Blogger “Still Re-evaluating” Future of Muse Machine

     (Dallas) Veteran blogger Chris Tucker continues to confer with advisers as he seeks “the road ahead” for the four-year-old Muse Machine blog, which recently recorded its 1,600th post. 

       “In case people didn’t notice, we’ve actually been in this decision process, sort of taking stock and seeing what was viable for us going forward,  since January 1,” Tucker said from his North Texas home. That was when Tucker concluded a monumental if little-heralded project called “31 Days of Cheer,” posting at least one uplifting, positive, affirmative, life-enhancing, humorous, brave or bold item every day of the month.

       Sources close to Tucker say the Promethean effort of finding 31 good things about the world while battling a bizarre and painful near-paralysis of the neck, learning of the death of a longtime friend,  and watching his beloved Dallas Cowboys crater and miss the playoffs left him “exhausted and close to despair,” especially as December readership figures plummeted in part due to holiday distractions.

       Others painted a rosier picture, repeating Tucker’s often-stated belief that the blog had “pretty well served its purpose over the years.”

         “Look, the guy’s done everything he set out to do with this blog,” said one long-winded  Muse Machine insider. “Go back to the guiding principles he laid out here. He wanted to comment on important issues. He did. He wanted to see if he could maintain the discipline of a blog over time. I’d say 1,600 posts checks that one off. And he wanted to do the whole thing in a way that reflected what he thought was the best of himself and of the American character, not the worst. Read it and judge for yourself. I don’t think he’s got anything left to prove.” 

         Muse Machine was never one of the best-read or most-commented-on blogs on the Web, averaging  50-100 independent viewers a month at its peak in 2010,  according to WordPress statisticians.  From the blog’s beginning in April 2007, Tucker steadfastly denied that he was interested in vast legions of chatty readers, often noting that many blog commenters were “vile, foul-mouthed, and far less articulate than George W. Bush.” Even as his readership dropped, Tucker maintained that his real interest in the blog was as a proving ground or “incubator” for ideas that often made their way into magazine pieces or radio commentaries.

        “I’m a writer,” Tucker told Small Blog Daily in 2008. “I like to take an idea and work with it, see where it goes, and see what the process teaches me. I don’t need a grandstand full of people to do that.” 

      But  blog watcher Herm Simbitz, author of How Facebook Killed the Little Blogger , says that despite his brave front, Tucker must have been keenly disappointed to see his efforts ignored by so much of the public–a fate suffered by thousands of small bloggers since the astonishing rise of Facebook in 2009. 

       “Let’s face facts,” said Simbitz. “Your typical Web-browsing person who used to check in on a blog like Muse Machine just doesn’t have time for that anymore. I mean, who cares about some unknown guy out in Texas with his finely tuned sense of irony and his references to a bunch of dead authors when you can be Facebooking about that great new Thai place and ‘liking’ your old high school boyfriend’s post about the new Labrador puppy he just bought?”

       Simbitz also noted that the very qualities that Tucker prized in Muse Machine–fair-mindedness, the exaltation of reason, a general sense that despite the constant presence of evil and the perplexities of existence, each day truly is a gift–may have proved fatal to the blog in the end. 

       “Come on, seriously, does anybody care about that stuff anymore?” asked Simbitz.  “What really delights people is conflict, profanity, violence, humiliating people and rhetorically ripping their guts out. The whole Jets vs. Sharks thing of American politics.  Nobody cares about some nice guy with a degree in English and a bunch of opinions. I mean, look at the name–“Muse” Machine. That says it all, for God’s sake.  We ain’t got time for musing, baby.” 

       For his part, Tucker denies that Muse Machine is no more, citing–naturally–Mark Twain’s line about those exaggerated reports of his death.

       “I’m just taking some time to think about what the blog should be,” Tucker said. “I want it always to be an adventure, even if it’s just an adventure for me. I don’t want to just do the same old thing just because  I’m good at doing the same old thing. We’ll see. Stay tuned.” 

Day 31: “Registered With Love”

So concludes the promised “31 Days of Cheer,” and with it, a Happy New Year to all.

A note of happiness rings through Updike’s prose, and draws us to it, makes us happy when we read it. It is not a fatuous happiness, or a happiness unaware of death (a preoccupation with death and dying was a steady feature of his work), but neither does it cede too much to mere mortality. One has a sense of someone who—as much as, though with more wit than, Andy Warhol—has spent a good deal of his life liking things. Women’s clothes, their hair, the hybridization of American accents; the way that the hyper-cold of the airline baggage compartment can be felt like a secret in the bag as you unpack—all these images and moments, recalled at random from his work, are not just reported but quietly rhapsodized, registered with love. It is his affections that rise, and that we recall.

Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Day 30: “Success in Life”

Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike. . . Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. 

Walter Pater, from The Renaissance

Day 29: Giving the Devil His Due

As we near the end of the Parade of Positives that has been Muse Machine’s 31 Days of Cheer, I’ve got to admit that NY Timesman Ross Douthat has out-happied even me by finding at least one thing to like about each of the far-too-numerous Republican candidates for president. Seriously. There is, quoth he, at least one worthwhile idea in each man’s head, and if you doubt, check out his inventory here.

Day 28: “The Whole of Life”

Reason, gentlemen, is a fine thing, that is unquestionable, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man’s reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life–that is, the whole of human life, including reason and various little itches.

