Everyday Life – Page 95

Books Beyond Books

December 8, 2010 by John 14 Comments

The whole e-books vs. traditional books debate spins crazily about one question: What is a book, anyhow?

Let’s pursue that question a step further: What is a reader?

Science-fiction (etc.) author Cory Doctorow tackles both questions in a very interesting project of his, called With a Little Help. It’s a self-published “book” — an anthology of short fiction — available in a dizzying variety of forms. For starters, he’s selling multiple physical editions of the anthology: paperback and hardcover print editions, and CDs of an audiobook version. He’s taken it a step further, though, by offering With a Little Help in multiple e-book formats (from plain text on up to EPUB, MOBI, and so on) and multiple audiobook formats (MP3, WAV, OGG)… and all the downloads are free.

He’s taking the free-digital-download release further:

The full text of all the stories in this collection is available as free downloads under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, meaning that you can copy them and make your own versions, but you can’t make money off them and you have to let others remix your creations. The audiobooks are likewise available as free downloads on the same terms.

I myself am not interested in remixing anything, but I thought you’d enjoy this story, “The Right Book” (read by Neil Gaiman). If you’d like to read along, the text is here (opens in new window/tab). It’s a tale reaching 150 years into the future, giving us a peek into not just how books (or “books”) might be sold, but how the readers (or “readers”) of books may change as well.

[Click Play button to begin listening. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 17:54 long.]

[audio:03-The_Right_Book_-_Cory_Doctorow_-_With_a_Little_Help.mp3|titles=’The Right Book’|artists=Cory Doctorow (reading: Neil Gaiman)]

The (Mostly Bogus?) War Between Men and Women

December 4, 2010 by John 29 Comments

From Seems to Fit, Chapter 23(ish):

Bonnie loved her own laugh. Or rather, she loved that George and other men loved it, that spontaneous eruption of trills and musical bubbles which erupted from her throat and open mouth when something struck her as especially funny — especially when the something wasn’t meant to be funny. She loved the way it made men’s heads swivel in a restaurant or crowded train, looking for the source of sudden brooksound. This laugh always caught even her by surprise, the first blurt and the ripple of voice and breath which followed quickly on its heels: it felt like a rabble of schoolkids at recess, chasing after and tumbling over one another.

But she also knew the trouble which could follow when that laugh emerged at a moment not funny at all to those around her, to men especially, no matter how deeply ridiculous the moment (and the seriousness with which men regarded it) might be.

How different are men and women? And what, exactly — even approximately — takes place at the vertices where they bump into one another?

I’m not talking physical vertices, of course. (This isn’t that sort of blog.) It’s like… Well, a couple years ago I devoted a blog post to the importance of edges: those (sometimes invisible) lines where two disparate things meet. In simplest geometric terms, an edge occurs where one two-dimensional plane intersects another. (In order to intersect at all, the two planes must “differ” in at least one respect: their angles in space.)

But all kinds of things scrape up against all kinds of other things. The taste of one cupcake ingredient juxtaposed with another. The sound of a musical note against a silence. Countries. Cultures. Ideas.

Are you familiar with the word frotteur? It comes from the French word frottage, rubbing, and is a term applied to someone who derives physical — often sexual — pleasure from rubbing against someone else. While the pleasure isn’t physical (I’m not that far gone), I sometimes think of myself as a frotteur of ideas and facts.

So what the heck is it, exactly, that happens in that narrow, narrow, quark-wide little gap where men and women intersect? Is it a “war”? Is it even friction? Is it even confusion?

(In what follows, please understand that I’m certainly not ignorant of extreme cases — relationships of brutal violence, physical or otherwise, or weird power trips and perversions. I’m just not talking of them for now. I’m talking of “normal” relationships — whatever the hell that means.)

[Read more…]

Another Looney Tunes Stereotype Bites the Dust

December 3, 2010 by John 7 Comments

So I just got back from having this test done. It wasn’t a big deal but it held a certain academic interest for me: it was an echocardiogram. Not electro-. Echo-.

Say what?

As the, um, echocardiogrammatical technician (or whatever her title is) led me to the room where the test would be performed, I asked, “So is this like an MRI or something? Or an EKG?”

She didn’t answer that question directly; she just told me what it was. “It’s an ultrasound. Like pregnant women and babies?”

But I wasn’t, uh—

“No.” She smiled. “You’re not pregnant. This is an ultrasound of the four chambers of your heart and a couple of blood vessels in your neck.”

In the examining room, she had me take off my shirt and lie flat on the bed/examining table/whatever they call that thing. She did the gel thing which you see them on TV doing (yes) to pregnant women’s swollen bellies, only to my chest and neck, and then she rolled me on my side and held a wand to the gelled spots, one at a time, for a few minutes each.

I couldn’t see the monitor of the machine from where I lay, so I don’t know if it showed an image of what lay inside. But I do know it had a speaker.

