License to kill also serves as a license to transfrom language

When I first heard the title of the latest Bond film, I, like many people, wondered what the hell it really meant. Happy to see Matthew Shaer over at VQR break down the other ways in which 007 plays with our nifty little language:

As Daniel Craig told the BBC earlier this year, there’s something poetic about the idea of a quantum of solace. (The dictionary definition of “quantum”: “The smallest amount of a physical quantity that can exist independently, especially a discrete quantity of electromagnetic radiation.”) When [relationships] go wrong,” Craig explained, “when there’s nothing left, when the spark has gone, when the fire’s gone out, there’s no quantum of solace.”

FBI kept tabs on Mailer

I'm reminded of a movie character who once left a nervous voicemail to her Lit major ex-boyfriend and said, "Oh, and I read War and Peace, which was good! [beat] Like that was a surprise...."

So now we discover that J. Edgar Hoover once wrote to a subordinate, "Let me have a memo on Norman Mailer." No kidding. "Like that was a surprise." I think we all expected that the FBI would have something on Mailer. Personally, I think Gore Vidal could provide more provocative gossip, but presumably we'll have to wait a while for that one, if the person-of-interest being kind of passed-away is a prerequisite.

Anyway, onward to the block quote!

In 1969, at Hoover's direction, an agent prepared a five-page, single-spaced review of Mailer's book "Miami and the Siege of Chicago," about the 1968 political conventions. The review carefully itemized all six references made to the FBI.

"It is written in his usual obscene and bitter style," the agent wrote. "Book contains reference to . . . uncomplimentary statements of the type that might be expected from Mailer regarding the FBI and the Director."

(via Paper Cuts)

Another magazine goes digital

And it's a biggie. I.e., The New Yorker.

So not to toot my own horn. But I wrote a little piece in May 2007 in order to graduate from my neighborhood journalism program, and the kicker went thus:

Unless major titles convert their websites into digital communities, then the mainstream magazine industry will trend down, and the niche, independent digital magazine communities will continue to trend up. As time marches on, those two species of magazine websites---digital billboards for the print publication versus digital magazine communities---will become increasingly distinct. And users will grow ever more savvy at recognizing which is which.

[Debbie] Day recently browsed NewYorker.com and learned that the magazine is trying to sell the complete archive on a hard drive that costs $199, rather than make that archive available online. Moreover, there’s no opportunity for readers to comment on stories, much less interact with each other. Day called the site “very, very elegant.” But it clearly lacked the affordances of front-edge magazine websites.

“I’m not trying to put down whatever their efforts are, but I don’t think they’ve mastered the medium,” Day said. “They’re still really dabbling.”

Publishing ain't the place for no halfway crooks!

I chuckled when I saw this on Chris Shea's Brainiac blog at the Boston Globe, due to I once lived the life of a book publicist. I don't think I ever stooped this low, but who knows? The wretchedness of the publicity world is in the eye of the beholder/pitched, I suppose:

As the subprime mortgage and credit disasters continue to wreak havoc on world economies and pocketbooks, many are looking to Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke for guidance and leadership in this tumultuous time. Fortunately, our Fed chief is one of the pre-eminent scholars of the Great Depression. Because of the market turmoil, Bernanke's treatment of the Great Depression has been finding a new audience of readers as media, policymakers, businessmen, professionals, and others -- both in the US and abroad -- seek to understand our present economic situation.

[sheepishly raising hand from the back row] Um, wouldn't "guidance and leadership" possibly -- just possibly -- have been best demonstrated by steering us clear of this catastrophre from the get-go? I mean, this kind of feels like asking the burglar who just stole your flat-screen TV and family jewelry how you might go about getting those items back. Except you have to pay for his advice and take time out of your schedule to listen to it.

Gone & done it again

Another blog post at the Kenyon Review. Here's the tease -- which I not so artfully buried in the bottom third of the piece:

Most important: What exactly are we writing when we’re doing all of this writing? I won’t pretend to coin a whole new term here; I still think the best we can muster is a more fitting analogue. And if we must find an analogue in an existing literary unit, I propose the paragraph. Our constant writing has begun to feel like a neverending digital paragraph. Not a tight, stabbing paragraph from The Sun Also Rises or even a graceful, sometimes-slinking, sometimes-soaring paragraph from Absalom! Absalom!, I mean a convoluted, haphazard, meandering paragraph, something like Kerouac’s original draft of On the Road–only taped together by bytes. And 1 percent as interesting.

Go Red Sox!! I mean (ahem), "Meanwhile, in Frankfurt...."

Good grief. Another week and I've laid off the gas. Damn Red Sox -- they do this to me every year. At least, every year that I've been following them (which dates to 2003, and my initial introduction to Sox heartache when Aaron Boone sent a soft Tim Wakefield knuckler to the second deck in extra innings). Just when you're about to write them off, they storm back from a 3-1 deficit to force a Game 7 in the ALCS. Oh, and I hear there's a mildly important political contest taking place these days, too. Anyway, that's no excuse. So back to the world of words....

The Frankfurt Book Fair took place this past week. It's one of the three major annual book fairs, London and Book Expo America being the other two. (BEA roves from city to city, but mostly bounces between New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.) Bookninja has a nice round-up of the Guardian's coverage, if you care to dig deeper.

I've attended two BEAs in a previous career, and I found them fascinating. But not for all of the author signings or keynote addresses. I just think it's kind of wacky that the world's publishers get together and announce, "Here. This is the culture's intellectual agenda for the next 12 months."

