Tag: writing

If You Could Only Hear Yourself

Read your writing out loud, advises Alan Jacobs, particularly in the case of opinion or argument. Hear how your words might affect an audience by passing them up through your vocal chords and out your mouth, feeding back into your own brain via your ears. How would you then evaluate your rhythm, the strength of your position, and perhaps most importantly, your generosity of spirit?

Jacobs quotes a prayer:

“O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despondency, lust for power and idle talk.” Idle talk! — how many of us would think to place, near the head of a long prayer to be repeated frequently in Lent, a plea to be delivered from that?

And yet many have been my idle words over the years. I wonder how much harm they have done to others, and even to me. . . .

In some cases the embarrassment would have been because of arguments badly made or paragraphs awkwardly formed; but in others because of a simple lack of charity or grace. An essay begins with an idea, but an idea begins with a certain orientation of the mind and will — with a mood, if you please. We have only the ideas that our mood of the moment prepares us to have, and while our moods may be connected to the truth of things, they are normally connected only to some truths, some highly partial facet of reality. Out of that mood we think; out of those thoughts we write. And it may be that only in speaking those thoughts do we discern the mood from which they arose.

I have argued that the skepto-atheosphere (or at least its online manifestations) could benefit mightily from the rhetorical and literary ethos of the essay. A movement eating itself alive, constantly swirling with varying degrees of outrage and righteous indignation, dividing into sects and factions which then divide further into sub-sects and sub-factions. (Go ahead, hop onto any popular atheist blog or onto any Twitter neighborhood where the heretics and skeptics play. You will doubtless see at least one jab thrown at another member of our “reality-based community,” at least one missile launched, perhaps brazenly, perhaps as a snarky aside.) But I would temper my prescription by adding that it must be a thoughtful essay, a careful essay, heard out loud by the writer as Jacobs has learned.

Something a fellow heathen has done or said (or is alleged to have done or said) has you fuming, and you take to one of the Web’s myriad platforms to immediately broadcast your ire — your dudgeon high and your motives unassailable. You feel it’s your duty to call it out, shine a light, muster disapproval.

But think: is what you heard true? If so, might there be additional context? Must it now define the character of your target forevermore, casting aside that you, they, and we were once all allies for some reason?

Might you instead at least consider, perhaps even experiment with, a dose of charity, a pinch of the benefit of the doubt, a slight hint of generosity of spirit? Can you just try it out?

Or just start with reading it out loud first.

September 8, 2013

atheism, blogging, culture, writing
A Website You Can Talk Over: Assigning Responsibility for a Meaningful Blog

What do I want this blog to be? Perhaps using that very word, blog, assumes too much, imposing a definition. What to I want this website to be?

A little while back, I posited that perhaps the essay as a format was something that more bloggers ought to rely on, as opposed to, say, the hasty, knee-jerk missive. The reason, essentially, was to lessen the noise, the pointless butting of heads and scoring of points. To encourage more thinking and consideration, and to discourage an endless episode of “Crossfire.”

It turns out, however, that there is a contradiction. A lot of my feelings about essays stem from Andrew Sullivan, who led me to Montaigne, and on. But it is Sullivan who, in 2008, said this about blogs:

There is, after all, something simply irreplaceable about reading a piece of writing at length on paper, in a chair or on a couch or in bed. To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading. Jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.

The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed. To listen to jazz as one would listen to an aria is to miss the point. Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other.

Put aside the question of physical medium for a moment. In blogs, Sullivan is describing a back and forth, not just a conversational tone (like Montaigne pioneered), but an actual discussion, a real chat. Is that in conflict with what the essay, placed on a website, would offer or imply?

“Uh oh” was my first thought.

That’s gone, though. It seems to me that the author of a blog post can hope to engender conversation that is substantive and respectful with a thoughtful essay-like piece. But the audience has to acquiesce, to buy into this approach.

On an episode of “On the Media,” Ta-Nehisi Coates describes in some detail how he manages comments on his blog at The Atlantic. He doesn’t simply allow anything to happen; he carefully curates, mediates, and if necessary, gives folks the boot who aren’t playing by his rules. I like that.

But this is about more than comments. Coates can’t control what happens on the wider Internet as a result of his writing. But he can choose not to engage with the activity that doesn’t suit his or her overall approach. As Pour Me Coffee has said, he can “ruthlessly curate [his] online experience.” I really like that.

So. The first part is to write in such a way, and with such a voice, that meaningful conversation (in comments, on Twitter, what have you) is encouraged, is exemplified. But then, second, the readers and participants have to play along in that mode. Third, the author then must manage his or her online interactions in such a way that incentivize substance over vitriol and snark for its own sake.

Good then!

But what else? Obviously, I’ve not limited this blog, by any means, to wordy essays. Like Sullivan, there are plenty of one-off links and a smattering of commentary. Does that dilute the site, perhaps? It doesn’t for Sullivan and The Dish, but I think that’s because his site never stops generating content. One can skim through the shorter bits, and stop and pause to read his longer pieces (or as he calls them “keepers”).

John Gruber at Daring Fireball works in a similar fashion: The norm is that a post will be a “link post,” where Gruber highlights a bit of news or commentary, throws in a sentence of his own, and even has the headline’s link lead to the originating source, not is own post. Then he sets apart “keepers,” longer essays, by marking them with a star before the title of the post. He also has no comments section on his blog, and lets all conversation happen outside and around his blog, but not on it.

But again, Gruber is more prolific than I. He and Sullivan, of course, make their livings doing this, while I am lucky to find the time and energy to blog regularly, as much as I would love for it to be my main occupation.

So can I ape their styles in an effective way in order to make Near-Earth Object what I want it to be? I’m not sure. I’m not convinced that irregular and sparse posting makes that style work.

I may have to experiment, to blog more often than I am initially inclined, to get the machinery in my brain working at full power. I’d also have to accept that, at least for a while, I may post a lot of garbage. (Would anyone notice?) I may want to retool the look of the site so that “keepers” can be easily spotted (in a sidebar?). I’m going to think about it, and more important, start acting on thoughts.

Back to physical medium, briefly. Sullivan, in the above quote, distinguishes between the reader’s behavior based on what surface they are reading content off of; a screen or a piece of paper. That was written in 2008, and I have to imagine that he’d rethink this today. There was no iPad then, and the Kindle was an expensive novelty device. And no one had heard the term “Retina display.”