You know how in old Tex Avery (and other) cartoons, when a guy (I think often a wolf, literally) sees a woman he thinks is hot stuff, and his eyes bulge out of his head, and he howls and sometimes says something like Hubba-hubba!, and this heart-shaped protrusion pushes rhythmically in and out of his chest? You know the sound? Right: ba-BOOM… ba-BOOM… ba-BOOM…

For real? What the human heart actually sounds like is, well, say you got a tiny microphone, and you inserted it into a convenient orifice or cavity in the surface of a live snail, and you put the snail on the ground with a wire leading to a powerful stereo speaker, and you touched the snail — gently, repeatedly — with the sole of your foot. That’s what the human heart sounds like:

squ-WISH… SQUOORT… squ-WISH… SQUOORT…

Just in case any of you were wondering.

“What If You Get a Question Wrong?”

December 3, 2010 by John 15 Comments

[Image: detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch
(click image for a much larger view of the whole triptych)]

From whiskey river:

You Learn

You learn.
After a while you learn the subtle difference
between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
and you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
and company doesn’t mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
and presents aren’t promises,
and you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes open
with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
and you learn to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn
that even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul,
instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure.
That you really are strong.
And you really do have worth.
And you learn. And learn.
With every good-bye you learn.

(Jorge Luis Borges)

…and:

This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.

To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers.

(Terry Tempest Williams [source])

[Read more…]

What You Find in the Cracks

November 26, 2010 by John 10 Comments

[For information about the above image(s), see the note at the bottom of this post.]

From whiskey river:

from Late Gazing, Looking for an Omen as the Sun Goes
I.
The window’s dark. Roll back the curtain’s waves.
What’s to be done about sunsets?
Climb up and stand in some high place,
lusting for a little more twilight.

(Yuan Mei [source])

…and:

Anyone can see that if grasping and aversion were with us all day and night without ceasing, who could ever stand them? Under that condition, living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness, and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us. We have periods of rest making us refreshed, alive, well. Why don’t we feel thankful for this everyday Nirvana?

We already know how to let go — we do it every night when we go to sleep, and that letting go, like a good night’s sleep, is delicious. Opening in this way, we can live in the reality of our wholeness. A little letting go brings us a little peace, a greater letting go brings us a greater peace. Entering the gateless gate, we begin to treasure the moments of wholeness. We begin to trust the natural rhythm of the world, just as we trust our own sleep and how our own breath breathes itself.

(Jack Kornfield)

[Read more…]

“I’m Everywhere! I’m Everywhere!”

November 23, 2010 by John 23 Comments

“Why do you watch this stuff?”

That was baffled I, speaking to The Missus. She was telling me about a reality-TV show she’s become obsessed with fascinated by, called Hoarders. If you don’t know the show, here’s the opening paragraph of the current “About” page at the official site:

Each episode of this groundbreaking series follows two different people whose inability to let go of their belongings is so out of control that they are on the verge of personal disaster. In season three of HOARDERS™, the stakes couldn’t be higher as the people profiled are faced with life-changing consequences including eviction, divorce, demolition of their homes, jail time, loss of their children, and even death.

(I can’t bring myself to include a video clip here, but if you poke about on that site you’ll have a pretty good idea what it’s like.)

The reason for the obsession fascination, explained the love of my life, is that she believes us to be hoarders, and hence almost certainly — unless we take drastic action! — doomed to trip down the same cluttered, tragicomic path as those featured on the program. The appeal lies in the cautionary tale, not in mere voyeurism.

(I myself am not so sure. Our stuff doesn’t lie thick on the floor, after all. On only one small room’s door could you fairly hang a sign labeled Et Cetera. And I’d guess, without a formal inventory, that 95% of all the — limited — clutter is more than fifteen years old. We’re not accumulating new stuff. We’re hanging onto scraps of our pasts. Or maybe hoarding begins in this sort of rationalization?)

[Read more…]

Hanging in the Sky

November 19, 2010 by John 1 Comment

[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

This is the Dream

This is the dream we carry through the world
that something fantastic will happen
that it has to happen
that time will open by itself
that doors shall open by themselves
that the heart will find itself open
that mountain springs will jump up
that the dream will open by itself
that we one early morning
will slip into a harbor
that we have never known.

(Olav H. Hauge, translated by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin, from The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems)

…and:

Wonder begins with the element of surprise. The now almost obsolete word “wonderstruck” suggests that wonder breaks into consciousness with a dramatic suddenness that produces amazement or astonishment. Because of the suddenness with which it appears, wonder reduces us momentarily to silence. We associate gaping, breathlessness, bewilderment, and even stupor with wonder, because it jolts us out of the world of common sense in which our language is at home. The language and categories we customarily use to deal with experience are inadequate to the encounter, and hence we are initially immobilized and dumbfounded. We are silent before some new dimension of meaning which is being revealed.

