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.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Thinking
I wonder, "Where is the thought?" "Where is the contemplation?"
I’ve had so many ideas, so many thoughts I wanted to write about and I’ve ended up with one sentence deletion after another. Ideas and concepts bombard me so rapidly that I don’t have time to process them or even create something meaningful out of them. So I’m attempting to create meaning out of the madness.
I look at people. I try to imagine their lives – work, eating, television, Internet, family and social connections and stress. I fail.
Last night, I attended a birthday party of one of JulieAnn’s friends from high school. It was a party, a celebration. I really didn’t know anyone there very well. All of the party accouterments were present, including a live band, shrimp and cocktail weenies (of the human and pork vanities) and rumor had it a comedian was going to come and perform later. I mourned me inability to simply relax into the frivolity. I couldn’t do it. I had nothing to say. I had nothing to contribute to the party euphoria.
This is when I lapsed into trying to figure out the people I was observing. I had the same thing happen to me the night before at an Italian restaurant, Zucca, near our house. My thoughts on the human condition intruded on my ability to enjoy the Margherita pizza, as I marveled at the sociality of my fellow humans.
I’ve never been much of a social animal, preferring to remain on the outside looking in, but I also crave to belong and be part of the crowd. I would like to be able to lose myself at a rock concert, banging my head in time with the moshing masses. I would like to immerse myself in the birthday party, dance and sing and speak of what? What were people talking about? I’m inarticulate and unable to speak the language of Party.
Music seems to be a mechanism for forming these communities and music hasn’t effected me much since my adolescence. Heavy metal gives me a little teen testosterone memory, but the music of parties baffles me – you can’t communicate over the noise. Karaoke baffles me. I can’t connect without words. The music that moves me is often in the words (ala Leonard Cohen), more than the rhythm, beat or melody. My I-pod is filled with spoken words, not music, an Apple aberration.
I want to connect to people. I want a society, a group to which I belong, but I don’t. I ache for a community like the Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Snyder) or the literary cliques in Paris in the 20s (Joyce, Hemingway, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co.) or 30s (Miller and Nin) or D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keefe in New Mexico.
Technology seems to offer an opportunity for such connections, but then I go back to my gaze at the crowd at the party and at the restaurant. There is a small likelihood I’ll connect at any level with those crowds through technology. In fact sprinkling my blog post with references to Apple, Microsoft and Amazon is more likely to get me a connection that anything I might write in a blog post, but I’ll be connecting with a computer, analyzing what I write for marketing purposes.
Yet, I hope. I feel connected reading. Books have always been the connective tissue joining me to the outside world. Occasionally, I’ve had the thrill of being connected by my writing and a reader who acknowledged the connection. The connection of words is the language I understand. I don’t understand the language of rock concerts or parties. I’d rather batter an idea with someone than smack at a pinata. I struggle with the banter of social websites, but crave legitimate debate and discussion.
I’m going to go to my Facebook page now. When it asks me what I’m doing, I’m going to tell it I’m thinking.
I’ve had so many ideas, so many thoughts I wanted to write about and I’ve ended up with one sentence deletion after another. Ideas and concepts bombard me so rapidly that I don’t have time to process them or even create something meaningful out of them. So I’m attempting to create meaning out of the madness.
I look at people. I try to imagine their lives – work, eating, television, Internet, family and social connections and stress. I fail.
Last night, I attended a birthday party of one of JulieAnn’s friends from high school. It was a party, a celebration. I really didn’t know anyone there very well. All of the party accouterments were present, including a live band, shrimp and cocktail weenies (of the human and pork vanities) and rumor had it a comedian was going to come and perform later. I mourned me inability to simply relax into the frivolity. I couldn’t do it. I had nothing to say. I had nothing to contribute to the party euphoria.
This is when I lapsed into trying to figure out the people I was observing. I had the same thing happen to me the night before at an Italian restaurant, Zucca, near our house. My thoughts on the human condition intruded on my ability to enjoy the Margherita pizza, as I marveled at the sociality of my fellow humans.
