Tag Archives: Writing

Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters — Scott Rosenberg

September 20, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In Why and How to Write a Blog, I said that “blogging is the genre that can subsume any other genre if you want it to.” It is to fact what the novel is to fiction or stories. But the development of the blog is an underreported phenomenon, at least on a broader scale, and Say Everything attempts to rectify that situation by tracing some of the early blogs and positing that while “blogging looked inconsequential and sounded ridiculous, […] it turned out to matter.” That blogging matters seems hard to argue against, given how many people do it and how blogging has democratized information by making the process of learning about a field easier. But how blogging comes to matter and where it might go is a much harder task and one that Say Everything probably hasn’t accomplished.

Of the three parts in Say Everything’s subtitle, the book only does one really well: how blogging began and where it’s been, on a factual level, since then. “What it’s becoming” is really too broad for anyone to guess: answers tend to range from “the media” to “everything” to “nothing” to the one that seems most probable to me: “who knows?” People barely had any idea of where computers would go in the 1970s, or where networking would go in the 1980s, or where the Internet would go in the 1990s. To presume that we know where something as amorphous as blogging will go in the 2000s seems unlikely. The final subtitle, “Why it matters,” ought to be obvious to anyone with any sense of history: communications revolutions tend to beget other kinds of social and cultural revolutions (see, for example, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change for an earlier example). When you can’t (easily) control what people are saying or how they’re saying it or who they’re distributing it too, interesting and unusual things start to happen. We’re barely at the infancy of that process in terms of blogging: that it matters shouldn’t even be arguable anymore. The question should be “how will it matter?”, but that merely leads us back to the problems associated with subtitle number two.

In Coders at Work, JavaScript and badass programmer Douglas Crockford says that “I think we’re tragically unaware of our history, and I’m often really disappointed to see that people who are now practicing this craft having no intellectual curiosity about where this stuff came from…” He’s referring to programming languages, but he could just as well refer to bloggers, who often suffer from the same kind of implicit and incorrect ahistoricism. Although it might be short on analysis, maybe blogging isn’t ready for the kind of deep interpretation that good professional historians bring to their subjects. Hell, maybe blogging itself isn’t mature enough to bring those tools to bear, or those bloggers who might (like professional historians) are too busy in other mediums that reward depth to bother with the intense research and thought such an effort would require.

Still, Rosenberg might be setting the stage for those deep analyses by giving us some facts before those facts disappear into the online morass: he’s giving us memories that might be hard to find today, let alone ten or twenty years from now. Say Everything threw surprises even at me, someone who has been using the Internet and reading one of the early blogs (Slashdot) since the mid 1990s. Before I could drive, I could post to Usenet. Yet I didn’t know how important Dave Winer was and is for the blogging tools that exist now, like RSS, which I use daily. If blogging is going to grow as a discipline, we need someone to bring together its broad early contours in a single place. Bloggers seem unlikely to do it on our own, or, if we do, the pieces of the conversation will be too scattered. One thing books are really good at doing by virtue of their length is bringing those pieces together in one place. Even posts like this much-cited one, on how the blogosphere has changed in the last six years, doesn’t really give much background.

One of the most fascinating passages in Say Everything is actually a quote from Justin Hall:

What if a deeply connective personal activity you do, that’s like religion, that you practice with yourself, that’s a dialogue with the divine, turns out to drive people away from you? … I published my life on the fucking internet. And it doesn’t make people wanna be with me. It makes people not trust me. And I don’t know what the fuck to do about it . . .

Hall is overly grandiose (“that’s like religion”), but it nonetheless rings true and reminds me of a New York Times story I can’t find right now about someone who decided to throw a party and only invite Facebook “friends,” and then discovered that no one showed up. This raises the question: are they really your friends? Maybe one needs to find the medium place where one can write usefully* online, but where one doesn’t necessarily write everything. In other words, just because you can say anything doesn’t mean you should.

Later in the same section, Rosenberg says that “Hall had always dedicated a big chunk of his time and pages to teaching and proselytizing for his faith in self-expression on the web,” and that his “calling to public autobiography was driven in part by the trauma of a parental suicide.” Maybe: but I’m not sure how parental suicide would lead one to public autobiography, and I find it fascinating that Hall’s public autobiography ultimately prevented him from forging closer relationships with others, which in turn broke at least some of the faith described in the first sentence. If the public autobiography isn’t good for close relationships, maybe people strongly inclined toward barring all in the blogs will realize the hard way what journalists and writers have long known: that to do one’s best work, or to do it over the long term, one needs to keep some private reserve in reserve, or at least in reserve for someone else who might value that reserve for its scarcity.

Others have trouble with relearning as well; Rosenberg echoes Paul Graham’s How to Disagree when he says “Any public career online is going to attract a certain volume of drive-by flak; potentially useful criticism is likely to be hopelessly tangled personal invective.” Dave Winer of Scripting News apparently didn’t know that, and Rosenberg slips into cliche when he says that Winer “took nearly every putdown to heart.” But that’s not just the nature of “any public career online,” but any public career: politicians, for example, deal with drive-by idiocy all the time. One could even take those attacks as a sign of success; as David Segal observes in Call It Ludacris: The Kinship Between Talk Radio and Rap:

You’re nobody in hip-hop until you claim to have hordes of detractors. The paradox, of course, is that the artists who regularly denounce their haters have a huge and adoring audience. How does Lil Wayne complain in song about the legions who seek his ruin even as he dominates the charts? Ask Michael Savage, who is forever describing himself as an underdog, marginalized by the media — on the more than 300 stations that carry his show.

