I Tought I Taw…

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I’ll go out on a limb here: Twitter “tweets” are the Schrödinger’s cats of Internet phenomena. In general, they exist or do not exist as long as you ignore Twitter altogether; when you actively pay attention, though, each tweet instantly crystallizes into a state of aliveness (Whoa, How about that, Ha!, or Hmm…) or death — forgotten at once. (My own experience indicates that tweets, on average, have a half-life of about two-thirds of a second before the inevitable decay into memes, interstitials, youtubes, and other elementary particles.)

So I haven’t enthusiastically leapt aboard the USS Twitter yet. Life’s too ephemeral as it is, y’know? That said, I do like seeing what others get out of (and sometimes put into) it.

For example, there’s Jon, of the newly (to me) discovered Ransom Note Typography blog (subtitle: “Discontinue Use If Rash Develops”). In a late-December post, Jon exhaustively documents his favorite tweets from 2008. After a brief introduction describing his criteria for selection, he lays out his month-by-month catalog of several tweets per month.

Here’s a small sample:
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Impossibilities

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Let’s pretend you have never, but never (ridiculous, I know, but bear with me) wandered through the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog which I often mention here. Consequently, you don’t know anything about their structured interviews with (mostly) children’s-book illustrators and authors.

Maybe even further, even more basically, you don’t know that the blog’s title alludes to Lewis Carroll. (In which case, go here* and scroll down a bit.)

Imagine now that you’re an author or illustrator who doesn’t know any of that stuff, and you’ve been approached for a 7-Imp online interview. So when you run into the very first sentence of the request, you’re immediately baffled. Mind you, now, I’ve no idea how the first sentence actually reads, but let’s suppose the request opens something like this:

Dear You,

We would like to feature you in an upcoming interview for the Seven Impossible Things blog…

What runs through your head then?

Right. As it apparently ran through the great Ed Young’s head when invited to his recent interview there (#79!). Born in Tientsin, China, grown up in Shanghai, a survivor of the Japanese occupation in WW2, he is drawn to questions of philosophy. So his first response — even before Yes or No — is a simple question, but it comes out weighted with unintended significance:

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The Blogger as Essayist (and Lens)

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E.B. White, bemused to find himself hereReal post for the day imminent. In the meantime, I think this quotation deserves a post of its own:

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays. There are as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes or poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams. The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person — philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, enthusiast.

[…]

I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist, a much too self-conscious and self-serving form for their taste; they feel that it is presumptuous of a writer to assume that his little excursions or his small observations will interest the reader. There is some justice in their complaint. I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others.

That’s E.B. White, talking to me (and maybe you) across the decades — about blogging.

And if White’s not talking to you, maybe the inimitable xkcd is:

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Finding What’s Important, Holding onto It Once Found

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From whiskey river:

Nothing is ever lost. If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life. From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theatre, from nursery rhyme to symphony, from jungle compound to Kafka’s Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored, and used on some later day. To be a child of one’s time is to do all these things.

(Ray Bradbury, from Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Inside You)

Not from whiskey river:

Happiness

Why, Dot asks, stuck in the back
seat of her sister’s two-door, her freckled hand
feeling the roof for the right spot
to pull her wide self up onto her left,
the unarthritic, ankle — why
does her sister, coaching outside on her cane,
have to make her laugh so, she flops
back just as she was, though now
looking wistfully out through the restaurant
reflected in her back window, she seems bigger,
and couldn’t possibly mean we should go
ahead in without her, she’ll be all right, and so
when you finally place the pillow behind her back
and lift her right out into the sunshine,
all four of us are happy, none more
than she, who straightens the blossoms
on her blouse, says how nice it is to get out
once in a while, and then goes in to eat
with the greatest delicacy (oh
I could never finish all that) and aplomb
the complete roast beef dinner with apple crisp
and ice cream, just a small scoop.

(by Wesley McNair, from The Town of No and My Brother Running)

…and —  simply because Wesley McNair has landed in my mind, swooping in out of nowhere, and now I keep finding more of his stuff I love — this:

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Ira Glass’s Half-Hour “Master Class in Storytelling”

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I’ve never attended the annual Gel Conference in New York City, but I always know it’s being held. Afterwards, I always look forward to learning about the year’s events. (Actually, I look forward to that before the conference, too. But I tamp down that particular form of expectation because it makes me wish I were going!)

What is the Gel Conference? It’s one project of a company called Good Experience, which itself is an offshoot of a larger enterprise, Creative Good (founded by one Mark Hurst): “the world’s first user experience consulting firm.” For years, I’ve subscribed to Hurst’s weekly e-newsletter, also called Good Experience; nominally for computer- and other tech-type people, about how to improve a user’s experience of one’s software, Web site,  product labeling, and so on, Good Experience actually is a general pack rat’s dream. A given issue generally begins with a mini-essay by Hurst such as the one from 2004 which began:

I walked into a Williams-Sonoma store here in New York a few days ago to return a gift that someone had sent me via the Williams-Sonoma website. When I got to the counter, I explained that I wanted to return the item – I already own something similar and just wanted cash back.

