Digital Fiction

I just came across a post on BoingBoing to some new digital fiction put together by Penguin. I'm excited about this for two reasons. First of all, each of the pieces (there are six in all) experiments with a different digital form. Second, a major publishing house is demonstrating interest in digital literature--great news for someone who's hoping to write, and write about, some digital lit himself one day. Aha: Dan's blogged this too.

(Crossposted from Professional Ed)

Great Moments in Criticism

Two zingers from the July 9 + 16 New Yorker:

Caplan is the sort of economist (are there others? there must be) who engages with the views of non-economists in the way a bulldozer would engage with a picket fence if a bulldozer could express glee.

Louis Menand, reviewing The Myth of the Rational Voter

At last [Michael Bay] has summoned the courage to admit that he has an exclusive crush on machines, and I congratulate him on creating, in "Transformers," his first truly honest work of art. Not that he needs my plaudits; as a passerby exclaims in the midst of the film, "This is easily a hundred times cooler than 'Armageddon'!" To be proud of your achievement is one thing, but to plant film critics inside your movie and review it favorably as you go along: that takes genius. Where it leaves, real critics--rusty old Concepticons, with failing firepower--I hate to think.

Anthony Lane, reviewing Transformers

New Year, New Faces

I'm working on a redesign of this site in my less-than-abundant free time. In the meanwhile, however, I finally got the gumption to do something I've been meaning to for a long time: an academic blog. It ain't much, but it will be home for my (putative) posts on academic subjects and (highly putative) future publications.

I'm drawing the line at publishing a CV for all the world to see, but I guess I will put some more details up there at some point about classes I've taken, papers I've worked on, etc. Maybe.

Also: what should I put in the footer over there? Maybe Anna can bake me some legalese.

Wedding poetry and the sands of time

Anna and I are working on picking out some poetry readings for our wedding ceremony. It's an incredibly fun thing to do, but also quite difficult. I find myself tempted to page through whole volumes looking for that impossible, perfect poem just around the corner. Clearly I need to write the damn thing myself.

But in the meanwhile, I also keep reaching toward the shelf for some book that I then realize is lost somewhere among the boxes and crates of multiple international moves. It could be in Tel Aviv, Princeton, or in a sweltering warehouse somewhere outside Washington. Or maybe I gave it away or tossed it accidentally in flustered moment during one of the nine moves I've made since 2002.

The task now--aside from composing a masterful hymeneal ode--is to dig those lost children out of the sands of time. I do have a very personal feeling about my books (the ones I like, that is, not the ones I resell on eBay). It pains me to think of them sitting out there somewhere unreachable, and perhaps unknowable. Now that we finally live in a home with room to move your elbows in, I'm really looking forward to reuniting my riches and treasures.

A new Aeneid

One of my old mentors is putting out a new translation of the Aeneid next week. There's a nice article on it in the Times with some good interview quotes. Taking classes with Bob Fagles was one of the best parts of Princeton, and it's really wonderful to see that he's completed this project. It's an incredible achievement, especially since Fagles has already done wonderful translations of The Iliad and the Odyssey. Just as I always hear Paul Muldoon's voice behind his verse, every line of Fagles' work is imbued with the mellifluous, slightly ethereal baritone that rolled across the seminars.

Fagles was my window into Homer's world during college. The Aeneid conjures up a different era--high school. Arduous line-by-line translations, flash cards, wooden desks, and the arid, brilliant wit of classicists...it will be fascinating to see how Fagles renders the Augustan epic, particularly since I have yet to read a really compelling English version of the poem.

Conferences are like airports

I just spent six hours at the Game Developers Conference, known universally as GDC. It's a behemoth of an event, with thousands of people, hundreds of companies, and many, many cups of coffee involved. Overhead signs direct traffic and milling crowds wander from one hangar-sized ballroom to another.

I'm doing a little reporting for GameSpot.com, a gaming news website that has an arrangement with some Stanford folks to cover a few of the vast panoply of panels, keynotes and talks taking place each day in the warren of fancy hotels that constitutes downtown San Jose.

It was a heady way to get back into the reporting gig, however temporarily. Not only was there a press room, replete with an army of orange t-shirt-clad personnel, but there were bona fide press badges. On lanyards. With little County Fair-style ribbons off the bottom with "press" printed on them, as if I were a prize chicken or a giant vegetable. There was a "reporter" in a gray felt hat. He looked about 17.

Anyway.