You have to let it roll, or use it to boost your ego. Furthermore, if you respond too seriously to it, or begin to believe in your own messianic power, you’ll face a different problem. As Rosenberg says of Winer, “[T]elling-it-like-it-is can easily tempt you over the edge into meanness.” In other words, if you lack tact, you can come across as a jerk even if you’re right, and if you lack sufficient intellectual playfulness,

These main points are the stronger parts of Say Everything, the sections that make you want to keep reading past the sometimes tedious recitations of everyday blogging (does anyone really care about the specifics of Winer vs. the haters fights?). Me neither. Consequently, I suspect the audience for Say Everything is relatively limited to bloggers themselves, scholars with an interest in the media, and journalists looking for a way forward. A fourth category might be useful too: the clueless but powerful whose work brings them into contact with bloggers but who have no idea what’s happening in the medium. Now, instead of spending 20 hours trying to find blog posts about the history of blogging, one can point at a book and say, “at least for the time being, this will tell you about the history of blogging.” And that reminds us at least in part about some of blogging’s present limitations, especially relative to books.

* Whatever this means. Defining a term like “usefully” could take an entire essay in an of itself. But this post is a very small part of a very broad effort at defining the generic boundaries and conventions of blogging, so maybe someone else will take me up on the point of what “useful” blogging could entail.

Why and How to Write a Blog: Questions on Hacker News

September 8, 2009 By in Personal, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

A recent discussion on Hacker News asked, in effect, what makes a good blog, which in turn asks the question, “why write a blog?” There’s no perfect answer; as Scott Rosenberg’s Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters indicates, people write for practically as many reasons as there are people: prestige, boredom, ego, whatever.

That being said, the best blogs focus on specific niches but often use those niches to explore the wider world. For example, Marginal Revolution is nominally an economics blog, but it also discusses foreign travel, ethnic cuisine, books, and more. The blogs I contribute to try to follow the same general principle: the one you’re reading now focuses on books (this focus can be very broad: some of my posts about keyboard reviews, for example, get a lot of traffic) and Grant Writing Confidential discusses grant writing. The latter in particular has a purpose beyond random musings: it’s there to show people how to write proposals and that we know how.

If you’re thinking about writing a blog, read Penelope Trunk’s comments, which are invaluable if not always accurate. In addition, I wrote a post called “You’re Not Going to be a Professional Blogger, Regardless of What the Wall Street Journal Tells You” that got slashdotted and ought to dissuade you from the idea you’re going to make money directly at it, at least in the short term. But if you’re looking for a means of expression and you want to write primarily because you want to write, then just roll with it.

“Without a purpose for writing, though, I don’t see how to even try writing a blog. Any suggestions?”

As others have said, don’t write a blog if you don’t have a purpose. Your purpose should come from something you care about deeply enough to know something about that you’d like to transmit to others: in my case, that means books, chiefly, but also grant writing. For many HN readers, it probably means programming. Remember too that the deep knowledge/writing/transmission process isn’t linear, but recursive: I’ve probably learned more about books by trying to sort my ideas about them out in a logical, rational way than I would if I just read a lot (this, incidentally, is why good schools require you to write a lot: writing forces you to embellish the ideas you do have and often to come up with ideas you didn’t have previously). Sometimes you don’t need a purpose in advance: you’ll find one as you start writing.

It’s been said by various writers and scholars (see, for example, Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel or Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel) that the novel is the genre that consumes all other genres—that is to say, it can contain elements of epic poems, Romance, poetry, history, philosophy, and more. By the same token, blogging is the genre that can subsume any other genre if you want it to, because blogging is more a form than a way of presenting content, and over the past 10 years we’ve hardly touched on what is possible.

Just don’t write about your cat. That’s the only rule. There are enough blogs about people’s cats.

See also Scott Rosenberg’s Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters.

The very very beginning writer

August 19, 2009 By in Books, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , 7 Comments

Literary agent Janet Reid is asking for advice. Or, more specifically, she’s asking writers for advice about advice:

When you were starting out, what advice did you get that REALLY helped you? And I mean both helped you improve as a writer, and helped you deal with the sense of failure and frustration when you wanted to do something so bad you could taste it, and it wasn’t working.

I left a comment, but after 90 of them, I’m guessing she probably got all the advice she wanted. That being said, I wish that a) all of the following books had been written, b) someone pointed me to them, and c) I was smart enough to find and read them:

—James Wood’s How Fiction Works
—Francine Prose’s Reading like a Writer
—The two collected volumes from the New York Times, Writers on Writing.
—Renni Browne and Dave King’s Self Editing for Fiction Writers

Those five are the major ones. A few others that might be worth leaving off at first because they could be overwhelming:

—The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House
—William Zissner’s On Writing Well
—Martin Amis’ The War Against Cliche
—Steven King’s On Writing

It’s somehow popular to argue that writing can’t be taught, but the more experience I accumulate, the more I begin to doubt that advice. Mark McGurl tackles it to some extent in his book The Program Era, which is also probably worth reading for anyone pondering a career in writing fiction, since so many of those careers today run through teaching at some point or another.

