YNPOSSYBULL!

Website Moved to JeremyHatch.com

2009-05-13T12:23:00.001-07:00

My website has permanently moved to JeremyHatch.com. Over the next few weeks, posts will gradually disappear from this site, before the site itself disappears into the ether. Or at least into the Internet Archive.

Rare but not Collectible: Link+ to the Rescue

2008-09-22T18:46:00.000-07:00

Recently I learned about the San Francisco Public Library's participation in a great program called Link+, which allows you to borrow books from any participating library. Most of the libraries are in the Bay Area, and a large number of libraries outside it, in California and Nevada, have also joined the consortium. It's a lot like the old Interlibrary Loan System, but a lot more efficient and friction-free. With Interlibrary Loan, you had to fill out a request form and wait for a month or more; with Link+ the wait time is a matter of days, and you place the request like a normal request, from inside the library's online catalog. All you need is a valid library card. The end result for patrons is that you can get your hands on just about any hard-to-find book that you might need for research in less than a week's time.

It's a powerful tool. For years I've been looking for a book by Geoff Dyer called Ways of Telling: it's a critical study of the English writer John Berger, published as a paperback original in 1985, and so far as I know, never reprinted. Of course it never will be published again; few people would be interested in a critical survey that only covers 3/5ths of the subject's career, and I doubt that Dyer is preparing new chapters on the work Berger has done in the intervening decades. More than that, it has been a long time since 1972, the year in which he won a Booker Prize for his novel G. and also achieved immense influence with a television program about art appreciation called Ways of Seeing (still a popular book). His fame is mostly confined to Europe; it's safe to say that in America, only those with a near-obsessive interest in Berger will seek out this book at all.

There may be only a small number of people answering to that description, but there are enough of us to make the book extremely hard to find. For one thing, Ways of Telling is the only comprehensive survey of Berger's career in existence, so it's valuable even though it ends with the mid-80's. What's more, it is written by Geoff Dyer, a man who has written at least two masterpieces himself: the memoir Out of Sheer Rage and his book about photography, The Ongoing Moment. Anybody who has a keen interest in either author, or both, is going to want very badly to have a copy of this book in his hands.

As a result, it has fallen into that vast category of books termed "rare but not collectible" by Mick Sussman in a recent essay, Attack of the Megalisters, in the New York Times. Whenever I went looking on Amazon for a copy, the price for this book was invariably in the hundreds of dollars. Today I did a search and found three copies for $50 and one for $375. These were unacceptable prices for what I understood to be a 200-page paperback, probably an apprentice work nowhere near the brilliance of Rage. (Having read most of it now, I can confirm that it is a well-written and useful text but not worth such prices.) For years, then, I simply hoped that I would stumble across it in a bookstore like Adobe Books, places where disorganization is a virtue, or the organization scheme is eccentric, and the owner might not always know the value of one title or another.

In the end, what connected me with the book was Link+. A search on that system turned up four copies in the whole consortium, and I requested the closest one, from the SF State library. Within a week, my copy had arrived at Main Library, and a search that I'd been on for at least five years was finished, and the book was in my hands. I just returned it today, after photocopying every page for my research, of course, at a total cost of one hour and $9. Not bad for an obscure book of interest to nobody but a handful of eccentrics like me.

Brian Doyle on Rejection Letters and Editing

2008-09-18T13:54:00.000-07:00

Over at the Kenyon Review, there is an entertaining and clever essay, "No," by one Brian Doyle, on the vast subject of rejection letters and editing in general. He's the editor of the University of Portland magazine.

Fantastic quote:

After lo these many years as a magazine editor I have settled on a single flat sentence for my own use (“Thanks for letting me read your work, but it’s not quite right for this magazine,” a sentence I have come to love for the vast country of not quite right, into which you could cram an awful lot of sins), but I still have enduring affection for the creative no, such as this gem sent to a writer by a Chinese publication: “We have read your manuscript with boundless delight, and if we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of a lower standard. And, as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition and beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity.”

[via ol' reliable Ninja George way up and over there in ol' beautiful Toronto.]

A Declaration of Independence

2008-09-17T14:04:00.000-07:00

For almost four years now I've been working on a particular novel manuscript. (Not every working day solid for four years, of course; if that had been the case, I probably would have finished it a long time ago.) The many problems it still has would be tedious to recount in detail, so let me just mention the two fundamental problems: 1) on several levels, the manuscript is more false than it is true, and 2) it is basically just boring.

