this is where i enter text

20110610

So, what does he mean?

When he types

Our editorial staff wrote a lot for the editorial staff. Instead of writing a daily newspaper, they were writing a magazine that was impressing other writers. We were a second, maybe a third read. The guy going to Wall Street was reading the Journal, the Times, and then us. The guy I would love to have reached was Joe Six-pack, and Joe Six-pack didn't need to read how the GM of the Mets reminded the writer of the Phoenicians. My immediate reaction was the guy reading this paper thinks the Phoenicians play in Phoenix.
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Well, first, he immediately confuses people with himself. That is, if the editorial staff is writing for the editorial staff, then they don't acknowledge that they are different from their audience? Or is it that the author confuses the action with the reason? Is it that he can't understand the perspective of someone who always wanted to write for an audience like themselves with what he believe the goals (business plan?) of the publication should be? Many people write what they write because they got into writing because of reading. That is, if you're not writing pieces like pieces that you like read, why are you writing, exactly?

The way you write depends on the way you read depends on the way you write depends on the way you write the way you read the way you read what you write the way you write what you read into what you write when you write what you read. Or whatever. The point is, the two are inseparable. I know they have separate words, but unlike, say "cake" and "thought", they are not at all connected only by the way that the seconds can contain the first. They are connected by dependence. There is no A w/o B and there is no B w/o A. They are, in the strictest sense, inextricable.

The man speaking is the CFO. The group he is describing is "the editorial staff". Well, it is the CFO's main goal deals with financials. Financial risks, rewards, realities, bottomlinities and the like. The editorial staff is to control the content of the publication. To make the thing that they are writing (as a group) something. What that something is, is (to mess with Clinton) depends on the meaning of what the word is is. The Editorial Staff of a paper is culled from writers. But how? With what purpose?

Well, that depends on the publication. That depends on the whims of the CEO and CFO and the like. If you choose an Editorial Staff (with[out] an E-I-Chief) you will determine what the publication will be. Not that you can always understand what that means, but that you can reasonably anticipate that smart people want to write for smart people. They want to read things written for smart people. Or, even, for people who are smart at what they do. Which is different. However slightly.

The thing about writing, is that it answers the questions which reading answers.
Switch 'reading' and 'writing' and it is just as true.

This is inextricability.

Which market are you trying to pursue? Well, this determines which Editors you should hire. They will determine which writers to hire. The Editors are the audience of the writers. Yes, writers is in lower-case.

Choosing of the Editors is up to... Well who started The National anyway?

Who started this blog?
We didn't start the fire.

We just watched the motherfucker burn.

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We Didn't Start the Fire

by Billy Joel

might be every song ever written.

And I can't stop watching it.

I mean: I can, but I really like it.

It is everything. It covers everything. Either immediately or by ap(prox[y])imation. Challenges. Overcoming of challenges. Hubris. Consumerism. Government. Brutality. Death. War.

Passingthebuck.

Then again, what is "the fire"? It seems to have always been here. Is it a desire for something? Is it a reach whose grasp it constantly exceeds? Is it... humanity?

No, Billy joel is not the messiah.
No, the video is not a revelation.
That doesn't mean = irrelevance.

The thing is that it calls into question all other songs, even all other thoughts. how is something you think or feel not an echo of what came previously? A larger circle in the ever-expanding ripple of human cause-n-effect. What of the Schoperhauerian idea* that we are all just echoes of humans who came before? Or was it Borges echoing Herr Schopenhauer?

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*- However much the plays and the masks on the world's stage may change it is always the same actors who appear. We sit together and walk and grow excited, and out eyes glitter and out voices grow shriller: just so that others sit around and talk a thousand years ago: it was the same thing, and it was the same people: and it will be just so a thousand years hence. The contrivance which prevents us from perceiving this is time.

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me

"He's just this guy, you know?"