I joined the PEI Writers’ Guild yesterday.
The workshop I attended – How to Get Published – was my second Guild event of the year (the first was the launch of J. J. Steinfeld’s book in January).
They are a weird bunch, those writers. But good-weird and interesting-weird, and, if I’m going to join something, better a society of writers than, say, the Chamber of Commerce.
Joining the Writers’ Guild is also another halfway step to declaring “I’m a writer!”
Advice from Warren Ellis if you’re attending Comic-Con, from his excellent weekly email newsletter, Orbital Operations:
If you’re going to San Diego, buy hand sanitiser, gallons of it, and some one-a-day multivitamin bombs, and lots of water. Don’t eat sugar. Carry loperamide and ibuprofen. User antiperspirant deodorant and pack more underwear than you think you’ll need. Avoid skin in all forms. Denounce the sun. Wear shades to prevent eye contact. Respect the fursona. Store your fluids. Go home. Sit in the corner of the room. Think about what you’ve done.
This seems like good advice for any conference.
And, indeed, for life.
Back in October of 2014 I made a presentation on behalf of the PEI Home and School Federation to the Prince Edward Island Standing Committee on Education. In the question and answer session after my formal remarks I had occasion to suggest that “the education system is not Walmart,” something The Guardian called out in their reporting on the session.
What I meant by the comment was that we are not consumers of the education system, we are participants in it: we are all as much learners as we are teachers. Education is not a commodity, it’s an experience, and one that demands participation, not simply consumption.
Walmart is certainly a useful place to go if you want to buy cheap socks.
But you don’t go there to become a better human being.
I have similar feelings about Facebook.
Deep in my heart of hearts I see the rise of Facebook as the go-to place to post baby photos (etc.) as representing a deep failure of we who were there at the dawn of the web to do better.
We naively thought that society would build itself into an army of DIY-friendly digital warriors, ready to spin up a server and configure a Drupal instance.
We were wrong, and I will bear the shame of that until I die.
It’s difficult to be critical of Facebook because when you do so you risk being critical of all the innovative uses that are being made of it. The breast cancer support groups, and the this:
But for all that good, Facebook is more like Walmart than it is like that spot in the park around the corner where neighbours chat while their kids play. It is a marketing platform in the sheep’s clothing of the agora, and I find that conceit deeply disturbing.
This was driven home for me several years ago when I had lunch with a friend of a friend of a friend from Halifax. He was in the marketing game, and told me the tale of using Facebook from the other side, the side we baby-picture-posters never see, the side marketers use to push messages to finely-tailored demographics.
His client wanted to market beer, and so they used Facebook to push the beery message to something like “men in the Maritimes between 19 and 35 who had ‘liked’ a beer brand.”
All of a sudden the utility, for Facebook, of the “like” jumped out at me (I’m ashamed to say I’d never considered it in this light before): when we “like” something on Facebook we are part of a demographic sifting process. We are helping Facebook learn more about us so that they can package that information and sell it.
And it’s not just the “liking” that Facebook uses: it’s who your friends are, and what they “like,” and what you post, and what your friends post. And it extends beyond the bounds of Facebook itself: Facebook follows you around the web (those seemingly-benign and handy “like” buttons on websites: all part of the information gathering).
I use Facebook about as rarely as possible. I push my blog posts there automatically, occasionally make a comment on others’ posts, and that’s about it.
And yet here are Facebook’s “Ad Preferences” for me, based on what it’s been able to accumulate through its demographic dredging processes (you can find your own under Settings > Ads > Ads based on my preferences > Visit Ad Preferences).
That’s 100% accurate. Imagine if I was a more serious Facebook user.
What we civilians seldom see is the other side of this equation (although there’s nothing preventing this: go and take a look).
Here, for example, is the start of a campaign I might launch to reach Canadians between 40 and 60 who drink coffee or use Android phones and who are parents of teenagers:
I don’t begrudge Facebook this, as this is its business, and it’s no more or less evil than any other enterprise.
What does bother me, though, is the popular notion that Facebook is somehow benign.
Progressive organizations routinely push the public to their Facebook pages, for example, with seemingly no critical reflection on how, in doing so, they are, in essence, requiring visitors to both deanonymize themselves and to further assist Facebook in its effort to target them (and their friends, and their friends’ friends).
And I am no better.
When I push my blog posts to Facebook and you click on them to read them here, you are helping Facebook target you, adding another data point to the big data pile.
I’ve been able to heretofore conscience this in the name of exposing what I write here to a wider audience.
But an odd thing has grown out of this: those that follow links from Facebook here and read what I write, will, more often than not, return to Facebook to leave a comment.