Someone else in Reid’s comments section gave similar advice to mine but in different words: “Go to your local library and read every book in the “How to write” 808 section.” Good call. If the writer takes this advice, they’ll learn more than they ever could in 10 or 15 minutes with Reid. The writer might disagree with some or most of what’d dispensed in the books I listed, or the books listed in the 808 section—which is a good thing, because otherwise fiction would droop into being formulaic. That being said, I still think that at least knowing such guidance exists is a positive: it gives you something to work with, or something to work against. Either way, I think the knowledge imparted will beat beating one’s way around blindly in the dark.

EDIT: A friend has been telling me to read Robert Olen Butler’s From Where you Dreamfor months, and I’m now getting around to it (this kind of lag between meaning to read something and actually reading it isn’t unusual for me: the number of books I’d like to read expands faster than the amount of time I have to read, and the list is continually being reshuffled based on needs and idiosyncrasies). With that long preamble, I’d like to point to this passage:

If I had me to talk to me back when, I might not have had to write a million dreadful words. If I’d caught me at the right moment—and in the right spirit—I might have had to write only a quarter of a million—maybe not so many as that if I’d really listened. You might ask, why did he write five terrible novels? How many terrible novels can you write? The answer is that I had no idea how badly I was writing. None. And my ability to continue working through a million words was so rooted in self-deception that I might not have been able to hear this message. So those are the things you may have to sort through, too.

You might. But if you stumble on this post, or Olen Butler’s book, or some of the other books listed above, in time, you might still come out with fewer terrible stories and novels than you would otherwise.

EDIT 2: This post concerning Philip Greenspun’s “Why I’m Not a Writer” is also germane. If you’re rich enough, you don’t have to worry about food and rent. Everyone else does. If you want to be a professional writer, one useful way to go about it is by starting off with a fat inheritance so you don’t need a day job. And if you want to be a writer, you’ll probably have a day job for life.

Early August links: Book stalking, teaching, Playboy's Guide to Lingering, and more

August 10, 2009 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

* Makers’ versus Managers’ Schedules:

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

* Rands’ The Book Stalker: Where is it? Everyone has one could well describe me.

* From the department of unintended consequences: “The New Book Banning: Children’s books burn, courtesy of the federal government.” This is because the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA) stops the selling of used children’s good produced before 1985, when lead was banned, unless those products conform to the post-1985 standards. Although lead in children’s books hasn’t been shown to be harmful, the books don’t pass muster anyway.

I am generally not an organized political person who writes angry letters to Congresspersons and such, but this might be worth an exception.

(Hat tip to Megan McArdle.)

* A “teach naked” proponent challenges us to stop using computers while we teach:

Mr. Bowen is part of a group of college leaders who haven’t given up on that dream of shaking up college instruction. Even though he is taking computers out of classrooms, he’s not anti-technology. He just thinks they should be used differently—upending the traditional lecture model in the process.

Here’s the kicker, though: The biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen’s ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods. The lecture model is pretty comfortable for both students and professors, after all, and so fundamental change may be even harder than it initially seems, whether or not laptops, iPods, or other cool gadgets are thrown into the mix.

This is what I generally shoot for; in classrooms without computers, I never use one, and even when they come with classrooms, I generally use them very little, and mostly as a whiteboard substitute.

* What goes into book jackets: sometimes the answer is “facile stereotypes” or “very little.”

* Edifying editing, from a journal reviewer. Contrast this with my recent post, “Careers—and careerism—in academia and criticism“. Notice this bit from “Edifying editing:”

Ellison finds that the profession has slowed down, doubling the “submission to print” time at major journals. What was unexpected for me was the finding that most of the
slowdown is the number of revisions, not the ‘within round cycle time.’ I hadn’t realized that the interminable wait for a response was common twenty-five years ago. What has changed, Ellison shows, is that we have about doubled the number of rounds. I had thought it was merely deficiencies in my own papers that caused me to revise three, four, even five times. But no, it is a profession-wide phenomenon.

Like most economists, I am personally obsessed with efficiency, and wasted resources offend me in an irrational way. The way economists operate journals is perhaps the most inefficient operation I encounter on a regular basis. It is a fabulous irony that a profession obsessed with efficiency operates its core business in such an inefficient manner. How long do you spend refereeing a paper? Many hours are devoted to reviewing papers. This would be socially efficient if the paper improved in a way commensurate with the time spent, but in fact revising papers using blind referees often makes papers worse. Referees offer specific advice that push papers away from the author’s intent. It is one thing for a referee to say “I do not find this paper compelling because of X” and another thing entirely to say that the referee would rather see a different paper on the same general topic and try to get the author to write it.

Does anyone have data about paper efficiency and the humanities? Searching through Project MUSE, JSTOR, and Google Scholar yields nothing through the criteria I tried.

* I very much like the poem “Playboy’s Guide to Lingering” by Joseph J. Capista, although I can’t decide why; normally the Slate poems leave me high and dry, like the New Yorker’s.

* A review of Thy Neighbor’s Wife from Bill Wasik at The Second Pass; compare to my comments here. I’m not sure I buy this: “Of all the mass utopian notions of the twentieth century, the sexual revolution was both the most spectacularly successful and, in the end, the most thwarted” because it would seem that the “success” part has dominated the “failure” part.

* Hilarious if silly: Vampires Suck. Actually, they don’t. And that’s the problem:

Just as America’s young men are being given deeply erroneous ideas about sex by what they watch on the Web, so, too, are America’s young women receiving troubling misinformation about the male of the species from Twilight. These women are going to be shocked when the sensitive, emotionally available, poetry-writing boys of their dreams expect a bit more from a sleepover than dew-eyed gazes and chaste hugs. The young man, having been schooled in love online, will be expecting extreme bondage and a lesbian three-way.

