Writers! Lend me your ears! (Or eyes?)

[The Red Menace]

Question here for those who write, for either their own pleasure or for professional reasons (or for both): what has been your experience with writing for online venues? I work for an organization where there is increasing pressure to publish all copy for the web in single-sentence paragraphs, or something close to it, and to adopt a simplified, declarative tone. While I agree that one's eyes tend to skip over larger blocks of text when reading online, I'm having a difficult time adjusting to a style that strikes me as close to "See Spot run." Has anybody else run into this? A friend of mine who's a noted jazz critic recently turned down an online newspaper book-reviewing job because of requirements similar to what I mention above.

[Shawn]

I may not write, but from someone who reads, I pray that more people refuse to "dumb down" their art for the general populace. The general populace is fucking stupid enough already, make 'em read.

[BruceH]

that type of writing bad

real bad, real dumb

I hate it

hate it lots

Edited September 18, 2010 by BruceH

[thedwork]

Question here for those who write, for either their own pleasure or for professional reasons (or for both): what has been your experience with writing for online venues? I work for an organization where there is increasing pressure to publish all copy for the web in single-sentence paragraphs, or something close to it, and to adopt a simplified, declarative tone. While I agree that one's eyes tend to skip over larger blocks of text when reading online, I'm having a difficult time adjusting to a style that strikes me as close to "See Spot run." Has anybody else run into this? A friend of mine who's a noted jazz critic recently turned down an online newspaper book-reviewing job because of requirements similar to what I mention above.

giant/interesting subject menace. it reminds me of the first part of a 'book' review i did back in june of 2009:

Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock co-founded No Depression magazine back in 1995. Alden spoke in 2008 on NPR about long form music writing not translating so well to the internet. He wondered whether readers would bother to turn the 'virtual page.' "The problem I have with the Web is it doesn't seem like a good home for a 10,000 word story on Little Miss Cornshucks... I don't think the reading experience works," he said. "And I don't know where that story gets told if magazines like ours can't survive." Whether or not long form writing 'works' on the Web is a debate that won't have any decisive closure any time soon. But at the very least, most can acknowledge that reading a 10,000 word piece on the Web at your desktop is a different experience than reading the same piece sitting on a park bench holding a magazine or book.

Or holding a 'bookazine' (whatever that is). Well, "whatever that is" is what Alden and Blackstock call the latest incarnation of No Depression. Their old magazine got swallowed up by our currently print-hostile era. In this modern McWorld where the average music listener's attention span is about as long as their most recently downloaded ringtone, the average reader's attention span may be following suit. Why read/write 5,000 words when you can read/write 500? Somehow, the idea of "faster/more" has become almost universally equated with "better" without any consideration beyond theaspects of speed and volume.

It seems an offshoot of (dare I say it?) a Capitalist mentality: more more more. Always be growing and consuming. If you don't make more this year than you did last year, you're a failure. Profit in volume. Don't give me one relatively in depth 1,000 word article when I can sell ten 100 word blips for more profit. Don't give me one 100 word blip when I can sell ten 10 word sentences. We have fast food, faster computers, the iPhone has everything 'now,' even faster wars (or so the puppet masters would have us believe: "Mission Accomplished"). And you see it on the nightly network McNews in the shrinking length of their stories. An "In Depth" report from CBS lasts all of a couple minutes and their following coverage of the previous day's annual G8 summit may last 30 seconds. It's information... kind of. But it's devoid of any real context. We are confusing knowing "of" something with really knowing "about" anything. Brooks Hatlen got it right when he left Shawshank prison observing, "I can't believe how fast things move on the outside... The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry." It's no coincidence that Brooks was the prison librarian.

full(er) review here

i'm going to bed 'cuz it's late and i'm tired. just wanted to put this up to start. i'll be checking in again. good stuff menace...

[Jazzmoose]

But at the very least, most can acknowledge that reading a 10,000 word piece on the Web at your desktop is a different experience than reading the same piece sitting on a park bench holding a magazine or book.