Today, we have those technologies that encourage and facilitate deeper, longer-form reading, such that Instapaper is an indispensable app, and so I think that today it’s not about screens and paper, but about presentation of content. And the onus for that is, yes, firstly on the author or outlet, but now just as much on the reader. If one opts to read a piece on their lunch break at a desktop display, the attitude and mindset may be very different than if that reader has saved the piece in Instapaper, and now reads it in a comfy chair from an iPad or Kindle, free (or freer) from distractions, windows, and notifications.

It is like jazz. You can, in fact, talk over it. But you can also buy the remastered CD, put on your pricey Bose headphones, and savor every note. Your call.

I like that, too.

July 6, 2013

blogging, Internet, personal, writing
A Tendency Away from Certitude: Our Blogosphere Needs the Essay

It had seemed to me that, in the ideal, the chief distinguishing characteristic of the blog format, as opposed to, say, formal print newspaper and magazine article, was that it represented a piece of a larger conversation. Not in the strict sense of point-counterpoint, you-go-I-go, but in the sense of being an individual’s considered musing upon a given topic that contributes to the overall swirl of thought and content going on all around. That’s certainly the picture painted by someone like Andrew Sullivan, who for me is kind of the Foundational Blogger for all intents and purposes.

But I can’t say that this is what I see today in the blogosphere, or the sectors into which I delve on a regular basis. I can speak best, of course, to my perceptions of the skepto-atheist blogosphere and the wider genre of political blogging. In those areas, I see very little of what could pass as conversation. Recently, I’m realizing how much I wish this were not so.

What I see in blogs today (and let’s keep it to the skepto-atheosphere for now) is more or less a competition of zingers, gotchas, and positions asserted as though self-evident, done via polemic, snark, indignant rhetoric, and quote-mining. I see not a conversation, but lines and lines of entrenched infantry, all working to win their war by scoring the most points.

I’m over-generalizing, I realize. Particularly due to my job, I am exposed to a very specific tributary of the vast rivers of online prose that empty into even wider digital oceans. But I am hoping to follow a thread of thought to something.

Sullivan sees the blog as an evolution — or perhaps modern manifestation of — the essay, and draws the greatest influence from Montaigne (as I do now, thanks in large part to Sullivan), the Ur-blogger.

Christy Wampole has written <a href="

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/the-essayification-of-everything/”>a beautiful piece about what the essay form can offer modern discourse; where we are missing out on its benefits, and abusing it when utilized. She presents her thesis as thus:

I believe that the essay owes its longevity today mainly to this fact: the genre and its spirit provide an alternative to the dogmatic thinking that dominates much of social and political life in contemporary America. In fact, I would advocate a conscious and more reflective deployment of the essay’s spirit in all aspects of life as a resistance against the zealous closed-endedness of the rigid mind. I’ll call this deployment “the essayification of everything.”

The “x-ification” of anything as a panacea is a gimmick I often bristle at, but Wampole is on to something here. For clarity, she writes:

When I say “essay,” I mean short nonfiction prose with a meditative subject at its center and a tendency away from certitude. Much of the writing encountered today that is labeled as “essay” or “essay-like” is anything but. These texts include the kind of writing expected on the SAT, in seminar papers, dissertations, professional criticism or other scholarly writing; politically engaged texts or other forms of peremptory writing that insist upon their theses and leave no room for uncertainty; or other short prose forms in which the author’s subjectivity is purposely erased or disguised. What these texts often have in common is, first, their self-conscious hiding of the “I” under a shroud of objectivity. One has to pretend that one’s opinions or findings have emanated from some office of higher truth where rigor and science are the managers on duty.

The shroud of objectivity, an office of higher truth…could there be any better description for the tone of so much of the skepto-atheosphere’s bloggery? She goes on:

Second, these texts are untentative: they know what they want to argue before they begin, stealthily making their case, anticipating any objections, aiming for air-tightness. These texts are not attempts; they are obstinacies. They are fortresses. Leaving the reader uninvited to this textual engagement, the writer makes it clear he or she would rather drink alone.

Case-making, anticipating objections, etc. In other words, winning on points. One part that many of my fellow bloggers might object to is her assertion that the non-essay “leav[es] the reader uninvited,” as most of the blogosphere is open to comments and reaction, but in my experience comments sections and other blog-based responses are usually more of a piece with the original posting. They are still fortresses, just perhaps smaller ones, or constructed on a different front.

There is, of course, a need for plain-speaking. There is a time and place for laying down lines of demarcation, of, yes, building a fortress, because that fortress may be defending something that is genuinely worthy. I would not feel such common case with “New Atheism” and its (to some) stark and uncompromising positions if I did not think that humanity faced moral and existential threats from religion, faith, and dogma.

But I also want the conversation. Rather than dueling blog posts about, say, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and their attitudes toward Muslims (one set of posts says they’re totally on-point for such-and-such reasons, and another set of posts declaring them unforgivable racists for such-and-such reasons), I’d prefer a slower contemplation — I’m talking primarily about text, but also audio, video, or what have you — that tackled the topic from all angles, and allowed space to look inward and question one’s own suppositions and conclusions. Certainly, the quality of the writing could improve if nothing else.

Blogs, from my vantage point, are not doing this. They are not essays. Are essays anywhere to be found? I have one idea. An essay, as suggested by Wampole, is informed by “possibilitarianism,” by

contingency and trying things out digressively, following this or that forking path, feeling around life without a specific ambition: not for discovery’s sake, not for conquest’s sake, not for proof’s sake, but simply for the sake of trying.

To me, this sounds a lot like Tumblr. Tumblogs are often, rather unintentionally I’d guess, explorations of experience, a gathering of encounters, predilections, and bursts of raw expression that might just be in line with what a Wampolian essay is supposed to be. They may or may not be as polished, and obviously they are not always (or often) text-based. But perhaps there’s something here.

But wait! Wampole says:

I would argue that the weakest component in today’s nontextual essayism is its meditative deficiency. Without the meditative aspect, essayism tends toward empty egotism and an unwillingness or incapacity to commit, a timid deferral of the moment of choice. Our often unreflective quickness means that little time is spent interrogating things we’ve touched upon. The experiences are simply had and then abandoned.

