Everyone Has Ink By the Barrel

Now everyone has ink by the barrel, the power will go to those who can hold our attention.

The changes in publishing are exciting, but how do you get past the narcissism of an audience of one?  The CEO of Border's stated, " “Everyone has a story to tell, pictures to share or advice to give."  Yes, we want to hear other people's stories, but even more so, we want our story heard, often to the exclusion of everyone else.  The paradox is we want connectivity and individuality.

Facebook quickly turns into numbing sameness.  Everyone may have pictures to share and advice to give -- and most of it is bad or mediocre at best.

Places like Borders, Amazon, B&N, Apple that allow us to self-publish are cashing in on our narcissism -- post your stuff for people to buy.  Maybe only 3 people will buy it, but hey, that is OK, because we publish everyone and 3 times everyone is a lot of money for us.  This is vanity publishing exploded into tiny little profitable bits.

I am in the race, but not the publish everything race.  I'm in the filter race.   Even the filter world will be fractioned, but the filter pie is the pie I want to eat -- not the crumbs of self-publishing.

The Publishing Pendulum

Traditional publishing is restrictive.  The restriction comes from economic constraints on the publisher. Publishing has always been a few hits to lots of misses and the only way to eliminate the economic risk was an extreme conservative approach. Yes, many authors are feeling the liberation of not having to answer to those conservative publishing enclaves, but economics still govern.

The problem isn't being "branded" as a self published author, but rather the author never gets a brand. JA Konrath has a brand, "the self-publish" brand, which he has been cultivating for a couple of years quite successfully. This is why his books sell. Everyone knows who he is, even people who don't read his type of books.

Somewhere there is a happy in-between, a sweet spot where the author has freedom, the publisher allows it and readers get what they want and a lot of books get sold as everyone plays off each other's strengths and needs. I think that is the future and that the self-publishing pendulum will swing back until it is resting somewhere in the middle -- which is good news for the middleman.

Content, Content, Content

What makes a book last?
To play off the old real estate adage -- content, content, content.

I can't even keep up with the stuff I write, let alone anyone else, and I read -- a lot. As a publisher, I hope I can direct my readers to the types of content they desire. Desired content is as varied as humanity, so directing the reader to what they may be interested in feels like an overwhelming task.

I feel the tension as I've begun the publishing company in a whole new way. Immediate gratification seems to drive the human compulsion to buy. And motivating the compulsion to buy is what a business is all about. Content, however, is what gives the book legs. A great book is not like a great feast. A great book can sit on the shelf for decades and it will still be a great book. A great feast can sit on the table for about four hours before it starts to go bad. The battle between immediacy and longevity is just one paradox the writer and the publisher must face, but it is a biggie.

As a publisher, I hope I can provide great books and great feasts.

The Flood of Words

Authors and writers are finding themselves in a similar position to musicians, except that is hard to go on tour and play to large crowds. The entire blog tour idea is somewhat analogous, but no T-shirts and beer.

I'm not so sure how it will all work out either. It is a great time to be a reader is a little bit like saying it is a great time to be swimmer during a flood. I'm not sure what the landscape is going to look like after the flood, but everybody needs to be finding an ark.

I think the easiest way around the pandering of self-promotion is a straightforward, outright declaration of what your self-interest is. I just got finished reading Christopher Hitchen's memoir and his friendship and relationship with Martin Amis and Salaman Rushdie didn't stop him from commenting fully on those authors or praising their work.

Taste is taste. If you like someone's taste, odds are someone with similar taste will like yours too. Think staff recommendations at the indie book stores. It won't matter if it is a book written by them or a friend or relative. Influence comes from the reader's taste and finding other reader's with similar taste. Think of it as the log you grab as the Titanics of publishing sink.

So What Does It Take To Be Officially a Publisher?

I'd say four books is a start.






The crazy thing -- this is going to be over ten within the next week or so. I will also be adding four or five more authors.

I love my new job (and I still have that attorney day job).