I’ve never been much of a social animal, preferring to remain on the outside looking in, but I also crave to belong and be part of the crowd. I would like to be able to lose myself at a rock concert, banging my head in time with the moshing masses. I would like to immerse myself in the birthday party, dance and sing and speak of what? What were people talking about? I’m inarticulate and unable to speak the language of Party.
Music seems to be a mechanism for forming these communities and music hasn’t effected me much since my adolescence. Heavy metal gives me a little teen testosterone memory, but the music of parties baffles me – you can’t communicate over the noise. Karaoke baffles me. I can’t connect without words. The music that moves me is often in the words (ala Leonard Cohen), more than the rhythm, beat or melody. My I-pod is filled with spoken words, not music, an Apple aberration.
I want to connect to people. I want a society, a group to which I belong, but I don’t. I ache for a community like the Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Snyder) or the literary cliques in Paris in the 20s (Joyce, Hemingway, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co.) or 30s (Miller and Nin) or D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keefe in New Mexico.
Technology seems to offer an opportunity for such connections, but then I go back to my gaze at the crowd at the party and at the restaurant. There is a small likelihood I’ll connect at any level with those crowds through technology. In fact sprinkling my blog post with references to Apple, Microsoft and Amazon is more likely to get me a connection that anything I might write in a blog post, but I’ll be connecting with a computer, analyzing what I write for marketing purposes.
Yet, I hope. I feel connected reading. Books have always been the connective tissue joining me to the outside world. Occasionally, I’ve had the thrill of being connected by my writing and a reader who acknowledged the connection. The connection of words is the language I understand. I don’t understand the language of rock concerts or parties. I’d rather batter an idea with someone than smack at a pinata. I struggle with the banter of social websites, but crave legitimate debate and discussion.
I’m going to go to my Facebook page now. When it asks me what I’m doing, I’m going to tell it I’m thinking.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
The Politics of Reconciliation
Reconciliation is not a popular political choice apparently. I wasn’t going to write anything today, but I noticed the article on Pastor Rick Warren defending his choice to give the invocation at Barak Obama’s inauguration, despite the fact he is openly hostile to the concept of gay marriage. The "left" as characterized by the news report is up in arms over the choice.
I’ve never completely understood the religious animosity towards liberal thinking. I’ve always believed that true Christian beliefs were more conducive to liberal, rather than conservative thought. You know – feed the poor and the hungry and do unto others. Somehow divisiveness over abortion, homosexuality and feminism, led the Christians away from New Deal politics.
I applaud Obama’s attempt at trying to bridge that gap in his bookend pastors for his inauguration – the anti-gay marriage pastor and the pro-gay marriage pastor. Anyone that is truly concerned about getting away from politics as usual and in favor of progressive government policies on an economic level, need to encourage their political representatives and political parties to remove the "moral" and "family value" issues and address what should be the real issues of politics: how best to govern and how best to protect all members of the society. Leave individual morality to the churches and religions and promote a society that isn’t divided, but reconciled towards common goals that we can all agree on.
Political discussion can actually have some benefit when it is about how best to accomplish a goal, rather than fighting over what the goals should be. The goals of a government are simple in theory – "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice and insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense and secure the blessings of liberty for us and our posterity." Let’s go back to step one – a more perfect union can only be created by knowing when we can agree to disagree. This is the message of Obama’s pastor choice. We must have a society that can agree to disagree.
Our political debates should be about how to better serve justice, peace and liberty with our government, not how with religion and belief.
I’ve never completely understood the religious animosity towards liberal thinking. I’ve always believed that true Christian beliefs were more conducive to liberal, rather than conservative thought. You know – feed the poor and the hungry and do unto others. Somehow divisiveness over abortion, homosexuality and feminism, led the Christians away from New Deal politics.
I applaud Obama’s attempt at trying to bridge that gap in his bookend pastors for his inauguration – the anti-gay marriage pastor and the pro-gay marriage pastor. Anyone that is truly concerned about getting away from politics as usual and in favor of progressive government policies on an economic level, need to encourage their political representatives and political parties to remove the "moral" and "family value" issues and address what should be the real issues of politics: how best to govern and how best to protect all members of the society. Leave individual morality to the churches and religions and promote a society that isn’t divided, but reconciled towards common goals that we can all agree on.