This is a wacky announcement because 1) book publishers are almost as slow as newspapers when it comes to adapting to the shifting sands of business in the digital age. And 2) they're still kinda right. Nothing offers quite the same ring of bona fides as publishing a book.

Since when was convenience part of the job description?

Thanks to Dan Gillmor for calling CBS News's Dean Reynolds on a ridiculous point. First, here's a clip from Reynolds's rant about the relative discomfort of working on the Obama campaign vs. the kindly generosity of the McCain campaign:

The McCain folks are more helpful and generally friendly. The schedules are printed on actual books you can hold in your hand, read, and then plan accordingly. The press aides are more knowledgeable and useful to us in the news media. The events are designed with a better eye, and for the simple needs of the press corps. When he is available, John McCain is friendly and loquacious. Obama holds news conferences, but seldom banters with the reporters who've been following him for thousands of miles around the country. Go figure.

OK, I readily acknowledge that my reporting experience pales in comparison to a career journalist's. There are surely many nuances of the craft that yet escape me. But I thought one of the basics that all reporters agree to when they get into this racket is that personal comfort pretty much goes out the window. It's really not any campaign's job to make the reporters more comfortable -- and it's almost always a power play when they do. Note the section in Reynolds's piece when the McCain campaign accommodates the press corps so they can write up a flattering piece about McCain. The irony, astonishingly, seems entirely lost on Reynolds:

The other day in Albuquerque, N.M., the reporters were given almost no time to file their reports after McCain spoke. It was an important, aggressive speech, lambasting Obama's past associations. When we asked for more time to write up his remarks and prepare our reports, the campaign readily agreed to it. They understood.

It's the last part, however, that really freaks me out:

Maybe none of this means much. Maybe a front-running campaign like Obama's that is focused solely on victory doesn't have the time to do the mundane things like print up schedules or attend to the needs of reporters.

But in politics, everything that goes around comes around.

This amounts to a threat against a political campaign to start catering to the press's comfort or else get ready for harsher reports. Am I missing something, or isn't that a flagrant ethical transgression?

Can't figure out the Web? Try suing your readers.

That's what the Washington City Paper proposes to do. Kind of. (It's not April 1, is it?)

THE BANKRUPTCY CASE AND THE PARTIES

1. On Oct. 9, 2008, the Debtors filed petition for relief under Chapter 86 of the Content Bankruptcy Code, Alternative Weekly Provision, in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Fourth Estate.
2. Debtor, City Paper, is an alternative newsweekly devoted to coverage of news, features, arts, and listings for the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area (“Washington, D.C.”)
3. Defendant, the Readers of City Paper (“Readers”), are residents of and visitors to Washington, D.C., with expectations of well-reported long-form narrative journalism (“cover stories”) in addition to comprehensive and critical coverage of music, film, theater, visual arts, happenings, et al. (“arts coverage”). [via Romanesko]

I could use this post to compose yet another expository essay on the vicissitudes of print media in the age of the Web. But I figure the average reader needs that like he needs a hole in the head. So I'm going to tell a vulgar story instead.

One of my former bosses used to work for some newspapers in the South. One day about a year ago, an old colleague emailed him after the latest round of buyouts and said the following. I paraphrase -- liberally -- and with apologies to the unnamed parties:

I'm going to start my own newspaper. I'm going to call it "Old Fuckers." It's going to be a one-sheet broadside with text front and back, six columns, printed only in black and white with no pictures, no images, no graphs -- nothing to keep your interest except the text. We're not going to have a website, we're not going to do "podcasts," we're not going to give video cameras to reporters and tell them to "film for the Web and cut the video on your laptop!" None of that shit. Just thin notebooks, #2 pencils, and impudent questions. In other words, just reporting, goddammit.

I have to admit, that sounds pretty good right about now.

Meanwhile, on other blogs...

I've been doing some traveling this weekend, so haven't had much time to monitor the Internets. But saw this little piece about a sea change for how Gawker will be run. (via Bloggasm)

I don't particularly follow Gawker -- because, well, it simply never appealed to me. But I'm vaguely aware that its management has always been a test case for new media business structure. Kind of a canary in the mineshaft, if you will.

Though it's hard to say whether this is an instance of the canary keeling over or finally perking up.

"How 'bout those markets?!"

That was the question emailed to me by a friend yesterday when the Dow crashed 778 points in one day following a nay vote on the $700 billion bailout package. (Needless to say, the answer was "ungood.")

Though matters of national fiscal catastrophe might seem far afield for this space, in many ways they are also deeply connected to the origins and means of what I do and what I try to do -- this nonsense of making a living with words. My debts have certainly held me back on occasion from chasing a dream, or in some cases the mere ideas of dreams. Yet my debts have also focused my energies and rightly reminded me of my surrounding circumstances. This isn't always a bad deal. I have sometimes found that the most rewarding and satisfying experience occasionally hides right before us, masquerading as unappealing: the simple solitary homemade meal vs. another night eating out with friends. (Or as a famous philosopher once put it, "A man's got to know his limitations.")

Thankfully, Margaret Atwood -- as profiled in this Times piece a few days ago -- puts the subject in appropriate perspective. Debt commands our culture. Very likely, debt, personal and national, will define not only my generation but the ones before and after it. But perhaps the most provocative truth, which Atwood points out, is that debt has both material and immaterial aspects, completely aside from money:

“It was never just about money: it was about owing. Money is the form in which we have embodied this but it takes a huge number of other forms. What we're really talking about is imbalances of obligation, which is what debt is.”

