Megan Power

Neuro-marketing

2012-01-25T13:25:00.000-08:00

On the continuum of market-research tools, fMRI is the most extreme, the most expensive, the most complex, the most medical and it has to be used under particularly controlled conditions. It’s something that fascinates all of us and something that will continue to be used by scientists, but it is not in the mainstream of application.

We have seen great advances in how to build software and algorithms. . . to better understand and interpret the scientific information. Five years ago, there was a tipping point, a mushrooming of activity in this area, with really improved applications. You can’t go to a marketing or advertising conference anywhere in the world now and not have some form of neurometric, biometric or emotion-metric talk.

Dominique Browning's NYT Essay

2012-01-16T06:29:00.000-08:00

Women alone eat breakfast at 11 if we feel like it, lunch at 3 and dinner never if that’s the way the day is winding down. Single women do not worry about cooking unless we want to. And we don’t want to unless we like to.

Single women love not having to get permission to spend our own money on a 10th pair of black boots or a painting or a wood stove.

We love not being judged, not being criticized, not being hemmed in. We love the give and take of making our own decisions. We love putting things down on a table knowing they will be there when we return. And eventually, we come to understand that there is no reason to curl up on “our” side of the bed while we sleep. We no longer have to take sides. We can sprawl across the expansive middle.

Single men could not care less about any of the above lifestyle features.

Alexander Girard by Todd Oldham and Kiera Coffee

2012-01-08T13:28:00.000-08:00

One of the most prolific mid-20th century designers, Girard's work spanned many disciplines, including textile design, graphic design, typography, illustration, furniture design, interior design, product design, exhibit design, and architecture.

The international lifestyle of Alexander Girard began in 1907, when his American mother and Italian father travelled from their home in Italy to New York City so that he would be granted U.S. citizenship. Girard was then raised in Florence and educated throughout Europe, attending the Royal Institute of British Architects in London and the Royal School of Architecture in Rome.

Girard was already a practicing architect and interior designer by the late 1920s. In 1932, Girard returned to the U.S., opening an office in New York City. By 1937 he had moved on to Detroit, Michigan where he was really to begin making a name for himself.

In 1949, Girard was selected to design the Detroit Institute of Art’s “For Modern Living.” The show focused on the design of everyday things, which happened to include the first public presentation of the molded plywood chairs of Charles and Ray Eames.

Influences on Book Purchasing

2011-12-11T07:04:00.000-08:00

Where do you most like to browse for books that you want to buy?

	2008	2009	2010
Internet	17%	40%	38%
Chain bookshop	34%	31%	25%
Independent bookshop	26%	15%	17%
Supermarket	17%	14%	14%
Social networking site	-	-	6%

Which of the following would make you more likely to spend money in bookshops?

	2008	2009	2010
More promotional offers/discounts	-	-	56%
More money off books	46%	55%	-
More offers like 3 for 2	38%	43%	-
Loyalty schemes	-	-	34%
Wider range of quality books	19%	22%	21%
More recommendations in store	12%	13%	17%
Ability to order online and pick up in store	-	-	17%
Bookshops stay open later	15%	17%	14%
Other products and services in store	17%	10%	13%
Better personal service in store	8%	15%	12%
More in store events	-	-	12%
National Book Tokens	-	-	12%
I never buy from bookshops	12%	6%	9%

How would you typically find out about new books and authors?

	2008	2009	2010
Recommendations from friends or family	12%	17%	20%
Display in a bookshop	26%	18%	17%
Newspaper or magazine review	14%	17%	15%
Interview or recommendation	9%	17%	13%
Mentioned on TV or radio show	13%	11%	8%
Blurb on book jacket when browsing	5%	6%	8%
Newspaper or magazine advert	6%	5%	5%
Recommendation from famous person	4%	4%	4%
Shop assistant’s advice	2%	1%	3%
Street poster or billboard	1%	2%	2%
Local reading group	1%	1%	2%
Librarian’s advice	2%	1%	2%
Book club catalogue	3%	2%	1%

Source: Reading the Future Survey (June 2008, 2009 & 2010)

www.thebookseller.com

Primary factor in book purchase decision

Author reputation	52%
Personal recommendation	49%
Price	45%
Book reviews	37%
Cover artwork/blurbs	22%
Advertising	14%

Online marketing awareness factors

Search engine results	58%
Author websites & blogs	30%
Social networks	20%
Online advertising	17%

Source: Verso Digital (US): 2009 Survey of Book-Buying Behavior (January 2010)

www.versoadvertising.com/survey/

"Not every story is for every reader"

2011-11-29T12:24:00.000-08:00

The wife of novelist Lawrence Hill, Miranda Hill, has won this year's $10,000 Journey Prize for a short story by an emerging writer.

“Petitions to Saint Chronic” is about three strangers who keep a hospital vigil for several days for Gibson, a man they’ve never met, who has survived a 24-storey jump. I

The prize was endowed by the American author James A. Michener, who donated the royalties from the Canadian edition of his 1989 novel Journey. It honours the best short story published in a Canadian literary journal each year. The award has served as a launching pad: past winners include Yann Martel, Alissa York, and Timothy Taylor.

Edugyan wins Giller Prize for 'Half-Blood Blues'

2011-11-10T06:46:00.000-08:00

Half-Blood Blues tells the story of Afro-German jazz musician Hieronymus Falk and his arrest in Nazi-occupied Paris. In this excerpt, Hiero reflects on the restless, imperfect, marvellous process of cutting a record:

Chip told us not to go out. Said, don’t you boys tempt the devil. But it been one brawl of a night, I tell you, all of us still reeling from the rot – rot was cheap, see, the drink of French peasants, but it stayed like nails in you gut. Didn’t even look right, all mossy and black in the bottle. Like drinking swamp water.

See, we lay exhausted in the flat, sheets nailed over the windows. The sunrise so fierce it seeped through the gaps, dropped like cloth on our skin. Couple hours before, we was playing in some back-alley studio, trying to cut a record. A grim little room, more like a closet of ghosts than any joint for music, the cracked heaters lisping steam, empty bottles rolling all over the warped floor. Our cigarettes glowed like small holes in the dark, and that’s how I known we wasn’t buzzing, Hiero’s smoke not moving or nothing. The cig just sitting there in his mouth like he couldn’t hear his way clear. Everyone pacing about, listening between takes to the scrabble of rats in the wall. Restless as hell. Could be we wasn’t so rotten, but I at least felt off. Too nervous, too crazed, too busy watching the door. Forget the rot. Forget the studio’s seclusion. Nothing tore me out of myself. Take after take, I’d play sweating to the end of it only to have Hiero scratch the damn disc, tossing it in the trash.

“Just a damn braid of mistakes,” Hiero kept muttering. “A damn braid of mistakes.”

“We sound like royalty – after the mob got done with em,” said Chip.

Coleman and I ain’t said nothing, our heads hanging tiredly.

But Hiero, wiping his horn with a blacked-up handkerchief, he turn and give Chip a look of pure spite. “Yeah, but, hell. Even at our worst we genius.”

Did that ever stun me, him saying this. For weeks the kid been going on and on about how dreadful we sound. He kept snatching up the discs, scratching the lacquer with a pocket knife, wrecking them. Yelling how there wasn’t nothing there. But there was something. Some seed of twisted beauty.

I didn’t mean to. But somehow when the kid turned his back I was sliding off my vest, taking the last disc – still delicate, the grooves still new – and folding the fabric round it. I glanced around, nervous, then tucked it into my bass case. The others was packing up their axes.

“Where’s that last record at?” said Hiero, frowning. He peered at the trash bin, at the damaged discs all in there.

“It’s in there, buck,” I said. “You didn’t want it, did you?”

He give me a sour look. “Ain’t no damn point. We ain’t never goin get this right.”

“What you sayin, kid?” said Chip, slurring his words. “You sayin we should give it up?”

The kid just shrugged.

We lined up the empty bottles along the wall, locked up real quiet, gone our separate routes back to Delilah’s flat. Curfew was on and Paris was grim, all clotted shadows and stale air. I made my quiet way along the alleys, dreading the sound of footsteps, till we met up again at the flat. Everyone but Coleman, of course, Coleman who was staying with his lady. We collapsed onto dirty couches under blackout curtains.

I’d set my axe against the wall and it was like I could feel the damn disc just sitting in there, still warm. I felt its presence so intensely it seemed strange the others ain’t sensed it too. Its wax holding all that heat like a altar candle.

Excerpt from Half-Blood Blues © 2011 by Esi Edugyan. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Allen Publishers.

The 2400 Year Old Story of Love

2011-10-28T16:00:00.000-07:00

by Aristophanes via Robert Krulwich

Once upon a time, people were not born separate from each other as they are now. They were born entwined, kind of coupled with each other.

So there were boys attached to boys, and there were girls attached to girls and of course boys and girls together, in a wonderfully intimate ball.

Back then we had eight limbs - four on the top, four on the bottom - and you didn’t have to walk if didn’t want to, you could roll, and roll we did.

We rolled backwards and we rolled forwards, achieving fantastic speeds that gave us a kind of courage, and then the courage swelled to pride and the pride became arrogance.

Then we decided we were greater than the Gods and we tried to roll up to heaven and take over heaven.

The Gods, in alarm, struck back. And Zeus, in his fury, hurled down lightning bolts and struck everyone in two.

Into perfect halves.

So all of a sudden couples were now detached and lost and alone and desperate and losing the will to live. The Gods, seeing what they had done, worried that humans might not survive so they gave us a few repairs - they moved heads to the front, moved genitalia around, basically made it easier for us to procreate with others.

And most importantly, they gave us a memory.

Memory gave us a longing for that original other half of ourselves. The boy, or the girl, that made us whole.

And that longing is still so deep in all of us that it has been the lot of humans ever since to travel the world looking for their other half.

Cogito ergo sum

2011-10-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

A "delightful, thought-provoking little collection [which] belongs to that category of strange, unclassifiable books that will haunt the reader long after the last page has been turned."

Neuroscientist Eagleman explained his belief on the afterlife as:

"Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position -- one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story."

2011-10-12T14:10:00.000-07:00

Various Positions by Martha Schabas
$22.00, Doubleday Canada

Too bad the psychosexual thriller Black Swan preceded (and probably overshadowed) this well-executed debut by Toronto author Schabas, which follows an aspiring dancer named Georgia through her acceptance into the Royal Toronto Ballet Academy and a disastrous fixation on a teacher.

