The Seattle Times: Politics: Senator says he’s sorry for “macaca” comment
Shows what I know.
I (1) would never call someone “macaca,” but (2) never knew “macaca” was a slur-ish word. Shows what I know.
During the couple years or so we lived in Belém, the maid or cook would sometimes refer to one or more of us kids as “doido macaca.”
“Doido macaca” == “crazy monkey” and that we were, that we were, sometimes, on occasion.
Lee Goldberg responds, calling Penzler “a sexist, narrowminded neanderthal…who embarrasses himself and, even worse, our profession every time he spews his offensive, sexist crap.”
Lee’s never one to mince words.
More of Lee at his blog: A Writer’s Life.
Found an interesting bit of commentary today as I was wandering the Web.
How did I get there? I was searching for information on Arthur Edward Waite and Aleister Crowley because of a comment someone made in misc.writing. There was a click in the article to /writing style/ and I, of course, clicked it.
The article starts thusly
Thumper’s mom said “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all”, but I would advise differently.
I am not referring here to the various ways one may dis the outside world: slandering celebrities, critiquing art, stating political convictions. What I am saying here is if you can’t write something nice about someone you care about, just don’t write anything.
Somewhat anathema to the spirit of Everything, I do firmly believe this admonition when talking trash about friends, family or people you care about. It’s something anyone with friends who read their nodes should take *very* seriously.
If someone you love has done something that you do not approve of, if they irritate you in one way or another and you simply have to get it off your chest but don’t want to let on to the person you are angry or upset, then go right ahead. Make sure they are out of earshot and say it. Yell it out loud. Scream it. Pound your chest, if you need to.
But don’t write it down. Once an idea is recorded, whether on paper or digitally, you won’t know whose eyes may someday read your thoughts. The pen is mightier than the sword, they say, and it’s true. The written word hurts much more than any spoken one, and if what you say is nasty, untrue or out of character, it will do nothing but reflect badly on you.
The writer continues on with a personal story of how something she’d written and planned to destroy (but didn’t) fell into her grandparents’ hands and broke her grandparents’ hearts.
I’ve been thinking on all this lately but from a different angle, not the “I’m so angry at his nibs because he is such a freaking sock dropper” [disclaimer: he isn't] sort of writing. I’ve been thinking about the balance between dishing honest guts — which takes guts, you’re exposing yourself, after all — and writing Ms Sweetness and Light when crappy things are happening or have happened in the past, solely because of concerns with how family and friends will feel if you lay it all out there.
No James Frey here. No narcissistic stories of snorting lines and waking up in a jail, not knowing where I am. No, that’s not what I’m talking about.
But what-if, what if un-sunny things are happening in your life and you are stressed all out of shape. What if your favorite great-aunt has been diagnosed with inoperable cancer and has less than six weeks and no money to provide her care in her final days and you are stressing over how to help.
What if stuff like this is happening, affecting you deeply, and you want to write about it, but your nearest and dearest want you to keep your mouth (and fingers) shut and not write a line about “private, family business.”
“Why would you write about that?”
“Why did you write about that?”
“You aren’t going to write about that, are you?”
What’s wrong with writing, “My great-aunt’s terminally ill and I’m falling to pieces, crying at the drop of a hat.” (She’s not. I don’t even know of any living great-aunts, for that matter.) What’s wrong with writing about her when who she was to me is why I’m crying at the drop of a hat?
Should I not write anything about family matters? Should I write about my life only after carefully carving all that family stuff out? Does my family get a bye? Always? Altogether? What if the person I’m writing about wouldn’t mind, but another family member does?
A writer I know told me an uncle was very upset about a memoir he’d written, because in the book he’d talked about being gay. The uncle was upset because he didn’t want people knowing he had a gay nephew. Well, it was a memoir, for pete’s sake. I guess the writer could’ve just cut out chunks of his life story, but why should he? To soothe an uncle who didn’t want to be embarrassed by him?