The first problem has an obvious cause: much of the manuscript was written before I moved to San Francisco, where the book is set, and also before I knew much at all about the art world. As a result, a lot of it is couched in false conceptions of both, with fatal results. It's not a surface matter, either -- the falseness goes right down to certain aspects of the conflicts that drive the plot. That is not a trivial problem.

Though it sounds worse, the second problem is actually less of an issue. I think it springs from the fact that the manuscript as it is spends far too much time on two characters who, strictly speaking, just don't deserve the attention. They're immature in key respects, and so they just aren't conflicted in a way that makes for interesting reading for 15,000 words.

Although I wasn't able to articulate these problems a few months ago, I was aware of them on some level, and they caused me to lose enthusiasm for the whole project. I barely worked on it the entire summer, and a few weeks ago, I even went so far as to tell my wife that I was giving up on the thing entirely.

But then about a week after I made that declaration, I reconsidered my position. I just couldn't allow myself to abandon the project altogether. Obviously, I didn't want to just throw out hundreds of hours of work unless the project was really unsalvageable, and it didn't seem quite that bad. The characters I have are good ones, and I have some interesting ideas in my outline. Between them, there is great potential for a compelling story; I'm just haven't told it, so far. More basically, I just didn't want to admit failure without giving it one more honest shot. That seemed pathetic to me.

As a result of these reflections, I sat down last Monday and made a conservative estimate of how many working days remained in the year -- about seventy -- and determined that I would start writing at least a thousand words every day, using my outline as a starting point but not being too wedded to it. Seventy thousand words is a typical length for a novel, coming out to about 200 pages when published, so even if I trashed everything and started over, I would be fairly likely to have a complete manuscript of some sort before I go on vacation on December 20th.

So far I've kept the promise: my new manuscript contains just under 8,000 words. But writing it has had a funny effect on me. Even though there is so much wrong with the thing, this daily effort has gotten me engaged with the project in a way that I haven't been for a long time. And I'm taking inspiration from Michael Chabon, who once gave himself permission, five years into a failed manuscript, to drop it and start off on a fresh tack.

I'm beginning to suspect that there is one other reason my novel is boring so far. I think that the story hasn't even really started yet. I think I may have spent a few years working on a hundred pages that nobody needs to read -- background notes for my own use, essentially. Right now I think that the real first scene is about halfway through my outline, and I haven't even written it yet.

So this blog entry is a declaration of independence of sorts: independence from the past four years of half-successful work. Because I've already failed in one sense, I am hereby giving myself permission to try anything in the days ahead, and permission to disregard or use my prior work in any way that suits me. Today I'm starting over without quite starting over. I'm going to skip ahead and start writing that scene in the middle of the outline, where I think the novel should begin. I'm going to write it as though it were page one, and see what happens. What have I got to lose?

The Golden Reader

2008-09-10T16:49:00.001-07:00

Last week I added an AdSense button to this blog, mostly out of curiosity: I wanted to see how the system works, not because I expect anybody to click on them and thereby send me money. (That said, if you're reading this, make a habit of clicking on them, deal?) But after I signed up and added the code, I felt instant regret. I'm not hardcore anti-commercial by any means, but when you use AdSense, you have no control over what appears in that little square; I worried about what ads would run and how it might reflect on me and this blog.

But so far I've been pleased with the results. Because of the little thing I wrote about Scott Brick, the first ad lately has been for Audible.com, a company I can definitely recommend. I don't support certain aspects of their model -- like the annoying DRM scheme -- but an Audible subscription is the most cost-effective way to own great readings of books. Of course, you can always borrow from the library for free too.

Then I saw this ad: Golden Reader. It's a text-to-speech engine, using synthetic voices by AT&T and NeoSpeech -- the two voices available from the latter company, "Paul" and "Kate," sound especially non-robotic, and I can almost imagine listening to a whole book of either one. "Kate" in particular sounds like a smart, sassy (and very possibly sexy) android.

What's really intriguing about this, for me, is how it could help with composition. You often hear the advice to read your work-in-progress out loud, or to have somebody else read it to you, so you can get a better idea of what's working and what isn't in your text. In fact, some have recommended that your friend read it to you in an affectless way. Well, I just threw a draft of a blog post into their free version to see how it would work: talk about robotic and incomprehensible. I just drafted the text earlier this week, but even then, I sometimes didn't understand a word of the output. However, I could see this becoming a useful adjunct in regular work, given a better voice.