This is a book to inhale over a weekend at the cottage - it has the tone of a YA novel and the narrative hinges on either a consensual relationship being consummated or a dark turn of events. It's hard to put down, especially since it's written in accomplished prose.

Making Room for Readers

2011-09-22T14:26:00.000-07:00

"'Yet I can't help but remember that reading -- both the careful selection of books and being given enough privacy to quietly read them myself -- was among the first freedoms I had.'

Humanity is losing its ability to be alone with nothing but our thoughts. Both writing and reading are solitary acts. They are also liberating acts that can free practitioners of either from reality for as long as someone chooses to read or write. You fall into the moment of the act, commit yourself to it, indulge imagination to the point that it usurps the daily grind -- the tedium of work, relationship troubles, baleful news reports..."

The Facebook Sonnet

2011-09-14T07:32:00.000-07:00

The Facebook Sonnet

Welcome to the endless high-school
Reunion. Welcome to past friends
And lovers, however kind or cruel.
Let's undervalue and unmend.

The present. Why can't we pretend
Every stage of life is the same?
Let's resume, exhume, and extend
Childhood. Let's all play games

That occupy the young. Let fame
And shame intertwine. Let one's search
For God become public domain.
Let church.com become our church.

Let's sign up, sign in, and confess
Here at the alter of loneliness.

Published in the May 16, 2011 New Yorker. By Sherman Alexie

The Spell of the Sensuous

2011-08-21T14:14:00.000-07:00

Our alienation from the nature began with the invention of the alphabet author David Abram says, attributing the first alphabet to Semitic tribes around 1500 B.C.E. Prior to that, communication was oral or pictorial. The epics of Homer originally were sung and re-sung long before they were written down around the 7th century B.C.E. but by the 4th century B.C.E., the dialogues of Plato were written.

With the advent of alphabetic writing, notions of space and time were radically altered. Not only did writing undermine the human participatory relationship with the natural landscape, it also dissolved the intimate link with particular places in which ancestral stories or myths took place. This “double retreat,” as Abram calls it, opened the way to a “pure and featureless ‘space’- “an abstract conception that today seems to us more primordial and real than the earthly places in which we remain corporeally embedded.” Once written down a people’s history becomes an account of irreversible and progressive events and time becomes linear.

Abram places the ancient Hebrews in the context of this radically new sense of space/time. They were, Abram reminds us, “the first truly alphabetic culture that we know of, the first ‘People of the Book.’”

"Everyone can dig a hole in a cemetery"

2011-08-02T11:22:00.000-07:00

From Margaret Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

"Most people secretly believe they themselves have a book in them, which they would write if they could only find the time. And there’s some truth to this notion. A lot of people do have a book in them – that is, they have had an experience that other people might want to read about. But this is not the same thing as 'being a writer.'

Or, to put it in a more sinister way: everyone can dig a hole in a cemetery, but not everyone is a grave-digger. The latter takes a good deal more stamina and persistence. It is also, because of the nature of the activity, a deeply symbolic role. As a grave-digger, you are not just a person who excavates. You carry upon your shoulders the weight of other people’s projections, of their fears and fantasies and anxieties and superstitions. You represent mortality, whether you like it or not. And so it is with any public role, including that of the Writer, capital W; but also as with any public role, the significance of that role – its emotional and symbolic content varies over time."

Billy Collins's New Collection

2011-07-30T08:51:00.000-07:00

Horoscopes for the Dead

Every morning since you disappeared for good,
I read about you in the daily paper
along with the box scores, the weather, and all the bad news.

Some days I am reminded that today
will not be a wildly romantic time for you,
nor will you be challenged by educational goals,
nor will you need to be circumspect at the workplace.

Another day, I learn that you should not miss
an opportunity to travel and make new friends
though you never cared much about either.

I can’t imagine you ever facing a new problem
with a positive attitude, but you will definitely not
be doing that, or anything like that, on this weekday in March.
And the same goes for the fun
you might have gotten from group activities,
a likelihood attributed to everyone under your sign.

A dramatic rise in income may be a reason
to treat yourself, but that would apply
more to all the Pisces who are still alive,
still swimming up and down the stream of life
or suspended in a pool in the shade of an overhanging tree.

But you will be relieved to learn
that you no longer need to reflect carefully before acting,
nor do you have to think more of others,
and never again will creative work take a back seat
to the business responsibilities you never really had.

And don’t worry today or any day
about problems caused by your unwillingness
to interact rationally with your many associates.
No more goals for you, no more romance,
no more money or children, jobs or important tasks,
but then again, you were never thus encumbered.

So leave it up to me now
to plan carefully for success and the wealth it may bring,
to value the dear ones close to my heart,
and to welcome any intellectual stimulation that comes my way
though that sounds like a lot to get done on a Tuesday.

I am better off closing the newspaper,
putting on the clothes I wore yesterday
(when I read that your financial prospects were looking up)
then pushing off on my copper-colored bicycle
and pedaling along the shore road by the bay.

And you stay just as you are,
lying there in your beautiful blue suit,
your hands crossed on your chest
like the wings of a bird who has flown
in its strange migration not north or south
but straight up from earth
and pierced the enormous circle of the zodiac.

Buying Reputation Management

2011-07-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

Through sites like MechanicalTurk.com, anyone can easily hire a writer (usually based in India, according to the NYT) to post negative or positive reviews on influential consumer review sites like Amazon and Yelp.

On MechanicalTurk (an "online crowdsourcing marketplace"), a five star review goes for about 25 cents, and experts estimate these types of bottom-feeding writers earn about $2 or $3 per hour.

The name of the site derives from an 18th century machine which was later revealed to be a hoax:

"A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings."

A Yelp media representative said its proprietary algorithms are designed to filter out fake reviews but sometimes authentic ones get caught in the net too. “We’re working hard at it. It’s a tough one,” said Vince Sollitto.

On Fiverr.com, members post "jobs" they're willing to perform for $5 and under.

"I will play Happy Birthday on the Bagpipes wearing personalized namecard," offers a user named johnnyzip. "I will make an emotional rant [video] for $5," says user mel864.

How to tell real reviews from fake ones? Look for nuance - the good and the bad.

Room definitely exists for more review aggregator websites of the professional and semi-professional variety - what RottenTomatoes does for movies hasn't been done for books, live theatre or other arts.

Required Reading in Jail

2011-06-11T08:02:00.000-07:00

This month's Harper's reports on the books Omar Khadr is required to read as part of his "deradicalization" process at Guantanamo Bay.

One of the books he's supposedly been assigned is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which Thomas Frank believes to be a dubious choice.

Covey's classic "is a book written for Americans who feel that their present contribution to the planet's richest economy is not quite fulfilling enough," Frank writes.

"It is a handbook for senior executives suffering anomie as they cruise gated communities in their purring BMW's - and for junior executives who don't yet have that BMW, but want to work their way up from the Camry they currently drive."

How is this former boy soldier supposed to assimilate American management theory?

It's possible, Frank argues, that instead of making Khadr more North American,Covey's book will simply teach him to be a more organized, efficient jihadist.

Or maybe he'll buy in.

Changing Lives Through Literature (CLTL) is a program that began in Massachusetts as an alternative to incarceration. Professor Robert Waxler and Judge Robert Kane set up a required reading list and book club for offenders.

"By discussing books, such as James Dickey's Deliverance and Jack London's Sea Wolf, the offenders began to investigate and explore aspects of themselves, to listen to their peers, to increase their ability to communicate ideas and feelings to men of authority who they thought would never listen to them, and to engage in dialogue in a democratic classroom where all ideas were valid. Instead of seeing their world from one angle, they began opening up to new perspectives and started realizing that they had choices in life. Thus, literature became a road to insight."

Running the program costs $500 per person; keeping a person incarcerated costs about $30,000 year per inmate.

Kindle 'Screensleepers'

2011-05-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

Though they're only greyscale, the Kindle's 'screensleepers' are an unexpectedly attractive feature.

Some users find the default images tiresome and balk at the lack of user control over this setting (find hacks here).

In addition to famous authors, poets and playwrights, the screensleepers feature a hodge-podge of symbols and paintings. Some explanations:

Sibylla Samia - ancient Greek priestess who prophesied Jesus’s birth in the stable

Albertus page - serif font named after the thirteenth century German philosopher Albertus Magnus

Hercules Constellation - fifth largest constellation, named after the Greek mythological hero Heracles

17th century astronomer & his wife w/ giant sextant

Audubon finches in a tree (above)

Illuminated page with Iohannis aquila in upper right corner

Cathedral floorplan

Fun fact: the name Kindle is meant to evoke "the crackling ignition of knowledge".

In-book Advertising

2011-05-01T09:59:00.000-07:00

John W. Doull's secondhand bookstore on Barrington Street has this alarmist sign in the front window.

Paranoia about the disappearance of printed books is a little tired. Digital devices are gaining popularity but the printed book is a survivor. It isn't going anywhere.

Far more interesting is the prediction that e-readers will soon be free, and e-books are going to have ads inside them (or commercial-free for a premium).

Ad-supported e-books means less risk for the publisher up front, and could/should even mean free (since people hate ads in the products they already paid for).

The debate is whether the advertising "ruins the integrity of the text".

Does product placement ruin the integrity of a film? If a character drinks a Coke or a Corona, is the story compromised?

The comics we read as children had ads in them:

Book sponsorship doesn't seem nearly as problematic as the number of people who read literature on a committed basis. The fact that Snooki is a bestselling author is a much scarier harbinger.

Here We Aren't, So Quickly

2011-03-23T17:17:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Safran Foer's contribution to the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" fiction issue published last summer is hypnotic and quixotic, irritating and sublime.

He paints an abstract picture of a marriage through the use of nothing but declarative sentences. It's a pain, and it's fascinating. To make it all the way through feels like an accomplishment. With rich rewards.

Here We Aren't, So Quickly

I was not good at drawing faces. I was just joking most of the time. I was not decisive in changing rooms or anywhere. I was so late because I was looking for flowers. I was just going through a tunnel whenever my mother called. I was not able to make toast without the radio. I was not able to tell if compliments were back-handed. I was not as tired as I said.

