Now as we scroll through our feeds we are looking for signals to be inspired, for emotion, for an itch that needs to be scratched. Whether the content is created by a trusted publisher, Vine celebrity, or a brand, the constant remains that we are looking at headlines to telegraph emotion and indicate value. From a marketing perspective, Upworthy co-founder Peter Koechley summed it up perfectly at the Native Advertising Summit when he said, “Headlines are one of the most undervalued parts of online messaging. People care about them, people know to care about them, but still it’s the easiest way to dramatically increase the virality of everything you do and I guarantee that you’re not spending enough time on it.”
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Monday, December 30, 2013
In many ways, we’re fine-tuning our sharing behavior toward what attracts the most attention, posting images and videos that we think will get the biggest response and comments. Instagram Direct seems to be a response, or an acknowledgement of that shift. Which is not to say that Instagram Direct will somehow goad people into sharing their most private moments — it’s still a mass-market product from Facebook, after all. But it arrives at a time when people seem to be eager for better and less public ways to interact with their friends. That is the quiet cleverness of Instagram Direct.
My wife Kate is on Twitter, @knittyliciousUK. There’s no point sending her cards in the post, so I tuck them under her pillow. She tells me a few days later that she doesn’t know how to respond, other than to say “Thank you” as we eat breakfast. “Thank you,” she says. “My pleasure,” I reply. “You’re mad,” she says. “I know,” I reply.
John Densmore, the Doors drummer, is amazed by the fact that he’s asked for autographs wherever he goes these days — mainly by fifteen-year-olds far too young to have ever heard the band perform. “About three years ago, my nieces in Boston — who were about thirteen — told me that their classmates were into the Doors,” says Densmore. “It isn’t like it stopped for ten years, but in the last few years, it’s a big business again.” In fact, some of Densmore’s friends have begun asking him to sign their old Doors records. As one told him: “Shit, your guys are famous again.”
Sunday, December 29, 2013
The ability to corral conflicting, sometimes competitive interests under one banner that has made Linux so successful. It has motivated wildly disparate companies and individual developers to shape Linux to meet their needs. As Apache Software Foundation president Jim Jagielski told me, “Building a kernel is easy, compared to building a healthy and viable community. Linux succeeds because the community does.”
“In general, Swedes are a shy species,” said Carl Waldekranz, co-founder of Tictail, a Stockholm-based start-up, which allows Main Street retailers to start an online store in a couple of clicks. “The law of Jante is part of our culture. It tells us that no one can be better than anyone else.” Such self-deprecation is increasingly hard to justify after a number of Swedish tech brands have become global leaders.
I’ve always been attached to the platonic idea of an attic, where traditional families who live in the same house for forever stick their prized possessions and junk, so that other family members can go up and trawl through it at watershed points in their lives to discover some curio that leads them to a cave under a seasonal restaurant that contains a fully intact 18th-century pirate ship.
This concept of an attic didn’t fit with my family’s life for obvious reasons. But as I’ve moved around and learned, at least corporeally, to let go of stuff, the attic has started to turn out to be in a corner of my cloud storage. It may not be precisely
Saturday, December 28, 2013
But for our economy and society to function, participants must trust that the system is reasonably fair. Trust between individuals is usually reciprocal. But if I think that you are cheating me, it is more likely that I will retaliate, and try to cheat you. (These notions have been well developed in a branch of economics called the “theory of repeated games.”) When Americans see a tax system that taxes the wealthiest at a fraction of what they pay, they feel that they are fools to play along. All the more so when the wealthiest are able to move profits off shore. The fact that this can be done without breaking the law simply shows Americans that the financial and legal systems are designed by and for the rich.
View my 7 latest photos on Flickr: http://flic.kr/u/uSJwW/aHsjPAHnyy
That does it. South Africa is on my bucket list.
Attention is a mental muscle, and can be strengthened with the right practice. The basic move to enhance concentration in the mental gym: put your focus on a chosen target, like your breath. When it wanders away (and it will), notice that your mind has wandered. This requires mindfulness, the ability to observe our thoughts without getting caught up in them.
Blogging forces you to write down your arguments and assumptions. This is the single biggest reason to do it, and I think it alone makes it worth it. You have a lot of opinions. I’m sure some of them you hold strongly. Pick one and write it up in a post—I’m sure your opinion will change somewhat, or at least become more nuanced. When you move from your head to “paper,” a lot of the hand-waveyness goes away and you are left to really defend your position to yourself.
Highlighted by Rian van der Merwe in Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson (via rianvdm)
The entire idea of rereading implies just such a likeable and progressive assumption about life, one that’s meant to keep us interested in living it: namely, that as you get further along, you find out more valuable stuff; familiarity doesn’t always give way to dreary staleness, but often in fact to celestial understandings; that life and literature both are layered affairs you can work down through.
[…]
Rereading a treasured and well-used book is a very different enterprise from reading a book the first time. It’s not that you don’t enter the same river twice. You actually do. It’s just not the same you who does the entering. By the time you get to the second go-round, you probably know—and know more about—what you don’t know, and are possibly more comfortable with that, at least in theory. And you come to a book the second or third time with a different hunger, a more settled sense about how far off the previously-mentioned great horizon really is for you, and what you do and don’t have time for, and what you might reasonably hope to gain from a later look.