Hell, it's a different experience even doing both at your desk. There is no way I'm going to sit at a computer and read a novel, for instance, on line. People can put all the public domain stuff they want on the web; if I want to read Dickens and don't have the novel I'm looking for, I'll go get the damned book, not waste my time and my precious eyesight on the web. It's the inappropriate use of technology that is eroding the attention span of readers; this rush to replace books with electronic devices sounds as silly to me as that idea decades ago of a house with everything controlled from one central area that (thankfully) faded away.

Edited September 18, 2010 by Jazzmoose

[Lazaro Vega]

Scrolling, using scrolls to read, went out with moveable type. Thanks to the internet for bringing it back.

The journalistic pyramid has been around for a long time -- who what where when -- with the lead in the first sentence. The front loading of information in that clear simple language Hemmingway made art with. I recall reading Larry Kart in column inches and was just amazed at how good he was at that type of writing (usually not realizing how good it was until well into the 5th or 6th paragraph and going like, hey, this flows). If you can make short and sweet read like butter than you're a word cook. Cookin'...

(edit for "you're" )

Edited September 18, 2010 by Lazaro Vega

[paul secor]

Study Chuck Nessa's writing style. Make your point(s) using as few words as possible. Prolix writing hurts my head.

[Larry Kart]

Thanks, Lazaro. My trick (if that's the way to put it) was to think in terms of speaking to a friend after, say, you'd gone to see or hear something together. You start talking first, but implicit in what you're saying is "And what did you think?"

Another way I'd sometimes think about it in retrospect (when I'd look at something where I got kind "out there" --as in an piece about Andy Kaufman that referred to and quoted from Kafka's "The Hunger Artist," this in an American daily newspaper) was that you can get away with talking about almost anything if you lay the table right. Besides, I wasn't dicking around there. What I thought about Kaufman could be said, so it seemed to me, in no better way.

BTW, about "laying the table right, " I mean several things (maybe more, but these are the ones that come to mind) -- do it swiftly/economically, don't pander, but also don't intentionally exclude anyone, assume the reader is with you, and don't apologize.

[papsrus]

Concise writing does not equal bad writing. Quite the opposite. We all have heard Mark Twain's quote: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

This may be an unpopular notion, but some of the best straight news writing around used to be in USA Today. Not the reporting, necessarily. The writing. And that may not be a bad place, Red, to get a feel for what you're being asked to do.

[The Red Menace]

I should clarify that I'm not talking about (or criticizing) concise writing and clear, simple language. I'm talking about restructuring your prose so that it has a radically different rhythm and cadence. (I should also clarify that I'm doing arts-oriented writing for a multi-platform news-and-arts media organization.) For example, here's the conclusion of John Updike's 1960 New Yorker essay about Ted Williams:

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent, in the smoke of Williams' miracle. Fisher continued to pitch, and escaped further harm. At the end of the inning, Higgins sent Williams out to his left-field position, then instantly replaced him with Carrol Hardy, so we had a long last look at Williams as he ran out there and then back, his uniform jogging, his eyes steadfast on the ground. It was nice, and we were grateful, but it left a funny taste.

One of the scholasticists behind me said, "Let's go. We've seen everything. I don't want to spoil it." This seemed a sound aesthetic decision. Williams' last word had been so exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of expectation, intention, and execution, that already it felt a little unreal in my head, and I wanted to get out before the castle collapsed. But the game, though played by clumsy midgets under the feeble glow of the arc lights, began to tug at my attention, and I loitered in the runway until it was over. Williams' homer had, quite incidentally, made the score 4-3. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out, Marlin Coughtry, the second-base juggler, singled. Vic Wertz, pinch-hitting, doubled off the left-field wall, Coughtry advancing to third. Pumpsie Green walked, to load the bases. Willie Tasby hit a double-play ball to the third baseman, but in making the pivot throw Billy Klaus, an ex-Red Sox infielder, reverted to form and threw the ball past the first baseman and into the Red Sox dugout. The Sox won, 5-4. On the car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York. So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit.

Now I'll recast it according to online style guide principles:

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming.

He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn't tip his cap.

Non-Transferable

Though we thumped, wept, and chanted "We want Ted" for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved.

