Rose DeShaw » NOTES

Social Networking – What IS it?

Rose — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:05:17 +0000

Sci Fi writer Fritz Lieber wrote more than one short story about a future population so satiated with virtual reality that they no longer participated in real life. When Karl Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses, he reckoned without Facebook. Enough of us are on line enough that the real world of politics and peril ceases to be of much interest.
Early this year our government decided that protests on Facebook, even with thousands of protesters signed up, were not anything to worry about. Because very few turned up at the rallies held in cities across the country. Protesters spent hous on line, marshalling people to object to highhanded tactics but few of them spent any time on foot.
There are a lot of folk sayings about talk being cheap and not walking the talk, all heralding such a time as this in the world, where we are too busy typing our walk to put on our shoes and get out there. So Social Networking, then, is a place to let off steam without anybody getting hurt. What a perfect safety net for the people in power! They would have to invent it, if it didn’t already exist. Social Networkiing is a universal mudroom where we hang up our coats and wipe off our boots before slipping easily into the comfy chair before the fire.
Revolutions are brutish, nasty, dangerous and perhaps unneccessary when everyone has a soapbox from which to yell. Perhaps we have seen the last of them in North America, thanks to social networking. which is a pacifier, an equalizer, a de-stressor to pass the time, more interactive than television, (where nobody knows your name or how many friends you have).
If the daily interface with Social Networking were to be taken away, the withdrawal pangs of millions would impact our world like nothing has ever done before. Back to daily life without that feedback from friends and family or the status such connections give anyone involved.
I admit to knowing Social Networkiing is a sometime thing, an experience that will brand forever these years and generations, and still feeling pleasure for having been part of it. Very few of my friends are on it and none of them have experimented with what it has to offer, mostly out of indifference, some from fear.
Some of the experience is amusing. The other day I mistakenly ‘friended’ a man whose name is at the end of the alphabet. Supposedly recommended by a mutual friend, I went ahead and lazily clicked instead of checking him out. If I had, I would’ve found that quoting Bible verses and making intoward assumptions about them, is the foundation of his life.
Once he began I wanted him to stop. But from long experience with Bible quoters, I knew he wouldn’t. So to ‘unfriend’ him, I had to click on rows and rows, and rows of my now nearly 2200 friends till I found him lingering at the bottom and took him out of my circle. Now I must watch cautiously lest he turn up as an ‘add friend’ suggestion again, as so many difficult individuals with agendas and few friends, tend to do, repetitiously.
With his addiction to religion AND Social Networking, perhaps more, the now defriended seemed to be awash in opiates. I keep expecting the streets to be much more bare and quiet, given the keyboarding of so many behind closed doors.
All it will take now to make a revolution is to unplug everybody who will wake up, dazedly to a world they haven’t inhabited for some time, rub their eyes and say, ‘Wha?’ Those who haven’t been plugged in all along will rule the universe.

Wanna Win A Short Story Competition?