Weird, huh?
I’m not talking about writing the sort of stuff the poster referenced above is talking about. I’m not talking about dissing sibs or parents or relatives. I’m not talking about writing out my anger because I’m afraid to tell someone to their face.
No. That’s not what I’m talking about.
I don’t know.
So I Google’d /writer family upset guts writing/ and found this.
The author says,
How can I grant myself the freedom to write and publish honestly, while making sure those I care about don’t feel as if I’ve done them a disservice?
Do you write about things that are affecting you personally? Do you spill your guts in public or on paper or both, or do you keep the guts wrapped up and show just the sweetness ‘n’ light?
Should you?
At one point in time, Max Tardiveau was in pursuit of the perfect bread and put his tasting notes online at San Francisco Bread Review.
The bread descriptions and reviews are thorough. Ranks the breads. Ranks the bakeries.
His top ranked bread is Bay Bread’s Walnut Boulot. Alas, his nibs does not like walnuts so I’ll probably never buy the bread.
Double alas that the most recent bread rating is May 2005.
4PM PDT Today! Watch the live Webcast as the Exploratorium and SLAC get together to use synchrotron radiation to scan some old goatskin that just happens to have some of the earliest Greek copies of Archimedes’ writings, the Archimedes palimpsest.
Oooooh. Pretty! Trochoid geometry!! Java applet.
[via Diane Duane’s Out of Ambit]
4.4 outside Glen Ellen at 8:08 p.m. — forty or so miles north of here.
His nibs was downstairs worrying about the mashed potatoes and didn’t feel a thing.
I said, “Earthquake!”
He said, “When? Where?”
“Uh. Just now, honey. Didn’t you feel it?”
I was up tip tappying and felt the desk heave back and forth and waited to see if it got worse (it didn’t). If it had got worse, I would’ve found something solid to hunker down next to.
Mark, feel that one?
I was just checking the HaloScan blog and noticed this:
And the biggest change—email notification of new comments is now 100% free! So be sure to go and activate the free email notification if you haven’t already done so.
I’ve always had a click in my toolbar that took me to HaloScan so I could check to see if there were new comments. Sometimes people comment on posts that are way off the current screen and I’d miss those comments otherwise. I may still keep doing that. Getting e-mail every time someone leaves a comment may get old after a while. But, hey! I have the option.
My vote for a couple months has been, and still is, this guy.
Private I’s?: Should the law protect us from kiss-and-tell bloggers?
By Dahlia Lithwick
[SLATE] Posted Saturday, July 29, 2006, at 1:24 AM ET
[...]
And that’s where Robert Steinbuch and Jessica Cutler come in.
Steinbuch was counsel to Sen. Mike DeWine when he started sleeping with staff assistant Cutler in May 2004. What he didn’t know was that the young woman was “blogging”—detailing on her Web log, Washingtonienne—every detail of their encounters. She regaled her friends with tales of his intimate sexual behaviors (as well as those of the five other men with whom she was sleeping) in a semiprivate Web diary that exposes Capitol Hill as a sad cross between seventh grade and Melrose Place.
Cutler identified Steinbuch only as RS. But when her blog was picked up by Wonkette—an Internet gossip behemoth read by everyone who was anyone inside the Beltway—Cutler joyfully nabbed her 15 minutes’ worth of limelight, including a $300,000 publishing deal, an HBO contract, and a feature in Playboy. Aided by the Internet, readers quickly deduced the identity of RS. And Steinbuch, according to a complaint filed in a 2005 civil suit against Cutler, was subjected to “humiliation and anguish beyond that which any reasonable person should be expected to bear in a decent and civilized society.”
[...]
A Man Scorned: His private life was made shockingly public. So why does he want to go through it all again?
By T.R. Goldman
Legal Times
May 22, 2006
I don’t know why we’re in federal court to begin with. I don’t know why this guy thought it was smart to file a lawsuit and lay out all of his private intimate details in an appendix to the complaint.