Political discussion can actually have some benefit when it is about how best to accomplish a goal, rather than fighting over what the goals should be. The goals of a government are simple in theory – "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice and insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense and secure the blessings of liberty for us and our posterity." Let’s go back to step one – a more perfect union can only be created by knowing when we can agree to disagree. This is the message of Obama’s pastor choice. We must have a society that can agree to disagree.
Our political debates should be about how to better serve justice, peace and liberty with our government, not how with religion and belief.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
ON DIGITAL PERSONA, FLESH PERSONA, AND PRIVACY
I’ve been fascinated by the idea of persona lately, whether it be a literary persona, a work persona, a dramatic character persona, a psychological persona or the new incarnation of the digital on-line persona. I find myself constantly donning masks to the point of wondering who I am. Am I the husband? The parent? The lawyer? The writer? The sinner? The saint? Am I my digital persona? Who the hell am I?
Social networking sites like FaceBook and MySpace are exercises in persona creation. I get to pick and chose the facade I give the digital world. The more devout afficionados of the digital world create their own websites. The real world is reflected in the digital world, but it is a funhouse mirror warped by the design and desire of each person posting.
The creation of a persona or societal mask is nothing new. High school is where every adolescent cuts their teeth on persona creation and the high school personas are predictable – the hot girl, the bookworm, the jock, the drama queen, the rebel. Go rent a copy of The Breakfast Club if you need a refresher course. Adults aren’t much better in the lawyer’s suits, the houses on the hill, the cars (or big trucks) and the entire fashion and makeup industry.
Digital persona are frighteningly easy to create, desperately hard to maintain and control. Fleshy manifestations of persona aren’t easily copied or replicated and due to years of culturization more easily interpreted. Changing one’s flesh persona took time and effort and was a gradual process. I’m no Luddite, but the digital persona swoon can make me light headed.
Another downside is the Narcissistic quality of digital persona, basically a "look at me" culture. Maybe that is why it always feels like high school – it is the adolescent technology screaming for attention. How will digital technology mature? Or are we to be always mired in MySpace and FaceBook?
As I was writing that last paragraph, I realized that I was a little bit off put by the fact that the geeky technology, which used to provide anonymity and protection to my anti-social side has turned into an exhibitionistic orgy with the explosion of social networking sites. I’m the nerd with glasses again being simultaneously turned on and socially overwhelmed by the cheerleader.
The technology has advanced to the point where maintaining a digital life is a little bit like being an adolescent whose diary is always accessible to their parents. Whatever you post, whatever you say, whatever floats off your keyboard into the internet ether is probably and in most instances lost forever, yet on occasion, it comes back transfigured into something unrecognizable or terrifying, often carried by the panting mutt, Google.
Google sounds like goggles and those Google goggles are peering at your every move trying to reduce your fleshy persona into a consuming, buying, advertising accessible animal whose data is slowly being filled in. Google is trying to clone you and anticipate your every move and like Pavlov’s dogs we salivate because Google gives us what we want. Google is the digital Big Brother watching our every move.
My predisposition has always been towards privacy – be it digital or earthly. Yet, I’m starting to wonder if privacy is such a great thing. I’m still very interested in protecting things that people want kept private, but I see a benefit to the lack of on-line privacy. The benefit is by being constantly googled, goggled and gapped at, the mature development is to create an on-line persona with integrity that includes the various flesh incarnations’ strengths and faults. In a world of ones and zeros, the digital persona that best reflects the real person will give the real person the most value in the real world. Become one with your digital self.
The other factor in this privacy debate is that the Internet is essentially the marketplace. Humans have always congregated for social and economic exchange and the two have always gone hand in hand. Posting on-line is supposed to have an economic impact for the participant. Do any of us really expect privacy in the marketplace? The two are incongruous. You enter the marketplace (and I envision street bazaars or farmer’s markets) and nothing is private. To resurrect a cliche, people who live in glass blogs shouldn’t post stones – or something like that.
Simply realizing that the on-line world is a big market free-for-all changes all sorts of perceptions about on-line privacy.