Defining Publishing

From a purely utilitarian standpoint, the attempt to label a publisher is an attempt to categorize quality for marketing purposes. The more accurate the label, the better indication of the quality of the product.

The problem isn’t with the vocabulary. The problem is that publishing is an industry in flux. At one stage in publishing history pamphleteer was a pejorative, but pamphleteers also produced classics, ie Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” Recently, so called traditional publishing applies as much to celebrity drek as to quality literature, so this isn’t really about quality either.

The identification by the public of the publisher “type” is the duty of the publisher. The publisher has to communicate to its audience who they are and what they do. A good publisher will be able to do that. A poor one won’t.

Publishing is about providing words to the public. The hope remains that despite the categorization of the publisher, in the flood of words, quality will still float.

The Future of the Book -- And It Is Now

I read an interesting article by Hugh McGuire in Forbes about the future of the book. In the article, he mentioned numerous things you can’t do with a book that you can do with a web page on the internet. McGuire muses that books must merge with the Internet and in so doing will become even more valuable.

Much of what he posited as needing to take place is happening. I can easily cut and paste anything I’m reading digitally and post the quote to Twitter and Facebook. Amazon is more than happy to direct anyone clicking on my quote right to the page to buy the book. This is cut and paste. This is deep linking to the book. And it maintains an economic novel that rewards the individual author.

McGuire gets lost in his own argument however when he writes: –You cannot query across, say, all books about Montreal written in 1942–even if they are from the same publisher. Wait a minute, I thought books and the Internet would be interchangeable. What McGuire is actually arguing for here is a more refined search, not the merging of books and the Internet. These are two different things. The digitization of books will merge books with the Internet. Accessibility will be the duty of the author and publishers.

The new job of a publisher is SEO. As McGuire pointed out, API’s are applications to make sure that people access your data and not someone else’s data. The future of books is incorporation into the digital mass of information. In an age were anyone can publish anything and have it remain forever, the future of publishing is search engine optimization.

Publishing 0101

One month ago I began an adventure.  All my life I've loved books.  I'm not even sure how many books are in my personal collection.  I know I haven't even come close to reading them all.  When people ask me how many I've read, I say "About a third."  But I really have no idea.

I do know one thing.  Reading has changed me in a fundamental way.   At one point in my life, something like five minutes ago, I would have said that the changes were "metaphysical", but I've read too much neuroscience to say that it is metaphysical.  Reading has created me in a physical way, carving out my neural pathways in a way that is unique.  The authors who have influenced me have allowed my brain to run down their neural paths, so I'm part Aristophanes, part Chaucer, part Shakespeare,  part Philip Roth, part Henry Miller, part Jack Kerouac, part Dostoyevsky, part Tolstoy, part Camus -- well, you get the idea.    I would be remiss if I didn't mention my wife, JulieAnn, the author that I met because of her book and writing -- talk about positive and passionate changes in my neural pathways.

So as an attorney and lifelong bibliophile, I decided to do something.  I decided to start a digital press.  In a way it was my response to the problem I saw that was addressed in Book Glutton this morning.   How do you write and read in the age of Facebook and Twitter?  The interplay of ideas and thoughts are what make us and I wanted to pass out the building block of deep, rather than superficial ideas.  My press is barely a month old and we will begin publishing within the week.  (Website, a week or two away)  I have the rights to publish  over 40 books, all by authors who have been previously published.

I feel the weight of trying to wrestle even a small portion of the unruly stream of words into a channel that can be used to irrigate the thoughts, feelings and lives of potential readers.

The Bankruptcy of Publishing

Ok, I'll admit that the title of the blog is for one primary reason -- I'm testing out how Google works. I really do want to talk about how I perceive the publishing industry is changing from my perspective in Ogden, Utah, but I also want to see how titles and labels effected Google's search engines. Which actually is a great segue way into what this post, inspired by a blog post by my lovely and talented writer/wife, is actually about --- How does a writer get heard in the digital age?