You were not able to ignore furniture imperfections. You were too light to arm the airbag. You were not able to open most jars. You were not sure how you should wear your hair, and so, ten minutes late and halfway down the stairs, you would examine your reflection in a framed picture of a dead family. You were not angry, just protecting your dignity.

I was not able to run long distances. You were so kind to my sister when I didn’t know how to be kind. I was just trying to remove a stain; I made a bigger stain. You were just asking a simple question. I was almost always at home, but I was not always at home at home. You were not able to cope with a stack of more than three books on my bedside table, or mixed currencies in the change dish, or plastic. I was not afraid of being alone; I just hated it. You were just admiring the progress of someone else’s garden. I was so tired of food.

We went to the Atacamama. We went to Sarajevo. We went to Tobey Pond every year until we didn’t. We braved thirteen inches of snow to attend a lecture in a planetarium. We tried having dinner parties. We tried owning nothing. We left handprints in a moss garden in Kyoto, and got each other off under a towel in Jaffa. We braved my parents’ for Thanksgiving and yours for the rest, and how did it happen that we were suddenly at my father’s side while he drowned in his own body? I lay beside him on the bed, observed my hand reaching for his brow, said, “Despite everything -” “What everything?” he asked, so I said, “Nothing,” or nothing.

I was always destroying my passport in the wash. You were always awful at estimating. You were never willing to think of my habits as charming. I was just insisting that it was already too late to master an instrument or anything. You were never one to mention physical pain. I couldn’t explain the cycles of the moon without pen and paper, or with. You didn’t know where e-mails were. I wouldn’t congratulate a woman until she explicitly said she was pregnant. You spent a few minutes every day secretly regretting your laziness that didn’t exist. I should have forgiven you for all that wasn’t your fault.

You were terrible in emergencies. You were wonderful in “The Cherry Orchard.” I was always never complaining, because confrontation was death to me, and because everything was pretty much always pretty much O.K. with me. You were not able to approach the ocean at night. I didn’t know where my voice was between my phone and yours. You were never standing by the window at parties, but you were always by the window. I was so paranoid about kind words. I was just not watching the news in the basement. You were just making a heroic effort to make things look easy. I was terrible about acknowledging anyone else’s efforts. You were not green-thumbed, but you were not content to be not content. I was always in need of just one good dress shirt, or just one something that I never had. You were too injured by things that happened in the distant past for anything to be effortless in the present. I was always struggling to be natural with my hands. You were never immune to unexpected gifts. I was mostly just joking.

I was not neurotic, just apocalyptic. You were always copying keys and looking up words. I was not afraid of quiet; I just hated it. So my hand was always in my pocket, around a phone I never answered. You were not cheap or handy with tools, just hurt by my distance. I was never indifferent to the children of strangers, just frustrated by my own unrelenting optimism. You were not unsurprised when, that last night in Norfolk, I drove you to Tobey Pond, led you by the hand down the slope of the brambles and across the rotting planks to the constellations in the water. Sharing our happiness diminished your happiness. I was not going to dance at our wedding, and you were not going to speak. No part of me was nervous that morning.

When you screamed at no one, I sang to you. When you finally fell asleep, the nurse took him to bathe him, and, still sleeping, you reached out your arms.

He was not a terrible sleeper. I acknowledged to no one my inability to be still with him or anyone. You were not overwhelmed but overtired. I was never afraid of rolling over onto him in my sleep, but I awoke many nights sure that he was underwater on the floor. I loved collapsing things. You loved tiny socks. You were not depressed, but you were unhappy. Your unhappiness didn’t make me defensive; I just hated it. He was never happy unless held. I love hammering things into walls. You hated having no inner life. I secretly wondered if he was deaf. I hated the gnawing longing that accompanied having everything. We were learning to see each other’s blindnesses. I Googled questions that I couldn’t ask our doctors or you.

They encouraged us to buy insurance. We had sex to have orgasms. You loved reupholstering. I went to the gym to go somewhere, and looked in the mirror when there was something I was hoping not to see. You hated our bed. He could stand himself up, but not get himself down. They fined us for our neighbor’s garbage. We couldn’t wait for the beginnings and ends of vacations. I was not able to look at a blueprint and see a renovated kitchen, so I stayed out of it. They came to our door during meals, but I talked to them and gave. I counted the seconds backward until he fell asleep, and then started counting the seconds backward until he woke up. We took the same walks again and again, and again and again ate at the same easy restaurants. They said he looked like them. I was always watching movie trailers on my computer. You were always wiping surfaces. I was always hearing my father’s laugh and never remembering his face. You broke everyone’s heart until you suddenly couldn’t. He suddenly drew, suddenly spoke, suddenly wrote, suddenly reasoned. One night I couldn’t help him with his math. He got married.

We went to London to see a play. We tried putting aside time to do nothing but read, but we did nothing but sleep. We were always never mentioning it, because we didn’t know what it was. I did nothing but look for you for twenty-seven years. I didn’t even know how electricity worked. We tried spending more time not together. I was not defensive about your boredom, but my happiness had nothing to do with happiness. I loved it when people who worked for me genuinely liked me. We were always moving furniture and never making eye contact. I hated my inability to visit a foreign city without fantasizing about real estate. And then your father was dead. I often wasn’t reading the book that I was holding. You were never not in someone’s garden. Our mothers were dying to talk about nothing.

At a certain point you became convinced that you were always reading yesterday’s newspaper. At a certain point I stopped agonizing over being understood, and became over-reliant on my car’s G.P.S. You couldn’t tolerate trace amounts of jelly in the peanut-butter jar. I couldn’t tolerate gratuitously boisterous laughter. At a certain point I could stare without pretext or apology. Isn’t it funny that if God were to reveal and explain Himself, the majority of the world would necessarily be disappointed? At a certain point you stopped wearing sunscreen.

How can I explain the way I shrugged off nuclear annihilation but mortally feared a small fall? You couldn’t tolerate people who couldn’t tolerate babies on planes. I couldn’t tolerate people who insisted that having a coffee after lunch would keep them up all night. At a certain point I could hear my knees and felt no need to correct other people’s grammar. How can I explain why foreign cities came to mean so much to me? At a certain point you stopped trying. I couldn’t tolerate magicians who did things that someone who actually had magical powers would never do.

We were all doing well. I was still in love with the Olympics. The smaller the matter, the more I allowed your approval to mean to me. They kept producing new things that we didn’t need that we needed. I needed your approval more than I needed anything. My sister died at a restaurant. My mother promised anyone who would listen that she was fine. They changed our filters. I wanted to learn a dead language. You were in the garden, not planting, but standing there. You dropped two handfuls of soil.

And here we aren’t, so quickly: I’m not twenty-six and you’re not sixty. I’m not forty-five or eighty-three, not being hoisted onto the shoulders of anybody wading into any sea. I’m not learning chess, and you’re not losing your virginity. You’re not stacking pebbles on gravestones; I’m not being stolen from my resting mother’s arms. Why didn’t you lose your virginity to me? Why didn’t we enter the intersection one thousandth of a second sooner, and die instead of die laughing? Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

I am not unrealistic anymore. You are not unemotional. I am not interested in the news anymore, but I was never interested in the news. What’s more, I am probably ambidextrous. I was probably meant to be effortless. You look like yourself right now. I was so slow to change, but I changed. I was probably a natural tennis player, just like my father used to say over and over and over.

I changed and changed, and with more time I will change more. I’m not disappointed, just quiet. Not unthinking, just reckless. Not willfully unclear, just trying to say it as it wasn’t. The more I remember, the more distant I feel. We reached the middle so quickly. After everything it’s like nothing. I have always never been here. What a shame it wasn’t easy. What a waste of what? What a joke. But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere: on the split stools of this bar, by the edge of this cliff, in the seats of this borrowed car, at the prow of this ship, on the all-forgiving cushions of this thread-bare sofa in the one-story copper-crying fixer-upper whose windows we once squinted through for hours before coming to our sense: “What would we even do with such a house?”

Jonathan Safran Foer, published in The New Yorker, June 14, 2010, p.72.

Literary Near Futurism

2011-03-14T08:09:00.000-07:00

"The near future - let’s peg it 2020 and beyond - is a blank because there is no version of a near future that seems both desirable and plausible," wrote Kevin Kelly in an essay two years ago which recently got recycled in the 10th Annual Year in Ideas.

(or maybe it's because the near future is just not inherently as dramatic as 100 years from now, nor as engaging as the present)

Gary Shteyngart's third novel, Super Sad True Love Story, is set in the near future. Books don't exist any more and people spend all their time on their iPhones.

In an interview on Fresh Air, Shteyngart said that he needed to set his novel in the near future because the present is moving too fast for novelists to fully contemplate.

"We're all living in the future constantly ... because right now things are happening so quickly," he explained.

"Here's the thing with this new technology. I think it's incredibly effective. I just don't think it's made anyone much happier. If anything, we are now always connected but we don't know what we're connected to. It's just an endless stream of information."

Beyond Borders - Specialty Retailers & Bookselling

2011-03-02T16:40:00.000-08:00

“The national bookstore chain has peaked as a sales channel, and the growth is not going to come from there,” David Steinberger, chief executive of the Perseus Books Group said in a recent NYT article.

Coldwater Creek, Lowe’s, Bass Pro Shops and even Cracker Barrel are adding new books. Some mass retailers, too, are diversifying - Target, for instance, is moving away from male-centered best sellers and adding more women’s and children’s titles this year.

"The ability to catch a shopper’s eye in a store is almost impossible to mimic online."

Though sales to nonbook retailers can be more complicated and labor-intensive for publishers, books are generally sold on a nonreturnable basis. Bookstores, on the other hand, can return unsold books to publishers.

“We know it’s a nice clean sale,” said John Duff, publisher of Perigee Books, an imprint of Penguin Group USA.

Aaron Hoey, head merchant for home and accessories at Anthropologie says, “We do a very good job of selecting unique books, books you’re not going to find in a typical bookstore, and certainly not in a mass-market bookstore like Borders or Barnes & Noble. And to stumble across it at Amazon, you have to really know what you’re looking for.”

(in the Anthropologie window display above, the letters 'S' 'N' 'O' 'W' are falling down and accumulating.)

Os Libros Arden Mal

2011-02-17T18:04:00.000-08:00

Books Burn Badly (2010), the latest novel by Galician writer Manuel Rivas, argues that those who destroy written material for political purposes are only one step away from destroying people.