Rose — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:54:49 +0000

I was the sole judge for a big city short story competition some years ago. (I’m sure after that, they always had more than one). I received about fifty stories in the mail. Young and enthusiastic at that time, I was delighted to have my reading material assigned to me for some weeks to come.
First I carefully read all the stories. But soon I began putting them into categories. Being inexperienced, I was surprised to find that the majority fell into one big lump in the middle. No matter the subject, they were all fairly similar.
Many were character-driven, one eccentric individual whom they thought was surely unique and would carry a rather mundane plot; aunts, bosses, mothers, lovers, who possessed, the writer felt, a uniqueness never before encountered in literature.
A good share were set in suburbia, as though no other place on earth existed, losing the distinguishing specifics of location which does so much to ground a good story.
Others shadowed well-known classic stories with slight changes here and there to distinguish them from the originals. I had expected great swathes of originality and brilliance and here in my hands I had submissions that could’ve come from any B level creative writing student in the country.
There were a very few perfectly awful. One man writing about how pretty his cat was, a couple about dogs being heroic, (and I LIKE animals, for pete sakes).
Then there were three wonderful, original stories that stuck out like raised hands in a sleepy classroom. They must have all been published by now. The winning story was about the torments of a writer, though I don’t remember all the plot after all this time. But it was a close tie between it and a suberb account of an obviously mentally ill man trying to shop in a supermarket but working against the impediment of all the canned goods on the shelves crying out to him.
After all these years, I still remember it so clearly, fresh and brilliant. He finally fled the supermarket and wet his pants on the way home.
I had to decide between the two. The writer one was far more conventional but had some good plot twists and definitely combined memoir. The main difference between them was that it had no grammatical problems at all. The grocery store story had no spelling errors but it had been written on a very old word processor that did not paragraph nicely nor had the writer been introduced to the proper use of the apostrophe.
Whether or not it was a class or money issue, I didn’t feel, in all good conscience, I could award him first place if someone asked to see the copy. It would be much worse to have his prize withdrawn, after, if someone, legitimately complained about structure. I wasn’t sure how far the competion organizers would back me but it was a near thing, something I agonized over for a week.
When I announced my choices, there was a dead silence. it was then I realized there had been an agenda. Members of this literary society had been holding the competition for many years and taking turns receiving top honours. All of their stories were in the middle bunch. But for a change, this year they had confidently opened their doors to the general public, not thinking it would matter much. But it had.
The winner was an outsider from a neighbouring village and not one of them but to their horror, second place went to a young man with schizophrenia. When he bounded up on the stage, beaming, to claim his small cash prize, I realized he hadn’t made up the supermarket story in any regard. He had written, extremely well, an experience that was completely non-fiction.
Unlike judges in my personal experience, I had written a page of mostly praise for each story with small suggestions for improvement. Him I had praised for his fresh wording, his unconventional subject matter, plot and writing skill.
“It’s my first time writing!” he said while his girlfriend hugged him and they shrieked together, while silence gathered around them. “I had to borrow somebody’s old word processor.” Coming in second was completely unimportant to him. I had high hopes he might go on and asked him to write me when he did so.
Needless to say, that was the last time I judged anything for that particular group of writers. Looking back I think being a judge was the best way I ever found for an overview of what likely all story competitions turn out to be. A startling one or two at each end and a vast pile in the middle, trying hard not to but sounding just like their neighbours. Clear evidence to mine your life and trust your gut and know what stories are yours alone to tell.

Authors on Facebook

Rose — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 13:55:05 +0000

Probably every living author in the world has seen facebook for what it is and got on. Why didn’t I see this sooner? I discovered the author fact backwards. One of my many struggling writer or artist friends suggested I add Brooke London who turned out to be an author of romantic suspense. (Hooray!)
Clicking on a list of HER friends, I discovered yet more writers in the genre who sound fine. So I friended them and then I thought, well, I’m reading P.N. Elrod who writes vampire fiction set in the thirties (I know, I know, but when you’re desperate for somethng to read, you go looking), and then I discovered just how GREAT ol’ P.N. is. Now I’m reading it aloud to my picky husband while he exercises and he loves her stuff – anyway, she has two fan sites, neither set up by her.
And there I found – wait for it – a Vampire DATING SITE. (’Not for fakes, wannabes or pervs!) it says strictly, promising to promptly throw out anyone who fits those odd descriptions. ‘fake vampires?’ ‘wannabe vampires??’ ‘Perverted vampires?’ Can dating get any odder?
At any rate, now I’m looking up favorite authors on facebook and seeing who they’ve friended and whether there’s any good reading material there for me, being desperate this winter, for stories with a good hook. I’M NOT LOOKING FOR GREAT LITERATURE & CLASSICS. Remember, I’m a retired bookseller. I know all about that stuff. I’m writing about how I came to know all about that stuff (What Happened In The Bookshop) coming soon to a publisher near you). What I need is something gripping to read that will take me right outa where I am and into the book.
It’s a funny way to track down books but I’ve given up on browsing the shelves at the library which is even slower and less productive. See how desperate a retired bookseller can get when no one takes her seriously about what to read? Or won’t admit what they read when they aren’t gushing over Margaret Atwood or the other latest book club stuff. I mean, nobody reads that stuff for pleasure, for the sheer joy of the text. Nobody. Book club books are read so you can tel your friends how fine your mind now is. You can’t burble on about Romantic Suspense or Ethical Vampires.
But if you’re addicted to having a good book in your hand and at least 4 or 5 absolutely gripping stories after that – for the hospital, I need that many for absolute certain. They need to start with a good premise, some sort of musing about the quirky way life can go, and proceed lightly from there into absolute chaos (which is what happens when you go into the gastro part of the hospital – you don’t die but its messy and back home everything goes to pieces – that’s when you need a book that straightens out an even worse mess as you read along.
Maybe it all goes back to being dazzled by Stella Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm at an early age. An unencumbered young woman who goes into a messy situation and gloriously sorts it out. I’m not actually demanding a dead body in any book, even though that seems to be the ultimate in messes. What I want is a good story and book club books keep shouting: “YOU’RE READING GREAT LITERATURE” at you every other page till you begin to foam at the mouth. Just shut up and get on with how a mess got fixed.
Fixing messes. Okay, that’s my real main interest, at bottom I guess. Didn’t realize that till I started writing this. Okay this is good. I’d like to see it done cheerfully, tidily, believeably, with lots of memorable characters and a point of view with whom I can identify, and at least two of the kinds of everyday villians you have to deal with all the time in everyday life – the self-absorbed martyrs (whom Georgette Heyer does so well), and the passive-aggressive whiners, probably two sides of the same character who make life miserable all around for the average person, and I’d like a dog in it, probably more than a cat. While I like cats, they, too, are self-absorbed.
Anyone is welcome to write and tell me here what THEY want in a book. But if you are in love with Only Great Literature, please find a more receptive site somewhere else. I Have Read It All.

