t made an impact. Yet.

And I’m not going to take on a ‘male’ persona to do it, either.

The only way we will make a dent in this world is to talk and keep talking and keep pointing things out and keep breaking into conversations, and disrupting networks, and annoying the guys until they give in from sheer exhaustion, if nothing else. Good stuff, bad stuff, doesn’t matter, as long as we keep talking.

Update

And though Anil doesn’t much like me — I do that to people a lot, it must be my own particular brand of charm and my even tempered nature — I appreciate his good writing, such as this Chicken Story:

Reheating some leftovers this evening, I was wondering why the chicken place seemed so familiar, despite its discomfiting social mores. It is a deeply misogynistic environment, filled with people paying a pittance and begrudging that they weren’t getting more for free, prone to arguing with and shouting at each other in a cacophony of languages while never bothering to even listen to the points they were arguing against. And somehow its allures were enough to keep drawing me back in. I’m realizing they probably should have named the restaurant after the place it most resembles: The Blogosphere.”

Maybe that’s what we women need more of — chicken.

Second Update

Seems that Dave Winer has checked into comments at misbehaving.net with:

Karlin, I consider you a friend, I’ve pointed to you many times, because you often have something to say and are professional about it. I don’t worry that I’m going to regret having pointed to you. I don’t point to Shelley because she’s very abusive of me, on a personal level, and I don’t want to, in any way, support that. And for the rest who are posting here, I honestly am not familliar with their work. If you want to start a blog to highlight the work of women technologists, I’d subscribe, and when something interesting pops up, I’d happily point to it. But if you use it as a place to bash men, I’ll unsusbscribe immediately. There’s already plenty of that in the world, I don’t need more.

So, imho, you’re wrong if you think it’s sexism, with Shelley and a few others (who are men, btw), it’s fear that keeps this blogger from pointing. Otherwise I just don’t know of any women technologists doing interesting stuff in weblogs. Hopefully you’ll take that at face value and won’t go somewhere personal with it. But if you do, there’s the demo of why you aren’t getting anywhere.

I didn’t want to respond to this in misbehaving.net’s comments — I guess I’m the kiss of death when it comes to dialog. But what Dave is doing here is using the carrot and stick I talked about earlier: do what I say, and I’ll link to you; start up with that ‘male bashing’ stuff and you’ll displease me and I’ll never link to you and you’ll stay obscure. This goes back to the conversations I’ve had about some A-Listers using the power of their link to control and manipulate the flow of information within our communities.

I’ve long decided that a link from Dave comes with too high a price tag. However, I consider his statement about not linking to people who are personally abusing rather quaint considering how much he’s linked to Mark Pilgrim lately, and I think we can all agree that whatever I’ve said or done about Dave, Mark’s beat me.

No this is a perfect example of the environment that Anil described in the Chicken Story — the men may argue among themselves and be abusive, but if a woman intrudes, even politely, the intrusion is never forgiven.

This wall of silence is what I referred to earlier and is the number one weapon to use against women who speak out in weblogging. Hell with that — it’s the number one weapon used against women who speak out, period.

And what’s sadder is that this wall is supported by women as much as men.

Technology Weblogging

Visual hints and clues

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date November 27, 2003

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

At Burningbird, I modified my Movable Type template to display a small graphic associated with the subject (category) of a posting next to its title. Those who are less interested in my technology writing can then skip postings with the associated binary graphic next to the title; those who are uninterested in politics, can avoid that graphic, and so on. (My friend Chris at Empty Bottle also uses graphics to designate categories. However, his graphics are a lot more sophisticated than mine.)

I thought about creating multiple weblogs and focusing each on a different topic within the framework of my writing as ‘Burningbird’, but I wouldn’t write more (or less) on any subject just because I split them out into different weblogs. All I would do is scatter my thoughts about like dried bits of corn on a dusty field, forcing my readers to take on the visage of Crow, pecking about hoping to find that edible kernel among the dirt.