The novel opens on August 19, 1936, the first year of the Spanish Civil War. Pyres of books were assembled by Fascist soldiers and set ablaze in public. Singed pages float away on a breeze.

The Independent called Os Libros Arden Mal a masterpiece and a tour de force.

Rivas echoes the German writer Heinrich Heine, who wrote (referring to the burning of the Qur'an during the Spanish Inquisition) in his 1821 play "Almansor": Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.

"Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings."

Throughout history, oppressive regimes have suppressed books first, then humans:

The destruction of the Library of Alexandria, the Library of Baghdad, the burning of books under China's Qin Dynasty, the destruction of Mayan codices by Spanish conquistadors and the Nazi book burnings all preceded atrocities committed on people.

"The burning of books publicly and ceremonially is a bizarre subtext of history, repeated constantly. It's an act of violence, a punishment, a deterrent, a death by proxy. To assume this is a futile act, a deluded, empty ritual, to think of it as something that has only happened at other times, to other people, in other places, is wrong. Books were burning thousands of years ago, in other countries, and books are burning, here and now."

Margaret Horsfield from "The Burning Books," presented on CBC Radio's Ideas (1990).

The digital age has allowed paper books a modicum of permanency -- electronic copies are easily distributed and copied -- but it's also made destroying them even easier.

A note about the UK cover: it's a mosaic of 36 book covers by Michael Salu.

Bibliotherapy

2011-02-02T06:51:00.000-08:00

In ancient Egypt, libraries were known as psyches iatreion, “sanatoriums of the soul.”

Now, science is starting to prove what readers and writers have long known: Words can help us repair and revitalize our bodies as well as our minds. As a result, bibliotherapy—reading specific texts in response to particular situations or conditions—is becoming more and more popular among psychologists, physicians, librarians and teachers.

A 2007 study involving 112 smelter workers in New Brunswick, Canada, for instance, found that workers who read a lot had greater protection against some of the effects of lead poisoning. Both readers and non-readers suffered equally from lead-caused motor impairment, but the non-readers had higher levels of intellectual impairment due to the brain damage the heavy metal can cause.

When reading, our brains simulate what happens in the story, using the same circuits we’d use if the same things happened to us. On a neurological level, we become part of the action.

The brain straddles fact and fiction when we read, which is why Michael Duda, a psychologist in private practice in Dortmund, Germany, believes books are so powerful and why they “act like a key that opens the door to a person’s inner world.” Simulating the feelings and experiences of literary figures “allows readers to perceive and express their own emotions,” he says.

From Ode magazine's October 2010 issue
http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/73/reading-writing-revelation/

Elizabeth Bishop's 100th Birthday

2011-01-16T15:39:00.000-08:00

Nova Scotia has a year of events planned to celebrate Pulitzer Prize -winning poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979).

Bishop's maternal grandparents took care of her for year in their home near the Bay of Fundy when she was 4. Her father died when she was just a baby, and her mother was committed to the Dartmouth sanitorium after a series of nervous breakdowns.

“Bishop has emerged as one of the most important and widely discussed American poets of the 20th century,” Bishop scholar Thomas Travisano says. “But she published comparatively little in her lifetime, and the standard image of her as a writer and a person has been continuously revised in recent years. This is due in part to the intense critical activity her work has generated and in part to the ongoing posthumous publication of powerful and revealing poems and other writings that remained in manuscript at the time of her death.”

She is now being widely read as "a poet of audacious yet masterly skills and of considerable, if often latent, emotional power".

Bishop taught at Harvard for seven years.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Bouba/Kiki Effect

2011-01-02T10:33:00.000-08:00

In 1929, German-American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler conducted groundbreaking psychological experiments on the Spanish-speaking island of Tenerife.

Köhler showed participants forms similar to those shown above and asked which shape was called "takete" and which was called "baluba".

Data suggested a strong preference to pair the jagged shape with "takete" and the rounded shape with "baluba".

In 2001, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard repeated Köhler's experiment using the words "kiki" and "bouba" and asked American college undergraduates and Tamil speakers in India ,"Which of these shapes is bouba and which is kiki?"

In both the English and the Tamil speakers, 95% to 98% selected the curvy shape as "bouba" and the jagged one as "kiki", suggesting that the human brain is somehow able to extract abstract properties from the shapes and sounds.

This suggests that the naming of objects is not completely arbitrary. The rounded shape may most commonly be named "bouba" because the mouth makes a more rounded shape to produce that sound while a more taut, angular mouth shape is needed to make the sound "kiki". The sounds of a K are harder and more forceful than those of a B, as well.

The presence of these "synesthesia-like mappings" suggest that this effect might be the neurological basis for sound symbolism, in which sounds are non-arbitrarily mapped to objects and events in the world.

The Martini Method

2010-12-15T08:25:00.000-08:00

The Martini Method is named after an anecdote about the novelist Anthony Burgess (Clockwork Orange).

Burgess was a very productive writer. He forced himself to write a 1000 words a day, 365 days a year.

When he had completed his word count, he would relax with a dry martini and enjoy the rest of the day with an easy conscience. Normally in a bar.

Burgess dismissed Clockwork Orange as one of his lesser works. His 600 page novel "Earthly Powers" was shortlisted for the 1980 Booker Prize. He died of lung cancer in 1993.

The Martini Method splits up a large project into small chunks, and quantifies those chunks into specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound goals (what management books call a SMART objective).

Failing to break down large projects into sub-tasks usually leads to anxiety, and procrastination as a coping response.

Procrastination is the greatest enemy of any creative act. And one of the most insidious is "Infinite Research Syndrome".

"The problem with web research is that it is a passive activity. You sit there and click like there’s no tomorrow. A world of facts, data and images scroll past your eyes and you accomplish nothing. The way to fight this is to disconnect yourself a little from the mesmerizing input. If you’re doing research on the internet make it an active process. Get a little primitive: make it a rule not to copy, paste or save files. You must take physical notes.This makes research an active process. Taking notes and using more muscle than your mouse-finger forces you to think about what you are reading and make judgments. Also write down other impressions or notions that come to mind as you do this, and very often you will be excited to get away from this to implement some great idea that suddenly comes to you."

G&M's $1.7 billion "Reimagination"

2010-12-01T09:09:00.000-08:00

The Globe and Mail unveiled a bold design makeover on October 1.

It's more compact, more colorful, printed on premium glossy paper and laid out like a webpage. There's a new emphasis on white space, photography and boutique ad content.

The redesign was an in-house job driven by a 2008 contract G&M management signed with Transcontinental Inc. and Glacier Media Inc., which own state-of-the-art German printing presses, KBA Commander CT (two located outside Toronto, one in Calgary and one in Vancouver).

Glacier has also purchased a new press to handle a hybrid heat-set and cold-set production process for its plant in Saskatchewan.

This equipment is used by only 5 newspapers in the world. The agreement is worth $1.7 billion over 18 years.

Editor-in-chief John Stackhouse told CBC he wanted to "celebrate the beauty of print".

"We see across the world a lot of high-quality papers - The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times - doing very well because more sophisticated readers still want a paper that helps them understand what just happened," he said.

Narrower columns (resulting in increased hyphenation) and ragged right alignment have generated considerable criticism.

Toronto designer Nick Shinn developed two fonts for the redesign. He is a passionate supporter of local design:

"Death to Helvetica! Helvetica is the #1 selling typeface at MyFonts. It's given away with every operating system. It's the corporate face of the multinationals, be they the Gap or Getty Images. But it's only one of the many old sans fonts that dominate today's typography. What does this say about the present age, when its spirit is best expressed by vintage and traditional sans faces? It speaks of a fascist aesthetic - banal, conventional, monolithic and utilitarian."

Facebook's Font

2010-11-19T10:47:00.000-08:00

Facebook's squarish, sans serif, gothic-inspired font is a customized version of a type called Klavika, developed in 2004 by a designer in England.

"In the same way that Facebook represents the culture and technology of a decade, Klavika does the same for typeface design - well crafted but blatantly simple, monolinear, square, nearly devoid of any calligraphic ancestry."

Movie posters for "The Social Network" also make use of this typeface:

And NBC is using a relative of Klavika now too:

Its creators describe Klavika as "a cross of humanist and geometric influences with allegiances to neither", which is eerily fitting for media use.

Barbara Kruger & Futura Bold Oblique

2010-11-05T10:53:00.000-07:00

American collage artist Barbara Kruger is internationally famous for superimposing messages in Futura Bold Oblique font on pre-existing photographs.

Her text questions consumerism, individual autonomy and feminism and the images she uses are often culled from mainstream media ads. Besides galleries, her work appears on t-shirts, mugs, bus placards and billboards, "confusing the boundaries between art and commerce and calling attention to the role of the advertising in public debate".

The NYT reviewed Kruger's October exhibit at the Whitney Museum this way: "In broad terms, much of Ms. Kruger’s recent art is similar to the work that made her famous 30 years ago, built around puckish, aphoristic bits of texts that are at once politically biting and coolly aloof."

Futura is a sans-serif range designed by German typographer Paul Renner in 1927. It's heavily influenced by Bauhaus style, and is derived from strong geometric shapes. Volkswagen, HP and Shell all use variations of it in their advertising.

Renner expressed his view of typeface design in 1947:

"Type reveals not only the character of whoever designed it. It also reveals the character of the people who use it, just like the handwriting of the individual. Therefore, what sort of characters we use concerns us all. Each populace has the script it deserves, for each time period, the script that corresponds to its nature.”

Kruger got her start working in the graphic design department of Mademoiselle magazine.

10 Proofreading & Editing Tricks

2010-10-14T06:45:00.000-07:00

Improve the clarity and power of your writing with these tricks:

10. Use hard copies to proofread. Errors jump out on paper in a way they don't onscreen.

9. Read your work with a ruler.

8. Read your work aloud.

7. Read your work backwards (start at the end).

6. Be extra careful of missing small words: a, an, the, or.

5. Use a more sophisticated grammar/spell check program than the one available in Word.
I like WhiteSmoke.

4. For major revisions, edit your work in a new document.

3. Omit needless words. From The Elements of Style:

owing to the fact that	since (because)
in spite of the fact that	though (although)
call your attention to the fact that	remind you (notify you)
I was unaware of the fact that	I was unaware that (did not know)
the fact that he had not succeeded	his failure
the fact that I had arrived	my arrival

2. Reckless comma usage leads to choppiness and difficult reading. Commit some time to learning the difference between a punctuation rule and a style choice. Start here. And watch this. Don't believe the old adage about using commas where you'd pause for breath - you'll end up overpunctuating.