Warned By Facebook

Rose — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 22:18:18 +0000

Most Facebookers with 5 or 6 friends will never see the message so for their edification, here’s what the warning says:
“You are engaged in behaviour that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users. Facebook Systems determined that you were going too fast when adding friends. You must significantly slow down. Further use of site features may result in a temporary block or your account being permanently disabled. For further information please visit our FAQ page.”
Then it shows you two words in a patterned setting and tells you identify BOTH words below, separated by a space. (Being a writer, I keep trying to determine if they are drawing these words from a specific text or just random pieces of paper lying about the house – notices from teachers, examination instructions, old recipes, the backs of dogfood containers…
I really don’t intend to be a scofflaw. I intend to follow the rules but it seems impossible to determine exactly when or how you are going too fast. Ah, says Facebook. Whether or not you deserve a warning is determined by ’speed, time and quantity.’ So there is no way to tell you’re about to be in violation. Except, when I have been adding about 5 minutes, I feel it about to descend, a large hand clapped on my shoulder.
Then there’s a site to answer 5 questions you might have about what being warned means: Why you were warned – or why your account was blocked or why your friend was warned or blocked or your page disabled.
After that, there is an additional site to display more detailed points about warnings. You can’t say they haven’t told you and I’m trying my best to be a good little facebooker but it’s hard when they keep dangling these ‘add friends’ in front of you who look most enticing.
I’m checking out my potential friends much more closely these days, adding more slowly but I tell you, that 5000 are a hard-won group of friends. I hope they appreciate all I am doing for them.
Wonder what’s beyond the 5000? Beyond the numbers. A great many seem to have reached it and stayed on, asking for fans. And what’s that like, I wonder?

