Skeleton Key

This n+1 podcast episode with editor Keith Gessen about the publishing industry, "The Book is Good," is well worth the thirty minute listen. (I highlighted Gessen's How a Book is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding a few weeks ago.) The meaty part of the interview starts around the 4:40 minute mark and there are quite a few interesting things to reflect upon.

For one, Gessen challenges the idea that the monetary success of a few blockbusters are subsidizing smaller works. I know you've heard this one before -- about how books like Snooki's latest opus creates the profits that allow for other authors to be published -- and I'm curious which perspective is actually true. Also, according to Amazon's research, the kind of book that people buy on their Kindles but don't buy in print are previous books by New York Times authors. Hum.

Halfway through the interview, Gessen relates the conversation that many authors have, about how friends that went on to become lawyers and doctors now approach them to ask, "I wrote a novel, can you help me get it published?" His response is amusing: "And you just want to say to them: 'I'll tell you how to get your novel published. Go back ten years, right, fifteen years, and instead of becoming a lawyer or doctor, become a writer. Because I don't show up to your office [and start performing surgery].'"

Of course, a good number of writers I hear of nowadays are former lawyers, so perhaps going that way might be more fiscally responsible. A final quote from the interview, Gessen speaking about n+1 being putting out their own stuff: "If you have undertaken to publish something, it is your moral duty to get it out into the world." Amen.

For the most part I've decided to skip any articles about the advance of the eBook overlords, or stuff about the death of the industry. I've gorged enough on both over the past year and they pretty much just present the same information. But sometimes I'll come across an eBook article worth reading, like this one, also from n+1, "Bones of the Book," a nice long piece about the history and direction of the eBook.

"Traditionalists attack e-books because they are not enough like print books. The electronic literary vanguard tends to dislike e-books because they are too much like real books. Electronic writers have long defined their craft as any piece of digital writing except e-books, which they consider mere scans of paper. They have perhaps overlooked some of the e-book’s creative possibilities, but they have helped to define what e-book connotes. If an e-book mutates too far from its physical progenitor, then it becomes electronic literature."
-Bones of the Book-

Sun Was High

This gap in my blogging doesn't mean we didn't make it cross country. In fact we made it very safe and sound, without much muss or fuss at all. Not one flat tire, rude local, or disgusting rest stop to be found. Given the chance I'd do the drive again but I'd take much longer.

For example, due to time constraints we were forced to pass up the Oz Museum and Larry Bird's hometown. Seeing as they are related to two of my top five obsessions, visiting them would have been something.

My drivemate also said she thought we could go to check out Dorothy's House. Then we looked it up and Liberal, Kansas was too far off route. I tried to reason that three hours out of the way probably wasn't worth it to see a recreation of a fictional person's house. But you can get your name on a yellow brick there --- for an "appropriate donation" -- so maybe we made the wrong decision.

If you are a fellow Oz fanatic, allow me to recommend Was by Geoff Ryman. It combines an abused and fictional Dorothy Gael, a very real Frances Gumm (before she became Judy Garland), and an actor stricken with AIDS who plays the Scarecrow and is on the search for Dorothy's house. Why is the Wizard of Oz so ripe for dark re-imaginings?

While I was gone, my Google Reader collected thousands of unread items, my fantasy football teams tanked due lack of consistent quarterbacks, and lots of world things happened that I'm just catching up on now. Amanda Knox, better Kindles, and a new iPhone released. Farewell Jobs and Davis. Occupy Wall Street is spreading. The NBA is on serious lockout... I'm still digging out of two weeks ago. It's gonna take awhile.



If you're looking for something to read right now, can I suggest this? "In Memory of Troy Davis." Regardless of how you feel about the death penalty, the article has a lot of interesting things in it. For example, a fact embedded about halfway down surprised me greatly: apparently a chimera isn't just a mythological creature. "In modern biology, a chimera is the result of the death, in utero, of one of two non-identical twins, and the subsequent blending of two types of DNA in the surviving individual." That seems like it could make one hell of a story. Someone please write something riveting involving real life chimeras. Or maybe a criminal organization that exclusively recruits them.

Not it.

Also, the article talks the etymology of "witness" and points out how eyewitness accounts tend to sway juries quite a bit but in an entirely different context, an eyewitness is something justifiably unreliable. Just read the article, it's good. Well, unless you don't like this kind of stuff, in which case, don't read it. It's PG-17ish probably.