1. The most misspelled word? Your - You’re (one solution: stop using you're altogether. Use only you are.)

Spencerian Script

2010-09-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

The Coca Cola logo was designed in 1880s by Frank Robinson, the company’s bookkeeper.

It's called Spencerian script, after the man who invented it, Platt Spencer.

Spencer was born in 1800 near the Hudson River. His family was too poor to afford paper so he practiced on whatever was handy – leaves, bark, snow and sand – everything was a canvas for handwriting. At 15, Spencer began instructing others in the art of penmanship. He worked obsessively to perfect his own script, which was filled with flourishes and meant to be "rhythmic and comfortable". After Spencer died, his 5 sons promoted the script tirelessly and it became the first standardized handwriting in the United States.

Spencer is considered “the father of American handwriting”. He was a fanatic, and advised his students to practice six to 12 hours a day. Mastering his script would, Spencer believed, make someone refined, genteel, upstanding.

Coke's bookkeeper Frank Robinson was likely trained in business and penmanship at a Spencerian school.

Handwriting must die, argues Anne Trubeck in a compelling essay, in order for us to evolve as writers.

"Conventional wisdom holds that computers are devoid of emotion and personality, and handwriting is the province of intimacy, originality and authenticity," she says. "But what we want from writing is cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts. A system that can become streamlined through specialization and automaticity has more time to think.

This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: We want more time to think.

Touch-typing is a glorious example of cognitive automaticity, the speed of execution keeping pace with the speed of cognition.”

However, a recent study by the University of Washington discovered that children write better and longer essays at a faster pace when using a pen as opposed to a keyboard.

"We need to learn more about the process of writing with a computer," said Professor of Educational Psychology and study head Virginia Berninger. "We need to help children become bilingual writers so they can write by both the pen and the computer. So don't throw away your pen or your keyboard. We need them both."

The Power of Foregrounding

2010-09-12T14:49:00.000-07:00

The term foregrounding refers to the theory that stylistic features of literary texts de-automatize perception.

Czech theorist Jan Mukarovský argued that with everyday language, communication is the primary purpose and foregrounding structures are normally not involved. But in literature the purpose of foregrounding is to disrupt such everyday communication.

Thus in literature, the act of communication becomes secondary. The primary focus of the reader is on style.

Art exists, the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky remarked, so that:

"one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged." (1917/1965, p. 12)

Metaphor lets the reader see the likeness between apparently dissimilar and disconnected ideas. Some examples of metaphors as foregrounding:

“lake shining like a pile of dimes” -Lisa Moore

“a pain in the knee sharp and bright as a small orange carrot” -Bill Gaston

Pablo Neruda describes his socks as “two long sharks of lapis shot with a golden thread”.

In poetic language foregrounding achieves maximum intensity to the extent of pushing communication into the background as the objective of expression and of being used for its own sake; it is not used in the services of communication, but in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself.

This does not mean that literature has no communicative function, as Mukarovský is at pains to point out . Rather, foregrounding enables literature to present meanings with an intricacy and complexity that ordinary language does not normally allow.

Defamiliarization obliges the reader to slow down, allowing time for the feelings created by the alliterations and metaphors to emerge.

It evokes feeling in a way that makes it not merely incidental but actually a constructive part of the reading process. When perception has been deautomatized, a reader employs the feelings that have been evoked to find or to create a context in which the defamiliarized aspects of the story can be located. This is a central part of the constructive work required of the reader of a literary text.

Stylistic variations are thought to evoke feelings and prolong reading time. In four studies, foregrounded segments of the story were associated with increased reading times, greater strikingness ratings, and greater affect ratings in readers.

Canadian researcher David Miall finds evidence that foregrounding evokes a strong emotional response in readers and captures their attention. In the phrase “Miriam Anthony was unbeautiful” the adjective “unbeautiful” is an example of lexical deviation foregrounding.

ee Cummings work uses graphological deviation to attract reader attention:

“spoke joe to jack
leave her alone
she is not your gal”

Advertising also uses foregrounding to attract attention. Alternate spellings of familiar words “Glo” for Glow and “Krazy” for Crazy are meant to stand out against an otherwise normal background.

One condition for foregrounding is that it must be used in moderation. If a reader is confronted with too many technical or rare vocabulary words he/she will approach the text defensively.

Book Art & Decor

2010-08-24T06:14:00.000-07:00

Artist Robert The cuts gun-shaped sculptures out of books. Disconcerting and witty, this particular gun book "reinforces McLuhan’s theory that technology shapes our understanding by making the book’s contents literally unreadable, but also offers up a paranoic critique of McLuhan’s mediated society".

Texan Cara Barer photographs curled, crinkled books edges against black backgrounds. She got the idea after seeing a wet Yellow Pages lying on the ground.

Richard Wentworth suspends books and furniture from gallery ceilings using iron and steel cable. Wentworth says he is "drawn to imaginative displacements of common objects."

Ruche's spring catalogue features a collage-wallpaper hybrid made of yellowed book pages.

End tables made from repurposed books are available on Etsy.

More ideas for decorating with books here.

Hugh MacLeod's “Sex & Cash” Theory

2010-08-09T16:15:00.000-07:00

How To Be Creative offers 13 suggestions for creative types and # 7 is don't quit your day job. Cartoonist and author Hugh MacLeod explains why.

THE SEX & CASH THEORY: The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills.

A good example is Phil, a NY photographer friend of mine. He does really wild stuff for the indie magazines- it pays nothing, but it allows him to build his portfolio. Then he’ll go off and shoot some catalogues for a while. Nothing too exciting, but it pays the bills.

Another example is somebody like Martin Amis. He writes “serious” novels, but he has to supplement his income by writing the occasional newspaper article for the London papers (novel royalties are bloody pathetic- even bestsellers like Amis aren’t immune).

Or actors. One year Travolta will be in an ultra-hip flick like Pulp Fiction (“Sex”), the next he’ll be in some dumb spy thriller (“Cash”).

Or painters. You spend one month painting blue pictures because that’s the color the celebrity collectors are buying this season (“Cash”), you spend the next month painting red pictures because secretly you despise the color blue and love the color red (“Sex”).

Or geeks. You spend you weekdays writing code for a faceless corporation (“Cash”), then you spend your evening and weekends writing anarchic, weird computer games to amuse your techie friends with (“Sex”).

It’s balancing the need to make a good living while still maintaining one’s creative sovereignty. My M.O. is gapingvoid (“Sex”), coupled with my day job (“Cash”).

I’m thinking about the young writer who has to wait tables to pay the bills, in spite of her writing appearing in all the cool and hip magazines…. who dreams of one day of not having her life divided so harshly.

Well, over time the ‘harshly’ bit might go away, but not the ‘divided’.

This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.

As soon as you accept this, I mean really accept this, for some reason your career starts moving ahead faster. I don’t know why this happens. It’s the people who refuse to cleave their lives this way- who just want to start Day One by quitting their current crappy day job and moving straight on over to best-selling author… Well, they never make it.

Anyway, it’s called “The Sex & Cash Theory”. Keep it under your pillow.

Seat of The Muse

2010-07-29T05:40:00.000-07:00

Ebon Heath is a visual artist based in Brooklyn who makes typographic mobiles.

"We use type daily yet rarely appreciate the form of a letter," he says. "By liberating type from the confines of the page we not only free the words to express the content in a new dimension of scale, volume, and movement, but also force the reader to become a viewer."

Heath's pieces would be perfect for an exhibition in the American Poetry Museum, which opened in Washington, D.C. in 2004. It's part gallery, part literary arts event space. They collect poetry on paper, audio recordings and artifacts related to poetry. They host readings, concerts and exhibits, mostly outside the walls of the museum.

Of all the literary arts, poetry is most under threat by modern publishing.

Swansea, Wales (pop. 231,000) is home to the Dylan Thomas Center, which functions as a tribute to the Welsh icon's life and work while also providing space for readings and workshops.

The tomb of mystic poet Rumi is part of the Mevlana Museum in Konya, Turkey.

The breathtaking galleries within the British Library in London house manuscripts of Beowulf, Pope's Iliad, the Canterbury Tales and other precious pieces of history.

The word "museum" is Greek for "seat of the muses". It originally meant a place for scholarly learning.

Critics accuse museums of "commodity fetishism" and claim that placing works under glass does a great disservice to the act of creating art. A museum is "a place of objects not ideas...a kind of terrible and admonishing cabinet."

"Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly impostors. We have infected the pictures in our museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things"

(Pablo Picasso quoted in Barr 1946: 274).

But museum practices are slowly changing. While museums have historically been hegemonic spaces associated with the bourgeois, modern museums are being forced (by technology and an aging population) to serve the cultural interests of all classes and gear collections to a younger, more media-savvy audience.

Instead, we're seeing new museums that seek to "abolish hierarchies and normal, given categories and push us to question the fundamental role of the artist, his/her social and critical responsibility and his /her link to history."

Here's W.H. Auden's poem "Musee des Beaux Arts", inspired by The Fall of Icarus at the fine arts museum in Brussels:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

B.S. Johnson's Novel in a Box

2010-07-22T05:45:00.000-07:00

In 1968, British writer B.S. Johnson (above) published a novel called The Unfortunates, with chapters of the story inserted at random in a removable wrapper inside a box. Printed on the wrapper was an author's note:

"Apart from the first and last sections (which are marked as such) the other twenty-five sections are intended to be read in random order. If readers prefer not to accept the random order in which they receive the novel, then they may re-arrange the sections into any other random order before reading."

In between those labelled First and Last, the chapters were each numbered uniquely starting with 1. In the new editions, each chapter has a unique symbol.

The Unfortunates is about a sportswriter on assignment in a small town who encounters ghosts from his past including his best friends and a young cancer victim.

Johnson called the book "an attempt to convey the chaotic nature of memory".

Johnson also published a novel called Albert Angelo, about a substitute teacher who aspires to be an architect and is haunted by a failed romantic relationship. On pages 149-152 of the book, a rectangular hole is cut into the bottom so readers could see future events:

The book ends with a meta-fiction cry of disgust: "Oh, fuck all this LYING!"

