Eccentric Flower:199811/talking to the names

twelve eleven again

talking to the names

Someone (Kymm, but I didn't say that) nagged me about not writing anything. Actually, her email, sent at about the same time this morning that I was posting the previous entry, said, in its entirety:

Where ARE you????

Yesterday was a holiday for me, I'll have you know, and I don't tend to write these on holidays because I'm usually too busy goofing off, which is what I feel one is ordained to do on holidays.

Besides, I've been a slacker lately. What did you think I was getting at, with all the talk about sins of omission?

I have, for example, been dangerously behind on reading the sites in the webring, which is why I am only now finding out a lot of things I should have found out several days ago. Both Kymm and Beth, for example, met one of their idols while I wasn't looking.

I'm not sure I ever met someone who was one of my idols and actually had the privilege of speaking to that person as an equal, as they did. (Book signings and such don't count - that's someone holding court.) Hmm. I had a conversation with Lisa Palac last year; that was the closest I've come in recent memory.

I think I tend to think of the people I consider Big Names as unapproachable - even if I liked Randy Newman as intensely as Kymm does, I would never dare go backstage to meet him. That would just seem rude to me - after a show he wants to rest, unmolested, right? If I send email to a Famous Personage, I'm just another fanboy or fangirl - and we won't go into the Fan discussion again, OK?

(In short, I believe that one should never, ever tell a Famous Person how much you like his/her cultural contributions. Ooh, that's screwed up. Hmm. Let me rethink that.)

By contrast, a person who has achieved a smaller kind of fame in his or her circle is apparently fair game, to my brain, though I respect his or her good works no less. Some of the people I consider "small celebrities" are Keith Dawson, who writes TBTF; Anne Semans and Cathy Winks, who write the Good Vibrations Guide to Sex; Eric Raymond, one of the most verbal advocates of Open Source software development; Alexander Seropian, head of Bungie Software, the company that showed you could make good games on the Mac; and this weird woman in NYC who handles the Open Pages ring, the premiere listing of online journallers everywhere. (Her name's been mentioned enough in this entry already.)

All of these people are at top-of-game in the fields they've carved for themselves (although they may protest that statement). Yet, with almost no angst, I have sent (and usually received) email from these people and interacted with them as peers. They don't intimidate me. Being in a room with them (I've met two of six) [eventually, four of six] doesn't intimidate me. But being in a room with Joe Haldeman, who has taught Nonelvis at MIT and who is sweet as can be, even when cranky, did intimidate me. Or maybe "intimidate" is the wrong word. Put it another way: Nonelvis was entitled to say hello to him. I was not.

You may tell me I'm schizophrenic if you like. No news flash there.

The oddest thing is: Although I'm about as far from a celebrity as you can get, I hunger for feedback, contact from readers - I adore it. Good, bad, otherwise. I wonder: Would there ever come a point (assuming I got off my rear and became famous) where I'd change, to the point where hearing from people became the nuisance I seem to think celebrities find it?

Being at The Institvte has made me acutely aware of this dichotomy in me, because there are Great Minds lurking around here, and most of them are going about their rounds fairly inconspicuously. (We saw Noam Chomsky on the subway the other day.) Students argue with them; administration gives them a certain amount of hell; no one treats them with kid gloves just because they have a major book contract or a lecture tour. For the most part, they don't insist that people genuflect. (There are exceptions, such as Nick Negroponte and His Travelling Ego.)

One thing about the diehard lovers of knowledge - and I think I consider this a good thing - they don't usually play rank. Richard Feynman describes how Bohr and his son would come find him to bounce ideas off at Los Alamos - because Feynman was the only one willing to argue back with the Great Man. Feynman just didn't care - for him the idea was more important than the politics or the rank.

I'd like more people to be like that, and it frets me a little that I can't achieve it more often myself.

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