* State governments are behaving with even less foresight than usual; according to a Salon post quoting the San Jose Mercury News, “In 1980, 17 percent of the state budget went to higher education. By 2007, that had fallen to 10 percent — the same as prisons and parole.” And 2007 predated the current crisis, showing that the trend away from higher education funding is accelerating.

* A variety of research shows that driving while distracted leads to more accidents, and I wouldn’t be surprised if thinking while distracted leads to an inability to consider deep thoughts and inhibits creativity. This is part of the reason I’m suspicious of Tyler Cowen’s argument in Create Your Own Economy that the ceaseless flow of bite-sized information bits is a net positive.

* Fascinating: Japan and Korea’s hidden protectionist measures prevented U.S. car companies from competing in their home markets, and the English-language press largely ignored the story. Compare this to the argument in David Halberstam’s The Reckoning. Maybe the widely held story regarding Detroit’s utter incompetence needs to be substantially revised.

* Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four from Slate’s Farhad Manjoo observes, “The worst thing about this story [of Amazon remotely deleting copies of Orwell’s 1984] isn’t Amazon’s conduct; it’s the company’s technical capabilities.” Indeed. But the main thing he forgets is that our future, like our toilets, is unlikely to be completely paperless: to the extent readers and publishers want to continue distributing books via print, they’ll still be able to. The situation probably isn’t as dire as Manjoo implies, but his warning is very much worth remembering: you don’t want the means of knowledge dissemination in a single company’s hands. It used to be that writers feared churches more than anything else; then it was governments; now it might be companies. Perhaps that’s a microcosm of the overall development of power in our world.

* Speaking of electronic books, Barnes & Noble has demonstrated its capacity to totally miss the boat with its recently announced eBook Reader. Problems: 1) It’s late to the game, with Sony and Amazon having preempted it by years; 2) No e-ink paper—who wants to read books on crappy computer and iPod screens? 3) Lousy device name. “Kindle” and “iPod” are evocative and unique; eBook Reader is not. If a Kindle-like device is coming, maybe Barnes & Noble could stage a dramatic comeback, but I’m not optimistic.

(Also see the WSJ’s article here.)

* Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The article argues it’s not evolution; compare this to Geoffrey Miller’s arguments.

* IKEA is not the social or environmental paragon its corporate image makes it out to be.

* Gas and the suburbs.

* The wisdom of Megan McArdle regarding bike commuting.

* Finally, for some foreign affairs: Is Burma attempting to build nuclear weapons?

The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

July 24, 2009 By in Books, Reading, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I rather liked the eclectic material in Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times and its sequel; many of the short essays didn’t impart, but they fascinated because of the range of their concerns and how appropriately well written they were, whether about people who always ask authors where they get their ideas, or what kind of typewriter/computer/paper/pen they use, or the importance of avoiding cliché. The subjects stay with me even when I haven’t read the novels of the authors writing, and the collections stay with me because they’re often enough correct in their descriptions of problems if not always their conclusions that they made me evaluate writing anew. Yes, some specimens had apparently either been written for the money or because the author had nothing else to say, but at eight hundred or so words each they were easy enough to skip. Word limits also have the benefit of forcing the author to be concise, logorrhea being an occupational hazard for many.

Given that, I went into The Writer’s Notebook with sympathy in mind. Its contents have the benefits and drawbacks of length: Matthea Harvey’s “Mercurial Worlds of the Mind” is clever, but a sharp editor might have cut the section on what 2-D versus 3-D means. Her opening metaphor is clever but overly broad: “Trying to write about imaginary worlds is like breaking a thermometer in a classroom, then trying to collect the little balls of mercury that go shooting off under the desks, down the hallways.” Maybe: but I don’t get the impression that’s how Tolkien felt as he invented Middle-earth, as the myths of Lord of the Rings feel built and layered, rather than chased down. In my own world-building efforts, I don’t at all feel like I’m chasing mercury.

Despite the first sentence, Harvey’s essay works. Someone must have told many of these writers that you have to start with a bang even if its decibel level doesn’t correspond to accuracy. For example, Tom Grimes’ “There will be no Stories in Heaven” is about how fiction uses time, but his lead says, “To me, we read and write stories for a simple reason: we all die.” Good thing his first two words qualify all of what follows! Despite the off note at the beginning, his essay works, and so does Harvey’s; she shows that what one must do to build fantastic worlds is not so different from what one must do to build a “realistic” one. You need rules, size, and so forth; each of those subjects could be an essay unto themselves. When you’ve finished Harvey, Stanislaw Lem’s Microworld’s is the next logical step.

Elsewhere, Margot Livesey’s “Shakespeare for Writers” might be shallow for those who’ve read John Updike on the Bard, but it still examines Shakespeare from the structure standpoint much criticism leaves out by asking, for example, why so much of Shakespeare makes implausible leaps of character and plot yet gets away with it. As she writes:

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the drug-induced affections of the lovers seem, in depth and passion, very similar to their real feelings. Motivation is often left out and provided, or not, by the actors and, of course, by the readers and viewers.

Why? The audience doesn’t have to ask the question, but the writer must, and maybe the real lesson, for the writer that language excuses all else; Livesey quotes some of the many, many examples of where Shakespeare nails speeches through elaborate, figurative language. The idea of language excusing all else brings me back to Henry James, since I didn’t love Portrait of a Lady because its plot was empty even if its language was vacuous. Shakespeare’s plots usually charge like cavalry. But they don’t overturn feelings, and they don’t override each characters’ interiority. Livesey’s essay explains how, and if I could summarize it, I would.