Facebook and I, midway in the journey

Rose — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:26:48 +0000

Facebook is one of those experiences that will come to define a certain social phenomena in the world that caused a change in the way people think. Facebooks ending will be very hard on many people. At first I thought it might be dangerous. Now I think, ‘no more dangerous than life.’
Shortly after joining I saw there were goals to be attained. If you added more than 5000 friends, you were not allowed anymore. If you have something to publicize, like a new book, starting a magazine, this would be the place to make a modest announcement to your 5000. Many are already doing so, not so subtly.
I decided to go for it and began blindly adding. Which means FB sends regular messages on your homepage with pictures of people, saying, ‘add as friend.’ The more friends you have, the more suggested friends they bring up.
But if you add too fast or too often it sends a sternly written message in large black type: ‘YOU ARE ENGAGING IN ANNOYING BEHAVIOUR! iF YOU PERSIST… and then various warnings. I haven’t written all the message out yet, though yesterday they warned me three times. Tempting on one hand – Taking away on the other.
At first I felt like a horrible person for getting such a warning – it was liked being shushed in the library. But FB was the one wanting me to add. Finally I decided that they were afraid FB would be used for publicity purposes and were trying to stop it, the only way they knew how. So I felt a little sorry for them.
Probably most people don’t have 5000 friends so they thought that a safe number, never thinking that addicts to popular culture like me would take their top number as a challenge. So I went on adding blindly till I am nearly up to 2500, mid-point. Some of them are people I know, love, trust and am delighted to be able to contact. Others are complete strangers, strange being the operative term here.
My goodness, what some of my new ‘friends’ are up to! Delete, delete, delete. For awhile I added everybody of the same name. All the John Smiths, for example, envisioning them as my marching armies who might all congregate in one place and get to know one another. It was obvious that most of them had never thought there was anyone else out there with the same name.
Some of them occasionally write back and asked why I’m friending them and how they know me? I told many of the early ones that it was a social experiment about which I was writing. Later I said that a friend of theirs suggested that I add you. Some of the writers had only 5 or 6 friends and evidently liked it that way.
There were some bloopers on the way. One man whose full name contained the word ‘golf’ and to whom I’d written about loving the game said that in his language, it was just a common name. He seemed indignant and I felt stupid but at least I’d perused his FB page, unlike so many early ones whom I had NOT checked out and proved to be up to all sorts.
How can i say I added without checking first? Now I look at that list of a couple thousand and see that someone in the world knows I have added a pornographer, several felons, way too many men disguised as women, probably some RCMP officers who are trolling (as they should be, thank heavens) and lots and lots of persons I know nothing about. How did the others with 5000 friends, do it but like this?
It is hard on the adders of friends to be constantly checking, chewing their fingernails, wondering if this one or that one will appear on an America’s Most Wanted site with you displayed prominently as one of their few friends. Could you say your connection was you as a social worker and them as the perp? Would anyone believe you? Is that a better interpretation than that you were adding yur 5000 to see how hard it was and what it might mean – a social experiment?
More about how this is going as I go. Stay tuned.

Song for Anti-Privatizing

Rose — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:03:04 +0000

Woke up yesterday to read about cutbacks for Daycare and seniors The folks they figure who won’t speak up. We’ve GOT to let them know they can’t do this stuff.Let’s keep the whole world from becoming just one vast corporation, eh? Or at least postpone it awhile.
Below is a song to a familiar tuen – the OTHER song from Singing In The Rain – Remember, ‘All I Do The Whole Night Through Is Dream Of You!? Debbie Reynolds and her troop of showgirls dressed up as 1920’s flappers doing the black bottom. If you don’t remember it – rent it and sing this:

Tune: All I Do The Whole Night Through
All they do the whole day through is privatize
Hospitals, schools, hydro too – privatize
Public trust, used to mean
We the people ran the scene
Now public’s gone private
All across this lannnnd
The boys who make the big bucks need
Always more dough
They say that privates, ’so naive’
and ‘wasteful, you know’
They’ll help us out, taking over
Anything to land in clover
All they need to do the deed
Is SILENCE from us!