As for the material aspects of debt, we can start with our own bodies:

In writing Payback Atwood became fascinated with a phrase spoken of the dead: “He has paid his debt to nature.” “It means you've borrowed something - the physical part of yourself made up of natural elements - and you're paying it back by dissolving into nature. What else are we borrowing from nature and how do we repay it?” The book's final chapter proposes an answer in strong terms.

I look forward to reading more of Atwood's appraisal of this fascinating (and uncannily timely) subject as soon as I can get my hands on a copy.

Books, computers -- selfish?

For the first time in what I hope will become a more regular thing, I posted a short essay on the Kenyon Review's blog yesterday. For my inaugural post, I tried to be all humble and unambitious-like. My topic? I tried to articulate yet another way to look at the whole debate between print and electronic media. (Like I said, unambitious-like....)

I would wager that for most readers, deciding how to read something consists of a messy and porous matrix of deeply personal factors. These factors might include a person’s age, the text being read, one’s comfort with technology, and environmental principles. In other words, we seem no closer to justifying either side of the argument than saying, “It’s just how I prefer to read.” Which is no justification at all.

So it recently occurred to me that we could frame the question around something a little more abstract, yet possibly arrive at clearer reasoning: selfishness. Namely, which platform–print media or electronic media–is more selfish, and which is more selfless and giving?

At one point I mention a reading I attended at Kenyon College as a senior, when David Foster Wallace visited in 2000. (I've avoided mentioning anything here about Wallace's sad passing, because, well, what could I really say about it?) Anyway, turns out another Kenyon student who was there that night also wrote about it recently.

Who’s Élite now, Bullwinkle?

I try not to wade into politics in this space, but this is just too good. George Saunders is one of my favorite writers, and it's because he writes incredibly smart and funny pieces that -- I am certain -- are a lot harder to write than they look.

In summary: Because my candidate, unlike your winking/blinking Vice-Presidential candidate, who, though, yes, he did run as the running mate when the one asking him to run did ask him to run, which that I admire, one thing he did not do, with his bare hands or otherwise, is, did he ever kill a moose? No, but ours did. And I would. Please bring a moose to me, over by me, and down that moose will go, and, if I had a kid, I would take a picture of me showing my kid that dead moose, going, like, Uh, sweetie, no, he is not resting, he is dead, due to I shot him, and now I am going to eat him, and so are you, oh yes you are, which is responsible, as God put this moose here for us to shoot and eat and take a photo of, although I did not, at that time, know why God did, but in years to come, God’s will was revealed, which is: Hey, that is a cool photo for hunters about to vote to see, plus what an honor for that moose, to be on the Internet.

Then again, I also acknowledge that this is just too easy a target -- a New Yorker jab at Sarah Palin. Talk about a self-selecting audience.

The problem with being a writer? You have to get a job.

Illuminating essayish article in the NYT Sunday Magazine about the maturation -- or corruption, depending on how you look at it -- of the writing life in academe:

Though I sometimes chafe at my collar, just as often I appreciate the miracle of the job. A typical creative-writing professor has four months of summer vacation; teaches passionate young people a subject they actually want to learn about (and often enjoy); carries a light two-class load per term that is the envy of professors in other departments; and gains both a sense of belonging and ego satisfaction as a pillar — even a star — of a small, intense community of writers and readers.

I first wondered about this dynamic while pursuing my straight-ahead M.A. in English at Virginia. It seemed that some of the students were looking to get an M.F.A. in order to get a teaching job, instead of getting an M.F.A. in order to write better stories or poems. The saddest part of that last sentence is that this wasn't necessarily their choice. It's kind of what the world had thrust upon them as the worst of few options. Except, you know, being extremely talented.

To echo chamber, or not to echo chamber?

Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review answers in the affirmative: echo chamber. (And yes, I just made a compound noun into a verb. I'm iconoclastic like that.)

Echo chambers have gotten a bad rap from some in journalism. But partisan media echo chambers can teach responsible journalists important lessons about how to motivate readers and to use the power of repetition to rebuild a newsroom's influence in its community.

We need to use the power of online interactivity to build our own echo chambers, not for partisan spin, but for real reporting. Because without it, traditional news reporting is going to continue to lose readership, and influence, in a hyper-competitive media market.

I like pretty much everything Niles advises here, but I'm not sure that he's using the phrase (yes, now it's back to being a nominative phrase) "echo chamber" correctly. More to the point, he's simply describing Web 2.0 publicity techniques. The goal shouldn't be to make your online echo chamber larger, but to break the chamber's walls and brand yourself and your work. Whether it's via the 1830s penny press or 2008's Internet, the end vision is to get other people to consume your product, not just hear yourself speak (or read yourself type).

If we look to the ways in which the Internet and social media increase interconnectivity, and then leverage that interconnectivity to push journalism onto more platforms and before more eyeballs, then great. But if we use that interconnectivity to produce more and more separate conversations, then we fall into the sort of "Daily Me" trap that Cass Sunstein, among others, warns us about.

It's like VH1's Pop-Up Video, but in politics...

...and with viewers controlling the pop-ups.

Translation: the AP reports that Current TV is going to broadcast tweets on-screen during the next presidential debates. This could be very good or very bad.

On the good side, perhaps it will connect viewers who sit in partitioned corners of the country -- the Bay Area, Lincoln NE, NYC, the Florida Panhandle -- who have been watching political coverage this year and wondering, "What in the world is the rest of the country thinking?" Which I think we all pretty much do in our own ways.