(Sam Keen, from Apology for Wonder)

…and (italicized portion):

You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world. At this moment, you are breathing some of the same molecules once breathed by Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, or Colette. Inhale deeply. Think of The Tempest. Air works the bellows of our lungs, and it powers our cells. We say “light as air,” but there is nothing lightweight about our atmosphere, which weighs 5,000 trillion tons. Only a clench as stubborn as gravity’s could hold it to the earth; otherwise it would simply float away and seep into the cornerless expanse of space.

(Diane Ackerman, from A Natural History of the Senses)

[Read more…]

Paying Attention to the “Take Her Hand!” Moments

November 17, 2010 by John 14 Comments

[Video: scene from David Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway. Soundtrack: Lou Reed’s interpretation of “This Magic Moment”]

Almost every writer of stories, I bet, has had at least one “Take her hand!” moment. Here’s why I call them that:

Over twenty years ago, I was working on a longish short story called “Sing, Sing, Sing.” (I’ve written about this story numerous times here.) In general, the plot revolves around the efforts of a young boy named Matty to get into a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, in 1938… without a ticket. In writing the story, I had to deal with challenges like these:

Why would eleven-year-old Matty — any eleven-year-old — be so eager to do this?
Given that Matty lived a certain number of miles from New York, how would he have even gotten there in the first place? How long would it take him — and thus, by what time would he have to leave his house?
What was the weather like in New York on that evening in January, 1938? Would Matty have to be dressed for cold temperatures? for wet? or for unseasonable weather?

But I hadn’t foreseen one complication.

There came a critical moment in the story’s action, bracketed by (a) the events which brought Matty to Carnegie Hall in the first place and (b) Matty’s experience of the concert itself: the precise moment when he moved from the street into the hall. Oh, I considered all sorts of wacky scenarios — all of which fell apart under the harsh glare of plausibility and actual facts. Especially, in the latter case, I had to accept the fact that the ticket-takers weren’t mere uniformed employees of Carnegie Hall, who might or might not be 100% on the ball: they were police, and they were checking every ticket.

So I’m writing the scene, and I’ve got Matty navigating his way through the pushing-and-shoving crowd at the doors, and there’s all kinds of traffic noise and shouting, and Matty seems as confused by all the ruckus and foofaraw as the author himself.

And then something curious happened, something very curious:

Matty’s eye was caught by a little girl and her father, approaching an elderly policeman at one of the entrance doors. Suppose he could somehow insinuate himself into the father-daughter group… But how would he do that, convincingly, without getting caught by the policeman? Meanwhile the man and his little girl were getting closer and closer to the doorway…

…and I thought, as loudly as I could:

Take her hand, damn it! Take her hand!

And as I watched, Matty reached out and clasped the little girl’s trailing hand. The cop looked down benignly at the little motherless family, smiled, glanced at the tickets in the father’s hand, and waved them through. He even tousled Matty’s hair a bit as he passed. (The girl was a little freaked out, but it took her a few lucky moments to protest.)

[Read more…]

What You Think, What You Know, What You Can and Can’t Have

November 12, 2010 by John 12 Comments

[Longer trailer for The NeverEnding Story (1981); you can see the whole film on YouTube, if you’d like, broken up into nine or ten parts]

From whiskey river:

I see human beings as a self-regulating system that wants us to discover our own nature. Our imagination, our deep mind, so to speak, wants to help us to do this. In part, that’s why it gives us the thoughts and feelings and associations it does. That’s why we dream what we dream and “think up” the imagery that comes to us. When we take all of this seriously, when we use it, that is, and are willing to risk releasing our tight grip on ourselves by writing what we don’t yet know, to paraphrase Paul Klee, we demonstrate to our own imagination that we can be trusted with its gifts. Of course, our imagination likes this. It says, “Hey. She’s serious. Let’s give her more.”

But when we turn our back on this powerful inclination toward completion, we risk losing contact with the gift-giving nature of the imagination. We risk damaging the relationship we’ve developed. Think of it as a relationship to “the muse,” if you will. As the poet Stuart Perkoff wrote in regard to abusing the gifts of the muse, “Be careful. It’s hers. She’ll take it back.”

(Peter Levitt, ZinkZine, Fall 2003 [source])

…and:

It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. [*] A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.

(Carl Jung [source])

[Read more…]

All in Good Time

November 5, 2010 by John 5 Comments

[A favorite minute from Citizen Kane. See the note at the end of this post.]

From whiskey river:

To Waiting

You spend so much of your time
expecting to become
someone else
always someone
who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been
met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you

meanwhile in your life
you hardly notice
the world around you
lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent
on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself

with whom as you
recall you were
never happy
to be left alone for long

(W. S. Merwin, from Present Company [source])

…and:

We’re here, there, not here, not there, swirling like specks of dust, claiming for ourselves the rights of the universe. Being important, being nothing, being caught in lives of our own making that we never wanted. Breaking out, trying again, wondering why the past comes with us, wondering how to talk about the past at all.

(Jeanette Winterson. from Lighthousekeeping [source])

[Read more…]