What I wrote about
Like I assume some of you have, I went through old OurSalon posts to save a bunch of them. As I did, I filed them in categories. I used:
Personal, Music, Life
Tales of J
One sentence posts
Race, Racism, other bigotry
Politics & Democracy
Economics and business
Israel & Jewish
Satire & Humor
Some posts fit into more than one category, so I just picked one.
I didn’t save everything and, with very few exceptions, I didn’t save threads. Even if I were tempted to, saving multiple pages of comments was too much of a pain, and I was mostly interested in the content in case I wanted to repost. I saved the comment thread from Reply To A Friend Checking On Me, the post immediately following Jonah’s death, which was already saved from OS where comments weren’t in pages. However, a problem with old threads is that if anyone commenting deleted their account, their comments vanished, though the replies to them didn’t, which in threads gets confusing.
No point in saving a post about pictures of rainbows. I have the shots, I don’t need the text. There were a lot of that kind of post. Sometimes I saved reporting posts with pictures, not because I expect to repost them but because they’re part of a body of work which has aspects of a diary and family might be interested in some of that stuff some year.
I didn’t save posts like the one where I organized a mass move from Open Salon to Our Salon. Now it’s irrelevant.
I didn’t save posts where I yelled at other bloggers for whatever. Also irrelevant. (I did save posts about what sorts of things to avoid when blogging because that might come in handy some day.) I didn’t drag that baggage.
I tend to think of myself as an economic writer but, really, I wrote about a lot of things more than I wrote about that, or at least saved about that, because some economic posts were redundant based on earlier posts – and I don’t mean just reposts. I of course repeated myself.
The biggest category by far was Personal, Music, Life, and that’s without the Tales of J posts. While I was saving, I found more posts about my daughter than I expected, though that’s mainly from expectations of a low number.
The next biggest, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this, is Race, Racism, and other bigotry. My Islamophobia count was a bit higher than I remembered.
I think the Politics & Democracy category and the Israel & Jewish categories were roughly the same size, the latter having more Jewish content than Israel content. In this case there’s a lot I didn’t save because they were topical at the time and there will never be a reason to repost them. There’s no point in saving current events rants against Netanyahu. I don’t ever expect to post again about his addressing Congress without telling the President he was coming. Like I didn’t save most of my Trump rants in Politics & Democracy. We know too much of that content by heart.
I guess because of what I omitted, these counts tell me less about what I wrote about than about what I wrote about that I thought was worth saving. Once in a while I saved something even in non-personal categories that I never expect to repost, like a Ground Zero Mosque post, which received more readers by far than anything else I ever wrote (and I know from a teacher who blogged with us was used in the classroom). That post also generated a comment on Open that shocked the living crap out of me, from Markinjapan saying “I really, really misjudged you.” Once I moved to OurSalon, that most viewed designation belonged to a post entitled That Girl in McKinney.
When you look at old posts, particularly if you look at threads (I did sometimes), you also find out which posts impressed readers the most. One of those possibilities I didn’t look at the thread of and I don’t remember its title; it was about using a lake as an analogy for wealth distribution, which for some reason more people seemed to like than another post using time as an analogy for wealth distribution, which I preferred. The one I’m sure of, though, was a post called How the Angry White Guys Got That Way because I synthesized aspects of a few decades of American history in ways I don’t think had ever been done.
What did you find when/if you saved your old posts? Did anything surprise you?
07/02/2019 @ 11:19 am
This post raised an important question for me. Preservation of artifacts. Since I am a poet, this is very important to me…but I also realize that much of my poetry depends on the context of the present moment, which is why poetry is a perishable commodity.
You point out an important problem: Do comments belong their authors or to the person whose post they are commenting on?
I think it is the later rather than the former because comments help to provide context.
I have all of my old OPEN SALON posts complete with the comments attached to them in the original format which I did with Evernote, which costs me $10 or $15 month and is really worth the price. When I asked what people thought about my publishing the comments along with the poems, almost everyone answered that I had their permission to do that.
However, here, I am following a policy of preserving everything forever, keeping the historical contexts as much as possible.
Jonathan Wolfman
07/02/2019 @ 11:52 am
I supposed I saved upwards of 60-65% from Open/Our.
koshersalaami
07/02/2019 @ 11:53 am
OK. I copied copy and paste. I wouldn’t ask anyone’s permission to publish their comments in the context they were publicly published in in the first place.
It also depends why you’re preserving old posts. When we publish a book of, I don’t know, Whitman, we don’t necessarily publish it with reviews of the period, though we might.
07/02/2019 @ 12:06 pm
Actually, I have a version of Leaves of Grass that includes two different versions, including the death bed edition. It also preserves some of the original criticism.
07/02/2019 @ 12:05 pm
I didn’t save anything from Our Salon. The only things I have archived are the my wive’s posts from Open Salon. I won’t be posting any of them, for obvious reasons.