When I was growing up (a long, long time ago in a county pretty dang close), musical taste was dictated by two things -- Kasey Kasem's American Top 40 (the morbid Seasons in the Sun at the top of the charts week after week) and the Friday Night Battle of the Records which lead to the perennial champions -- Goodbye Yellowbrick Road, Cherokee People and much to my adult chagrin and childish delight, The Bay City Roller's Saturday Night. It frightens me that I remember that.

Musical tastes were spun out of the mass media, record label machine into my head through the only radio station that played anything remotely young and pop-ish in the early 70s. If you wanted to make it big in the record biz, you were going to need to sign with a big label. Today, we have Pandora and the record industry is a lot like a very nice vase that got dropped on a very hard floor from a very high height. Forget labels, American Top 40 and Friday Night Battle of the Records and think DRM (Digital Rights Management), iPod, indie and bit torrent.

From what I can see, the publishing industry is also a vase that is hitting the floor and it is as if I'm watching the pieces scatter in slow motion. Terminology has not caught up. The Wall Street Journal just this week called digital publishing "Vanity Publishing." Digital publishing is the same as regular publishing at least to the extent that it has vanity and non-vanity versions. J.A. Konrath sells some self-published books, but authors have often self-published and that is technically different from vanity publishing. Konrath is also published by -- and this is a very important point -- Amazon Encore.

What did traditional publisher's do? They prepared the product for mass marketing. They mass marketed the product through the current media -- TV, print and radio. They sold the book to libraries. Libraries were the repositories for the community's books. We shared books as a community. The books we read were determined by teachers, friends and word of mouth.

Amazon is acting just like a traditional publisher. Only a couple of things have changed. The cost of distribution has shrunk to pennies if it is digital. The mass market is disappearing. Traditional advertising has diminished and fractured. Libraries have shrunk. Amazon steps in and is not only the publisher, but the book warehouse, the delivery truck, the book store and the promotional advertising media promoting the books and even a really massive pay as you go library -- all rolled into one digital company. Amazon also changes the community so that you can connect with a community of your very own idiosyncratic tastes. Your friends and word of mouth aren't relegated to a quiet little rural town in Utah. The writer's reviews and Amazon rankings and referrals carry more weight than the publishing equivalent of American's Top 40 -- The New York Time's Bestseller List.

The rules of the game have changed, but the ultimate game for the writer has not. The writer must write. The writer must write words that other people want to read -- and other people need to talk about it so that the writer gets read. The task of writing (and reading) is as David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen concluded -- an act to assuage loneliness and separateness of being human and provide connection with someone else, somewhere at sometime who felt the same way.

The words are the only salve for mortality.

The Author as a Commodity

This week I'm attending a writer's workshop in New Orleans with my wife, who is the real writer in the family. I rather hate being the living cliche of attorney who is a wannabe writer, but I'm finding that it is easier to aspire to be an author than it is to take the attorney out of my psyche.

For example, the instructor of our class is filling in our little workshop group on the travails of the publishing world. Specifically, She claimed that authors are "brown leather pumps" to the publishers. She said it to make the point that authors were mere commodities to the book industry and the fickle reading public will burn through a book and it doesn't matter much whose book it is. If you don't write it, someone else will. My poetical version: authors are the meat that is ground up to make book sausage.

I don't doubt the wisdom of the instructor's comments. From what I can see, commercial fiction (and non-fiction) on a visceral level work in this way. The formulaic novel, the ghost written celebrity book, the tough life memoir and the motivational/spiritual tome really could be written by anyone and consumed by the undiscerning hordes as the corporate book manufacturers scoop up the majority of the cash.

The best example of this is James Patterson, who doesn't even write all his own books. He hires would-be authors to write them for him. This is the final end game of creating books as entertainment (a game that has sadly been encouraged by "cut and paste" technology -- How much of the Harry Potter series was cut and pasted back story?) The brand supercedes the art. Sure there is quality control and a formulaic sameness that soothes the reader, that is why it works.