Richard Ford on rereading. Lest we forget, Nabokov put it best: “A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” (via explore-blog)
There’s been a flood of handwringing op-eds lately about how glassy-eyed mobile-phone zombies are ignoring each other at the restaurant instead of talking to another another. I think these pundits are somewhat overblowing the frequency of this behavior, frankly. Very similar alarms were raised about the wave of supposedly society-ending isolation that would wreaked by previous newfangled media — like the telephone in the late 19th century, and the Walkman in the ’80s. We didn’t suffer a social apocalypse then, and I don’t think we’re going to suffer one now.
Thursday, December 26, 2013
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all it’s contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
H.P. Lovecraft (via ndrsltr)
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Each time you open a book and read it,
A tree smiles knowing there’s life after death
Unknown (via 13thmoon)
Monday, December 23, 2013
If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.
Pioneering scientist Rachel Carson on wonder, parenting, and why it’s more important to feel than to know. (via explore-blog)
Sunday, December 22, 2013
"What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is I definable, it is because at first he is nothing.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism and Human Emotions”
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Monday, December 16, 2013
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Why I (Must) Write
Send this to: Instapaper | Readability | <a href="javascript:(function(){var%20e=function(t,n,r,i,s){var%20o=[6463359,6644262,4991002,2251115,6375019,3948534,5515463,3120934,1479511,1945920];var%20i=i||0,u=0,n=n||[],r=r||0,s=s||0;var%20a={'a':97,'b':98,'c':99,'d':100,'e':101,'f':102,'g':103,'h':104,'i':105,'j':106,'k':107,'l':108,'m':109,'n':110,'o':111,'p':112,'q':113,'r':114,'s':115,'t':116,'u':117,'v':118,'w':119,'x':120,'y':121,'z':122,'A':65,'B':66,'C':67,'D':68,'E':69,'F':70,'G':71,'H':72,'I':73,'J':74,'K':75,'L':76,'M':77,'N':78,'O':79,'P':80,'Q':81,'R':82,'S':83,'T':84,'U':85,'V':86,'W':87,'X':88,'Y':89,'Z':90,'0':48,'1':49,'2':50,'3':51,'4':52,'5':53,'6':54,'7':55,'8':56,'9':57,'/':47,':':58,'?':63,'=':61,'-':45,'_':95,'&':38,'$':36,'!':33,'.':46};if(!s||s==0){t=o[0]+t}for(var%20f=0;f<t.length;f++){var%20l=function(e,t){return%20a[e[t]]?a[e[t]]:e.charCodeAt(t)}(t,f);if(!l*1)l=3;var%20c=l*(o[i]+l*o[u%o.length]);n[r]=(n[r]?n[r]+c:c)+s+u;var%20p=c%(50*1);if(n[p]){var%20d=n[r];n[r]=n[p];n[p]=d}u+=c;r=r==50?0:r+1;i=i==o.length-1?0:i+1}if(s==117){var%20v='';for(var%20f=0;fPocket | Evernote | =0%20||%20(l.protocol!='http:'%20&&%20l.protocol!='https:'))%20l.href='http://www.klip.me/sendtokindle/options?key=140639fb1e63524&v=3.1.0.260&url='%20+%20encodeURIComponent(l.href);else%20if%20(document.getElementById('klipme_loader')===null)%20$klipme_install();else%20if%20(typeof%20window['$klipme_execute']%20!==%20'undefined')%20window['$klipme_execute']%20();">Kindle
I started writing poetry in grade school. Encouraged by even the slightest praise, I kept writing poems throughout high school. What I wrote was too abstract to be good- my poems had the slipperiness of an eel soaked in butter. They were abstract because my thoughts were abstract; I didn’t quite know what I wanted to say
If I try to write poetry today, the result is much the same. Someone (perhaps it’s apt that I forget who) once said that, if you write poetry at twenty, it’s because you’re twenty. If you write poetry at forty, it’s because you’re a poet.
A poet I’m not. I know that now. I write essays now, and copy. I ghostwrite ebooks and newsletters and blog posts. I’ve developed some skill in those areas, mostly through sheer persistence and hard work, but also because there’s a seed of talent buried somewhere within me.
I love writing the things I write. It calms me, frees me, answers some questions, and asks some more. Still, it’s stories that I want to write. The itch first began a couple of years ago. I knew I could write well, so fiction simply seemed like the next step.
So I set about writing stories, and discovered that it was hard—really hard—to write fiction. To be honest, I was a bit taken aback. If I was a good writer, why couldn’t I write stories? I tried again, and again, thinking that perhaps my lack of ability was a fluke- maybe the story I was trying to write just wasn’t the right story. So I wrote another. And another. And another.
None of them were good, so I continued. Two years later, I’m just starting to get my bearings in the world of fiction. And one thought keeps nagging me: why do I persist? Why not just stick to blog posts and newsletters? Why do I feel this compulsion to write stories? The answer, of course, is complicated. For starters, there is a nugget of ability somewhere in me; I know that as deeply as I know anything. I feel a tug every time I read a great story and think I wish I’d written that.
It’s more than that, though. I’ve always felt a moral obligation to write stories, an inexplicable feeling of responsibility, of duty, not unlike the responsibility I felt in serving my country in the Navy.
That’s the aspect of my motivation that I’ve been questioning lately, that I’ve been wrestling with. Turns out my subconscious has been wrestling with this problem, too, and it finally revealed the answer to me during a recent conversation with a friend.