You can test the various voices with 200 characters of text right on the home page. It's especially hilarious to send English text through a French, German, or Spanish voice -- it's like listening to somebody with an accent so thick they can't make themselves understood no matter what. Give it a try!

New Review: On the Road

2008-09-10T14:24:00.000-07:00

On the Road: The Original Scroll Version was released in paperback a couple weeks ago; check out my review of it here on CurledUp.com.

The End of the Line

2008-09-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

Whenever I go to New York, I try to save money by taking the subway everywhere, and I've always been tempted to ride the train all the way to the end. I always want to know what it's like way out there at the end. Well, now I know: this interactive feature at the New York Times provides photos, film and stories from the end of every line (I think) in the NYC Subway system. Definitely don't miss this one.

Q&A with Scott Brick on eMusic.com

2008-09-08T18:00:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to audiobooks for at least fifteen or sixteen years now, and some of my fondest memories of particular books have to do with the audio versions rather than the printed versions, largely thanks to their talented narrators: Zorba the Greek as read by George Guidall is a good example of that; Joyce's "Portrait" read by Donal Donnelly is another. I've lately become aware of a new star narrator: Scott Brick. Among the recent books I've heard from him are A Perfect Mess and In Defense of Food. I just came across an interesting Q&A with Brick on eMusic, where he reveals some tricks of the trade: lots of breaks, Throat Coat tea, and salt on the tongue.

On The Bittersweet

2008-09-05T14:58:00.000-07:00

Check out this lovely passage from John Berger's latest novel, A to X, which I am reviewing in the winter issue of The Quarterly Conversation. The narrator is a young woman, A'ida, writing to her lover in prison:

As a child I thought almonds were like no other nut or fruit because I was convinced they were handmade. Today I know they contain soluble protein and that the bitter, as distinct from the sweet variety contains hydro-cyanic acid, the catalyst used for extracting gold and other pure metals from their ores, and, sometimes, for filling the little phial which can save us, when captured, from fates worse than death.

I knew, of course, about almond trees with their white blossoms. Bridal white, and I dreamt of being married with those flowers in my hair. [...] I knew about the trees, yet when I arranged the nuts in circles on the tabletop, I told myself that, long ago, it was a woman who had thought them up as a sweetmeat. Very long ago. She was a goddess, not a woman. A sweetmeat for her sweetheart. She concocted the first almond, tasted it, reduced the sugar, added oil, tasted it again, nodded, added a touch of cumin, and decided almonds were what she would make for her lover's return.

So, she gave instructions to a tree. It was the first graft, made with words, not with a cutting and rags. The next Spring the tree flowered and produced in June abundant almonds with the same taste as the one I'm biting now. Later the goddess's lover sailed away, never to return, and she grafted on to a second tree instructions for the bitter almond whose blossom is pinker, for it is mixed with drops of blood from a broken heart.

And while we're on the subject of the bittersweet: here's a short strip called Mr. Bookseller, by Darko Macan and Tihomir Celanovic, translated and scanned by this person. Sentimental, but a nice story all the same.

[Thanks to Kelsey Osgood for reminding me of the almond passage, and Jessa Crispin for the link to the strip.]

Comics: Seth on The Quiet Art of Cartooning

2008-09-04T14:47:00.000-07:00

This little essay by the cartoonist Seth is a nice piece about following such a solitary art. From his description I'd say that cartooning -- or at least fiction cartooning, such as Seth practices -- sounds exactly like fiction writing, which I practiced, unsuccessfully, for many years. Nonfiction writing has been quite a bit different, in that it often entails picking up the phone, getting out of the house, and meeting new people on a regular basis. I imagine that drawing nonfiction comics would be different in the same way -- although I can't think of anybody who is doing reportage in comics right now apart from Joe Sacco, and that's a life not too many people would want to pursue.

Don't miss the little included strip, Down the Stairs. My office is also down the stairs from the main part of the house, in a spare room by the garage, so I could really relate to that. Every morning, down the stairs.

And here's an illuminating Q&A with Seth from the same magazine.