Ah yes. And loop Facebook and Pinterest and their ilk into this as well. A running log of oh-well-that-happened. Maybe. What, then? Wampole, one more time:

Today’s essayistic tendency — a series of often superficial attempts relatively devoid of thought — doesn’t live up to this potential in its current iteration, but a more meditative and measured version à la Montaigne would nudge us toward a calm taking into account of life without the knee-jerk reflex to be unshakeably right.

Good, then. Let us demand more of our own essays, be they in the form of blogs or social network posts, podcast episodes or YouTube monologues. Let us begin each piece with so much confidence in our own intellect and capacity for understanding, that we allow that we may be wrong. We allow that we may have our own blinding biases and obstructive obstinacies. And we say so, and we explore that fact as deeply as anything else.

June 3, 2013

atheism, blogging, culture, writing
Bluster v. Nuance

Oh, hi, Internet.
Angus Croll:

Writing online is so nearly effortless that reading (not to mention reflection, deliberation and thought) has become a chore in comparison. It’s easier to jot off a patronizing, indignant or self-aggrandizing missive than it is to take the trouble to read the whole article or give fair consideration to the author’s perspective. Thus the vicious circle sets in…

Why go to the trouble of producing a balanced or inquiring article for a medium that encourages rapid-fire feedback over deliberation and reflection? And why, in turn, respond to that article with any semblance of balance in a medium that rewards bite-sized bluster over nuance and accuracy? And why, for that matter, bother reading the article at all, when speed is everything, and you’d better get your soundbite in now because they’ll be new outrages to decry tomorrow?

The opposite extreme also causes me great agitation: Hyper-attention to a piece of writing for the sole purpose of mining it for things about which one can be righteously indignant, or errors (usually trivial) over which one can gloat. That leads to more of the same thoughtless/effortless writing Croll talks about.

My eyeballs have been filled with this of late. Filled.

I wonder if I’m doing it myself right now. Bah, thinking is hard.

April 2, 2013

culture, writing
A Phase of Incestuous Contraction

As a performing artist, here’s a thing I’ve definitely fretted over; doing art only for an audience of people who all do the same thing. Here’s Steve Almond at The New Republic writing from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference (AWP):

But there’s a larger and more unsettling truth. . . one that AWP inadvertently drives home: As a pursuit, literature is in a phase of incestuous contraction. Yes, people still read novels and stories and essays and poems. But today most of those people are also writers.

This was certainly true at the last event I did, a reading at a local bookstore. Every member of the audience, aside from a stray spouse or relative, was a writer.

Here it’s writing and literature, for me it was theatre, and specifically Shakespeare and classical theatre. All the effort, the creativity, the nuance, I knew it was largely lost on the vast majority of the audience. This is not because they were dumb or even uncultured. They just weren’t immersed in the field and the craft like the actors and other practitioners were.

But the tragedy to me was that we would all be agonizing over the smallest details and the most subtle moments, when chances were that almost no one would have been able to tell the difference. I mean, you should see the garbage I’ve seen audiences give standing ovations for.

It was probably a factor in my leaving theatre for politics. I thought that even if normal folks that didn’t know all the ins and outs, they at least got tangible benefits from political work. But I didn’t have the confidence that even our most masterful production of Othello, say, would have meant as much to a general audience to match what we had put in to it. It wasn’t until fellow actors, directors, and other artists came to see it that opinions suddenly had real weight. (And it depends on the person and the product, of course. I’m speaking in broad generalities here.)

I don’t write literature, per se, but I do write essays, and I’m toying with a book of sorts, a kind of memoir of one period of my life. As of now, I want attention from all eyeballs, regardless of the skulls in which they sit. Maybe that would change if this thing ever went anywhere.

But for theatre, it was always a depressing thought to think that we were putting every ounce of ourselves into a piece of work that could only really be appreciated by the few others who also did theatre. I’d hate to think that if I were to be able to write in a more full time capacity that I’d be doing primarily for other writers. Then why bother?

March 13, 2013

culture, personal, writing
Me vs. the Western Canon
As part of a recent initiative of mine to read a bunch of the foundational classics that I’d so far missed, I finally got around to reading Machiavelli’s The Prince, maybe about a year ago. Though it’s something that has had a tremendous impact on political thought for centuries, I had somehow managed not to be compelled to digest it. Heck, I even got my master’s from GWU’s political management program, which could well be described as a graduate school for Machivallianism itself, now that I think about it, (when the school was established, The New Republic dubbed it “The School for Scoundrels”), but I still missed it.
But despite all this, when I finally read it, it didn’t land with me. I partly chalked this up to the fact that its tenets had, by this point in history, been so thoroughly digested by Western culture, that perhaps there was nothing left to resonate with me — it was all, by now, old news.

Suffice it to say, I am not actually convinced by this explanation, as it feels more like an excuse for my own inability to comprehend it, or perhaps, more generously, a problem with my failure to read it with sufficient slowness and closeness.

When I first read Montaigne’s Essays, not too long after I read The Prince, I had a similar experience. But because of the breadth and conversational tone of much of Montaigne, it was not quite so alienating. Some of it I truly loved, while much of it remained beyond my ability — or really, willingness — to grasp.

Then I read Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live, a brilliant exploration of Montaigne the person through the essays, and I found myself falling in love with Montaigne after the fact. But what was I so enamored by, really? Montaigne’s own words, or Bakewell’s interpretation?

I am faced with the same question today. The New York Review of Books has recently put online a 1971 piece by Isaiah Berlin on The Prince and what it tells us about Machiavelli’s morality. The piece is wonderful, long but an easy read, and totally understandable despite its many references to philosophers and academics with which I am not, and likely never will be familiar. Berlin’s explanation of what is so goddamned important about Machiavelli — why he has stirred the centuries-long furor that he has — has made my mind spark with ideas and appreciation. Just as Bakewell has inspired me to return to the Essays, Berlin will drive me back to The Prince. To rediscover.

But I must come back to the central question of this post: Why the hell didn’t these masterpieces of Western Civilization land in the first place? What was I doing wrong?