But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now.

Gods do not answer letters.

No Further Harm

Every true story has an anticlimax.

The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent, in the smoke of Williams' miracle.

Fisher continued to pitch, and escaped further harm.

An Unusual Taste

At the end of the inning, Higgins sent Williams out to his left-field position, then instantly replaced him with Carrol Hardy, so we had a long last look at Williams as he ran out there and then back, his uniform jogging, his eyes steadfast on the ground.

It was nice, and we were grateful, but it left a funny taste.

One of the scholasticists behind me said, "Let's go. We've seen everything. I don't want to spoil it."

Not Ready to Leave

This seemed a sound aesthetic decision. Williams' last word had been so exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of expectation, intention, and execution, that already it felt a little unreal in my head, and I wanted to get out before the castle collapsed.

But the game, though played by clumsy midgets under the feeble glow of the arc lights, began to tug at my attention, and I loitered in the runway until it was over. Williams' homer had, quite incidentally, made the score 4-3.

Unexpected Triumph

In the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out, Marlin Coughtry, the second-base juggler, singled.

Vic Wertz, pinch-hitting, doubled off the left-field wall, Coughtry advancing to third. Pumpsie Green walked, to load the bases.

Willie Tasby hit a double-play ball to the third baseman, but in making the pivot throw Billy Klaus, an ex-Red Sox infielder, reverted to form and threw the ball past the first baseman and into the Red Sox dugout.

The Sox won, 5-4.

On the car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York. So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing.

Quit.

Or here's a passage from Larry Kart's book, Jazz In Search of Itself:

What can jazz tell us about Jack Kerouac? That would seem to be the obvious question, but it’s one that can’t (or shouldn’t) be answered until it’s been turned the other way around. Jazz was part of the furniture of Kerouac’s fiction, perhaps as much so as anything this side of Neal Cassady. But jazz, as Kerouac seemed to know from time to time, was not quite raw material, waiting there to be rearranged as the novelist saw fit. Instead, jazz has its own thingness, makes its own demands, and is likely to turn on anyone who would merely use it. Which is not to say that jazz can’t be put to fictional use or that Kerouac didn’t use it in more-or-less valuable ways--as subject matter, as the trappings of his personal myth, and as a guide to prose technique. But there has been so much loose romantic talk about Kerouac and jazz, some of it Kerouac’s own doing--as in his cry, “I’m the bop writer!” from The Subterraneans, or “The Great Jazz Singer/ was Jolson the Vaudeville Singer?/No, and not Miles, me” from the ll6th Chorus of Mexico City Blues--that it’s time to look at the role of jazz in Kerouac’s fiction and give the music equal weight.

Recast in the current online style guide that I've been given, it might read as:

What can jazz tell us about Jack Kerouac?

That would seem to be the obvious question, but it’s one that can’t (or shouldn’t) be answered until it’s been turned the other way around.

Its Own Thingness

Jazz was part of the furniture of Kerouac’s fiction, perhaps as much so as anything this side of Neal Cassady. But jazz, as Kerouac seemed to know from time to time, was not quite raw material, waiting there to be rearranged as the novelist saw fit.

Instead, jazz has its own thingness, makes its own demands, and is likely to turn on anyone who would merely use it. Which is not to say that jazz can’t be put to fictional use or that Kerouac didn’t use it in more-or-less valuable ways--as subject matter, as the trappings of his personal myth, and as a guide to prose technique.

But there has been so much loose romantic talk about Kerouac and jazz, some of it Kerouac’s own doing--as in his cry, “I’m the bop writer!” from The Subterraneans, or “The Great Jazz Singer/ was Jolson the Vaudeville Singer?/No, and not Miles, me” from the ll6th Chorus of Mexico City Blues--that it’s time to look at the role of jazz in Kerouac’s fiction and give the music equal weight.