On the bad side -- the very, very bad side -- this could turn out to be extremely polarizing. Not to mention highly gameable. Some parts of the country are much more Twitter-happy than others, I'm sure. Just because technology is pervasive doesn't mean it's equally accessible.

But I like the direction this is headed, if we take the Current PR line at face value. Punditry is maddening. I tend to think the American populace would be much better informed with more exposure to the nation's barbershop and hair salon chatter than with the average punditry.

It's an all the more interesting new kind of interactivity in political discourse given that Current was co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore. Joel Hyatt, CEO of Current, said the technique — dubbed "Hack the Debate" — was not Gore's idea, but he and Gore both share a dim view of post-debate punditry.

"He certainly shares the belief that the punditry aspect of the process has not been enriching to American democracy," said Hyatt.

I'm also tickled by the fact that this sort of cross-media integration is working in a counterintuitive direction. Recent innovation has attempted to put images and video on text-traditional devices. But putting tweets on a TV broadcast involves putting text on top of video.

From hippies to cloud computing

I never heard of the Whole Earth Catalog until moving to Silicon Valley just over two years ago. What can I say -- stuff like this wasn't floating around the east side of Detroit when I grew up. But now it's the 40th anniversary of the publication's debut. (Coincidentally -- I'm sure -- it's my wife and my wedding anniversary today, too!)


It took a while for me to comprehend how exactly a hippie print artifact was at the center of modern computing and technoculture, but the WEC truly is. I've been lucky enough to hold one in my hands just once -- and it was a revelation.

Check out Plenty for more. They explain it better than I could. (Via Boing Boing)

We have 18 quotes.... Let's pin the article on the weakest one!

An AP writer gets rightly lambasted at Salon for writing a bizarre story based on one viewpoint that doesn't even come from a real person (it came from another media source). This, despite the fact that 18 other quotes gathered for that story don't support the article's premise--in this case, that liberals purportedly have doubts about V.P. nominee Sarah Palin's ability to hold office with five children.

As Raum's own list conclusively demonstrates, he doesn't have even a single example supporting the assertion around which his entire article was built.... What Raum plainly did was just invent an anti-liberal narrative that matched the deeply misleading and manipulative claims being made by the McCain campaign in order to parade around as chivalrous defenders against liberal attacks on the rights of moms to work without restrictions.

If you have 18 quotes taking you in one direction, why not just write the story about those? The answer is that the reporter doesn't put any faith in the veracity or accuracy of those viewpoints. Sometimes this incredulity is merited (cf. Iraq War). Reporters should have latitude to call things by their right name, even when everyone is spinning the reporter in a different direction. The only catch is that you still have to support your argument when you make that call. You can't call a thing by its right name and then justify yourself by saying, "Cuz I said so."

That might work for TV hacks. Not so in the print world.

(Via Bloggasm.)

Down with books! (well, textbooks)

A few weeks ago there was a hubbub about Amazon's Kindle elbowing its way into the textbook market. It remains to be seen, but it feels like putting semi-affordable, money-saving, tree-saving devices into the hands of umpteen million early adopters every year could be one helluva tipping point.

Most people still seem to love the tactile delights of a good book. Thus, it's hard to get behind things like the Kindle, which appear to threaten said tactile delights. But what if the book doesn't bring you any delight whatsoever? What if the only physical reactions you associate with a particular book are massive caffeine consumption, blurring eyesight, dull headaches and sore shoulders? Not to mention all of the naughty yet banal doodles that provoke mild contempt for generations previous? Those books would be easy to miss, right?

Unfortunately, we're still a few million Kindles short. So if you must buy that 800-page ECON-110 book, buying used is still the way to go. Sierra's Green Life blog points out that the book industry "emitted about 12.4 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2006." Love for learning and the written word doesn't have to equal environmental destruction.

The thing that complicates this plan is that education publishers revel in their monopoly -- they issue new editions every year with special add-ons like DVDs and CDs...and don't even get me started on the shrink wrap.

Ingenious form letter response to fan mail

I love this response crafted by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, applicable to every sort of fan mail he received. (Click image for full size.) Kevin Kelly calls it a "nerdy solution." That's a bit harsh. It's just downright fun, by my lights. Which Kelly does give him credit for:

In the days before the internet, Heinlein's solution was fabulous. He created a one page FAQ answer sheet -- minus the questions. Then he, or rather his wife Ginny, checked off the appropriate answer and mailed it back. While getting a form letter back might be thought rude, it was much better than being ignored, and besides, the other questions you did not ask were also answered!

NYT article on ambient awareness

Today’s Sunday NYT magazine has a fairly solid article on ambient awareness, which reporter Clive Thompson defines as “incessant online contact.” What do we really get out of this constant stream of updates from friends via Facebook, Twitter, and GPS positioning on your iPhone? (Let me get back to that iPhone matter in a minute…)

Thompson suggests that we can potentially get an outstanding benefit from ambient awareness. Digested steadily and with a modicum of perspective—tweets are not meant to be all-consuming—ambient awareness has the potential to make rich contributions to our relationships.

Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel.

I have three (and a half) beefs with Thompson’s otherwise provocative piece.

First, he never fully engages how much work it requires to keep up-to-speed with Twitter or Facebook’s Newsfeed. He makes a half-hearted sally, but doesn’t stab this problem square in the chest.

I asked Seery how she finds the time to follow so many people online. The math seemed daunting. After all, if her 1,000 online contacts each post just a couple of notes each a day, that’s several thousand little social pings to sift through daily.