We now convey information more freely, but we are still working on the infrastructure for how that is to function economically. Our libraries are manifestation of the willingness to pay economically for ideas, but the pricing of those ideas has always been a conflict. I’m writing this sitting in my library at home, cocooned in books. Many of the authors died impecunious – Thomas Paine and Oscar Wilde are a couple that spring to mind. Great ideas and great writing have not always ended in an economic payoff. Dying has often been one of those great mechanisms for validating an artistic position. The point is the old system wasn’t always that great at allocating economic resources to benefit the writer and artist and the new system suffers from the same problem, but also offers some unique solutions.
The main solution I see is that it allows us to create social networks that match our own predispositions. I’m no economist and I’m a little bit upset that they made economics such a dry topic when I took it in college, because I’m fascinated by it now, particularly as it pertains to writing and art. I read a short story by Tolstoy, "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" this week. The moral of the story is essentially don’t forget your mortality in your acquisitiveness.
How much income does an artist need? This is the question I find intriguing in light of the internet culture. I wonder how much income would I need from my writing to pull the literary equivalent of a Gaugin and chuck it all and move to Tahiti and spend the rest of my life swimming in the warm tropical words. I do the math. 1000 fans at $10 a month and I think I could probably do it. Math is an evil thing, because 10x1000 is such an easy equation. You see someone with 850 friends on FaceBook or you see the amount of traffic other blogs receive and it almost seems do-able.
The problem is that the art suffers if you turn from artist to huckster to get your thousand, so the art must come first. Which brings me back to the original thrust of this post – what is a digital persona? Is it the huckster selling? Is it the tortured artist? Is it the social butterfly? Is it the bitter misanthrope? Who am I and why have I donned this digital mask and entered this new frontier? In the past, I’ve always been just a little bit fearful of what I’ve posted on-line, wondering about the what ifs were a client, a potential reader, a judge, another attorney, my siblings or my parents to read this. The answer is amazingly simple and amazingly difficult all at the same time – be a person of integrity and it doesn’t matter.
Social networking sites like FaceBook and MySpace are exercises in persona creation. I get to pick and chose the facade I give the digital world. The more devout afficionados of the digital world create their own websites. The real world is reflected in the digital world, but it is a funhouse mirror warped by the design and desire of each person posting.
The creation of a persona or societal mask is nothing new. High school is where every adolescent cuts their teeth on persona creation and the high school personas are predictable – the hot girl, the bookworm, the jock, the drama queen, the rebel. Go rent a copy of The Breakfast Club if you need a refresher course. Adults aren’t much better in the lawyer’s suits, the houses on the hill, the cars (or big trucks) and the entire fashion and makeup industry.
Digital persona are frighteningly easy to create, desperately hard to maintain and control. Fleshy manifestations of persona aren’t easily copied or replicated and due to years of culturization more easily interpreted. Changing one’s flesh persona took time and effort and was a gradual process. I’m no Luddite, but the digital persona swoon can make me light headed.
Another downside is the Narcissistic quality of digital persona, basically a "look at me" culture. Maybe that is why it always feels like high school – it is the adolescent technology screaming for attention. How will digital technology mature? Or are we to be always mired in MySpace and FaceBook?
As I was writing that last paragraph, I realized that I was a little bit off put by the fact that the geeky technology, which used to provide anonymity and protection to my anti-social side has turned into an exhibitionistic orgy with the explosion of social networking sites. I’m the nerd with glasses again being simultaneously turned on and socially overwhelmed by the cheerleader.
The technology has advanced to the point where maintaining a digital life is a little bit like being an adolescent whose diary is always accessible to their parents. Whatever you post, whatever you say, whatever floats off your keyboard into the internet ether is probably and in most instances lost forever, yet on occasion, it comes back transfigured into something unrecognizable or terrifying, often carried by the panting mutt, Google.
Google sounds like goggles and those Google goggles are peering at your every move trying to reduce your fleshy persona into a consuming, buying, advertising accessible animal whose data is slowly being filled in. Google is trying to clone you and anticipate your every move and like Pavlov’s dogs we salivate because Google gives us what we want. Google is the digital Big Brother watching our every move.
