Theresa Williams-author

3:28:52 AM EST

My new house is at:  http://theresawilliams-author.blogspot.com/

AOL Journals: You've Got Ads Move Draws Protest From Some Longtime Subscribers

By Yuki NoguchiWashington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 23, 2005; Page D04

As America Online Inc. turns more toward advertising dollars to offset the shrinking number of subscribers who pay a monthly fee, the company may be upsetting the longtime customers who have remained faithful over the years.

Virginia Heatwole of Rockville, for example, has been a paying customer since 1993 and turned to AOL when she decided to start her own Web log. One of things she liked about AOL Journals was the absence of advertisements on her blog page.

America Online and Time Warner

America Online Inc. is trying to find ways to keep customers coming back to its Internet community while parent company Time Warner Inc. seeks ways to expand its Internet empire.

• AOL Journals: You've Got Ads
• Time Warner to Buy Back More Stock
• Case Quits As Time Warner Director
• Timeline: AOL & Time Warner
• AOL, and Other Online Keys More News

 Now, her personalized Web page that includes her thoughts about nature and spirituality has become a platform for Netflix DVD rental ads.

"They're flashing and screaming at the top of my blog," she said.

The change came last week, when Dulles-based AOL started posting ads on the pages created by AOL Journals, which had been ad-free for two years. Back in May, the company opened the free service to nonsubscribers, saying that those blogs would contain ads but that blogs by paying customers would be ad-free.

The company, which is quickly losing subscribers to broadband service providers, switched to an "audience strategy" earlier this year, offering free music, video, blogs, and other services and features with hopes of increasing the audience and grabbing more online ad dollars.

"The decision to implement banner advertising on AOL Journals is consistent with our business and advertising practices," AOL spokeswoman Kathie Brockman said in an e-mail. The company, which hosts about 600,000 blogs, received several dozen complaints about the advertisements and is taking suggestions into consideration, she said.

"We have advertising on the AOL.com portal, in email, instant messaging, and across our network," Brockman wrote. "It is also consistent with the practices of other major blog providers on the Internet."

Some users of AOL's instant-message service are also dealing with the automatic arrival of new "buddies" on their buddy lists: AOL services called Moviefone and ShoppingBuddy. The links allow users to search for movies and products by typing instant messages, which automatically generate a reply message.

Users were notified of the change through a posting on AIM.com and were given an option to remove the new listings by going to the set-up menu to delete them, the company said.

However the new ads cannot be deleted from the blogs, and that has other bloggers such as Armand Thompson, a Tacoma, Wash.-based U.S. Army sergeant, steamed. In response, he created a new blog at Google's rival blog site, Blogspot, and is trying to move his older entries to it.

His form of protest: keeping his AOL Journal open to speak out against the ads on it.

"It's using their platform against them," he said.

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1:15:40 AM EST

OPEN HOUSE

by Theodore Roethke

My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise.

My truths are all foreknown,
This anguish self-revealed.
I'm naked to the bone,
With nakedness my shield.
Myself is what I wear:
I keep the spirit spare.

The anger will endure,
The deed will speak the truth
In language strict and pure.
I stop the lying mouth;
Rage warps my dearest cry
To witness agony.

 

 

My new house is at:  http://theresawilliams-author.blogspot.com/

Dear Reader,

The banner ads on this journal are placed here without my consent.  I do not endorse any of the products being advertised here.  My journal was started more than a year before these advertisements became the headers on AOL Journals. This is an invasion, tantamount to theft.

There are many reasons why people keep journals. 

 I speak now on behalf of any and all who consider their journals to be hallowed ground, a place where their "secrets cry aloud." 

I also speak on behalf of some who are dead and therefore cannot speak.  I speak for those who have left us their words, whose journals we visit as we would graves or memorials, whose journals have been defaced with ads. 

This last entry I leave, as a testament to the sanctity of art.

This journal was once my "Open House."  

To AOL:  We do our living, laughing, loving, and dying on these pages.  They are not billboards for advertisers. 