Some possibilities, a couple of which were mentioned previously in this post:
- I didn’t pay close enough attention, and devote the kind of slow, thoughtful time required of such works, wanting instead to have checked them off my to-read list. (Possible.)
- Having chosen free versions of both works for reading in the Kindle format, I was stuck with public-domain translations that are very old, written in such a way as to feel very antiquated and archaic to me. (Only a slight factor, I suspect, if at all.)
- The ideas contained in these works are now part of our cultural fabric, and don’t resonate because they are at this point entirely assumed or humdrum. (Almost certainly not correct, or else Shakespeare is a phone book.)
- I’m simply not smart enough, or sufficiently educated, to appreciate these works. (Possible on both counts.)
I, being a master of self-loathing, am inclined toward the last bullet in that list, but for the sake of this post, and of giving myself the all-too-rare benefit of the doubt, I have one final possible explanation that pleases:
- Bakewell and Berlin, in their works, served as the teachers I never had, instilling in me an appreciation and excitement for Montaigne and Machiavelli that might have otherwise come from a brilliant college professor.
I went to undergrad for theatre. I went to graduate school for what is essentially a vo-tech for politics — not “political science” or political philosophy, but the practical navigation of the modern political industry. Montaigne and Machiavelli would not appear in these classes, not explicitly anyway. Much as it takes an enthusiastic science teacher in high school to turn a kid into a physicist, or it takes a crazy and overdramatic English teacher to make a student fall in love with literature, I posit that Bakewell and Berlin have been my teachers, and her book and his article have been my classes. And so my eyes were opened, and my mind awakened to what I would have otherwise missed from casual readings.

So maybe I’m not so dumb after all.

No, I probably am. But still.

* * *

Note: I’ll have more about the Berlin piece specifically in a separate post, and I’m considering delving back into Montaigne’s Essays and beginning a new blog project in which I write posts in reaction to each essay. We’ll see. Oh, and my current selection from the Western canon is Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. I am going to understand conservatism if it kills me.
February 17, 2013

books, culture, personal, politics, writing
The Tech Press and the Truth

I was rather angered by how the tech press handled the Mike Daisey affair. They seemed to me to be dancing with glee at the prospect of having their consciences somehow cleared because the man delivering the message of the treatment of workers at Foxconn had turned out to be something of a fabulist. Daisey certainly erred when he implied that his theatrical story was documentary truth. But the tech press was way too happy that Daisey had been caught fibbing about details, which of course allowed them to entirely forget what the whole point of Daisey’s crusade was to begin with.

I couldn’t quite see why they would be so blind to such an important distinction. Daisey’s mischaracterization of his theatrical play as journalism aside, surely the tech journos would understand that in the context of theatre, of storytelling, one relays a truth without necessarily telling The Whole Truth. That’s what art does. I found it hard to believe so many in the tech press couldn’t — or wouldn’t — understand this. (Let alone Ira Glass, but that’s another thing.)

Then today I read a piece at PandoDaily by Farhad Manjoo, whose work I normally very much enjoy and find refreshing for its clarity and boldness. Manjoo has decided, long before any dialogue has been written, that the Steve Jobs biopic by Aaron Sorkin will suck. He has pre-reviewed the nonexistent film, and found it to be offensive.

Manjoo first complains that one need only look to The Social Network to see how Sorkin apparently didn’t understand what Facebook really is (a “product” and not an “idea,” which I suppose is a fair point), and took too many liberties with relationships and portrayals.

I would presume that most of you would think, well, it’s just a movie. Let him take whatever liberty he wants! You’d think that, right?

But Manjoo truly opened my eyes to the blind spot of the tech press with this section (emphasis mine):

… Sorkin has said that he was glad Mark Zuckerberg didn’t cooperate with The Social Network, because then he’d have to had to make the character more lifelike: “I feel like, had I met Mark, I would have felt a certain obligation to make the character sound like Mark, walk like Mark, all of those things,” he told New York magazine.

Sorkin also said: “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.” Seriously. Sorkin actually said that. He doesn’t care about the truth.

Hold on, this is supposed to be some kind of scoop? Is Manjoo really, seriously under the impression that he’s somehow nailed Sorkin as a fraud with this quote?

I’m appalled to think so, but it seems to be the case.

I’m almost embarrassed to have to spell this out, but perhaps it’s necessary. Movies, theatre, television, what have you; even when these things are produced with actual historical occurrences as their bases, their end goal will almost never, ever be to merely report the facts as they happened. Rather, the prime objective of artists will always be to make the best possible art, to tell the best possible story. Sometimes that will mean sticking closely to historical fact, sometimes it will mean veering sharply away from reality. But Sorkin is 100 percent correct. His fidelity is not, and should not be, to the “truth,” the facts, but to realizing something special with that particular work, a something from which its own truth emerges.

This is perhaps part of why the Daisey episode drove the tech press into a frenzy of schadenfreude. Not only were they free to use their iPhones without guilt, but they were also completely confused about what it means to tell a story versus reporting on an event. I admit it’s unfair to paint the entire tech press with this brush, but Manjoo’s piece is awfully revelatory and I think this is at least a pretty strong hypothesis.

That said, Mike Daisey did cross a line by implying his story was genuine reportage, but the truth of his play is not therefore diminished. And whatever Sorkin does with the story of Steve Jobs, it will rise or fall on its own merits. Not as a documentary about the man, but as a film with a script and actors to speak the lines.

June 3, 2012

art, technology, writing
Formed by Boredom

This worries me a little (by Toby Litt in Granta):

A couple of years ago, I spent three months playing World of Warcraft – partly as research for a short story I was writing, mostly because I became addicted to it. This convinced me of one thing: If the computer games which exist now had existed back in 1979 I would not have read any books, I think; I would not have seen writing as an adequate entertainment; I would not have seen going outdoors as sufficiently interesting to bother with.

Similarly, I find it difficult to understand why any eleven-year-old of today would be sufficiently bored to turn inward for entertainment.

This raises the question as to how future writers will come about, without ‘silence, exile and cunning’ – without the need for these things?

I was formed, as a writer, by the boredom of the place in which I lived.

Now, I did have video games when I was eleven (not anything of the scale or complexity of WoW, but I had the NES and the Segal Genesis), and I think they are a big reason (second only to cable TV) as to why I almost never read books at that age, despite being “bookish” in all other respects. With rare exceptions, I allowed the television screen to use up almost every single waking minute of my life. I can’t tell you how much I regret that.

Eventually, I got bored. In my boredom, I learned to play — just barely — some guitar, and wrote songs. Or wrote in my journal. As a young adult, particularly when I was a working actor without television available to me, I got really bored, and dove head first into my songwriting, and other reading and writing as well, for a good stretch of about five years.