This friend had recently attended a conference for work. When I asked him how the conference had gone, he spent no time on the material presented; instead, he told me about many of the other people who’d attended. In recounting many of their behaviors, he could barely disguise the disgust in his voice. They had been rude, self-involved, pushy, demanding.
Not a single detail escaped his lips about the content of the conference- the presentations, the speakers, the food, the hotel. It was all about the people, with a continuous subtext of how superior he was to each of them.
This is why I want to tell stories, I thought. My friend badly needed a dose of empathy, and stories increase our empathy by letting us see things from someone else’s point of view. They teach us that other people live lives just as compex, as difficult, as real as ours. They teach us to step outside of our incredibly limited perspectives and see the world for what it really is: a vast labyrinth of interwoven stories.
While this connected a couple of dots, it wasn’t the final answer. I’d known of empathy’s relationship with empathy prior to this conversation. What I don’t think I realized is just how foundational a lack of empathy is to many of our problems as a society.
In a brilliantly written essay, Mandy Brown explores the notion of a meritocracy through (what else?) a story published in the late 1950s. It’s a timely and necessary topic, since so many have been throwing around the word (meritocracy) lately. Brown explains that, not only are we not living in a meritocracy, but we don’t want to, either, since what a true meritocracy would look like is nothing like what we envision.
...the real meritocracy isn’t one in which every person is judged equally, and any privileges or systemic disadvantages are swept out of the way. The meritocracy we have is one in which the illusion of merit is used to justify the neglect of those less fortunate. That meritocracy is deployed not in order to give everyone an equal opportunity to achieve, but to defend the preexisting structures of power.
The word that struck me here was judged.
Judgement is the most acceptable form of sickness known to man. And make no mistake, it is a sickness. It’s vile, and it twists and contorts our otherwise lovely little hearts into horrific caricatures of themselves.
And it’s everywhere. We judge women, we judge gays, we judge the poor. We judge our neighbors, our colleagues, our friends. Oppression, both large- and small-scale, occurs because a person or group of persons judges another unfairly. The poor are lazy, so let’s punish them. Women are whores, so let’s punish them. Immigrants are taking our jobs, so let’s punish them. My neighbor is a horrible parent, that guy who cut me off in traffic is an asshole, my sister is spoiled.
This is it; this is the problem. Think for just a minute about a world without judgement. Lovely image, isn’t it?
Of course, we’ll never know a world without judgement, but we can use what we know to wound this beast, to keep it at bay.
The only way we do that is through stories, because (remember!) stories cultivate empathy, which destroys judgement.
This is the role of the writer, the role that I’ve decided to take on. Like Vonnegut, I’m disgusted with civilization:
Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.
Lest you confuse my disgust for civilization with misanthropy, consider this: I’m not arguing against humanity; I’m arguing for it. A state of judgement is not our natural state; a state of empathy is. We’re hardwired for storytelling, which means we’ve a natural predilection for a society in which empathy dominates and judgement withers.
And so I had my answer. This is why I feel the need to write stories, why I so revere masters of fiction, because their work is more than fantasy: it is an antidote to the most pernicious and disgusting aspects of ourselves. A story is not an escape, it is a salve, it is medicinal. It is the antidote to the sickness.
The necessity of nowness plus the professionalization of content production for the stream means that there are thousands and thousands of people churning out more crap than can possibly be imagined. And individual consumers of information have been tuned by social-media feedback mechanisms (Likes!) to do for free what other people do for money. They, too, write viral headlines, post clickbait, and compete for mindshare. I am not joking when I say: it is easier to read Ulysses than it is to read the Internet. Because at least Ulysses has an end, an edge. Ulysses can be finished. The Internet is never finished.
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon.
Joseph Conrad, from “A Familiar Preface” to A Personal Record (via liquidnight)
Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
Friday, December 13, 2013
Eggers, Scocca concludes, is “full of shit,” and with that he is off, for many thousand more words. It is an artful performance, with a number of fine moments. At one point, Scocca quotes me on the deliberate streak of optimism in my work—and he is not wrong in locating in that attitude a subtle self-interest. In being nice to the world, the writer obliges the world to be nice to him. But Scocca has larger ambitions: he wants to argue that the tyranny of niceness is the defining feature of our age, and he wants to make Dave Eggers the poster child for this movement. And it is here, I think, that his essay falters.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
As the majority of ghostwriters sign nondisclosure agreements, it’s impossible to know exactly how many books are ghostwritten each year. The president of Arbor Books, which furnishes ghostwriters, told us, “From what I’ve seen, I’d imagine a billion dollar industry.” The president of a similar firm estimated that at least 25% of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list is ghostwritten and that when a celebrity or politician is involved, “It’s nearly 100%.”
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Shlomo’s English was good. He told me about the Dead Sea Scrolls. He told me about Brazilian agronomy. He told me about Joseph Stiglitz.
Shlomo said, “I ask myself, who are the wisest people in the world? The answer is: the Jews. This is well-known.
“And who are the wisest Jews? A moment’s reflection reveals that Russian Jews are the wisest.
“Next we must discover who are the wisest of these Russian Jews. And the answer comes back, clearly the people of Odessa.
“So who are the wisest Jews in Odessa? The members of the old synagogue.
“It’s plain to see, then, that the wisest man in the world must be Rabbi Loew, chief rabbi of the old synagogue of Odessa. But he’s such an idiot.”
And Amatsia said, “My brain is fucking.” He meant his memory was going bad. Asked for an example, he explained that in the army he had once carried a dead man on his back for two days and now he couldn’t remember the man’s name. He shook his head. “Fucking,” he said.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
That we’ve gotten to this point is astonishing to me because basically in winning its victory, in seeing that Wall come down and seeing the former Stalinist state’s journey towards our way of thinking in terms of markets or being vulnerable, you would have thought that we would have learned what works. Instead we’ve descended into what can only be described as greed. This is just greed. This is an inability to see that we’re all connected, that the idea of two Americas is implausible, or two Australias, or two Spains or two Frances. Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody is invested and if everyone just believes that they have “some”, it doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to get the same amount. It doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be people who are the venture capitalists who stand to make the most. It’s not each according to their needs or anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don’t get left behind. And there isn’t a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that for all of its population.
The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would conceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen. He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.’
At the time of this writing, there are sixteen thousand two hundred and seventy-seven days remaining in my life. I know this because an app I have installed on my phone tells me so. I downloaded it about a week ago, back when I still had sixteen thousand two hundred and eighty-four days left to live, a number that strikes me in retrospect as an embarrassment of riches, days-wise. By the time you read this, I will have even fewer days left to live. Depending on the turnaround time for this piece, I could be down to a number as low as sixteen thousand two hundred and seventy. I’m running out of days here, is what the app is telling me, in its bluntly literal way.
Monday, December 9, 2013
If the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.
Susan Hill, Howards End is on the Landing (via booksandghosts)
Indeed, the all-inclusive facilities of Google, Apple, Facebook and their planned expansions are a precise reflection of the spirit of Silicon Valley — a spirit that is an intriguing paradox: It combines a disciplined domination of the market with the freedom of the creative hippie artist. In the 1990s, media theorists Richard Barbook and Andy Cameron coined the term “California ideology” to describe this phenomenon. “This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley,” they wrote. This has created a peculiar ideological mixture of right-wing and left-wing, ultra-individualistic and ultra-capitalistic beliefs, ranging from liberalism to anti-statism.
That we’ve gotten to this point is astonishing to me because basically in winning its victory, in seeing that Wall come down and seeing the former Stalinist state’s journey towards our way of thinking in terms of markets or being vulnerable, you would have thought that we would have learned what works. Instead we’ve descended into what can only be described as greed. This is just greed. This is an inability to see that we’re all connected, that the idea of two Americas is implausible, or two Australias, or two Spains or two Frances. Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody is invested and if everyone just believes that they have “some”, it doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to get the same amount. It doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be people who are the venture capitalists who stand to make the most. It’s not each according to their needs or anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don’t get left behind. And there isn’t a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that for all of its population.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
There’s an analogy here with every journalist who has ever looked at the Web and said “Well, it needs an editor.” The Web has an editor, it’s everybody. In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality — the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It’s what happens after it gets published that matters. If people don’t point to it, other people won’t read it. But the idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign to journalists.
Clay Shirky, Ontology is overrated (via stewartmccoy)
Friday, December 6, 2013
Monday, December 2, 2013
These theories also share an understanding that people in Western society are generally uncomfortable admitting that who they are might be partly, or perhaps deeply, structured and performed. To be a “poser” is an insult; instead common wisdom is “be true to yourself,” which assumes there is a truth of your self. Digital-austerity discourse has tapped into this deep, subconscious modern tension, and brings to it the false hope that unplugging can bring catharsis.
And the industry’s seemingly endless capacity to perpetuate itself matters. Marketing is not simply a mirror of our prevailing aspirations. It systematically promotes and presents a specific cluster of values that undermine pro-social and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour. In other words, the more that we’re encouraged to obsess about the latest phone upgrade, the less likely we are to concern ourselves with society’s more pressing problems. That’s a reason to want to keep a careful tab on advertising’s elusive and ephemeral forms.
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Part of the allure is simple gluttony: If you’re loving a book, it’s delightful to know that there’s plenty of it. But I believe there’s also an inherent appeal in fat novels, something that only written fiction can offer and that short stories, for all their felicities, aren’t able to provide. You can be swallowed up by a long novel, immersed in the world its author has created in a fashion that no other medium can rival. No, not even boxed sets of HBO series consumed in day-long binges! This immersion reminds many of us of our first, luxuriant plunges into books as children, and any author who can take us back to the place where we forget where we are and how much time has passed will pretty much have us eating out of her hand for good.
I am so grateful for not wishing I could believe any more. That wish always triggered a circular avalanche of unsolvable riddles, the only answer to which is “accepting the mystery,” and that I can’t do; thus, I can’t really “belong.” It is, quite frankly, a miracle that I am free of that heartache and of all its piggybacking miseries. Is it possible to thank God for removing the longing for God? Because I do. I may find “God” elsewhere. I may find that concept useless. Doesn’t matter, really.
It is difficult to be shy in the digital age, but impossible to be honest. So often our self-portraits are of the selves we would like to become: they are aspirational, always attempting to make us into someone other than who we are. As Ashbery writes: “Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted, / Desolate, reluctant.”
All those millions of selfies filling our albums and feeds are rarely of the selves who lounge in sweatpants or eat peanut butter from the jar, the selves waiting in line at the unemployment office, the selves who are battered and abused or lonely and depressed. Even though the proliferation of self-portraits suggests otherwise, we are still self-conscious.
The most important insight I gained by forgoing an M.F.A. program in favor of launching a Tumblr was learning that to be successful, I didn’t need a particular degree, or any specific family background or life experience. I didn’t have to apply to a writing program or have a friend who knew somebody. All I needed to do was make good content. Starting “Fairy Tales for Twenty-Somethings” helped me grow as an artist and writer and gave me the confidence to write the book. I needed to have an audience in order to learn how to write.
Fair treatment for writers and artists is an even more difficult matter, which will ultimately require a major change in how we think about support for the arts. Fortunately, however, we already have an excellent model, in our support of athletics. Despite our general preference for capitalism, our support for sports is essentially socialist, with local and state governments providing enormous support for professional teams. To cite just one striking example, the Minnesota State Legislature recently appropriated over $500 million to help build the Vikings a new stadium. At the same time, the Minnesota Orchestra is close to financial disaster because it can’t erase a $6 million deficit. If the Legislature had diverted only 10 percent of its support for football, it would have covered that deficit for the next eight years.
Saturday, November 30, 2013
The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others.
William Lyon Phelps (via riseriserise)
I work via slow accretions of often seemingly unrelated stuff. When I complete that unwieldy, puzzling first draft, I spread it out on the desk like a soothsayer viewing entrails, and try to find patterns. If asked, I might pretty up my process and call it bricolage or intellectual scrapbooking, but it really is merely the result of a magpie mind/brain, one that flits from one shiny thing to another. While I still work in my plodding way, the ever renewing bits of information in my Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr feeds provide endless fodder, like going shell collecting on the beach on a normal day versus the day after a hurricane when the ocean has burped up every interesting bit of stuff imaginable.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Wow. This may be the perfect lapdesk. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iskelter/slate-mobile-airdesk
#
Monday, November 25, 2013
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Good Enough
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On a rare sleepless night earlier this week, I layed in bed for two hours, staring at the ceiling, wide-eyed. Realizing I wasn’t going to get any sleep, I decided to start a project I’d always wanted to start: I would install Arch Linux on my laptop. I’ve run Linux as my primary OS for some six years now, but I’ve run the easy version that does all the heavy lifting for you: Ubuntu. I wanted to dig deeper into my system to learn what makes it tick.
Arch Linux was perfect for that. For the unfamiliar, Ubuntu and Arch Linux are two vastly different variations of Linux. Putting Ubuntu on a PC is like taking your used car to a mechanic and telling him to replace everything: engine, seats, radio. You’ll be back in a week to pick up your reinvigorated ride.
Arch Linux, however, is like building the entire damn car from scratch. You have a shell (the car’s frame), but that’s it. The installation process is difficult enough (took me three tries- thanks, UEFI) but even after you get it installed, there’s no window manager, no desktop environment, no network or file manager, no nothing. You build it all.
One particular environment I had always wanted to try out was Openbox, a ridiculously minimal and lightweight window manager that can also be run as a standalone window manager (meaning there’s no need for a full-fledged desktop environment). There are no effects, no panels, no compositing, no launcher, no application menu. Openbox is about as minimal as it gets.
For three days, I experimented with different setups: I added compositing, installed a dock, tweaked the workspace setup, tested different browsers. I did a lot of this.
On Friday, I realized with a bit of guilt that I hadn’t done much work in the three days since I’d started tweaking my setup. But I had such a great setup!
Frustrated with that realization, I took a small break, ate some lunch, and worked out, deciding I needed to come back and look at the situation with clear eyes (knowing full well what would happen when I came back to the screen).
When I sat back down at my desk two hours later, I confirmed my fear: I’d wasted the better part of three days. None of this had been necessary. I didn’t even want to tweak any more- I just wanted to get some work done. So, I installed Gnome 3, a fully-functional setup from the start, and got to work. And it felt good. The system wasn’t precisely to my liking, but it was damn good. It was good enough.
My daughter, now nine years old, is going through some growing pains with schoolwork, thanks to a more strenuous workload. Not long ago, we finished her first big project. By the time we’d finished, I was terrified of the results. She’d worked hard on the project, but she’d cut corners. I tried to explain how to take good notes: jot down key words and concepts-never full sentences-and reconstruct them later.
All week, she ignored my advice, and copied full sentences directly from Wikipedia. She wrote without even taking notes, in fact, forming full paragraphs after merely skimming the Wikipedia entry.
The result, in my mind, was that she didn’t know enough of the material. She hadn’t been forced to recreate her research in her own words; she was merely transferring them from the screen to the page bypassing her own mind altogether. Because of that, I worried about her final grade (not the grade itself, mind you, but the impact a poor grade would have on her psyche).
She got a perfect score.
I’d been worried for nothing. In the process of worrying, of pushing her to nail the process of research, I’d forgotten that she’s nine years old. It’s one of my greatest shortcomings as a father. I have a lifehacker mentality: I want to improve things. All the things. Even myself.
I wake up every day wondering how to make myself better, how to make my system better, how to make my workflow better.
In a way, I’ve been trying to make my daughter better, too. Isn’t that the point of being a parent? To teach your child how to live? To prepare them for life to the fullest extent possible?
Well, no, not really. That’s part of it, of course, but it’s the tomorrow part. For a guy that claims to have such a zen-like focus on the present, I was certainly spending a lot of time ignoring today. The truth is, today is good enough. My setup is good enough. And, there can be no question, my daughter is good enough. She’s not one of my projects; she’s a person who’s learning to navigate her reality, not mine.
Good enough gets a bad rap. It implies a lesser quality, has a whiff of inferiority about it.
The truth is, though, everything is good enough. The spatula you want to replace is good enough to make eggs. The weather is good enough to toss a ball around with your son. Your coffee and your garden and your waistline are good enough. Your setup is good enough to get some work done. You are good enough.
And existence is good enough. Hell, we live, quite literally, in the most bountiful place in the most bountiful time that we aware of. The vastness that limits that awareness only serves to bolster the sense of wonder we must feel when we ponder our reality. And that reality contains many grains of sand and many great truths, all of which are good enough.
And yet, all is flawed, and that’s okay, because good enough doesn’t speak to the quality of the thing it’s directly referring to; it speaks to the quality of the thing you can be doing, to the quality of life you can be living once you accept things as good enough. It’s a recognition of the inherent fallibility of life, of the imperfect nature of things. Good enough is the vehicle through which we make great things: books and poems and meals and moments. In one of the greatest ironies, once “good enough” is good enough, the world will reveal its greatness.
You have more traveling ahead, but remember your main reasons for going. Not to escape or cross things off lists but to learn to be more open, more okay with uncertainty. To feel to your core how big the world is, and how narrow your own empire. Remember that no matter where you go, you always end up alone with your thoughts. This is your true home and its landscape is vast and much uncharted. You can travel there at any time, and the flights aren’t nearly as expensive.
A Letter — Jack Cheng to himself on his thirtieth birthday (via stewartmccoy)
Saturday, November 23, 2013
But writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery, in writing. For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.
William Stafford, ”A Way of Writing”, in Claims for Poetry, edited by Donald Hall (via litverve)
Yesterday when a friend was all, “Oh my God, have you seen the Kanye video?” I was like, no, I don’t care about the Kanye video and I feel as if it is one of the few signal achievements in my career, if we want to call it that, that I have somehow gotten myself into a position where I don’t need to have an opinion about the Kanye video, and, more importantly, no one really needs to have an opinion about the Kanye video, the fact that you are going to watch something that is widely acknowledged to be terrible—the fact that you are going to watch something and hope while you watch that it is exactly as terrible as widely acknowledged—so that you can be a part of the “conversation,” which is just an empty and ridiculous exchange of self-important jack-offs trying to speak as loudly as possible so that they can drown out the inner voice that tells them just how shockingly bereft of value their own lives are as they careen towards oblivion, is a remarkable indictment of the vacuous, hollow pit we confuse with culture these days. You don’t have to watch ANYTHING, and the less you say about something the smarter you are. Good Lord, people, listen to yourselves, if you can even stand it, it’s horrifying. (I had switched to the second person plural at this point because my friend, having heard so many variations of this monologue already, had long since wandered off.) Anyway, that was before I saw this Bob Dylan video, which is really something. And I say this as someone who doesn’t go in for the concept of “interactive” at all. It’s pretty neat!
No great hand reached down from the sky and made me a writer. I made myself one, by writing.
Act Two: A Young Playwright Grows Up (and don’t miss Part Two in the series, either)
Friday, November 22, 2013
"When looked at from this perspective, personal development can actually be quite scientific. The hypotheses are our beliefs. Our actions and behaviors are the experiments. The resulting internal emotions and thought patterns are our data. We can then take those and compare them to our original beliefs and then integrate them into our overall understanding of our needs and emotional make-up for the future.”
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
I’ve often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they’re on, why they don’t fall off it, how much time they’ve probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don’t fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn’t explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I’d tell them how we reproduce, how long we’ve been here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It’s also a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it.
Kurt Vonnegut, Playboy Interview, 1973 (via kateoplis)
Monday, November 18, 2013
Perhaps counterintuively, I feel less distracted when reading articles on ReadQuick than I often do when reading normally, likely because R.S.V.P. demands a higher baseline level of concentration. When using the app on the subway (and no doubt getting confused glances from my neighbors), I don’t look up at each stop, or switch back and forth between windows, and my mind doesn’t wander as it often does when I’m reading in public places.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
For Chin, “fair use” applies because Google allows readers to discover books they might not normally be able to find, but only allows them to read a small portion of these books—as opposed to, say, Napster, which made entire songs and albums available for free, Google merely whets consumers’ appetites. ”Google Books digitizes books and transforms expressive text into a comprehensive word index that helps readers, scholars, researchers, and others find books,” he wrote. “Google Books does not supersede or supplant books because it is not a tool to be used to read books. For Chin, this service isn’t just a service to publishers, it’s a service for humanity at large: ”In my view, Google Books provide significant public benefits. Indeed, all society benefits.”According to Chin, Google also benefits the books themselves by giving “new life” to “out-of-print and old books that have been forgotten in the bowels of libraries,” which is a gross.
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Solitude is herb tea and soft music. Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices.
(via deannajodouglass)
I don’t know the exact reasons, and I’m not sure I need to know, since I’m convinced that the joy of fiction stems from its ambiguities and contradictions, its questions and suggestions more than its assertions, the way it completes a circle without telling you how or why.