To AOL:  You have defaced my house.

This entry will remain here, as testament of what you have done. 

--Theresa Williams

 

  

 

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5:59:09 PM EST

Remove the ad banners.

--Theresa Williams

Dear readers, please consider posting a comment of protest at:  http://journals.aol.com/journalseditor/magicsmoke/

My comment to "magic smoke" is posted in the comments section of this entry.

I have moved to:  http://theresawilliams-author.blogspot.com/

If you leave AOL Journals, please go here to post a link to your new home:  http://journals.aol.com/pattboy92/TheGreatExodus/

Sign the petition at:  http://gopetition.com/sign.php?currentregion=237&petid=7527

I will return to this AOL journal only if the ad banners are removed.     --Theresa Williams

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From a reader of this journal:

re. banner ads on online journals-
Jonathan Miller, CEO of AOL. Joe Redling, Chief Marketing Officer.
Corporate Headquarters:
America Online, Inc.
22000 AOL Way
Dulles, VA  20166
(703) 265-1000
Personal calls or letters are often best.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has."
Margaret Mead
ggw07@aol.com

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11:13:55 PM EST

Painting by Chagall

~>~>~>~>~>~>~>

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From "The Song of Songs"

Like an apple tree among the

trees of the forest

is my lover among the young men.

I delight to sit in his shade,

and his fruit is sweet to my taste.

He has taken me to the banquet hall,

and his banner over me is love.

Strengthen me with raisins,

refresh me with apples,

for I am faint with love ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  A fellow journaler recently expressed some sadness at not having found the perfect lover.  The journaler writes of having unreturned love.   I've found that the best writing comes out of such longing. 

Walt Whitman once wrote of the pain of unreturned love, saying,   "Now I think there is no unreturn'd love, the pay's certain one way or another.  (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return'd, yet out of that I have written these songs.)"    

There is nothing else to say:  Channel your longing into your art.

 

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5:22:42 PM EST

What is Reality?

What is the truth?

I'm thinking now of the writer whose self-concept depends on authencity.   Does this describe you?  It describes me.

Perhaps I'm more comfortable writing fiction than non-fiction because I worry that non-fiction has to be completely "true," detail by detail, and I drive myself mad trying to get all the details "right." 

I'm finding more and more that I don't know how to tell "the truth."  I only know how to tell "my truth."  And in telling "my truth," I find myself constantly departing from facts and into the realm of mythology.  I believe there is so much truth in myths. 

A wonderful poem by Rabia al Basri explains the difficulties of writing from the heart, of writing, to, for, out of, or about the Divine source (by Divine source, I mean that mysterious place our creativity and imagination comes from):

REALITY

In love, nothing exists between heart and heart.

Speech is born out of longing,

True description from the real taste.

The one who tastes, knows;

the one who explains, lies.

How can you describe the true form of Something

In whose presence you are blotted out?

And in whose being you still exist?

And who lives as a sign for your journey? 

~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~

"In whose presence you are blotted out..."  This is very much what Yolen means, I think, about the self falling away. 

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2:44:13 AM EST

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At Seventy-Five: Rereading An Old Book

by Hayden Carruth

My prayers have been answered, if they were prayers. I live.
I'm alive, and even in rather good health, I believe.
If I'd quit smoking I might live to be a hundred.
Truly this is astonishing, after the poverty and pain,
The suffering. Who would have thought that petty
Endurance could achieve so much?
                                                      And prayers --
Were they prayers? Always I was adamant
In my irreligion, and had good reason to be.
Yet prayer is not, I see in old age now,
A matter of doctrine or discipline, but rather
A movement of the natural human mind
Bereft of its place among the animals, the other
Animals. I prayed. Then on paper I wrote
Some of the words I said, which are these poems.

--------------------------------------------------------------

I love Hayden Carruth's poetry.  His poems are a unique combination of realism and spirituality.  Whenever I start to feel a little off-balance, or lost, I read Hayden Carruth.

