Fungible Convictions

My latest post is up at the Identity Theory editors blog, about the mental gamble it is to re-read a favorite book:

But re-reading other texts, even ones that provided the same feeling of accomplishment, can be a totally different, even crushing, experience.

I once tried to re-read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, the book that first got me to love literature. And I couldn’t get through the first chapter. I could hardly believe it. I thought the writing was awful, the characters flat, the premise almost silly.

And it hurt.

“The Risks of Re-Reading”–Identity Theory Editors’ Blog

“…and that is that health care is a moral issue.”

I spent a good deal of this weekend suddenly sad, and in trying to explain it to my wife, one of the things I lingered on was a dissatisfaction with how well I do things I know I should do.

The quote above is from Ted Kennedy’s memoir, written as he thinks back on his time spent in a Boston hospital convalescing from a broken back, when he realizes that the average person is an illness or accident away from utter ruin. I cite the quote because it exemplifies Kennedy’s ability to do what he should do. He sees a moral issue to address, and he therefore spends the next forty years addressing it.

Most of us though are like me. If we’re not lazy, then we’re at least in search of comfort to displace discomfort, driven not by a roaring fire but by warm gray coals, ones we stoke every so often, the kind of fuel that gets us through the day and the years but can’t power our souls to do all the things we should do.

It’s always troubled me. Most of us do just enough to get by, but why don’t I do more? Why is my capacity for personal comfort larger than my capacity for moral action? I have little to lose by working a bit harder, reading more books again, getting up early on a Saturday to volunteer, calling old friends more often. Why does that simple motivation fail me and most of us?

It’s a related issue that permeates Kennedy’s memoir, in the words of his father Joseph: you’re either going to live a serious and productive life, or you’re not, and if it’s the latter, know that I’ll love you all the same but I won’t have much time for you. Ted Kennedy had many opportunities to live a comfortable life but always ran up against his father’s—let’s face it—threat that if he’s not going to choose to face the harder things life has to offer, then he’s out of his father’s life.

Is that what it takes before people always do what they should do?

I’m making my way through Ted Kennedy’s memoir True Compass. As reviewers have said, it doesn’t break new ground, neither in Kennediana nor in memoir-writing. But what makes True Compass worthwhile is having the Kennedy family act as a thread for following major events of the 20th century.

For example, Ted’s sister Kathleen was a fine writer who authored many private essays, and Ted quotes an unpublished essay she wrote about life in London during WWII, when Londoners were preparing for German bombing campaigns. Her writing is funny, touching, and seemingly emotionally accurate—and is an illustration of Kennedys telling their story against the backdrop of big-h History.

You Ted fumbled with the black[out] curtain . . . to prevent the last ray of light from shining through. Within five minutes three air-raid wardens called to complain of great streaks of light shining through the window. . . . Jean sprained her ankle in falling downstairs. Joe returned from an exploring trip with a very swollen eye. No one believed his story of walking into a lamp post, until we read in the next morning’s paper, of hundreds bumping into trees, falling on the curb and being hit by autos. . . . Thus, now one hears [the] tap, tap, tap, not of machine guns, but of umbrellas and canes as Londoners feel their way homeward.

I’m reading Style: Towards Clarity and Grace, and for anyone who spends a lot of time writing and thinking about writing, it’s one of the best books on the subject—better than some of the standbys and better than newer books like Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.

But the book has some seriously flaws. Author Joseph M. Williams fails, for example, to follow through on a promised topic, as one Amazon reviewer points out:

The author states on page three that “English writers have responded to three influences on our language. Two are historical and one cultural.” The two historical influences are quickly dealt with, but the cultural influence is never clearly presented.

That’s a serious sin. I would have encouraged Williams to cut way back on the etymological discussion altogether so that he wouldn’t forget to mention explicity the cultural influence on the English language.

Nevertheless, the book is stellar. Williams thrives where other writers on writing have failed: in his examples. You read them and you immediately understand the concept. In his section on concision, he offers this:

Even when you arrange all [sentences' and paragraphs'] parts in all the right ways, they can still succumb to acute prolixity:

The point I want to make here is that we can see the American policy in regard to foreign countries as the State Department in Washington and the White House have put it together and made it public to the world has given material and moral support to too many foreign factions in other countries that have controlled power and have then had to give up the power to other factions that have defeated them.

That is,

Our foreign policy has backed too many losers.

Editing for concision is a skill honed over the course of a lifetime. Authors often don’t realize how few of their words are essential until their article or manuscript is in the hands of an editor with a strict wordcount. (Concision is a life-long skill, but authors don’t know that until they have an editor.) (Authors learn concision once they have an editor.) That life-long learning process accelerates with Style: Towards Clarity and Grace. It focuses less on rehashing the rules we learned in middle school English and more on why what works, works.