Or:

Hearing that actual tone of voice (and, just as important, putting it on the page), Kerouac is as far as can be from the romantic posing he falls into elsewhere. Even though the point of this brief passage now may be lost on many readers (and may have been obscure even then), it has an irreducible grittiness to it that gives strength to the surrounding fictional enterprise in any number of ways, even if one doesn’t know a thing about Allen Eager or Richie Kamuca. Kerouac did know, and the point of that knowledge was not lost on him, for as a novelist who chose to work close to the autobiographical bone, he could never be sure, as he transformed fact into fiction, which bits of factual “grit” might be essential. Thus the widely acknowledged brilliance of Kerouac’s naming (“Lorenzo Monsanto” for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Bull Hubbard” for William S.Burroughs, and, of course, “Cody Pomeroy” and “Jack Duluoz” for Neal Cassady and himself), which surely arose from a need to place the actual at just the right distance from his created, fic¬tional world. And thus the weakness at the heart of The Subterraneans, in which events that took place in New York were transferred to San Francisco--a shift in scene that might have given no problems to a different kind of novelist but one that seemed to disrupt Kerouac’s fictional machinery, in the same way Proust might have been thrown off if he hadn’t been able to use Cèsar Franck’s Piano Quintet as a model for the “Vinteuil Septet” in The Search for Lost Time.

To this (and here I've changed some of Larry's writing as well, to reflect stylistic/tone preferences):

Hearing that actual tone of voice (and, just as important, putting it on the page), Kerouac is as far as can be from the romantic posing he falls into elsewhere.

Even though the point of this brief passage now may be lost on many readers (and may have been obscure even then), it has an irreducible grittiness to it that gives strength to the surrounding fictional enterprise in any number of ways, even if one doesn’t know a thing about Allen Eager or Richie Kamuca.

A Need For Distance

Kerouac did know, and the point of that knowledge was not lost on him. As a novelist who chose to work close to the autobiographical bone, he could never be sure. So he transformed fact into fiction, which bits of factual “grit” might be essential.

Thus the widely acknowledged brilliance of Kerouac’s naming (“Lorenzo Monsanto” for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Bull Hubbard” for William S.Burroughs, and, of course, “Cody Pomeroy” and “Jack Duluoz” for Neal Cassady and himself), which surely arose from a need to place the actual at just the right distance from his created, fic¬tional world.

And thus the weakness at the heart of The Subterraneans, in which events that took place in New York were transferred to San Francisco. This was a shift in scene that might have given no problems to a different kind of novelist but one that seemed to disrupt Kerouac’s fictional machinery. Proust might have been thrown off in the same way if he hadn’t been able to use Cèsar Franck’s Piano Quintet as a model for the “Vinteuil Septet” in The Search for Lost Time.

The effect is to amplify almost every sentence as a standalone declaration. This may not be at much of a remove from newspaper writing style; I haven't written for a newspaper since college, so writers such as Larry and Mark Stryker may be able to weigh in with authority on this topic. (I haven't read Larry's newspaper columns, only the collected essays in his book.) Rhythmically speaking, I tend to think such a style sounds less off-key for news reporting, but that it renders any sort of reflective writing declarative to the point of self-importance. (Speaking, I hope, without a hint of pandering, I think Larry's prose holds up quite well in spite of what I inflicted on it.)

I think there's no doubt that it's much more difficult to read longer paragraphs online than it is in a book or a magazine. Surely, though, there's a happy medium that doesn't involve bold headlines every other paragraph and bursts of single-sentence statements.

[Quincy]

Ah, so the marketing department came across another study involving eye-tracking and the way we read online? Red's above example reminded of a Slate article.

[Christiern]

The BBC website used to reduce text to a series of independent sentences that cried out for being parts of paragraphs. It was ridiculous. Dumbing down is in and of itself dumb, imho.

As for reading sizable chunks of text off the screen, I agree that it may well be too much for the eyes, but there is a very simple solution, and it is one that does not come with a printed text: Have your computer read it to you. There was a time when computer talk was unbearable, but my Mac now has a number of remarkably human-like voices. I guess the PCs have them, too—if not, just wait a couple of years, Windows eventually catches up!

[Larry Kart]

BTW, Red Menace -- almost all the pieces in my book (though not that piece about Kerouac and jazz) were written for a daily newspaper, the Chicago Tribune.

