After four and a half years of inconstant operation, I’m wondering what to do with this blog. At its height, the blog had a friendly and intelligent community of regular readers, a fair bit of google juice, a perfect number of daily hits, and a wonderful network of impassioned fellow bloggers.
Now? Not so much.
And it’s all my fault. I first let the blog slip in the Spring of 2006, when I decided to take time off from it to finish my doctoral dissertation. That worked out well in the sense that I finally received my degree, but the blog never really recovered from that six-month hiatus.
I started the blog up again just as I went on the academic job market, which was probably a bad idea. And the blog has suffered — few new posts . . . . obituaries, of all things, languishing on the front page . . . . tumbleweeds blowing through the comment sections (though certainposts continue to resonate) . . . . WordPress upgrades ignored . .. . . well, it hasn’t been pretty.
But here’s the thing: I miss blogging. I miss the friends I made here, the dialogue I had with readers, the emotional and intellectual connections that I had with fellow bloggers . . . . and, most of all, I miss the writing. I miss sharpening my prose on a daily basis, playing with language, attempting to improve my skills.
As much as I’d like to return to doing what I used to do, however, many things have changed. The time I used to have while I was writing my dissertation has evaporated. My new job, which I started last fall, is great, but it’s time consuming — I’ve got a fairly heavy teaching load, but I also need to produce research for tenure. Although I still have family in Philadelphia, the new job brought me up to New York City, which means that my relationship to the amazing network of Philly bloggers has changed.
But the biggest difference is that I’m no longer focused on what used to be the primary subject of this blog: politics. I still care about it (Go Obama!), and I still read political blogs, but at a certain point, I became so sickened by the inexorable cycle of disappointment and frustration in recent years that I stopped believing in the power of the people to effect real change. And it’s hard to blog when you don’t have that faith.
I’ve become interested in an entirely different set of blogs and issues. Nowadays, I’m likely to read teaching blogs written by fellow academics or technology blogs written by instructional technologists. In my reading, at least, I’m moving from the realm of political blogging towards the realm of edubloggers, and I’m not sure how much crossover there is between the two camps.
So, here is my problem: I want to blog again, but I don’t know where to do it. I could start blogging again on The Tattered Coat, and there are certain ways in which that idea is attractive (see my notes about google juice above). However, I wrote this blog semi-anonymously, and I’d prefer to write my new blog under my real name. If I started blogging here under my own name, I might feel that it would be necessary to delete some older posts — an idea that bothers me. And I wonder whether it would be wrong, somehow, to re-purpose links given to me for political content that will be largely absent from the new blog.
And yet, I would have a hard time letting go of this blog, because giving it up would mean letting go of all of the meaningful connections I made here in the past.
So I find myself at the impasse that has kept this blog silent for months on end: I want to go forward, but can’t find the way.
Deadpan is one word I could use. Intelligent to a fault. Angst ridden. Passionate. Searching. Always reading something. Jimmy was a guy who had been through the worst that life could throw at him, but still maintained a finely-honed sense of humor.
Jim was, as Susie notes, a founding member of the liberal blogosphere, and a central figure in the Philadelphia scene. I always enjoyed seeing him at Philadelphia’s Drinking Liberally. He was, in fact, one of the first people I met there in late 2004, and I’ll always remember the generous words of advice that he gave me.
Jim is survived by his family, by Mildred (the bulldog that he loved), and by a multitude of fellow bloggers and readers who mourn the loss of his distinctively pithy and sardonic voice. May he rest in peace.
I never met Steve, but I did have some run-ins with him over the years, most notably over the Downing Street Memo. I was pushing for blogstorms; Steve thought the whole thing was a waste of time.
In response to the people who disagreed with him about the DSM and a few other issues, Steve wrote an important post titled “Why We Fight.” In it, he exemplified the pugnacious, take-no-prisoners approach to political blogging that made him such a star:
What people have to understand is that we’re going to have a lot of fights, internally, externally and we need to make sure that it’s the other side which doesn’t want to take us on. We have to make sure that when they want to lie on us or attack us unfairly that the world comes down on them.. We have to be a very different kind of liberal/progressive/democrat/leftist, which is to say, we have to be the kind not only willing to stand up for ourselves, but the kind who takes the fight to the opposition effectively.
When I dismissed the Downing Street Memos out of hand, some people were pissed. Well, they missed the point. Congress doesn’t care. They need Bush or think they do, and short of being caught with his dick in Jim Guckert’s mouth, impeachment ain’t gonna happen. People need to take this fight local. To start bringing the war home to the chickenhawk Congressmen and Senators who voted for this war then didn’t support the troops. It means standing outside their local offices questioning their votes. You have to go to them at home, you have to make them squirm. Not talk about memos, but people, their constituents. You have to move from the Beltway to the home district. You have to endanger their seats, not speak nicely to them about something they don’t take seriously.