For anyone who wants to write a follow-up, know that Williams dismisses precision altogether. (In fact, he misuses precision when he writes that it has to do merely with battles over that/which, I/me, etc.) Precision in language means that two or more people understand the same word to mean the same thing. His neglecting precision—his neglecting almost everything to do with thoughtful language, an linguistic order of magnitude less than “sentence” and “paragraph”—holds the entire book back. Addressing precision could greatly improve a future version.

From Book reviews continue inevitable migration to web, via Harvard University Press:

“Some bloggers have pointed out that book reviews inevitably will migrate to the Web,” Brauchli said. “Reviews online are no doubt easier to find. Putting them online also shortens the distance between reading a review and buying a book, which surely is a good thing for authors and the book trade.”

While continuing to publish book reviews in other sections of the print edition, he told the critics the Washington Post would also develop a well-indexed Book World site online.

The article ignores or doesn’t realize the most important part of reviews’ migration to the web: actual discussion. Washington Post Book World, like other voice-of-God printed book reviews, ends with its own final period. Meanwhile, reviews online—whether those by newspapers posted with comment forms below them or on Amazon—let people thrash on their ideas, collectively, about any book, whether it’s brand new or centuries old.

It’s frustrating as some people mourn the loss of Book World and other Sunday book review inserts (I do too, don’t worry). Books got reviewed and discussed and promoted before newspapers, and they’ll get reviewed and discussed and promoted without newspapers. And while it’s arguable that no single review will ever match the elegance of one of the better stand-alone New York Review of Books pieces, collectively being able to find multiple reviews and compare them to one another—the excellent ones and the piddling ones—will lead readers to the best books. That, not necessarily Book World.

Though I can’t speak for the students taking advantage of the Independent Activities Period at MIT, it’s been a quiet week for everyone in the Comparative Media Studies department.

When things are slow, I turn to two profoundly dorky pastimes: picking out books from the library during lunch and working through programming or design tutorials.

These week I did both, and in one case they overlapped.

My all-time favorite musician is jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, so I stopped by the MIT music library (conveniently down the stairs from my office) and picked up the Thelonious Monk Reader, a well-curated collection of writings by critics, fans, and contemporaries. The book helped me track down some early photos I’d never seen of him:

So for the first tutorial, I used that photo in Photoshop to try some pop art stuff (warning that I’m not good with colors):

Then I practiced some of those same skills—namely, using the pen tool A LOT–some more. I took the Facebook profile picture of my wife’s friend Annemarie, who’s a huge Yankees fan, such a big fan that she work a Yankees jersey at a wedding reception, and put her in left field of Fenway Park with a Red Sox hat on (the hat was originally a Buffalo Bills hat):

It was fun to play with the texture of the Sox logo for that one, though you can see I had trouble with the cloning tool while trying to clean up the gray part of her hat—so now it looks like she was beat up and has a lump on the side of her forehead.

When I try tutorials, though the skills are good for work, I usually try to do something explicitly that can help my office too. So I attempted a “slow shutter effect” tutorial that used my office’s acronym. This came out good but showed why I need to bring my drawing tablet into the office because using the pen tool for lettering looks pretty rough:

Lastly there’s the glowing light painting effect, achieved by using the pen tool to outline a figure and then using a blurred stroke to make that outline glow. For this one I outlined the image of my wife in a moose hat. You heard me. Then I made it glow and placed it in a darkened photo of a river in Juneau. I also added some smoke:

And that about covers my slow day!

Favorite images

The wedding gets top billing of course. Lindsay and I still have to go through all our photos to choose prints, but this is still my A+ #1 favorite, the Nuptial Terrorist Fist Jab:

A close second was a photo from my final chemo session back in January:

The most emotional image of the year came from election night. Not Palin in front of slaughtered turkeys, not Jeremiah Wright at the lectern, not even Obama’s speeches—the image of a weeping Jesse Jackson will be my visual definition of the 2008 election:

Immediately after the election, there was a flood of photographs uploaded to the “Message for Obama” pool. This was tops:

Favorite songs (maybe only one or two actually written and released in 2008):

• “Book of Love” by the Magnetic Fields. Lindsay’s and my first dance.
• “The Well Below the Valley” and “Sí Bheag Sí Mhór” by Planxty. Both still haunting.
• “Wonder Worm” by Captain Sky. “Unidentified craaaaawling object!”
• “Young Folks” by Peter Bjorn and John. Tops from my drives to and from Tufts while listening to WERS.
• “Where Is My Love” by Lucinda Williams. One of the top five songwriters working today.
• “Cayman Islands” by Kings of Convenience. Must have felt amazing for them hearing the recorded version the first time. Just a lovely song.
• Anything by the Rev. J. M. Gates from the Anthology of American Folk Music
• “Terraplane Blues” by Robert Johnson. Oldest favorite.
• “Freddie’s Dead” by Curtis Mayfield. A superb song from Superfly, largely lost to history except that it was covered by, of all groups, the Derek Trucks Band.
• “II B.S.” by Charles Mingus. A favorite song every year until I die.