The Writer’s Notebook continues a conversation about aesthetic form, meaning, and creation that’s lasted for centuries if not longer; they are a small effort to map an infinite space and discuss the fundamental choices writers must make: where to revise; whether one should organize a story around a “clock” or time period; how to use language; historical influence; and more. Some might not be finding new space so much as configuring what we already have. Anna Keesey’s “Making a Scene” uses the terms “outfolding” and “infolding” to describe how a writer can primarily move forward by dialog and action or by interior thoughts, respectively, with Hemingway and Virginia Woolf as examples. The line isn’t perfectly clear, and the point about how things happen either within or outside a character has been made in various ways before, but I’d never seen it articulated so well.

Collectively, many essays from The Writer’s Notebook are also keeping an eye on one’s back, toward how history affects or should affect writers and how genre and literature aren’t as separate as they appear. None are so gauche as to come out and say either point, but it’s there, lurking beneath them, because for a writer, who cares if one is writing capital-L Literature? You’re always in pursuit of whatever works, and if works, maybe it is, or will become, Literature, which is fundamentally about stories, how we tell stories, and how we listen to them.

The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House

July 24, 2009 By in Books, Reading, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments

I rather liked the eclectic material in Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times and its sequel; many of the short essays didn’t impart, but they fascinated because of the range of their concerns and how appropriately well written they were, whether about people who always ask authors where they get their ideas, or what kind of typewriter/computer/paper/pen they use, or the importance of avoiding cliché. The subjects stay with me even when I haven’t read the novels of the authors writing, and the collections stay with me because they’re often enough correct in their descriptions of problems if not always their conclusions that they made me evaluate writing anew. Yes, some specimens had apparently either been written for the money or because the author had nothing else to say, but at eight hundred or so words each they were easy enough to skip. Word limits also have the benefit of forcing the author to be concise, logorrhea being an occupational hazard for many.

Given that, I went into The Writer’s Notebook with sympathy in mind. Its contents have the benefits and drawbacks of length: Matthea Harvey’s “Mercurial Worlds of the Mind” is clever, but a sharp editor might have cut the section on what 2-D versus 3-D means. Her opening metaphor is clever but overly broad: “Trying to write about imaginary worlds is like breaking a thermometer in a classroom, then trying to collect the little balls of mercury that go shooting off under the desks, down the hallways.” Maybe: but I don’t get the impression that’s how Tolkien felt as he invented Middle-earth, as the myths of Lord of the Rings feel built and layered, rather than chased down. In my own world-building efforts, I don’t at all feel like I’m chasing mercury.

Despite the first sentence, Harvey’s essay works. Someone must have told many of these writers that you have to start with a bang even if its decibel level doesn’t correspond to accuracy. For example, Tom Grimes’ “There will be no Stories in Heaven” is about how fiction uses time, but his lead says, “To me, we read and write stories for a simple reason: we all die.” Good thing his first two words qualify all of what follows! Despite the off note at the beginning, his essay works, and so does Harvey’s; she shows that what one must do to build fantastic worlds is not so different from what one must do to build a “realistic” one. You need rules, size, and so forth; each of those subjects could be an essay unto themselves. When you’ve finished Harvey, Stanislaw Lem’s Microworld’s is the next logical step.

Elsewhere, Margot Livesey’s “Shakespeare for Writers” might be shallow for those who’ve read John Updike on the Bard, but it still examines Shakespeare from the structure standpoint much criticism leaves out by asking, for example, why so much of Shakespeare makes implausible leaps of character and plot yet gets away with it. As she writes:

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the drug-induced affections of the lovers seem, in depth and passion, very similar to their real feelings. Motivation is often left out and provided, or not, by the actors and, of course, by the readers and viewers.

Why? The audience doesn’t have to ask the question, but the writer must, and maybe the real lesson, for the writer that language excuses all else; Livesey quotes some of the many, many examples of where Shakespeare nails speeches through elaborate, figurative language. The idea of language excusing all else brings me back to Henry James, since I didn’t love Portrait of a Lady because its plot was empty even if its language was vacuous. Shakespeare’s plots usually charge like cavalry. But they don’t overturn feelings, and they don’t override each characters’ interiority. Livesey’s essay explains how, and if I could summarize it, I would.

The Writer’s Notebook continues a conversation about aesthetic form, meaning, and creation that’s lasted for centuries if not longer; they are a small effort to map an infinite space and discuss the fundamental choices writers must make: where to revise; whether one should organize a story around a “clock” or time period; how to use language; historical influence; and more. Some might not be finding new space so much as configuring what we already have. Anna Keesey’s “Making a Scene” uses the terms “outfolding” and “infolding” to describe how a writer can primarily move forward by dialog and action or by interior thoughts, respectively, with Hemingway and Virginia Woolf as examples. The line isn’t perfectly clear, and the point about how things happen either within or outside a character has been made in various ways before, but I’d never seen it articulated so well.

Collectively, many essays from The Writer’s Notebook are also keeping an eye on one’s back, toward how history affects or should affect writers and how genre and literature aren’t as separate as they appear. None are so gauche as to come out and say either point, but it’s there, lurking beneath them, because for a writer, who cares if one is writing capital-L Literature? You’re always in pursuit of whatever works, and if works, maybe it is, or will become, Literature, which is fundamentally about stories, how we tell stories, and how we listen to them.