Which, to me, seems sort of like excusing oneself from a conversation and driving out to Walmart.
I’ve tried and failed to understand this behaviour. And I’ve grown more and more uncomfortable with the notion that my non-commercial rantings in this space gain a non-benign commercial quality when I push them to Facebook.
So this will be the last post I push to Facebook. And, for that matter, to Twitter, which, despite greater hipster street cred, is essentially in the same game as Facebook.
But what are you to do if you have been following along from Facebook or Twitter and now find yourself cast adrift?
There’s no reason you can’t visit ruk.ca in your browser whenever the mood strikes. It’s not automatic, but it’s the simplest solution.
Every time I post something, you’ll get an email.
All you need to do is sign up once. If you choose to do this, be aware that:
Firefox lets you create bookmarks that are “live” inasmuch as they always have an up to date list of blog posts attached to them.
If Firefox is your browser, then this is as simple as going to Bookmarks > Subscribe to This Page when you’re on the front page of my blog:
Once you’re live bookmark is in place, it will automatically be kept up to date with my new posts:
If Safari on Mac OS X is your browser, then you can click the “share” icon in the browser toolbar and select “Add Website to Shared Links,” like this:
Once you do that then your Safari sidebar will be kept up to date with all the new posts like this:
Much the same “share links” functionality is available on iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad: just tap the “share” icon, then tap “Add to Shared Links,” like this:
Once you do that, like on the Mac, new posts will show up in your Shared Links tab:
IFTTT is a website service that allows you to set up “recipes” — it stands for “if this, then that,” and that’s as good a description of the service as any. Setting up an IFTTT account is free (but, of course, as with all such “free” services, assume that there’s something in it for someone else at some point).
To set up an IFTTT recipe once you have an account, just click Create a Recipe, then search for the trigger channel called “RSS”:
Select this channel, and then click “New Feed Item” and enter http://feeds.ruk.ca/ruk in the “Feed URL” field:
For the “that” part of the equation — i.e. how you’ll be notified — the world is your oyster.
You could choose to receive an email message:
or a text message:
Or you could have the lights in your living room flash off and on:
Ten years ago this would have been my go-to suggestion, but while RSS is still alive and well and a vital part of many people’s information lives, it remains trapped in the nether regions of “it’s easy, just go do this and do this and then understand this and then do this other thing differently.”
That said, I encourage you to use an RSS reader if you can, as it’s a delightful, decentralized way to experience not only this website but many others.
You have two choices:
No matter what RSS app or service you choose, the “RSS feed URL” you need to use for this blog is:
http://feeds.ruk.ca/ruk
If that address looks familiar, it’s because if you’re adding a Firefox “Live Bookmark” or a Safari “Shared Link,” you’re actually subscribing to the RSS feed, simply from within the more comfortable confines of your browser.
I went to a PEI Writers’ Guild workshop called How to Get Published yesterday morning. I was simply curious; unlike most in the room, I don’t have a manuscript in my desk drawer waiting for the world.
One of the points driven home several times by the presenter was the importance of “building a social media platform” as an author.
Consider this withdrawal from social-media-pushing my doing the opposite of this.
As such, I’m aware that fewer people will read my words here.
But my words are not like Walmart. They are heartfelt. I spend a lot of time on them (it took me 90 minutes to write this post). I am proud of them.
They should demand a little work, at least on the head end, to be able to read regularly.
If this is the last blog post of mine that you read, I’m sorry; it’s been fun, and I will miss you. I hope you find another way in the door.
If any or all of the above confuses you, and you need help finding a replacement way to receive notifications, email me at peter@rukavina.net and I will help you until you’re set up properly.
We’ve had the better part of a month with our new Home Depot window fans. The verdict: thumbs up.
The 9 inch blades suck in a good quantity of air, and with the pleasantly cool nights we’ve been having our bedrooms are kept pleasantly cool.
I plan to buy a few more.
So, recommended.
I’ve returned again to the task of sorting through my various bits of sound scattered across servers and hosts. Deep among them I found this recording of Oliver when he was three years old, singing a song about pie.
Summer thirty years ago, 1986.
I was 20 years old.
I’d just completed my first year at Trent University.
I’d moved from Champlain College residence into John Muir’s house at 640 Reid Street in Peterborough.
Did I have a summer job? I can’t remember.
I was hanging out a lot at Trent Radio, I remember that. Listening to a lot of Suzanne Vega. Going to the Shish Kabob Hut. Taking my once-a-week turn at cooking supper for my roommates. Developing a crush on a girl for the first time.
My year at Trent had been neither a failure nor a success. I went in with no particular sense of purpose, and emerged mostly the same.