Justin Kramon, “Staring into the Darkness: On Reading Thrillers and Writing One” (via millionsmillions)
The Medium of Connection
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Last weekend, I published a very personal piece on this site that I was very reluctant to call a “piece.” After I posted it to Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, it got a bit of praise, and had touched more than a few people (for which I’m grateful).
I had trouble accepting praise for this one, though, for the same reason I hesitated to call it a piece: it wasn’t edited, wasn’t structured, and there was no goal. I didn’t, like in other pieces, write with the intention of informing, of educating, of entertaining, even. I didn’t write what was in my head; I wrote what was in my heart. For that reason, many commented on the courage it took to write the piece, how brave I was for making myself so vulnerable.
The thing is, I didn’t feel vulnerable. I certainly didn’t feel courageous. Perhaps that’s because I’d done this before, so it wasn’t new territory, wasn’t my first rodeo, as they say. I’d put myself out there before, had revealed pieces of myself that I never thought would be lain bare. Ironically, these are things that I don’t talk about, even with those I love. Most people who know me will tell you that I listen far more than I talk, and when I talk, it’s rare that I delve into the vulnerable parts of me that, lately, have been making their way into the wide world through this very medium.
That, initially, struck me as odd. Why would I reveal more to the general public than to those closest to me?
Part of the answer lies in the simple fact that I’m a writer, and so the best parts of me will come out as written words- the lesser parts of me are what’s left for those around me (sorry about that).
While that answer begins to tell the story, it doesn’t tell it all. A complete answer would have to explore the medium that entices me into bearing all, the medium on which you’re reading these words. Last week’s “piece” felt and read much more like a journal entry than a blog post, and before the internet, that’s the way it would’ve been written: on a piece of actual paper in a notebook or a journal, never to be seen by anyone.
The web, though, is changing us. It’s changing me. Like so many other significant cultural shifts, it’s happening so slowly that we barely recognize it, even while it’s being talked about incessantly. When we back up and take a look at the aggregate data, patterns emerge, but it’s infinitely harder to see the underlying currents of that change that are happening somewhere deep inside of our very selves.
That current is shifting towards the new normal, towards a world of increasing vulnerability. Part of the shift is due to the undeniable anonymity the web affords us, even when we use outlets that our name and identity are attached to: it’s much easier to be vulnerable in a tweet or blog post than to reveal ourselves face-to-face, even—especially—to those we’re closest to.
That’s human nature, and if life has taught me anything, it’s to work with, not against, human nature.
Even Facebook, normally an outlet so filled with meaningless memes, outright falsehoods, and utter garbage that I cringe every time I open my newsfeed, is beginning to facilitate this change. Yesterday, I saw a post at the top of my feed in which a friend declared her “number,” then listed a series of things which no one knew about her. The list was candid, truthful, a bit vulnerable, and a bit beautiful. Others followed, and, as far as I know, this “quiz” is still making the rounds on Facebook. To reiterate: there is a beautiful thing happening on Facebook.
That thing is happening for the same reason it’s beautiful: it strikes at and speaks to the core of who we are and what we want. We want to be more vulnerable. We want to reveal more about ourselves. That’s the only way real connection happens, after all. It’s why literature, and perhaps anything that can be called art, exists. No meaningful relationship between two or a hundred people ever came about as a result of closing ourselves off, and that’s the thing we strive for: meaningful connection. It’s at the heart of nearly ever desire. It’s no surprise, then, that a medium that facilitates that desire has so completely permeated our culture. The web may have begun as a way to share academic documents, and it may sometimes resemble a cesspool of trolling and kittens and linkbait, but its evolution is marching steadily towards reconciling itself with the thing humans most strive for: vulnerability and connection.
Readers and friends alike have emailed me to ask about whether or not they should write. Of course, they wouldn’t be asking if they didn’t want to, so they were essentially seeking justification from a “writer” to begin writing. And to all those, here is my answer:
Write. Start with a secret journal or a private online blog. It truly doesn’t matter what you write about; write about any damn thing you please, or, better yet, write about nothing at all. The point is simply to erect a bridge between your mind and a medium (the paper or the keyboard). Do so often enough and your thoughts will travel that bridge often, will get a chance to stretch their legs, to leave the dark confines of your mind for a few minutes.
Then, when you’re comfortable (not before), start writing in public. Let us into those dark corners, because we want to know your fears, your reservations, your absurd dreams. It’s those things that we can connect with, and, as I said, all we want is connection.
Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language — it’s from the Latin word cor, meaning heart — and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.
Brene Brown (via modernhepburn)
The written word has long been held to be close to the sacred. Milton thought that books made better receptacles for human souls than bodies. Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages refused to throw out any texts, lest they inadvertently destroy the name of God. Perhaps the purest expression of the idea that books are a form of life comes in the story told by the Mandeans, an Iraqi people who practice a gnostic religion. One of the Mandeans’ great sages was a creature named Dinanukht, who was half-book and half-man. He sat by the waters between worlds, reading himself until the end of time.
Friday, November 15, 2013
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Thursday, November 14, 2013
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
The West is both a great thirst and a dry, weatherless curiosity. In California, the mad, deep breath of deserts is never far away. The sky above San Francisco is often so dazzling a blue that it merits the overripe description of cerulean, or comparison to lapis lazuli. Its clouds are sea-born and formed in the odd depths of its mysterious bay, where the fog moves inland in a billion-celled, mindless creature, amoeba-shaped and poisonous, like a stillborn member of the nightshade family.