"The two terms 'novel' and 'fiction' are not synonymous," Johnson wrote in 1966. "The novel is a form in the same sense that the sonnet is a form; within that form, one may write truth or fiction. I choose to write truth in the form of a novel."

Johnson began his writing career as poet. But his poems were not, as you might guess, conventional.

I'm fond of women
Naked
But I like my salad
Dressed

Johnson "explicitly rejects traditional approaches on the entirely characteristic grounds that it is ‘dishonest’". It's this passionate honesty he is remembered for today. His work is enjoying a significant revival in academia and Picador has re-issued The Unfortunates.

Quoting Samuel Beckett, Johnson explained his beliefs this way:

"What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos, and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The forms and the chaos remain separate. . . to find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now."

Above is a set of pages from his novel House Mother Normal which show his experiments with spacing and typography.

A Few Selected Sentences by Johnson appears in many anthologies of British literature. It is "a sequence of heterogeneous fragments", the shortest one simply saying "Life" and the last line pointing out that "Someone has to keep the records".

This text by B.S. Johnson reminds me of a Rothko painting. One's impulse is to try to understand what it is about.

But it cannot be interpreted or explained in any satisfying way. It just is.

The text resists our efforts to uncover meaning.

Susan Sontag celebrated this effect, saying it teaches us to just to appreciate art for its inherent value instead of analyzing or deconstructing it. We learn to take pleasure in art instead of being concerned only with what it means.

"Fat Man on a Beach", Johnson's short film, is available on YouTube in 5 parts.

Johnson committed suicide by slitting his wrists in the bathtub in 1973, the same year "A Few Selected Sentences" was published. He was 39.

Creativity and The Default Network

2010-07-15T07:46:00.000-07:00

Margaret Wente, a columnist for the Globe and Mail, recently wrote an article called "In Praise of the Wandering Mind" in which she criticizes society's "cult of productivity" and emphasizes the benefits of leisure, especially as it applies to creativity:

"Researchers have learned that your brain is often at its best when your body is engaged in low-level, undemanding activity (like showering) and you’re not thinking about much of anything at all."

Neuroscience is providing a major paradigm shift, especially in the field of cognitive psychology - Freud actually labeled daydreaming (a sub-category of mind wandering) "infantile and neurotic" and textbooks used to warn it could lead to psychosis.

But over the last ten years, thanks to advances in functional imaging technologies, most scientists argue that daydreaming is a crucial tool for creativity. Mind-wandering allows the brain to make new associations and connections. Instead of focusing on our immediate surroundings - such as a church sermon or an office presentation - the daydreaming mind is free to engage in abstract thought and imaginative ramblings. As a result, we're able to imagine things that don't actually exist.

Creative types often report that inspiration strikes when they "least expect it". Tom Waits famously says that melodies and song lyrics frequently "come to him" while he's driving on the freeway in L.A.

How does this happen?

Brain imaging shows us that when the brain is "at rest", a default network of cortical regions is activated. This default network is located in the anterior medial prefrontal cortex, which has a dense network of fiber connections. It's one of the most highly connected areas in the brain:

Women have stronger connections in the network than men and the connections weaken with age. Brain-imaging studies involving babies suggest that newborns don't have a default mode network. But by two weeks, a primitive and incomplete version is up and running.

In addition to default network activation, mind wandering is associated with "executive network recruitment". Evidence of interconnectedness between these two brain systems - which have so far been assumed to work in opposition - suggests that mind wandering may evoke a unique mental state that could allow otherwise opposing networks to work in cooperation.

Why low-demand situations provoke activity in the default network is still not understood:

"One possibility is that it enables individuals to maintain an optimal level of arousal, thereby facilitating performance on mundane tasks. A second possibility is that, as a kind of spontaneous mental time travel,it lends a sense of coherence to one’s past, present, and future experiences. Finally, the mind may wander simply because it evolved a general ability to divide attention and to manage concurrent mental tasks. Although the thoughts the mind produces when wandering are at times useful, such instances do not prove that that the mind wanders because these thoughts are adaptive; on the contrary the mind may wander simply because it can."

Artist Ryan Wallace curated a group show now on display on at the Morgan Lehman gallery in NYC which visualizes the default network in abstract paintings, figurative sculptures and photography. The work is aesthetically powerful and technically complex.

Highway Gothic and Other Iconic Typefaces

2010-07-08T08:12:00.000-07:00

The font most commonly used on road signs and highways in Canada and the U.S. is FHWA Series E Modified. This is a sans-serif font informally called Highway Gothic.

"FHWA" refers to the Federal Highway Administration. "Series E" refers to one of the variations of fonts (the differences are mainly thickness, width and horizontal spacing of the characters) and "modified" refers again to the thickness and width of each character.

FHWA was developed in WWII by the Public Roads Administration to "maximize legibility at a distance and at high speed" and hasn't changed much since then. Australia, Mexico, Spain and Peru also use the FHWA font series. Newer highways in China have begun adopting it as well.

Over the next few decades, the new Clearview typeface, also specifically developed for traffic signs by an independent design firm, is expected to gradually replace the FHWA series.

Clearview is slightly more rounded and thicker. Speculation has it the new font is being implemented to help a growing demographic of elderly drivers. Here's a side by side comparison:

Interstate Highway Markers (FHWA Typeface)

Interstate Highway Markers (Clearview)

Tourist destinations often eschew the standard font in favor of something more beautiful. Lunenburg's is the best one I've ever seen:

Designed in 1965 on a variation of the serif typeface Baskerville, Canada's wordmark (essentially the government's logo) is timeless, fresh and still extremely popular:

The Federal Government has installed 5,337 of these signs across the Canada over the past few years to keep citizens informed about the strategies in place to cope with the recession:

B.C.'s signs were painted in the U.S., which caused a media furor. Transportation minister Shirley Bond defended the decision by explaining that "there is a competitive bidding process and sometimes we go outside Canada...that is part of the process of finding the best value for dollars."

Lastly, these yellow and brown Parks Canada signs make me extremely nostalgic for the 80's and summers of camping as a child:

AdHoles Blog has a great post about "Summer Fonts" here.

J.G. Ballard's Death of Affect

2010-06-24T05:33:00.000-07:00

British novelist J.G. Ballard wrote the postmodernist classic Crash and coined the phrase "Death of Affect".

'Affect' is a term used by psychiatrists to refer to emotion, as in 'being affected by something'.

Technological advances, Ballard theorized, return us to a kind of infantile mental state 'where any demand, any possibility, whether for lifestyle, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly'.

The convergence of "mass-merchandizing, advertising and politics conducted as a branch of advertising" has transformed our reality into that is based on signifiers, or representations of things instead of the actual people/places/things themselves.

More than a few scholars have claimed Ballard's entire body of work is a study of our inability to feel. In The Terminal Beach, his 1964 collection of short sci-fi, the title story deals with a man who can't get over the deaths of his wife and son and smuggles himself onto an island where nuclear tests are being carried out.

He encounters two visiting scientists who are on the island to conduct biological research. The exchange between Travern and one of the scientists neatly sums up where Ballard's concerns lie:

'"Doctor," he said, "Your laboratory is at the wrong end of this island."

Tartly Osborne replied: "I'm aware of that, Traven. There are rarer fish swimming in your head than in any submarine pen."

reStart, a 45-day detox program for Internet addicts, opened in Falls City, WA, last August. From their press release:

"The program employs a combination of mindfulness training and meetings based upon the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program, as well as nutritional education and adventure expeditions with the end goal being to help the patient re-establish connections to the real world."

The program costs $14,500 USD (plus fees) for the 45-day stay.

Dr. Oz has a much cheaper - although much less comprehensive - Digital Diet plan, which includes the following suggestion:

"Go Analog! Get out a paper calendar and jot down real-world activities and plans on it."

In a USA Today profile of 5 readers who attempted to overcome their technology dependencies, one participant put it this way:

"I text more than I talk. I'm almost afraid that sometimes I don't know how to communicate with people." She says her phone is not just smart, it's tantamount to her second brain

So it seems Ballard's Death of Affect is reaching new heights. Over at fourhourworkweek.com, author Tim Ferriss blogs about living on a "low information diet" and this post about Not-To-Do Lists is particularly helpful.

The most accessible, cheapest way to have a successful Internet detox? Go camping for a weekend.

Imagination as Salvation

2010-06-17T08:03:00.000-07:00

Imagination is salvation, the visionary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said. Creative thought saves us.

Aristotle, who has been credited with inventing the concept of imagination, used the Greek word “phantasma” (a term used by Plato to refer to reflections in mirrors or pools) to mean "[mental] image".

Aristotle describes phantasmata as being analogous to paintings or wax impressions (De Memoria 450a-b), and as “a residue of the actual [sense] impression” or “a movement resulting from an actual exercise of a power of senses". He believed linguistic meaning derived from imagery, spoken words as the symbols of our inner images.

From a non-philosophic point of view, Descartes believed the pineal gland in the center of the brain was somehow able directly to affect, and be affected by, the thoughts of the immaterial soul, as a result of the formation of optical images on the retinae of the eyes.

Notable work in this area was also done by Kant, Hobbes and Locke.

Let's skip ahead to to the 20th century. A group of psychologists working in Würzburg, Germany, come up with the imageless thought theory and cause a huge controversy that is never completely resolved.

The Würzburg group believed that thought should be understood in terms of language per se, and that it was a serious mistake ever to have believed that the representational power of language derives from some more fundamental form of representation, such as mental imagery.

In the 60's, Canadian psychologist Allan Paivio quietly worked on proving his Dual Coding (imagery code and verbal code) theory of the imagination.

He demonstrated quite incontrovertibly that subjects who follow explicit instructions to use simple imagery-based mnemonic techniques to memorize verbal material (typically lists of apparently random words, or word pairs) remember it very much better than subjects who do not use such technique.

Secondly, and somewhat more controversially, Paivio and others claim to have shown that imagery plays a large role in verbal memory even when the experimental subjects are not given explicit instructions to form imagery, and make no deliberate effort to do so.

More recent work has sought to explore the relationship between current conceptions of mental imagery and the more resonant, but more nebulous, notion of imagination (and related concepts such as insight and creativity) (White, 1990; Brann, 1991; Finke et al., 1992; Thomas, 1997a,b, 1999a,b, 2006; Kind, 2001; McGinn, 2004; Blain, 2006).