Here are the two pieces I wrote up yesterday:
GDC: Taking mobile games to the next level
GDC: Getting excited about serious games

Now it is time for bed. They start early.

Back home books

After a frenetic holiday season, it's good to be back in California. I'm sitting at my desk on the early side of 9 AM, again, because Anna's exam schedule is almost as much fun as her regular class schedule. So, it's just like old times around here, except I have no work to do for another week. Life is not bad.

---OK, it's not 9 AM anymore. Or even the same day. But I'll continue.---

I have to say I'm facing 2006 without any of the usual new year excitement--no resolutions, no marveling at the passing of the years (well, a little marveling), no sense of grand momentum as another sheaf of pages falls off the calendar. There's just a sense of calm, unusual in my case, and I'm enjoying a very mellow post-Christmas week of sloth. There has been time for The Blind Assassin, for The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and for X Out of Wonderland. A few words on each:

X Out of Wonderland is a book we discovered because one of Anna's professors invited his entire class to his home for a book signing--the author, David Allan Cates, is the professor's cousin. Curious to see what the San Francisco home of a famous legal scholar might look like (many books, but not as many as you might expect), we jumped at the chance. I ended up talking to Cates for a while at the party, and he's a really nice guy. It's always surprising to match up the personalities of books with their authors, and X is no exception: how did this sweet, gentle person create this dark, biting satire? As many have noted the book is a sort of free-market post-modern Candide, but it's also an extended prose poem. Oracular, oddball, outre, and a really fun read if you're up for some gently vicious satire of the global economy. As one irate reviewer on Amazon noted, it also reads a bit like an LSD trip, but not in a bad way. Think of Coleridge hopped up on something and set loose in Walmart.

I first heard about The Mysteries of Pittsburgh because of an article Michael Chabon wrote in the New York Review of Books where he talked about his early days as a writer. The essay got me really excited about writing, as many other things have in the past, so reading the actual book was a little bit like a sequel to the creative punch of Chabon's article. Specifically, Chabon described the too-high workbench and battered typewriter he used to tap out the first, striking paragraph of Mysteries, his first novel. The book has a really first-novel feel to it, especially if, like me, you're coming at it from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: the writing is too cute, at times, and if anything overflowing with the poetic moments that Chabon learns to marshal so effectively in his later work. Elements of Tender is the Night, Evelyn Waugh, and a bittersweet mix of young energy and pained irony combine to create dark, funny portrait of one summer in Pittsburgh.

Most recently, I read The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood. I've never read Atwood before, so this book was a fresh experience for me, though as with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh I found her writing to have a little too much descriptive poise, a little too much poetry in it as well. Maybe I was just not in a poetic mood as I toiled through the bitter winds of another New Jersey winter. I can't say that I really liked it, but it was a good book. The story centers on two sisters growing up through the 1920s and 1930s in a small Canadian city. Three narrative threads--a contemporary present, a historical recollection of childhood, and a fictional story within the novel--come together over the course of 500 pages of shadowy sadness and regret. So it's great if you're into that sort of thing. The novel-within-the-novel occasionally roves into a third-layer story, a pulp science fiction tale of scantily-clad damsels and human sacrifice, which provides a relaxing contrast to the equally heavy plod of the main dramatic plot. That isn't to say that the novel is predictable--the salient facts are revealed early on, but the mystery is in their unfolding, and there are some very powerful moments.

All of this makes me think I should really adopt a separate category for capsule reviews on this site, or put together some kind of "what I'm reading" list. Another item on the holiday to-do list that never got done: updating the site to match my new academic direction. Well, I guess I read books instead. Sorry, reader(s?).

Back from the town too tough to die

When Tombstone was first built, way out in the middle of nowhere, it was considered one of the most remote spots in the country. It took longer to travel from New York to Tombstone than from New York to San Francisco.

We went there last weekend for my first ever book signing event. And my second ever book signing event. It was a lot of fun, and everyone I met was really nice. Some of them were crazy, but all of them were nice. Anna estimates that 60% of the nation's crazy population was in town for the weekend, and I stand by her assessment.

You see, it was Helldorado Days, Tombstone's annual celebration of pistol-whipping, drunken-arguing, vigilante-mission-running, point-blank-gunfighting fun. In 1881 the Earps had a showdown with a bunch of cowboys, and the legend of Gunfight at the OK Corral was born.