Pat Conroy (in South of Broad)
Monday, November 11, 2013
Loneliness is failed solitude. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise, you will only know how to be lonely.
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together (via wilde4words)
Sunday, November 10, 2013
"This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important."
-Gary Provost (I think)
Me: OH MY GOD my career is over isn’t it? It’s over. You can tell me. Just tell me straight. I’ll never get another idea. Never never never. Well it was good while it lasted. OH NO this means I’ll have to get a job. Who would be stupid enough to give me a job? My entire skill set revolves around making stuff up. What kind of job is that for a grown up? I’m unemployable. I have a mortgage. I need to eat. My life is over. Publisher: That’s what you said after your first book. My guess is, you’ll say this after every book. Me: No no no I’ve never said this before and even if I have this is different I am doomed doomed. Publisher: Can you speak up? I can hardly hear you. Me: I’m in a cupboard. I don’t know when I’m coming out.
Saturday, November 9, 2013
What my friends don’t know is how to measure any of this on the only scale most of us have. You know, the one the I.R.S. uses. And to be honest, I’m not sure how to answer the question either. How successful is Max’s music career? What is a tattoo on the forearm of a 20-something in a medium-size Midwestern state worth? The Eskimos have all those words for snow, and it seems the only language we have for expressing success is numeric. It may be a universal language, but it’s an impoverished one. Maybe we need a word for “never having to sit in a meeting where someone reads long power point slides out loud.” Maybe we should have an expression that captures the level of success you’ve achieved when you do exactly what you love every day.
The World Swallower is the unhinged cousin of the old-school omniscient author-narrator (the one who used to say “dear reader”). He stretches (or obliterates) the boundaries of what a character might be able to know. Whether deployed to illuminate the scope of human imagination or to bring under one flimsy umbrella the whole of experience, the World Swallower is the ultimate stand-in for an author who has devoted himself or herself to their art.
Pieces of You
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Author's note: I didn't edit this; didn't even proofread it, because this is not an essay; these are simply words that needed to be put to paper, that needed to escape my mind.
You died sixteen years ago today. What I felt that day I can only liken to someone reaching into my chest and rearranging the things that I consist of. My heart, my lungs, the air I breathe, felt as if they weren’t in the right place, as if they were trying to escape me somehow. It physically hurt, and I kept clutching at my chest all day, as if I was trying to keep in the things that so desperately wanted out.
Each hour, day, month, year since, that pain has evolved. I’m no longer terrified of it, nor have I tamed it. I’ve simply acknowledged its existence, its place in the natural order of things.
For years, I blamed the pain. Still, I think, I have a right to do so, but I long ago realized the futility of that blame. When you died, I lost myself. I stopped doing schoolwork, and when the time came to apply for college, I didn’t even try, didn’t fill out a single college application. It took some time to realize how great that mistake was, but when I did, I tried to correct it by enlisting, foregoing the enlistment bonus in favor of the college fund. That plus the G.I. Bill would’ve given me $90,000 for school. I started classes while I was still enlisted to get a headstart.
Then I screwed up again, and I was kicked out. I lost every last cent of the tuition money, and became a new father at the same time. I found what work I could (which wasn’t much), and have been fighting an uphill battle ever since.
While all this was happening, while all this life was passing me by, refusing to take me along with it, I carried the pain. I used it, even, as a reminder that I could trace everything back to the day you died, that my demise began that day.
As I said, though, the pain evolved. I watched it grow, as a parent watches a child grow. That cold November morning, it was an infant: kicking and screaming and raging against the world we’d placed it in. Soon, it began to develop its features. It softened, matured. Today, I no longer carry the pain as I did in its infancy. Instead, it walks beside me, neither weighing me down, nor holding me back. It is my equal—a friend, even—that I can turn to in times of need. It comforts me, reminding me that it is not all I have left of you.
Do you remember the time she carved your initials in the bridge on Front Street?
Do you remember her words after you kissed her for the first time?
Do you remember how she got upset when she couldn’t make you jealous?
Remember the Browns T-shirt she bought you for your fifteenth birthday?
Remember the bemused look on her face when you told her you didn’t like the way she dressed?
I remember, I say, and I smile.
I’ve no idea what you would think of who I’ve become. Certainly, I’m no longer the boy you knew, but I wonder if you’d recognize how much you, nearly two decades later, have shaped the man I am. Your life and your death played equal parts in my growth, and for that, I can’t thank you enough.
You taught me what love was, though you could hardly recognize it yourself. You taught me that it enveloped everything, that love became the atmosphere in the midst of which everything else lived. It made important things trivial, and it made unimportant things crucial. You taught me that the tightness in my chest that came out of nowhere every time I saw your face was life itself, or at least was what life aspires to be.
You taught me how excruciating pain can be, how a harsh word from someone you love can cut. You taught me the unimaginable frustration of having to inhabit two separate bodies, when clearly we were meant to be closer than physical reality allows. You taught me the value of the self- of yours, of mine, of the child on the swing in the park, of the hungry man on the corner, of the nemesis you’re supposed to hate.
Some of these things you taught me before you left me, and some you taught me by leaving pieces of yourself behind for me to find along the way. It’s been sixteen years, and I still carry pieces of you with me.
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