Variety: “That blogger at TMZ.com, which is owned by Warners’ own AOL, doesn’t fit the common stereotype of a lonely geek in sweats hunkered in a dark basement staring into a glowing computer screen. In fact, he was a trade reporter who was competing with his ex-colleagues at Variety for scoops. His advantage: as a blogger, he could post his items faster online.”
There are several questions that must be asked:
1. Is there anything wrong with basements?
2. Why is it that bloggers are associated with basements? Which blogger set the precedent? Have any bloggers been found dead in a basement?
3. Was the first basement-observed blogger based in Terre Haute?
4. Are they any journalists in New York now working in basements?
5. Is the preferred blogger basement a daylight basement, a walk-up basement, or a look-out basement? If we are to carry out a stereotype, I think it’s important to be specific about it.
6. Are there any known cases in which a blogger working in a basement has been bitten by a rat or a spider or a creepy crawly? Asbestos?
7. Are most of the basements owned by Warner?
8. Why would one wear sweats or pajamas in a basement?
9. Is the basement really that ideal of a spot for a desktop or laptop computer?
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
Not only do I not blog from a basement, I don’t have a basement. Not only do I not blog from a basement, I blog from an upstairs room that is so hot in the summer it might as well be the attic. But that’s not to say if I had a basement I wouldn’t blog from it. I might. And while I’ve never been to Terre Haute, I used to have a basement in one of the places I lived in in another midwestern “I” state, the great state of Iowa, home of the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses. And yet, I never blogged from that basement. It was dank, unfinished, had an unused heating oil tank and the ghosts of many miserable writers. Plus, there were no blogs back then. If there had been, I might have blogged from that basement. But I didn’t.
Don’t go in the basement!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0Z6SOlWbds
Basements. Who has a basement on the west coast?
In South Florida, there are no basements, either. You’d be under water. In this case, of course, it’s the MSM cliche that’s all wet.