It’s not about being right, being right is easy. John Kerry was right. It’s about being effective. It’s about getting out your message and stomping the shit out of people who fuck with you. If Carol Darr wants to fuck with Kos, then her mailbox should be flooded. If they want to run their mouths about Dean, not only do they get the same treatment, they find out he’s raising money hand over fist from regular folks.
If some weenie wants to start shit with you, he can be humiliated on two of the most read blogs on the Internet.
This isn’t about agreement. This is about power and using it. We have to basically make people pay a price for starting in with us. Because we know their motives are not about policy. They want us to go away. So we have to show them two things, we’re here to stay and we can hurt them if we have to. And people get squeamish when power is used. Anyone think Kos is making an idle threat? No? Then shit, let’s back his ass up. We agree with him, so let’s act like it for God’s sake. Let’s not play the Judean People’s Front/People’s Front of Judea game,. where we argue over minor differences.
[. . .]
Politics is a hard business and you have to impress upon some people that you can fuck up their plans before they respect you, especially when you can execute your own.
posted by Steve @ 8:10:00 PM
[emphasis added]
Steve understood, before most of us, that Karl Rove and the Bush Administration had changed the playing field. All the heartfelt pieties and rational arguments in the world were moot; we had to learn how to fight, and Steve was the one who taught us how to do it.
Again and again, I’d watch Steve argue with his readers in his comment section. He’d debate them for a while before finally telling them to go start their own damn blogs.
I bet he launched a hundred bloggers that way.
If you want to remember Steve and honor his legacy, get the hell off of my damn blog and go start your own. Then go fuck up the other side’s plans, even if you piss off a few people along the way.
Whatever you do, don’t stop fighting. Steve never did.
Update 3:The News Blog now has a PayPal link up to collect donations to defray expenses for Steve’s funeral.
Update 4: (6/7/07) I knew — or, rather, I hoped — this was coming: the inimitable Driftglass, whose blog took flight under SG’s wing, lays down the best tribute to SG that I’ve seen so far.
The ride to the PACCA was traumatic: I noticed the mother shaking and panting heavily in her cage; her tongue lolled out of her mouth. I kept telling her that I was sorry. The kittens were trying to climb out of their box, and I had to reach back several times to push them gently back inside.
When I arrived at the shelter, I asked everyone I could whether or not they thought that the kittens would be put down. One attendant looked at me, pointed to a sign on the wall, and read it out to me. The sign went something like this:
Due to overcrowding, we cannot accept any kittens under two pounds. Kittens weighing less than two pounds are likely to be euthanized.
Please consider providing foster care for your kittens until they reach two pounds.
I kept looking down at those cute kittens in the box. I had come in worried about the mother’s welfare, but now it looked like the entire group of cats might be endangered. A woman emerged from the back room and demanded to know who had brought these kittens in to the shelter. She told me that they were likely to be put down unless I could provide foster care for them, and she pleaded with me to take them in. I asked whether or not I could take only one or two, but she said that I shouldn’t separate the litter.
I couldn’t leave them to an uncertain fate. There wasn’t much I could do for the mother at this point, but it was within my power to save the kittens.
So I agreed to join PACCA’s foster parent program, and to provide foster care for these kittens. I didn’t even have time to clear this with my wife — I just made the decision to take them in.
We’ve now had the kittens in our downstairs bathroom for four and a half days. It has been an immensely rewarding experience so far. The kittens are all cute, friendly, and affectionate.
(click on pictures to enlarge)
When we brought the kittens into our home, they had never tasted food — having only had their mother’s milk, they didn’t even know what food was. They were hungry, but they’d walk up to the food, sniff it, and walk away. We eventually got them to eat wet food by getting them to lick little bits of it off of our fingers. They are now feeding regularly on both wet and dry food, and they all use the litter box.
Unfortunately, they also tend to frolic in the litter box, quite often after using it for other purposes. We’ve done more loads of laundry than I can count in recent days, and I’m constantly cleaning the floor of the room in which they’re living.
But I can’t tell you how happy it makes me when I see all four of these kittens going at their little plates of food! And how amazing it is when they meow at the sight of me, when they close their eyes and purr as I stroke their chins and bellies.
All four of the kittens are absolutely beautiful, and remarkably healthy for having lived outside for so long. We’ve named the two above Nigel (gray and white) and Celene (orange and white).
Nigel has a very special place in my heart, as he is the runt of the litter. He was the last one to eat, and he most needs affection. For a long time, he kept trying to suckle our fingers in search of food. Celene, who has a girl’s name but is actually a boy, is the strongest of the bunch and is amazingly sweet.
