The task of rebuilding Identity Theory from the ground up is daunting because there are so many old stories — ten years’ worth — that are difficult to transfer to a more high-powered content management system, not to mention that the site contains a handful of multi-author blogs, substantial “orphaned” content, and dozens of photo galleries. (I also worry about losing the search placement we’ve built up through eleven years of backlinks, though I have some faith in 301s.)

This large-scale content transfer and redevelopment is such a complicated undertaking for a relatively minor literary journal — thousands of dollars of development work for a payoff that is at best questionable — that I’ve put it off for years, settling for minor patches to a sinking ship on the theory that people ultimately only care about the content (which is true, I hope).

I don’t believe, however, that you can produce a quality magazine-style website unless you can manage the content at least as well as a random blogger can manage a Blogspot blog. Since Identity Theory launched 11 years ago — before you could build a powerful online magazine in WordPress, Drupal and the like — it has paradoxically lagged behind the more recently launched journals in interactivity and ease of use.

With that in mind, here are some online magazines/literary blogs that have actualized many of the ideas I have wanted to put into place on Identity Theory over the years — and with very nice designs to go with them.

The Awl – Their motto: “Be Less Stupid.” I couldn’t “Be More Impressed.”

HTMLGIANT – I like the informality, visual feel and constant literary dialogue.

The Nervous Breakdown - Haven’t spent much time on this site yet, but when I found it I was like, “Hey that’s exactly what I envisioned years ago doing with Identity Theory if I ever had the time.”

Similarly, The Rumpus - Always has good stuff. Every day. Stephen Elliott has done a great job putting together a literary website that takes advantage of all the latest web technology.

Feel free to point me to other magazine websites using the latest publishing technology that will make me jealous. It motivates me to see what the new kids are doing, and I am excited about building Identity Theory into a fully functional site that could be even half as useful/informative/awesome as the sites listed above.

This is a real thing that somebody made for a contest. A September 11th…cow. I encountered it at Young’s Jersey Dairy in Yellow Springs during my last trip to Ohio in 2004.

The memorable piece of fine art came up in conversation again today not because of Osama bin Laden’s recent death but because I announced on Facebook my plans for a Memorial Day visit to Ohio.

Somehow I doubt the cow will still be there, but I hope he feels redeemed by the developments in Pakistan.

Imagine if after only a few days of meditating, he had said, “That was cool, now I’m gonna go drive around for a while, try every drug imaginable, meditate some more, write a bunch of rambling novels, get famous and drown myself in alcohol.”

According "Wake Up," Jack Kerouac loved dogs and "dogs loved him."

Then he would have turned out something like Jack Kerouac.

It turns out Kerouac wrote a little tome about his ancient alter ego called Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, which I picked up at a used bookstore in Tennessee while on a not-totally-Kerouacian road trip this summer.

In the foreword to this long-lost religious fiction, Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman (a brilliant/awesome fellow actually) points out that Kerouac’s interest in Buddhism focused on the Tibetan/Indian sects of the religion that emphasize compassion. He wasn’t crazy about the Samurai-rigid, discipline-minded Far East Zen schools, which he referred to as “mean” when discussing it with a fictionalized Gary Snyder in The Dharma Bums.

I found this interesting as a reflection of Kerouac’s life as a whole. His writing is full of compassion. But from his Benzedrine-fueled “typing” binges to his zigzag-around-the-country lifestyle to his alcoholic demise, it’s even more full of compulsion. Which is of course what makes it greatly appropriate and essential American literature. We Americans are always confusing “freedom” with unadulterated compulsion.

Of the two values, which are of course not mutually exclusive, this is a country—a world—that generally neglects compassion and breeds compulsion. Even if you’re a reserved sort of person, you are constantly encouraged to be compulsive, prodded to buy things you can’t afford, advised to eat food that your body doesn’t need, told to do things you don’t want to do, surrounded by compulsive behavior. Compulsive activity is so ubiquitous, as Buddha (and probably the Beats) understood, that it’s hard to recognize when you’re being compulsive and when you’re being free and acting on your own conviction.

Buddha committed to the discipline necessary to conquer compulsion and develop real freedom. Kerouac intellectually understood it, but he couldn’t develop it for a variety of reasons—from pure genetics to having-Allen-Ginsberg-as-a-friend to the fact that his fame was built in part on glorifying compulsion. (As Goethe said, “Knowing is not enough.”) Even the most prominent American Tibetan Buddhist of Kerouac’s time, Trungpa Rinpoche, a friend of the Beats, was a helpless womanizing drunk, so it’s not like Kerouac had the healthiest mentor.

The above screenshot is from Hal Hartley's appropriately named film "Surviving Desire."

Which brings me to my next point. Can compassion be taught? I find a lot of times when I feel a sense of empathy for someone, the programming isn’t there to know exactly what to do. This is something I personally need to develop. I think it’s difficult because “the right thing to do” for someone who is suffering is rarely obvious. Perhaps when you have a well-developed compassion faculty, you just know. I definitely know people who are good at being compassionate. I admire them. I’m just not one of them.