124 years later, little has changed. You can still walk down dusty streets populated by guys wearing large hats, morning coats, bandoleers and many, many guns. Costumed ladies of the night, ladies of a certain age, and ladies who belly dance crowd the streets (these categories not being mutually exclusive). About every half an hour somebody reenacts the gunfight somewhere as crowds of onlookers gaze in amazement. Small persons wear cap guns and tiny cowboy outfits. There are bookstores with little card tables inside where authors sit and sign books.

That's all. I have no profound impressions to relay, and much reading to do. It was a great trip. Now I have to figure out whether I can make it back for Wyatt Earp Days.

#312,857

That is my book's current sales ranking in Amazon. I advise you to get it direct from Rio Nuevo/Treasure Chest Books here (or via the cover image to the left), but you can also get it from Amazon and other major retailers. Please feel free to write a review, email to a friend, or, heaven forfend, read the thing.
Thanks.

Stars in their courses

Last weekend Anna and I were in south-central Pennsylvania and so we visited Gettysburg. In preparation for the trip, I'd run down to the mid-Manhattan library to get a couple of good books on the battle (turns out there's a whole Dewey decimal number for the Battle of Gettysburg). Of course, neither of the books I'd wanted to check out, which were advertised as available, were anywhere to be found. But lurking among the coffee-table war art and middle school primers, I found a tattered little volume in gray called Stars in their Courses by a man named Shelby Foote. He was aptly described in the preface as coming from "a long line of Mississippians. He was born in 1916 in Greenville, Mississippi, and has had a consuming interest in the history of the Civil War since boyhood."
The book brought the battle to life for us (or to vivid death, more aptly). Gettysburg is an open space of rolling hills, green slopes and countless memorials. Driving through it on the "autotour", it's easy to miss the gravity of the place. Foote's book painted those 50,000 deaths in the rich, bloody tapestry they deserve. The prose roves gloriously between the Union and Confederate generals, as if Foote was drawling out hometown newspaper dispatches or telling the tale to some youngsters under a shady oak.
So I was touched to read that Shelby Foote passed away yesterday. The Times obituary said his voice was like "molasses over hominy", and related the facts of his storied 88 years.
It's strange to think about a man who found such poetry in the darkness and destruction of a country ripping itself apart. I've never read Foote's epic history The Civil War: A Narrative, but now I hope I can:

Responding to the observation that it took him five times as long to write the war as its participants took to fight it, Mr. Foote pointed out that "there were a good many more of them than there was of me." Inspired by the works of Tacitus, Thucydides, Gibbon and, more surprising, Marcel Proust, Mr. Foote's own specially prized writer for prose style, psychological insight and the sweep of his vision, he created a history as written by a novelist, with due bows to a line that included Tolstoy, Stendhal and Stephen Crane.

Ed Reads Books IV: A New Hope

So I recently finished another book by David Mitchell, British bard of the disjoint near future. I have to say Ghostwritten did not blow me away as much as Cloud Atlas did, but that's judging a first novel pretty harshly. The inverted way I'm reading his work fits well with his evolving style of interconnected narratives (and the title of this post, of course).

Ghostwritten was actually a much more pleasurable read because I had already taken in Mitchell's later work, so I knew where he was trying to go. The novel traces the lives of several characters with tangentially intersecting lives as they move through the oceans of time and space toward a dystopic near-armageddon. The sticky wicket is that the last sentence describes both novels with almost equal accuracy. The extent to which they share characters, places, and metaphors is striking, leading me to wonder how much rapport he intended to create between the works.

Apparently Mitchell's middle novel is limited to just one country and a more conventional tale, but the idea of another work fitting between these two in the author's mind is strange to me.

The bridges between Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas are easy to see, but not so easy to explain. In a sense, the earlier work is focused on mental ownership--mind-share doesn't quite do the idea justice, but what I mean is the ways in which we are beholden to others because they explain us to ourselves. The stories in Ghostwritten are close-quarters psychodramas, pitting one mind at a time against its own constructs and inhibitions, and then shifting focus to lock the reader into another mental sparring room. From that beginning, Cloud Atlas describes the greater exterior battle, the functioning of society as a whole when everyone operates on a given set of mental rules.

The results, at least in the two novels I've read so far, have the arresting beauty of atomic sunsets. Characters deceive themselves, promises are broken, worlds go mad. Overall, I think one of the reasons I can forgive Mitchell's occasional writerly excesses is the dramatic, reckless way he runs his literature into the ground. One gets the feeling that he's more trustworthy for it, somehow--a scientific explorer of narrative who's not afraid to string out his characters to their last thread...and then light the whole deal on fire.