Life: Writing edition

July 21, 2009 By in Life Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

“Interviewer: To write, that is to sit in judgment over oneself.
Robertson Davies: Yes.”

—From Conversations with Robertson Davies.

April Links: EBooks, Zombies, Writing, and more

April 15, 2009 By in Books, Links, Reading Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

* Terry Teachout’s prescience regarding e-books deserves to be noted and commended, despite my reservations.

* Speaking of ebooks, Randall Monroe describes how to read a Kindle while in bed. Personally, I prefer to just hold my forearms up with a book in front of me.

* It’s hard for me not to like this description, from Amazon’s review page, of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem.

* Although I disagree with the conclusions in Life On Venus: Europe’s Last Man, I find it fascinating:

Precisely because novels are not, and should not be, political documents, they offer a less guarded, more intuitive report on the inner life of a society. And when novelists from different European countries, writing in different languages and very different styles, all seem to corroborate one another’s intuitions, it is at least fair to wonder whether a real cultural shift is under way.

Kirsch cites three major novelists—Ian McEwan, who is one of my favorites, W.G. Sebold, and Michel Houellebecq—as major examples of modern European-ness, and then looks at a book by each:

Three more different writers could hardly be invented. Which makes it all the more suggestive, I think, that their portraits of the spiritual state of contemporary Europe are so powerfully complementary. They show us a Europe that is cosmopolitan, affluent, and tolerant, enjoying all the material blessings that human beings have always struggled for, and that the Europeans of seventy years ago would have thought unattainable. Yet these three books are also haunted by intimations of belatedness and decline, by the fear that Europe has too much history behind it to thrive. They suggest currents of rage and despair coursing beneath the calm surface of society, occasionally erupting into violence. And they worry about what will happen when a Europe, gorged on historical good fortune, must defend itself against an envious and resentful world.

This, however, could also describe a great deal of science fiction since the 1970s, or any number of major American writers, who often take it upon themselves to demystify the American dream—and here I’m thinking of Philip Roth’s later novels, much of much of Melville, and so on.

(Once again, I found this somewhere on the web and forgot to write down the original linker. Sorry!)

* William Zinsser on On Writing Well, a book I often recommend to those interested in, well, writing well:

I would write from my own convictions—take ’em or leave ’em—and I would illustrate my points with passages by writers I admired. I would treat the English language spaciously, as a gift waiting for anyone to unwrap, not as a narrow universe of grammar and syntax. Above all, I would try to enjoy the trip and to convey that enjoyment to my readers.

(Hap tip to somewhere, but I forgot where. Sorry!)

On Writing Well is, along with James Wood’s How Fiction Works and Francine Prose’s How to Read Like a Writer, an important discovery in my own writing life. T.C. Boyle said you can’t teach writing, and maybe he’s right, but you can learn the principles that’ll make it easier to learn through experience and teaching yourself.

* Men, women, and reading:

A study of reading habits showed almost half of women are ‘page turners’ who finish a book soon after starting it compared to only 26 per cent of men.

The survey 2,000 adults also found those who take a long time to read books and only managed one or two a year were twice as likely to be male than female.

(For a really fun time, now debate whether this is cultural or biological.)

(Hat tip Marginal Revolution.)

* Although I’ve praised Amazon’s prices elsewhere, those prices come at, um, a price:

Is Amazon.co.uk targeting Britain’s indie publishers with an offer they have little choice but to accept? That’s what the trade group the Independent Publisher’s Guild is saying after a Friday meeting with Amazon in which the American internet retail giant refused to negotiate a new demand for greater discounts from the indies.

* Rouss Douthat on The Tough-On-Crime Trap.

* Regarding Literacy and Suicide, from Alan Jacobs:

Dr Andrej Maruai, a Slovene psychiatrist involved in organizing the conference, presented a paper called “Suicide in Europe: Genetics, Literacy and Poverty” which convincingly shows the links between the social factors of literacy and poverty, and suicidal behavior. . . .

According to Maruai’s theory, the higher any given country’s literacy rate and the lower that country’s GNP, the more likely the country is to have a high suicide rate. The theory can be convincingly applied to the countries with the highest suicide rates in Europe, namely the three Baltic states, Hungary and Slovenia, where literacy is at almost 100 percent and where the GNP and standard of living have been adversely affected by the transition process.

* I love this quote, provided courtesy of Daring Fireball: “My muse for the session was this quote from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.” To me, that’s it. That’s the thing.”

* Alexander McCall Smith writes “Lost in Fiction” for the WSJ, saying that

This, and many other similar experiences, has made me think about the whole issue of the novelist’s freedom — and responsibility. The conclusion that I am increasingly drawn to is that the world of fiction and the world of real flesh-and-blood people are not quite as separate as one might imagine. Writing is a moral act: What you write has a real effect on others, often to a rather surprising extent.

I don’t buy the moral act comment, or at least not in all cases (see additional comments here). As for Smith, he wrote “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” books, of which I read, or, rather, tried to read the first two, and I quit because they were tremendously boring and kitschy. I wonder if his political views on fiction are part of the reason; later in the same article, Smith writes, “It is one of the jobs of fiction to report on the sorrows and tragedies of this world. This must be done, though, from a morally acceptable standpoint.” That line could require an entire essay to refute, but I would say rather than part of what a novel does is a) explore what is and b) explore what “morally acceptable” means, rather than reinforcing what is already considered by most of society as morally acceptable. And a novel doesn’t have to accomplish a) and b) at once, and it could accomplish neither and still be an excellent novel. I would argue that Lolita is such a novel.

