Archive for the 'Paper & Ink' Category
January 7, 2009
I’m happy to report that I finally finished the 900+ page “Anathem” by Neal Stephenson, just four months (!) after starting it. I have to admit that I took breaks to read a few other things.
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).
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Posted in Moving Images, Paper & Ink | 2 Comments »
Tags: aliens, American Nerd, Anathem, Any Rand, Arbre, Battlestar Galactica, Books, Buddhism, Clock of the Long Now, concents, Cryptonomicon, Edmund Husserl, geeks, Google, Internet, IT, jeejahs, Kurt Gödel, Neal Stephenson, nerds, quantum physics, Reticulum, Roger Penrose, science fiction, spacecraft, speely, speelycaptor, string theory, uncertainty, video, Web
December 14, 2008
Supposedly, nerds are now cool. People compete to show their nerd cred. They are joining Facebook, taking nerd tests on the Web, and discussing the definitions of geek and nerd on their blogs. They watch TV shows like “Battlestar Galactica,” “Heroes” and “The Big Bang Theory.” They read adult comics and mammoth science fiction novels. Even Barack Obama is said to be a nerd. It was not always this way, a topic that Benjamin Nugent explores in “American Nerd: The Story of My People,” published earlier this year.
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.
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Posted in Paper & Ink | 7 Comments »
Tags: American Nerd, Benjamin Nugent, Books, computers, D&D, dorks, Dungeons & Dragons, dweebs, Facebook, films, geeks, herbs, J.R.R. Tolkien, movies, nerd cred, nerds, podcasts, Revenge of the Nerds, Saturday Night Live, SNL, Sound of Young America, technology, uber-nerds, Wikipedia, wimps
December 11, 2008
I jumped into an esoteric debate Wednesday evening: What is the most effective way mainstream media can use social media like Twitter? Should they never post RSS feeds automatically? Must every tweet be crafted by human hands?
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.
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Posted in Blogging, Paper & Ink, Social Media | 4 Comments »
Tags: City Room, Facebook, feeds, newspapers, NYT, RSS, Social Media, Twitter
December 6, 2008
One notable aspect of the 21st Annual Indie & Small Press Book Fair this weekend is the location, the members-only library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, at 20 West 44th Street in Manhattan, which is also home to the New York Center for Independent Publishing.
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.)
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Posted in New York, Paper & Ink | 1 Comment »
Tags: Algonquin Hotel, Books, comics, Continuum Books, David Rees, Dzanc Books Best of the Web, General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, Get Your War On, Indie and Small Press Book Fair, Kindle, Matt Taibbi, Midtown, Neutral Milk Hotel, New York Center for Independent Publishing, NYC, O.K. Computer, Radiohead, Sony Reader
November 30, 2008
The Post Office has become the department of print spam, an agency that delivers trash for us to recycle. I pay most of my bills online, and do most of my reading digitally (computer, iPhone or Kindle); I subscribe to fewer and fewer print magazines and have no use for catalogs. So it’s great when the mail includes something I want to read. Last week, that was the 200-page issue No. 7 of N+1, entitled “Correction.”
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).
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Posted in New York, Paper & Ink | 3 Comments »
Tags: A.O. Scott, Adderall, Benjamin Kunkel, fiction, Frederick Seidel, hedge funds, junk mail, Keith Gessen, Mad Men, mail, Molly Young, movies, Mystery, N+1, Neil Strauss, NYC, Poetry, Postal Service, seduction, The Game, Wesley Yang
November 20, 2008
I recently skimmed a galley proof of “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis. The book, available from HarperCollins in January, is structured as a series of rules or aphorisms about how Google does business, with some anecdotes from Jarvis about things he has observed in his groundbreaking work as a blogger and media consultant.
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.)
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Tags: Blogs, Books, computers, data, Facebook, Google, Jeff Jarvis, macs, SEO, technology, Twitter, Web 2.0
November 18, 2008
(Photo Courtesy PDPhoto.org)
When my daughter was 2, she loved
the moon. She still loves the moon. “Luna!” she used to call it,
after the character on “Bear in the Big Blue House.” I helped her to love the moon, by talking about it and playing music about it and buying her certain books and reading them over and over. She used to love
Margaret Wise Brown’s “Goodnight Moon” and
Eric Carle’s “Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me” in which a little girl’s daddy uses a very long ladder to climb into the sky to bring the moon down to earth. (Later she moved on to
Tintin and his moon explorations, drawn by Hergé long before the real moonshots.)
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.
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Posted in Paper & Ink | 7 Comments »
Tags: Apollo Space Program, Eric Carle, Eugene Cernan, Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown, moon, NYC, Richard M. Nixon, space travel, Tintin, Tracy Cernan
November 15, 2008
I was walking barelegged across a desert-like blue and red plain with sparse vegetation and rocks. There was a sudden sharp pain in my leg. I turned around and saw something out of the corner of my eye. Then it happened again. What was that? Somebody standing off to the side, out of my line of vision, but a friend, called out, “watch out! there’s more of them!” And it happened again. And this time I saw it, a spider about the size of one of those yap-yap dogs. I gave it a kick and it scuttled away under a rock. But then as I turned around there were three more of them. They were everywhere, for miles. They were fast. And where was my friend? Gone. Aieee! Help!
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.)
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Posted in Paper & Ink | 2 Comments »
Tags: deserts, lucid dreaming, movies, nightmares, Podcast Zeitgeist, Richard Linklater, spiders, Waking Life
November 7, 2008
Good news for my wife, Jane: The second issue of the literary journal Makeout Creek has just been published, including her poem, “Allenwood.” The poem itself is not online, but you can buy a print copy. We’re still waiting for ours. (You can still find her poem “Lemons” online in the Burnside Review, published over the summer, and a chapter from her novel, published in The Adirondack Review.)
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Tags: Burnside Review, literary journals, Makeout Creek, Poetry
November 5, 2008
Eddie and Kay, circa 1950, Nick's in Greenwich Village
When the news of the day seems particularly big, I wonder what my parents would think about it all. They’re dead, and gone with them are all the stories and family lore that I only half-listened to when I was younger. Rattling around in my head are half-remembered snippets of conversations about their childhoods in the Great Depression, long-ago presidents and wars, those scary Beatles with their rock and roll, pulp fiction and radio dramas. They lived through World War II, the atom bomb, the invention of television, Vietnam, hippies, Watergate, pet rocks, disco and the bad old 70′s, the Cold War, the Iranian hostage crisis, recessions and more.
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Posted in Blogging, New York, Paper & Ink | 9 Comments »
Tags: Blogs, cancer, children, computers, death, fathers, generations, Internet, parenting, smoking, technology, Web
I’m happy to report that I finally finished the 900+ page “Anathem” by Neal Stephenson, just four months (!) after starting it. I have to admit that I took breaks to read a few other things. 