A book of Carruth's letters was recently published.  The book is called Letters to Jane.  The title refers to the poet Jane Kenyon, and the letters in the book were written in the months just prior to Kenyon's death from leukemia.  The letters are a window, looking inward at the friendship of two great poets.  Carruth's presence in these letters is huge.

What's wonderful about Carruth's letters to Jane is that they are so honest.  One of the things Carruth is honest about is what it is like to be a writer.  He's so honest in saying that sometimes writers are just wasteful of their time.  For instance, in his letter of May 9, 1994, Carruth writes:

"So I frittered away the weekend: read a short manuscript, wrote a few letters, watched a hell of a lot  of basketball, read what we used to call cheap-screw fiction. I haven't heard that term for a while. At first it meant under-the-counter porn, but later came to mean any escapist literature. As a consequence, on top of the desperation and depression, I feel guilt. What else is new?"

For those who picture the writer's life as one in which the author sits thoughtfully poised over a manuscript 24-hours a day, this may come as a revelation: writers waste time, they struggle to keep themselves on track, they fail, they get depressed.

I find this revelation uplifting rather than sad.  Ah, so, I'm not the only one!

Carruth was also honest about many of his other human failings.  For example, in another letter to Jane he tells about having to take his laptop computer to a repair shop because of "excessive cat hair." Carruth, a lover of cats, says that his repairman suggested he get rid of the cat whereupon Carruth admits:

"I said immediately, 'Oh, I can't do that,' implying that my wife wouldn't stand for it, which was a cowardly way out, and no doubt sexist too. The fact is I wouldn't stand for it either."

I really had to laugh at that.  There are so many useless little lies we tell to save face.

Looking at Carruth's poem just now, I find myself believing that prayer is really an avenue to help us to tell the truth.

How different might my writing be if I thought of it as a prayer?

  

 

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5:40:18 PM EST

One of the ideas I've talked about in my journal before is "loving my reader."  This is something I discovered as I was writing my novel, that I needed to love my reader in order to compose meaningful prose. 

I've not talked about what this means, "loving my reader," partly because I wasn't sure how to explain it.

In my reading the other night, I found something that may serve as at least a partial explanation.  It is from Thich Nhat Hanh's The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching. 

Some of us have been asking about the difference between writing that is theraputic to the writer and writing that is theraputic to the reader.  This is an issue I had to deal with my own novel because so much of the book is autobiographical.  How could I write about my own pain in a way that would be meaningful for readers? 

In his book, Thich Nhat Hanh discusses forms of writing.  He tells us:  "Of course you have suffered, but the other person has also suffered." 

I think this is an important realization.

I think this realization is what transforms our own suffering into something our readers can use.  We have to write with recognition that our reader has suffered, too.

Thich Nhat Hanh  says that the other person's suffering is worth our compassion:  "When you begin to understand the suffering of the other person, compassion will arise in you, and the language you use will have the power of healing.  Compassion is the only energy that can help us connect with another person."

When we write, we are making important connections to others.   As Thich Nhat Hanh says, "We know that our words will affect many other people."  So it helps to consider the affect our words might have.

Thich Nhat Hanh says, "Writing is a deep practice.  Even before we begin writing, during whatever we are doing--gardening or sweeping the floor--our book or essay is being written deep in our consciousness.  To write a book, we must write with our whole life, not just during the moments we are sitting at our desk."

I love this phrase:  "WE MUST WRITE WITH OUR WHOLE LIFE." 

I also like the way Thich Nhat Hanh says that writing is a "Deep practice."

I'm not saying that our writing must be light and happy all the time.  A lot of good writing is dark and a lot of good writing--important writing-- expresses hopelessness.  We need to know that others feel hopeless, so that we don't feel so alone. 

But what I believe Thich Nhat Hanh is saying is that when we express anything in writing, we have a responsibility, not just to ourselves, not just to our own anger, our own hurt, our own need, but to our readers. 

One of the things I'm learning as I read about Buddhism is that there is no concept of "self" because we are all connected. 

I am not separate from my reader!