We refer to the other two kittens as “the twins.” They both have tiger-like black and yellow-gray stripes. One of them is a little smaller than the other, and a little more shy.
Part of what we’re doing is socializing the cats — getting them used to human contact. This process has made me wonder whether my own cat, Luna, had such a socialization process, because she can be a little resistant to contact. Judging by what I’ve seen so far, I think that all four of these kittens are going to grow up into kittens who love to be held.
We ran into a big issue two nights ago, when we discovered a flea on Nigel. Knowing the problem could spread if we didn’t act quickly, we flea-combed all of them (finding a total of three fleas), and then removed the kittens from the room, which we doused in a diluted bleach solution.
The next day, my wife and I spent a long time flea-combing and shampooing the kittens, and using flea spray and carpet powder on their entire living quarters. We did our last clean-up of the area last night. As of today, none of the kittens have flea dirt on them, so I hope I’ve tackled the problem by going ballistic on it.
Besides that issue, which I hope has been resolved, all of the cats appear to be in perfect health.
We can’t keep the kittens too much longer, so we’re going to give them to another foster family soon (perhaps tomorrow). The work we’re doing for them is amazingly rewarding, and indeed life-saving, but it is also time-consuming.
If you are interested in adopting (or fostering) one of more of the kittens, please get in touch. Before you adopt (and once the kittens have reached two pounds), the PACCA will spay the kittens and give them shots, etc., for the adoption fee of $25. And it’s “buy one get one free” season at the PACCA.
I have to say that these kittens are some of the most adorable felines I’ve ever been around. It’s obvious that they’ve quickly become socialized, as they enjoy attention and have no fear of humans. I would love to find happy homes for them.
I’m still trying to find out what has happened to the mother. If I had to do it all over again, I would have left the family in the backyard for another few weeks, until the kittens were fully grown. I don’t know whether I’ve done the right thing, but I do know that I’ve had the best intentions all along, and I hope that my fostering parenting of these kittens will make it more likely that they will be adopted and loved.
For those of you who haven’t read the previous post, here’s the backstory: a few weeks ago, my wife and I found a stray cat and her litter of newborn kittens in our backyard. I felt that I couldn’t let them stay there, but I feared that they would be euthanized if I brought them in to a shelter. Many commenters chimed in with wonderful suggestions and advice.
When I got back from my trip on Friday, the situation was unchanged: the mother and her kittens were still in the backyard, and I was still conflicted about what to do about them. Upon mac’s advice, I had contacted a few “no-kill” shelters. But it was difficult to find one that had room. Kitty Cottage, for instance, which I had deemed my best hope, told me that they couldn’t accept the cats.
I went back to the PACCA to rent a trap. I ran into a distraught man in who arrived cradling a small box in his hands. At one time, it had contained contractor garbage bags; now, it held a tiny kitten who could barely breathe. The man had found it on his construction site among a litter of deceased siblings. But PACCA couldn’t help — the man was told that the shelter could not accept the kitten because it was under two pounds (this is a shelter policy that I’ll discuss in further detail in a later post).
Two women, who had arrived carrying cages full of white rats, gave him the phone number of a woman in the area who bottle-feeds and rehabilitates sick and stray kittens. Then, they got into a heated argument with a man who told them that he feeds rats to his pet snake. The women, it turned out, run a rat rescue, and had come to the shelter to have their rats spayed. They seemed to know their way around the shelter scene, so I asked them what they thought I should do. They agreed that I should trap and turn in the cats — and that the PACCA was the right place to bring them. “It’s full of good people,” they told me.
So I rented the trap, came home. I put a small plate of food at one end of the trap, and went inside my house. I saw the mother enter the trap, but she managed to avoid pressing the step-lever which would close the front of the trap — she simply stood before it, and craned her head over the step to get at the food.
I opened the door, and the cat got nervous. As she turned around to get out of the trap, she mistakenly stepped on the lever, and the front door snapped shut.
It was a horrible moment. The cat, realizing that she had been trapped, backed frenetically towards the front of the long cage and lashed out at the steel barriers. She let out several loud, fearful moans. She would stay very still, and then spring at one of the walls of the cage, as if she could startle it into opening.
I spoke soothing words to her, but I didn’t know whether to believe them. Was everything going to be okay? Would she be taken care of? Or was she right to feel that a door had just shut her away from the life, freedom, and love that she had known?
I couldn’t answer those questions, but I had to get the kittens. They proved difficult to capture, but I eventually got all four of them in a box, and headed off to the PACCA with a heavy heart.
It has been a while since I have written regularly on The Tattered Coat. A full explanation of my absence, and an announcement of some exciting news, will be coming soon.
In the meantime, I’m requesting your help with a moral drama that has been playing out in my backyard.