The only time I can think of when a specific compassionate response is encouraged is when a major catastrophe is involved. When something like Hurricane Katrina or the Haiti earthquake happens, it’s usually followed by months’ worth of pleas for donations by Red Cross, MSF and the like. And that’s great, to give money, goods, blood, or time. All of that goes a long way to relieve suffering. It’s obvious, simple, everyone can do it.

But what about when an everyday individual is going through a hard time? Usually they’re encouraged to buy their way out of it, whether through overpriced (they have to pay for those ads somehow!) prescription drugs or some other quick fix that makes someone else an equally quick buck. We’re taught that America is a place of “personal responsibility.” Compassion in the public sector—like, say, trying to keep the cost of emergency health care down—is “socialist,” while striving for compassion in the competitive private sector opens you up to exploitation.

So, at least my view, the “personal responsibility” to be compassionate is truly personal, because very few people will help you nurture that value. Polite? Heck yes, you have to be polite to get ahead. You kill more flies with honey. Etc. Being “nice” is just a part of the daily routine. (Lots of suicide bombers are generally well-mannered, too, I’m sure.) But what about taking the time to enact positive change in other people’s lives? I think it’s quite rare to be encouraged to do that. I think it’s your personal responsibility to develop that capacity for yourself.

Back to our tragic hero: what drew me to Kerouac’s writing early on, as a teenager reading various pieces of the Duluoz Legend, was the the open-minded, open-roaded adventure. There was a quality that seemed pure in its clumsy, refreshingly unpackaged (of course it was packaged) spontaneity. In hindsight, though, I have gained a new appreciation for his compassionate depictions of the random characters he encountered on the road.

Unfortunately, as Kerouac’s life shows, compassion and adventure doesn’t always lead to happiness or enlightenment. You have to have the discipline to ward off those “demons”—to use an outdated but appropriate word—who try to convince you that compulsion and consumption are in any way comparable to actual freedom.

“Photographer Ned Castle collaborated with youth living in difficult circumstances across Vermont to re-enact high and low moments from their lives. The resulting large-scale photographs depict elaborate re-creations of these situations. Audio narrations by the participants provide context for the photographs.”

I developed the website for this project, which offers a preview of the exhibit’s photos and audio, over the summer. The show will be on display at several more locations throughout Vermont this year.

More Wall Street quotes

I am watching a live video speech by a bi-racial leader of the free world on the website of a newspaper on a link that I found via Twitter.

I am talking to people in real time using less than 140 characters about a speech I am watching on the website of a major newspaper.

You would think with all this ability to communicate through various media in real time, somehow people would be able to come to a consensus on health care reform.

You would think.

Bush and Cheney are no longer there to help me come up with easy blog posts...or are they?

As much as I’d like to be freezing in Chicago with the literati right now, I’m instead shockingly not freezing in Burlington, where a spring-like, mid-February rain gave me a free winter carwash this afternoon.

Coming up with ideas to post to a non-themed blog is difficult because of the complete lack of “topic fences.” You’d think I could just find something that makes me really angry and write about that. But I don’t know what to be mad about right now. I simply don’t feel significantly peeved about anything in the world. It used to be much easier to come up with stuff to get riled up about because I could just type “George W. Bush” into Google News and instantly feel completely incensed. But now he’s gone, and he’s taken my anger with him.

Certainly, Bush’s exit didn’t magically make the world a better place, but I think over his eight-year reign of anti-terror-terror he gave many left-wingers the opposite of compassion fatigue. Call it anger fatigue. Now that Obama’s in charge, the blue staters seem to be relaxing because at least for the time being, they are sick of boiling their blood over unjust wars, declining civil liberties, faltering economies, and so on. They’re still mad, yeah, but not mad enough at any one particular individual or cause. Case in point: Bernie Madoff screwed people out of billions of dollars and is still not in jail.

Now, clearly, the world is not short on causes and topics of outrage and actionability, so this lack of anger is somewhat troubling. How does that saying go… “If you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention”?

The United States, like much of the world, is probably more rife with critical issues than ever before—and shorter on time to act on them. The economy is falling apart and people don’t have health care and the pandas are dying off and all of that stuff, but the big picture is even more grim: how are we going to feed and house our booming population and run all these fancy machines when we have such a limited amount of space and a rapidly decreasing supply of nonrenewable energy?

This is an obvious point, but worth meditating on: anxiety over the dire state of the world should dwarf any distress you felt over the last eight years when you watched Bush stumble over the lines of a speech force-fed to him by his friends in the oil industry.

Of course, while the urgency of creating a more sustainable world is great, the difficulty of overcoming the forces that made it unsustainable in the first place are even greater. So, it’s no wonder liberals focused their anger on Bush for so long—he was an easy target who personified their struggle. But now that he’s gone, it’s vital that people don’t trap themselves by thinking that the non-green forces he represented somehow scurried away to rural Texas with him.

So, I suppose what I’m trying to say is, it’s well past time to stop celebrating Obama’s victory; it’s now time to get down to the business of saving the world.