Isn't that just the most amazing thing?

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4:18:21 PM EST

Times are busy for me right now at the university, but I wanted to do this entry before the thoughts slipped through my hands.

Of late, I've seen journalers questioning why they are keeping a journal.  I've seen journals abandoned, journals put on hold, and journals searching for a new direction.  Just a few entries ago, I was writing about how we are finding our tribe.  Now people are questioning what their role is within the tribe.  This is a good thing, it seems to me.

"Where are our moorings?  What behooves us?"  These are questions the poet Adrienne Rich once asked.

In searching for my mooring, I find myself always going back to the heart. 

At the end of our time at Esalen, Sy Safransky, editor of The Sun, mentioned a book called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.  After I got home, I ordered the book and have just finished it.  I still need to reread it and underline passages that are important to me, but I want to say something now about this book and how I think it relates to my moorings.

After the ecstasy of discovering our tribe, comes the day-to-day work of living within the tribe.  Of "doing the laundry," so to speak. 

In a section of the book, called "The Heart's Intention," Kornfield says that "Becoming aware of intention is a key to awakening ..."  He says that it is in "small things that we fulfill the lessons of the heart.  It is from our intentions that our life grows.  It is in opening to one another that our path is made whole" (253).

I think that as long as we bring some kind of awareness to the table we are spreading for our Internet friends, we are fulfilling an important need.  In opening up to one another, our lives are made whole.

Later in this book, Kornfield quotes E. B. White, who once said, "Every morning I awaken torn between the desire to save the world and the inclination to savor it."

I find this is exactly where my intention springs from--the tension between these two states of being.  If I incline too much toward trying to save the world, my writing gets dull and preachy.  If I write just to savor life, my writing loses its spiritual component, which is very important to me.  I have always been drawn to authors who elevate ordinary objects to the realm of the spirit--Richard Brautigan was such a writer, so was J. D. Salinger.  So, naturally, that is how I want to write, too.  To do that, I have to cultivate awareness. 

Richard Brautigan wrote a story called "The Kool-Aid Wino."  In the story, a child found delight in making a jar of Kool-Aid.  Because the child was poor, he put at least twice the amount of water into the mixture he was supposed to.  But the point of the story is that when he drew the water, the  spigot thrust itself out of the earth like the finger of saint.  Thus, making the Kool-Aid became a ritual, a spiritual act.

That is the kind of awareness I want.  That is the kind of awareness I want to bring to my writing.  Even to this journal.

In my last entry, I talked about the perils of the publishing world, that uniqueness is sometimes eshewed in favor of the "tried but true."  

Another idea I meant to express in that same entry was that if I begin any creative work with the goal to publish it, that piece of writing is dead from the start.  That's because, for me, writing for the sake of publishing is the wrong intention.

Don't get me wrong, getting work published feels good.  But I can't start there, with that intention.  I have to start with the need to reveal an awareness. 

All of us do writings that have clear purposes, writings that are requirements for our job, for our bread and butter.  I'm not talking about that kind of writing.  I'm talking about the kind of writing we do because of what's in our hearts.  The kind of writing that expresses why life itself is so precious.

It is much harder to determine the purpose of heart writing.  But that is indeed what we must do. 

Lest you think your writing is self-absorbed or that you're being selfish by taking the time to do it, consider what Kornfield says in his book:

"Years ago Ram Dass went to his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, to ask, 'How can I best be enlightened?'  His guru answered, 'Love people.'  When he asked about the most direct path to awakening, his guru answered, 'Feed people.  Love people and feed people.  Serve the Divine in every form.'"

Remember what I told you Barry Lopez said?  That sometimes a person needs a story more than food?

Kornfield then asks, "But whom are we serving?"

His answer:

"It is ourselves.  When someone asked Gandhi how he could so continually sacrifice himself for India, he replied, 'I do this for myself alone.'  When we serve others we serve ourselves.  The Upanishads call this 'God feeding God.'"

So then, what are our moorings?  What is our heart's intention? Why do we keep a journal, anyway?