Quote of the Day

2008-09-03T10:44:00.000-07:00

"I had been asked to write a brief essay for Gentlemen's Quarterly, which is not for gentlemen and comes out monthly, which makes its entire name a lie."
Joseph Epstein

[From "Grow Up, Why Dontcha?", in the Autumn 1997 issue of The American Scholar.]

Summer's Over

2008-09-02T15:05:00.000-07:00

I took August off, but summer is now officially over -- which in San Francisco means it's finally going to warm up a little -- and daily posting shall recommence with this little item today. It has been 34 days since the last post here, a defense of screen-based reading and writing that got links from both Kevin Kelly and Mark Hurst. Thanks to their interest in my post, I find that I now have a number of new subscribers and regular visitors. Welcome to Ynpossybull, new readers! I hope to keep things interesting for you.

In August I only published one substantial piece: a review of Michael Kammen's wonderful history of visual art controversies in American history. However, a couple have been finished and submitted to the relevant editors, and several more are in development. I expect to see them all through to print in September, so stay tuned.

Short Attention Span? It's Not Your Laptop, Mr. Carr: It's You

2008-07-29T11:14:00.000-07:00

The following essay is in response to this forum over at Britannica Blogs, which is itself a discussion of the Nick Carr piece, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, which I recently blogged about. In his article, Mr. Carr contends that the internet is fostering short attention spans and shallow reading, thereby fostering shallow thinking, and damaging the ability of users to concentrate on a single text for a long period of time. Carr of course entirely ignores the role of the user's intentions; his internet users seem to be helpless automatons, forced to click links and graze on RSS feeds against their own will by the nefarious machine.

As you might expect, Sven Birkerts has chimed in, and after all these years, he still seems to believe that a lengthy text is somehow vitiated when it is read online, in the presence of other texts, otherwise known as hyperlinks. (As if reading a book in the public library doesn't expose you to similar temptations!) And then this other guy Clay Shirky foolishly proclaims that literary culture is so 19th century, and the web will kill it once and for all.

What follows is a skeptical response to all of the above. Not surprisingly, I find myself agreeing most with Kevin Kelly in this forum. I think the web and our new tools will inevitably replace paper technologies if only for economic reasons -- and that we have a huge opportunity now to determine the form they will take in the decades ahead. I also think we have the challenge of keeping our tools subservient to our humanity -- a challenge that every technological advance has posed to date.

. . .

One of the things that surprised me most in reading this whole debate is this: nobody has yet acknowledged that it is entirely possible to read, be absorbed in, and thoroughly enjoy a book-length work of literature (or a book-length argument) on a screen. And not just contemporary works, but classics too. Not simply in spite of the availability of the web and recently-developed technologies, but because of it.

My discussion is going to take us slightly away from the web for a moment, but bear with me: I'll make the connection presently.

Four years ago I bought my second PDA, to replace an old, creaky green-screen model I'd had for years. I'd read (and composed) a lot of plain text on that old PDA, and I enjoyed that well enough. But this new PDA had the advantage that it could display DRM-protected PDF files. That meant I could now read not only public-domain classics from Project Gutenberg on it, but also contemporary titles purchased from Amazon and other online vendors (they do exist).

With this new power, I bought and devoured Haruki Murakami's masterpiece Kafka on the Shore -- not a short book. Because I was interested in Proust and had just read Swann's Way with such enjoyment, I bought (and read!) the PDF versions of Within a Budding Grove and the Penguin Lives biography. (It wasn't so expensive from Amazon, back in the day.) I also read Norman Mailer's book The Spooky Art, no longer available (for now) as PDF. Those are just the titles that really stand out in my memory. I know I read dozens more, mostly business and self-help books that seemed to offer something to me. My list of classics from Project Gutenberg was just as packed. I remember reading Tolstoy's trilogy of memoirs (the Hogarth translation), DeQuincey's Confessions, and a great deal of Robert Louis Stevenson's travel writings. I read some Montaigne, and Seneca. All this over a period of a couple years, when I was also reading quite a number of other things -- mostly magazines and novels -- in paper form.

My point in citing all that is to exonerate the medium of the screen itself. There is nothing inherently bad about reading or writing on a screen, at least these days. So long as the contrast is good and you can turn the brightness down to a level suitable for hours of reading, so long as there's enough text between "page turns" that you're not pressing a button more than once every 200 words or so, so long as the battery life is long enough and you can sit comfortably while using the device, you should have no trouble getting lost in a long text.

Now, let me bring it back to the web. You might raise the objection that reading a PDF or a text file on a PDA is not reading "in cyberspace." After all, I did load that device with these book-length texts, and it was disconnected from the web the whole time. Those texts contained no hyperlinks to tempt me off the lines I was reading.

All that is true, but it seems to me a distinction without a difference. I sold that PDA to a refurbisher a long time ago, and in the meantime I've used two laptops, both with wireless internet connectivity. (I'm using one of them now.) In both cases I find myself perfectly capable of switching to a long text when I want to, and concentrating on it for long stretches of time, whether for pleasure or for work. Recently I devoted two entire days to reading and digesting Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture, in PDF form, on my laptop. The entire time that I was focused on his arguments, I might have switched over and checked my email, or read my RSS feeds, or I might have made a blog post of my own, but I didn't -- at least until I needed a break.

Well, what about hyperlinked web pages? What then? Aren't those links irresistably tempting to click? In a word, no. For example, I've spent hours of my free time reading and contemplating this very discussion, beginning with Nick Carr's piece -- which I read online, and yes, made a blog post about -- without losing my focus. And anyway, you can always turn the wireless off.

Which brings me to my main point: your ability to concentrate on a long text is not a function of the medium of delivery, but a function of your personal discipline and your aims in reading. If you sit down to read War and Peace with the aim of enjoying yourself, whether you have paper in your hands or plastic, you expect to be focused on it -- joyfully focused, one hopes -- for hours on end, perhaps the entire day. Whereas if you sit down to catch up on your RSS feeds -- and might I point out how similar that activity is to catching up on your magazine and newspaper reading, in the "paper economy"? -- you expect to spend your attention in short bursts, five minutes here, twenty there, perhaps an hour on a long article that especially interests you.

What about writing and thinking? Developing a long argument or meditation? Everything I said above about screen brightness and so on applies here, plus three simple words: full-screen text editor. Any program with a full-screen mode will do, but my personal favorite is DarkRoom, a clone of the Mac program WriteRoom.

I hate to be so bald about it, but my visceral reaction to Nick Carr's piece was not the internet is destroying everybody's attention span, but rather this guy obviously needs to take a month-long retreat somewhere and get his discipline back. My strong sense is that, medical conditions aside, the responsibility for an individual's failure to concentrate rests with the individual who can't bring himself to do it, not with the potential distractions his environment presents.

Nor do I think that the skill of focus will be any less relevant in the decades to come. The ability to concentrate on complex, abstract ideas for long stretches of time, despite potential distractions, is essential to success in the present economy, and it seems likely to remain so indefinitely. And a skill that you need for work, a skill you practice for forty hours a week, will have a way of infiltrating your leisure as well. Focus is a skill I find well-honed in almost everybody I know -- they often refer to it as "work" or "reading for pleasure" -- and everybody I know is deeply involved with the web. They use it to make a living, to make and connect with friends, and to find entertainment, which includes the possibility of deep reading, along with YouTube.

At this point you're wondering what my exact demographic is. Well, if anybody is actually damaged by the web, I would be among them. I'm thirty, and I came of age in the 1990s, in an out-of-the-way corner of the Silicon Valley itself. By my reckoning, about 85% of my early friends went on to be software engineers. Consequently, my memory of a world without the interconnectedness of the web is pretty dim. (The Harper's forum that Kevin Kelly exceprts ran two years before I started my first subscription to the magazine.) I dialed in to local BBS services when I was thirteen, and had access to the net via a friend's UNIX system by the time I was fifteen. Today I live in San Francisco, where it's difficult to even get in touch with certain people if you don't have a smartphone. Those of my friends in their early twenties cannot even dimly recall a world without Google and Wikipedia and a web-connected gadget in every other pocket, never mind the web itself. For them, it has always been thus.

That earlier world, the one without the web and this connectivity, the one without Project Gutenberg and Google and Facebook and smartphones, feels like a Dark Ages to me; it's not one that I would really want to go back and live in once more. Contra the fears of Sven Birkerts, I would feel more isolated, not less. By now I would have lost touch with almost all of the old friends I'm still in contact with, and I would have lost the power to easily reach out to strangers and make new friends of them. More to the point, I'd also be less well-informed: I would have lost the incredible power given me by the web to direct and focus my attention on whatever slice of information I happen to need to advance my personal, intellectual, and creative goals. Simply put, the web has enriched my life -- my reading and writing life in addition to my social life -- much, much more than it has impoverished it. If, indeed, it has done that at all.

In my experience, the distractions the web offers are entirely ignorable when you want to ignore them, and the web also enables deep research and contemplation to a degree that stretches far beyond the invention of the open-stack public library. There are drawbacks to every age, but I don't think that the drawbacks of ours will include the total obliteration of prolonged thought and meditation, deep research, and the joy of getting lost in a really good work of literature. People will continue to require all of those things, both for work and for personal development, and they will not go neglected for long.

Gary Panter on VBS.TV

2008-07-26T21:08:00.000-07:00

VBS.TV has a 4-parts-plus-a-bonus video series with designer/painter/comic arts legend Gary Panter, and every one of its 20-odd minutes is worth watching. I'd never seen him before and always imagined he'd look something like Henry Rollins; instead he more resembles a cross between John Malkovich and Norman Mailer. (Which isn't a bad thing, mind you.) Here's a link to the first part; the other four are accessible via the scrollbar at the right.

Oh, and: don't be too put off by the weird zombie raver muppet videos at the front of each one. I saw more details with every replay.

VBS.TV says:

Gary Panter has been up to so much shit over the past three decades it is literally crazy. He’s painted, played and recorded music, made puppets, drawn for magazines—all of this stuff extremely good by the way—and was one of the main designers for Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the show that single-handedly warped an entire generation’s mind for the better. And this isn’t even what he’s known for, which is comics. Do you know how long it takes to make comics? Unless you’re just plopping them out like Sam Henderson it takes for-ever. Somehow, amid his bazillions of side-projects Gary made time to create the Jimbo and Dal Tokyo comics and flesh them out to insane, philosophical proportions, either of which series would have been enough to seal his reputation for all time. Oh yeah, and he also teaches college and puts on 60s-acid-test-style light shows with Josh White, one of the originators of the form. Fuck’s sake, right?

Picturebox just put out a huge two-volume monograph of his work, which you can get here. Be prepared to feel pretty unmotivated though, unless you’re Billy Childish or something.

By the way, VBS.TV appears to be nothing short of amazing. Check out their mission statement. Their creative director is Spike Jonze. Say no more.

This whole story comes to you courtesy of this post on the Juxtapoz blog.

Read Fiction, Conquer the World

2008-07-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

Says Jeff on The Syntax of Things: "A group of researchers in Toronto have just released results of a study showing that 'bookworms have exceptionally strong people skills.' This comes as news to those of us bookworms who pretty much can't stand people. I kid."

Jeff extracts the essence here, but you may as well read the full article (estimated reading time: 2 minutes). Key quote:

"Fiction is really about how to get around in the social world, which is not as easy as one might think," said Keith Oatley, one of the researchers and a professor in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto. "People who read fiction give themselves quite a bit of practice in understanding that. And also, I think reading fiction sort of prompts one to think about these questions - you know, what are these people up to?"

To me these results seem entirely predictable; after all, narrative (whether fictional or not) is our most primal and intuitive tool for analyzing social life. Whether the story is gossip about your coworkers and friends, whether it takes place in the most mundane setting ever or thousands of light-years away from Earth, or doesn't even appear to involve humans at all, narrative is inherently about the social relations of human beings.

But it's good to have somebody out there explicitly verifying these intuitions. The results of such research could be useful in satisfying those with a narrow, utilitarian view of life and education. Such people are rumored to exist; fortunately, I don't know any myself.

Back at the Starting Line

2008-07-01T18:07:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I went back to work after a month or so mostly away from it all, apart from minimal efforts on SF Metblog and here. It was a refreshing but also mostly unplanned vacation. Its most obvious result was a formidable pile of magazines and scraps of paper and books, and unopened snail mail, and all kinds of other clutter strewn across my desk and tables, and the floor of the studio, and to some degree even throughout the house. (Books by the bedside, notepads in the sitting room, and so on.) All that physical clutter was matched by a certain amount of electronic clutter: eighty or so unread emails, ten or fifteen notefiles in Google Docs and on my desktop, and nearly five hundred unread blog posts in Google Reader.

The only thing truly free of clutter was my brain. Indeed it felt empty. Even now I have only the vaguest idea of where I left off with my projects and email conversations. It's as though I've hit the 'reset' button on my life. Not a bad mental state to be in: it makes me feel ready to face my personal goals once more.

Most of yesterday was consumed by an out-of-town meeting and numerous errands, but once home, the first item of business was to collect everything up and deposit it all on my desk. This is something I learned to do as a child. If you want to tidy the place up in a hurry, centralize all the clutter on the bed or a table. As an adult I learned a corollary rule: if you have guests coming, centralize the clutter in a room with a door you can shut. And lock, ideally.

Well, it's never fun to start the day with a desk full of junk -- especially not that much junk. But today I viewed it as my alpha task, with nothing else of greater importance. It took four hours, but eventually I cleared away all the irrelevant stuff and got myself to the starting line once again.

So here goes; another month awaits.

Googleditzen

2008-06-18T12:31:00.000-07:00

One of the pieces that caught my attention this past week was this one by Nick Carr, in which he laments that reading on the web trains you to skim extensively, reading longer articles in a superficial way, if you read them at all. Carr writes:

What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

To me all this is bunk. (I was about to joke that I only read the first few paragraphs and skimmed the rest, but it's actually not true.) It may well be so for that guy, and for the others who provide Carr with his anecdotes, but not for me. Every day I read about 40 blogs via Google Reader, but I certainly haven't lost the ability or the inclination to read War and Peace. More commonly, I still keep up fairly well with my 40 magazine and newspaper subscriptions (which also involves a lot of skimming and skipping) along with the books I'm reading, both for fun and for review.

Plus, I'm a blogger myself, which provides another way to look at the problem. It's true that each week, I spend about five hours writing 5 to 10 articles under 600 words. But that definitely doesn't prevent me from writing one to three 1,500 word articles each month; and so far it hasn't prevented me from making progress on a novel manuscript, now around 27,000 words in length. There are people who read all these things. I know it, because I hear from them. They email me. They aren't always the same people, but the readers exist.

As for Carr's concern about losing "the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter," I really don't share it. I believe that contemplation is a fundamental human need, and that people will find the time for it when they need it. Whether that contemplation comes along with a long-form essay, or a book, is another matter.

But then, the mere presence of a book has never guaranteed quality contemplation. The Bible and The Fountainhead are obvious examples of books that have clearly inspired great thought in fertile minds, but which have, much more often, inspired the kind of contemplation that ends by narrowing horizons instead of expanding them. Carr also writes that "deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking." Really? I think not. Just as often, it seems to be indistinguishable from slavishly retracing the recorded thoughts of another -- which can feel like thinking, but isn't.

For a different kind of response to Carr's article, check out Kevin Kelly's post on the question Will We Let Google Make us Smarter?

And one last thing: if Google has in fact made a lot of people stupid, I propose the following, rather Yiddish-sounding term for all those unfortunates: Googleditzen. Ein Googleditz, in the singular.

You Can't Blog with a Comp Book

2008-06-18T11:10:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, the sunny weather began in San Francisco; the major effect of this was to yank me inexorably away from my computer, and into the outdoors. It's never quite as dramatic as the sun rising in Antarctica after ten weeks of total darkness, but still: genuine outdoor warmth is rare up on the peninsula, and you've got to run out and take advantage of it while it exists. So, what little work did get done, was done outside, generally with paper and pencil.

Obviously, you can't blog with a comp book. But you can make headway on your reviewing assignments. After many months of on-again, off-again work, I finally finished with the exhaustive (and often, exhausting) Visual Shock, which I'll be reviewing for Curled Up in the next week. This week I get to start work on the scroll version of On The Road, which I've really been looking forward to doing. The publication of that review will probably be timed to the paperback release in late August.

Interview with Robert Toledano

2008-06-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

The other day I posted about the photography of Robert Toledano. Over at The Morning News, Rosecrans Baldwin has a brief interview with the artist about his new book, Phone Sex.

Banville on Simenon

2008-06-09T14:30:00.000-07:00

At LA Weekly, John Banville has an entertaining and interesting essay about Georges Simenon, with a particular focus on his romans durs:

As one contemplates the life and work of Georges Simenon, the question inevitably arises: Was he human?

Before New York Review Books started their comprehensive re-issue of these titles, they were difficult enough to find that I originally just bought them in French. (Bay Area residents can pay a visit to the very fine European Book Company.) Here's the publisher's Simenon page. I can recommend Dirty Snow and Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, which coincidentally are the two that Banville writes about at length; the others I either haven't finished or never started on. Monsieur Monde Vanishes is next for me. The more accurate French title is La Fuite de Monsieur Monde — his "flight," though obviously that word would make you think the novel was set on an airplane.