"It’s as if we forget, when we are under that spell, about the other possible meaning of 'first person.' Taken in a different context -- in literature -- it means almost the opposite of unassailable authority. It means limited omniscience. It means unreliability. It means subjectivity. It means, quite simply, one person's story."
-In Memory of Troy Davis-

You and I Must Make a Pact

I've got two basic rules for dating requirements. (1) Must read books (2) Must have Gmail. This article does a nice job of describing why the former. If I were to pair this article with audio, I'd choose "What You Thought Hops" by Denizen Kane. Actually this is a stellar idea, pairing reading recommendations with music like we do with food and wine. I'm a genius! Oh wait, people already do this. Well, it's still a good idea.

Note: Some words and images in or near the article may not be safe for young readers. There are mature themes like procreation and lots of big multisyllabic words. If you are underage -- still in your Nickelodeon not quite MTV stage -- and insist on clicking through anyway, congratulations on your reading comprehension skills. You're gonna kill it on the verbal SAT. Oh and it could be slightly NSFW, because you should be working while at work. From what I hear anyway.

"Date a girl who doesn't read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don't date a girl who reads because girls who read are storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so goddamned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold.

You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life of which I spoke at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being told. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. Or, perhaps, stay and save my life."
-Date An Illiterate Girl-

You and I Both

"Despite the saying about opposites attracting, people usually fall in love with people like themselves. There's even some evidence that people tend to pick partners with noses of similar breadth to their own and eyes about the same distance apart. At lunch, Harold and Erica quickly discovered that they had a lot in common. They both affected connoisseurship regarding prosaic things such as muffins, hamburgers, and iced tea. They both exaggerated their popularity in high school, and had the same opinions about the characters in 'Mad Men.'

People generally overestimate how distinct their own lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them a series of miracles. The coincidences gave their relationship an aura of destiny."
-The New Yorker: Social Animal-

Fifteen Hands

"What I learned from editing that book [Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit] was just how important it is for a book to actually leave you with a feeling. I had been a very analytical guy up to that point, in terms of my editing. For nonfiction, I had always assumed that if it made sense and was well written and had an important point to it, people would respect it and like it. But that isn't what it's about, ultimately. People have to be moved by it. And there was something going on between the lines in that book, from beginning to end. I could give you lots of reasons why I think it's moving. It's a terrific transformation story: The horse is transformed by these three men, and the three men are transformed by the horse. It's about winning. It's about overcoming adversity. And the writer's reasons for writing the book were pure and personal. It was infused with a kind of passion that you very rarely encounter in nonfiction -- and that passion was augmented by a degree of focus and precision that you rarely find. So the book worked on every level. It worked on a prose level, it worked on a story level, and it worked on an emotional level."
-Interview with Jonathan Karp-

Why Read?

"The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book."
-Ursula K. Le Guin, "Notes on the alleged decline of reading"-

Is that so?

"Young people, heed this advice: Never marry someone who doesn't love the movies you love. Sooner or later, that person will not love you. I could go even further, and quote the great French cineaste Pierre Rissient, who instructs us: It is not enough for you to love a movie. You must love it for the right reasons."
-Roger Ebert-

Keep Smiling, Keep Shining

"Historically, we have often thought that having a small cluster of tight, long-term friends is crucial to being happy. But Christakis and Fowler found that the happiest people in Framingham were those who had the most connections, even if the relationships weren’t necessarily deep ones.

The reason these people were the happiest, the duo theorize, is that happiness doesn’t come only from having deep, heart-to-heart talks. It also comes from having daily exposure to many small moments of contagious happiness. When you frequently see other people smile -- at home, in the street, at your local bar -- your spirits are repeatedly affected by your mirroring of their emotional state. Of course, the danger of being highly connected to lots of people is that you’re at risk of encountering many people when they are in bad moods. But Christakis and Fowler say their findings show that the gamble of increased sociability pays off, for a surprising reason: Happiness is more contagious than unhappiness."
-Is Happiness Catching?-

I'm Sorry, Do I Know You?

"A growing body of experimental evidence suggests that, on the whole, we know significantly less about our friends, colleagues, and even spouses than we think we do. This lack of knowledge extends far beyond embarrassing game-show fodder -- we’re often completely wrong about their likes and dislikes, their political beliefs, their tastes, their cherished values. We lowball the ethics of our co-workers; we overestimate how happy our husbands or wives are.

...