Looking at the entire process through the legal lens, I see a supply chain of author to agent to editor to proofreader to printer to book distribution company to book retailer with every participant sucking off the teat of the writer's words. In much the same way a lawsuit bleeds the litigants dry, the publication process bleeds the author's work dry.

And if this really is how it works, why would an author (attorney or not) want to be treated like a pair of brown leather pumps chewed on by the book industry puppy?

The Future of Reading

One of my favorite new blogs that I read daily is Kindle Review. Anyone who knows me at all, knows that I am in love with my Kindle and in love with books. Today there was a post on the future of reading -- or more accurately the future of books. (I don't think reading is going anywhere, books appear to be in a state of flux however.)

The post raised a couple of questions, especially when it was combined with my wife's post about literature yesterday. So here are a couple of questions and my random musings on them.

1. What is literature?

Harold Bloom, the literary critic, sees the literary tradition as agon -- a conflict or contest of artistic style and morals. (Agon is the same root as agony, which seems completely applicable to the writer's craft.) Being the male combative that likes rugby and the law, this theory of literature appeals to me greatly. Obviously literature is a game and as a writer it is fun to play the game. The problem is that there are no rules -- or at least you need to pick the literary game you want to play. Literary fiction is a different game than writing mystery novels.

Before you answer the question as to what is literature, you must look to see that you are comparing tradition to tradition.

2. Will books become more than words on a page?

No -- and yes. No, because books are words on a page. Yes --think David Foster Wallace. His books become words on different pages through an old technology, footnotes. eBook technology is going to open up artistic possibilities to authors that have been tried before, but the tools weren't really there until now -- split narrative streams, collage, asides, merging of various texts/authors, alternate endings and whatever an artistic mind can come up with to use the brush strokes of eBooks and digital technology. Depending on what literary tradition forms around these uses of technology, then yes, books will become more than words on a page, but it won't replace the century old progression of other literary traditions. This is an addition, not a subtraction.

3. Time to go to work

The problem with books is not the form, but the quality.

A New Book

Everything has changed. At nearly 47 years of age, I stand on the precipice of the future and realize that the dreams of my youth have been made irrelevant by life and technology. Things are changing so quickly and I’m adapting with the speed of a slug – mired in salt.

One problem with the rapidly changing world is no one realizes how much it is changing. We whir along and change without even thinking about it. I realize that hardly anyone reads what I write on this blog, but I think nothing of the fact that I sit here on a Sunday morning in slippers, typing and in a moment my thoughts will be accessible to anyone who cares to listen. This is were you get humility, because no one is really listening. We are all too busy talking and worrying about ourselves to give anyone else much thought.

Writing Dream: Be published. When I was thirteen, being a published author was the holy grail of all I wanted. Instead of pursuing writing, I ended up in the law, but I’ve clung to this dream of being published. Publication brings about serendipity. Your words get out there and you have no idea who will actually connect with them. My wife gets to put up with me because she was published. So all seems right with the world, my dream to be published is still alive and kicking.

Wrong – sort of. The infrastructure of the past and the machinery of publication still spits out books. Every Sunday in the New York Times I can read reviews of the latest and greatest. I’ve developed a fondness and attachment to particular authors, living and dead, reading almost everything that they write – Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Saul Bellow, Douglas Coupland, Chuck Palahniuk – the list goes on and on. I read them, connect and think I want to be like one of those guys. (Yes, honey, I realize that they are all white males and about half of them are Jewish, but I still read women authors, too. You being my favorite woman author and so much more than just a friend.)

I realize why I have no friends to speak of – my friends are authors and their books. Being friends with an author is easy. They don’t ask of anything other than you spring for the price of the book. In fact they tend to hate creepy stalkers and emails, so they prefer it if you put their book on the shelf and leave them alone. If you are busy and ignore them, they don’t care, as long as you keep reading.