Mitchell himself--not to take the fun out of dissecting the guy's brain solely from his books--in his own explanation (hooray for the Guardian!) for the source of Cloud Atlas, hardly hints at the darker recesses of his self-immolating creations. Or the fact that his characters reappear--a remarkable touch for a writer who's otherwise so daring with imagination. Obviously it's not because Mitchell couldn't think of new people.

I think these character recurrences lie at the heart of what makes the books tick, firstly because the idea in general lies at the heart of his interlinking narrative structure, and secondly because they keep bringing his worlds back from the edge of disaster. He must have reeled back Timothy Cavendish and the rest from Ghostwritten's near-apocalypse for a good reason if he was only going to send them through it again in round two. So in a way they counterbalance his millenarian tendencies.

At least, that's my theory. I should read that middle book.

Ed reads books, part 3

Ok, well, today it's not a book, it's the New Yorker. I should start by explaining how much Anna dislikes The New Yorker--somehow the combination of snooty prose, New Yorkishness and the relentless publication schedule turn her off. My parents subversively renewed my subscription, and for the past couple of months I've been keeping the thing in my bag to avoid domestic strife. But recently I've come to realize that Anna doesn't really hate the magazine all that much. Hi. My name is Ed, and I read the New Yorker.
This is last week's issue, from an article by ol' boy Princetonian John McPhee, in an article about the mail-order lobster business and a giant UPS "superhub" in Kentucky:

In a couple of million square feet of automation, a human voice giving directions is not easy to find, and we bushwhacked a good deal before coming upon someone like Jeff Savage, a manger of the small sort. After a crystal explanation that preprimaries decide which of three primaries are to follow them, preceding an advance to a Posisorter, which sets up the pucks and diverts packages to belts, he walked with us a considerable distance as if among the hedges of a maze and eventually came to a mezzanine edge where you could see far down and far up through a cavernous vista of the core of the hub. This was the Grand Canyon of UPS. On each of ten or fifteen levels, packages were moving in four compass directions at the rate of one mile in two and a half minutes on a representative sampling of the seventeen thousand high-speed conveyor belts. Pucks were pushing packages to the left, to the right, including lobsters that raced into cylindrical spaces and whirled in semicircles as if they were on an invertigo ride with an "aggressive thrill factor," in the language of amusement parks. In no other place could you absorb in one gaze the vast and laminated space where, in the language of UPS, "automated sortation takes place."

And, yes, it is snooty (not to mention dead-set on a political agenda which can grow tiresome no matter how laudable I think it is). But I almost always learn something from an issue (perhaps because I feel compulsively obligated to read the things nearly cover to cover--the real reason Anna dislikes my New Yorker habit).
But it also provides an outlet for this stuff, the five hundred word paragraphs that follow an idea through every bizarre refraction of author's fact-dazzled brain. Reading McPhee's article is like psychoanalyzing The Man Who Knew Too Much, but it's also fantastic. Who else would dare to describe this convoluted UPS shipping facility in such intrepid factual detail? Instead of just calling it "a maze of interconnecting conveyor belts and sorting areas," he first took the time to really look over the behemoth and then to explain the parts he understood to the rest of us. It's not that he pretends to map out every package's journey through the 17 miles of conveyors, but he maps out his own expedition through the jungle.
After writing about my reading for three days in a row, I'm beginning to wonder if I like the same things about every book. McPhee's bushwhacking and Tarzan's are both adventure stories in their way--the former's writerly grace makes a styrofoam box with a lobster in it as compelling a protagonist as Burroughs' jungle superman). I think some people read to sit in one place, to have a sensation of settling down into a story, but I crave momentum, progress, transformation. You'd think I would read fiction all the time. But for all my New Yorker compulsions, I hardly ever read the short stories.

Ed reads books, part 2

After reading The Book of Illusions, I picked up another tome that's been languishing on my shelf, this one a gift from Byron. That's right, it was time for Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar by Edgar Rice Burroughs (amazingly available online through Project Gutenberg). Burroughs loads up this fabulous paragraph early on:

To Tarzan of the Apes the expedition was in the nature of a holiday outing. His civilization was at best but an outward veneer which he gladly peeled off with his uncomfortable European clothes whenever any reasonable pretext presented itself. It was a woman's love which kept Tarzan even to the semblance of civilization--a condition for which familiarity had bred contempt. He hated the shams and the hypocrisies of it and with the clear vision of an unspoiled mind he had penetrated to the rotten core of the heart of the thing--the cowardly greed for peace and ease and the safe-guarding of property rights. That the fine things of life--art, music and literature--had thriven upon such enervating ideals he strenuously denied, insisting, rather, that they had endured in spite of civilization.

