No, I’m not some modern-day MLK emerging from the barracks, positioning myself at the right hand of God and the left wing of the voting populace. No, I had a bad dream. I dreamed that I paid John Chow $450 to review my blog, and all he could say was, “that’s not blogging; that’s typing.” My nemesis in Thailand has said as much already, heckling me and my blogs, informing me that Jack Kerouac’s ‘automatic writing’ died even before Kerouac himself. Cool… I can live with that. With enemies like this, who needs friends? If the man is trying to diminish me by comparing me to Jack Kerouac, then I’ll take that as a back-handed compliment. The thing hack writers don’t understand about Kerouac is that he was essentially a poet, writing novels. They don’t call it the ‘Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Narrative’ now, do they? Poetry relies on spontaneity and inspiration to be effective. There is no such thing as a ‘poetic essay.’ That’s a contradiction in terms. Unfortunately there’s little point of reference for poetry, since most is scarcely compelling, much even repelling, though not repulsive. It’s just too boring to be repulsive. The journals and slams are full of ‘rhymin’ Simons and their fellow-traveling Garfunkels on one hand, and poetry professors and professionals on the other, making self-conscious references in a secret palace language that only they can understand. Modern poetry is so lame that I doubt even one percent of us can name the current US poet laureate. I know I can’t, though I might recognize her (his?) name if I heard it. It’s hard to even say what poetry really is since pop music stole it’s thunder, like fine art being liberated by the camera. It’s not rhyme; that’s lyrics. It’s not meaning; that’s philosophy. It’s not narrative; that’s a story. Any ideas? As Allen Ginsberg himself claimed, Bob Dylan is the poet of our era, not the guys in the textbooks.
Of course the quote in question was Truman Capote’s about Jack Kerouac. Now there’s a world of difference between Truman Capote and Jack Kerouac, not the least of which is writing style. Truman may have played the late night talkies to his own advantage or certainly to his increased celebrity, but he never had a moment like Kerouac reading to Steve Allen’s piano. You can’t book that, though McClure and Manzarek give it their best shot. Give it a listen, but don’t wait too long. The Beat poets are showing their age. Kerouac self-destructed and Burroughs and Ginsberg are now long gone. The next generation looks to Patti Smith for inspiration and elder statesmanship, she having bridged the gap between poetry and rock, but heirs are few and airs are many. The MySpace generation can barely spell their words, much less cast a spell, and whatever hip-hop is, it ain’t poetry. Naropa Institute in the early 80’s was a revelation and an inspiration even then, that the Beat poets were still alive and howling twenty-plus years after we all added –niks to our knacks. There was Gregory Corso next door literally screaming drunk and A.G. himself wrote me a poem for a buck to support the cause of learning, now long lost among a nomad’s middens. Still the fire burns, somehow somewhere. If Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs were channeling Rimbaud, Whitman, and Joyce, then who was Truman Capote channeling? At best he may have evoked F. Scott Fitzgerald, and there’s plenty of talent there, but enough to dismiss the Beats? Naah…. As Oliver Stone said of Tarantino, he’s “making movies about movies.” It’s the difference between art and artifice, the ‘real thing’ or its derivative bastard offspring clones, capable of standing and working, but not reproducing. ‘Non-fiction’ novels are fine, but they both did that. Does that place Capote’s journalism above Kerouac’s poetry? I doubt it, but time will tell.
Blogs are the same, or more so, maybe the quintessence of literary nothingness. For those of you who don’t know, John Chow is a self-proclaimed blogosphere ‘mogul’. Disregarding his Asian features and possible Mongolian ancestry, I think he means to claim himself king of the hill, Mr. Blogger par excellence. Now I don’t know how he or anyone else defines ‘mogul’, but six figures doesn’t usually do it, certainly not in Mr. Gates’ dot.com world, not even in hyper-hyped Hollywood. I think that says more about the ‘blogosphere’ itself than anything else. I’m sure Mr. Chow is a nice guy; it’s just that he doesn’t really offer a product in return for the money he promises to make you online. That’s the definition of a pyramid scheme. He got into trouble by trying to scam Google and promote himself by offering ‘back-links’ to anyone who’ll mention him in the same breath as “making money online.” So basically he’s building his ad-revenue potential by biting the hand that feeds him. Now I won’t malign his Asian character by referring to the historical precedents of Chinese wanting to control the medium of currency; I’ll just say that he threatens to bring down the very system that sustains him, i.e. biting the hand, etc. Now that’s OK as long as you have something creative to add, but apparently he doesn’t. Aside from a few references to cars and fine dining, he only blogs about blogs, and “making money online.” So he makes money online by telling people how much money he makes online. He’s not the only one, only the most brazen. Now he’s charging $450 just to review other people’s blogs, hyping the hype, and getting it. I’d like to say that’s not American, but it is. Look at the robber barons. Look at Bill Gates. But it shouldn’t be that way. The glass is half full, not half empty. There’s always room for new ideas. So Google in retribution has diminished him in the search rankings, but the war’s still on. This is the new webocracy, bloggers plowing the field whose harvest that mostly others will reap, personalizing the impersonal net. Let’s keep the playing field level.
So this is probably why Google suspended my ads after the ‘Thai women are digital’ blog. After I exposed their inner workings, they responded by pulling my ads. That’s okay; I don’t exactly depend on ad income to support myself and my habits. You guys aren’t exactly ad-clickers now, are you? No, me neither. When they start putting public service ads on your site, though, you know you’re in trouble. Maybe they thought I was spamming and scamming, promoting my own ads to promote my own income. A quick reading might make you think so. I may have even clicked a few of them myself. Some of them are interesting. I can always use a cheaper flight to Thailand. So now it’s either travel insurance or nothing, or gulf hurricane relief. Which gulf? Which hurricane? Sounds like a business with a future. If I do a blog on Thai girls, then they pull all the Thai girl ads. I guess that makes sense. I suppose this is all supposed to be transparent and subliminal. You read a blog and see an ad, so then click on it without thinking, as if it were an extension of the blog itself. It may work on consummate consumers, but you guys are too smart for that, aren’t you? Judging by my Google Adsense revenue, you are. So any self-reference to the system itself could be a scam. Only a human would know. Spiders and bots only count and categorize. So now I’ve got search ranking but no ads. Not that I had income from them, but I like their spontaneity. Well, the Google ad fairies, spiders, and bots must be scratching their heads over me now, or scratching something, at least. We’ll see what they do next. At least they function according to reason. That’s better than a nemesis would do. What’s the protocol with a nemesis? I’ve never had one before. I’ve always prided myself in never having burned bridges, but I guess there’s a first time for everything.