* Megan McArdle asks, Whither GM? Notice this:

As GM moves through its forecast period, its cash needs associated with legacy liabilities grow, reaching approximately $6 billion per year in 2013 and 2014. To meet this cash outflow, GM needs to sell 900,000 additional cars per year, creating a difficult burden that leaves it fighting to maximize volume rather than return on investment.

This seems, if not impossible, then at least very close to it. Someone is going to write The Reckoning for this time period.

* Check this out: “The School Edition:”

One way to see the difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to examine different procedures which separate librarians, the custodians of real books, from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.

[…]

Real books conform to the private curriculum of each author, not to the invisible curriculum of a corporate bureaucracy. Real books transport us to an inner realm of solitude and unmonitored mental reflection in a way schoolbooks and computer programs can’t. If they were not devoid of such capacity, they would jeopardize school routines devised to control behavior. Real books conform to the private curriculum of particular authors, not to the demands of bureaucracy.

* On The Radical Honesty Movement:

Once again, I felt the thrill of inappropriate candor. And I felt something else, too. The paradoxical joy of being free from choice. I had no choice but to tell the truth. I didn’t have to rack my brain figuring out how to hedge it, spin it, massage it.

“Just being honest,” I shrug. Nice touch, I decide; helps take the edge off. She’s got a thick skin. She’ll be okay. And I’ll tell you this: I’ll never get a damn gift certificate from her again.

* Alain de Botton: Brilliant or poseur? I tend towards “brilliant” with a dash of “neither.” But I think he speaks to modernity better than many other writers, and you can expect a post on his novel On Love shortly.

(Hat tip Mark Sarvas.)

* Although I haven’t actually read any of the novels mentioned in this paragraph, I’ve read about all of them prior to reading further about them in Slate’s thoughtful “Readin’ Dirty: Wetlands is the ‘2 Girls 1 Cup’ of novels.”

Looking in the most obscure corner of the Grove/Atlantic library, you might notice that the publishing house has imported such hits as 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, an “erotic coming-of-age novel” crafted by a Sicilian authoress of jailbait age; The Sexual Life of Catherine M., a French art critic’s Foucauldian analysis of having many trains pulled upon her; and Baise-Moi, a revenge thriller that is somewhat an odd duck in this subgenre as it boasts an actual plot. While studies have shown that every boat on the sea will be floated by something, even Helen’s grill tools, these books don’t rate as erotica; seldom does anything like an Anaïs Nin fever shiver through them, except perhaps Catherine M., which is kind of hot. On the whole, these books do not intend to arouse but to titillate, and, in this respect, Wetlands is the epitome of the form.

* The battle against barbarism continues, per “Video of girl’s flogging as Taliban hand out justice: Mobile phone movie shows that militant influence is spreading deeper into Pakistan” from The Guardian. The horrific video attached is difficult to watch.

* That battle isn’t just far away, either, since the Phoenix police raid[ed the] home of [a] blogger whose writing is highly critical of them. Apparently no one can find out any specifics regarding the alleged reason the police raided Miller’s house, as this Arizona Republic article shows.

Life: Frankenstein edition

March 30, 2009 By in Books, Life Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

“The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imagination of her own.”

—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

January links: Distraction, reading, routine, and more

January 19, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* I wrote a lot about distraction in this post, and now Cory Doctorow—the same one who wears a red cape and blogs from high-altitude balloons—has written another of these articles. I’m going call them a genre. Reblock Yourself the Polly Frost Way! in The Atlantic might be part of it.

* The Daily Routines of Interesting People, courtesy of Mental Floss. Most of them are writers of some sort. You can find similar material in Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times.

(I don’t remember where I picked up the link, but someone deserves a hat tip.)

* By way of the New York Times’ idea blog, a write up in New Scientist says Victorian literature might function in ways that demonstrate or reinforce positive social behavior:

WHY does storytelling endure across time and cultures? Perhaps the answer lies in our evolutionary roots. A study of the way that people respond to Victorian literature hints that novels act as a social glue, reinforcing the types of behaviour that benefit society.

Literature “could continually condition society so that we fight against base impulses and work in a cooperative way”, says Jonathan Gottschall of Washington and Jefferson College, Pennsylvania.

[…]

The team found that the characters fell into groups that mirrored the egalitarian dynamics of hunter-gather society, in which individual dominance is suppressed for the greater good (Evolutionary Psychology, vol 4, p 716). Protagonists, such as Elizabeth Bennett in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for example, scored highly on conscientiousness and nurturing, while antagonists like Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula scored highly on status-seeking and social dominance.

I wonder how the writing of, say, Bret Easton Ellis, Martin Amis or Elmore Leonard would fit that theory. Maybe they’re showing us what not to do.

* Speculative Fiction and criticism is a nice complement to Science Fiction, literature, and the haters, my post on a topic that, I’m now starting to realize, is constantly discussed anew as though it hasn’t been analyzed before.

* The New Yorker has a simpering article about The Village Voice and its history. Although it’s not clear that the Voice did much to change journalism or is important beyond a New Yorker’s myopic vision, there are a few amusing pieces worth quoting:

Wolf considered his editorial policy as philosophy. “The Village Voice was originally conceived as a living, breathing attempt to demolish the notion that one needs to be a professional to accomplish something in a field as purportedly technical as journalism,” he wrote in the introduction to “The Village Voice Reader,” in 1962.