U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman — April 5, 2006
It’s your worst dating nightmare. You meet someone, the attraction is immediate, the sex is scorching, and — hold on — you think you might be falling in love.
[...]
Privacy cases are notoriously fact specific, and in this case there are several elements to the privacy tort of “publicity given to private life” that Steinbuch must prove.
First he must show that Cutler’s actions provided publicity to her blog. Cutler, who declined to comment for this story, has responded that she gave the URL of her blog to just three friends. She flatly denies giving the Web address to Cox.
“The key is to distinguish between the gossip you whisper to friends and something that’s more indelible and more broad,” says Daniel Solove, a George Washington University law professor. “When you put something on the Internet, it often changes the whole dynamic; it oftentimes won’t go away, and it won’t fade with memory.”
“I haven’t seen much about the publicity element for stuff on the Internet. That’s not been fleshed out by the courts,” Solove adds.
Steinbuch must also convince the court that his acknowledgment of his affair with Cutler to others in DeWine’s office — which happened before the story broke on Wonkette — was not the sort of waiver that would nullify an invasion of privacy claim.
In addition, he must show that the facts in Cutler’s blog are indeed private, despite joking about some of them in the office.
Steinbuch further must convince the court that Cutler’s blog is not newsworthy, something Friedman has already explicitly agreed with.
And he must show that the contents of Cutler’s blog are highly offensive to reasonable people.
Steinbuch is also suing under the so-called false-light invasion of privacy tort, which holds a person liable for publicly exposing false and humiliating information about someone else.
Friedman has already ruled that each of these torts has a one-year statute of limitation, which raises a particularly nettlesome question for both sides: At what point in a blog’s life does the statute of limitations begin to run?
Steinbuch filed his lawsuit on May 16, 2005, and, according to Cutler’s lawyer, Umana, that means actions relating to almost all of her blog, which began more than a year before, on May 4, 2004, are time-barred and off-limits.
“Only the May 18 posting in the blog is within the one year, and all that says is that they had sex in a missionary position,” says Umana, a D.C. solo practitioner. “The fact that they were having an affair already was public knowledge; the plaintiff was joking about it.”
Rosen, naturally, disagrees. “Every time you make an entry in a blog, you open the whole document,” he says. “Each posting is a new document,” he adds, that incorporates all of the previous postings on the blog. “We’re going to have substantial expert testimony on that,” he says.
[...]
So what’s the scoop here? What gives above and beyond prurient interest?
I’d like to know what I can and can’t write about on my blog. I’ve always been Ms Sweetness ‘n’ Discretion, but what if I weren’t? If I’m writing the truth of my life, does someone have the right to tell me I can’t?
Steinbuch is suing over invasion of privacy, despite the fact their fling wasn’t a secret in the office. He’s added “false-light invasion of privacy tort, which holds a person liable for publicly exposing false and humiliating information about someone else.”
He says the stuff Cutler wrote about him was false.
Some of it, anyway.
Cutler claims she didn’t mean the blog to be public, that she’d only given the URL to three friends and she’d made sure it wasn’t a “public” blog on Blogger. She doesn’t know who gave the URL to Wonkette.
Steinbuch’s willing to drag all the blog bits that he claims were so damaging through public courts and rile up the bottom feeders and Web wonks again just to defend his reputation.
Huh?
Depositions ‘r’ us.
The Steinbuch-Cutler mini tempest has turned into a perhaps career-busting hoohah. How did less than two weeks’ (05May2004 – 18May2004) worth of blog posts warrant this?
Interesting times, and the click-clicks in the articles head off to interesting places. …
[n.b. Cutler yanked the blog off the Web as soon as the fit hit the shan. Some kind soul archived the content of the original Washingtonienne so peepers could see what the rustle in the courts is about. ]
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