Douglas Barone
Douglas Barone
A Post-postmodernist writer, fighting to catch up with his art after serving time as a capitalist oppressor of the people
Doug Barone retired from corporate life after 20 years in the finance industry, and is fooling everyone into thinking he is a writer. Having been a corporate strategist, finance executive and IT executive, he’s found almost nothing of use to him from those years except the zany people and crazy stories that no one in their right mind could have made up.
He has a B.A. from St. Lawrence University, and a graduate degree from Loyola. He’s studied with Sharon Mesmer, Sidney Offit, Josh Gaylord and Justus Rosenberg in The New School’s writing program, and since 2009, in Pulitzer Prize winner Phil Schultz’s Writers Studio. In 2010 he was selected to attend the New York State Writers Institute at Skidmore at the masters level, where he studied with Rick Moody. Somewhere along the way he learned to write about himself in the third person.
His work, his prose fiction, is focused on power, its entanglement with emotional fulfillment, the impact of institutional concentrations of authority, the ontological-deontological tension of existence in a post-postmodern world, one filled with ideas re-emerging as vastly powerful things, even in the simple acts of everyday life, and the creation of long periodic sentences to explain it all.
Sometimes his work allows just a bit of the mystical to cross over into reality, breaking the barriers of perception, heightening a sense of the possible.
Since this is all antithetical to the held narrative of our time, he fully expects to be pilloried by the academic left as well as the religious right, and looks forward to every lashing.
Old media brands are the answer to the “cesspool”? Naw…
Over at The Written Word they wrote that “Earlier this week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted on several websites and news feeds as having called the internet a “Cesspool”. Cnet reported it as “ the Internet is a “cesspool” where false information thrives…Schmidt gave the magazine publishers hope for their future. Brands, he said, are the way to rise above the cesspool, and of course he is right.”
Really? Old media is the answer?
Looking to the mainstream media brands as a model of fair and accurate reporting is like looking for a pacifist at a prizefight.
An accurate collection of facts is not truth when those facts are organized and interpreted in a way that distorts their original meaning. The hallowed journalistic principle of balance creates its own falsehoods of a higher order.
Here’s an absurd example: The fact that the stove is hot needs to be balanced with a minority vew that fire can be transcended by thought (Don’t want to insult Tony Robins, or an indigenous fire walking tribe in the South Pacific, now do we?) hence a “highly reguarded, branded” news source must say that fire may or may not be hot, if it conforms to current journalistic ethics.
Silly, hun?
But any political consultant of national order will tell you that the key operating tool of American politics (and PR in general) is to exploit the fairness doctrine to cast a set of “new truths” on the news. And it works.
So, while I deplore the abject falsehoods that spin around the web I think we need to reach for a new ethical standard that takes into account bias, philosophy and facts. Because certainly the traditions of the Brands out there are not serving us well.
I do agree that this trend does bode well for writers, but the brands of import will be new brands, micro brands, that link content to author and (perhaps) bypass the media delivery tools of old. Anonymity is the enemy of truth, and as writers isn’t anonymity what we spend out whole lives fearing?
(Am I showing my bias?…)