Publication always felt to me like the one sure way to obtain immortality. A book bound with your name on it could speak after you were dead. Now, it is possible to literally speak after you are dead with recorded voice and video. Nearly any aspect of our lives can be reduced to digital format and “published” for the future. The philosophical implications of the ease of publishing are seemingly endless with one of the biggest questions being does the urge or desire to publish one’s life interfere with living one’s life?

Author’s by nature must be at least a little exhibitionistic and simultaneously reclusive, J.D. Salinger any one? They flash us with their words, not their presence. And they want us to look at the words, but they love the barrier the book and word creates between themselves as people and the reader.

I know because it is that desire for connection, understanding and dialogue that has compelled me throughout my life to want to write. I want to talk to my friends the authors and the social structure is such that I talk to them by putting out my work for others to read. My value in the conversation is determined by the audience I develop, not by what I say. I want to be published because I don’t want to violate the social norms of author-hood.

And yet, the world is changing. I can see it, feel it and realize it and the dream is fading with every Google search I commit or every “friend” I add on Facebook. There are better ways now to connect with the authors, the friends of my life than books. Publication was all about access, public knowledge and public acceptance. Access to text has gone from extremely difficult to instantaneous and easy. My original desire to be published was so that others could have access to my words. Technology has eliminated that need.

The problem has shifted from access to letting the public know and care about what I write. The previous social milieu of books was a sub-genre of the celebrity culture, a culture where our heroes walked on Olympus, dropping words like lightening on us mere mortals. The digital age is crumbling Olympus and words are flying everywhere. The old guard remains fortified by publishing houses and Barnes and Noble, but the attack on them is relentless and continuing unabated.

Carnegie Libraries, public libraries, law libraries and school libraries are fading into the digital abyss. Why go to the library, when I can find any book at home on my laptop or Kindle? When an entire library of a University is digitized by Google, why pay all that money and take up all that space? It doesn’t make sense and cities and schools will stop doing it.

Suddenly, my desire to be published seems silly. Throw out a book into the enormous and never shrinking, constantly expanding digital slush pile. Within my lifetime it appears that most, if not all books ever published will be available digitally. No single person can ever attempt to read or comprehend all that material. The Renaissance Man or Woman has been killed by a tidal wave of text and information.

With the publication of a book, there was always the possibility that someone would stumble upon it at a much future date. Publication was about social recognition and a stamp of approval from the society that there was at least some merit to the words. The pesky one and zero that digitized everything changed that – the one and the zero don’t discriminate, they accept all comers. I’m laughing a little bit this morning when I think back to the dismay I used to get walking into Barnes and Noble and wondering how even if I managed to get a copy of my book on the shelf would it ever get read, there were so many choices. I had no clue. It is a million, possibly a billion times worse than I ever imagined. (Translation technology is improving at such a rate that it is going to be easier than ever to translate books between languages, so for us English writers, the competition is about to jump by about 4-5 billion more potential authors.)

So I’ve dreamed a new dream. I haven’t always followed through on adapting to rapidly changing things, but I still have the same desire to be published, but I’m going to do it for a new digital age.

1. First I’m going to take a page out of Facebook and look for friends for my writing and friends for me. This is the replication of my own author focused friendships I’ve developed over the years.

2. I’m going take a page out of Blogger and Word Press and use the ease of publication and search to create a digital persona for myself that will hopefully stick around for awhile after I’m gone.

3. I’m going to take a page out of Google and include everything and make my digital persona searchable.

4. I’m going to take a page from the publishing industry and provide human editorial control over the content. Having everything is cool, but time consuming for a reader. Editorial control allows for different layers of friends from the mere acquaintance to the best friend that knows everything about you.

5. I’m going to take a page out of cloud computing and move my information, writing and digital persona out of my laptop and office and on to the cloud of the new Olympus, a digitally replicating and growing Colossus of new information. It is out of that Colossus’ Chaos that a new world is being created.