Perhaps the most ambitious claims in this regard are those of Arp (2005, 2008), who comes at the matter from the controversial perspective of evolutionary psychology.

Arp suggests that scenario visualization is unique to the human species, and is the crucial factor that has made our high-level creative problem-solving abilities possible. From this perspective, it is in large part thanks to our capacity to form and manipulate mental imagery that humankind has been able to out-compete rival species, and develop our complex cultures and technologies.

So whether Frank Lloyd Wright was talking about imagination as his spiritual or literal, physical salvation, he absolutely nailed it.

"Nobody Wants To Read Your Shit"

2010-05-18T06:57:00.000-07:00

The Most Important Writing Lesson I Ever Learned

By Steven Pressfield | Published: October 21, 2009

www.stevenpressfield.com

My first real job was in advertising. I worked as a copywriter for an agency called Benton & Bowles in New York City.

Advertising teaches its own lessons. For starters, everyone hates advertising. It’s evil, phony, it’s trying to sell us crap we don’t need. I can’t argue with any of that, except to observe that for a rookie wordsmith, such obstacles can be a supreme positive. Why? Because you have to sweat blood to overcome them - and in that grueling process, you learn your craft.

Here it is. Here’s the #1 lesson you learn working in advertising (and this has stuck with me, to my advantage, my whole working life):

Nobody wants to read your shit.

Let me repeat that. Nobody - not even your dog or your mother- has the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or Delco batteries or Preparation H.

Nor does anybody care about your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame chicken joint at Canal and Tchopotoulis.

It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.

Nobody wants to read your shit.

There’s a phenomenon in advertising called Client’s Disease. Every client is in love with his own product. The mistake he makes is believing that, because he loves it, everyone else will too.

They won’t. The market doesn’t know what you’re selling and doesn’t care. Your potential customers are so busy dealing with the rest of their lives, they haven’t got a spare second to give to your product/work of art/business, no matter how worthy or how much you love it.

What’s your answer to that?

1) Reduce your message to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form.

2) Make it fun. Or sexy or interesting or informative.

3) Apply that to all forms of writing or art or commerce.

When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer, must give him something worthy of his gift to you.

When you, the student writer, understand that nobody wants to read your shit, you develop empathy. You acquire that skill which is indispensable to all artists and entrepreneurs: the ability to switch back and forth in your imagination from your own point of view as writer/painter/seller to the point of view of your imagined reader/gallery-goer/customer. You learn to ask yourself with every sentence and every phrase: Is this interesting? Is this fun or challenging or inventive? Am I giving the reader enough? Is she bored? Is she following where I want to lead her?

When I began to write novels, this mindset proved indispensable. It steered me away from Client’s Disease. It warned me not to fall in love with my own shit just because it was my own shit. Don’t be lazy, Steve. Don’t assume. Look at every word through the eye of the busy, impatient, skeptical (but also generous and curious) reader. Give him something worthy of the time and attention he’s giving you.

The awareness that nobody wants to read/hear/see/buy what we’re writing/singing/filming/selling is the Plymouth Rock upon which all successful artists and entrepreneurs base their public communications. They know that, before all else, they must overcome this natural resistance in their audience. They must find a way to cut through the clutter.

By Steven Pressfield | Published: October 21, 2009 Visit: www.stevenpressfield.com

The Art of Typography

2010-05-06T13:21:00.000-07:00

Print is a "visual homogenizing of experience", declared Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, and he went on to argue that the printing press made it possible for democracy, nationalism and capitalism to develop. Print gives us a collective identity, as opposed to the fragmented, oral cultures of long ago.

Typography is not merely decorative but pivotal - especially in the electronic age - in how a reader perceives what they're reading. Type affects the reader's eye by creating a mood, by making words readable, coherent and visually satisfying.

In this post from his NYT blog, Canadian author Douglas Coupland talks about experimenting with type in his novels and proclaims his love for the font Helvetica. "It was designed to be 100-percent emotionally neutral," he writes. An indie documentary about the font was even made in 2007.

This WSJ article takes a fascinating look at the much-hated Comic Sans font and talks about a woman who broke up with her boyfriend in a typewritten letter using Comic Sans to soften the blow.

UK airports and tube stations use a font called New Johnston, a variant of the original commissioned by London Transport in 1913:

Let's come back to this in a moment. Can you spot what's wrong with the typefaces below?

As Designshack.co.uk points out, "there is a major disconnect between the visual personality of the font selections and the words written with them. You would almost never see the world’s leading ultimate fighting champion exclaimed in a pretty script font."

Consciously we don't think about the relationship between words and type but it does exist and is a powerful influence.

I perceive New Johnston (the tube sign font above) as sensible, clear and easy to follow - just like I want my experience with mass transportation to be. The font communicates reassurance.

Type is often called "visual poetry" because, like a poem, it is meant to convey a feeling.

Rob Pruitt's "101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself"

2010-04-28T07:24:00.000-07:00

This conceptual art installation currently lives in Venice at the Palazzo Grassi. It's exquisite to read.

Rob Pruitt is a New York artist also famous for his Cocaine Buffet installation.

1. Tell the truth.
2. Tell a lie.
3. Change your name.
4. Make someone happy!
5. Make someone cry.
6. Fake laugh.
7. Fake an orgasm.
8. Fake your death.
9. Get plastic surgery.
10. Put make-up on body parts. Ear shadow, belly blush.
11. Put make-up on your face.
12. Make a painting with make-up.
13. Stay in bed.
14. Draw on your bedsheets.
15. Make a baby.
16. Kill yourself.
17. Sell a collector a key to your house.
18. Customize your refrigerator with paint, decals and locate in a place other than your kitchen.
19. Customize storage boxes and display as sculpture.
20. Make a painting on a lampshade.
21. Vandalise your home with spray paint.
22. Graffiti your bathroom.
23. Use a magazine as a sketch book.
24. Spread rumors.
25. Draw something small, scan it, print it out big.
26. Turn your TV upside down.
27. Turn your TV on its side to watch while lying on your side.
28. Watch your TV without sound or listen to TV with the screen covered.
29. Watch a DVD in fast motion, slow motion or reverse.
30. Make a drawing by pressing pause and tracing the image off the TV screen.
31. Spend the day in a costume.
32. Sit on the toilet backwards.
33. Make a sound composition when you pee by alternating the flow between the porcelain and the water.
34. Do an interpretative to environmental sound. Baby crying, vaporetti, pigeon cooing.
35. Wear diapers.
36. Sprinkle glitter.
37. Take drugs.
38. Shoplift.
39. Sneak your own merchandise into stores.
40. Collect stuff.
41. Curate a Netflix or YouTube festival.
42. Make a mix tape.
43. Take audio snapshots with a digital recorder.
44. Arrange flowers in unexpected combinations. Baby's breath & spring onions; buds, blooms and withered blossoms.
45. Make a monochrome meal.
46. Dress in monochrome.
47. Live in a monochrome house.
48. Be a photographer without a camera. Download images from the internet.
49. Buy something expensive and put it on a pedestal. Return it for your money back. Repeat.
50. Make mud. 2 parts dirt, 1 part water. Use as paint or clay.
51. Make a leaf out of paper and tape it to a tree.
52. Make a tree and add it to a forest.
53. Pour a glass of water to look at.
54. Draw yourself into your favorite comic strip.
55. Put everything inside outside.
56. Bring everything outside inside.
57. Fill a desk drawer with gravel and make a secret Zen garden.
58. Make a drawing by holding a marker in a place other than your hand, wherever you can. Toes, mouth, underarm, butt cheeks.
59. Make a drawing by highlighting as you read.
60. Translate from one language to another.
61. Frame a picture with a feather boa.
62. Hang a painting crooked, sideways, or face to the wall.
63. Go on an urban animal safari. Pigeons, rats, squirrels, cockroaches.
64. Paparazzi your pet.
65. Interior decorate your pet's habitat.
66. Make a valuable sculpture by adding a diamond.
67. Put things on pedestals.
68. Take things off pedestals.
69. 2 identical things side by side.
70. 10 identical things in a row.
71. Something cut in half.
72. Put googly eyes on things.
73. Draw faces on styrofoam wig heads, lightbulbs and eggs.
74. Point a treadmill at a painting.
75. Name all of the bricks that make up a wall.
76. Make up drag queen names. Amber Alert, Whitney Biennal.
77. Make up band names.
78. Name your plants.
79. Name household pests. Bugs, mice.
80. Invent a new color and name it. Francois Pinot.
81. Take things apart.
82. Put things back together.
83. Toss loose change into a pile on the floor.
84. Make an aluminum foil death mask.
85. An electric fan wearing a t-shirt becomes an easy figurative sculpture.
86. Make a portrait of someone by printing their phone number poster size.
87. Make a portrait/self-portrait by captioning a mirror.
88. Frame your credit card statement. i.e., the month of your trip to Paris.
89. Stalk someone.
90. Collect autographs. One per canvas or page. Think of as portraits.
91. Make a photo album of all your worldly possessions.
92. Record yourself talking for fifteen minutes, let your consciousness stream.
93. Save and transcribe your voicemail. Publish your emails.
94. Make a collage on an unopened wine bottle for the year of its vintage.
95. Don't clean your house and call it scatter art.
96. Make a scent installation. A pine branch in a mircowave, pour a glass of cologne, fart.
97. Write captions on the glass for the view outside your window.
98. Write lyrics to a classical music composition.
100. Title untitled paintings.
101. Title your life.

Publishing Behind-the-Scenes: Typesetting a Manuscript

2010-04-02T07:18:00.000-07:00

Further to a blog I posted this week over at TNB about typesetting, here's a visual comparison of a story as it was submitted to me, then the same story after being edited and typeset.

Original Submission in MS Word (with editing notes):

After Being Edited & Typeset in QuarkXpress:

A typesetter makes text uniform by justifying paragraphs, controlling tracking (adjusting space between words/lines) and also by tweaking margins where necessary. Editing for clarity and style is where the main magic happens, but typesetting gives a text immediate legitimacy, before content is even processsed.

I recently edited, typeset and contributed to a new anthology of work:

Typesetting is a fairly obscure part of the manuscript production process. But it's indispensable and not going anywhere: even e-books will still need typesetting.