My predisposition has always been towards privacy – be it digital or earthly. Yet, I’m starting to wonder if privacy is such a great thing. I’m still very interested in protecting things that people want kept private, but I see a benefit to the lack of on-line privacy. The benefit is by being constantly googled, goggled and gapped at, the mature development is to create an on-line persona with integrity that includes the various flesh incarnations’ strengths and faults. In a world of ones and zeros, the digital persona that best reflects the real person will give the real person the most value in the real world. Become one with your digital self.
The other factor in this privacy debate is that the Internet is essentially the marketplace. Humans have always congregated for social and economic exchange and the two have always gone hand in hand. Posting on-line is supposed to have an economic impact for the participant. Do any of us really expect privacy in the marketplace? The two are incongruous. You enter the marketplace (and I envision street bazaars or farmer’s markets) and nothing is private. To resurrect a cliche, people who live in glass blogs shouldn’t post stones – or something like that.
Simply realizing that the on-line world is a big market free-for-all changes all sorts of perceptions about on-line privacy.
We now convey information more freely, but we are still working on the infrastructure for how that is to function economically. Our libraries are manifestation of the willingness to pay economically for ideas, but the pricing of those ideas has always been a conflict. I’m writing this sitting in my library at home, cocooned in books. Many of the authors died impecunious – Thomas Paine and Oscar Wilde are a couple that spring to mind. Great ideas and great writing have not always ended in an economic payoff. Dying has often been one of those great mechanisms for validating an artistic position. The point is the old system wasn’t always that great at allocating economic resources to benefit the writer and artist and the new system suffers from the same problem, but also offers some unique solutions.
The main solution I see is that it allows us to create social networks that match our own predispositions. I’m no economist and I’m a little bit upset that they made economics such a dry topic when I took it in college, because I’m fascinated by it now, particularly as it pertains to writing and art. I read a short story by Tolstoy, "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" this week. The moral of the story is essentially don’t forget your mortality in your acquisitiveness.
How much income does an artist need? This is the question I find intriguing in light of the internet culture. I wonder how much income would I need from my writing to pull the literary equivalent of a Gaugin and chuck it all and move to Tahiti and spend the rest of my life swimming in the warm tropical words. I do the math. 1000 fans at $10 a month and I think I could probably do it. Math is an evil thing, because 10x1000 is such an easy equation. You see someone with 850 friends on FaceBook or you see the amount of traffic other blogs receive and it almost seems do-able.
The problem is that the art suffers if you turn from artist to huckster to get your thousand, so the art must come first. Which brings me back to the original thrust of this post – what is a digital persona? Is it the huckster selling? Is it the tortured artist? Is it the social butterfly? Is it the bitter misanthrope? Who am I and why have I donned this digital mask and entered this new frontier? In the past, I’ve always been just a little bit fearful of what I’ve posted on-line, wondering about the what ifs were a client, a potential reader, a judge, another attorney, my siblings or my parents to read this. The answer is amazingly simple and amazingly difficult all at the same time – be a person of integrity and it doesn’t matter.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
ON THE POWER OF THE WRITTEN WORD
I’ve always loved books. The word written down on a page or a computer screen – it hasn’t mattered. The power of the Word has influenced me throughout my life, transformed me as a person and shaped my life in ways I probably haven’t even imagined. I’ve read countless books from first grade on and how I think, how I feel, how I love, how I parent, how I make a living have all been shaped by the written word.
Now, I’ve spent an entire Sunday morning wallowing around in words, trying to make digital connections (and failing mostly). The irony is that as I listen to the words of the Christmas songs wafting down the stairs, I realize that my whole life is now connected to things I’ve written. I met my wife because she writes. I read what she wrote. I wrote about it. Now we are married and she lets me stay downstairs on Sunday and play around with words.
The playground of words is so broad and so encompassing, it is easy to feel lost, like I do now. You scream out the words, but no one hears. Words are most beautiful when they are heard, acknowledged and understood.
The power of words comes from their ability to connect us (or in the context of the law – control us). I think I prefer connection over control. I ache for my words to connect and sometimes they actually do.