6. I am going to take a page out of my upbringing and look for integrity in my digital persona, so that it matches up completely with the flesh and blood version. Those who know me will wonder how this is even conceivable given the numerous facets of my identity, but I’m becoming more convinced that privacy, especially as an author, is a rapidly dying concept. Creating an integrated digital persona is the only method to eliminate privacy concerns. We are all celebrities now.

So far my new book is only six pages of infinite length or at least the length of a lifetime.

Some Old Words

I wrote this in July of 2001, almost eight years ago. As I'm finally plugging away at my novel that has languished in my digital storage for years, I thought my old musings on digital writing and publishing were as relevant and disheartening as it was back at the turn of the millenium.

July 7, 2001
The Problems with Being a Reader/Writer in a Digital Age
The printing press isn’t that old. From a global historical perspective, Gutenburg barely got the Bible published. In 500 years, we’ve gone from typesetting to word processing. Even 20 years ago, most writers still plucked away on typewriters. I didn’t use a computer to type my school papers until law school in the mid-1980s. Now, my writing has proliferated as much as the technology. Any rant, any rave, any errant thought can be captured and held. Storage space is small for words and the editing is easy. No need to discard the old drafts or maintain stacks of paper. Old habits die hard and paper is still strewn all over my offices, but the stacks in files in my word processor alone, boggles the mind. I’ve authored thousands of pages and I have yet to fill a CD.
1. Publishing has lost its mystique.
Nothing can be as overwhelming or disconcerting as stepping into a Barnes and Noble and strolling through the mass marketed isles, understanding that on my desk at home is an even more voluminous warehouse of books on the web site, ranked, critiqued and ready for my shopping cart. The volumes, the pages, the sheer mass conjures thousands of individuals at word processors, sitting at desks, pecking or scrawling their thoughts, their stories, their recipes, their how-tos, their histories and their life stories to be processed and consumed.
The entire process seems not unlike farming. The farmer toils and produces food, growing each year out of the land, as massive machinery, picks and harvests the grain only to start the process over next year. The writers have become consumables, not unlike food. We stuff our heads and return to renew our feast another day as cranial hunger ensues. For over a hundred years, this has been done through the newspapers, mass produced, read and discarded. No lasting art from the paper. The proliferation of web zines, the ease of self-publishing with a computer and laser printer, takes the cost of publishing and puts it into the hands of those to whom it might otherwise have been inaccessible. Anyone can publish. Anyone can see their words in print.
Twenty years ago, being a published writer was a Holy Grail that at times seemed unattainable. Even now, the rejection slip stories are proliferated and propounded. The only reason people don’t get published today is if they have a rejection fetish and enjoy the rejection. The difference between being successful and making a living writing and publishing is vast.
For a case in point, I look at a poet whose workshop I attended in Salt Lake. Apparently, she is highly regarded and well thought of in academic circles. I purchased a book she had published on her philosophy of art. The thing that amazed me was the length of her personal bibliography contained in that book – 14 pages of books, essays, journal articles, published poems, video recordings, sound recordings, interviews and biographical/critical studies. She has a fourteen page bibliography and until I signed up for the workshop, I’d never even heard of her. I thought of my own bibliography – non-existent. I thought of all the writers with longer and shorter bibliographies that I’ve never even heard of or thought about.
Maybe this is where the food analogy falls apart. Books are worse than food. They may become dated, lacking those illusive literary qualities of universality and verisimilitude. Unless they are burned or the hard drive crashes or the CD scratches, the written word becomes the perpetual consumable. We can eat and eat and never be filled and the thing we consume still exists. This gives rise to the ubiquitous discount book shelf. Super Buy blue stickers. 50% Off or More. Prices as Marked. The book, having lost its economic efficiency, can still be consumed by the deal and word hungry. I used to yearn for literary recognition. Now, I yearn to one day find my book on a discount book shelf.
There are no used food stores. What happens when one consumes a book already consumed by another? My house, my office could be used book stores. I have more books than I’ll ever read that I own and I still buy more. I am not a library. I am not wealthy. I think I could start at one end of my personal library and never read it all in a lifetime. What does that mean to a writer? I’ve eve bought the books and the author may not be able to get me to read it. The task seems insurmountable – a triathalon of biking up Everest, swimming the Atlantic and running across a continent. How or why in the multitude of voices, will anyone bother to hear what I have to say? Why is what I say important in comparison to the words that have gone before me? Am I just looking for a flash, a moment in time, where for a second I become consumed, rather than ignored?
2. Too much information, so little time.