[…]

Since devaluing authority is one of the things journalism does, this [habit of internecine warfare among Voice writers] amounted to using the methods of journalism against the pretensions of mainstream journalism.

The same descriptions are frequently applied to bloggers.

* Another reason not to like the Kindle, this one from Philip Greenspun:

My Amazon Kindle is just slightly past its one year anniversary and showing signs of very ill health. Half of the pixels on the screen are stuck following a light knock. I called Amazon and they’re happy to fix it… for $180 plus $7 in shipping (free if you’re a Prime member). The Kindle is more fragile than a laptop computer but less likely to be pampered given that you use it in all the situations where you’d use a book.

I may have to rethink my enthusiasm for the electronic book. Realistically the way that people handle books, the Kindle is not going to last more than one year. That means you’re spending $360 for the initial purchase and $187 every year for hardware repairs. Some of the Kindle editions of books are edging their way up towards $20 […]

See my reasons here.

* Read Jason Fisher’s excellent post on The Imaginative and the Imaginary: Northrop Frye and Tolkien. Pay special attention to the second comment, which is from Glen Robert Gill.

* The Wall Street Journal asks, Blockbuster or Bust? about the incentives behind mega-advances in the publishing and other media industries (merely calling them industries feels dirty, but I guess everyone else does it, which makes it okay). Compare this to my recent post on how the Publishing Industry’s Gloom is Readers’ Gain and Why are so many awful movies so awful? 

* In the post on the publishing industry linked to above, I also linked to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading, which is so good that I will point to it again here. See too Ann Patchett’s The Triumph of the Readers: The markets may be down, but fiction is on the rise in the Wall Street Journal. I agree with this sentence: “I am a firm believer in the fact that it isn’t so much what you read, it’s that you read.” Later, she says “Even if you’re stepping into “Valley of the Dolls,” it’s better than nothing. I’m all for reading bad books because I consider them to be a gateway drug.”)

Compare that to Reading: Wheaties, marijuana, or boring? You decide, my post from June 2008:

Let this be a lesson, by the way, to the natterers, including myself, on getting young people to read—instead of pushing reading ceaselessly like whole wheat bread, maybe it’s time to forbid it, and stock copies of Henry Miller and Bret Easton Ellis in the liquor store, thereby necessitating that teenagers get their older siblings or boyfriends or whatever to buy it for them. They might pass copies of [Alan Moore’s] Lost Girls around like furtive bongs at parties. I call this the “gateway drug” approach to reading, as opposed to the “whole wheat” approach.

There are shades of Orwell too. Here’s Patchett:

It’s true, as a source of entertainment reading ranks somewhere between cheap and free, depending on where you get your books. A movie can give you two hours of entertainment, but a book can go on for days or even weeks.

And here’s Orwell in 1942:

Reading is one of the cheapest and least wasteful recreations in existence. An edition of tens of thousands of copies of a book does not use up as much paper or labour as a single day’s issue of one newspaper, and each copy the book may pass through hundreds of hands before it goes back to the pulping mill.

* Reason #1041 why I dislike Tucson: no authors come here because the city’s literary culture is insufficient to draw them. One might think a town with a major university would do better, but, alas, it does not. Steven Berlin Johnson’s book tour for The Invention of Air doesn’t include Tucson—but Johnson will be in Seattle, L.A. and Portland.

* As long as I’m beating up Tucson, notice this post from Nigel Beale regarding the United States’ most literate cities. Minneapolis/St. Paul dominate, Seattle is number two, and Tucson doesn’t make the top 10. But at 32, it does beat Los Angeles (56) and Phoenix (57), although I would take literary L.A. over Tucson for the better bookstores if nothing else.

* PCWorld writes “Inside the World’s Greatest Keyboard” concerning the IBM Model M. I wrote about the Unicomp Customizer here; it’s a version of the Model M that’s still manufactured.

* I’ve linked to Paul Graham’s essay on Philosophy several times, but now someone has written an excellent post disagreeing.

* From Kate’s Book Blog quoting “What is Style?”:

There is no such thing as a writer who has escaped being influenced. I have never heard a professional writer of any quality or standing talk about “pure” style, or say he would not read this or that for fear of corrupting or affecting his own; but I have heard it from would-be writers and amateurs.

* Although politics don’t interest me much, this seems so insightful regarding the Middle East as to deserve a link:

IV. As a consequence of the above three trends, major political issues of importance to the people of this region are increasingly inconsequential to most people and powers around the world. The electoral politics of the Metn region in Lebanon, the tribal politics of Gaza, the human rights conditions in Syria and Morocco, and the forty years of Moammar Gaddafi’s rule in Libya are issues that no longer occupy any serious time or thought among leaders in the world’s most powerful countries, regardless of whether we accept that or not.

The worst ramifications of the Middle East’s dysfunctions — terrorism, illegal migration, ethnic strife, corruption, police states, and assorted atrocities perpetuated by both state and private actors — are only occasional irritants for the rest of the world, not pressing strategic threats. We have marginalized ourselves as serious players on the global political stage, and now assume the role of nagging annoyances and miscreants.

Indeed: and the pity is that too few seem to realize this.

(Hat tip Jeffrey Goldberg. Incidentally, his piece Why Israel Feels Threatened is worth reading too.)

* The Wall Street Journal discusses Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader. See my analysis of the novel here.