Now, this is a book that gets me going in another way. It's straight out of the heart of the jungle, as it were--the purple, swash-buckling prose that I loved to visit as a young reader. It's the spirit The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay recaptures, the sense of boundless possibility that infuses youth, the moral compass light enough to carry across foreign territories but steely enough to wield as a weapon against the forces of doom. As a reader, it's great to feel that way, to lapse into the four-color aura of a good adventure story.
I'll have to pick this idea up later, but my fascination with adventure stories is, I think, tied up somehow with the idea of epic for me (another fascination). I mean epic not only in terms of might and derring-do, but complete and self-encapsulated. A world on a platter, a full system of characters, right and wrong, purpose and conflict, all laid out on a nice arc, pulled taught like the bow of Odysseus. That's what I love about even the bad adventure writing, and especially the writing so exquisitely, fabulously bad it turns the wrongs into a form of genius. I am really enjoying my stay with Tarzan of the Apes.

Ed reads books, part 1

Recently, I was motivated to read Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions for three reasons. First, it's been on my shelf for about a year and Anna makes fun of me for all the books I own but don't read. Second, I am soon going to be a Lit graduate student. I understand reading is involved. Third, a friend from work forbade me to read it until I delved into some of Auster's earlier work. So I read it, and it reminded me of another "book" book, Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book. Why does reading about writing get such a rise out of me?

The Book of Illusions centers around a Vermont professor who loses his entire family to a plane crash. Initially, the novel manages to carry this heavy load of depression without weighing down the reader, mostly by leavening the protagonist's grief with the strange and wonderful tale of Hector Mann, a fictive Emmet Ray of silent comedy films. As the professor becomes more engrossed by his new line of research, the suffering gradually inverts until we're rooting on his happiness and it's Mann who makes us sad.

I was intrigued to learn that Auster spent time in France and has translated French writers, since this is one of the mourning projects the novel's protagonist throws himself into. Those sections of the book inspired an emotional cocktail of jealousy, excitement and purpose I often get when I read about writing (one favorite: Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book). It was strange to experience that sense of creative longing in the context of The Book of Illusions, however, because of the glass-eyed walls of depression Auster builds around his character. I found myself wondering if Auster had felt that way about his work, if he had experienced that same distance with the physical world he describes. Thinking about Auster thinking about writing brought me back to my own distance and my emotional undercurrents. Why I don't write as much as I'd like to--am I just happier now, too happy to write? But why does it still irk me?

There's something in the descriptions, the diary of production, that draws out my competitive side. It's strange, because after decades of thinking I would one day become a novelist I'm now beginning to think I might have more drive for non-fiction (I've certainly written a lot more fact than fiction or poetry). So I don't have the desire to write fiction, except when I read other people writing about writing fiction. I don't have what I can only imagine are Andrew Walsh's explosive attacks of composition, or the productive drive of the NaNoWriMo crowd. Yet here I am, raising hackles over someone else's fictive description of translating Chateaubriand.

Clearly I'm fooling myself. It's time to get off my ass and start writing again...or for the very first time. It's time to stop pretending that I know how to write fiction and somehow choose not to. It's time to practice. I'll just need to keep some real writers on my shelf to goad me on.

Bastards.

From the reading room

I read this book recently that I've been talking about irrepressibly to everyone. It's called Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, and it's the best work of new fiction I've read in a while.
The book is written in six interwoven sections moving forward through time from a British colonial travel diary all the way to a post-apocalyptic naturalist sci-fi story. The arrangement of the sections reminds me of a jewelry box my mother once had, where as you lifted the lid terraced layers rose up from within on a set of hinges. Uh, let me tell you why. You see, each section is interrupted halfway through by the next, until you reach the sixth and future-most section at the center of the book. Then we pick up each interrupted section where we left off, moving gradually back through time and concluding in the earliest time-frame, where we began.
It sounds gimmicky, but the effect is startling and marvelous. The sextet of stories is melancholy but also funny and sweet, a kind of parallel rumination on the ways we explain ourselves and the destruction (both ugly and beautiful) inherent in human nature. The sections flow into each other in a subtle, almost soothing way, creating a literary version of the book's framing metaphor, the Cloud Atlas Sextet composed by one of the main characters.
The story also addresses other themes warm to my heart, especially the way we embrace the corporate maxim that capitalism equals justice with all the deliberation and concern of a zombie army. Additional themes that warm my heart: hard-boiled young journalists, thrill-laden Pacific voyages, and North Korea. All in one book!
If you're going to read one book of imposing British fiction this year (and really, it's not imposing OR pompously British), read Cloud Atlas.