The clerk behind the counter said, “Sorry, sir, but we don’t sell this item in the store. This is going to have to go back.”

“What do you mean, ‘go back’?” I asked.

“It has to go back to the catalog. We don’t sell that item in the store.”

I showed the clerk the purchase receipt. “This *is* Williams-Sonoma, right?”

“Right. But as I told you, there are some items that the catalog sells and we don’t sell. This has to go back to the catalog.”

(Read the whole thing here.)

As for the Gel Conference, its site sums up the annual mission:

Short for “Good Experience Live”, Gel is a conference, and community, exploring good experience in all its forms — in business, technology, art, society, and life.

Instead of focusing on just one thing (design, technology, user experience, business, etc.) like many conferences, Gel touches on many things. This challenges attendees to find, and learn from, the patterns that underlie good experience, even in disciplines vastly different from their own.

Quite a grab bag, in short.

In 2007 one of the Gel speakers was Ira Glass, host of the NPR (and later PBS) program called This American Life. Just a couple days ago, they posted a video of his talk, “one of the most popular Gel talks ever.” In it, he discusses — with many examples from the show — the elements of a good story. On the surface, he’s discussing good broadcast stories, but I believe he’s really talking about story in general.

Here’s the video; it’s over a half-hour long, so give yourself a good block of time to listen. (Just pretend you’ve got NPR turned on in the background — there’s no particular reason to watch this).

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Quote of the Day

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From S.J. Perelman, born on this day in 1904:

I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.

Ha!

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Paying Attention to Bits of Everyday Life

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Insignificant Detail, by Piotr Moszczenski (click for original and info)

When writing-related blogs ask their writing audience when, exactly, they “knew” they were writers, the answer most commonly offered is: I’ve always wanted to write.

Not so, in my case. Up until seventh grade, I had no such ambition, although teachers and family members had often complimented me on my writing. (I remember one grandmother — this was probably when I was around ten years old — chuckling in her grandmotherly way at something I’d said. Then she stopped for a moment, looked at me, and said, It’s not so much what you say, Johnny. It’s how you say it. Obviously, I never forgot that moment.)

In high school, one of the teachers I became friends with was Mr. Hanlon, who taught trig, physics, and calculus. He kept telling me I needed to consider a career in engineering.

No, I’d say, engineering didn’t interest me. I wanted to be a writer.

A look of almost-mock horror would flash across his face. “A writer?” he’d exclaim. “What about engineering?!?”

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Deciding to Stop; Deciding to Start Again

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From whiskey river:

I remember the word and forget the word
                   although the word
Hovers in flame around me.
Summer hovers in flame around me.
The overcast breaks like a bone above the Blue Ridge.
A loneliness west of solitude
Splinters into the landscape
                   uncomforting as Braille.

We are our final vocabulary,
                   and how we use it.
There is no secret contingency.
There’s only the rearrangement, the redescription
Of little and mortal things.
There’s only this single body, this tiny garment
Gathering the past against itself,
                   making it otherwise.

(Charles Wright, Negative Blue)

…and:
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Shucks, Folks. I’m Speechless.

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I’m a godawful blogger in at least one sense: I don’t do much to promote RAMH, other than to visit sites I like — visit them regularly, for the most part — and just let this site be discovered, if the reader should choose, by (a) following the link to it from the “JES” in comments elsewhere, or (b) wandering in, all unawares, probably as the result of a misguided left turn in the halls of Google.

(When I do provide an explicit link to a post here, it’s always with a cringe and a hurried look away, in the other direction — almost hoping no one catches me in the act.)

Like, what’s wrong with me? Don’t I know how important it is that I suck in not only the intentional but also the accidental audience? Don’t I want to [insert gigundo-scaled objective here] sooner rather than later?

Apparently not.

Thus, positive attention from any quarter at all feels wondrous to me. It’s like waking up on a sunny morning to find a rainbow arching through the sliding-glass patio door and terminating mid-forehead.

So anyhow, generous Kate over at What Kate Did Next has seen fit to pass to me and four others this… this… “baton,” is it, Kate? This emblem, in any case, of something called the Superior Scribbler Award, first begun by The Scholastic Scribe in a post back in October. Here’s the driving motivation for the award, per the Scribe:

Diverting the internal traffic between the Writer as Angel of Light and the Writer as Hustler is the scribbling child in a grown-up body, wondering if anyone is listening.

(by Herbert Gold, elder statesman of The Beat Generation)

“Scribbling child in a grown-up body”: I can’t think of a nicer compliment, irrespective of anyone’s listening or not.

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Man of Mystery

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Recognize the handsome guy at left? Neither did I.

Then I read Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to His Tell-Tale Stories, by Harry Lee Poe (a distant cousin of its subject). Turns out that this painting, by Samuel Stillman Osgood, was rendered in about 1845 — four years before EAP’s death.

Right: he had no mustache at all until the last year or so of his life.

More importantly for understanding him, he didn’t always look so troubled, so twisted up inside, so “Don’t talk to me — I’m ready to implode” as he did in the familiar pictures and daguerreotypes of his last years.

My review of the Illustrated Companion is (finally!) done, and posted at The Book Book blog.


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