Now, I’ve spent an entire Sunday morning wallowing around in words, trying to make digital connections (and failing mostly). The irony is that as I listen to the words of the Christmas songs wafting down the stairs, I realize that my whole life is now connected to things I’ve written. I met my wife because she writes. I read what she wrote. I wrote about it. Now we are married and she lets me stay downstairs on Sunday and play around with words.
The playground of words is so broad and so encompassing, it is easy to feel lost, like I do now. You scream out the words, but no one hears. Words are most beautiful when they are heard, acknowledged and understood.
The power of words comes from their ability to connect us (or in the context of the law – control us). I think I prefer connection over control. I ache for my words to connect and sometimes they actually do.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
ON BEING HUMAN
I’m having serious issues with the tenth commandment. I am coveting someone else’s words. Few authors make me covet their work – at various times Dostoevsky, Philip Roth, Shakespeare, Kerouac, T. S. Eliot and Kafka have made me slip into paroxysms of jealousy and desire. Yet one author stands above the rest for me – Henry Miller.
Miller has a strange and glorious cosmology, mixing mortality and philosophy into a down and dirty humanism. Miller has the ragged and romantic streets of 1930's Paris as a back drop to much of his writing and he takes full advantage of the squalor and decadence to state his case on creating art and being human. Look at this writing:
When the eyes waggle then will I hear again Dostoievski’s words, hear them rolling on page after page, with minutest observation, with maddest introspection, with all the undertones of misery now lightly, humorously touched, now swelling like an organ note until the heart bursts and there is nothing left but a blinding, scorching light, the radiant light that carries off the fecundating seeds of the stars. The story of art whose roots lie in massacre.
I read that and I honestly don’t feel worthy to hold the moniker of writer and think my voice is not Art. An anger and frustration wells up inside me and again a voice from the grave sings to me. Henry has felt the anger and frustration and fought back with a vengeance. He is more alive now, even though he is dead. He is dead and lives. I live and part of me feels dead. Yet he fights and dances on my living corpse on a Sunday morning when his immortal words out live his worn out and decaying flesh.
Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse . . .
Henry was persecuted and prosecuted for his blasphemy that being honestly human is the most difficult of tasks. Yes, he used naughty words, but the repulsion to the dirt, the rejection of the dirt is the rejection of the dust and Earth where Henry rots and dances. The fight to be human and to create art out of being human and out of surviving is the dance against death, against inevitability, against the dust we sprang from and to which we again descend. As usual, Henry writes it and it is not off key:
If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back. There are always too many rotten pillars left standing, too much festering humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of centuries there does appear a man with a desperate, hungry look in his eye, a man who would turn the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge. If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defense left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.
Did he know when he was furiously writing out those words seventy years ago that his page would explode in my face and wring tears out of my eyes? Is existential desperation required to write words that explode and wound? I want to feel desperate. I read Henry’s stare down on art and beauty and my world transformed.
I’m not scrounging for meals or food. I’m slathered comfortably into my suburban home surrounded by loving wife and children. My extended family wraps around the outside of my cozy shell of existence, insulating me from Henry Miller’s rotting Paris. Yet . . . Yet . . .yet I want to blaspheme. I want to rip the skin off of the face of society because underneath I don’t think I’ll find a skull and certainly no brain.
Ogden, Utah is the scrubbed up and prettified version of 1930's Paris, but it is worse than Paris, because the rot, the decay, the putrefication hides behind gleaming scrubbed houses and manicured lawns. Miller spoke and I finally inherited those X-ray glasses off of the back of the comic books and I can see. I was blind and now I can see. The facade of clean brick turns to dust to reveal a burned out, toxic waste site that would make the EPA run screaming from the room.
Maniacally we work. Manically we consume. The economy is rotting because we don’t consume, but the human locust leave nothing living behind its consumption, other than the rotting carapace shells of the growing insect and the defecating waste. Like good little locusts, every Monday we parade our consumptive trash to the curb so that the waste and destruction we are committing is toted away in a communal exercise of denial that is known as "garbage day." Consume and show your patriotism. Consume and be happy. Consume and consume, don’t tread on me, I’m eating my own tail. The serpent has come to the American Eden and offers up no fruit, but begs Eve and Adam to consume themselves out of existence. Obligingly we fall. Just make it look like paradise, even though it is a rotting swamp, and we will consume. We will walk through the Garden of Wal-mart and eat whatever the serpent would have us eat. If we keep eating the forbidden fruit of consumption, maybe we will never realize that we have left Eden and paradise is the fantasy of the deluded.