[Teasing the Korean]

I don't think these styles are necessarily "dumbed down;" rather, I think they try to take into account how people read content on the interwebz.

I often read Websites differently than I do hard copy.

[The Red Menace]

Ah, so the marketing department came across another study involving eye-tracking and the way we read online? Red's above example reminded of a Slate article.

That Slate article is exactly what I'm talking about. Again, I don't mean to dismiss accommodations to online reading habits out of hand; but like Chris, I find the BBC single-sentence paragraph approach inane. Perhaps it's workable for short newsflash/bulletin stories, but in the context of any sort of longer critical or feature writing it's offputting in the extreme. If you're like me, a writer's tone and cadence plays an important part in how you respond to his or her writing. The Nielsen value system IMO moves against that and tends to boil everything down to short, digestible but bland bites of prose.

I think Marc Myers (Jazzwax blogger) does a very good job of online writing (he's a copy writer by trade, and it shows--in a good way--in his jazz features), but even his paragraphs are too long for the Nielsen standard, and would be subjected to bullet-pointing, bold headlines, and other layout manuevers. For me, his work and Mark Stryker's at the Detroit Free Press are probably the happy-medium examples for which I'm looking. They are also both excellent writers in general, and excellent writing (such as Larry's thoughts on Kerouac above) will still hold up to some degree even when it's dismembered.

Quick note: I just remembered that many of the pieces in Larry's book did originally appear in a newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. I have to wonder, though, what kind of editorial treatment his wonderful 1978 essay on Johnny Griffin would get today, or what Nielsen-style processing would do to it.

EDIT: Larry, duly noted--I was in the midst of writing this post and hadn't yet seen your comment, but rather picked up your book and glanced at the attribution page in the beginning. Would the Trib still accommodate that kind of writing today?

And not to drag politics into it, but for those of us here with a liberal inclination, I think Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo posts very readable, generally well-written and thoughtful commentary that isn't broken into single-sentence paragraphs replete with the visual bells-and-whistles described by the Slate article.

Edited September 18, 2010 by The Red Menace

[JSngry]

Hunter Captured By The Game?

If the medium truly is the message, maybe the best thing for a still-pliable spirit to do is figure out how to work the medium to best convey the message. If that can't be done, then perhaps the messenger has become ensnared by the medium more than by the message.

An Honorable Discharge At The Fork In The Road

Of course, people who have mastered a previous message and its medium should not have to worry about this, their value having long been established. But for the rest of us, as society moves along and takes us with it, it is likely to prove more useful to look to grasp these artists' substance than it is their style.

[Larry Kart]

EDIT: Larry, duly noted... Would the Trib still accommodate that kind of writing today?

Don't know for sure, but I would guess that if they had a problem with me now it wouldn't be because of style but subject matter and content. They wouldn't want me to write about things that I found interesting or, if there were areas of common interest, wouldn't want me to say some of things I wanted to say.

[The Red Menace]

Hunter Captured By The Game?

If the medium truly is the message, maybe the best thing for a still-pliable spirit to do is figure out how to work the medium to best convey the message. If that can't be done, then perhaps the messenger has become ensnared by the medium more than by the message.

An Honorable Discharge At The Fork In The Road

Of course, people who have mastered a previous message and its medium should not have to worry about this, their value having long been established. But for the rest of us, as society moves along and takes us with it, it is likely to prove more useful to look to grasp these artists' substance than it is their style.

I get your drift, but I'm not citing Larry's work here in any sort of "could Larry Kart write this way" manner; I'm citing it and re-processing it a la Nielsen style because it's work that many of us (myself included) admire, and it therefore offers a useful contrast. The problem with Nielsen style IMO is that it makes everything look/read like a corporate memo, or a PR presentation. If you took a paragraph of Larry's praising several qualities of a Wayne Shorter saxophone solo, a Nielsen-guided editor would bust up the paragraph and list Larry's sentences as bullet points.

There are probably creative ways to work within these guidelines, and this still-pliable spirit will pursue them in the context of his online work. I have a hell of a long way to go as a writer in all senses of the term, too (and just hope that I live long enough to get there, or to at least continue arriving at new and improved destinations). But rhythm and flow are a large part of any writer's approach, and the Nielsen standard acts as a compressor that tends to flatten cadence into a series of proclamatory, self-dramatizing announcements.