About this far into the summer I was debating whether to return to Trent or not, a decision that represented an opportunity to stake my own claim on life, but that was also tinged with a large amount of guilt for turning my back on, well, everything.
In mid-July it was all just theoretical. Stirrings.
By mid-August the die was cast.
I announced my decision to drop out by cowardly calling home at a time I knew my parents wouldn’t be there.
“Tell Mom and Dad I’m dropping out of Trent and hitchhiking out to the east coast,” I told my brother Steve when I called.
(In retrospect: what was I thinking?! What a phone message to receive from your son. I’m sorry.)
And that’s what I did. From Toronto to Montreal to Lévis to Rivière-du-Loup to Fredericton to Saint John. Across the Bay of Fundy to Digby by ferry, then by thumb to Pointe-de-l’Église and Yarmouth. Student standby on Air Canada from Yarmouth to Boston, Greyhound to St. Albans, and then hitchhiking to Montreal and back to Peterborough. How long was I gone? A week. Or two.
I must have phoned my parents back at some point. We must have had an animated conversation or two about my plans.
On my return to Peterborough I found that I’d received a partial scholarship for my second year at Trent, but by that time it was too late.
I’d staked my claim.
My walk to and from the office everyday takes me along the pedestrian mall known as Victoria Row, a stretch of Richmond Street that’s closed to vehicles in the summer months.
I have more than a passing familiarity with this stretch of street: not only to I walk it perhaps more regularly than anyone, but I was the founding president, back in 1993, of the Victoria Row Business Owner’s Association (I was the compromise candidate: as neither a shop owner nor a restaurateur – I worked for a non-profit – I was a neutral third party in situations where the interests of each were seen to be at odds).
Victoria Row has always been full of political intrigue: there was the Clarinet Man controversy, the kiosk debacle, the issue with the water feature in the middle of the street, debates about music or no music or what kind of music or how loud the music should be.
This year the issue is vehicles; specifically, how frequently there are vehicles on a theoretically vehicle-free street: Vehicles on Victoria Row ‘out of control’ reads the CBC headline; Row rage as vehicles ignore signs to keep off Charlottetown’s mall in The Guardian.
The city’s response to this has been to plaster the end of the Row with more and more signs:
From left to right you’ll see:
In total there are 8 signs there, all with some variation of KEEP OUT.
And yet these signs have seemingly no effect. Other than to make the street seem rather more unwelcoming than I imagine the merchants and restaurants would like, and creating a grove of signposts more at home at the entrance to a toxic waste dump than a tony urban oasis.
All of this brings to mind my first encounter with signage on Prince Edward Island almost 25 years ago: when my friends and I pulled up to the University Avenue Visitor Information Centre. At the end of each parking space was a sign titled “POLITE NOTICE” that went on to indicate that the parking was only for visitors. For a time you would see these signs dotted around the Island, and while you might consider them to have a sort of passive-aggressive tone, I always admired them for leading positive.
Cheekiness like this can backfire too: Oliver and I take issue with the David’s Tea window sign “Sorry pets, humans only” every time we visit with Ethan at his side; in their quest to be witty they’re also saying, by implication, “service dogs are not welcome here.” Sometimes it’s better to be plain and direct.
In other words, whether you are a pedestrian street or a tea shop, maybe it’s better to be welcoming with exceptions rather than all-out unwelcoming.
In this spirit, I present herein my proposal for a replacement of the current signage grove with a single plain and welcoming sign. It dispenses with the “no, no, no, keep out, you’re not wanted here” and replaces it with a “come on in, except you vehicles.”
The City of Charlottetown is welcome to use this without recompense.
Back in 2003 I had occasion, due my work in publishing, to meet with a mailing list broker.
Mailing list brokers are companies that work for magazine publishers. When you check the box to decline “from time to time we will send you valuable offers from our trusted marketing partners”, you’re telling them to leave you alone: they take publisher’s subscriber lists and sell them to third parties who might want to market to that group.
You can imagine, for example, that if you’re in the fishing tackle business, the list of people subscribing to Field & Stream is filled with just the kind of people who will buy your products. Or so the theory goes.
Learning about this business made me curious to know if I could use a mailing list broker to learn more about the subscribers to the one magazine that I subscribe to, The New Yorker.
As it happened the company that I met with also handled The New Yorker account and so I knew where to write. Here’s what I asked, with a mixture of authenticity and conceit:
I am the secretary to the Board of Directors of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust, a non-profit land conservation charity in Prince Edward Island, Canada.