I’m a little monkey typing on a keyboard. Pounding letters onto a screen and no one is listening. The absurdity of me sitting here and typing in the cool fall light about the desperation I feel with existence, with the consumptive rot I see around me as I realize that the writer screaming at the world doesn’t have a place to stand and my body is drawn and quartered, pulled in four directions at once, leaving my heart to beat once or twice in the dust before it is done, but it is the only drawing and quartering ever done as a suicide. I can’t let go of my paycheck. I can’t let go of my comfort. My toes turn blue grasping at physical comfort and solace and at human acceptance. I grasp the reigns of the horses that tear me apart, even as I feel the legs and arms pulling out of their sockets and all I can think of is there something I could bite and grasp with my teeth that would pull me into five instead of four pieces – drawn and quintupted – with my head rolling along in the dust behind the apocalyptic horsemen that have graciously pulled apart my flesh, my teeth grinningly biting into the rope that pulled off my head.
Words have become just another commodity to be consumed and eating only makes the hunger grow worse. Lives and words repeat and the hunger grows because the soul is malnourished. The skeletal soul can’t take in nourishment in the Dante-ian hell of eating without any cessation of the starvation. Words slip down the mental gullet and slip out in an explosive diarrhea leaving emptiness and hunger – nothing sticks. Words are cheap. Here are my words. You have my words. You have nothing. I’ve read and read books and all the words are gone. I remember nothing. You’ll remember nothing of this.
Being human means that we forget. Being human means that we don’t really look at what our life is. Being human means that we don’t realize our life is nothing but a feast of death, that we live by eating other life. Being human is desperate. Being human is being mundane, predictable and agonizingly the same as everyone else. Being human is to decay and grow old and die. Being human is to hurt, an agonizing schism of opposites.
Being human means that we remember. Being human means that we can really look at what our life is. Being human means that we realize our life is nothing but a feast of death, but somehow we still manage to respect life. Being human is being hopeful. Being human is being unusual, unpredictable and gloriously unique. Being human is to grow and expand and become immortal. Being human is to feel exquisite pleasure, in an orgasmic ecstacy of opposites.
Mostly, being human means to covet the beauty and try to add to the beauty we find amongst the horror of existence. Thank you, Henry.
Miller has a strange and glorious cosmology, mixing mortality and philosophy into a down and dirty humanism. Miller has the ragged and romantic streets of 1930's Paris as a back drop to much of his writing and he takes full advantage of the squalor and decadence to state his case on creating art and being human. Look at this writing:
When the eyes waggle then will I hear again Dostoievski’s words, hear them rolling on page after page, with minutest observation, with maddest introspection, with all the undertones of misery now lightly, humorously touched, now swelling like an organ note until the heart bursts and there is nothing left but a blinding, scorching light, the radiant light that carries off the fecundating seeds of the stars. The story of art whose roots lie in massacre.
I read that and I honestly don’t feel worthy to hold the moniker of writer and think my voice is not Art. An anger and frustration wells up inside me and again a voice from the grave sings to me. Henry has felt the anger and frustration and fought back with a vengeance. He is more alive now, even though he is dead. He is dead and lives. I live and part of me feels dead. Yet he fights and dances on my living corpse on a Sunday morning when his immortal words out live his worn out and decaying flesh.
Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse . . .
Henry was persecuted and prosecuted for his blasphemy that being honestly human is the most difficult of tasks. Yes, he used naughty words, but the repulsion to the dirt, the rejection of the dirt is the rejection of the dust and Earth where Henry rots and dances. The fight to be human and to create art out of being human and out of surviving is the dance against death, against inevitability, against the dust we sprang from and to which we again descend. As usual, Henry writes it and it is not off key:
If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back. There are always too many rotten pillars left standing, too much festering humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of centuries there does appear a man with a desperate, hungry look in his eye, a man who would turn the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge. If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defense left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.