Facebook & Popular Culture & Me in the Morning

Rose — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:05:49 +0000

Woke up to 2015 friends this morning but it’s early days yet. That number seems to be feeding off itself. Funny, I don’t feel any different. And how else could I end up with a considerable number of friends in India and other far off places? Sitting down to eat breakfast on my tv trray by the stove and, no doubt due to the nine hardcovers I had also piled on the tray along with a bowl and plate of breakfast, a bottle of kaopetak, pencils, scissors and unopened mail, the thing collapsed. it isn’t possible to have a little table that doesn’t fold up here. I’ve tried and periodically whatever I’ve installed needs to be gotten out of the way. So I put up with periodica collapses, sending the bowl of breakfast food across the room as it hits the floor, 2 glasses, (last night’s and this mornings) rolling under the stove (on which I have a stapler and another glass – I keep saying I’ll tidy up and then some great idea hits me and I move sidewise to the computer (at which I’m supposed to be wearing special computer glasses which I have tied to my lamp – eventually I’ll have 3 pair of glasses, two tied firmly to the nearest light source – talk about opportunities to lose things!) anyway, all this to say I am midway to kicked off Facebook. Yesterday I got three reprimands for adding friends too fast, yet they throw them at me. ‘Add friend! Add friend!’ they beg but woe betide me if I do. Sunday . I keep hoping my new friends don’t go out robbing banks or worse. You can never tell what your close dear personal intimate 2015 friends may take it into their heads to do next. I try to set aside a little time to check them out now. What are their interests? Are they really not this known poseur attempting to pass himself off? I unfriended a known poseur the other day and right away she was back in line, trying to get friended again. When the person has only one or two friends (for good reason), and you unfriend them, they notice right away. Why am I doing this? An interest in popular culture, I guess. To experience the full range of what it means to be Facebooked, I think you have to play their game of 5000 and off. Many have and seem to bear grudges. I don’t. Midway to explusion will be 2500 which I should hit sometime around Easter. The more friends you have, the more you get. It’s one of those rolling down hill kind of things. Names turn up whom I do not know, with whom I share something like 268 mutual friends. But maybe, in the back of my mind, I think that if war broke out, you would only need to yell between shootings that, ‘You are one of my Facebook FRIENDS! Check it out!’ and, given laptops in the trenches, the firing could cease. For sure they are not my enemies.

Glad To Be Gluten-Gone

Rose — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:42:33 +0000

In the middle of my life, I found I was CELIAC, Thank heavens. What I’d been was sick which got worse and worse. I’d be bumbling along in my life and WHAMO! I’d get pains like lightning hit my stomach. Rolling around on the bathroom floor. They would last about a day, weak for a week after.
Every fall in the hospital for two weeks, Great family doctor setting aside an afternoon appointment nearly daily during the bad times. It was official. I was a sickie.
After a lot of hoo-hah, gastrontologists at the hospital said I had Crohn’s Disease. Except I wasn’t skinny like all the other Chronnies. Lots of times I could digest anything and then, WHAMO!
I’d go to Crohn’s clinic and get sidelong looks as though I was a doctor groupie. The gastro’s would ask me if my marriage was okay and was I under stress? Well, yeah, when I’m trying to get some work done but I get this stomach pain and the backdoor trots out of the blue. Did some part of me secretly WANT to be sick but wasn’t letting on?
Finally, after the usual two weeks in the hospital, my family doctor, Nick Cristoveanu, volunteered to let me abandon the clinic and take over looking after the WHAMO’S himself. Buoyed by his confidence in me and desperate for answers, I went to the net and began to research.
Bingo! One of the Crohns sites I was on suggested that Crohns and Celiac Disease, whatever that was, were often linked. It meant not eating wheat-oats-barley-rye and cutting out milk. It meant you had to read the labels on anything you ate that hadn’t come out of the ground, from a tree or an animal.
Well all rightie then. I cut all that stuff out immediately, then sat and waited for the WHAMO! as it was fall and I had my little bag ready for the hospital. But nothing happened. The pain didn’t come along to greet me,( as the raindrops song in the Sundance movie says the blues do). Week after week, and no pain, except a couple sharp jabs once following a bakery cookie mistake.
I went to Nick Cristoveanu with my new diet. “Isn’t it hard to follow?” he asked.
“When I’m pain free? I’d do anything to keep the pain away.”
“Early days yet,” he said, but I could see he had his fingers crossed. Still all the gastros at the clinic would’ve demanded I get back on the meds, which I’d stopped taking. In fact I wasn’t on anything at all. Nick supported whatever I thought I had to do. He had noticed I wasn’t coming in sobbing in the afternoons anymore.
There was a short time out when I decided I probably didn’t have Crohns at all and ate some popcorn which resulted in a blocked bowel and an ostmy. “The gastros are bald,” I told him when got out. “Their hair is falling out because they haven’t got any cures for the pain.”
“They’re not ALL bald,” he said. “Your diet’s really working?”
“No pain,” I said. “By now it’s been nearly three years.”
He said he should’ve thought of it himself and I said it was his believing my pain was real and supporting me that gave me the courage to do the research and besides, NONE OF THE GASTROS EVER SUGGESTED IT MIGHT BE DIET!
The clincher had been overhearing a head gastro talking to a bunch of medical students out in the hall when they were doing rounds. The ward was filled with middle-aged women patients, whom he suggested were ‘bed blockers,’ women with other than medical problems who enjoyed being the centre of attention in the hospital, as though we didn’t have rich full lives and families to get back to.
I never wanted to leave a place so badly in all my life. I wished them all bald and I knew I’d do anything to keep from going back in. Even live the rest of my life without wheat-oats-rye and barley, read every word in every tiny label on anything before I bought it. Even eat the laughable rice flour bread still touted to Celiacs as ‘just as good as wheat.’ It isn’t. I keep expecting to see ‘gravel’ listed as an ingredient.
So here I am, seven years into this thing and going strong. Yeah, you have to fight off all the fabulous Celiac desserts made by those who feel sorry for poor deprived us: Squishy lemon squares with flaky pie crust base, peanut butter squares with Belgian chocolate tops, the long, long list of replacement treats.
If they can make sweets this good, why can’t they make real bread? But with breakthrough diagnosis’s on every hand, Celiac products are going mainstream so it won’t be long before hot buttered toast that actually crunches, is a reality. (It doesn’t exist, not where I am in Canada, anyway. There’s some that slithers…)
At any rate, thank heavens for the net and all the generous people who share their stories as honestly as I am doing now.