But in the thick of the social web today, along with the rigor of parenthood, I am once again rarely bored. I loathe television now, even to the point where even high-quality programming makes me impatient and anxious for the time I lose to viewing it. But my iPad and Mac and iPhone ensure that I never need be without distraction once the kid is asleep.

A happy difference now from my days of TV-cured boredom is that I spend a huge amount of time on my devices reading, far more than I did as a child or teenager. I am not delving into genuine books as much as I would like (and not nearly as much as I did when I was essentially bereft of television and Internet access), but my iPad serves primarily as a reader for long- and medium-form written content. I almost never visit YouTube, I play almost no games, etc.

But that’s me, a nerd who never fully embraced his nerddom in his teens, and is now trying to intellectually and culturally catch up. To today’s eleven-year-olds, will such an endeavor even occur to them? I’d like to think so. I’d like to think, at least, that they’ll do better than me. On a hopeful note, my two-year-old son Toby, who, although he does love his episodes of Dinosaur Train, absolutely loves books and being read to. I will do all I can to keep him loving books. He’ll be a better man for it.

April 16, 2012

books, culture, reading, technology, writing
Then Vonnegut Asked Caro, “Are We in the Same Trade?”

I’ve not yet read any of Robert Caro’s enormous Lyndon Johnson biographical series, even as he readies to release the latest volume that takes the subject up to his ascension to the presidency. I intend to read them, and the political world has a minor buzz to it because of this imminent release.

In another world, I was alerted to the fact that well before he tackled Johnson all those decades ago, Caro had written a biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. I found this out thanks to John Siracusa’s use of this book as an example a biography against which all others could be judged (in the context of lambasting the Steve Jobs biography on his podcast Hypercritical).

It was only serendipitous, then, that I stumbled upon this gem, a literary magazine piece from 1999 in which Caro is interviewed by perhaps my favorite novelist, the late Kurt Vonnegut. It’s wonderful, and I thought I’d at least share a snippet to give you a taste of its overall flow:

VONNEGUT

Let me ask you a question, Bob. I was on a panel with Joe Heller down in Florida. We were talking about the war mostly because that’s what we wanted to talk about, but I asked him at one point if he was disappointed about what the country has become. Because I am deeply disappointed. I was a prisoner of war with the Brits and the French and listened to all their plans for after the war, wanting justice and distribution of power in the world and that sort of thing, and Heller said that he was not disappointed-that he was unsurprised that the nation had turned out this way. Are you disappointed?

CARO

I guess, in a way, I am. I think with all our riches and wealth and the fact that we don’t have an enemy now who can threaten us, we ought to be doing a lot more now with the dispossessed of the world and the Blacks and Hispanics in our own country. I don’t think we’re doing very much compared with what we could do.

VONNEGUT

Well, what about your basic trade of journalism…What are you, sixty, now?

CARO

Sixty-one.

VONNEGUT

All right, so in the past thirty years, how has journalism done?

CARO

Yeah, I’m very disappointed in that. Aren’t you?

The interview opens with Vonnegut, a novelist, asking Caro, a biographer, whether the two of them are “in the same trade.” Fantastic. Read the whole thing.

December 28, 2011

books, culture, kurt vonnegut, writing
So Long, and Thanks for All the Text

The text stops here.

My webby little heart is broken, as I have just read that author and scholar Alan Jacobs is retiring his blog Text Patterns. It’s hard for me to overstate Text Patterns’ influence on me and this blog. Jacobs opened up a whole new world of topics to cover in my own blog writing, helping me discover a passion I barely knew I had; exploration of the history, fate and role of the written word in our modern technological landscape. This is a common enough topic, I suppose, on the Internet, but Jacobs covered it with erudition, accessibility, humor, and humility. When I blog about books, writing, and communication, I am very much aping — if only aspirationally — Jacobs and Text Patterns.

I don’t remember how I discovered Text Patterns to begin with, but I suspect it was probably via a linking by Andrew Sullivan, or perhaps I was googling about for things Kindle-related. Whatever the first cause, I found Text Patterns at its original home, the now-defunct “Salon-for-conservatives” known as Culture 11 (which also featured the likes of Conor Friedersdorf and David Kuo). When I realized what Culture 11 was, I was a little trepidatious to be hanging around there, but it became apparent very quickly that Jacobs’ blog was not some ideological screed in a web browser (nor was the wider Culture 11), but a thoughtful, independent-minded destination. When Culture 11 went under in 2009, I presumed all was lost, but then the magazine The New Atlantis picked up Jacobs’ blog, and Text Patterns continued. Now, I have to suffer its loss a second time.

And it is Jacobs’ more conservative roots that make my affinity for his work all the more remarkable to me. I spent a couple of years blogging nearly exclusively on atheism and the harm done by religion. Jacobs is not only a Christian, but a scholar whose frequent focus has been theology. Yet, like Andrew Sullivan, he is clearly no Tea Party know-nothing, but a brilliant man who has arrived at very different conclusions than myself in regards to things like the nature of reality and, presumably, (because I have not read any political writing he may have done) policy.

Those differences matter little. In fact, they make him and his work all the more fascinating to me. My tens of readers will already know how I adored his recent book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. I hope, as Jacobs notes in his final post, that this ending means more writing along those lines.

I am glad that Jacobs will be able to pursue new avenues of discovery outside the bounds of his blog, but the end of Text Patterns leaves a gaping black hole in the Internet that will not easily be filled.

August 16, 2011

blogging, culture, writing
Bloggy Relevance: Thoughts on What This Blog Is and Ought to Be

As long-time readers of this blog probably already know, I have at various times struggled over the identity of this blog, and my identity as a blogger or, really, as an “Internet personality.” I first began blogging in 2004 just to try and promote my first (and so far only) CD, Paul is Making Me Nervous. That didn’t last too long, and it wasn’t terribly interesting.

And you know the old saw: If you want to build an online audience, you need to find your niche and stick to it. I had not found mine yet.

In 2006, I realized I wanted to blog on politics more specifically, so I started a site called FifteenNineteen. By this point in Web history, of course, everyone and their mother already had a political blog, but I intended my blog to distinguish itself as being a kind of educational chronicle: I was about to start graduate school for political management, and I was going to blog on politics from that vantage point: what am I learning, and how does it apply to current events? It will not surprise you to know that I did not follow this tack at all, and simply defaulted to fairly typical punditry, peppered with some Onion-esque fake news articles (some of which I think were pretty damned funny).

I was still nominally maintaining the old self-promotion blog, and I didn’t like the idea of juggling both, so I merged the two into the first incarnation of Near Earth Object. I still focused mainly on politics, with occasional notes on things like my acting career, music, etc. I puttered along.

At the height of the 2008 campaign, a fire was lit under my hindquarters on the subject of atheists’ treatment in American politics, and after a few posts in the old Near Earth on that topic, I realized that I had found a niche I was really quite passionate about. So I more or less left Near Earth Object derelict, save for occasional generally-political posts, and started Bloc Raisonneur, a blog specifically focused on atheists’ place in the culture. I had a lot of fun working on it, learning from it, and I built a tiny following and a modicum of relevance in the atheist online community, which was solidified when I began blogging as a columnist for Examiner.com as the National Secularism Examiner.

Eventually, though, I began to work in the atheist movement itself professionally, and so opining on the topic no longer reflected only on myself — I now also represented a major secularist organization, whether I intended to or not. So both Bloc and my Examiner column atrophied.

But I didn’t feel through with blogging, so I backtracked somewhat, abandoned the idea of a specifically-atheist blog, and resurrected Near Earth Object, the blog you’re reading right now. After my assault in October and the subsequent major changes in my life since, for a while I was very sparse in my blogging.

But as you may have noticed, I’m picking it back up. It means something to me, and I care about making a strong blog product that I can be proud of.

And here’s the thing: my relevance has all but totally dissipated. My posts are read (when they are read) pretty much exclusively by friends on Facebook, and a few from Twitter. One friend only today remarked that due to my refusal to blog within one specific niche, I am not “seriously blogging” anymore.

But the fact is that I think my writing is stronger than it’s ever been. I cover a wide variety of subjects that includes politics, atheism, religion, book reviews, technology, as well as the personal. I write long essays and post brief, Tumblr-like one-off posts or images. I think as an Internet publication, Near Earth Object is strong.

My sense of a job well done is mitigated by the failure of the blog to validate itself through pageviews. My ego wants recognition, for my opinions to resonate beyond the confines of my social network.

I could easily jump back into atheist-only blogging, but why? There are countless other blogs of that nature, and the well-established, well-read among them are fairly entrenched at this point. If I felt that I had something crucially unique to add to the discussion — on a regular basis — that might change things, but it seems to me the grander debate within the atheist blogosphere is on something of a loop: we shouldn’t be aggressive, oh wait yes we should, repeat. (I should note I have an idea for an atheist-centric blog, one that specifically tracks the portrayal and treatment of atheists in the media, a kind of Media Matters for heathens, which I might one day pursue.) Beyond these common discussions, we all essentially agree with each other, and I feel that I can do more good for my blasphemous brethren by highlighting our movement within the context of a publication that is broader in scope.

So this is where we are. I have no plans to change the format of Near Earth Object. My only recourse to relevance, I think, is to write even better posts, as often as I can; to offer unique perspectives (both my own and those of others) on a wide array of subjects that stir readers to think in ways they may not have thought before (or, even, just to provoke a cheap laugh). I’ll make my non-specific blog the best non-specific blog it can be, and that, I suppose, will have to do. I hope more people come by to see it take shape.

June 30, 2011

blogging, personal, writing
A Natural Worshiper of Serendipity and Whim: Alan Jacobs’ “Pleasures of Reading”

Alan Jacobs, who readers of this blog (all ten of you) may know from previous references to his excellent blog TextPatterns, has recently released a wonderful book about reading that I simply can’t recommend highly enough. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction is just the sort of pithy, sympathetic tract that our times demand — it encourages bibliographic exploration, celebrates chance literary encounters, while offering sincere understanding for the would-be “well-read” among us who fear missing out on an overly massive menu of “great works.”

Those chance literary encounters are the subject of this passage, which I found so delightful and even moving, that I thought I’d share it here.

The cultivation of serendipity is an option for anyone, but for people living in conditions of prosperity and security and informational richness it is something vital. To practice “accidental sagacity” is to recognize that I don’t really know where I am going, even if I like to think I do, or think Google does; that if I know what I am looking for, I do not therefore know what I need; that I am not master of my destiny and captain of my fate; that it is probably a very good thing that I am not master of my destiny and captain of my fate. An accidental sagacity may be the form of wisdom I most need, but am least likely to find without eager pursuit. Moreover, serendipity is the near relation of Whim; each stands against the Plan. Plan once appealed to me, but I have grown to be a natural worshiper of Serendipity and Whim; I can try to serve other gods, but my heart is never in it. I truly think I would rather read an indifferent book on a lark than a fine one according to schedule and plan. And why not? After all, once upon a time we chose none of our reading: it all came to us unbidden, unanticipated, unknown, and from the hand of someone who loved us.

As the daddy of a toddler who absolutely loves to be read to, this strikes a chord. Jacobs reminds us that just as we trusted our parents to bring the world of words to us when we could not yet even speak sentences, so we can, as adults, allow the myriad chaotic forces around us to drop texts in our path, and accept them as they come, rather than worry over the time not spent on things we feel we are “supposed to” read.

Jacobs, incidentally, also confirms my feelings about the benefits of dedicated ereaders such as the Kindle. Particularly at this time in our technological lives when so many other gizmos promise to inundate us with all manner of simultaneous stimuli, Jacobs recognizes that this gizmo can help to cleanse the palate and provide oasis.

… people who know what it is like to be lost in a book, who value that experience, but who have misplaced it … They’re the ones who need help, and want it, and are prepared to receive it. I had become one of those people myself, or was well on my way to it, when I was rescued through the novelty of reading on a Kindle. My hyper-attentive habits were alienating me further and further from the much older and (one would have thought) more firmly established habits of deep attention. I was rapidly becoming a victim of my own mind’s plasticity, until a new technology helped me to remember how to do something that for years had been instinctive, unconscious, natural. I don’t know whether an adult who has never practiced deep attention—who has never seriously read for information or for understanding, or even for delight—can learn how. But I’m confident that anyone who has ever had this facility can recover it: they just have to want that recovery enough to make sacrifices for it, something they will only do if they can vividly recall what that experience was like.

So beyond Jacobs’ excellent prose and insight, perhaps one of the things that recommends this book to me so strongly is validation. I can live with that.

June 25, 2011

alan jacobs, book review, books, culture, reading, writing
Why We ‘Refudiate’ the Brasolaeliocattleya: Thoughts on ”The Lexicographer’s Dilemma”

Jack Lynch’s fascinating book, The Lexicographer’s Dilemma, is full of original insights, refreshing perspective, and delightful trivia about our mother tongue. It spans history and academia to lend understanding to what it means for a word to be considered an “official” part of the English language. The gist, as you might surmise, is that there is no such thing as the official version of the language. Dictionaries and pedants have over the centuries set down guidelines about propriety, some more sternly than others, but on the whole, the language is an ever-evolving, gelatinous swarm of words, idioms, and ideas. Lynch would have it no other way, and has little regard for those prescriptivists who attempt to nail it down.
To give an idea of the book’s overall theme, see Lynch’s take on the word/non-word “ain’t,” which he describes as…

… the most stigmatized word in the language … [which] every five-year-old is taught is not a word. But why not? Just because. It originally entered the language as a contracted form of am not (passing through a phase as an’t before the a sound was lengthened) and first appeared in print in 1778, in Frances Burney’s novel Evelina. We have uncontroversial contractions for is not (isn’t) and are not (aren’t), so what’s wrong with reducing am not to ain’t? The problem is that it was marked as a substandard word in the nineteenth century, people have been repeating the injunction ever since, and no amount of logic can undo it. It’s forbidden simply because it’s been forbidden.

You see where he’s coming from. We can so easily take for granted notions of what words are “real” and which are not (I am more guilty of this kind of parsing than most), forgetting that the real arbiters of these disputes are not thick books of alphabetically arranged terms, nor English text books, but actual human beings using those words. We don’t fault Shakespeare, for example, for inventing new words — whether they were based on existing words, or made from whole cloth — in fact, the earliest lexicographers used great writers such as Shakespeare as the starting point for what was and was not an English word. But any such effort made before Shakespeare would have missed his substantial contributions.

So what other kinds of words tend to get nudged out of “proper” or “official” English? It can be pretty surprising when one considers what gets to stick around. For example. it makes perfect sense that newer words like “blog” or even the latest sense of the word “tweet” should be given general lexicographical approval, but what about words based entirely on error — not on some creative use of language? I’m thinking, of course, of the recent decision of the folks of the Oxford English Dictionary to give “word of the year” credence to Sarah Palin’s “refudiate,” a word muddled entirely from her ignorance of the word’s two roots. If a “wrong” word falls into common use by millions, that’s one thing. When a narcissistic anti-intellectual mob-inciter like Palin screws something up, I have trouble understanding why that should be given any credibility, even if it is half-tongue-in-cheek.

Another example of those terms that are real English words in the sense that Anglophones use them, but don’t get dictionary codification because of their arcaneness in the eyes and ears of the general populace: scientific terms. Lynch again:

… if including everything scientific is impossible, so is excluding everything scientific. Everyone recognizes the need to include some scientific words like fruit fly, koala, carbon, and salt. But why should a lexicographer include daffodil and atom but omit brasolaeliocattleya (a kind of orchid) and graviscalar bosons (theoretical subatomic particles)? There’s no difference in the character of the words, only in the familiarity of the things they identify. If some future technological breakthrough makes us all familiar with graviscalar bosons, they’ll eventually show up in the major general dictionaries. Until then, they have to remain in the language’s antechamber.

I’m pulling for graviscalar bosons. I see no reason why it shouldn’t be in general use, if for no reason than that it’s a delight to say. Try it.

But, like “ain’t,” some words are beyond the language’s antechamber and instead find themselves in the house’s hidden dungeon. These are of course our “dirty words.” The origin of the concept of utterly-unacceptable words may surprise you, and be especially enlightening to my atheist readership:

The notion that particular words are taboo can probably be traced back to primitive beliefs about sympathetic magic, in which language can be used to injure people at a distance. It’s telling that many of our unseemly words are known as curses, since the conception of offensive language seems to have derived from a belief in the power of a malefactor to place a curse on an enemy.

So not only are “curse words” arbitrary and, on the whole, harmless in and of themselves, but their supposed power derives from notions of the supernatural, as though uttering them could do actual physical or spiritual damage. Makes the case for their enfranchisement even stronger, as no one will be made mysteriously ill or forced to reincarnate as a dung beetle by my typing the word “fuck.”

Of late, there may be no one who better illustrates — through written and verbal usage — the delightfully changeable nature of language than humorist Stephen Fry, who wrote a few years ago in an ever-relevant essay:

Convention exists, of course it does, but convention is no more a register of rightness or wrongness than etiquette is, it’s just another way of saying usage: convention is a privately agreed usage rather than a publicly evolving one. Conventions alter too, like life… . Imagine if we all spoke the same language, fabulous as it is, as Dickens? Imagine if the structure, meaning and usage of language was always the same as when Swift and Pope were alive. Superficially appealing as an idea for about five seconds, but horrifying the more you think about it.

If you are the kind of person who insists on this and that ‘correct use’ I hope I can convince you to abandon your pedantry. Dive into the open flowing waters and leave the stagnant canals be.

But above all let there be pleasure. Let there be textural delight, let there be silken words and flinty words and sodden speeches and soaking speeches and crackling utterance and utterance that quivers and wobbles like rennet. Let there be rapid firecracker phrases and language that oozes like a lake of lava. Words are your birthright.

This being so, we should make better use of this birthright. Embrace the changes, relish the experimentation, the creative truncations, the inventions, and at the same time, educate yourself. Learn the words that are unfamiliar. You can’t do Jackson Pollock-type abstract painting until you learn to reproduce the works of the impressionists. You can’t do improvisational jazz until you have mastered, note for note, the classical works of centuries past. Likewise, don’t presume to change the language until you are sufficiently familiar with it that your creativity means something — be aware of what you and those around you are doing to the language hundreds of millions of us share. And as Fry says, in this, find pleasure.

