[Edits done 12/6/12.]
It is striking to me, judging from statistics showing the accumulation of e-mail links to my different blog entries (including those on this blog and those on the “Jersey Mountain Bear” blog), how much interest there has been in my first (November 6) entry on Gene Mulvihill, and associated entries largely dealing with the pseudonymous Skoder. Where Mr. Mulvihill is concerned, I would expect that there are two very different, almost diametrically opposed, schools of thought: those defending him (understandably enough) and those who have long viewed him skeptically, in contempt, and/or such (also understandably, or not incomprehensibly).
It is striking to me, judging from statistics showing the accumulation of e-mail links to my different blog entries (including those on this blog and those on the “Jersey Mountain Bear” blog), how much interest there has been in my first (November 6) entry on Gene Mulvihill, and associated entries largely dealing with the pseudonymous Skoder. Where Mr. Mulvihill is concerned, I would expect that there are two very different, almost diametrically opposed, schools of thought: those defending him (understandably enough) and those who have long viewed him skeptically, in contempt, and/or such (also understandably, or not incomprehensibly).
I didn’t expect to tap into such a wellspring of interest on the local issues of Mr. Mulvihill and Skoder (and I am not as expert in Mr. Mulvihill as others are in the local area). But while, in general with this blog, I try to be fair in choosing my topics primarily with an intuitive feel for what will make an interesting entry (and usually not trying to cater to “market considerations”), I know I run a risk with certain blog entries of stirring up some kind of hornet’s nest of interest, not all of it with full sympathy or respect for my view. And this leads me in those cases to wonder if there is some way I can mitigate any sense of disturbance I cause, or contrarily if I can add to a story to satisfy people’s curiosity, or their moral sense of wanting a fuller story out.
I have several blog entries in the works (not related to Mr. Mulvihill or Skoder) that should interest various constituencies, but I have been planning to make an entry on a specific set of incidents that occurred in summer 1989—related to both Mr. Mulvihill and Skoder—that are only tangentially hinted at (in pp. 8-9 if put in print-preview mode) in my November 21 blog entry, “The place of Skoder in my war stories, Part 1 of 2.” This projected entry’s topic is a somewhat different matter from the issue of what Mr. Mulvihill’s wrongdoings were (particularly ones he pleaded guilty to) in the 1980s that were the subject of so much press attention, but in a way it relates to them. (For preliminary suggestions about the legal stuff, see the last subsection of my November 27 entry.)
It will have to do with a news-story assignment Skoder gave me—and the way she defined the assignment was almost ludicrously paradoxical—that I made an elaborate attempt at doing, including with an interesting interview with Mr. Mulvihill and with others (among them, town government representatives). This story was not published, and generally speaking, it is really what triggered Skoder’s no longer using me for about two weeks in later summer 1989, at the end of which two weeks I resigned. This whole entry will take some time to put together (it has already been started), but when I post it—which might not be until late December or early January—it should prove interesting to those numerous people who have seemed interested in my entries on Mr. Mulvihill and on Skoder.