Tell Me About Your Book

Rose — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:56:17 +0000

If you are a lighthearted fiction author, especially Chick Lit or a lover of Jane Austen, please let me know about your work. I am also interested in ideas and history. Not keen on the Drats & the Boo Hoos. Taking the risk of living large, stepping out, encountering the possibilities, learning and growing, (whether we want to or not), all that sort of thing welcome here.

Buddy, Can You Spare A Good Book?

Rose — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:58:29 +0000

I’m growing sick of the vampire as reading material. Plus the werewolves, witches and other fantasy folk who think erotica is an important plot point. I’ll do my own fooling around, thank you, which means I don’t need anyone else’s vicarious experience, all of which is simply good fodder for the Liar’s Club.
I’m a retired bookseller after about 40 years in the out of print book business. I’m running out of good books. Right now my system is to find out what the book clubs are reading – and read the opposite. If a book is award winning and recommended, I’m not interested. But I’m going through genres too fast. Like mysteries, which used to be fine, prior to the bloody serial killer necessity or the determined but preposterous cozies.
I want some evidence that the author has a sense of 1) humour, which rules out the devout catholic soccer mom series, a woman who runs around killing demons, disguised as the paperboy, the mailman, the furnace repairperson. As a metaphor, this means anyone who annoys her or gets in her way. You just hope no one takes this dumb writing seriously.
I’m looking for some real life connection, 2) a bit of memoir, disguised as fiction. Almost ‘how to. Chick Lit often fills the bill 3) minus erotica. We make the most important decisions of our lives at the time we are least equipped; Career, Marriage, Children, Education, in our mid-twenties. I’m happy to explore these
I’ve read through Austenania, glad that it has become a genre in its own right but after Georgette Heyer and all the Jane As Detective and Personal Encounters With Jane, where do you go? I’ve read the highly under-rated Georgette Heyers, all 60. Why aren’t modern authors as prolific?, 4) gripping plot, peaceful conclusion.
The supernatural’s okay when it doesn’t take itself too seriously like the odd Michelle Rowan. Christopher Moore is actually profound. But there’s not enough ‘light paranormal romps,’ around. There’s mainstream stuff with Marian Kane, Susan Isaacs, Penny Vencenzi, Janet Evanovich and the wonderful woman who wrote, ‘Shut Up & Wear Beige. Also Lee Child. Thank heavens most of them write at length and none have gone tits up after less than ten books, except for Wendy Holden whose bitterness about the rich cancels out her last two. (C’mon, Wendy, get a perspective already).
I’ve still got a bit of influence on readers. Tell me someoneI’d enjoy reading who doesn’t have a ‘smiling through tears,’ sensibility for pete sakes and sans religion please. No warm generational stories where the one wise character makes you want to smack her. No totally unbelievable predictable romances. Having said that: TELL ME WHAT TO READ??