Thompson ends up backing off from how “daunting” keeping up with Twitter could potentially be. Tweets are really like newspaper headlines, he argues, not emails or letters—the latter group would require full mental attention. The former can be skimmed. I don’t buy this argument. As Umberto Eco points out, life is lived in the interstices. It doesn’t matter how interstitial work feels, it’s still work. And it always adds up to a massive commitment of time, energy, and resources.

Point two: since it doesn’t cost you any money to tweet or update your Newsfeed, then maybe you think that money isn’t part of the ambient awareness equation. This would be a huge misjudgment.

Facebook already makes hundreds of millions of dollars with ads. Twitter is inevitably going to travel the same road. The work you’re doing on these platforms might be free to you, but it’s making the platforms piles of money. Instead of them having to spend capital on marketing research in order to divine precisely the best ways to reach you, you’re providing all the marketing information they’ll ever need—and voluntarily! It’s been said that watching television consitutes the work of watching. Shortly thereafter, it was rightly observed that reality television—and by inference, social networking—constitutes the work of being watched. (Bonus: I've been known to say that television is evil. I say this for fun, but also because it's pretty much true.) Anyway, to Facebook and Twitter and every other microblogging service out there, we're nothing more than tidy little nodes of marketing data dropping capital into their pockets.

My third beef is that Thompson doesn’t delve into the political dimension of ambient awareness. Howard Rheingold may have invented this discussion with Smart Mobs, but that doesn’t mean it has run its course. News that Barack Obama was going to announce his Vice Presidential nominee via text message raised this topic in the media just a couple of weeks ago. It feels odd and disconnected that Thompson didn’t at least give smart mobs a passing mention. (Disclosure: Rheingold was one of my professors at Stanford, though I read his book before I ever took his class.)

Lastly, my half beef (as it were). I don’t see nearly enough discussion in technology journalism over the ballooning costs involved in keeping up with the Jobses, and this article is yet another example. An iPhone may have come down in price, but it’s still a few hundred bucks, not to mention the monthly service payment topping $100. Even if you have standard cell service on a pedestrian Razr, texts cost extra—either individually or in higher service packages. Twitter and Facebook are free, but in order to tweet or change your Facebook handle (or comment on your friends’) with your mobile device of choice, you need to pony up the monies. And not everyone has that option.

It is hard to continue this last (half) beef without getting deeper into the numbers—which I simply don’t have. But I’d love to know how much the average consumer is spending on connectivity these days, and how much that amount has increased in recent years.

But to end on a positive note. I do enjoy Thompson's concluding graf, and the observation he makes. "In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself." The narcissism of emerging technology is another outstanding aspect of our digital century that I'd like to read more about. I fear we all take techno-enhanced narcissism as too much of a given, as somehow inevitable and copacetic. I rather believe it's neither.

Thomas Mann and pounding out the copy

Seeing as we are fewer than ten years into the twenty-first century, an occasional digression into centuries past is sometimes unavoidable—even if those centuries weren’t quite as digital as this one already is.
I’m currently reading Thomas Mann. I should say re-reading Thomas Mann, because Death in Venice was assigned in at least two of my classes at Kenyon and Virginia. My Vintage paperback edition is marked up from start to finish. (It’s always curious to see which sentences and grafs I esteemed years ago; in some instances, as I puzzle over why I would have possibly underscored a particular section, I conclude that I might as well be reading someone else’s copy.)

Though I read Death in Venice at least twice before, I never could have told you quite what it was about. Sure: old man falls in love with young boy during a farewell-to-life sojourn in the titular Italian city. But the textures, the depths, the material that truly courses through the story all escaped me. After thinking about it for a few days, I’ve decided that my receptiveness to the story this third time around results in some large degree from the fact that I was just a student during my first two readings. I hadn’t yet struck it out in the world. I was probably 20 the first time I read it, maybe 22 or 23 the second time. Now I’m 29. Back then, I hadn’t attempted to make my own way on this absurd path of earning a living by means of letters and words. As Pete Dexter once put it, I hadn’t yet learned that writing is always about the “integrity of the sentence”—and that countless struggles ranging from writer’s block to solitary grumpiness and embarrassing credit card debts were only some of the obstacles to achieving the sort of high integrity I desired in the sentences I composed. Consquently, all of the passages in Death in Venice where the narrator describes Aschenbach’s life as an artist were Greek to me.

Something that particularly surprised me, however, was when I finished the novella and turned the page to the next story in the collection, “Tonio Kröger.” I don’t remember ever having read “Tonio Kröger”—but I must have done so once upon a time. The pages are filled with the same underscoring and marginalia of the book’s first 73 pages. But if I could barely remember Death in Venice, I had absolutely no recognition of “Tonio Kröger.”

The challenges and tribulations of artistry are once again a central theme in this story. But if Death in Venice sounds this theme with the pacing of a symphony, “Tonio Kröger” does so with the punch of a great rock song. Consider this passage on forming art with words:

But his love of the word kept growing sweeter and sweeter, and his love of form; for he used to say (and had already said it in writing) that knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.

That seems as perfectly concise as any writer’s credo could possibly be.