Besides, my thoughts don’t split cleanly along subject and topic, neatly categorized into discrete buckets. I’m just as likely to throw new photographs or a bit of writing whimsey into an essay on RDF, or mix a little technology into an essay on the Environment. My weblog reflects my writing, which reflects my mind: muddied waters of blended interest.

First, I created all the graphics of a relatively uniform size. I made them slightly longer than the heading caption bar, as I wanted to drop just below it. I then saved the graphics in the PNG format, naming them the exact name of the category.

Next, to add the graphic, within the main index template, I found the entry section associated with the posting title, as marked with the use of the MT template tag <$MTEntryTitle$>. I then replaced that tag with the following, which not only displays the graphic, but also has a link to the category page for people who want to read more entries based on that category:

<a href=”MTBlogArchiveURL<$MTEntryCategory dirifty=”1″ $>/index.htm”><img src=”http://weblog.burningbird.net/mm/<$MTEntryCategory$>.png” alt=”<$MTEntryCategory$>” align=”left” hspace=”6″ border=”0″ /></a>
<div class=”titlebox”><span class=”title”><a style=”text-decoration: none” href=”<$MTEntryLink$>”><$MTEntryTitle$></a></span></div>

The exact same template code can be used with the title on each individual page, for the same effect.

Graphic/Topic:

– Adventure

– Connecting

– Culture

– Environment

– Life

– Metablogging

– Neighborhood

Photography

– Politics

– Sensory

– Technology

Writing

– Sensuous Technology

– Women’s Writing

Technology Weblogging

Borrowing a Page from Wood s as Thanks

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date November 26, 2003

I found a page that lists several literary magazines and publications and over the last month or so have been skipping about among the entries, checking out each publication. One such is the The Diarist’s Journal, a revival of a publication that ended a few years back. According to the description, the publication contains Fake, Fictional, and Fictionalized Diaries. I was, of course, compelled to read more, and spent some time among sample entries based around September 11, 2001. For instance, the following, written by “A 33-year-old Journalist in San Francisco”:

9/11, 11pm
The WTC is just gone. People I know, they saw it collapse. Saw it collapse into itself and rain metal and glass and desperate bodies. What’s the point of talking about retaliation? Who do you hit back at? How do you fight a non-corporeal entity? And what good can it possibly do? It’s gone. A terrorist attack with George W. Bumfuck Bush at the wheel. Gods help us….

9/12
I slept until almost 11 today, not wanting to wake up to the changed world. I’m afraid of what might happen. People are attacking Arab-Americans, sending hate mail to mosques. Shrub is talking about a battle between good and evil, an American jihad. People are talking war, not criminal investigation. Who do you hit?…

9/13
…I don’t know what scares me more: the possibility of further attacks, or the possibility that our leaders will destroy our freedoms in order to save them.
…
The world has changed forever. I know that’s obvious. What’s really disturbing is that the change began some time ago and no one seems to have noticed….

Several of the publications only print their Table of Contents online, which is a bit of a tease. But considering that most operate more on hope than on solid funding, it’s not surprising that they don’t want to give “the goods” away for free. But I still prefer the publications that at least provide some of the material online.

That’s why I love The Missouri Review, with so much wonderful reading freely available. Most people turn immediately to the fiction and poetry, but I rather fancy the editorials, in particular those by Scott Kaukonen. Learn that name, you’ll hear it more in the future:

When I first decided I wanted to be a writer, I feared that I would enter the field with a handful of disadvantages, given my what-I-perceived-to-be generic upbringing. I’d been raised in the Baptist parsonage of a small Midwestern town and enjoyed a pleasant childhood. I did well in school, stayed out of trouble, participated in all manner of socially-approved activities, and loved my parents, who in turn loved me. You could say I lacked personal traumas, at least those personal traumas that could be most obviously turned into the material of potboiler fiction. Non-descript seemed the best description.

