I took two workshops with her after that first class, and while I was never destined to be an actor, I learned so much about myself and how to tap into feelings and emotions I'd always avoided even making eye contact with, all of which helped my writing even more than my stage presence.
In light of Marvel and DC's continued inability to introduce new superheroes with diverse backgrounds, a full generation after everyone wanted to "be like Mike" and Will Smith became a bankable leading man, what does the furor over Morales say about the state of comics and their place within pop culture?
While many book publishers and academy types might argue otherwise, poetry has always been an oral form, first and foremost. A poem on the page is theoretical, incomplete; like a promising idea not yet vetted. Reading your work out loud is also one of the best forms of editing, and not just for poetry, but straight fiction and non-fiction, too.
"Editorial control" is a four-letter word in my book. It's a legacy of the pre-participatory era, and journalists, editors, authors, etc. who fight to maintain it, or the illusion of it, are spitting into the wind that should be filling their sails. Credibility is more important than control, and that comes from your community.
While Wall Street and technology pundits continue to devalue those who create and curate content professionally in favor of dumb pipes, content aggregators, and social media pyramid schemes, the fact is, at the end of the day, it all starts with good content. Without it, the digital business is a cork floating on the publishing stream, and the new shiny devices are little more than electronic bricks sinking to the bottom at varying rates of speed.
Google+ is an intriguing mash-up of Facebook and Twitter, but its use of "circles" does a better job of reflecting and managing the variety of solid and permeable walls that exist in real-life networks, and when it comes to privacy, I trust our robot overlords a slight bit more than the new kids on the virtual block.
In backing down, I suspect Jobs saw the HTML5 on the wall and realized he was fighting a rare losing battle, playing hardball with major content producers whose early, enthusiastic and unabated promotion of the iPad -- as inherently a consumption device as has ever been conceived -- helped demonstrate its value to consumers. It was, theoretically, a mutually beneficial relationship until his reach finally exceeded his grasp.