We would like to send a fundraising letter to subscribers of The New Yorker magazine who live in the province of Prince Edward Island. I’ve examined your web page on the magazine, but as we are amateurs unfamiliar with the language of list rental, I’m having difficulty figuring out what fees would be involved.
Can you tell me what the cost would be to our organization for one rental of Prince Edward Island-resident New Yorker subscribers?
Less than 24 hours later came the reply:
Unfortunately, there are only 25 subscribers to The New Yorker that reside in PEI. I’ve checked the Canadian Database, which is a compilation of all of the magazines published by Advance Magazine Group (the publisher that publishes The New Yorker), but there are only 209 subscribers in PEI. The minimum order size is 3,000 names. I’m not sure if there are other provinces that you would be interested in mailing into. If so, please let me know and I’d be happy to get those counts for you as well.
This was, perhaps, the most intriguing email I’ve ever received: I’ve spent the 13 years since, slowly and deliberately, trying to learn, by word of mouth alone, who those 25 subscribers are.
There’s me.
And Catherine Hennessey.
I was pretty sure that Harry Holman would have a subscription, wouldn’t he?
The public and university libraries would surely take up 4 or 5.
But who else?
From time to time, in the intervening years, I will meet someone at a party, and they’ll say something like “Oh dear, did you read that Talk piece by George Packer this week; wasn’t it droll!”1 and I’ll quietly take the list from my pocket2 and add their name.
I think I outed Susan Brown on Christmas Eve this year, but I may mis-remember.
Bob Gray just outed himself to me on Facebook.
All told I have probably accounted for 10 of the 25.
But who are the rest?
Please feel free to out yourself in the comments here.
Even if you don’t live on Prince Edward Island.
Perhaps I can cement up the list and organize some sort of gathering for us all. We could find a big wooden table in a corner somewhere and chat for hours about William Shawn and Tina Brown and our feelings about the reordering of the front matter. Apparently I’ll only need 25 chairs.
Current temperature in Charlottetown: 26°C.
Current temperature in my air conditioned bunker deep inside The Guild, as Anne & Gilbert plays in the next room: 15.8°C.
My tenancy comes with some enviable privileges on days like this.
Every year around this time I receive a letter from The New Yorker subscription department informing me that my subscription is to be automatically renewed in the fall.
And every year that letter is signed by Michael Spencer.
Michael has no job title listed. He’s not “Director of Circulation” or “Subscriptions Manager” or “Customer Service Agent.”
He’s just Michael Spencer, The New Yorker:
I am a longtime and contented subscriber to the magazine. Reading it every week is one of the central activities of my life.
So I’ve no grudge with Mr. Spencer.
Other than wondering whether or not he exists.
There’s always been something vaguely suspicious about the generic nature of his name (like the G. Raymond that TD Visa uses in its marketing).
And about his lack of job title.
And about the fact that he maintains the same role, signing these letters, year after year after year. Why is he never promoted?
His name even appears in materials released by WikiLeaks under the The Global Intelligence Files project. That’s surely suspicious.
Others have wondered about this before. They’ve been irate, however, whereas I’m simply curious.
Like those others, my first impulse was to call Mr. Spencer at the number on the renewal form.
After wading through a robotic telephone tree, I provided my subscription information to an agent and asked to talk to Michael Spencer.
“In what department?”, the agent asked.
“He signed my subscription renewal letter,” I replied, “and I’d just like to talk to him about the design of it.” (Which was true – the bit at the top about October appears to conflict with the bit in the middle about September).
“Alright,” came the reply, “I’ll have to put you on hold.”
After about 7 minutes on hold I was transferred to “her supervisor” who asked me for Mr. Spencer’s extension number. I replied that I didn’t have his extension number, as it wasn’t listed on the letter. She asked me what department he works in. I didn’t have this either, obviously.
“We’re a very large corporation, Sir,” came the reply, “and I cannot transfer you without an extension. Is there something I can help you with?”
“I just wanted to provide Mr. Spencer with some feedback on the subscription renewal notice,” I told her.
“I could pass that along to our publisher,” she replied.
“Perhaps I could just call the magazine directly,” I suggested.
“You are calling the magazine,” she answered.
At this point I rang off, as it was clear that Mr. Spencer was not there.
So I’ve no recourse but to send Mr. Spencer a letter. I will let you know his reply.
I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, listen to audio I’ve posted, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, see things I’ve favourited elsewhere, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way).
I have been writing here since May 1999: you can explore the 25+ years of blog posts in the archive.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of posts, an RSS feed of comments, an RSS feed of favourites elsewhere, or a podcast RSS feed that just contains audio posts. You can also receive a daily digests of posts by email. I also publish an OPML blogroll.
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