Blogs--are they literature?

Are blogs literature? Ever? I'm flying down to UVA in a couple of days, and I'm supposed to talk about something that thrills me, doctorally, and I find blogs pretty exciting.
I realized that, of course, defining literature is not so easy. But I decided that, for my purposes, it's partially the functional/non-functional definition (signs, manuals, and buttons are not literature, but useless words are), and partially the verbal transmission of personal experience (which, intriguingly, is a Google-void of a phrase).
So, are blogs literature? Perhaps, rarely, occasionally. I think there are writers out there who manage to put us in their lives as effectively as a novel or a play might. There are infinitely more blogs, like this one, that never really strive for anything so real, and fail the test. And then there's a whole world of people using blogs to inspire writing, to craft writing, to spark the brain and grease the keyboard.
In the end, I don't think the blog is so impressive as a genre (though there are some great possibilities for serial novels and half-real portraits out there), but as a catalyst for ideas and a motivator for writers.

A Royal Fuhrer

I wrote in Slate today about Prince Harry dressing up as a Nazi. I do feel bad for the foolish young man, but he does deserve to get lambasted in the press. Hopefully he'll grow up one day, and this will all be a tiny smirch on a long, strong record.
In metanews, Anna the live-in muse was integral to the title. Unlike the usual slew of invective, my mailbox was full of compliments for the royal pun. Here's my favorite:

Nice coverage, but that headline is nothing short of true inspiration. If he who would pun would pick a pocket, that headline makes you The Night Fox from Ocean's Twelve.

Sailing with hydrogen

For a limited time only, since PopSci.com tends to rotate things off their webpage, you can find an online version of my article on the Hydrogen-powered sailboat. I'll have the print version from the January issue up soon.

It's here

My book is finally up on Amazon. I am now a $9.71 name (plus free Super Saver Shipping if you buy three!). That's a nice feeling.
Ok. Time to finish this coffee and get my butt to work. I read a poem by a colleague recently about all the poems he hasn't written, how beautiful they are and how they transform the world with their subjunctive grace. I feel that way about my unwritten poems too, and also about this blog. Oh well. Anyway, buy John Brehm's book of poems--it's great.

Then buy mine later.

Goodbye, Colin

Another week, another International Papers. This time I followed the world's reaction to the passing of Colin Powell from the stage of global diplomacy. It's hard to imagine that four years ago people were talking about Powell for president. A very decent man ruined by politics.
Now, for those interested in the inside scoop on producing world-class journalistic product like International Papers...whatever, I'm telling you anyway. It sometimes takes an hour to find an appropriate topic. This time, Anna thought of Powell right off the bat, and it was perfect. She did offer to write it for me too, but I wasn't sure how Slate would feel about that. Anyway, here it is.
Powell Outage
The world bids farewell to the secretary of state.

Au Revoir, Arafat?

It was a crazy week, in part because of this. His status is still uncertain, but the Middle East is going to change a lot with his passing. I hope, anyway.
Au Revoir, Arafat? - Imagining a world without Yasser. By Ed Finn

The Case of the Menacing Moustache

You saw it here first: my fascination with Veerappan, the madcap Robin Hood smuggler of southern India has led to an International Papers article on his grisly end.
The Case of the Menacing Mustache
Indian police kill the country's most notorious criminal.
And he was in southern India. Not the Chambal region. Those were the Dacoits. Got it.

A novel marathon

It's been a day of fiddling with the Web and investigating various tools for fiddling further. I've patched up a few bits of this blog, though there's still a lot more work to be done. I was noodling around the Movable Type website, came across an Amazon book queue plugin that doesn't seem quite right (I secretly want everyone to know what films are in our Netflix queue, and then to write capsule reviews of them. Ok. It's not a secret anymore.)
But then, through the interesting blog of one "Blogoholic Eponymous," Brad Heintz, I came across this fascinating idea: A marathon for writers. The National Novel Writing Month website is encouraging people to sign up for a true endurance challenge: writing a fifty thousand word novel during the month of November. I don't usually go in for the bold, but that is bold. I like it.
As usual, I was supposed to spend the day writing, and instead spent it thinking about writing, reading about writing, and doing a liiitle bit of writing about writing.