David Letterman tried to ease his conscience the other night by airing this clip of comedian Bill Hicks that Letterman cut from his show about 15 years ago.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the housing market, and recent unemployment figures provide about as much inspiration as the thought of a George W. Bush worldwide speaking tour. (In case you’re wondering, we’re not expecting W’s version of the Clinton Global Initiative to launch anytime soon.)

A feeling of financial panic–encouraged both by our hysterical hypermedia and the cold, hard reality of the markets–seems to be enveloping the entire industrialized world, with no shortage of complaining and begging-for-bailouts going on, much of which is justifiable, but some of which is ridiculous.

To allow this temporary downswing in the financial markets to control your mental well-being is not going to help you during the crisis and will definitely continue to take a toll on you after the economy corrects itself. I say, don’t call it a “recession.” A “recession” is something that happens to you. Don’t let yourself become the beat-up stepchild of Wall Street fat cats and George Bush economics. I say, take ownership of the situation, and call it a “vow of poverty.”

Complaining about rich capitalists getting the best of you is neither graceful nor appropriate when you choose to live in a capitalist society. Conversely, taking a “vow of poverty” is both noble and cleansing. You’ll cut out the fat from your lifestyle, free your mind, and reassess your entire value system. And you’ll probably have more fun and possibly learn some valuable life lessons.

If you feel like you are a little too deep in love with your shopping and dining habits and need a helping hand, check out a few inspirational films, such as:

Into the Wild: A young idealist gives his money to OxFam, cuts up his Driver’s license and walks the Earth alone, meeting interesting characters all over the American West and going to Alaska to live off the land. That’s what I call traveling on a budget. And it’s not just a movie, it’s a true story, so I don’t want to hear you claiming it’s just a Hollywood fantasy. (Yes, the kid meets and unfortunate ending, but surely you can learn from his mistakes and get by just fine.)

Fight Club: Not a true story, but what better way to get inspired to take ownership of your poverty than to watch someone quit his job and blow up his own apartment? AND with his spare time and mental space, he starts a national organization of extremely loyal followers! You won’t see Tyler Durden whining about the housing markets or Dow Jones Industrials anytime soon. (Okay, I know what you’re thinking: this one’s totally fiction, and you don’t want to wake up with a broken jaw, bleeding organs, etc.–to which I respond: stop being a wuss.)

Life is Beautiful: If that Roberto Benigni guy can make a good time out of a friggin’ concentration camp, what are you complaining about?

Office Space: Bummed that you got laid off? Stop whining! Watch as the main character in this classic of American cinema gets himself fired from his office (er, cubicle) job on purpose and discovers the joy of manual labor.

If that doesn’t help, you can always watch Survivor. That should give you some tips on how to deal with the next phase of this crisis.

“Does Tim Tebow now belong at the top of the list as the greatest college football player of all time?” they argue, some believing it to be true, others holding off judgment for another year.

“Tim Tebow carried his whole team on his back and willed them to victory,” others proclaim, turning this 21-year-old man into, as one woman put it, a “demigod.”

“Tim Tebow is beautiful inside and out,” gushed Steven A. Smith.

Yes, Tim Tebow…he’s been compared to everyone from Chuck Norris to Jesus Christ. He’s won the Heisman Trophy and two national championships. He spends his spare hours saving lives in Bangladesh and counseling hard-time prisoners at Starke, the hellhole down the road from Gainesville where Ted Bundy was executed. He’s a 21-year-old legend who doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the words “quit,” “lazy,” and “beer.”

I will never get sick of hearing about him.

But as person who loves to criticize the American news media, I am inclined to point out that they give him way too much credit for the success of the team.

Tim Tebow wasn’t the one who intercepted Oklahoma on the goal line to prevent a touchdown. That was…hmm, I don’t remember who it was, but I’m pretty sure it was Major Wright or Joe Haden. I’ll have to look it up, because no one in the media is mentioning it.

Tim Tebow wasn’t the one who tackled Oklahoma’s running back on the one yard line to prevent another touchdown. That was Torrey Davis, but I haven’t heard his name mentioned once this morning.

What about the guy who stole the ball from Oklahoma on an interception, preventing a likely score? Oh yeah, that was Ahmad Black. No one’s comparing him to Superman this morning.

Percy Harvin, without whom the Gator offense would have been almost entirely stagnant, did eke out one interview on ESPN.

If you take away any one of those four players, Florida loses. Just like they lost four games last year despite Tim Tebow’s Herculean efforts.

There are probably 100 players on the Florida football team, but Tim Tebow gets almost all the credit in the media when they win, because Americans love to believe that one person can single-handedly be responsible for a large group’s success. That’s why CEO’s make so much money and why presidential elections cost so much money. Instead of baseball, maybe our national pasttime should be switched to “Follow the Leader.”

I love Tim Tebow. (Though I almost killed him in a parking lot in 2006 when he took a corner too wide on his scooter while not wearing a helmet and I simultaneously took the corner a little too tight in my car.) But I would bet any amount of money he wishes that more people would get acknowledgment for his team’s success.