Some time ago, I noticed that a couple of stray cats from the neighborhood seemed abnormally interested in my yard. Figuring that these cats had simply been lured by the sultry scent of my beloved Luna, I didn’t give their plaintive cries and wanton yelps too much of a thought.
Mom
That all changed last week, when I discovered that one of these stray cats was a female, that she had recently given birth to a litter of kittens, and that they were all camped out behind an azealia bush, underneath a fence.
Jesus — could they be more cute?
Watching this mother feed her brood, my wife and I took pity on her, and started giving her a can of the good stuff every night. Though the mother has not quite warmed up to us, she’s hissing at us a little less often now.
I’ve tried to leave well enough alone, but, as the Dude said, this will not stand. For one thing, this mother seems to have two male cats staking out her turf, and they have been spraying all over our grill, our back steps, and our yard.
But my urge to do something about this mother and her kittens has less to do with the scent of these gentlemen callers than it does with the bigger problem of feral cats. If this website’s claims are correct, one pair of breeding cats “can exponentially produce 420,000 offspring over a seven-year period.”
That’s a lot of stray cats.
The most humane solution, it seems, is to follow the Trap-Neuter-Release method. The problem? The Philadelphia Animal Care and Control Association doesn’t support such a program. I can trap the cats and bring them in to be neutered, but each operation will cost $25, and the association doesn’t have any openings until September.
So, it seems that my options are these:
1. Leave the cats alone.
2. Trap the cats, bring them to the shelter, and hope that at least the little kittens will get adopted. It’s likely that the mother, at least, will be euthanized.
I feel that Option #2 is the right path to follow, but every time I think of bringing these cats in to the shelter, I shudder a little bit. Do I really want to be responsible for killing these animals?
And what is the morally and ethically responsible thing to do here?
In today’s mayoral race, I will be voting for Michael Nutter, and I encourage you to do the same.
Like many others, I’m troubled by Nutter’s “Stop and Frisk” proposal. But I’m voting for him for a few important reasons:
1. As my councilman in the 4th District, he was responsive to constituent concerns.
Nutter showed up on a regular basis to the meetings of my dinky little neighborhood association. He’d listen to concerns voiced by members of the community . . . and then he’d go out and get things done.
2. He has taken tough, and sometimes unpopular, stands.
Pushing on through countless setbacks, Nutter got the votes he needed to pass the smoking ban. And he did so by outmaneuvering his longtime adversary, Mayor Street, into a corner.
3. He’ll fight against the pay-to-play political culture of Philadelphia
As the Inquirer noted, “Nutter was the stubborn Don Quixote who brought his windmill down, forcing City Hall to confront the shame its chronic corruptions had spawned.”
4. Nutter is the only candidate who has children in the public schools.
This alone, I think, is reason enough to vote for Nutter: he is invested in the city itself, and is committed to solving its problems. Plus, how can you resist this commercial?
5. He is, as Joey notes, the smartest guy in the room.
And isn’t it about time that we had a man of real intellect running this city?
I hope you’ll join me today in voting for Michael Nutter, a candidate who has the vision, experience, character, integrity, and intelligence to lead this city towards a brighter future.
Dictionary.com defines “inchoate” as “not yet completed or fully developed” and “just begun; incipient,” words that aptly characterize the way in which most songs from this band seem to begin as nothingness and to blossom steadily into complex sonic architectures. It is as if each song, having been seeded and fed by the nibbling waters of guitars, drums, and bass, slowly gathers itself and begins to grow, until it shimmers into being before our eyes and ears.
That is true of the following song, titled “First Breath After a Coma” (from The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place [2003]). Through instrumentals alone, it tells the tale of an awakening consciousness becoming alive to itself and branching out into the world of thought after a long absence.
[note: to watch the performance of the song, you’ll have to click play, click the forward button once, and sit through a very loud, but mercifully short, commercial for Fabchannel. Sorry about that. I think it’s worth it.]
F. Rex’s ribald, allusive, and downright blasphemous graphic novel parodies the excesses of modern capitalist culture as it finds bathos and transcendence in a debased, Vatican-themed Las Vegas casino. With a colorful cast of characters that includes Thomas Carlyle as a down-on-his-luck drunkard, Karl Marx as an overweight vagrant donning a beer helmet, T.S. Eliot as an uptight casino-floor manager, and Jesus as an oppressed janitor, plus a dozen other characters too profane to mention, Vatican City, Las Vegas reads like a version of The Waste Land re-imagined by R. Crumb. Let’s hope that Philly’s slots parlors don’t turn out like this . . . though if they do, they might wind up being a lot more fun.
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“Lusting to be Lost” by mdumlao98
Mom
Jesus — could they be more cute?
a kitten awaits an uncertain fate