Favorite books:

1. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
2. The Best American Comics 2008
3. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
4. Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk
5. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
6. How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative by Allen Raymond
7. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind by Bruce Watson

Favorite poems:

• “Exxon” by Robert Wrigley
• “Here the Birds’ Journal Ends” by Mahmoud Darwish
• The O’s by Baron Wormser

Favorite moments, aside from my own wedding and the election:

• Commiserating with my wife on the side of the G.W. Parkway as we both got sick after my cousin’s wedding and needed my dad to pull over seven separate times. (Moral: stay away from homemade Romanian liquor.)
• Last year was all about my illness, and though this year featured the end of chemo, it was far more awesome to a) meet my chemo-twin Erica and to spend a long afternoon with her and her husband at the Gulu-Gulu Cafe in Lynn, to b) meet up with paraneoplastic-twin Scott on the Cape, and to c) have dinner with Marc Wein, who’s a sweetheart and presented on my case at a conference.
• Babies! Our friend Katie is ready to burst—the baby “dropped” last week—another friend had their first last month, Nancy (see post below) just announced her pregnancy, and our friends Nada and Alex welcomed the world’s prettiest catcher’s mitt back in January (I kid! She’s beautiful, especially now that she does parlor tricks):

  

Favorite new computer programs (absolutely new or just new to me):

• Twitter/Ping.fm/Brightkite: Twitter and its companions spread faster than lolcats, theinternetisseriousbusiness, and the aforementioned Palin turkey video combined.
• Vidalia and Tor: high-gear, well-maintained, indispensable tools for online privacy.
• FontExplorerX: saves a ton of time when I’m trying to find good typefaces to use, though I overwhelmed it when I installed about 15,000 of them.
• Evernote: replaced Delicious this year, because Evernote also saves entire webpages for offline viewing—not to mention saving images with my built-in iSight camera.

Favorite websites:

• General interest: BoingBoing, as always
• Prurient interest: The Daily Puppy and Cute Overload
• Politics: Talking Points Memo
• Tech: Schneier on Security
• Friends’: The Newtster Prepares Supper and Things
• Work: Center for Future Civic Media
• Design: I Love Typography
• Tutorials: PSDTUTS

Favorite quotes (all of them come from my cousin-in-law Colin, who’s currently recovering from serious surgery on his gut):

• Absolutely belted in a silent cathedral before his epistle reading at my wedding: “GOOD MORNING.”
• Yesterday in his hospital bed, to his mother. “The pain button isn’t working. You’re still here.”
• And to give his mother the last word. “His new girlfriend is nice. They’re always nice. And then they leave.”

Special thanks for helping make 2008 great go out to:

• My wife.
• My family and in-laws, but especially my dad for continuing to come to Boston to take me to doctor’s appointments, particularly the two sleep-deprived EEGs.
• Paddy, Jon, and Alan for a kick-ass bachelor-party weekend in Chicago.
• Sarah Wolozin, Henry Jenkins, William Urrichio, and Ellen Hume of MIT for hiring me for the best job I’ve ever had. And Geoffrey Long for aiding the transition into what had been his old job, and Generoso Fierro for being an incredible resource for understanding the inner-workings of MIT.
• [Snark]Tufts for not really understanding what I did so that I felt compelled to look for another job.[/Snark]
• And a very special thanks to Paul and Hope of the Half Shell restaurant, for feeding me so much food over the last five and a half years and for cracking me up a few months ago by showing me a picture of your new grandson and saying proudly “His name Demetrios! Is Greek name!”

And to all you readers, thanks for a great 2008. Keep in touch for 2009, and my best wishes to you and yours.

Design Hive Market:
http://www.designhivemarket.com/

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Pick up Neal Stephenson’s latest:

Generally enjoy the snow before the next blast tomorrow:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/17/henry-jenkinss-neil.html

Timothy Egan has my sympathies when he writes in today’s New York Times that “the idea that someone [Joe the Plumber] who stumbled into a sound bite can be published, and charge $24.95 for said words, makes so many real writers think the world is unfair.”

But throughout his article, he makes no mention of readers’ preferences—that is, consumer demand. He comes close when he writes this:

I know: publishers say they print garbage so that real literature, which seldom makes any money, can find its way into print. True, to a point. But some of them print garbage so they can buy more garbage.

But the real issue is that publishers print what sells. And bad writing by itself isn’t market poison. So long as people are willing to buy books, like the forthcoming Joe the Plumber autobiography, publishers will keep printing them.

Is the world unfair to good writers, as Egan argues? I don’t think so. There are so many good writers, those who, if we paid them the attention that they may very well deserve, we would probably die. We’ve all skipped meals and missed subway stops and lost sleep because of good writers. With only good writers to read, we’d be changed and challenged, radically, every day.

Thank god for a little drivel.