Debra...writing...can't understand the point...*head explodes*

Wow. That's pretty uppity.

I get the impression that many readers here, with lots to do and so on, read a leading paragraph or two; they may well call it a day and assume they've percieved the jist of an article.

If they did, in this instance, they would have missed out on an otherwise well-done piece o' work.

Your mission was to praise the worker-bees that make life smooth for, well, let's just call them award-winners, in this context. But the first two paragraphs may have led one to believe that your thrust was pure snark.

A couple of intro phrases may have prevented that from happening. And I'm assuming that you may be quoted from a partiality of the article, so perhaps you should keep that in mind?

All that said, I appreciated what you had to say.

This is a NON-article. It's filler, abut nothing. Not even amusing. I want my precious time back. Can I sue you for that?

Reading the thank yous at the end of CD booklets is a favourite pursuit of mine while loitering in the corner of boring parties or killing time in music stores.

My favourite: Destiny's Child on their penultimate album. 'Finally, we want to thank God. There is no one like you, God. You are the greatest.'

If I ever win anything I plan to quote that.

Debra Dickerson has officially lost it.

Three words: Out. To. Pasture.

...about a dog lazing about on a porch all day and incessantly whining that he's right on top of a nail, and by golly it hurts. The moral of the story is, get up off the nail! If ya'll hate Debra Dickerson so much, why do you (apparently, by being the first 5 comments) refresh salon constantly looking for something of hers so you can read it instantly? Get a life. I'm not a huge fan, but I'm not going to use the letters section to complain about my CHOICE to read her stuff. Jeesh.

DD doesn't give her editors any thanks? Guess they're either doing a really crappy job or taking up ego bandwidth...or both.

Next up: Debra Dickerson and Camille Paglia analyze the "Girls Gone Wild" series. DD ponders why no black women are shown while CP defends the uber-hottest and genius of Joe Francis.

Ms. Dickerson’s seemingly genuine appreciation for and homage to loyal and competent underlings is diminished only slightly by a somewhat condescending, or one might say uppity, tone.

Ms. Dickerson is a brilliant and provocative writer whose work I am constantly recommending to others. What shall I tell them now?

A thank you seems the least that could be done for the people who willingly endure the tedium of complicated details because others of us choose to believe we cannot. Or if we did, we choose to believe we might make ill of it, and so must engage another's help. Some kind of token or expression to show appreciation beyond the scope of paying a particular percentage. When the rest of us think about the opportunity to additionally thank someone who is doing a job they agreed to do--a paid job, however exceptionally they're doing it--we tend to think of perhaps a bonus, or sending flowers, cards or gifts. Then we do it, in a fairly private way.

Sure, not everyone is given the opportunity to offer someone a public thank you in an oscar speech or in the closing pages of our book. I certainly wouldn't know what the proper level of thanks would be to give to someone after I achieved that level of renown. But for good measure, when I or others who want to take pains to publicize our thanks, there is a way. There is a powerful way available to those who lack a podium or afterword or liner notes: we tell other people in conversations how great the services of our friend/confidant/tax confessor are. They love it when we do this, it's that word of mouth thing that always drives new business.

What has become of our world? To defend the 'little guy,' a brilliant writer has to spend her time defending those who live the life of the mind, so the rest of us will not begrudge the firm of Dewey Cheatem & Howe the kind words someone speaks of them on oscar night. This practice did not need defending. It certainly did not need defending in a way that drew yet another stupefying distinction between...well, "artists" and the assorted "professionals who take their work every bit as seriously as the artists they serve" and...pretty much everybody else.

The rest of us are also living in our heads, god dammit. Most of us work incredibly hard to make house payments and feed children and read stories and make love and/or take a night class and/or work on a book, some poems, the guitar, knit, create, engage, do something. Even if our lives and jobs are astonishingly fulfilling and rich, we still like to think of ourselves as noteworthy thinkers, artists, world beaters, people who are getting there (and, I might point out, we still think it's important enough to expend our precious time and money on paid subscriptions to Salon.com). The criminally maddening quality of the contemporary world is that we have come to believe in a kind of ascetic vision of the arts, hell, of anything. We have recreated something like the stultifying theosophy of the middle ages: only the secular monks will create art, make films, write books and articles, make records. Only by singular focus on these, risking everything, alienating their families, giving over their schedule-managing-and-forms-completing brain functions to the Process will they accomplish The Work. Anything less and ...what? Anything less and we are not the artists? We who do not fly with Icarus do not get to be part of the myths, either.

Anything less, and you-- we must endure the thank you speeches of the ones who dared, or something like that. Why is that fair? Why is that worth defending?

I suppose it's too much to hope for another Renaissance? That there might be polymaths in every neighborhood? That I (yes, I admit it) might too be recognized for the many things I'm invested in, not the One thing I'm really good at? Who will defend the "thank you" practices of those who seek to be known for living artfully as itself an artistic end? This sounds awfully bitter, or perhaps the dismissable anxieties of a wannabe , and it is. Though it appears to be my destiny, no doubt the future of my own sentiments, once I get a grip on that same brass ring, available if I'll only free up the parts of my brains I use for tax rules or reading fine print and join the parade. What has become of our world?