"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.