But when as a young adult I began to travel ‘to see other parts of the country and the world’ the generic seemed less generic. The town in which I’d been raised, the circumstances under which I’d grown, the world as I saw it suddenly appeared different. I’m not exactly sure how that has translated into my stories except to say that I no longer assume that a story set in some faraway land is necessarily more worthwhile to read than a story set in a town that remarkably resembles my own.

Then there’s my favorite repository of American poetry, The Academy of American Poets. I found two new poems that I liked, both by very well known poets. The first, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is The Day is Done:

The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.

I see the lights of the village
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o’er me,
That my soul cannot resist:

A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.

Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.

Not from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.

For, like strains of martial music,
Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life’s endless toil and endeavor;
And to-night I long for rest.

Read from some humbler poet,
Whose songs gushed from his heart,
As showers from the clouds of summer,
Or tears from the eyelids start;

Who, through long days of labor,
And nights devoid of ease,
Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.

Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer.

Then read from the treasured volume
The poem of thy choice,
And lend to the rhyme of the poet
The beauty of thy voice.

And the night shall be filled with music
And the cares that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.

Another poem I liked, very much, is Walt Whitman’s “Spirit that Form’d this Scene”, about the connection between artist and the natural world, no matter how separated from the world the art is:

Spirit that form’d this scene,
These tumbled rock-piles grim and red,
These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks,
These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked freshness,

These formless wild arrays, for reasons of their own,
I know thee, savage spirit–we have communed together,
Mine too such wild arrays, for reasons of their own;
Was’t charged against my chants they had forgotten art?
To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse?
The lyrist’s measur’d beat, the wrought-out temple’s
grace–column and polish’d arch forgot?
But thou that revelest here–spirit that form’d this scene,
They have remember’d thee.

Yes, more pictures of rocks. I cannot go for another walk until my foot is feeling better so I am forced to dig into my photo repository for photos not yet published. Are you tired of trees and shrubs, and ponds, and rocks? Well hopefully soon, I’ll have something new for you.

Speaking of trees and rocks, Rolling Stone Magazine has a wonderful article called Crimes Against Nature, about the destruction of environmental laws in this country. But, like so many other writers, the author of the article also brought in the comparison of times between now and Europe of 1930’s:

Corporate capitalists do not want free markets, they want dependable profits, and their surest route is to crush competition by controlling government. The rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930s offers many informative lessons on how corporate power can undermine a democracy. In Spain, Germany and Italy, industrialists allied themselves with right-wing leaders who used the provocation of terrorist attacks, continual wars, and invocations of patriotism and homeland security to tame the press, muzzle criticism by opponents and turn government over to corporate control. Those governments tapped industrial executives to run ministries and poured government money into corporate coffers with lucrative contracts to prosecute wars and build infrastructure. They encouraged friendly corporations to swallow media outlets, and they enriched the wealthiest classes, privatized the commons and pared down constitutional rights, creating short-term prosperity through pollution-based profits and constant wars. Benito Mussolini’s inside view of this process led him to complain that “fascism should really be called ‘corporatism.’ ”

I was wrong to push back so strongly about the comparison of modern times and the facism of the 1930’s. However, I am still wary of it because I wonder – if today the US is the Germany of the 1930’s, what does that make us? We who live in the country that other people look at with so much distaste? Will the people from the rest of the world some day make us stand in our virtual village greens over the bodies of dead Iraqi and face what we have allowed our leaders to do?

How will you feel about us if we do not manage to remove Bush next year?

