Quoting Gil Crouch, Joel Miller writes: “The idea of the gift economy is fundamental in how we create social bonds, form and maintain relationships, deep or just transactional, such as with a brand through marketing activities like advertising,” says Crouch. “Writing poems, sonnets, novels, non-fiction books, articles, blog posts, all are forms of this moral and social gift-giving. The writer creates a book and publishes it because they want to tell a story. When we read the book, we are reciprocating the gift by reading it.” A piece of writing is a pact between the writer and reader. It’s a contract, and we feel betrayed or cheated when we discover the writer didn’t invest their work with the effort, intent, or skill we expected. It’s like buying a bag of chips and finding out the package is mostly air. We feel ripped off. Deepening this dynamic, Ruth Gaskovski and Peco recently discussed the “I” of the creator. “There is an ‘I’ behind a work of art,” they write. Ruth mentions ...
The recent news--or should I say, the recent news we are allowed to know about or are fed through our algorithms because they pluck the strings of our appetites--seems to be about suicides. Jason Arday committed suicide after much of his fraudulent, or autism-induced behavior, was exposed and he was discharged from Cambridge. Very perplexing all around. Hayden Panettiere, a young actress, was found deceased in her apartment. She had lived a successful (as an actress) and deeply sad (as a young person and mother) life. Very troubling. Lindsey Clancey is on trial for the killing of her three pre-school children three years ago, by strangulation. She tried to commit suicide after the act and was found unconscious outside of the window from which she had jumped. She is now in a wheelchair as a paraplegic. She confessed to the killing but under what might seem to be defensible circumstances related to postpartum psychosis. Extraordinarily tragic and the hardest for me to fa...