Mrs Raptor
07/03/2019 @ 8:06 am
I saved a few of my Open Salon posts. Mostly about the kids or my grandfather. I saved the recipes I posted to Open Salon, mostly because they were the only copies of then I had and I didn’t want to lose them. Beyond that though I didn’t save much.
jpHart
12/11/2020 @ 6:30 am
radical priests, targeted tambourines, Barabbas
Georgia On My Mind, Bluebird Helen Reddy, Midnight Train
Fell from fruit pickers’ ladder pruning leafless weeping cherry.
Grazed right temple on Sears’ shears.
Located Lidocaine patches 48 hours ago.
Tears slid to my scarlet bandana.
All eyes upon your Tales of J … koshersalaami
Attempting to estimate sunrise here on the shores of Loch Michigan.
Silent surf.
Recurrent mood of who’s it? Richard Wright or LeRoy Jones down the staircase abashed by that mahogany banister. Trying (OMGDI)(OMYGODOI) sure sure the vile glows amber and I ought shave although i-d lapses of a guillotine rapid clip guilt slide show as my razor is cheaply disposable and no place left to hide nor again punch plaster without gloves just to listen for falling rain. Whatismore dad’s Norelco was 18 YO when I inherited it and now 32 yrs exposé-facto fodder’s emaciated escape the buzzing No results were found for picqueenishly picks, pinches pushes (impales-alias??) pecks parrot-like as though a tarnished tweeter tweezer tug-boat-upstream tortures Trepadazionizes Polypills pulverizes…just to say hello ol’ bard . . .
Spirit In the Sky might get me out of this 1,000 years how far 500 miles ago 100 notes
Having a Happy Hanukkah! U2?
Happiness sounds like that continuous dribbling round ball on hot asphalt with a coo-coolly pure wayward NE wind. Bouncing ball. Shadow bumpers. Orange paint fleck falls flees FREE.
Sự thanh bình
koshersalaami
12/11/2020 @ 8:34 am
Hi JP.
Curious. Is the Tales of J series something you read? I never know and especially in that case I’m curious.
jpHart
12/11/2020 @ 11:10 am
How to convert Coordinated Universal Time. UTC Sorry. My ergonomics are out wake and out back/wack. OT hill LO;{ Quake rhymes here 7.11B steps ceaseless grieving.
You plateaued Dalton Trumbo with Tales of J
There are no results for eulogislisticly. Threads ——-} no words.
I’ve an initial comment somewhere/yes your excerpt soOSos displayed once upon a time.
Poignant. James Emmerling and Scanner and who JMAC1949 and trig. Steel Breeze.
Martin Gugino. Yessiree that seawall in Galveston good grief is there relief: EP’s ghost
HURTTruthurts . . . pole vaulting at midnight 00 might help [_—–_] low slung that rainbow ‘found’ circumference a half round; particularly that sound
And I’d gone streaming all the way from the House of Blues off topic re: my Martin guitar. O no!
Reviewed archives, harkened and covered and lost. Yes your beloved son’s chair. Parade rest.
koshersalaami
12/11/2020 @ 2:18 pm
Alas, I no longer have a Martin. I had a D28 satin finish for years and pawned it a few years ago. I ended up replacing it with a used Gibson Hummingbird, also dating from 1970’s (I was D28 original owner). Oddly, I prefer the Hummingbird. I didn’t expect to.
I lost track of Steel Breeze and would like to find him again. We were at a couple of weird conservative blog sites together. If you know how to reach him I’d appreciate it –
Unless you know something I don’t. After all, the list you gave has a lot of deceased people on it, though I haven’t heard anything about JMAC. Scanner, Emmerling, and trig are all deceased, which I assume you know.
jpHart
12/11/2020 @ 4:28 pm
‘O Steel Breeze I dunn 0.
As a kid I chased cryptic paper for statured folk in Laos Vegas that is I used to find dudes and duchesses closely encountering losing streaks.
Nowadays no-ways.
Too much knock-knock boom-boom.
Others? Hey! Robin Sneed. Jan Sands. Madeline Proust.
Fell asleep ‘hind the Sisyphean FJ7 wheel one hot August night amidst an ashtray fire. OFT
con-fusion plot, ‘filler’ narrative venues, slick DeLillo-ian show-n-tell (though I do have Andy Pafko’s autograph).
And Steel & me were going to do a 120′ feature on the Cubs World Series Victory.
He’s not far. Harvard, IL I guess and of running late I whist I’d his # as ’twas gong-bong his option/advice apropos robins’ egg blue garage floor coat.
Again to redux from Sammy Davis, Jr.: ‘[sic] when you quit the wine…YALL…memories come back’.
[R just glued up a spinning mobile of fish-finned bananas.]
Alas even the BLUEBERRY POET Arthur James mite be off the grid/cred or chair-bouncin’ up or down G00Dhelpus in Nova Scotia.
Shirley I don’t argue the PT of auditing a post-grad Russian half-LIT course. Do U communicate with Con Chapman or Ted Burke koshersalaami?
My money’s on WIMOWEH as THE FINAL SPELLING B WORD for the footlight kids.
I ought call datahub and posit a big bet.
Bittersweet all this ennui! Not perfect as See’s Candy.
Whoops the rig is here with our whirlpool.
nOStalgic nOStrovia!