Mar 2, 2004

Narcissistic Egomaniac Peanut



At times it is pragmatic for the Ego to supercede the Id. Since the Id has claws and the Ego coddles. I don't want to be a part of the club. If you want to come into my cave I'll tell you the visions I have. I don't like the town meeting because you have to wear shoes. We've got more important things to do here in the dark... Since when did poetry become a sewing circle? I read your books, I go to your readings. If I want to hear from you while I eat my frozen pizza, I'll invite you over for dinner...

This post is about the Buff List v. Blogging, for you linear types...

A few entirely practical words about the Buff list and why, for me, it's sort of a little alarm clock telling me it's 12:15 AM and time to go to bed and not much else. (If the Buff List floats your boat, fantastic, I'm merely offering my 2 cents):

Cent #1.) IT'S UGLY. Given that I spend a significant portion of my day staring at the Yahoo! Interface or alternately MS Outlook, the last thing I want to do is spend a lot of time scanning variously formatted text in the context of that window. Start a Website or a group Blog or something, I can't bring myself to stare at black-on white single-spaced text. What's one of the best things about books? They're often very beautiful and the sense of design interacts with the content. I find blogs to be quite similar to books in that respect.

Cent #2.) THE DIGEST CONTENT IS POORLY ORGANIZED. If I see something in the digest list what interests me, I generally have to spend an untoward amount of time looking for it, or sometimes I go to the archives and do a keyword search. Or most of the time, I just don't bother. Again, this could be remedied by a change of format.

Cent #3.) I like pictures. Blogs often give their authors the opportunity to incorporate images with their text, thus adding another dimension to the experience of reading them, which enhances the experience in many ways, from Christina Strong's flash poems to Jim Behrle's delightful cartoons, this adds something charming to the experience of reading blogs. Much more pleasant than trying to parse a half a page of Harry Nudel...

Innovation, ye experimental poets... The Buff List dinosaur has remained the same for I don't know how long. Are you ladies and gents still using rotary phones? C'mon, I know some of you guys are techies. Build yrself a website with a decent interface. Really, I'm that shallow, or at least that spoiled by technology...

No comments: