I am a bit irritated by the newly aggressive ad placement by WordPress.com. I have no control over that and would prefer no ads whatsoever, but WordPress charges for that. I will probably explore other hosting options if I do revive the site.

In the interim, I am more likely to share longer-form content on Google+. Go to my Google profile and put me in one of your circles for that stuff. You can also subscribe to my occasional public updates on Facebook, though I reserve friending for actual acquaintances.

Thanks for visiting.

@palafo: Is talking to people a waste of time? Sometimes it is, I guess. Twitter is a conversation. You get what you put into it. I don’t think talking to our readers is ever a waste of time.

That’s the short answer. Here’s the long one.

I view my Twitter account @palafo as part of my identity. It does not belong to The Times any more than my name does.

But The Times is part of my identity, too, because I am an editor here. For that reason, I behave on Twitter as I do in the newsroom or on a public panel. I try not to say anything on Twitter that I wouldn’t say in front of a live microphone with cameras rolling.

Background: I joined Twitter in 2007 when few people in the newsroom knew what Twitter was, and I didn’t hide my Times employment, but I didn’t advertise it at first, either. At the time, I was on the Metro desk, where I was editor of the City Room blog. We were always looking for ways to engage online with New Yorkers. The blog had an automated Twitter feed, but it had fewer followers than my account (still true, alas). It turns out that a personal touch on Twitter was more successful than spitting out headlines. So I identified myself on Twitter as the blog’s editor and started interacting with readers through it.

In my current job, editor for news presentation, I oversee copy editing and production for print and Web, and I continue to experiment with all the social media tools, including Twitter. I have a responsibility to understand the digital media innovations transforming journalism and the news business.

But I admit it: I love this stuff. I’ve been on the Internet since it was the Arpanet, when I was a teenager in the 1970s. Twitter reminds me of the computer bulletin boards, Usenet newsgroups and other online forums of the early days. The rest of the world has finally caught up.

Now, to your specific questions…

The Public Editor: What are the benefits to you of tweeting and what kind of content do you tweet?

I follow about 1,100 news organizations and blogs, competitors, Times colleagues and other journalists, people who follow the news closely, media critics, tech experts, some friends and acquaintances and anyone or anything anything else that catches my interest. I try to pare the list back from time to time. It was easier to follow when it was closer to 500. I also have a number of Twitter lists with even more accounts that I consult from time to time. I have a list that shows how Twitter looks to me.

These Twitter users “curate” the Web for me, which means they find, analyze and comment on useful links that interest me far more quickly than I could ever do for myself. If they link to something that grabs my attention, I will generally look at it or save it for later. I don’t read everything. I dip into Twitter when I have time. The analogy is a cocktail party. You can’t join every conversation, but you drift through the crowd and stop now and then. Important or significant news gets repeated, and it sometimes shows up in the trending topics.

Often I learn about news from Twitter. Your predecessor, Clark Hoyt, wrote about Twitter’s role in a big story in 2009 that was an aha moment for me and the newsroom, when a jetliner landed in the Hudson River.

But Twitter is more than a tip sheet or a place to find sources. It is important to remember the “social” part of social media.

Since the people on Twitter share so much useful information with me, I try to give back to them by interacting there. I don’t write about my lunch, or anything too personal. Mostly, I share links. The links are generally to news articles, blog posts, interesting uses of digital media, pictures, video, you name it. I follow our newsroom policies for personal Web writing, which permit journalism reflections, and lively commentary on one’s avocations like music and food, but forbid taking stands on divisive public issues.

I am not a Times spokesman or a marketer. I share a lot of our journalism on Twitter, because it is excellent. I don’t feel obligated to do so, and I don’t share everything. The article has to interest me personally as a reader and be something that I think my Twitter followers will like. People can tell when you are just randomly pumping your own stuff or your employer’s offerings. Luckily, Times journalism — I am biased about this — is almost always of a high caliber.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter is asynchronous, so I am followed by about 10 times more people than I follow back. Sometimes they want to talk to me. So I read all “mentions” directed at me on Twitter. People know I’m busy, so they don’t abuse the opportunity. I ignore anonymous gripes, but people who use their real identities are generally polite even if they are upset about something The Times has done. If someone like that has a question, a correction, or a criticism, or a technical problem, I try to answer it or find someone who can.

The Public Editor: Do readers benefit and, if so, how? Does The Times benefit and how?

As everybody knows, over the last several years Twitter and social media have grown at a great rate, and many news sites, including The Times, now receive a growing amount of traffic from referrals on Twitter and other social media sites. Having our journalists on Twitter also translates into credibility with readers who live their lives online. It shows we understand the digital world and how it works.

More important, The Times and its readers benefit from a newsroom that understands digital culture and is familiar with the conversations about the news on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, blogs and similar sites.

The news report and readers also benefit from the news-gathering power of tools like Twitter. Brian Stelter has used Twitter to develop ideas that have turned into articles. Rob Mackey of The Lede blog (@thelede) has shown how news events from earthquakes to political revolutions have played out on Twitter, YouTube and other social platforms.

In general, sites like Twitter have accelerated news competition. Not all of the effects of high-speed social media have been positive. Rumors and bad information spread faster — but they are also debunked faster. The pressure to compete in real time, and the transparency and immediate feedback from readers can be nerve-racking and destabilizing. But competition is good for everyone. We are closer to our audience, and they are closer to us. That results in a better news report.

The Public Editor: Are there any costs to you, or the Times, of using Twitter as a tool? Surely, it takes time. Does that time subtract from the time available to do your job? Any other costs?

It doesn’t take away from the job. If anything, the job probably eats into many more hours of my personal time than it should. Or so my wife tells me.

Part of my job is to read The Times and its competitors, a task that could fill every hour of my day if I let it. Twitter is a useful tool for figuring out priorities for my attention. It doesn’t take that much time. At work, I use an iPhone app, and there’s always down time, walking down the hall, waiting for stragglers at a meeting, riding the elevator, while I’m grabbing a bite to eat. It only takes an extra second to save a link or share it. At home, I’ll look at Web sites and Twitter on my laptop, phone or iPad while I’m watching TV or listening to music, a podcast or an audiobook. I am busiest on Twitter at night and on weekends. The Web and Twitter have definitely cut into time I used to spend reading books.

Another cost is the occasional irritation of family and friends, although e-mail is a worse cause of inattention and wasted time. I’ve been trying harder lately to turn off devices and get off the grid away from work. It’s not easy. The people I know are like me: They talk about the news a lot, and they want to know the latest news, too.

###

Addendum: As I mentioned on Twitter, I might have chosen a different metaphor had I known the headline was going to be “A Cocktail Party With Readers.” The analogy is as old as Twitter, and useful for newbies, but it doesn’t capture everything:

[See also: Basic Twitter Tips for Journalists.]

The article is reprinted below, with permission (My favorite line: “Some people believe the Web or some future souped-up version of it will transform society. Others think the accent in ‘hypertext’ should be on ‘hype.’”) The series was later archived on the paper’s rudimentary Web site (logo at above left), a precursor to the now-thriving YDR.com. That site was pushed into the world a bit early, thanks to some bad weather.

Design of the York Digital Record had been proceeding with slow deliberation around the time the series was written. Then, on Jan. 9, 1996, a blizzard paralyzed the region, and The Daily Record couldn’t deliver papers (the state ordered all vehicles off the highways and local roads were impassable). I rushed the “York Digital Record” online with summaries of snow emergency information. A week later, the snow melted and ice blocked the Susquehanna River. which overflowed its banks. We posted flood updates online too. Traffic was in the high three figures, and we were pleased. We began publishing a daily headline and selected articles. I would update the site at midnight at the end of my shift as night city editor, after we put the print edition to bed.

The following year, in early 1997, The Times hired me as a print copy editor. I was disappointed that the Web operation was separate, in another building, with almost no regular contact with the newspaper staff. That has changed considerably, thank goodness.

In York, thanks to the march of progress and efforts of smarter people with design ability who came after me, YDR.com is a lot prettier and newsier. The hideous original (oh, those frames!) is partly preserved by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. If you click around in “Our Back Pages,” you can find reports on the 1996 blizzard and flood, articles about the local band Live and the archive of our explanatory series “Untangling the Web” from December 1995. Here’s part one, presented for your historical amusement.

What Is This Thing Called the Web?

Once on line, it’s easy for Internet travelers to enter this growing cyberspace neighborhood and find York County connections

By Patrick LaForge Daily Record staff

A year ago, most people unfamiliar with computers had never heard of the World Wide Web. Something to do with the Internet, whatever that is, right?

Now TV commercials sport Web addresses, and mainstream magazines review new sites. Students use the Web for homework, and job hunters scan ads on it. Politicians use it to campaign for president, and Congress spends hours debating whether it poses a threat to children.

Some people believe the Web or some future souped-up version of it will transform society. Others think the accent in “hypertext” should be on “hype.” Over the next several days, the Daily Record will offer a guide to this high-tech world, with a look at some places of special interest to York County.

Live connection

One Web site in particular has put York on computer screens around the world, with some help from the city’s chart-topping rock band.

Last year, Jimmy Lang noticed one of his favorite bands didn’t have a place on the Web where fans could go for information.

The 24-year-old network engineer for Cerfnet, a San Diego-based Internet provider, happened to have a friend who worked for Live’s booking agent.

He struck a deal with the boys from York — he would set up a Live site in return for free concert tickets. He and his girlfriend, Meg Jahnke, a 24-year-old Cerfnet network specialist, set it up in their spare time. More than a year later, Lang has been to 19 Live shows across the country, and the band’s site (http://live.cerf.net) has taken off in popularity.

The site features interviews, lyrics, photographs, sound and video samples, tour dates and more. Band members even answer fan questions through an e-mail newsletter, Straight Out of York.

“A lot of fans do not get a chance to go to shows or go backstage or talk to them directly,” Lang said. This gives them a chance to do that. “People who don’t know the band can go to the site and get a sound sample.”

The growth of the Live site has paralleled the growth on the Web. In October 1994, when the page went up, 904 people visited it. At the peak of the 1995 Live tour a year later, Lang said, as many as 10,000 people were hitting the page each month.

Read the FAQ

Like many Web sites, the Live page has a file called a FAQ that contains answers to “frequently asked questions” about the band.

The Web itself has many FAQs and guides that offer more details once you’re on line. One of the best is a student guide kept at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business Administration. Some basic information from that and similar documents follows.

The Web is part of a network of computer networks called the Internet that links 20 million to 39 million computer users in 50 countries.

People use the Internet to send and receive electronic mail, chat or post messages to each other, access archives and transfer software and other files. Most people access the Internet through local or national services, called providers. Most services range from $10 to $20 per month.

In mid-1989, CERN, a European particle-physics laboratory, started the World Wide Web to transfer multimedia information text, graphics, sound and primitive video to the international research community.

Average computer owners didn’t start getting on the Web until commercial software for using it became widely available during the past two years.

The Web consists of computers called servers that store documents called pages. At a site, the “home page” is the first document you see. It connects you to other pages.

Storing information are more than 135,000 servers operated by universities, research centers, major corporations, individuals and kitchen-table businesses.

Each server has a specific Internet address. Users navigate the Web with software called browsers, chief among them Netscape and Mosaic. The programs use a computer’s modem to connect with the Internet through a telephone line.

Surf and crawl

In a world where many people still can’t program a VCR, the Web still isn’t a user-friendly paradise. You need to know the basics: How to set up a modem, how to operate basic computer software like Windows or the MacIntosh desktop, and how to work a mouse.

Once you are on line, navigation is pretty simple. You can bring files to your screen in two ways:

–By typing the Universal Resource Locator. Every Web page has a unique URL that starts with the letters “http://” that’s short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Browsers can also view documents that do not use hypertext.

–By clicking with the computer mouse on a link in a Web page that points to the address of another document.

–Web pages are written in Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, which allows text to appear in various colors and sizes. The language can also be used to embed graphics or sound and video files in the page.

The browser also stores the links you’ve hit, leaving a trail of electronic bread crumbs that you can follow back and forth from each page you visit (It’s common for users to find themselves flying off on tangents from link to link.)

Wait a minute, or two

Even with a powerful computer, a fast modem, up-to-date software and a first-rate Internet provider, connections to other servers and pages can be slow, especially if they have a lot of pictures and graphics.

Lang, the designer of the Live site, said the biggest problem is that some providers simply do not have enough telephone lines for the amount of information going back and forth. This capacity is called “bandwidth.”

“If you’re a user on one of these providers, you’ll notice a lot of sluggishness. Things are slow, they don’t work,” Lang said. “That’s because they’re selling four or five on-ramps a week, and it’s only a 10-lane freeway. You’re just going to have a big parking lot, really. You have to stay ahead of the people who are coming on line.”

Adam Viener, a partner in Cyberia Communications Inc., a York County provider of direct Internet access, agreed that’s part of the problem.

“We’re adding about five lines a month to keep up with it,” he said.

Viener said things could speed up quite a bit next year when GTE begins offering Integrated Services Digital Network lines. For now, York County lags behind other parts of the country.

Better hardware and a good Internet connection can only do so much, though. Often the problem is with the site a user is trying to reach, he said.

The server at the other end may be down for maintenance, which could leave you waiting for an answer, or it might have inadequate lines or hardware.

Home pages — particularly those put up by hobbyists — suffer from programming problems or go off line without warning. And sometimes a site’s popularity spells its doom: Servers have been known to shut down pages that get too much traffic and interfere with other operations.

Viener predicted these problems would be solved as the Web matures. The sites that are going to be successful are the ones that run properly and quickly, he said.

[Copyright 1995 by The York Daily Record. Used with permission.]

Jane is promoting her second chapbook, “Half-Life,” from Big Table Publishing. It is drawn on experiences with cancer in her family (her mother died in November 2009 and her sister in July 2010, while many of these poems were being written and revised). (I wrote last year about Jane’s first chapbook, “After Voices,” now in its second printing, about growing up with a deaf father.)

About the other writers: Lisa Marie Basile has published a chapbook, “White Spiders,” and her full-length poetry collection, “A Decent Voodoo,” will come out in 2012. (She’s on Twitter.) Britt Gambino’s work has appeared in anderbo.com and DecomP. Jim Meirose is the author of “Crossing the Trestle,” a new collection of fiction from Burning River.

All will read from their work from 7 to 9 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 11, at a free event at Sparks Art Center, 161 West 22nd St., in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan (just off Seventh Avenue, handy to No. 1 train). The art space is under the green awning in a building shared with a tile shop (the former Sparks Cafe).

Books will be available for purchase, and a quick reception with the authors will follow the readings. You can also order copies of Jane’s book here.

While I prepare myself for the inevitable post-purchase depression and “why can’t I do that, Mr. Jobs” revelations, here are some unboxing pictures and a video from my Posterous page.

At some point I’ll list the pros and cons. But I’m done with the posting and tweeting today. I doubt there’s much new that I could say about it.

Technology isn’t my beat, so I’ll leave the iPad news and reviews to my colleagues at Bits. (Here’s an earlier post about how I made the purchase decision.)

For me, the iPad is first and foremost a book and media reader. My Kindle died a while back. I expect to make heavy use of not only the native iBooks reader but the Kindle for iPad reader [iTunes download], and a variety of customized apps from newspapers, magazines and comic companies, including this new app from The New York Times [free iTunes download].

I also expect this device to be good for casual gaming and for watching movies and TV, as well as casual Web surfing. It doesn’t seem like a work device to me. It’s more of a toy.

And if you wonder why I need a book reader, just look at this picture below. I have six more like that in our tiny Manhattan apartment. I do not want to be a latter-day Collyer brother.

Blah, blah, blah. Nobody knows the future, so such pronouncements are justifiably viewed as so much hype.

I’m not a tech or media critic, though I work for a newspaper (and yes, full disclosure, that paper does seem to have a working relationship with the iPad developers, but I had no role in that or the news coverage of the tablet).

I’m approaching this as a gadget lover and a reader. And to this consumer, the iPad vs. Kindle question is the most important one. To my surprise, I find myself leaning toward the cheapest, $499 iPad without 3G or a lot of storage.

Back in August, my Amazon Kindle’s e-ink display melted down. A tragedy.

I had some frustrations with the Kindle. The hardware of the first model in particular always felt a little cheap and poorly designed. I was constantly turning pages by mistake.

While e-ink did seem to reduce eyestrain, I went through a series of booklights that didn’t quite fit the device and had to be positioned just-so to avoid creating glare on the screen.

I actually found the backlit Kindle app on the iPhone to be easier for reading in bed and on planes.

The Kindle did a poor job rendering newspapers and magazines. The user interface was awkward, requiring you to page through endless menus. The device didn’t have enough storage. And the crippled experimental browser was so bad that some users are apparently willing to pay Amazon for blog posts. And I actually paid Amazon for the privilege to email PDFs to myself.

But I forgave all that. I loved my Kindle. Its always-on, free Internet connection made downloading free first chapters and shopping for books anywhere a dream. The eBook prices (and first chapter previews) were easy on my wallet. The selection was Amazonian. I no longer had to lug around so many heavy books on vacation trips. So I really missed it when it died. And I lusted for the Kindle 2 and the Kindle DX. The Nook and Sony Reader didn’t measure up. But I held off, because everyone suspected the Apple tablet was coming soon.

Now that I’ve seen the iPad, I think it’s my Kindle replacement. I’ll have to hold one and read on it to be sure.

Do I need another way to watch movies and video? Not really, but it’s cool the iPad does that. Do I need another way to get my email or surf the Web? Not really, but any device that can’t do those things easily loses points. Do I need another way to write or do other computer work on the run? Not necessarily, but it’s great that the iPad has some solutions for that. Do I need another music player? Not one this big. Do I need another mobile GPS device? Again, not one this big. Do I need another way to display digital photos? (Well, actually, that is kind of cool).

But as a book reader, it seems like a winner. This may not be the greatest news for Apple’s bottom line or its dreams of a media revolution.

Consider the iPad’s reading features: The ability to turn pages via touchscreen. Books with color charts and photography. Books with video embedded. Everything in Amazon’s proprietary format via the Kindle app. Everything else that comes in the (relatively open) ePub format, including many Google Books and everything else available on the Stanza reader. (The Kindle limits you to the Amazon library.)

With customized apps, the iPad will render magazines, newspapers and other print items far better than anything out there, including standard Web browsers on computers.

And yes, that will allow some content providers to charge for the enhanced reading experience. That won’t “save” journalism or book publishing. Journalism doesn’t really need saving, but devices like this will be another force working to transform how it is distributed and financially supported. That will be good news for bloggers and small news shops looking for income, not just the big corporate media.

Sure, the Kindle hardware and software will catch up — but it’s still wedded to the proprietary Amazon format. Sure, there will other devices, running Google Chrome or Android, netbook-type devices from the Windows world, and proprietary gadgets from some content providers (which will probably fail). All that competition will be good for consumers and content providers everywhere.

But one other thing tips the balance toward the iPad for me that might not apply to everyone: I am among the minority that live in a Mac world, and there’s a justifiable expectation that the iPad will work seamlessly within that world, from iPhone apps to the iTunes store. I’m not an unreasoning fanboy. If the iPad turns out to be as buggy as my Apple TV, or too locked down (what, no Flash?), I’ll be annoyed.

Much of the commentary has focused on whether the iPad will replace the laptop or even the desktop computer. It might, for people who don’t really need computers for their jobs, who are more consumers of content than creators. It might appeal to casual touch-gamers, but not hard-core PC gamers.

I don’t think an iPad would completely replace my MacBook Air (which I got after flirting with a cheaper, smaller Acer Windows netbook; too awkward to use routinely, and I remembered why I hated Windows).

For work, I need to use Microsoft Word, and I need to run the newsroom’s publishing software, which is a bit of a system hog. I want to be able to run the Firefox browser, with some special plugins for work, and I bet the iPad will be a Safari world. I rely heavily on Bento 3, and the iPhone version of that program is pretty much useful only as a read-only app for me. I need to be able to view my paper’s video players and other Flash content, which the iPad doesn’t do (although it appears that the customized Times app for the iPad does play video, based on the keynote demo). And with a keyboard stand, the iPad looks a bit awkward for day to day office or home use on a lap. I don’t enjoy writing anything longer than a Tweet with a touchscreen keyboard. And the iPad’s maximum 64 gigabytes of storage is not enough.

This would be a third device after the laptop and the iPhone, and I probably wouldn’t carry it every day. I imagine it would mostly be for home use, or trips. It’s for pleasure, a toy, not a necessity.

So that leaves the cost question. The gadget freak in me lusts for the high-end $829 iPad with 64 gigabytes and 3G connectivity. That’s an awful lot for an e-book reader, and might not pass the spouse’s-raised-eyebrow test. At that price, I might not feel comfortable flashing it around on the New York subway, either.

But do I really need 3G and an always-on connection? Looking back on my Kindle usage, I mainly downloaded things at home or the airport, both places where WiFi is not a problem. More and more free WiFi hot spots are popping up, and more friends have wireless in their apartments. It’s becoming customary to give your WiFi password (if you lock it down) to friends and other guests. No device can give me Internet in most of the subway. And with AT&T’s network still overloaded in Manhattan, browsing the Internet via 3G is not all that fun, though it’s great to have a 3G phone in an emergency.

Those factors make the non-3G $499 to $699 models more attractive than the tech pundits realize, as I posted to Twitter earlier this week. Many hard-core geeks can’t imagine not having maximum connectivity everywhere, whereas I can’t imagine paying another $30 to AT&T for yet more slow Internet. I’d rather spend the money on books and other content. So the main trade-off when it comes to cost will be the gigs of storage versus price. I already spend a lot of time managing audio and video files on my maxed-out 32G iPhone. When I travel, I keep extra content on an old 60G video iPod. Books don’t take up much space, but a few movies and TV series will fill this up quickly.

There’s another factor, too — the life of the device. Early adopters might be salivating to have the first generation, but we know that the next one in a year or two will probably be better. It might have a camera, more storage, software improvements, subsidized deals with content providers, and so on. An early adopter with a smaller budget is probably better off with the cheapest model this time around.

That’s where I’m heading. What am I missing?

(One more thing: If this device melts down, Pee Wee Herman points out it could have other uses. Also, it turns out the iPad is better than this primitive tool.)

March 2010 Update: Yes, I did order the non-3G iPad today, but I opted for the one with the biggest storage, 64G at $699. I figure I’ll load it up with media, so I wanted the extra capacity, but I still don’t see a need for 3G. I’ve never needed it for my laptop.

April 2010 Update: I wrote about my experience with the Apple iPad here.)

Also, Jane’s “After Voices” poetry chapbook — published last month by Burning River of Cleveland — is now available at the McNally Jackson Book Store in SoHo, one of the few remaining interesting indie bookstores left in Manhattan.

Jane plans to read some of the poems at a New York University faculty-student reading in the East Village in December.

A hard copy of the chapbook can be ordered online for $6 a copy from Burning River. A PDF version can be downloaded for free (it includes a bonus poem not in the print edition). It will eventually be available as a digital book in epub format from Project Gutenberg. You can also buy a copy at Visible Voice Books in Cleveland, Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in SoHo, and the McNally-Jackson Bookstore, also in SoHo.

I’ll update this post if it becomes available anywhere else. Jane’s working on that. Poets have to be their own distributors sometimes. It’s a tough field, without a sustainable business model.

On the weekend of Oct. 17, the chapbook was released in conjunction with readings at the Morgan Conservatory of Papermaking and Visible Voice. Jane read several of the poems, including my favorites, “Lemons” and “Highway 5 Stockyard,” as well as some of her unpublished poetry.

Some poems in the chapbook were previously published in some form or another in La Petite Zine, Burnside Review, Bateau, Makeout Creek, Ottawa Arts Review and Noun Versus Verb. She has also had work published by the Tipton Poetry Journal and Adirondack Review.

Recently, I noticed a sort of smudge developing in the upper left corner of the screen, even when the machine was turned off. There were also slight streaks of white lines going vertically down the screen, with a washed-out appearance at the top. I could still read books, but it was sort of annoying. I decided to see if Amazon tech support could offer any advice.

I wasn’t looking for a replacement, although I wouldn’t have minded a sort of cash-for-clunkers trade-in discount on a Kindle 2 or a DX. Mainly I was hoping this was an easy problem that they had learned how to fix. If they couldn’t, I would live with it.

So, first I sent Amazon Kindle support a note explaining the problem, and got this reply from Bobby Chowdary:

I truly understand your concern in this regard. Please check to make sure your battery is fully charged or that your Kindle is plugged in using the power adapter. If your Kindle’s low on power, the screen may not refresh properly.

You can also clear the screen by restarting your Kindle. Visit Kindle’s Settings screen by selecting that option from the Home screen menu. When you’re on the Settings screen, select Menu again. You’ll then see a “Restart” option you can select to reboot your Kindle.

If restarting Kindle doesn’t help, please give us a call so we can try some real-time troubleshooting.

As I had mentioned in my email, the Kindle’s memory was full, so I deleted a bunch of old NYT Kindle editions, some books I had read and private documents I no longer needed. Then I charged it overnight and used the reset option on the screen menu. The smudge was still there the next day.

This time I called Amazon, or, rather, put my cell number on the Kindle support site, causing them to call me back in a matter of minutes. The support person on the phone walked me through a reset procedure that involved putting a paperclip into a small hole in the back of the device.

When the device reset, it was as if the e-ink had exploded. “Amazon Kindle” was now visible behind the text, and dark and white streaks were much worse (see picture). The text was basically illegible.

The Amazon helper explained that my device was out of warranty (it had been covered until June) but that I had two options: I could buy a Kindle 2 at full price, $299, or they could ship me a discounted original Kindle for $180. I said I was a bit reluctant to shell out money for a device that might not last another two years, especially with so many other competing toys being rumored. And I certainly wasn’t going to pay $180 for a beta device that “had a lot of problems” that had been solved for the Kindle 2. We went around a bit, and I could hear her whispering to a supervisor.

When we ended the conversation, I told her I wanted to be marked down as dissatisfied.

I then posted what happened on Twitter, in between denial-of-service attacks from Russia. I also used my iPhone to post a picture on my Posterous page.

By going public, I am tying my hands, ethically. Even if Amazon changed its mind, I couldn’t accept a replacement unit or even a discount at this point, lest someone suggest I’m using my position as a journalist to get a better deal than anyone else. And that’s fine. I just want to warn others who might face the same problem.

Today, somebody named Irshad of Amazon wrote in response to my follow-up email:

I’m sorry for any trouble that has been caused with regards to the Kindle device. I have reviewed your order, as well as the notes regarding your phone call to our Customer Service department on August 08, 2009. I know this may be frustrating; however, please understand that the One-Year Limited Warranty for your Kindle expired in June of 2009. We can’t offer warranty support or repair services for this Kindle. However, as one of my colleagues mentioned, we can send you a refurbished kindle with charges. If you’re interested in receiving a refurbished Kindle, please write back to us and let us know.

No, thanks. Kindle 1 prices on eBay range from $100 to $227, so I could probably get a better deal if I wanted another one of these.

I wrote yet another message to Amazon urging them to add some notes to their tech support guide on this problem. Customers should be warned that resetting an original Kindle with these symptoms might end up turning it into a useless brick. The customer might want to choose discretion and see if the device can be nursed through a few more months. (I am not the only one who has encountered this problem.)

(The following day, I tried resetting the Kindle again, with no effect. The e-ink problems persist on the screen even after the thing is fully powered down. I am tempted to disconnect the hard-wired battery, just for curiosity’s sake.)

As tempting as the new Kindles (the 2 and the DX) look, the rumors of an Apple tablet-sized iPhone-type device have kept me from taking the plunge. A full-color computing device with an e-book reader and continuous Kindle-like wireless would be a category-killer. [Update: See this.]

For now, I’ll live with the Kindle iPhone app. This morning, I canceled my NYT Kindle subscription, since that doesn’t work on the iPhone. That and reading my wife’s manuscripts was the main use I had for the Amazon device, though I am in the middle of a few books.

Oh, well. No doubt I would have moved on to some new device in the next six to nine months.

The fatal plane-helicopter crash over the Hudson on the same day put it all in perspective, too — there are worse things than a broken e-book reader.

I thought the @replies from my followers on Twitter were interesting (a selection):

(Sept. 21 update: To my surprise, I find myself returning to print books, reading them faster and appreciating the superior interface. And several readers have recommended the observations on Kindles vs. books in this excellent New Yorker piece by Nicholson Baker.)

April 2010 Update: I bought an Applie iPad and wrote about my experience with it.)

His thesis is that we humans don’t have much choice in our international politics, that we are guided by geopolitical considerations, and that armed conflict is inevitable. The book is an odd mix of plausible scenarios and wacky Star Wars fantasies.

Perhaps that is not surprising, coming from a fellow who is the chief intelligence officer and founder of Strategic Forecasting Inc. (Stratfor), a private intelligence agency whose clients include foreign government agencies and Fortune 500 companies (and plain old citizens willing to pay $199 a year for newsletters).

There is a some fresh thinking in the book, but ultimately it suffers from a failure of imagination.

First, the big stuff from Friedman that might seem counter-intuitive: The United States is not in decline, he says; in fact, it has only begun to flex its muscle as the dominant power on the globe, a position it will hold for the rest of the century. (That part sounds right, though it also flatters the potential customers for his intelligence newsletters.)

What about China? Pretty much written off as an insular and isolated giant, economically dependent on the U.S. as a buyer and a borrower.

Overpopulation? Not a problem. Nations will soon be underpopulated and fighting to lure immigrants.

Global warming and the energy crisis? Population decline and technological advances will solve both.

Forget al Qaeda and radical Islam, he says; they’re just passing problems, already moving off stage.

Is the current White House going to transform domestic policy? Writing before the outcome of the 2008 election, Friedman says no, that won’t happen for another 15 or 20 years, the end of a 50-year cycle that started with Reagan.

The shift in domestic policy will be caused by a financial crisis that will make our current situation look like a blip. Russia will briefly rise again, for a mini cold war, then collapse. Eastern Europe will grow in dominance over Western Europe. Our greatest adversaries will be Turkey and Japan, and, eventually, Mexico, as the southwestern United States becomes a borderland of people and state governments with dual loyalties. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict will never be resolved; it will just fester on for another 100 years.

Friedman concedes he could be wrong about many details. He treats his predictions as a parlor game, something his grandchildren will enjoy reading in the future.

He does make plausible cases for the events and predictions mentioned so far. He is on firm ground when explaining the hidden motivations for everything from our Middle East interventions to open trade with China. It is when Friedman ventures into the realm of science fiction and elaborate scenarios contingent on specific incidents that he starts to strain credulity.

He predicts that the United States will build giant “Battle Stars” in space, but that because of hubris these space stations will have one fatal flaw, that we will think of them as unbeatable, not noticing that a hardy band of rebels could launch a sneak attack… Yes, it does sound a lot like the original “Star Wars” Death Star, though Friedman gives no hint that he is familiar with the film (or “Battlestar Galactica”).

On the elaborate scenario goes. Japan knocks out our Battle Stars from its moon bases in a surprise attack (why didn’t future Americans just read Friedman’s book!?), then Japan teams up with Turkey to cripple our military. But the U.S. strikes back with super-secret high-tech weapons that run on unlimited electrical power harnessed from space.

One side effect of that unlimited solar power beamed from space: We’ll all have robot servants. (Well, actually, I’ll be dead by then, along with all the baby boomers, after spending my old age in the care of Mexican immigrants, who will be paid handsomely to run our medical care and service industries. He predicts the boomers will use political clout to approve one expensive government program after another well into their 80s).

Interestingly, Friedman does not predict that these robots will turn into a humanlike race of androids known as the Cylons, nor that we will invent time travel so that a brave man named John Connor can travel back to the 20th century, pursued by a lethal killing machine that never stops… I’m kidding him a little here, but Friedman was on firmer ground in the first part of the book. Science fiction writers thought out the ramifications of his technological predictions in far greater and better detail years ago.

“The Next 100 Years” is in some ways the flip side of another book I’ve been dipping into, “The Black Swan,” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is fascinated by huge, random, hard to predict events outside the normal realm of experience, which he calls Black Swans.

Friedman acknowledges that such unpredictable events happen all the time — for example, nobody could have predicted that the government’s Arpanet would lead to the Internet and then to an iPod that can hold thousands of songs in the palm of one’s hand. But he still views the world as one in which nation states will inevitably turn to armed conflict, and where domestic policies will be driven by social and economic pressures independent of political party and personality. In his world, it didn’t really matter who got elected president last fall. The country will head in the same direction, more or less, with just a few differences in details.

So what are the “Black Swans” that Friedman missed? That’s the hard part, of course. Taleb would say that Black Swans defy prediction. Jetliners slamming into skyscrapers on a sunny September day. A tsunami off the coast of Georgia. A deadly pandemic wiping out major population centers. A giant asteroid striking the earth. Nuclear accidents. The mistake is thinking that chance events are ruled by the Platonic rules of the gambling casinos, when they are a lot messier than that. He no doubt knows Friedman’s type. A quick excerpt from the second part of his book:

When I ask people to name three recently implemented technologies that most impact our world today, they usually propose the computer, the Internet and the laser. All three were unplanned, unpredicted, and unappreciated upon their discovery, and remained unappreciated well after their initial use. They were consequential. They were Black Swans. Of course we have this retrospective illusion of their partaking in some master plan. You can create your own lists with similar results, whether you use political events, wars, or intellectual epidemics.

You would expect our record of prediction to be horrible: the world is far, far more complicated than we think, which is not a problem, except when most of us don’t know it. We tend to “tunnel” while looking into the future, making it business as usual, Black Swan-free, when in fact there is nothing usual about the future. It is not a Platonic category!

We have seen how good we are at narrating backward, at inventing stories that convince us that we understand the past. For many people, knowledge has the remarkable power of producing conficdence instead of measurable aptitude. Another problem: the focus on the (inconsequential) regular, the Platonification that makes the forecasting “inside the box.”

I find it scandalous that in spite of the empirical record we continue to project into the future as if we were good at it, using tools and methods that exclude rare events. Prediction is firmly institutionalized in our world. We are suckers for those who help us navigate uncertainty, whether the fortune-teller or the “well published’ (dull) academics or civil servants using phony mathematics.

Friedman makes only passing mention of the Web, and he was writing before its latest social media iterations. He does not seem to recognize how it is already knitting our world together, how it empowers ordinary citizens, destabilizes traditional sources of authority, spreads knowledge and liberation, and generally acts as an agent of change. Imagine how another 50 or 60 years of technological change in computing alone might transform our societies. Imagine an unforeseen invention or breakthrough.

I read both of these as e-books on my Kindle and on my iPhone, devices that might seem amazing now but will surely seem primitive in a short time. Friedman writes of robots, but other thinkers have already predicted that we will be the robots, cyborgs with lifespans far beyond what is known now, in a world of artificial intelligence advances we can only barely imagine. (Ray Kurzweil’s singularity might sound as kooky as Friedman’s space battles in all its details, but some shadow of it could be on the horizon in 50 years.)

Friedman clearly knows he is playing with fire, that he could be very wrong. And how could he foresee the unforeseeable, the unknown unknowns? So his future still sounds “inside the box,” much like the 20th century, only with cooler weapons. I’d like to hope for a great leap in computing and technology that will make us more connected across the globe, in a networked economy where war is no longer considered good for business (or for empires like our own). Imagine a mixed and transparent society that transcends borders, perhaps. And for something else… something interesting and unforeseen.

I think Neal Stephenson did a better job imagining the implications of new science and technology in his novel “Anathem”. His world is no utopia, but I’d rather live in it than in the one Friedman sees, a world where we keep making the same dumb mistakes over and over, fighting over the same turf.

I’d say I’m hoping for some Black Swans, but you have to be careful what you wish for, and besides — they’ll happen anyway.

Revised 4/12/09

I previously posted about the difficult, otherworldly vocabulary that Stephenson made up for this book. (For example, the “Reticulum” is similar to what we call the Web or the Internet, though you have to figure that out based on the description of a narrator who is basically a cloistered monk who never uses technology. “Jeejahs” are smart phones or mobile devices of some sort. Videos are “speelies” recorded with “speelycaptors.” Those are some of the neologisms that feel apt. Not all of them do.)

Others have weighed in about the lexicon, and the book’s need for editing, especially in the early chapters (here’s an example from Slashdot, the bulletin board for geeks). And there’s the question of the title, which looks like a typo and calls to mind Ayn Rand’s completely unrelated polemical novel “Anthem,” which Stephenson says he has never read (see video below).

As Dave Itzkoff observed in The Times, “Anathem” is a thought experiment. It also benefits from a leisurely read. In the end, I found it to be a more satisfying novel than some of Stephenson’s other enjoyable fictions. For example, his novel “Cryptonomicon,” about the early roots of information technology and code-breaking during World War II, simply fell apart at the end (as Stephenson seems to acknowledge in the video below). I was dreading something similar would happen in this one.

The ending of this one is a bit confusing, for sure, what with contradictory action in the parallel worlds and the need to have a bit of a grasp of uncertainty and quantum physics and string theory, but it does hang together. Stephenson takes some of these modern physics theories to their logical limits and suggests that our conscious brains are time machines that are also able to span multiple “world tracks.” He is completely serious about all of this, as you find if you consult the acknowledgments on his Web site. It would be interesting to hear him in conversation with somebody like Bob Thurman, the Columbia professor of Buddhism, who has described Bodhisattvas in precisely those terms.

The main world in the book, Arbre, seems like a nerd planet at first. The sorts of people who get caught up in very literal and geeky discussions of ideas, engineering and philosophy have been herded up and segregated in monastery-like mixed-sex “concents” — concentration camps, essentially, surrounded by concentric walls that open only periodically.

Isolated from the ebb and flow of society outside, and barred from using its technology, they get by on pure theoretical thought, from generation to generation, for thousands of years. These communities are not religious; they dispensed with that long, long, ago. The length of time is important, because Stephenson has an obsession with long periods of time, which was part of the inspiration for this book. And it takes a long time — at least 300 pages — for Stephenson to build a word picture of this life, step by step. There’s way too much about the forms of songs and chanting, rituals of punishment, and the social organization. Here is where he could have used better editing.

Things pick up once the narrator, Erasmus, finds himself outside in a modern world similar to our own, on a mission to help the “saecular government” (which is, actually, controlled by religious “deolators” — believers), which is confronted with the arrival of a spaceship full of aliens. The aliens actually turn out to be from our own Earth and other parallel worlds. They are searching for a more ideal version of their own reality — a better earth. They have a form of government remarkably similar to that aboard the Battlestar Galactica. Yes, there’s an admiral.

The way the monastic thinkers come together on the outside to solve the thought experiment of alien contact is quite entertaining, as are Erasmus’s adventures in a world of stupidity and conflict that is far more familiar to us than it is to his character. It is a place with all the modern ills, where illiterate people work dead-end jobs and occupy themselves staring at speelies and jeejahs all day, amid a cycle of booms, busts, wars and environmental calamities, where the Reticulum is both a tool of surveillance and revelation, enslavement and freedom. The online network is used to both rewrite history and to reveal it live everywhere in ways that the powers in control of the society cannot deny, as when Erasmus and his friends make a video of an alien crash landing as the military rushes to cover it up. The saecular power uses the Reticulum to rewrite the past. The aliens use it to learn how to conquer and infiltrate Arbre.

The obsessive and somewhat socially dysfunctional thought processes of the monastic nerds and geeks are described at length and will be familiar to anyone who has spend a lot of time among engineers, software developers, comic book collectors and the like.

In that respect, Stephenson has used fiction to write a far better nerd book than the nonfiction book “American Nerd” (which I read on a break from this one). You suspect that Stephenson might enjoy living in a concent, especially when you watch the video below. But he does reject the stifling rules that came along with herding all the nerds and geeks into one place, and Arbre ends up a freer place for them.

Most likely, if you have read this far, you would be a candidate to live there too, especially if you actually go going to his Web site to read explanations like this, and enjoy them:

The work is relevant to Roger Penrose, and has influenced, Anathem in at least five ways: Penrose posits, in The Emperor’s New Mind (ISBN 978-0192861986) and Shadows of the Mind (ISBN 978-0195106466), that the human brain takes advantage of quantum effects to do what it does. This has been so controversial that I have found it impossible to have a dispassionate conversation about it with any learned person. The dispute can be broken apart into a number of different sub-controversies, some of which are more interesting than others. The science-fictional premise of Anathem is based on the relatively weak and modest assumption that natural selection has found some way to construct brains that, despite being warm and wet, are capable of exploiting the benefits of quantum computation. Readers who are uncomfortable with the specific mechanism posited by Penrose…

In this world and on Arbre, there are two kinds of people: The kind who roll their eyes at that passage (“in at least five ways”), and the kind who have already clicked away from this blog to read the other four.

Stephenson also mentions Edmund Husserl, the founder of the Buddhist-like western philosophy of phenomenology, whose works briefly blew my mind in college, and the mathematician Kurt Gödel, somebody I hadn’t really thought about since reading “Gödel, Escher, Bach” with my fellow geeks in the dorm back in 1981. I still have my dog-eared copy around here somewhere, and remember some interesting things about recursion and record players. That and the feeling that my head might explode. After reading “Anathem,” your head might feel that way. And if you enjoy that, go read Stephenson’s account of Gödel’s work on time travel, which explains the theory behind novel’s alien rocket ship and the hidden knowledge of consciousness developed over centuries by a group of monastics in the book called the lineage.

But, while Stephenson does a great job making these ideas accessible and understandable to a liberal arts brain, I think some reviewers have sold it short as a novel. There is suspense. There is politics. There is conflict. There is a satisfying resolution.

Last fall, Stephenson gave a lecture at Google, which is not only a company but a concent of sorts, with a staff of highly credentialed intellectuals who spend much of their time thinking and living within the same walls. There’s an important difference: They are allowed to use our versions of speelycaptors, jeeejahs and the Reticulum. Indeed, it’s their way of life.

Because I am fascinated by geek and nerd culture, I was struck by a few quotes from the video (you can watch the whole thing below):

I’m interested in the geekification of knowledge… Fifty years ago the repositories of knowledge were paper books and the brains of people who were basically paid to be university professors and researchers, and that was where you would go to get stuff you needed to know. And all of that is still there, but there’s kind of this new phenomenon of networks of geeks on the Internet who are geeks of a particular topic that they are interested in. Sometimes it can be very academic sorts of topics. But it can also be blue-collar stuff. I saw some instructions lately on how to make your own springs. You have to temper the steel in a particular way….

I swing back and forth between being depressed about the way that traditional knowledge-carrying institutions are kind of falling apart and not doing their job right and being fascinated about how their work is being taken over by these networks of geeks. And i think within those networks of geeks that quality of the knowledge that they’re exchanging is probably higher, because the Wikipedia page is a static thing and unless you’re deliberately watching that page it can be changed without your knowing, whereas if it’s an active conversation and it’s live and you say something and it’s wrong, people are going to jump down your throat and start writing you emails in all capital letters telling you how wrong you are…

That’s all true. Here’s the speely.

I ordered the book after listening to Nugent give an interview on The Sound of Young America podcast about what he called his childhood experiences as a self-loathing nerd. It was poignant (and familiar) to hear him describe dumping his nerdy Dungeons & Dragons friends in high school so he could pass for normal. Unfortunately, the book did not quite live up to that interview, either intellectually or emotionally. (But it was a pleasant diversion from reading more of “Anathem,” the giant Neal Stephenson SF novel on my to-do list.)

Let’s start with the definition of a nerd.

Nugent rejects a Wikipedia definition that focused on social awkwardness. Instead, he describes nerds as “intellectual in ways that strike people as machine-like and socially awkward in ways that strike people as machine-like… people who remind others, sometimes unpleasantly, of machines.”

He says they tend to be passionate about technically sophisticated activities and enjoy playing with machines, speak in a language that hews close to standard written English, seek to avoid physical and emotional confrontation, favor logical and rational communication over other types. He also contends there is a second type of nerd, who does not necessarily fit these characteristics but who gets the label out of extreme social exclusion.

There is also a racial component, with nerds exhibiting what might be described as “hyperwhite” behavior. Nerds don’t dance. Except when they do.

The Wikipedia definition has been revised since Nugent’s book came out. (Unlike this reviewer, I consider Wikipedia to be authoritative on this topic, since it is written by nerds and geeks for nerds and geeks, hence its impeccable accuracy on topics like comics and computers and other obsessions).

At the moment, Wikipedia says:

Nerd is a term often bearing a derogatory connotation or stereotype, that refers to a person who passionately pursues intellectual activities, esoteric knowledge, or other obscure interests that are age inappropriate rather than engaging in more social or popular activities. Therefore, a nerd is often excluded from physical activity and considered a loner by peers, or will tend to associate with like-minded people.

(Wikipedia goes with Webster on geek: “a peculiar or otherwise odd person, especially one who is perceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things including those of intellectuality, electronics, gaming, etc”.)

The best parts of Nugent’s book are the historical-sociological sections. He has some fun with nerd-precursors like a character from “Pride and Prejudice.” Victor Frankenstein, and poor Hugo Gernsback, who was born at least a century too early.

Nugent traces the modern nerd archetype from its early origins — a silly creature in a 1950 Dr. Seuss book, Jerry Lewis’s characters, mid-1960s issues of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s student humor magazine, as an epithet for squares on “Happy Days,” up to the famous “Saturday Night Live” skits written by Rosie Shuster and Anne Beatts for Gilda Radner and Bill Murray. This was an era before widespread use of personal computers, before the Internet, before fake nerd chic, which Nugent rightly mocks, although he is himself open to the charge that he is not an authentic nerd.

He notes that the original awkward archetype bore some resemblance to stereotypes about Jews and Asians and and was also reminiscent of Asperger’s syndrome (then unknown). But he barely touches on the homophobia that often made targets of nerds because they failed to conform to proper sex roles (whatever their actual orientation).

I was in high school when those SNL skits came out in the 1970s, and they had always struck me as a little cruel and off the mark. Words more likely to be in circulation in our part of the country for people like this were dweeb, spaz or dork. I was never cool in high school, but I did not think of myself as a nerd. I read a lot of books, used a lot of big words and spoke in standard English, had spent a lot of time in my early teens on D&D and board war games, was obsessed with Tolkien, dabbled in programming BASIC for the school’s PDP 11 mainframe, played on the chess team and had been called a wimp and worse because I refused to fight. I did for a brief period in junior high wear a pocket protector and a calculator on my belt.

Thankfully, the high school cliques of the late 70s were never as strict as they are in movies or TV skits. The more socially agile could slip among different social groups. There were smart jocks and popular nerds. The smart kids with unusual interests learned to hide them when they were hanging around in the field, parking lot or basement drinking beer with the others.

If you had asked, we would have said we were the smart people, surrounded by a lot of not-as-smart people in a brutish anti-intellectual culture ruled by fists, insults, good looks, and rigorous social ostracism. Thirty years of experience only confirm that assessment.

From what I gather, Nugent is younger than I am, so perhaps he had the benefit of living through the revenge-of-the-nerds era of the 1980s and 1990s. Much later, the show “Freaks and Geeks” came along to retroactively soften the adolescent pain with a fresh coat of nostalgia. The Web and computers and other gadgets have also turned the social pecking order upside down, rewarding mental labor in ways that 70s nerds could only dream about. As this story line goes, for the nerds it’s a happy ending after all. Aren’t we all nerds now? Even the jocks! Is there anything nerdier than fantasy football?

But even if we can all joke about “being a little nerdy” or celebrate a geek love for some oddball topic, there’s something a little too precious about nerd pride, even now. As much as I admire the desire to take back the label, maybe this blogger is right: “If being called a nerd doesn’t hurt your feelings, then you aren’t one… If you think you are a nerd, then you aren’t one.”

And concepts like “nerdcore” feel like marketing, the kind of inauthentic pablum that nerds used to deplore.

I enjoyed Nugent’s book but wished there had been a more in-depth discussion of the social trends at work, a closer look at the differences between nerd and geek, cool and square. The trouble is, there’s no real agreement on what these terms really mean, and the meanings shift with each graduating class. It’s youth slang, intended to create out-groups and confuse adults. And so the nerd, dork, square and melvin of past generations give way to today’s “herb” (defined as “an individual easy to disrespect, take advantage of, and/or violate, usually due to cowardice or the desire to avoid conflict.” Sound familiar?)

The second half of Nugent’s book turns to personal memoir. As Nugent admitted in that podcast interview, his adolescent crime was to abandon his junior-high D&D friends so he could fit in. It’s a common if shallow story. He had lost all touch with the friends he labels nerds and had to find them again to write this book. I wanted to hear more of their voices here, more about their lives now, and what they thought of Nugent turning up to enshrine their nerd histories on ink and paper.

The book has its appeal. Some will carry it around proudly, while others will sneak it home to read in private. “Yeah, I’m kind of nerdy, in the cool way that people admire,” some of them might think. “But I’m not one of those big honking pathetic nerds nobody can stand to be around, right? Right?”

If you have to ask…

Notice that I don’t say “old media,” because I happen to think that term is bull. Plenty of supposedly “old media” outlets have been on the Web since the earliest days and produce innovative multimedia content that is as good as or better than anything found elsewhere in the “new media.” But that doesn’t make for a good story. (Yes, plenty of old media practitioners still have their heads in the sand. And I don’t claim to have figured it all out — my point is, nobody has figured it out. The Web is 20 minutes old. Nobody knows anything.)

Anyway, the first thing I re-learned was how hard it is to have an extended discussion on Twitter. My Tweets are in one place, under my updates. The other person’s replies are somewhere else, and I can’t even link to them easily on Twitter. I have to use this search tool. Messages are limited to 140 characters. We’re surrounded by a cloud of unrelated tweets by others, in varying degrees of engagement, who also might get annoyed if you’re posting every 30 seconds.

There is no threading, and Twitter lacks other tools we expect in messaging/commenting software. (Direct messages on Twitter are even worse, as Robert Scoble notes.)

So for the sake of preserving this record, here’s the discussion I had with somebody Twittering for the MediaTricks blog about media organizations that put up RSS feeds using services like Twitterfeed.

NYT is a culprit, with many automatic headline feeds, including one for the City Room blog, where humans also tweet sometimes. I follow MediaTricks on Twitter (they return the favor), and butted into a conversation about Twitterfeed. I have, with some labor, turned the tweets into a conversation:

[@mediatricks to] @baltimoresun: Congrats on turning off Twitterfeed. Thanks for the mention, too. Turning it off has been a winning formula for media so far.

[@palafo (me)] to @mediatricks: What’s the argument against using Twitterfeed?

@mediatricks This is our argument: [MediaTricks blog link] Twitter is not a push medium. On Twitter, do you prefer following RSS over following people?

@palafo I follow both RSS and people on Twitter. I find it useful to have them in the same place. No need for rules; market decides.

@mediatricks Not rules, just advice based on our experience. We think media misses out on the “social” part of social media w/RSS via Twitter.

@palafo Really? Then why do 14,000-plus people follow CNN and NYT rss feeds? They’re getting something out of it.

@mediatricks Check out @news8Austin or @kvue (RSS) vs. @kxan_news (human) to see apples-to-apples. Same market, same size operations.

@palafo Will do. I have posted a longer comment on your post, because Twitter is simply not a useful tool for an extended chat.

@mediatricks Followers are not getting social interaction still. People follow them b/c they’re large & established. They’re the exceptions.

@palafo Hm. It’s not just media. There are power Twitter users who get personal but follow few people themselves. It’s not that social.

It’s possible there was some cross-talk here. The conversation continued over on the Old Media New Tricks blog. (The comments there are in reverse-chronological order, yet threaded, which I find a little jarring, personally.)

Here’s my take. As I mentioned in my tweets, I use my personal Twitter account to talk to real people and to follow RSS feeds of selected news organizations and blogs. It is handy to have them all in one place.

Patrick LaForge: Twitter is too young for its users to start making up rules on how it should be used. Nobody knows until different approaches are tried. Let the market decide. CNN has about 14,000 followers for its feed. Someone gets value from that. Nobody’s making them follow. Likewise, NYT has a variety of feeds for its sections and blogs that people follow, or don’t. There are also many individuals who work there who have personal Twitter accounts (like me) who dive into the social interaction.

What I prefer is truth in labeling. If you are an individual on Twitter, use an individual’s name or handle, and we can chat. Don’t call yourself “IndyStar” or “MediaTricks.” I expect an institutional name like that to be an RSS feed with only occasional human updates, and I don’t really want it pestering me for feedback or crowdsourcing or sharing the views of an unnamed person who is paid to “keep it real” under the outlet’s name.

Twitter is still a very small audience, not worth a lot of staffing resources for a large media organizaiton. It is also a flawed tool. No threading, poor archiving, inadequate search. I am posting on your blog because 140 characters was simply too limiting and bound to get lost in the flood of Tweets, not from RSS feeds, which are predictable, but from the umpteenth individual telling me what’s for dinner tonight. (Don’t get me wrong, I do get a kick out of that stuff.)

Robert Quigley: Thanks, Patrick, for the comment.
I our defense of @mediatricks, our real names are listed in the bio. There’s no hiding our identities.

We have found Twitter to be worth staffing, despite its flaws. It doesn’t take that much to staff, and the feedback we’ve received is overwhelmingly positive.

You’re right – the market can decide. I personally unfollowed @NYTimes (despite loving the paper) because it’s an RSS feed, which I get from Google Reader. People can unfollow our account because they WANT an RSS feed. It’s just our experience that people prefer a human-staffed account, therefore it’s our advice. The NYT, WSJ, CNN are exceptions because they’re mammoth national outlets.

You may call social interaction “pestering,” but our followers (of @statesman and @ColonelTribune) haven’t complained. Check out some the feedback from @statesman’s followers. It’s as much about brand-building (or more) than it is about getting people to click our links.

Twitter is still a small audience, but it is a social media tool. I don’t think anyone doubts that. If your paper is going to use social media (Twitter or elsewhere), our advice (just our advice, not a rule) is to use it for *social* media.

Patrick LaForge: … I don’t think Twitter is all that social. Even the individuals on it are broadcasting their likes/dislikes, links, blog posts, what they had for dinner. There’s a little back and forth but not a lot of tolerance for an ongoing conversation. It’s not that social. There are big names on Twitter who are definitely humans posting, but they only follow a few people and have very little social interaction. The tool itself creates this asynchronous community, with very little to encourage more than passing interaction. It’s not THAT social.

Quigley: Sure, it is what you want it to be. We happen to get quite a bit of useful social interaction out of it (beyond what you’re eating). It has its limitations, but we don’t think it should be dismissed because of them. And news organizations CAN benefit from that social exchange.

LaForge: Individuals within a news organization can benefit. I really don’t see any value in WKRP pretending to Twitter like a live person. Because the examples you’ve sent me just look like a slightly more sophisticated version of a feed, maintained by a low level producer or assistant. It would be better for the on-air personalities and reporters to all get their own Twitter accounts and be themselves. And keep a feed out there, why not. That’s my advice, based on my experience.

The only thing I would add here is that many people have no idea what Twitter is. Compared to Facebook or blogs or plain old Web sites, it is a niche Internet service with a small number of users. Even fewer people could tell you what an RSS feed is. So this debate is really esoteric nerdstuff.

There are other comments worth reading over there, probably more enlightening than my own unedited ramblings. I commend them to you, and the ether. Some day someone will make sense of it all, I’m sure. And someone else will pop up to disagree, in 140 characters or less, in a streaming video blast from his or her Mark V brain plug.

The free book fair (donations accepted, in exchange for homemade baked goods on each floor), which lasts through Sunday, is a great excuse to wander up and down the floors and halls of this fascinating building on one of the more interesting blocks of Midtown. The Algonquin Hotel, another literary landmark, is across the street. (Times have certainly changed: The hotel now lends Amazon Kindles to its guests.)

It was busy with people skimming books, talking about books and buying books. Who said print is dead? We strolled about for a couple of hours, and I came home with a bag of promising oddities, including a few entries in the Continuum Books series on significant pop albums (Radiohead’s “O.K. Computer” and Neutral Milk’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” for example) and some gifts for others that I can’t list now.

The books at the tables are from small literary presses — offbeat novels, noir story collections, journals, poetry and alternative comics that don’t get promoted with big ad budgets or displays at corporate bookstores. I picked up a few that piqued my curiosity, including Dzanc Books’ “Best of the Web 2008,” a collection billed as the year’s best writing from online literary sites. It is an interesting idea, curating all those millions of online words into something manageable.

Many of the tables at the show are staffed by the editors or publishers themselves, and sometimes the authors. You can sometimes sense waves of eagerness and anxiety as you peruse their wares, which are mostly labors of love not likely to grace best-seller lists. It was hard not to muse on the technological and economic changes faces print publishers and creators. (Notably, one of the fair’s sponsors was Sony, which had a table promoting the latest model of its digital book reader.)

These small publishers will probably fare a lot better than the big ones in the webby future. Even so, the digital revolution and the country’s economic problems are a subtext of the book fair’s lectures, readings and other presentations on topics like memoir writing, getting an agent, comics and “the next digital age.”

One of Sunday’s main events is a 1 p.m. “debate” between Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and the cartoonist David Rees (“Get Your War On”) . The topic: “How Doomed Is America?”

That is to be followed at 2 p.m. by a panel on the future of independent publishing. The description reads:

As new technologies once again turn the publishing world on its ear, small presses are surviving — and thriving — by embracing alternative publishing models, from limited editions that treat books as collectible objects, to innovative multimedia that make digital books more fluid, interactive and open source.

The final event of the day is a 4 p.m. trivia smackdown pitting representatives of PEN versus a team of literary bloggers, billed jokingly (I think) as “a showdown between new media and the old guard.”

A few years ago, Tony Scott wrote an essay about the earnest young New York writers who started N+1. On a whim, I bought a lifetime subscription. (They still sell them for $200.) It seemed like a good deal, even for a journal with an uncertain publication schedule, now described as twice a year. The cover price is $11.95 per issue, so I have yet to break even. (The founders went on to write first novels — both enjoyable but slight — or become literary fixtures, and they have tangled with the gossip blogs now and then).

N+1 feels right in print. Despite the promise of “Web only” content once or twice a week, I rarely visit its Web site, which is odd behavior for me, given that most of my news is filtered through blogs or social media like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and Delicious. (There is some good stuff there, like this article about being a student of David Foster Wallace).

An infrequently published print journal of incoherent aims is an anachronism, to be sure, but an enjoyable one — the news writ slow. I devour it in a way I do not devour The New Yorker, which tends to pile up into a tall stack that taunts me until at last, weeks behind, I skim wildly, looking for the articles people went out of their way to mention. “Did you see in The New Yorker…” Well, yes, I saw it.

This issue of N+1 was not a disappointment. It was perfect like hot coffee on a cold November morning. Here’s how it went down:

The book reads like an expanded version of a PowerPoint presentation on the conventional wisdom of Web 2.0. Transparency. Learning from your customers. Simplicity in design. Always being in beta. The importance of links and search engine optimization. The information wants to be free business model. The let-it-all-hang-out-in-public lifestyle of Twitter and Facebook and blogs. (Jarvis gave an overview of his thesis in the Guardian on Monday.)

None of this will sound new to anyone paying attention to the Web in 2008. But for those who feel like the digital world is quickly leaving them behind, or who regard the new trends and tools with bafflement, Jarvis’s book will be a good tutorial, even if some of the lines sound like Tom Peters-style excellence-speak (“Your worst customer is your best friend”), or call to mind burning Vietnamese villages (“we have to kill books to save them”).

Jarvis offers a lot of Google-style advice for traditional media and other businesses facing a paradigm shift. His point in the section on books is that authors and publishers should turn their works into living texts online, as he promises to do with W.W.G.D. on his blog Buzzmachine. Smart plan. Books in this genre have a short shelf life, often measured in months not years.

(Photo Courtesy PDPhoto.org)

We live in New York City, so it is often hard to see the moon. There are a lot of lights and a lot of buildings in the way, and while some people keep their toddlers up late in this city we used to put ours to bed before the sun even went down. But one day back in 2002 my wife was pushing her in the stroller to the library and our daughter was craning her neck at the sky and pointing, very excited. It was broad daylight. My wife looked up. The moon was out. Weird. But not so weird. It happens all the time. My daughter, who is now 8, still spots Luna, peeking around the side of a skyscraper, when I’m looking at the traffic or the sidewalk.

There’s something magical about the moon. We humans have always felt an affinity for it, that light in the sky. It has kept us company for centuries on lonely dark nights. Maybe we don’t think about it so much anymore in this country, now that we have electric lights and good roofs over our heads most of the time. But when I was a kid, it seemed like people talked about the moon all the time.

I remember watching the first moon walks in a grainy black and white image. You’ll remember this for the rest of your life, my father told me. And now I can watch it on YouTube, too, whenever I want, which is kind of amazing.

It’s hard to convey how astonishing this walking-on-the-moon business was to everybody then. We’ve had a few decades to get used to it. The closest emotional truth I’ve seen is a headline in “Our Dumb Century” by the humorists of The Onion, not for the eyes of 8-year-olds.

But that headline is about right. That’s what it felt like.

This may be the last time in this century that men will walk on the moon.
President Richard M. Nixon Dec. 14, 1972

Whether that turned out to be true or not, it was an inappropriate statement for the President of the United States to make.
Harrison Schmitt, second-to-last man and only scientist to walk on the moon, and one-term U.S. senator (R-N.M.), in 1992

Everyone knows the name of the first man to walk on the moon and what he said when he got there. (Or, at least, what they thought he said: Turns out we missed a word.) Not as much is known about the 11 other men who walked on the moon in the last century. Fewer people could name the last man to walk there, 36 years ago this December. He is still alive. He can’t believe he was the last. He wishes he wasn’t. That final mission, Apollo 17, was actually one of the most productive. They thought it was a new beginning. In fact, it was the end.

Quite a while ago, I heard something interesting about the last man on the moon. He had a daughter, too. She was 9 in 1972, the year of the last mission, Apollo 17. (I turned 10 that year.) She wanted him to bring her a moonbeam. He didn’t bring her a moonbeam, but he did something almost as cool. (The story and other details about the Apollo program can be found, among other places, at this nearly 10-year-old PBS site about a two-hour Nova special, “To The Moon.” It has inspired art and poetry.)

Standing on the moon
I’m feeling so alone and blue
I see the Gulf of Mexico
As tiny as a tear
The coast of California
Must be somewhere over here

Standing on the moon
I see the battle rage below
Standing on the moon
I see the soldiers come and go
There’s a metal flag beside me
Someone planted long ago
Old Glory standing stiffly
Crimson, white and indigo
Robert Hunter & Jerry Garcia (1984)

It’s an incredible view, to be sure.

Some people hope we’ll be going back to the moon one of these days, although there doesn’t seem to be a lot of scientific or economic interest in making the trip. We went to the moon for all the wrong reasons in the first place. It was about the cold war; science was a secondary matter. The United States had been humiliated in 1957 when the Soviet Union astonished the world by putting a satellite, Sputnik I, into Earth orbit. NASA was created in 1958. In 1961, after a Russian cosmonaut became the first man to orbit the earth in space, President Kennedy called for a man on the moon by decade’s end. And by a man, he meant: An American.

There were martyrs: the first Apollo mission ended in a ghastly triple death on the launch pad. The Apollo 13 mission nearly ended in disaster, too. But you’ve probably seen that movie. Or the HBO miniseries about the Apollo program.

Of course, some people think the whole thing was a hoax. One guy says it was all a movie, directed by none other than Stanley Kubrick. Again, I prefer the Onion version.

The biggest problem with the manned missions was always the expense. It costs a lot of money to keep a human alive in that environment. Many scientists thought unmanned probes were the most cost effective and safest way to explore the moon and planets. The European space agency is planning some missions that will use high-tech scanning to take the first good look at the moon in 30 years.

Still, there’s just something romantic about a human being standing and looking at earth.

Let’s get this mother out of here.
Capt. Eugene Cernan, Dec. 14, 1972

Captain Cernan left the last bootprint on the moon, and those were the last words spoken there. Granted, they do not have the same poetry as the first. Captain Cernan said them as he got in the capsule and became what he did not expect to be, the last man to walk on the moon in that century. Many years later, he wrote a book that had a bit more poetry in it, and he there are excerpts and other materials at the Nova site.

Cernan is not exactly a household name, but he pops up in the news from time to time. He’s 74 now. He started as a fighter pilot, getting picked to be an astronaut in 1963. In 1966, he was the pilot of Gemini 9. While he was outside the ship testing a piece of equipment, his helmet fogged up and froze over. Blinded, he found his way back after a then-record spacewalk of 2 hours, 9 minutes.

Captain Cernan describes the walk in his book, “The Last Man on the Moon” (1999):

When the hatch stood open, I climbed out. Half my body stuck out of Gemini 9, and I rode along like a sightseeing bum on a boxcar. This was like sitting on God’s front porch. We crossed the coast of California in the full flare of the morning sun, and in a single glance I could see from San Francisco to halfway across Mexico.

(There are more excerpts at the Nova site.)

By the time he got to the moon, though, a lot of the romance was gone. The media had lost interest, and NASA had to fight for coverage. We had beat the Russians, meeting a political goal. The science fell by the wayside. It’s too bad. By many accounts, Apollo 17 was one of the most productive and memorable missions. Cernan and Schmitt spent three days on the moon — a record — and took three seven-hour excursions in the moon buggy. They brought back 240 pounds of rocks and dust, adding to the total 843 pounds that became part of a strange story of theft and government ineptitude that continues.

In his book, Cernan is prone to some of the hokey poetic spiritualism that seems to affect people who have been off the planet. It must be a remarkable experience, one I’ll never have, so I can’t blame astronauts for waxing lyrical.

He writes:

The power of the situation was simply overwhelming. One result of space travel was that I had become much more philosophical, at times unable even to focus on minor problems back on Earth because they just seemed so small in comparison to what I had experienced and the places I had been. My fellow astronauts who went to the moon encountered varying degrees of the same disease; we broke the familiar matrix of life and couldn’t repair it.

For instance, looking back at Earth, I saw only a distant blue-and-white star. There were oceans down there, deep and wide, but I could see completely across them now and they seemed so small. However deep,however wide, the sea has a shore and a bottom. Out where I was dashing through space, I was wrapped in infinity. Even the word “infinity” lost meaning, because I couldn’t measure it, and without sunsets and sunrises, time meant nothing more than performing some checklist function at a specific point in the mission.

He describes stepping on the surface:

No fear, no apprehension, but a tremendous sense of satisfaction and accomplishment welled within me. My size-10-1/2 boot was poised just inches above the surface of this almost mythical land that mankind had watched so closely for uncounted eons and to which we had assigned properties ranging from religious icon and symbol of romance to maker of werewolves and clock for the harvest. Every night of my life it had been up there, patiently waiting for my visit. I lowered my left foot and the thin crust gave way. Soft contact. There, it was done. A Cernan bootprint was on the moon.

He was standing on a place where no human had ever been before, feet planted in the dirt and dust of a celestial body different from his place of birth.

On the last day, he did the cool thing for his daughter, Tracy.

He stopped, knelt and used a single finger to scratch her initials in the lunar dust: T D C.

There is no wind on the moon. He knew her initials would remain there undisturbed for “more years than anyone could imagine.” (He later kicked himself for not writing her full name somewhere.)

I like to imagine her, a woman about my age, looking up there thinking about those letters every now and then. Her dad couldn’t bring her a moonbeam, but he gave her that.

For E.C.L. First draft, February 2003. Revised, November 2008. Moon photo at top is public domain, courtesy of PDPhoto.org. This moon obsession runs in the family: read a chapter from my wife’s novel, “Sending Mommy to the Moon,” published in The Adirondack Review. And thanks to my brother Mike, who has been peppering me with corrective details.

So I realized I was in a dream, and I woke up. Sometimes I am able to control what happens in my “lucid dreams,” but in this case no immediate solution presented itself (a flood? a helicopter rescue?). I was distracted. Spiders were biting me!

It took me two hours to get back to sleep. (I listened to some more podcasts and updated this post.)

This lucid-dreaming reminded me that one of my favorite movies is Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” (2001), which touches on lucid dreaming, so I spent a few minutes this morning looking at the pages of The Lucidity Institute and this how-to wiki. Some people don’t remember their dreams (I usually do, for a while), and some can’t influence them (I can, sometimes). To remember them, write them down as soon as you wake up. To influence them, try writing down some ideas before you go to sleep. To control them, the first step is to be aware you are dreaming. If you are in a weird situation and you think it might be a dream, try to read some writing or look at a clock. If you can’t make out the symbols, you’re probably dreaming and with practice you can learn to change the situation.

But let me reiterate: This is hard to do if a) you are in a desert without clocks or books around, and b) you are getting bit by giant spiders.

Happy dreams.

Eddie and Kay, circa 1950, Nick's in Greenwich Village

I wish they had kept journals, or blogged, so I could show what they wrote to my daughter. But they didn’t keep diaries, and there were no blogs then, and I can only make out every other word in my mother’s cursive script in letters that she wrote. She had me late in life, and she died in 1986, when I was 24, just starting out. Leukemia, after she beat colon cancer.

My father, Ed, or Eddie, depending on who was talking, lived about 11 years longer than my mother, Kay, a surprise to him, considering his fondness for booze, cigarettes and red meat, and her abstention from most vices. He was a man of the old school, reserved when it came to affection, but often loud, angry, not always kind to her, or any of us. Before he retired, he worked as a bureaucrat for the national security state, and the cold war defined his adult life, as the war in the Pacific had defined his youth. He flew to then-exotic places like California and Florida when jet travel was still in its golden age, returning with stories of the Magic Castle, the Playboy Club, and beaches in January. He was a wit, sometimes the life of the party, always ready with a joke, the center of attention. My brother and I were his TV channel changers, his butlers. “Get your old man a beer out of the fridge.” Indeed.

My old man kicked the bucket from lung cancer complications in 1997, and my uncle was the executor of his estate.

Long after the paperwork was done, my uncle mailed me a package of documents — Army records from my father’s Philippines tour, various vital documents, security clearance forms for the job with the Defense Department, a weathered brown wallet with a Playboy Club card, a stopped watch. And there was a spiral notebook, too, of some jottings, from mid-1986, not long after Ma died, leaving him rattling around alone in that big old house up in the frozen wastes in that rural air force town that he thought would be a great place for us to grow up (it was) and maybe even stick around (boring and in decline, so we didn’t). They had lived for several years in the vicinity of New York City, but I know little about those years, apart from left-over photos (like the $1.25 souvenir shot above from Nick’s in Greenwich Village, a jazz joint) and stories of living in Shanks Village, an outpost of former barracks turned into housing for veterans in Rockland County.

Ed was never a good investor, lost his shirt in mutual funds once, but stuck with the old standbys of passbook savings, mortgages, pensions, certificates of deposit, a federal pension. In the end he ran up a lot of credit card debt, and nursing home expenses, and my uncle sold off the house to pay off the bills. But creditors can’t touch life insurance, and it isn’t taxed, and that nest egg got me seriously started as an investor.

He wanted to be a writer once, so maybe I got that bug from him. He used to write wonderful jeremiads against banks and utility companies and, after he retired, politicians and the like. When he was young, he wrote some short stories. One was about a World War II veteran who was suffering from what today we would call post-traumatic stress syndrome. The guy blew his head off at the end, sort of an obvious ending, and Salinger did the same thing better, but his prose was just fine.

After he quit the fiction game for a salaryman’s life of paperwork, my old man spent the rest of his life reading impossible stacks of books and magazines (Gourmet, Playboy, Esquire), with the TV on most of the time, from the moment he walked in the door until he went to bed. His other hobbies were outdoor activities without a lot of talking — golf, fly-fishing and ice-fishing, hunting with bow, rifle and shotgun. If there was a gutted deer hanging in the garage in the fall, it was a good year.

He was the one who told me to learn about computers, there’s money in it, and he logged me onto the Arpanet back in the 1970′s with a terminal from work. It didn’t have a screen — it had a roll of paper. It connected through couplers that you screwed onto the telephone handset. The only people on the pre-Internet were military types and academics, sharing research and occasionally furtively playing text-based games and chatting. I caught the bug then. Networking. Talking. BBS’s and Usenet newsgroups, eventually the Web when it was just a handful of sites. People looked at me funny when I talked about how it was going to change the world. Yeah, right.

But then came the 90s, and the Web explosion, and I put my money in tech before it was a bubble. And when I got out, it was partly dumb luck and partly the old man’s voice telling me this was a little crazy, slow down, they’ll skin you if they can. He knew about hardship. When he was growing up in the Great Depression, his parents shipped some of the kids off to an aunt because there wasn’t enough food for all of them at home.

When I want to remember his voice, I read the few words he ever bothered to set down in his later life, mailed to me in that envelope from my uncle, painstakingly printed by hand, a blog before there were such things:

4-28-86

+Four weeks yesterday (27 April 86). Still seems unreal. Mass cards/ letters are trickling after the initial flood.

+My feelings are more in check except when answering a letter or note from a close friend. Better than letting it build up destructively, I guess. Still having trouble concentrating on the job, or the so-called important things (ie. income tax, bills, refinancing the house.)

+Worked in the garden yesterday for a while — too hot. Planted some broccoli. Nabbed the boy next door to cut the grass — explained the do’s and don’ts. Trying to civilize this barbarian was probably one of my better ideas — he won’t kill the golden goose. Maybe!

+My favorite fishing rod and reel (the ultra lite) has disappeared — no idea where to! Must replace!

+Got to get things sorted out.

12 May 86

+I never said this was a diary. It’s a way of me communicating with myself, I guess. Mr. Y— of C— and Sons and I have struck a bargain of sorts. The head stone should be ready in about 6 weeks ($875). That, plus the funeral, took about $5,000, which is what I had figured. Another 20 years, it will be triple!

+I planted some Impatiens on the plot on Mother’s day — she always loved them — it would be nice if someone could do it every year.

+I scared the shit out of E—- the other night, I suppose. I told her and B– if it wasn’t for you guys, the obvious solution to my grief, at first, was the obvious one. I think I meant it but when you’re in deep distress, what the hell do you really know. I still cry every day! Oh God, how I miss her.

13 July 86

+All it takes sometimes is a little thing; a song that reminds me or a phrase in an old movie (e.g. “Chapter 2” when James Caan says “How dare she die — I’d never do that to her”). Jesus!

It ends there. I am impressed by the economy of language. He had a need to say something, write it down, and he did for a while. Then he moved on.

But he kept on living, for years, in that old house, giving up fishing and hunting eventually, slowly losing his lungs to emphysema, driving down to his favorite Italian restaurant with an oxygen tank on a little wheeled cart, breaking his hips a couple of times, calling me with me updates on the upstate weather (136 inches of snow!). When I showed him the early Web, he was impressed, but he waved off my offers of a computer. By then, it was too complicated to learn something new. He spent most of his spare time gardening and running VCRs in every room to tape all his shows. He would have loved TiVo.

My parents’ relatively early deaths, their setbacks, their stories of growing up when everyone was poor, the 1970s with their cultural chaos — all these experiences have made me skeptical of progress, not quite believing the balance in my 401K or that the good jobs would last, that my health would hold out, that anything awaits any of us at the end of the line besides a shrinking circle of pain. It’s the kind of outlook that leads my father, a proud atheist married to a daily church-going woman, to let a priest mumble by his deathbed, I suppose.

It was a few years ago that I got this stuff in the mail. My daughter was young, and I was inspired to write down some thoughts on my laptop:

I spent part of this night sitting up with a toddler who had been throwing up periodically for hours. She will never know her grandparents, though she has her grandfather’s eyebrows, as do I, and a little of her grandmother’s smile.

After she finally fell asleep, I sat for a while on my little bench in the darkness, listening to her breath, listening to mine, then to hers, then to mine, hers, mine, inhale, exhale, our mortal bodies sharing certain pieces of code, strands of DNA, mixed up and handed down through the generations, destined one day for cold stillness.

But not yet.

The last time I had to read with a dictionary this close to me was when I made my way through “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace, may he rest in peace. Wallace never misused a word, though — and I am not sure I can say that for Neal Stephenson — nor did he often coin them, though he rescued many from obscurity and put them to new use.

Stephenson’s work is, at least on the surface, a work of science fiction, set in an alternate world, where words do not quite mean what they mean to us, and where many words have been invented.
Now, I remember loving Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” and I learned to write in Elvish during my teenage “Lord of the Rings” period (no tattoos, though). Heck, I read the “Silmarillion“! And the ever-more baroque works of Pynchon. Maybe I just don’t have the patience for this sort of thing anymore.

Here are some examples from my exasperated notes:

extramuros
chronochasm
oculus
analemma
aut
avout
chancel
concent
fraa
nave
orrery
praxis
sline
surr
theoric

…and the book’s title, which I misread as “anthem” for quite a while (a word that it echoes, and of course the title of a popular book by the awful hack Ayn Rand, spiritual adviser to fed chairman Alan Greenspan, which is neither here nor there, except when I look at my dwindling portfolio. I always knew her claptrap was bad news).

Now, it helps that Stephenson’s book has a glossary, something I only noticed after resorting to the Web, where the Anathem Wikia proved to be of some help. And, admittedly, I am starting to get into a groove, as fans of the books claims will happen after the first 100 pages or so. We shall see. I am willing to give him a chance, since I was a fan of his early works, though I was unable to wade through his mammoth trilogy about the history of physics, or whatever it was about. (My friend Andy says I should give it another chance.)

Stephenson doesn’t make it easy. Many of the chapters of “Anathem” are preceded by helpful dictionary entries, along the lines of this:

Provener — The primary daily aut of a concent, Provener is celebrated by the avout just before the mid-day meal. Main features are a lesson, recapitulating some theoric achievement in history, and the winding of the Great Clock.

It’s enough to make you sit down on an analemma and weep.

At least one coinage appears to need no explanation: bulshytte. Stephenson — eschewing the footnote-endnote-happy style of DFW – might argue that the term is slightly different from our earthbound one. He promises to discuss more about the ideas that inspired the book at his Web site. I haven’t clicked there yet. I’m still working on the book.

This could take a while.

Some friends and I are going to see “Dahlia: A Very Nearly True Theatrical Fantasia” by P. Seth Bauer, performed at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, of all places. The gist:

The grisly murder of a young actress and the dumping of her body in a vacant lot in Los Angeles in 1947 is infamous as the Black Dahlia murder. Dahlia: A Very Nearly True Theatrical Fantasia is based on the 2003 best seller “The Black Dahlia Avenger” by retired Los Angeles Police Detective Steve Hodel in which he attempted to prove that his own father was guilty of the murder. P. Seth Bauer’s play is a veritable who’s who of Hollywood celebrity

It’s free, but you need tickets. Final show is 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 27.

The book’s Web site has more than a dozen Frequently Asked Questions files about the case, which it describes this way:

On January 15, 1947, the body of beautiful 22-year-old Elizabeth Short — dubbed the Black Dahlia because of her black clothing and the flower she wore in her hair — was discovered on a vacant lot in downtown Los Angeles, her body surgically bisected, horribly mutilated, and posed as if for display. Even the most hardened homicide detectives were shocked and sickened by the sadistic murder. Thus began the largest manhunt in LA history. For weeks the killer taunted the police — and public — much as his infamous English counterpart Jack the Ripper had done in London 60 years before, sending tantalizing notes, urging them to “catch me if you can.” And for weeks and months the LAPD came up empty. Charges of police ineptitude soon gave way to rumors of corruption and cover-up at the highest levels. Meanwhile, between the Hollywood and downtown areas of Los Angeles, a dozen lone women were brutally murdered, and their cases also remained mysteriously unsolved. Could the Black Dahlia Avenger be, in fact, a serial killer stalking the city streets?

Mr. Hodel also takes credit for coining the forensic term “thoughtprints” [Word Doc] in the book.

Others have apparently expanded on the concept.

Update: We went on Saturday night, and this was surprisingly better than expected. The writing was good, and witty, and even though it was billed as just a reading, the actors did a first-rate job keeping it interesting. The first act in particular was riveting. The story is autobiographical, mostly about the lead actor, Joshua Hodel Spafford, the grandson of George Hodel, and his struggle to deal with the accusations in his uncle’s book about his beloved grandfather. The second act — a series of hallucinatory dream sequences — was not as strong. The Hodel Black Dhalia theory involves the surrealist Man Ray and the director John Huston. The play was preceded by remarks by Mark Nelson, a co-author of the art book “Exquisitive Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahila Murder.” I came away interested in learning more about this old crime. Supposedly, there is a movie coming soon based on the “Black Dahila Avenger.” (Different from the Brian Depalma version of 2006, based on the James Ellroy book).

By the way, if we are heading for another Great Depression, we’re going to need more than 700 hobo names.

I have no desire to return to Catholicism myself. So I have even less desire to read these two particular re-conversion tales, and almost skipped over this review. But Buckley hooked me, and not because he has been in the news lately after this surprise. It was the knife-work.

A few choice lines:

Eszterhas writes with his fists. You practically have to duck as you turn the page. Rice is a voice whispering at you from behind a beaded curtain: you have to lean into the binding. Neither is exactly pleasurable.

Buckley outlines their hard luck tales of rough upbringings, personal tragedy, brushes with disease (throat cancer in one case, diabetic coma in the other) and addiction.

Then he outlines the essential problem with this kind of book:

So the stages here are set for many — many — deployments of the word ‘miracle.’ One of the more challenging or, if you will, trying aspects of accounts by people who have been ‘saved’ is that everything is viewed as a personal intervention by Jesus himself.

Which is to say that confessional (and profess-ional) literature is like faith itself: to believers, a tone poem of perfect lucidity and logic; to the unconvinced (in whose camp I squat, nervously clutching Christopher Hitchens’s pant leg) it can sound a little, well, fruity. It’s one thing to be in the hands of, say, G. K. Chesterton or C. S. Lewis or Arnold Lunn or Malcolm Muggeridge (all of whom seem to be English). But their accounts of being knocked off their horses on the road to Damascus make for literature. These books do not.

Eszterhas’s book sounds like the better of the two but it is also compared to “an extended bar rant,” while Rice’s book is “a crashing, mind-numbing bore. This is the literary equivalent of waterboarding,” Buckley writes.

Then he unleashes the reviewer’s most deadly weapon, the direct quotation of terrible sentences, like these from Rice: “Let me describe a few of these experiences… Let me take this opportunity to say something about the nuns of this era.” Then the dagger:

Which takes us up to Page 53, out of 245. I could go on, but let me first take this opportunity to say: this begins to grate.

By the end of the review, I was more inclined to read a book by Buckley, who can turn a great quip (“Berkeley, Calif., the Vatican City of atheism”) and — judging by this feature — might have a juicy memoir in him. For whatever reason, I’ve never read any of his books, but I enjoyed the movie version of “Thank You for Smoking,” which was nearly as funny as “Showgirls.” (It will be a while: I am only on Page 7 of this 933-page monster.)

Simply put, bubbles are how new commercial infrastructure gets built in this country. In the 1840s and 1850s, European governments slowly strung up telegraphs from large city to large city. But in the United States, bubble-drunk entrepreneurs rampaged throughout the countryside, stringing up competing and often redundant wires way ahead of demand. Most went bankrupt. In the 1880s, vast competing, and often redundant, rail networks were built way ahead of demand. By 1894 about a quarter of the rails were in bankruptcy. The 1990s saw an orgy of commercial infrastructure built for the Internet. We all know how that ended.

So, we just had a real estate bubble pop. Or maybe it was a credit bubble. What was it good for? What was built? What remains?

I am also working my way through a stack of comix, graphic novels and illustrated memoirs, including:

• “Too Cool to be Forgotten” by Alex Robinson
• “American Elf: Book 2” by James Kochalka
• “The Surrogates” by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele

I tend to whip through the graphic books and plod through the text. Don’t expect a review soon.


Posted in Paper & Ink Tagged: Anathem, Books, comics, graphic novels, Neal Stephenson, science fiction ]]> http://palafo.com/2008/10/13/what-im-supposedly-reading/feed/ 2 palafo anathem http://palafo.com/2008/10/05/cheap-vegetarian-food-in-new-york/ http://palafo.com/2008/10/05/cheap-vegetarian-food-in-new-york/#comments Mon, 06 Oct 2008 04:56:41 +0000 Patrick LaForge http://palafo.wordpress.com/?p=13 ]]> This week, the author of “Frommer’s NYC Free & Dirt Cheap,” Ethan Wolff, answered selected City Room readers’ questions about where to find bargains and free events and how to live cheaply in New York.

Here’s his tip on cheap vegetarian/healthy eating:


In addition to the Punjab taxi stand mentioned in the comments ($5 for a nice-sized plate of vegetarian food on East First Street), there’s great Indian food at Chennai Garden on Curry Hill, which is super fresh and all vegetarian. Mooncake, in SoHo and Midtown, keeps a loyal following with Asian-accented entrées that mostly top out under $9. You can probably guess the menu at Hummus Place, which is almost recklessly cheap. Other vegetarian options include Pukk, which has a full lineup of ersatz meats, and Tiengarden on Allen Street, which uses no egg, onion, garlic, meat, or dairy, but still manages to serve up some of the most flavorful food in town.


Posted in Blogging, New York, Paper & Ink Tagged: bargains, City Room, Consuming, Eating, NYC, NYT ]]> http://palafo.com/2008/10/05/cheap-vegetarian-food-in-new-york/feed/ 0 palafo