Five For Tom Spurgeon

I wrote something for The Beat‘s collective tribute to Tom Spurgeon, but somehow it got utterly screwed up by the time it ran. Here’s the original.

**

In no particular order:

1. The thrill of recognition when I was starting out and realized that Spurgeon was reading me. He was the real deal, even then. (I’m old, I can say that.) To this day, I feel like he was being too polite when we’d talk and he wouldn’t just tell me to stop wasting his time.

2. The kindness he showed me when I had to bail on doing an interview with him because of my father’s death; I remember extremely clearly, more than a decade later, how much his down-to-earth reminders that what was happening was far more important than talking about comics helped at a time when I was, basically, a complete mess who thought that I couldn’t let anyone down about anything, no matter what.

(I did the interview on the plane home after the funeral; it was shitty because of where my head was at, and I’ve always felt bad that I wasn’t more entertaining or interesting; Spurgeon was pleasantly dismissive of such thoughts.)

3. His response when I told him that he and I were both on a Prominent Comic Creator’s private list worst case scenarios for comics journalists, along with a third I’m-not-naming-them-here journalist, as told to me by a mutual friend. The best word is probably “tickled”; he thought it was ridiculous and funny and confusing that the three of us were on the same list, but decided that it was probably a badge of honor for all three of us, somehow.

4. An email I got from him after he’d heard that an entirely separate Prominent Comic Creator tried to start a fight with me at a comic convention. It’s very silly, but having him write, “I got your back,” felt like… validation? Having someone I respected to that degree say something as simple as that about something that I was feeling pretty embarrassed about meant a lot. Also, considering the creator involved, the mental image of the two of them fighting is utterly amazing, trust me.

5. This essay: http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/sickness_essay/

It’s such a wonderful piece of writing, when viewed through an analytic eye, sure, but it’s also a wonderful encapsulation of Tom as I knew him; the last section, where he writes about sharing his story because he hopes it will make people get check-ups again, and “embrace the inevitable fragilities of getting older with good humor and perspective,” speaks well of him as not only a writer, but also as a person.

I’ve re-read it a couple of times since learning of his death, and it’s overwhelming right now. I know if he was here to read this and I said that to him, he’d say something funny to try and put my mind at ease, but also take pains not to undercut how sad I am. That he’d do that for me, when we weren’t especially close, says everything there is.

I would love to, but … It’s a mixture of being too lazy and also having been spoilt by writing lyrics. In songs, you can write something that’s only a page long and yet it’s the whole song. I’m reading the new Dave Eggers book [The Circle] at the moment, which is about 490 pages long. The idea of sustaining something over that length, well, I’m in awe of people who can do it. I’m more like a short-sharp-bursts kind of person.

Jarvis Cocker sums up my attitude towards writing a book. Just replacing “writing lyrics” with “blog posts.”

Platforms Are Important

What the findings suggest, Holton said, is that the news platforms a person is using can play a bigger role in making them feel overwhelmed than the sheer number of news sources being consumed. So even if you read The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, The New York Times, and ESPN in a day, you may not feel as inundated with news if you read on your phone instead of on your desktop (with 40 tabs open, no doubt). The more contained, or even constrained, a platform feels, the more it can contribute to people feeling less overwhelmed, Holton said. A news app or mobile site, for instance, is an isolated experience that emphasizes reading with minimal links or other distractions. Compared with reading on the web at your computer, your options seem smaller.

“There was no connection between the number of news outlets people were using, so it made us think it was the device,” Holton told me. “You see less of a statistically significance between outlets and more between platforms.”

From here.

Hmmm.