Did he know when he was furiously writing out those words seventy years ago that his page would explode in my face and wring tears out of my eyes? Is existential desperation required to write words that explode and wound? I want to feel desperate. I read Henry’s stare down on art and beauty and my world transformed.
I’m not scrounging for meals or food. I’m slathered comfortably into my suburban home surrounded by loving wife and children. My extended family wraps around the outside of my cozy shell of existence, insulating me from Henry Miller’s rotting Paris. Yet . . . Yet . . .yet I want to blaspheme. I want to rip the skin off of the face of society because underneath I don’t think I’ll find a skull and certainly no brain.
Ogden, Utah is the scrubbed up and prettified version of 1930's Paris, but it is worse than Paris, because the rot, the decay, the putrefication hides behind gleaming scrubbed houses and manicured lawns. Miller spoke and I finally inherited those X-ray glasses off of the back of the comic books and I can see. I was blind and now I can see. The facade of clean brick turns to dust to reveal a burned out, toxic waste site that would make the EPA run screaming from the room.
Maniacally we work. Manically we consume. The economy is rotting because we don’t consume, but the human locust leave nothing living behind its consumption, other than the rotting carapace shells of the growing insect and the defecating waste. Like good little locusts, every Monday we parade our consumptive trash to the curb so that the waste and destruction we are committing is toted away in a communal exercise of denial that is known as "garbage day." Consume and show your patriotism. Consume and be happy. Consume and consume, don’t tread on me, I’m eating my own tail. The serpent has come to the American Eden and offers up no fruit, but begs Eve and Adam to consume themselves out of existence. Obligingly we fall. Just make it look like paradise, even though it is a rotting swamp, and we will consume. We will walk through the Garden of Wal-mart and eat whatever the serpent would have us eat. If we keep eating the forbidden fruit of consumption, maybe we will never realize that we have left Eden and paradise is the fantasy of the deluded.
I’m a little monkey typing on a keyboard. Pounding letters onto a screen and no one is listening. The absurdity of me sitting here and typing in the cool fall light about the desperation I feel with existence, with the consumptive rot I see around me as I realize that the writer screaming at the world doesn’t have a place to stand and my body is drawn and quartered, pulled in four directions at once, leaving my heart to beat once or twice in the dust before it is done, but it is the only drawing and quartering ever done as a suicide. I can’t let go of my paycheck. I can’t let go of my comfort. My toes turn blue grasping at physical comfort and solace and at human acceptance. I grasp the reigns of the horses that tear me apart, even as I feel the legs and arms pulling out of their sockets and all I can think of is there something I could bite and grasp with my teeth that would pull me into five instead of four pieces – drawn and quintupted – with my head rolling along in the dust behind the apocalyptic horsemen that have graciously pulled apart my flesh, my teeth grinningly biting into the rope that pulled off my head.
Words have become just another commodity to be consumed and eating only makes the hunger grow worse. Lives and words repeat and the hunger grows because the soul is malnourished. The skeletal soul can’t take in nourishment in the Dante-ian hell of eating without any cessation of the starvation. Words slip down the mental gullet and slip out in an explosive diarrhea leaving emptiness and hunger – nothing sticks. Words are cheap. Here are my words. You have my words. You have nothing. I’ve read and read books and all the words are gone. I remember nothing. You’ll remember nothing of this.
Being human means that we forget. Being human means that we don’t really look at what our life is. Being human means that we don’t realize our life is nothing but a feast of death, that we live by eating other life. Being human is desperate. Being human is being mundane, predictable and agonizingly the same as everyone else. Being human is to decay and grow old and die. Being human is to hurt, an agonizing schism of opposites.
Being human means that we remember. Being human means that we can really look at what our life is. Being human means that we realize our life is nothing but a feast of death, but somehow we still manage to respect life. Being human is being hopeful. Being human is being unusual, unpredictable and gloriously unique. Being human is to grow and expand and become immortal. Being human is to feel exquisite pleasure, in an orgasmic ecstacy of opposites.
Mostly, being human means to covet the beauty and try to add to the beauty we find amongst the horror of existence. Thank you, Henry.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)