The Two Paths of Women Writers

2010-03-26T07:47:00.000-07:00

The Orange Prize for Fiction is one of the UK's most prestigious literary awards and goes to the best novel written by a female author of any nationality.

In an interview with the Guardian, this year's chair of the judging panel said, "...female authors appear to have suffered a collective sense of humour failure".

Daisy Goodwin went on to say that she could barely read through all of the submissions, calling them "grim" in tone and explaining that "a lot of books start with a rape...pleasure seems to have become a rather neglected element in publishing." She then goes on to accuse publishers of "lagging behind what the public want" (which is a different argument altogether).

Why is this?

Perhaps it's because women writers long for serious consideration. Our writing is still largely ghettoized in genres like Romance and (the horrendously named) Chick Lit. Not to knock these; many female writers have paid their mortgages with book profits from commercial categories. But they don't win prizes or the acclaim of critics.

A lot of us writing today are striving to produce work with literary merit. We want to create art. We think think it is possible and desirable to have both - critical and commercial success.

But the unisex truth is it's easier to write dark and emotional stories than to write humor. Being funny on the page is hard. Really hard.

Amanda Craig, one of the novelists longlisted for this year's Orange Prize, said: "There really is a sense that women writers have two paths – on the one hand, towards chicklit; on the other, the serious route. And if they take the latter, there's a feeling that they have to be extra serious in order to be treated with respect."

If women can balance work and home, surely we can balance light and dark in our writing. Goodwin raises a good point. No one wants to read through 200 pages of unadulterated tragedy. Life isn't all bleak, and our stories shouldn't be either.

The Responsibility of a Writer

2010-03-18T15:34:00.000-07:00

The fiction writer's responsibility is not only to engage the reader with effective story and characters but also leave him/her with a glimmer of hope.

Capturing the emotional complexity of life is paramount. If everything is doom and gloom, why do any of us get out of bed in the morning? Writers have a duty to include the moments of magic and beauty we all experience - however fleetingly - in addition to exploring the darker sides of human nature.

Canadian literary icon Margaret Atwood said the function of a fiction writer is to examine society in ways “through which we can see ourselves and the ways in which we behave towards each other”.

In an interview, writer David Foster Wallace put it this way:

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.

Sherwood Anderson and the "Poison Plot"

2010-03-11T11:23:00.000-08:00

Ohio-born writer Sherwood Anderson hung out with Gertrude Stein in Paris and shared an apartment with William Faulkner in New Orleans.

Though he isn't as widely read or as well-known as his contemporaries, the collection Winesburg, Ohio and his later short stories are today considered masterpieces of American short fiction. Some academics claim this collection "revolutionized the short story genre" in the U.S.

Anderson rejected what he called the "poison plot" and focused instead on interiority: isolation, sexual repression, and lack of spiritual fulfillment. Writing about craft in A Story-Teller's Story he said:

"There was a notion that ran through all storytelling in America, that stories must be built about a plot and that absurd Anglo-Saxon notion that they must point a moral, uplift the people, make better citizens, etc., What was wanted I thought was form, not plot, an altogether more elusive and difficult thing to come at."

Burton Rascoe described Anderson's technique as “selective, indefinite, and provocative, instead of inclusive, precise, and explanatory.”

Winesburg contains portraits of various inhabitants of the town. Anderson's style is frank and unadorned, a journalistic aesthetic later adopted by many American writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Literary critics attribute his excellence in smaller narratives to direct authorial address; a circular, not linear, narrative structure; plot subordinated to characterization; simple style and vocabulary; and images drawn from elemental aspects of nature.

Anderson died tragically of peritonitis while on board a ship bound for Panama, after having accidentally swallowed a three-inch toothpick garnishing olives in his martini. The toothpick perforated his colon.

5 Commonalities of E-books and Paperbacks

2010-03-05T02:50:00.000-08:00

Instead of framing this debate as an either/or proposition, let's see where the two formats overlap.

1. Both digital and printed books are soldiers in the battle to promote the written word. Mass audiences today overwhelmingly consume oral entertainment (TV/movies), which actually discourages critical thinking.

2. Time alone without distractions is still required.

3. Semantic processing - how a reader understands and remembers a story - occurs in the same fashion regardless of format.

4. Contemplation, reflection and self-examination are the desired result of each.

5. Elements are the enemy of both. Drop your e-reader in the bath and most likely it's kaput. Same with paperbacks or hardcovers.

As British novelist Nicholas Shakespeare has said, a writer shouldn't think of him/herself writing on paper or writing on a screen but on a human heart.

The Beautiful Toilet

2010-02-25T01:54:00.000-08:00

American poet Ezra Pound was a Fascist sympathizer tried for treason and a rabid Anti-Semite who spent twelve years in a mental hospital.

Creative writing students are still forced to consider at length the minimalist beauty of his:

IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.

And

THE BEAUTIFUL TOILET
Blue, blue is the grass about the river
And the willows have overfilled the close garden.
And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth,
White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door.
Slender, she puts forth a slender hand;

And she was a courtezan in the old days,
And she has married a sot,
Who now goes drunkenly out
And leaves her too much alone.

While his verse is undeniably powerful and skilled, there's more to it than that. Pound continues to be adored by academia because he didn't write about himself.

Other poets of his time were writing about their personal lives. But Pound forced himself to learn Confuciansim and Noh theater. In addition to poetry he wrote prose essays and basically brought Chinese poetry to America in translation.

He was ambitious, and this ambition is why academics love him. He is still considered one of the "most influential and innovative poets of the modernist period".

And in the best part of his craziness, he was convinced poetry would move civilization forward.

Pound died a semi-recluse in Venice in 1972.

Labov's 6 Basic Elements of Storytelling

2010-02-19T03:35:00.000-08:00

Classifying and delineating story patterns is a vast field of study, but one of the most influential theories was written in 1972 by sociolinguist William Labov. His research essay "The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax" isolates recurring narrative features in face-to-face storytelling:

1. Abstract - How does it begin?
2. Orientation - Who/what does it involve, and when/where?
3. Complicating Action - Then what happened?
4. Resolution - What finally happened?
5. Evaluation - So what?
6. Coda - What does it all mean?

Studying this structure helps us understand how people encode information about the world on a personal level. Much of it is applicable to narrative discourse, especially the short story, though not necessarily in this order.

"The more we understand the nature of narrative, the more we understand ourselves."

"Screen Life is Very Shallow"

2010-02-12T04:54:00.000-08:00

In a brilliant interview with Salon.com, embattled hip hop artist Gil Scott-Heron describes the effects of TV this way:

"What [TV] does is it keeps people from reading, and therefore from learning. Screen life is very shallow, and it speaks to the fact that most people don't want to know themselves, especially the dark parts. So they learn how to push these buttons in a certain order. But that's just your life becoming a video game, baby."

How shallow is screen life, exactly?

Television screens have red, blue and green pixels that flicker at a high rate when bombarded with fast-moving electrons. And the brain responds immediately to this radiant light by essentially "shutting down the mid-brain and neo-cortex" (higher regions).

You're not asleep, and you're not exactly awake, either. It's like being somewhere between a coma and a trance.

Studies have proven that, in the long run, too much activity in the lower brain leads to atrophy in the higher brain regions.

Digital entertainment allows us to escape from and avoid rather than contemplate, says Sven Birkerts in his book The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age:

A sense of the deep and natural connectedness of things is a function of vertical consciousness. Its apotheosis is what was once called wisdom. Wisdom: the knowing not of facts but of truths about human nature and the processes of life. (74)

Unlike texts, tweets and TV, books pull us back "from the onslaught" and help us distance ourselves "from the present as a way of reconnecting with a more elemental sense of who we are".

The Center for Screen-Time Awareness is a non-profit advocacy group that helps families reduce time spent watching TV and surfing the Net. They do this by organizing community events and distributing fact sheets about the links between sedentary lives and poor health. Their mission is to "encourage real experiences with real people in real time." They've recently joined forces with Barnes & Noble to promote their cause.

Turn off the TV this weekend and read.

"We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die"

2010-02-05T03:41:00.000-08:00

Italian novelist Umberto Eco claims that lists are the origin of culture. We want to make sense of the "incomprehensible infinite" and part of the way we try is through organizing thoughts/objects into lists.

Catalogs, museum collections, dictionaries, encyclopedias - humans have all kinds of practical lists. We do this, Eco explains, because we like to think things can go on and on. We have our "humiliating limit" - death - but lists don't. So they occupy us. Soothe us. Inspire us. Keep us going.

A surprisingly effective writing exercise we did in class recently involved making lists under broad headings such as Time, Shadows, and Interesting Sensations ("the sensation of saying a big word when you're unsure of its meaning"). These are taken from Suzanne Cleminshaw's clever, whimsical book "The Great Ideas", shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award in '99. Here's her list of Time:

A clock striking thirteen, the hour of the monkey, high noon in a Western town, Aztecs blowing conch shells at dawn, sundials and hourglasses, schoolroom clocks on hot June afternoons, tenses of verbs, the time it takes for a Chinese painter to draw a perfect cat in a single brush stroke, for a frog to snatch a fly, the time it takes for a hippo to lift its head from the water and check for danger.

Lists spark creativity. Here's two more fantastic headings from Cleminshaw - Glamourous Deaths and Enviable Animal Attributes. Go on, make your own.

A Trick for Overcoming Procrastination

2010-01-29T12:41:00.000-08:00

In a fantastic seminar today about creatives & motivation, Mark McGuinness explained how one of the best ways to overcome procrastination is not to try. Sounds counter-intuitive. But he says this type of thinking can "short-circuit" our tendency to put things off.

Instead of saying, I'm going to write (and then finding ten other things to do instead), we should say to ourselves, I'm NOT going to write, I'm just going look at my notes. And inevitably in looking at our notes we'll get drawn in and start writing.

Funny enough - I actually already do this with exercise. I tell myself, I don't have to go for a run, but I do have to get dressed and go outside. Which usually ends up in a run.

One of the women in the seminar said she quit smoking in a similar way. She told herself, You don't have to quit smoking. But you're NOT going to smoke today. And that day turned into two days which turned into ten years.

Once you get into work you love, it's easy. Getting into it is the hard part. This trick seems like a clever way to circumvent our inherent laziness.

Mark McGuinness is a creative coach and his free e-books are worth checking out.