June 20, 2011

book review, books, culture, writing
David Mamet Exchanges One Herd for Another

The National Review has a must-read cover story on David Mamet’s (de)evolution toward conservatism, and despite my loathing of everything the magazine stands for, Andrew Ferguson does a marvelous job of putting Mamet’s beliefs into context, and exposing his subject’s reasonings and inconsistencies.

And that’s what catches my eye. For as something of an idiosyncratic liberal (my sympathy for nation-building, my alignment with Sam Harris on our conflict with radicalized Islam, and other positions which I feel stem from a liberal humanism but challenge liberal orthodoxies), I can see why Mamet feels like he must turn accepted conventions of progressivism on their heads, but the evidence from Ferguson’s piece suggests that Mamet has, as Ferguson even suggests, traded one set of unquestioned tenets for another.

For example, in a new book, Mamet goes on the attack against Bertolt Brecht, a hero to we theatre folk for his revolutionizing of the form, and to liberals for his attacks on capitalism and war. But Mamet saw a problem. From the National Review piece:

The reverence came to an end when [Mamet] finally noticed an incongruity between Brecht’s politics and his life. Although a cold-blooded—indeed bloody-minded—advocate for public ownership of the means of production and state confiscation of private wealth, he always took care to copyright his plays. More, he made sure the royalties were deposited in a Swiss bank account far from the clutches of East Germany, where he was nominally a citizen.

“His protestations [against capitalism] were not borne out by his actions, nor could they be,” Mamet writes. “Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold… .”

This is disingenuous, it seems to me. I don’t profess to know anything about Brecht’s biography, but at least in the abstract, this much is true: Brecht was not operating within a communist utopia, he was operating in a world in which one had to protect one’s work within the context of capitalism and ownership. What does Mamet expect? That Brecht should have thrown his works into the public domain and denied himself an income all in the name of ideological consistency? To do so would have been akin to playing under the rules of baseball in the middle of a football game. One must operate within the world in which one finds oneself. Does Mamet propose to deny himself the use of highways and police protection because he doesn’t like the government?

Later in the piece, Mamet rails against what truly sounds like a ridiculous example of local government overreach that truly was absurd, involving the regulation of how folks had to maintain their hedges on private property. But Mamet takes this aberration and inflates it to represent “all government”:

“It made no sense,” he said. “But this is how government works—all government. I saw there’s no difference between the hedge commission and the U.S. government. It’s all the same principle.”

No it’s not, actually. Local pols over-regulating something banal for whatever parochial reason is not, in fact, the same as, say providing for the common defense, guaranteeing basic human rights, or even regulating the monstrous health care industry. This is the kind of overgeneralization that Mamet seems to think is a unique sin of liberals.

Mamet focuses very much on what he sees as the ‘liberal herd,’ in which folks of one ideology react in tandem regardless of even their own best interests. Lefties like myself attribute this kind of behavior much more to the right, particular in regards to teabaggers or theocrats. But Mamet thinks that the right’s uninformed mob rage is less of a problem than, say, liberals’ nausea over the prospect of a Palin vice-presidency:

“So I was watching the [2008] debates. My liberal friends would spit at the mention of Sarah Palin’s name. Or they would literally mime the act of vomiting. We’re watching the debates and one of my friends pretends to vomit and says, ‘I have to leave the room.’ I thought, oh my god […] This is the reaction of the herd instinct. When a sheep discovers a wolf in the fold, it vomits to ward off the attacker. It’s a sign that their position in the herd is threatened.”

Mamet runs into the herd instinct every day.

“I’ve given galleys of The Secret Knowledge [his new book] to some friends. They say, ‘I’m scared to read it.’ I say, ‘Why should you be afraid to read something?’

“What are they afraid of? They’re afraid of losing their ability to stay in the herd. That’s what I found in myself. It can be wrenching when you start to think away from the herd.”

As one who wanders regularly from the herd, I agree, it can seem wrenching if one cares about what the rest of the herd thinks. But Ferguson does a service by putting a mirror up to Mamet’s complaint:

The conversion is complete: This is not a book by the same man who told Charlie Rose he didn’t want to impose his political views on anybody. At some moments—as when he blithely announces that the earth is cooling not warming, QED—you wonder whether maybe he isn’t in danger of exchanging one herd for another. He told me he doesn’t read political blogs or magazines. “I drive around and listen to the talk show guys,” he said. “Beck, Prager, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved.”

Yeah. You think global warming is a hoax and you listen to Glenn Beck and his raving ilk. Welcome to your new, angrier, dumber herd, David. Make sure you don’t get out of step. I hear this herd is particularly merciless to its own when they stray.

May 15, 2011

david mamet, politics, theatre, writing
Facing Irrelevance

How many readers does it take to make a blog worthwhile? What constitutes a sufficient number of pageviews for a given post? The most obvious answer is that there is no line of demarcation; the act of writing is an end in itself. If I were to have a meaningful conversation with a single person, or even just have something good and substantive to say to an audience of one, would that not be enough?

And yet when it comes to writing for the Internet, those numbers feel like they matter. Outside the context of the Web, it would be unlikely that anything I wrote, for any reason, would ever be read by more than a handful of people. Today, even my least-read postings still garner 20 to 30 views or so. I don’t know how many of those folks are actually reading the content, of course. But often, I have posts that take in 100 views or more. But that doesn’t feel like enough. (Once, I was fortunate enough to compose a piece for Examiner that won over 70,000 views. I’ve never come anywhere close to that since, either in raw numbers or even in the amount of zeroes.)

I think it’s because the standard in my mind is that of the well-known blogger, the Web-based influencer who is asked to join panels at conferences, who is cited by the likes of Andrew Sullivan or John Gruber, whose posts seem to matter to the wider Internet culture at least to some degree.

But I know this is not the usual way of things. Most blogs — as with he vast majority of all other online content — are read by staggeringly few souls. In which case, the notion that even a smattering of people would take the time to consider one’s writings should be humbling, should be sufficient for all but the most insatiable of egos.

Well, I have to do some careful reading of my own ego-meter. I am trying to find value primarily in the creation of the work. But its lack of larger relevance is proving to be something of a weight on my will to produce it. Looking back, I think I may have put too much energy, too much thought, into my online identity, on creating a brand that might one day grow into something that had resonance beyond immediate friends and the occasional passerby. Perhaps that energy would have been better spent on producing more meaningful — and better — material.

March 9, 2011

blogging, personal, writing