And though our life in that manifestation often turns out to be a bit of trash, still it is life and not just the extraction of a square root. I, for example, want to live so as to satisfy my whole capacity for living, and not so as to satisfy just my reasoning capacity alone, which is some twentieth part of my whole capacity for living. What does reason know? Reason knows only what it has managed to learn . . . while human nature acts as an entire whole, with everything that is in it, consciously and unconsciously, and though it lies, still it lives.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground

Day 27: As the New Year Looms

Everybody’s thinking about how to make the New Year a better year. In other words, we’re talking change. And as longtime readers who have not abandoned MM for Facebook know, MM is all about change and the thousand picky particulars that prevent it.  Here, as we prepare to launch into 2012, are some change-related classics from the past:

Workin’ on the Change Gang: New Year’s Renewal

Posted on December 27, 2009 by ctddd

Okay, New Year’s Change Gang: As you wonder just how you can make this year’s resolutions stick, Muse Machine is here as always to fan the flames of growth and renewal. Below you’ll find a number of posts from the past on the subject of change. Whatever you’re trying to overcome or do better at or banish from your life, you’ll find helpful advice here.

August 30, 2007: “The Carnivore’s Dilemma”

January 2, 2008:  “Are Your “Change Muscles” in Shape?”

April 5, 2008:  “More on Will Power and Change Muscles”

May 16, 2008:   “Strategies for Change: Start Itty-Bitty”

June 18, 2008:   “Fighting the Puppet Masters of Habit”

January 5, 2009: “New Year’s Changes: Gradual or Radical?”

Day 26: Happiness and How You Get It

Point-counterpoint words to live by, or at least muse on, in 2012:

Happiness is desired by all men, and moments of it are probably attained by most men. Only moments of it can be attained because happiness is the inner concomitant of neat harmonies of body, spirit, and society; and these neat harmonies are bound to be infrequent. There is no simple harmony between our ambitions and our achievements because all ambitions tend to outrun achievements. There is no neat harmony between the conscious ends of life and the physical instruments for its attainment, for the health of the body is frail and uncertain. . . There is no neat harmony between personal desires and ambitions and the ends of human societies no matter how frantically we insist with the eighteenth century that communities are created only for the individual.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

But still. . .

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Day 25: Orwell’s “Reflections on Gandhi”

If I ruled the world, I’d have every person who aspires to be a writer, politician or any kind of thought leader  read this essay at least once a year. It should be posted on the walls of all newsrooms and magazine offices. In this piece, Orwell models clarity, honesty, and humility while performing what for many is an impossible task: He takes the measure of a man who in many ways is his polar opposite and gives this complicated man his due. Rather than begin with some cheap political agenda that must be served, Orwell sets out to evaluate Gandhi in his own terms.

Here you find none of the thundering, blustering certainty that makes most political discourse today unbearable; instead, you see a great writer trying to follow the truth wherever it seems to lead. Key quote:

His character was an extraordinarily mixed one, but there 
was almost nothing in it that you can put your finger on and call bad, 
and I believe that even Gandhi’s worst enemies would admit that he was an 
interesting and unusual man who enriched the world simply by being alive. 
Whether he was also a lovable man, and whether his teachings can have 
much for those who do not accept the religious beliefs on which they are 
founded, I have never felt fully certain. 

The full text of this great essay is here.

Day 24: Lennon for Christmas

I’ll be heading out for a few days of holiday visiting, but don’t worry–the “31 Days of Cheer” pledge will be honored.

Here’s a favorite Christmas song by John Lennon and the inexplicable Yoko Ono. The lyrics are hopeful but tinged with just enough reality to save it from the too-sugary pile.

Day 23: “A Christmas Memory”

Truman Capote seemed to make a mess of his life in many ways and in his late years became almost a parody of the boozy, neurotic writer, but one of his earliest stories, “A Christmas Memory,” is perhaps the  most heart-breakingly beautiful story I’ve ever read. You can read it here.

Day 22: “Actors in the Same Tragedy”

One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need — of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.

Bertrand Russell, from “A Free Man’s Worship”

Day 21: “Toward the Winter Solstice”

Here’s a nice poem for the shortest day of the year.

Toward the Winter Solstice
by Timothy Steele
Although the roof is just a story high, It dizzies me a little to look down. I lariat-twirl the cord of Christmas lights And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown; A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs Will accent the tree’s elegant design. Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause And call up commendations or critiques. I make adjustments. Though a potpourri Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs, We all are conscious of the time of year; We all enjoy its colorful displays And keep some festival that mitigates The dwindling warmth and compass of the days. Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule, But UPS vans now like magi make Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves Are gaily resurrected in their wake; The desert lifts a full moon from the east And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze, And valets at chic restaurants will soon Be tending flocks of cars and SUVs. And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk The fan palms scattered all across town stand More calmly prominent, and this place seems A vast oasis in the Holy Land. This house might be a caravansary, The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces And ceintures of green, yellow, blue, and red. Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed; It’s comforting to look up from this roof And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost, To recollect that in antiquity The winter solstice fell in Capricorn And that, in the Orion Nebula, From swirling gas, new stars are being born.

Day 20: Mark Twain on Mankind

The 31 Days of Cheer continue with one of the great American satirists: Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain. I’ve seen this superb show three times, going back to the 70s, and we’ve got tickets to see it again next month. Holbrook jokes that when he first started doing Twain almost 50 years ago, it took several hours to do the makeup and hair. Now, at 82,  he’s ready in about half an hour.

Here’s a good segment from one of HH’s many shows. In this one, Twain mocks man as “the reasoning animal” and “the religious animal.”

Day 19: It Could Always Be Worse

So you’re not on fire for Obama, Romney, the Newtnik or scrappy underdog John Huntsman? Hey, at least we’re not waiting for this guy to take over! Let’s rejoice!

31 Days of Cheer: Springsteen for Christmas

It’s a holiday staple of Bruce Springsteen tours: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” This particularly good video, shot by the Boss’s own crew, is also a nice goodbye to the late, great Clarence Clemons. Click here to get into the spirit as Bruce ceremoniously hands out the Santa hats.