Whatever the cause, such findings challenge our idea of what friendship is. Friends and spouses are people to whom we are supposed to be able to confide anything -- we draw support and a sense of well-being from the thought that our friends know us better than anyone else in the world, and like us nonetheless. Instead, it appears that there are whole regions of our personalities that they miss entirely, and we do the same with them.

The news is not all grim. Other researchers argue that people are pretty good at seeing at least the building blocks of their friend’s personalities. And in certain realms, like judging intelligence and creativity, there’s evidence that our friends are actually more perceptive about us than we are, if only because any illusions they may have about us are dwarfed by the illusions we have about ourselves."
-What you don't know about your friends-

A Fine Romance

"He may not have a girlfriend, but he certainly likes girls -- he's even, in some cases, a hetero blade, scoring with tourists or love-hungry single mothers. But if he does have a girlfriend she works hard. Usually, she's the same age as he is but seems older, as if the disparity between boys and girls in ninth grade had been recapitulated fifteen years later. She dresses in Donna Karan or Ralph Lauren or the like; she's a corporate executive, or a lawyer, or works in TV, public relations, or an art gallery. She's good-tempered, honest, great-looking, and serious. She wants to 'get to the next stage of life' -- settle down, marry, maybe have children. Apart from getting on with it, however, she doesn't have an idea in her head, and she's not the one who makes the jokes.

...

There they are, the young man and young woman of the dominant romantic-comedy trend of the past several years -- the slovenly hipster and the female straight arrow. The movies form a genre of sorts: the slacker-striver romance."
-David Denby, The New Yorker (2007)-

Midas' Cupid

"No evolutionary biologist will ever tell you that humans have evolved to mate for life. Lately some of them will tell you that humans have evolved to pair-bond for four-year increments (about as long as it takes to get a child up and running), which seems about right. This information is not particularly hard to come by. But a weird thing about the show [Millionaire Matchmaker], and about American culture in general, is that we are so eager to hear and believe scientific and pseudoscientific explanations of why people "fall in love," but then we cover our ears and hum so that we don't hear the end of the sentence, which is about why people fall out."
-Emily Gould, Qualify Your Buyer-

Great Title

Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles

It seems these poets have nothing
up their ample sleeves
they turn over so many cards so early,
telling us before the first line
whether it is wet or dry,
night or day, the season the man is standing in,
even how much he has had to drink.

Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.
Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.

"Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune
on a Cloudy Afternoon" is one of Sun Tung Po's.
"Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea"
is another one, or just
"On a Boat, Awake at Night."

And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with
"In a Boat on a Summer Evening
I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird.
It Was Very Sad and Seemed To Be Saying
My Woman Is Cruel -- Moved, I Wrote This Poem."
continued...

Got Black to Asian and Caucasian sayin'...

"As a teenager, I lived in two worlds: the traditional Bengali heritage inside our home and the contemporary California of my suburban peers.

Sometimes the gap between those two worlds seemed huge. Apple pie? Didn’t taste it till I got to college. Our kitchen smelled of mustard-seed oil, turmeric, and cardamom. Bikinis? No way. A one-piece bathing suit felt too revealing (and still does). My mother never showed her legs in public, even when she eventually shelved her sarees in favor of jeans and long skirts. Dating? Fuhgeddaboudit. My parents’ marriage was arranged, and the clan expected the same for me.

I trudged back and forth between cultures, relying heavily on stories for insight into the secrets and nuances of North American life. But exactly what did those stories communicate about my place as a brown-skinned foreigner? And, in that mostly white suburb where I went to school, why can’t I remember any educators who were bold enough to raise the issue?"
-Mitali Perkins, Straight Talk on Race: Challenging the Stereotypes in Kids' Books-

All the ladies who truly feel me

"But it is disappointing to watch what some have called the 'year of the woman' come to such an embarrassing conclusion. This was an election cycle in which candidates pandered to female voters, newsweeklies tried to figure out 'what women want,' and Hillary Clinton garnered 18 million votes toward winning the Democratic nomination. The assumption was that these '18 million cracks in the highest glass ceiling,' as Clinton put it, would advance the prospects of female achievement and gender equality. It hasn't exactly worked out that way.

In the grand Passion play that was this election, both Clinton and Palin came to represent -- and, at times, reinforce -- two of the most pernicious stereotypes that are applied to women: the bitch and the ditz."
-New York Magazine-

No Bull

"I'd never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous -- which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from.