[Link via The Morning News.]

Lynda Barry on TOTN

2008-06-09T12:30:00.000-07:00

Lynda Barry recently appeared on Talk of the Nation, in which she discusses her new book, What It Is, which is about creativity. As it happens, I just got around to reading Best American Comics 2006, which included a few pages from it. It looks pretty good!

[Link via Bookslut.]

So What Else is Going On?

2008-06-09T10:30:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, Ron Silliman posted a long, fascinating piece about why last Thursday's monster roundup was even more monstrous than usual, and by implication why all his roundups are so big. Thursday's post, with 122 sections, was not intended

to overwhelm you, but to indicate rather just how much is now going on in poetry. These represent just five days' worth of activity on the web of news stories, noteworthy blog comments & interesting new web sites. And it’s not “National Poetry Month” anymore either, which artificially pumps up the number of events and stories in the “regular” media concerning the existence of poetry. I’m sure that I missed many other items, especially blog notes, as interesting as those I chose to include.

A little later:

My point is that the problems of poetry today have, at least in terms of what’s going on, very little to do with scarcity & much more to do with hyper-abundance, a condition that poetry’s traditional institutions – schools, the publishing industry, arts programs in general – institutions that, at best, represent overlapping concerns that sometimes touch upon poetry, are ill-equipped to handle.

Silliman goes on to discuss the economics of publishing poetry — in this case, the economics of attention rather than the economics of finance — and how it has changed over the last fifty years. In the midst of that, he offers a typically incisive critique of a poetry contest, in this case the Lambda Literary Awards, which he basically indicts for being too commercial. That's not as much of an oxymoron as it sounds, because (like all awards) the whole point of them is to select a single title for promotion in bookstores, out of the 4,000 or so that are coming out every year. A prize sticker on a book says one thing: "if you buy one book this year, buy this one; the other 3,999 can be safely ignored." Which is hardly the case.

Faced with such contests, Silliman offers his enormous-to-staggeringly-huge link roundups as a corrective: "Think of these as alternative logics – one a process of winnowing everything down to a single book from a trade press, and that long list of links here Thursday as a counterbalance intended to suggest that the world of poetry is not like this at all."

[The post that sparked the discussion is here; today's roundup is here.

Poetry: Read it When You're Drunk

2008-06-05T16:30:00.000-07:00

Another light item for the afternoon, this one from Paper Cuts at the New York Times. A few choice quotes about poetry taken from the new book, Quote Poet Unquote, by Dennis O'Driscoll:

“There’s nothing like a punch in the mouth to remind you that that poem about your next-door neighbor was not as clever as you thought.”
— Simon Armitage

“I like reading poetry at night — a doctor I know claims that this is because ‘poetry is the only thing you can read when you’re drunk.’”
— John Lanchester

More here.

George Takei to Wed Partner

2008-06-05T14:30:00.000-07:00

Now here's something that warms my secret Trekkie heart. George Takei and his partner of the past two decades plan to marry September 14 in LA, in a wedding for which Walter Koenig and Nichelle Nichols will have the places of honor. Leonard Nimoy will be among the guests, but not William Shatner. Big surprise there. Speaking of surprises, Takei's partner Brad Altman had one for him:

As for what they'll wear on their big day, Altman said they'll both walk down the aisle in white tuxedoes, which seemed to catch Takei off-guard.
"Well, now that you've announced it on the air, I guess it's settled," he said.

William Grimes on 1001 Books...

2008-06-05T12:30:00.000-07:00

This one's been going around for a while. William Grimes takes issue with the rec book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, or at least he takes issue with their recommendations. Eight books by Paul Auster when a couple would probably do? After all,

when Professor Boxall brings death into the picture, he sets the bar very high. Let’s have a look at some of these mandatory titles. Not only is it not necessary to read “Interview With the Vampire” by Anne Rice before you die, it is also probably not necessary to read it even if, like Lestat, you are never going to die. If I were mortally ill, and a well-meaning friend pressed Anaïs Nin’s “Delta of Venus” into my trembling hands, I would probably leave this world with a curse on my lips.

Here's a bunch of books to help you feel inadequate in other ways as well.