TTK: I agree. I read differently online as well. I just think Nielsen's guidelines are an extreme reaction (and I didn't even give the full flavor of it--for instance, every name mentioned in the Updike piece or Larry's Kerouac passages should have been highlighted in bold, and Updike's concluding description of the game probably should have been rendered as a bullet-point list). Sites like Talking Points Memo and Jazzwax seem to accommodate online reading habits without that kind of dramatic overreach.

[JSngry]

The problem with Nielsen style IMO is that it makes everything look/read like a corporate memo, or a PR presentation.

Illusion-Free

No sense in pretending that it's not that kind of world or hoping that it will stop being that kind of world any time soon. All the more reason to start getting "the message" into that kind of format.

Hardwire That Bitch

What better way to kill the beast than from within, and what better way to keep the message alive than getting it to a new generation in ways that they will intuitively grasp?

Outliers Exempt, But To What End?

Of course, there's always going to be the niche market of people who refuse to "move along", and there will always be a market in giving those people that in which they take comfort, but that niche will never again regain it dominance, nor should expectations that they will be encouraged, entertained, or otherwise considered. The only thing that should be expected is that they will slowly and inevitably attrit.

Adapt or Die

Like it or not, that's pretty much how it goes. Nobody asks me what I think before shit changes, if you know what I mean.

Edited September 19, 2010 by JSngry

[kenny weir]

Having just started a blog, I know for a fact I'm enjoying the freedom to be myself more than is the case with my various newspaper gigs, although I sometimes got away with plenty there, too.

Having to grapple with the technical side of blogging very much as a beginner, I wonder if some of what is being sought from Red, is due to Search Engine Optimization, keywords, web analytics and so on.

Edited September 18, 2010 by kenny weir

[JSngry]

You Temptacious Son-of-a-Bitch!!!

Dammit Kenny, no fair putting up all those pictures of that great-looking food that's a half-continent away!!!!

Edited September 18, 2010 by JSngry

[kenny weir]

You Temptacious Son-of-a-Bitch!!!

Dammit Kenny, no fair putting up all those pictures of that great-looking food that's a half-continent away!!!!

Half a continent? Half the planet, actually!

As I say in the "about", there a zillion food blogs and many hundreds in Australia, with many of those centred on food-obsessed Melbourne. Yet only on other person is specifically covering the colourful and multi-cultural western suburbs where we live.

So I see this as a great opportunity to have some fun and establish myself as ... um, we'll see. Gotta get a stack of content up there first.

After spending a couple of years trying to shoehorn my journalistic experience into a corporate setting, and failing, I now realise it's just not me. This is more like it - not only will it act as a glorified business card, but it's keeping me focused so the therapeutic upside is considerable.

The software and so on provided, for free, by wordpress.com is amazing. I have a buddy who's been doing an Australian jazz blog - http://ausjazz.net/ - using the same setup.

I'd like to be doing some music stuff, too, but blogs don't work that way. So if I feel the need, the easiest thing to do is start another one!

[JSngry]

You Temptacious Son-of-a-Bitch!!!

Dammit Kenny, no fair putting up all those pictures of that great-looking food that's a half-continent away!!!!

Half a continent? Half the planet, actually!

Used to be half a planet, but you know, with the world shrinking and all.... :w :w

Edited September 18, 2010 by JSngry

[kenny weir]

Used to be half a planet, but you know, with the world shrinking and all.... :w :w

I hear you.

In some ways, though, the US seems even farther away from me than used to be the case; before the world, um, shrank.

I yoyo-ed across the Pacfic through the '80s and '90s with great frequency.

Now:

*I can't afford it.

*Parenthood has taken me on a different journey.

*And even had I the time and money, to tell you the truth I'm not sure my back woes/pain are up to the rigours and stresses of spending 24 hours in economy class and waiting in airports. There comes a time, it seems, when such a thing becomes a seriously life-threatening issue. Business class? I wish!