I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people's money, would be expelled from finance."
-Michael Lewis, The End-

Tweet Tweet

"For many people -- particularly anyone over the age of 30 -- the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme -- the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world.

...

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update -- each individual bit of social information -- is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like 'a type of E.S.P.,' as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life."
-Brave New World of Digital Intimacy-

Do-Gooders

"The ancient Aristotelian idea of friendship is that friends bring out the best in each other. Friends might have common backgrounds, similar affinities, like interests, but at its highest level friendship is about the formation and elevation of good character. Friendship that brings out corrupt or otherwise bad ends is, ipso facto, not true friendship.

Real friends, good friends in the Aristotelian sense, confer benefits on one another; or as Aristotle put it, 'It is more characteristic of a friend to do well by another than to be well done by, and to confer benefits is characteristic of the good man and of virtue.' In fact, one of the reasons for having friends, Aristotle believed, was to have people for whom to do good. That is why even the perfectly happy man needed friends, and why without them he was incomplete."
-Joseph Epstein, Friendship-

Nu Asian

"Over the past 18 years, an entire generation of Asian Americans has come of age. And while the world that they've inherited has been radically transformed, the dialogue we're engaged in around what it means to be Asian American has remained frozen in place -- obsessed with issues and ideas that aren't just out of sync with the next generation's interests and priorities, but completely out of touch with their reality.

My generation bristled at any implication of foreignness -- we were Asian American, accent on the second word, and we wanted to create a hard distinction between our native culture and identity and that of our overseas ancestors. We took defiant pride in our ability to speak fluently without a trace of ethnic taint. And we were so deeply wounded by the thoughtless schoolyard chants of childhood that any media image that isn't dominant and heroic and handsome still feels to us like a punch in the gut, a reminder of finger-slanted eyes and bucked-out teeth.

This current generation, on the other hand, has flipped the polarity of our identity. They're Asian American -- American being a given, an understanding, while Asianness is their source of distinction and, more often than not, pride."
-Jeff Yang, The Ides of May-

Penance St. Croix

A "twixter" is someone who is trapped between adolescence and adulthood. A "boomerang baby" is a young adult, usually a recent college graduate, who returns home to their parents. Somewhat similar to that, a boomerang baby in Japan is called a "parasite single," but they use the term to indicate single men and women who live with their parents so that they can enjoy a comfortable and carefree life. Plus housing in Japan is just scarce.

Isn't it nice to know that there are special definitions out there for people just like you? I don't know how anyone feels special anymore. If you think you're leading a totally unique life, check again.

I've always enjoyed trying to figure out which generation I'm a part of. Obviously, I'm no Baby Boomer (1946-1964). Technically speaking, I should be a part of Generation X (1965-1980), but I sort of feel a kinship to Millenials (1981-2000). What exactly do these things mean anyway? How can you describe a whole generation of people by affixing them with fun little labels? Well, apparently, you can.

Because people born in a common time frame face the world (hypothetically) together, they share common challenges and advantages. Take Generation X for example. We got birth control pills, saw the end of the Cold War, and can remember when modems ruled the Earth. The problem is, I don't have much in common with the majority of Gen-Xers -- the top end of which would be people in their low 40's, an age I generally feel no kinship to. I mean, I really didn't like Singles that much. Then again, Reality Bites is my favorite movie and Troy Dyer is my hero so I guess I fit the profile nicely: slacker.

"If you couldn't neatly place yourself in any of the (generations), then you're probably a Cusper. 1943-1947, 1962-1967 and 1976-1985 are each considered transition times. Many people born during these cusp periods identify with the generations on either side. Often, Cuspers feel like they belong to neither and belong to both. They are generationally bilingual. They can act as translators and ambassadors between the generations."
-John Losey-

Actually the whole point of this post was to share these two articles from Radar Online: Generation Slap, an article billed as a "call to arms against Millenials" and Get Off the Stage, one Millenial's response. My main take on it is that I fear my time is already over and unless I throw my lot in completely with the Millenials, I'll never make anything of myself.

Buy, Sell, or Hold

"It is said that we are all three different people: the person we think we are (the one we have invented), the person other people think we are (the impression we make) and the person we think other people think we are (the one we fret about).

You could say it would be a lifetime's quest to reconcile this battling trinity into a seamless whole. Maybe, but for the time being I am convinced that, in Kurt Vonnegut's words: you are what you pretend to be."
-The Gentle Art of Selling Yourself-