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July in June: No One Belongs Here More Than You

Miranda July’s characters would not welcome digital lifelogs. Although they perk up in the last several stories, July's protaganists  are generally dowdy loners  with delusions where culture should be; they are mild yet desperate, rooted in the rootlessness of the cubicle, the strip mall, the apartment–the kind of people who don’t get it together enough to be serial killers or stalkers or predators.

July rather bravely tackles an interesting challege:  How do you write about aloneness? How do you write about the inertia of depression? How do you write about people who aren’t popular enough to have antagonists and who aren’t pro-active enough to have crises?  You rely on delusions, fantasy, the karate between what’s perceived and what is.  You rely on a charismatic voice. “One is seldom knighted.”    

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.

Laurie Phillips Show: Harvesting The Crops

Download laurie_mcad_art_show.pdf  Our friend Laurie Phillips has a thought-provoking, emotion-provoking show at MCAD:  horizontal photographs, with the people’s faces cropped, with their stories elaborated in hand-written, hand-drawn narratives which, depending on your cultural references, will evoke chinese scrolls or comic strips.

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. 

The Honest Truth: Thoughts On Laurie Lindeen’s Petal Pusher (II)

“Novels about the music world are not uncommon and tend to be trashy . . .  the necessary bit about the star’s mystical communion with the muse is never quite as convincing as the necessary bit about group sex.”

Greil Marcus, in a review of Josef Skvorecky’s The Bass Saxophone

I think what Marcus finds objectionable about most music novels–and, by extension, memoirs–is their dishonesty. And by dishonesty, I don’t mean getting their facts wrong, but failing to acknowledge their filters: their sentimentality, their sensationalism, their grudges, their need to be hip, their self-hagiography.      

What distinguishes Petal Pusher is its honesty–its acknowledgment that one can be motivated by both a pure love of music and an impure desire for fame, its ability to admit one’s vices and acknowledge other people's virtues, its reluctance to milk one’s multiple sclerosis, its bravery in documenting frazzled  performances and savage reviews, its willingness to be be unhip by acknowledging one’s debt to Julie Andrews.

If it wouldn't’t be the kiss of death, I’d praise Petal Pusher as a grown up  book about the music industry.

Flower Power: Thoughts on Laurie Lindeen’s Petal Pusher (I)

I need to acknowledge my bias here. It was cool to read in a published form what I’d workshopped in a manuscript form, to realize that Laurie’s friend Carolyn from the Global Café is also my friend Carolyn, and to revisit familiar zip codes from the 80s and early 90s.

That said, Petal Pusher passes two almost objective tests:  I ripped through it in just over two days, and I’ll be recommending it to friends (in person, not just virtually) and giving it to my sister for her birthday.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story of this memoir, Lindeen and her band Zuzu’s Petals careen around the country (and England and a little bit of Europe) in search of a curdling dream of alt rock fame. This quest explains some, but only some, of the book's appeal. More tomorrow. 

Judging A Cover by Its Book I: Jami Attenberg’s Instant Love

Whoever designed the paperback version of Instant Love did an almost miraculously good job of capturing the book’s essence.  The cover features a photograph of a wish bone, which immediately conveys a moment of wish and fracture, of wincing anticipation, of delicate gestures and imagined futures,  of things we want to believe in and yet which don’t think can support belief, of someone getting a little more and someone getting a little less.  And that is precisely what the best stories in Instant Love are about.  And the details–the mild tension created by the type placement between the bones, the wistful yet surgical background color–are all just dead on.  (I just thought to look on the book: Jennifer O'Connor designed it.)

When Did You Get All Dulcet?

Public radio is holding what is essentially an online audition for a radio show.  My friend Rob McGinley Myers has put together what I think is a pretty impressive audition.

If you'd like to register to vote in the contest, you may go here.