A few pages later, Kröger also suggests one chilling culprit that has prevented me from finishing a single damn story since I first began trying to write them five or six years ago. I’m not saying this is the single reason—but it struck a deep note of recognition for me:

If you care too much about what you have to say, if your heart is too much in it, you can be pretty sure of making a mess. You get pathetic, you wax sentimental; something dull and doddering, without roots or outlines, with no sense of humour—something tiresome and banal grows under your hand, and you get nothing out of it but apathy in your audience and disappointment and misery in yourself….only the irritations and icy ecstasies of the artist’s corrupted nervous system are artistic. The artist must be unhuman, extra-human; he must stand in a queer aloof relationship to our humanity; only so is he in a position, I ought to say only so would he be tempted, to represent it, to present it, to portray it to good effect. The very gift of style, of form and expression, is nothing else than this cool and fastidious attitude towards humanity; you might say there has to be this impoverishment and devastation as a preliminary condition….[and here Kröger really lets it fly] It is all up with the artist as soon as he becomes a man and begins to feel.

How many pieces of writing have I commenced while in some sort of sentimental or over-sensitive delusion? Too many, without question. I don’t know if the extreme position articulated by Kröger—“this cool and fastidious attitude towards humanity”—is ultimately called for. In fact, this feels like a winning candidate for the story to finally disprove, and to dramatic effect for Herr Kröger, before the last sentence’s full stop. (I have a few pages to go.) Then again, maybe not.

But I do believe that Mann positively nails the professionalism of writing, which is an aspect of the craft that many would-be practitioners overlook. I certainly learned how to be a better professional when I was working full-time as a reporter, triumphing over the daily discomforts of headaches, fatigue, annoyances, creative ennui (if I may be so bold), and physical restlessness in order to keep my ass planted in my chair and pound out the copy. In addition, I had to learn how to hold real people aloof, to write about them critically in fair, sparse sentences; to lend the experiences they had shared with me the most fundamental and even-handed treatment I could provide. Only when I succeeded in that mission did any of my work begin to depart the realm of "poor" and maybe encroach upon the realm of "good."

Much of why I’ve recommenced this blog—and, I hope, with nary a sentimental or “dull and doddering” impulse—ultimately comes back to that desire for professionalism. My current work doesn't call for any writing, though I am still deeply involved in gathering stories. But reading Mann has reminded me of a truth that all writers would do well to tattoo on their brains: few things are more pathetic than a self-identified writer who seldom puts a word on the screen.

Shamless self-promotion

More than 20 years ago, Dave Barry famously opined on how news coverage can sometimes get distorted by reporters filling out journalism award applications:

At certain times each year, we journalists do almost nothing except apply for the Pulitzers and several dozen other major prizes. During these times you could walk right into most newsrooms and commit a multiple ax murder naked, and it wouldn't get reported in the paper, because the reporters and editors would all be too busy filling out prize applications. "Hey!" they'd yell at you. "Watch it! You're getting blood on my application!"

Well last spring we hardly had a naked ax-murderer charge into our newsroom. We did, however, have a round of applications to fill out for the California Newspaper Publishers Association's annual awards. The Review won 14 1st- or 2nd-place nods last year (second only to the L.A. Times), so we had some steep expectations for ourselves.

This year, I'm proud and honored to announce that we surpassed last year's total with 16 finalist nominations.

Three of the 16 finalist nominations carry my byline -- two of them individually, and one shared:

Local News:
http://hmbreview.com/articles/2008/03/26/news/doc47eab8e116a3b356534208.txt
(Caught the Air Force dumping untreated stormwater into the Pacific Ocean.)

Business & Finance:
http://hmbreview.com/articles/2008/02/27/news/doc47c4bcfbcc5d0661218629.txt
http://hmbreview.com/articles/2008/02/27/news/doc47c4be12e6c1d442247855.txt
http://hmbreview.com/articles/2008/02/27/news/doc47c4bcfbcc5d0661218629.txt
http://hmbreview.com/articles/2008/02/27/news/doc47c4bcbd6d427624950484.txt
(I wrote these four articles as a one-week package on how the recession was hitting the Coastside economy.)

Breaking News Coverage:
http://hmbreview.com/articles/2008/01/09/news/local_news/story01.txt
(shared byline)

I'll dispense with the faux self-deprecation because it would be all too transparent. Allow me only to say that I'm humbled to have worked with such an excellent staff that was committed to extraordinary work during a very lean year in journalism. I'm also grateful to all of my former teachers who instructed me how to hold my own in a very competitive and energetic newsroom.

Here's one footnote, though, to illustrate the vicissitudes of newsroom life these days: three of the five reporters and the one staff photographer who earned accolades this year have moved on to other pursuits. In other words, approximately 70 percent of the newsroom staff turned over in less than 10 months.

I have a lot of love for the Review, and will always wish it well. But that can't be good.

Summer idleness

I've been keeping a low profile this summer after a job change and the requisite training to finish the San Francisco Marathon (I wanted to break four hours, but I'm not complaining). Now that much of that is in my rearview mirror, I'm going to update this space regularly.

Finishing graduate school and jumping right into a reporter's chair at the Half Moon Bay Review was exhilarating, exhausting and educational. Who knew that it would take a summer of reading everything I could get my hands on and training for a 26.2-mile race in order to catch my breath? Gratefully, I think I finally have.

A few years ago, I placed a marathon high on my to-do list. It obviously took me a while to pull it off. Achieving that goal has given me some perspective. I needed some distance from Stanford, and even from traditional reporting, in order to get my bearings a bit. The next step in my career -- which will occur who knows when -- must be a strong one. And improving this space, thinking out many of the reactions and ideas that occur to me as I navigate our ever-shifting media cyberscape, I have concluded is crucial to taking that strong step forward.