For many of us it is to speak the matters of the heart.

In doing so, we feed ourselves.  In feeding ourselves, we feed others.  In feeding others, we get closer to the divine.

 

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4:04:43 PM EST

Because I subscribe to writing magazines, I receive a lot of unsolicited mail about writing and publishing.  I received some mail the other day that troubled me.  

It is a pamphlet that purports to contain "Everything you need to know to get your work accepted by a commercial publisher."  Inside the pamphlet is much advice but one piece of advice in particular angered and saddened me.  It says that an author should never claim that "his book is unique."

First of all, how difficult would it have been to structure the sentence in such a way as to avoid the gender bias?  We teach our students at the university a very easy way--use the plural form of pronouns and verbs--Authors should never claim that their ...

That nonwithstanding, I was dismayed at the suggestion that uniqueness is not prized by commercial publishers.   This is what the brochure says about an author claiming that "his book is unique":

"This statement is the kiss of death because editors don't want a unique book.  They want a book that fits into an existing category and meets the needs of an existing audience.  At the very best, this statement implies that the author doesn't understand the market for his book.  At the very worst, it indicates that the book is, indeed, unique--and therefore either has no audience, or has an audience that is difficult to reach."

I understand the very human need to categorize, I do.  Having categories is useful, even necessary.  But strict adherence to categories can be the "kiss of death" for art.  Do we really want to live in a world in which the publishers have already pre-decided that unique books will not be of interest to readers? 

Over the weekend, Allen and I went to Toledo to have a bite to eat.  Afterwards, we decided to take in a movie.  I'd been wanting to see Capote, so we went to the four movie houses near us, only to find that all of them offered the same movies, all of them of the mass-audience genre.  Capote was not playing at any of the theaters.  There were many choices at the 18-theater cineplex, yet to my mind, there were no choices.  I didn't wish to see any of those movies. 

There are more books being published today by the commercial presses than ever before.   But if writers and publishers follow the advice in the brochure I recently received, what are the readers' choices?

The "advice" in the brochure I received in the mail dismayed me.  But it won't change what I want to write.  Writing in order to satisfy a pre-existing category is not something I'm interested in doing.  Each poem, story, essay, or novel I write--or want to write--is a voyage of discovery.  Otherwise, my thinking is, why do it?

I know there are many writers who are perfectly happy writing within a given category or genre.  That is okay for them.  That is great for the readers who enjoy that kind of writing. 

But writing with a certain "category" in mind feels cramped and "smothery," as Huck Finn would put it.  It lacks purpose for me because I'm not that kind of writer.   I wonder how many writers, for the hope of getting published, will heed this "advice," which I feel is killing to the soul.

Believe this:  for everything you write, there is someone in the world who needs to read it.  Barry Lopez said that sometimes a person needs a story more than food. 

To thine own self be true.  In doing that, you contribute something of value to the world.

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3:50:32 AM EDT

This is the first time I have submitted a piece to Judith Heartsong's Artsy Essay Contest.  This is the contest for October.  The subject of the contest is "The One Thing I Would Most Like You to Know About Me."

The One Thing I Would Most Like You to Know About Me

I want you to know that I am bitter.

Does this seem like a negative thing to admit? 

It's an observation that's related to a painting I recently became acquainted with, "The Vinegar Tasters."

In "The Vinegar Tasters,"  three men stand around a vat of vinegar.  Each man has just tasted the vinegar and is having a reaction to it. 

Vinegar, by the way, comes from a French word, vinaigre, meaning sour wine and has been used since ancient times.  The Chinese saw great medicinal qualities in vinegar and called it the essence of life. 

One man in the painting looks sour.  He represents Confucius, who looked to tradition for meaning and order.   Another man looks bitter.  He represents Buddha.  He represents me:  I am bitter.

To Buddha, life is bitter.  Life is full of  attachments and desires that lead to suffering.  Life is a revolving wheel of pain, which can be escaped by achieving Nirvana.