Filter. The only option at our disposal is to filter. The problem is that in this ocean of
words, to borrow a tired metaphor, the reader is adrift. My personal reading style could be described as the synchronicity of the accidental encounter. I read something. It leads me down a path. I follow it, finding others along the way. I drift, apparently baseless, reading vociferously and indiscriminately.
The great promise of the information age is that all our information will be filtered. We will receive only those items we wish to receive. We can make ourselves myopic by choice or multi-optic. I can write a piece on reading and writing in the digital age and it can be directed to those who wish to read it, by an expressed preference. If I can generate an audience, Amazon.com will send them an email every time I publish a new book. I can subscribe to email lists that effect my own interests. On top of the bombardment of books and paper, I receive electronic missives at a rate that could eliminate my entire need for books at all. I could simply spend my time reading what is sent to me on my computer.
The question is how do you select what you read – obviously, if you have reached this point in the article, you have read this far. Case in point – why have you chosen to read this article? The answer is complicated, but lies rooted in the answer to two deeper questions: Why do I read? and Why do I write? If this was a flow chart, these two questions could be followed back to the initial question of all questions – Why?
Certainly it may be overkill to suggest that metaphysics lies at the heart of reading a magazine article. Yet, the choice of what to do with the precious commodity of life, is inherently tied in with the desire to write. The writer realizes that the written word, if preserved (thus the appeal of the ‘published’ author), is a perpetual consumable. The perpetual motion machine of interacting in the world. Even when the machine of a body dies, the perpetual motion machine of words carries on.
The more eccentric and outrageous science fiction fantasies discuss the potential to download our thoughts and mind into the computer. We scoff. We realize the absurdity of capturing the entire consciousness in a machine – or at least the incredible complexity of such a task. Yet, I sit in my apartment on a Saturday morning, not dressed, a computer on my lap, pouring my thoughts in as fast as my fingers can act as a conduit to the screen, so that this moment or at least a portion of this moment is preserved to be consumed and consumed again by an audience. The life seems not to come from simply saving the thoughts on the hard drive, but by having that hard drive accessed by other conscious beings. My thoughts in your head give me a sense of immortality. Every writer must at some time fantasize and hope that the body of work is discovered after they are dead. I want to be discovered while I am alive. I want to connect with other human beings. This becomes the answer for me to the two questions and ultimately to the Why? question. I write to connect with other people. I read to connect with other people. I live to connect with other people.
If this is the purpose, then why not just converse? Why not just hang out with my friends and family? As a basic answer, the need to connect is broader. I need to connect with like minded souls. I need to connect on my own selfish terms. Some compulsion spurs me to create art. Art is a connection that is deeper than simply conversing. Art reaches at the deeper issues in life. Art gets into the depths that daily life seems to miss. Art speaks to a spot that seems often ignored. We have trained ourselves to see the artistic only when we are reading, looking at art, watching film or engaging in some aesthetic activity. To connect on that level, we must play on that stage. Art is a conveyor of emotion. We speak of an emotional connection, yet we experience the connection in a poetic image or a story.
3. Lack of direction in our information choices.
Where do we look for art? Academics can kill the artistic impulse. Capitalism can kill
the artistic impulse. The exceptions are obvious. Academics occasionally out of all the dryness and banality, create amazing artistic creations. Capitalism and consumerism similarly have produced out of the over-dramatized and highly sentimentalized dross, sparkling gems of artistic expression. Even in the fledgling artists and fledgling publications, much is highly lacking. and amatuerish, yet the novice creates great art. The percentages, if they were kept, I have a feeling would be remarkably consistent. The percentage of junk versus the percentage of brilliance is probably quite consistent.
To some extent, when I write, I always want to tap into the brilliance, the amazing force of creating great art. However, in a discussion of art, its purpose and the nature of being a reader and a writer, I do not intend this to be great art. I intend this to be a jumping off point for discussion, a more direct appeal to the community created by writing – to discuss and illuminate what we mean when we say we find something great. The discussion becomes critical in the sensory overload of the digital era. Time needs to be spent, simply to determine where or what is deserving of our time.
I abhor at times the pure chance system of what I read. At other times it takes me wonderful places that I would have never gone. I have become wishy washy, lacking any absolutes. I learn of history and influences and the web becomes a convoluted mixture, folding in on itself and folding out, lacking and filled at the same time. It is a very personalized mixture of knowledge and it is unique from anyone else’s.

