Unprintable Version

Can frowning be an isometric exercise?

Check out the picture of the Waugh family, especially Evelyn and wife.  The book looks interesting, too.

On Coolness and Chilling Effects

Both the possibilities and pitfalls–or pratfalls– of the “lifelogging” phenomenon fascinate me. While recording is not publishing, the possibility of publication squirms around in every record.

I think of Joe Queenan’s idea of the tyranny of good taste and of people who “act as if the rest of humanity is watching their time sheets.”

Consider this, in matter of the recent attempts to log every thing one has ever done:

I’m driving home from Kowalski’s. While the sticker on my back window says “The Current 89.3,” I am listening to a vintage Kassey Kassem on the Oldies station. A new song starts. I recognize it immediately. “Timothy” is a tale told by a young miner. He and two other young miners were trapped in a collapsed mine for days. His friend Joe mentions that he would kill “for a piece of meat” and the narrator points out “Timothy, Timothy, he was looking at you,” repeating “Timothy” because you can emote twice as much in six syllables. At this point, the narrator faints like a teenybopper at a David Cassidy concert. When he awakes, he sees light. He and Joe are rescued. Timothy is never heard from again and, weirdly, no one asks any questions. The song ends,  “Timothy, Timothy, God what did we do?” 

Why didn’t I change the station? Why did slightly more people buy this song than the Janis Joplin song which preceded it? God, what did we do?    

I think a certain amount of junk in one’s cultural diet is a good thing, just as a quorum of germs evidently keeps us healthy. As a writer, it might be worth noting that successful trash is doing something right and to try and figure out what it is. ("Timothy' has a hook, a story, and a sense of urgency.) But there’s also the “bad” art which is good but uncool  (Glen Campbell, Roger Miller) or good but not serious enough for the If it’s Not Kierkegaard, It’s Krap school (Batman Begins, the first Pirates of the Caribbean).

I also think I may need to reconsider my disdain for Joe Queenan. This essay rocks.

Every Step You Take, Every Move You Make

Wired reports on a Rutgers Professor, falsely put on the terrorist watch list, who is pre-empting surveillance by documenting his entire life through GPS positioning, debit card usage reports, and cell phone photos. The New Yorker documents the attempt of Gordon Bell, now of Microsoft,  to digitally archive his entire life, including every web site visited, every computer window opened, the nutritional content of every meal he consumes, an image of every face he sees (through a camera which hangs around the neck and senses the body heat of others) and his large collection “of commemorative t-shirts.” So far, Bell's team has created a great digital subconscious, because they have found it easier this to record stuff than to index and access it but serious–and useful–commercial applications.   

But my first thought was something like, “I can never go to White Castle again.” 

I Just Webbed You: Author Websites I Think Are Cool

After having spent years telling people that "cool" wasn't a meaningful design criteria, I  have to admit that what attracted me to some recently discovered authors' pages was a kind of coolness–cool, not in the sense of chilly but in the sense of "that red thing in the toy store window looks interesting." Some of my recent favorites include the preposterous password requirement in Miranda July's author page, the flip book odyssey of her No One Belongs Here More Than You site, the Christmas cracker surprise of Jonathan Lethem's links page, and the dorky self revelation of his "my first novels" page.

Screen Writing: A Writer's Website

I have to admit to the ultimate bias here. I helped create the site. 

"Helped" being the operative word. Most of the content came from Trish and reviewers and Christiansen Creative provided the design.  I just helped focus the strategy, structure, and tone; wrote a little promotional copy; picked quotes; and worked with the design firm.

I also realized something about writer’s websites.  The process reminded me of when we were planning our wedding. We thought we would pick up a template from other people’s weddings, but other than a remedial checklist, we didn’t find them of much help: everything has to flow from your personality. Of course, this insight is Marketing 101  but it still surprises me.  I always assume templates and I’m always surprised when they have to be discarded. 

Why Not the Worst? - New York Times

Link: Why Not the Worst? - New York Times. My reaction to this essay started off simple and got complicated when I realized Joe Queenan wrote it.  His use of the phrase "corn-shucker" when he describes The Bridges of Madison County as a "corn-shucker's Madame Bovary" tells you eveything you need to know about him, yet I will tell you a little more: he is a corn shucker's Kurt Andersen and one of the brain trust behind the show Fraser which seemed funny at the time but feels insufferable in reruns. ("Oh, look MPR made a sitcom.") Also note that standards aren't being relaxed here, they're being inverted: there are still three categories and there's still a distinction between "camp" and Queenen's evidently more sincere form of condescension and there's still a lot of sniffing around for signs of compromise. Queenen always seems more aware of the badness than of the book. When I watch things other people find atrocious–Jackie Chan movies, the less nuanced Star Trek series–it's because I actually like them. Of course, anyone who has ever watched Plan Nine From Outer Space has watched it precisely for its badness. Nobody's perfect. 

Colorful Penquins

Link: Penguin UK.  Penguin UK continues to do interesting things–one of which is to send out engaging emails. This month they're announcing classic works of fiction with covers by graphic novel artists.  I also didn't know Rashomon was originally a short story.

If You Don't Have Cauliflower, You May Substitute Haggard Squirrel: Harry Mathews

The Paris Review contains an interview with Harry Mathews who appears to have made a career out of writing exercises, which I suspect is a slightly more serious thing to do than it appears to be.   

"I took two texts, Keats’ "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and a cauliflower recipe from a Julia Child cookbook. I made a list of the vocabularies in each piece and I rewrote the poem using the vocabulary of the recipe and vice versa. It was agony. But I discovered something very important, which is that once you start on a project like that. no matter how insane it is, you rapidly become convinced that there is, in fact, a solution . . . "

God And Man and Monkeys at Common Good Books

I stopped in at Common Good Books Monday night and was reminded of what independent brick-and-mortar bookstores are good for:  pleasant hovering and creative indecisiveness. I’d meant to swoop in and pick up Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! But of course I looked at the books displayed on the front tables, specifically, The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books because I was feeling pretty good about myself lately and this kind of books-I-haven’t-read collection is just the thing to take me down a notch. And then I saw a Best of Stephen Jay Gould; I’ve been always meaning to read him and I noticed that he’s written about evolution and faith and I’m interested in that because the blog-level, bull-session level discussion of that subject is just so impossibly inane. Oh look, the people who want to be smarter than everyone are bashing the people who want to be more righteous than anyone.  I’m not quite sure how a subject which should inspire humility has inspired so much certitude. Everything in my life has convinced me that much of human thought–religious and otherwise–is superstitious, incomplete, myopic, muddled, fear-based, resentment-permeated, self-serving and unaware of its biases and that for all I know monkeys evolved from us. (They seem to have more fun.) Or is that just me?

But then I proceeded to the non-new fiction aisle and bought the Cather. I’m very glad I did, but those other books are somewhere in the back of my mind, too.

David Foster Wallce at Kenyon: Groceries and Epiphanies

David Foster Wallace's best fiction is intellectually daring, emotionally fearless, charmingly regular-guy, almost uncomfortably pressurized, and deceptively spiritual. His essays circle a subject then often nail it. (I think his Updike review in Consider the Lobster is definitive.) And all of these qualities enliven  the graduation speech he delivered at Kenyon in 2005 and which I found collected in Best American Non-Required Reading 2006. My only question for those of you who read the speech: does this so accurately describe the addictive personality that it is lost on the well-adjusted?  Of course, this requires you to self-identify as "well-adjusted" which I will define as anyone who's never said to themselves, "I wonder if there's some sort of treatment program for this thing I'm doing."