But it's not just toward the ends of furthering my career that I wish to improve this space. (Honest!) I chose this career in the first place because I love stories. The more stories we hear, see or read, the richer our lives become. The better we learn how to tell our stories, the richer we make the world around us. A Detroit Free Press columnist recently pointed to Garrison Keillor's observation that stories are currency. I agree. And since I'll probably never become rich in dollars, I better damn well do my part by becoming a better storyteller.

Listen to what my living hero, Garrison Keillor, has to say: "Stories are basic currency, the dollar bill of conversation. ... You go to the grocery store and the checkout woman tells you that she wasn't at work yesterday because her dog had to be put down, the dog she's had for 13 years. That's a story right there, whether she amplifies on it or not, and her willingness to tell it to you is what moves her out of the ranks of the nameless and makes her real to you.

"And if we're not real to each other, then we're dangerous to each other." Stories, he said, "give us that simple empathy that is the basis of the Golden Rule."

How books come and go

I found the contrast of these articles interesting. On the one hand, you Rachel Donadio pointing out that we have more books being published than ever before:

In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. University writing programs are thriving, while writers’ conferences abound, offering aspiring authors a chance to network and “workshop” their work. The blog tracker Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day (with a lucky few bloggers getting book deals). And the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”

Then on the other hand, you have a meditation on how books -- yes, they do, after all, remain pesky material objects, Amazon Kindles notwithstanding -- actually end up becoming dust.

Some burned, some pulped, some simply forgotten. Some stillborn in our minds, some dead of neglect, some strangled in their cradles by a critic’s contempt. We don’t mourn for books, or the life that passed into them during their creation, because we rarely know about their loss. Those that die usually do so without ceremony, like the wordless exhalations that take place each day in nursing homes, public hospitals, or prison wards, where death is an act of forgetting and a problem of remains.

I've often wondered how vanity press books will skew future historians' interpretation of our era. Then again, I guess the books that were (and were not) published have always given a skewed snapshot of any era's cultural thoughts.

A newsroom morgue

A photographer at the San Jose Mercury News took these stirring shots of the newsroom following the most recent round of layoffs. (via San Francisco Peninsula Press Club) I think they blocked image copying on Flickr, so I can't mirror a sample image for you here. But the pictures are worth the jump.

The thing that scares me is that every empty desk represents two or three stories per week that won't get reported, and at least one per week in which someone will swindle, rip-off, injure or abuse someone else and the wrongdoer won't be exposed.

Not to mention all the stories of the good things that happen day in and day out in Silicon Valley that also won't get their proper notoriety.

Meanwhile, a former teacher of mine got feisty about the whole to-do:

Just last week I was privileged to briefly visit the newsroom at the San Jose Mercury News, a paper that has embraced the buyout mania even more than the Washington Post or New York Times. The newsroom staff has been reduced by half in the past few years, and everyone agrees it's been an enormous benefit. The paper no longer worries about covering lots of pesky stories that once seemed to take endless time and energy and threatened its readers with information overload. Gone, too, is the anxiety year after year of trying to make the Top 10 list of great American newspapers. And no more over-editing! The enhanced oxygen supply in a half-empty newsroom, the spaciousness and the blessed silence reminded me of the peace and tranquility I found in abandoned villages in Kurdistan in 1991 after the Iraqi army had passed through during its own special buy-out program.

Must we crush each other? Really?

BusinessWeek has a bit about the success of the Financial Times. The odd thing to me that jumps out of this article is the notion that the competition must be crushed. I digress to the inevitable quote: "But many suspect that if Job One for a Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is suffocating The New York Times, then Job Two is crushing the FT. (via Romanesko.)"

I'm all for good sportsmanlike tussles, mind you, but crushing other companies strikes me as a bit over the top. Especially when media companies aren't really competing against each other anymore, but against the consumer's time and habits. It's kind of like Johnny sweeping the leg. Shouldn't the bigger victory be for karate teachers everywhere?

In all seriousness, my first acquaintance with destroying the competition, at least in a journalistic sense, came when I interned at the Kenyon Review. No, we weren't throwing down the gauntlet against the Paris Review or the Yale Review. (Sissy publications all!) But our managing editor at the time had recently come from the newspaper business and was delighted to land at the Review. He said his previous job at a Cleveland newspaper involved putting the city's other paper out of commission. And that that just wasn't a very fun task, he told us, or anything that he wanted to do with his career. Hence his defection to the Review.

That always stuck in my mind. I'm all for free market economies and such, but there's a point beyond which too much competition can obliterate the market. And in their haste to maintain their relevance to consumers, today's news outlets shouldn't be racing toward such obliteration.

Kvetching--a great journalistic tradition

I'm certainly among the last reporters to write or comment about AngryJournalist.com, but I still think I can throw some thoughts out there. Primarily, I'd like to offer a half-baked theory to explain why the site has been so successful---that is, success measured in terms of hits, posts, etc.

Here it is: good journalists cannot flip the switch.

The "switch" refers to the difference between two methods of living & working. The first method is how most professions demand that its workers conduct themselves---normally. Even in today's 24-hour work cycle, most workers still punch the metaphorical clock. Even if they're workaholics, the nature of their work is always directed outward, on the project or matter at hand. Work is work, family is family, and usually that separation stands up over time.

The second method is how journalism requires reporters to conduct themselves---hungry to dig up information, knock down walls and analyze disparate or complex stories. This requires reporters, in many instances, to become bastards. Sure, we can sound polite on the phone, but the fact remains that we're always trying to get information. If someone is forthcoming with that information, we're always trying to leverage them for more. If someone isn't forthcoming, then we're digging all around them so that they'll have no choice but to give it to us.