Not much has changed, with the possiblity that things have gotten worse for the publishing industry and the choices have exploded exponentially.

Words -- it is all just words.

ON TIME AND INTERDEPENDENCE

It is appropriate that I am writing this on an extreme deadline – I have less than an hour before I need to get ready to start my day of picking up children, meeting with clients and going to court. Almost every tick of the clock today is going to entail me interacting with and depending on the people around me. Just the simple act of getting out of bed, walking downstairs, reading the paper, drinking and preparing a warm glass of liquid and sitting down to write this little blog post and I’ve relied on countless individuals.

I usually only get these thoughts when I have a moment for quiet reflection and the effect is always extreme humility. I can’t do anything by myself without help. I sit now at a table that I don’t even know who manufactured and built, who shipped the table and which store sold the table to my wife before I was ever even in the picture. So my laptop is propped up by factory workers, lumpers, and a retail sales staff – not much independence there. I did not even mention all the parts of the laptop, the history of computing and science that developed the technology to allow me to write this in the hour before I go to work in the morning and post it for essentially the entire world before breakfast compliments of ISPs, digital theoreticians, Hewlett and Packard, Thomas Edison and my seventh grade typing teacher, whose name I can’t remember and who taught me how to type in a room full of Selectrics from IBM, so I guess IBM deserves some credit (or blame) as well.

Time keeps ticking. As totally dependent as I am on the entirety of human existence that has preceded me, the dependence on the ticking clock is what really enslaves me. I want to contribute to the massive flood of interdependence that is the human condition and to make the slightest ripple on the surface of surging existence I need time – and I don’t have any.

Nurturing relationships takes time. Making a living takes time. Raising children takes time. Developing a career takes time. The simple act of reading the paper takes time. Getting Thanksgiving dinner takes time. Getting into shape and staying healthy takes time. Reading takes time. An all time great thief of time – writing.

Time is all about taking.

I’m always humbled by the fact that if someone is bothering to read this I’ve taken their time. This morning I’ve read Philip Roth, various articles in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman and JulieAnn (my wife and author) – all before 6:30 a.m. In fact it was the New York Times that inspired this riff on time and interdependence. Sometime before 5:00 a.m. my Kindle downloads the New York Times on my digital doorstep with a digital thunk on my bedside table. I’m compelled to read the paper. I want to read Friedman on the latest economic meltdown. I want to read about the Obama transition team’s exploits. I want to read about how Philip Roth’s publisher has placed a moratorium on acquiring new books and how his Roth’s last three books sold less than 75,000 copies in hardback. I want to think about what that means to an aspiring writer who is masquerading as an attorney and happens to be one of the less than 75,000 that bought Roth’s books.

I’m caught in the cross currents of time and interdependence. Time constraints pull me in various directions, while interdependence goes in another and the swirl can require every effort to try and create a modicum of self-determination in the direction I’m heading. Right now, I’m headed to the showers – a cliched sports metaphor and the reality of my day.