This sounds awful, I know.  We all want to be happy.  But bear with me, now.

For a long time, I tried to avoid my feelings of suffering.  So I buried myself in intellectual pursuits.  I set a series goals for myself, most of which I achieved.  These are some of the goals I set for myself:  I will get this degree, I will get this award, I will get into this program, I will get this grade, I will be inducted into this society, I will be the best in the class, I will win this contest.   (Not this artsy essay contest, mind you.  I'm speaking of the past!)

Many of my pursuits were in the arts.   I studied studio art and creative writing.  But I'm pretty sure that neither my art nor my writing really spoke to people.  It certainly didn't speak to me.  I was a scholarship girl. 

A scholarship girl is a student who works hard and does all the "right" things, but doesn't know why she is doing them.  She takes good notes, writes good papers, learns techniques, and even creates mildly exceptional works of art.  And her teachers love her.  She loves them, too.  She lives for their applause.

I use "girl" instead of woman because in so many ways I wasn't fully grown.

The whole time, I was pretending I wasn't suffering.  I was suffering, but I had pushed down my hurt.  The details of my hurt aren't important.  The hurt and the reasons for it are common enough, universal.  All of us have hurt in the ways I was hurting.  In a nutshell, I hurt because I had never learned to deal with loss or longing or grief.  I hurt because I didn't know who I was.  Tobias Wolff described my condition in his memoir, This Boy's Life.  He said, "Because I did not know who I was, any image of myself, no matter how grotesque, had power over me."  Images of yourself aren't necessarily grotesque as in "ugly."  A beautiful image of yourself, such as a scholarship girl, can feel grotesque if it doesn't feel true.

 Inside, I was bitter, like Buddha is bitter in the picture.  Outwardly, I smiled a lot.

The one thing I would most like you to know about me is that I was bitter then.  And I want you to know that I'm bitter now.  I'm no longer a scholarship girl (Although there are still many ways in which I'm not fully grown.) 

The difference between the person I was then and the person I am now is that I'm learning to embrace my suffering, as one embraces a child.  I'm not running away from my suffering by trying to find happiness in outside  accomplishments or pursuits.  I'm learning to cherish my suffering as one cherishes a child.  Because out of my suffering comes my art. 

The thing I want you to know about me is that I don't believe that this kind of bitterness is a bad thing.   The Chinese character for suffering is "bitter," and Buddha said suffering is holy.   It is holy because points us toward liberation.  I think the Christ story teaches us the same thing.  When Thomas touched Christ's wounds, Thomas looked deeply into those wounds, the wounds representing all suffering.  Indeed, to look at any wound takes courage.  

Now, when I write.  I look deeply into my suffering, and it is sometimes a terrible place to go, but there's a liberation that happens afterwards.  With that liberation comes a new energy.  That energy feels a lot like joy.

I want you to know:  I am bitter and that is okay.

A few years ago, I ran across a poem by Stephen Crane:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter-bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

I remember my own heart beating fast as I read this poem.  The hairs went up on the back of neck and on my arms.  Something about the poem felt very true.  But for a long time I couldn't get past the negative connotations of "bestial" and "bitter." 

Now, I see that the creature is bestial in the way we all are.  We are animals, after all, beasts.  We live according to the same natural laws as beasts.  We have to kill to eat, and we have to eat to live.  We are mad to couple, mad to survive.  

The beast is bitter in the same way that I am bitter, I realize now.   The beast is eating its bitter heart because that's where its suffering lives.   

When I write, I'm a lot like the creature in Crane's poem, I think.  When I write, I am naked and bestial.  I am eating my bitter, bitter heart.

Which brings me to my final point:

Who is the third man in the painting of the "Vinegar Tasters"? 

He is Lao-Tse.  He is smiling.  He has learned that life, even as painful as it sometimes is, is sweet.

Do I want someday to be the smiling one?

You bet.

I don't know what it will mean for my writing.  But, yes, I want to be like him, like Lao-Tse. 

I want you to know that I'm working on it.

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