In grad school, a classmate became catatonic in her car before interviewing a tough source. She called our professor---a grizzled yet polished veteran editor and reporter for the Mercury News---for advice. "I have to be honest with you," she told him. "I'm scared out of my mind to talk to this guy." "I hear you," he responded. "But if you don't talk to him, you don't have a story. So take a deep breath or suck it up or do whatever you do--and get out of the damn car." Everyone in class---including the student---agreed. The professor was right to talk to her this way.

Then comes deadline. We have no time to atone for our rough edges. We have to make some words. And we do so with manic energy.

Anyone who lasts as a reporter for more than one month will admit it: the whole process revs us up. Few other professions require its workers to step out of their comfort zones so consistently, and simultaneously demand the quick, difficult analysis of writing on top of it all. Few professions also deliver such satisfaction when the process is done right. And the only way to survive is to keep your engine revved so that you're ready to do it right at all times---ready for any story, any moment.

Small wonder, then, that reporters can't help themselves from the type of kvetching that they suppy to AngryJournalist. The state of the media today is convoluted, indefinite, and often times antagonistic. Just like the stories we usually report. We can't very well report the world in one manner, and report on our own experience as reporters in another.

Like I say, we can't flip that switch. And readers wouldn't want us to flip it, because the consequence would be soft articles, press releases rehashed into briefs, and stories that stop after a couple of passes instead of prying open the real stories beneath the surface.

The salient question, however, isn't how or why we kvetch about our tough times in journalism. It's whether we should be doing it to such a degree. What good is complaining unless you propose some solutions---and then act on them?

No good at all, of course. The former is navel gazing; the latter is gettin' it done.

Panic! on the dais

Everyone's wunderkind of the moment, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, found himself at the center of one of the oddest online/offline PR moments in recent times in early March. Zuckerberg was being interviewed by BusinessWeek reporter Sarah Lacy at the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas.

The crowd filled the room. Tech fans were ga-ga to hear Zuckerberg talk about the popular online platform. Then the crowd apparently turned on Lacy, upset with the way she was interviewing Zuckerberg. Daniel Terdiman's article at C|Net tells the story:

"Other than rough interviews," an audience member asked Zuckerberg during a short Q&A session at the end of the keynote, "what are some of the biggest challenges Facebook faces?"

"Has this been a rough interview?" Lacy asked Zuckerberg.

"I wasn't asking you, I was asking Mark," the audience member said.

The battle between Lacy and the audience began almost immediately. From the beginning of her interview with Zuckerberg, she repeatedly interrupted him, and all around me, I started to hear annoyed murmurs of people saying that she should stop doing so.

Later on, Zuckerberg himself seemed to get annoyed by Lacy's style. As he was answering one of her questions, she began to talk over him, only to notice his reaction.

"I kind of cut you off," she said. "You kind of had this hurt look, like, 'I was talking.'"

Near me in the third row of the ballroom, someone said, "Is she serious?"

It only got worse from there. At one point, Lacy got confused about how much time was left for the interview, and Zuckerberg teased her.

"Did you run out of questions?" he asked.

The line got a huge cheer from the thousands in the audience.

Lacy's party line afterward was to claim that she and Zuckerberg were on the same side, and wondering why the crowd turned against them. One interviewer pointed out that they didn't turn against "them" so much as they turned against "her." Nonetheless, she was unapologetic, even pulling the gender card and boasting of her increased Amazon ranking. Hardly the humble approach consumers generally appreciate from their journalists.

It's hard to get an accurate read on such a bizarre event, even with all the feeds of interconnectivity that were plugged into the moment---live-blogging, texting, Twitters, etc.---but a few things seem certain. First, mob rule is insatiable, particularly among a crowd as overly caffeinated and supercharged as the tech crowd. Second, be careful when and where you play minority/disadvantaged cards or boast of your own profile and accomplishments. Especially when a reporter is videorecording you.

Most important, however, is a basic journalistic tenet: Don't be the story. Consumers don't read even the most beloved and uniquely voiced columnists for the way they say things---it's always the what that consumers are after. The way is always a value-add; it's never the substance.

Anyway, feel free to judge the interview for yourself.

Woman identified by NYT despite asking not to be identified

There I was a couple of weekends ago, cruising along through a Sunday edition of the New York Times. Until I came across an article on Eckhart Tolle, a name I recalled from my days as a publicist for Shambhala Publications. (I don't believe Shambhala ever published Tolle, but his name was in the same circles, and I believe he blurbed a book or two.)

The article was straightforward enough---a typical mainstream dip into New Age media, via an Oprah newspeg---until I reached this passage:

Mr. Tolle’s own representatives had fewer specifics. “We don’t have a lot of knowledge about Eckhart Tolle as a person,” said a woman who answered the phone last week at the Vancouver office of Eckhart Teachings, and who asked not to be identified. “And I’m the only one here.”

That's a mighty quick process of elimination for someone who doesn't want to be identified!

This is surely a moment in which the rights and privileges of journalists lock horns with the uninformed expectations of the "area woman"---in this case, the one who "answered the phone." More likely than not, this woman hadn't been interviewed by a reporter before (at least not in her current capacity as a Tolle representative), and didn't realize every word she uttered was on the record. She was sharp enough to declare that she wished to remain anonymous; but she wasn't sharp enough to withhold information that could identify her. Or at least come close to identifying her.