Finally, from Mark Morford at SF Gate, Be Thankful you are not Dubya, a list that only Mark can write, and one reason he is still my favorite:

Be thankful that you do not have to suffer Dubya’s massive crushing karmic burden, as wrought by inflicting heaps of environmental disaster and vicious unnecessary war and a stunning string of lies lies lies like a firehose of giblet gravy splattered all over the planet.
…
Offer immense gratitude that despite a massive ongoing Herculean effort on the part of numerous world governments to rape and pillage and pretty much slap down most all tender offerings of the planet, Earth still manages to produce for us an astonishing array of flora and fauna and oxygen and edible delicacies and awe-inspiring trees and relentless merciless beauty.
…
We are deeply flawed. We are massively arrogant. We are bratty and insolent and abusive and sloppy and violent. But we balance it with astounding acts of love and beauty and art, nature preserves and activism and organic awareness and sex positivism and community awareness and quiet personal spiritual questing and lots and lots of great bookstores.
…
Here is where you make you own list. Here is where you set aside the cynicism and the sighing and the bitterness, just for a moment, and get quiet, look around, look inside, check the karmic inventory and offer up heaping pies of gratefulness for what you find.

Amen, Mark. Amen.

(And thanks to another Mark for bringing us so much, including a unique and wonderful style of journal from which I borrowed liberally from for today.)

Just Shelley

Men on Harleys

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date November 25, 2003

If I seem cranky in my recent posts, I am a bit but that’s just because in the last few days I have had some discomfort in my teeth/jaw/sinus, as well as my foot. These are two areas of the body most sensitive to pain, and I’m hit with both at the same time.

However, I now have legal drugs. Good legal drugs. Nice legal drugs.

I’m also a bit disappointed about a couple of things, including the fact that it doesn’t look like my minimum reserve on my mineral collection auction will be met. I have a starting bid, but not enough to justify selling the collection. My roommate suggests that the timing was bad – Christmas is coming up. Too true. If it doesn’t sell this week, I’ll try again in January.

Also, the Practical RDF book isn’t quite selling as well as other books I’ve written. I’m not surprised – it is a very esoteric subject, and I don’t go to conferences and put my face into other people’s faces, or talk about RDF a lot. It should be a consistent seller over time, especially if I keep updating outdated sample code and putting said code out at the O’Reilly site. But it’s not going to be the success Unix Power Tools is (which was just published in Japanese – I’ll post a photo of the copy being sent to me when I get it), or Developing ASP Components. (which made it into Russian and Spanish).

However, with the sour always comes the sweet. It doesn’t look like my foot is broken, but some toes most likely are and haven’t healed well (heeled well, heh), and the X-Rays tomorrow won’t cost me a dime with my medical (I do have very good medical insurance).

In addition, I’ve had the loveliest comments from the rock and mineral Interest community about the collection. They loved the collection, the stories, the photos. Makes me feel good about the job I did putting this site online.

A couple of other things might be looking up nicely soon, but I won’t say anything specific until the rubber hits the road, so to speak. I also have a very good friend (who happens to have an exceptionally handsome voice by the way), who suggested that my next bits of photography focus on things I don’t normally take photos of, or don’t like taking photos of, to increase my expertise and reach.

Excellent advice, except that I like taking pictures of everything, being a most indiscriminate photographer. However, I am shy about taking photos of people, and that’s one I need to work on. Also, I haven’t spent much time recently taking photos within cities or towns, or of industrial areas, and these could use more attention. In fact, there is a road trip I want to take (when I can afford it again) that will involve taking pictures of people and places of this nature, not just the wonderful Missouri country side.

But I will never tire of taking photos of Missouri. I may mention the statistics about St. Louis and the crime, but this really is a wonderful city full of charm and character. And the countryside – if you’ve never been here, nothing I can photograph, or tell you, will ever convey the richness of this state: the forests, wetlands, granite mountains, and deep rivers. And the charming towns, and quirky, maddening, fascinating, and complex people that live here.

And, girlfriends, the men on Harleys here are drop dead gorgeous. When they say life begins at 50, they must have been talking about these guys, silver foxes everyone, I tell you. Youngsters got nothing on these guys. Well, okay, maybe Johnny Depp and Hugh Jackman, but that’s it.

Did I happen to mention the good drugs?