International Papers

Turks at the Gates - Will the European Union allow Turkey to join? By Ed Finn
Today's pull-quote:

A columnist in the daily Zaman argued, "Winds of hate and anger from the wars that took place centuries ago are still blowing harshly." The piece also suggested Turkey's strong military could help the European Union, which "is always driven into a state of desperation and despair in any event, because it does not have a strong army."

International Papers

Bambang's Peaceful Victory - Indonesians elect their first president. By Ed Finn
Indonesia's first directly elected president comes in on a landslide.

International Papers

President of the World - Kerry's won the international vote, but can he win here? By Ed Finn

The article found a new angle on Bush's success at the Republican Convention: "[T]he unvarying encomiums eerily echoed those of the brainwashed soldiers about the sleeper agent in The Manchurian Candidate."

a large splodge of wonga

That phrase is the greatest gem in my recent International Papers: Grabbing Guinea - Did Mark Thatcher try to overthrow an African dictator? By Ed Finn
But you can also check it out for the rally racing, the weird school nicknames, and the part where the Glasgow Herald is mistakenly identified as the London Herald.

Mysterious Absence of Sparrow

Linked, somehow, to tumbling
rain clouds and the silence
of the phone, Sparrow’s absence
abides, like a distant jackhammer
or the angular, hirsute prophecies
of a well-trod living room rug.

It’s not that Sparrow isn’t
here that troubles, but
the inscrutable vector,
the urbane unknown
of his mid-Manhattan
meanderings.

Somewhere, there is Sparrow—
that is the problem, the intractable
query that has grid-locked
the innocent avenues of
my Friday afternoon.

autogoogle: low notes, high notes

A trombonist and trumpet player are practicing a duet--badly--somewhere nearby. Makes me nostalgic for my music days. I played trumpet for around 8 years, and piano for three. Since all of that happened before the Internet really took off, there's no Google trace of it like there would be today. Odd, to think that most kids growing up today will leave a trail of digital markers for everything they've done. Though I suppose a lot of things evaporate over time--how many web pages from the 1990's are still up now?
But my errant Google search did turn up an unexpected find: some kind of automated list of things I've written for Slate--I guess I could update it with everything else, and save myself the bother of maintaining a clips page. That is, if I bothered in the first place--good job there, Freelance Ed. Anyway, how weird.
Wow--this site is pretty cool. You can have it email you whenever an author you enjoy posts a new article online. Too bad you can't update the list with new articles--only the handful of sites that are scanned automatically. Well, it's still worth a thank you to Phil Gyford at Byliner.com. So thanks!

Poesy's Actuary

A story on CNN reports on a new study revealing the sad fact that poets die younger than all other writers. After pondering the morbid, obvious explanation, the article suggests another possibility:

There could also be a more benign explanation for poets' early demise, Kaufman said. "Poets produce twice as much of their lifetime output in their twenties as novelists do," he said.
So when a budding novelist dies young, few people may notice.
"A great novelist or nonfiction writer who dies at 28 may not have yet produced her or his magnum opus."

This throws an entirely new layer of complexity on the already contentious issue of where I should be devoting my literary energy. Obviously, the thing to do is get the poetry out early, and then move on to novels. Oh, and make sure your work will make you famous after you die.

my imaginary career

Julian Dibble, the writer who decided to see if he could earn more money trading goods from online games than he did freelancing, has completed his filing to the IRS. How did he do? About $47,000 for the year.

Like Dibbell, Castronova is a moderator of Terra Nova, a collaborative blog that covers issues surrounding virtual worlds, gaming and economies. In his Terra Nova posting Thursday, Castronova congratulated Dibbell for his efforts and pointed out that an annual salary of $47,000 is nothing to sneeze at. Indeed, he wrote, such a salary exceeds the national averages for dancers, museum curators and several other professions. Dibbell is somewhat humbled by that fact. "Look at the people I'm making more money than," he says. "Firefighters, drug counselors and teachers, for God's sake."

Hong Kong Hustle

Hong Kong Hustle - China crushes the territory's dreams for democracy. By Ed Finn