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Thursday

04Feb2010

The House of Mirth or "Real Housewives of Victorian-Era New York"

Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 7:20PM

Just finished listening to a librivox.org reading of Edith Wharton's House of Mirth. Considered on of the first novels of manners, Mirth charts the course of a woman, Lily Bart, as she falls from a comfortable position in New York society.

Read by a single reader (sort of a rarity within the crowd-sourcing melieu that is librivox), Mirth had me completely wrapped up.

How wrapped up? Wrapped up like driving in the car with with this expression on my face.

What Wharton managed to do was tell a story in which no one does a thing to harm any one else but the landscape is littered with corpses anyway. This is due, in no small part, to the kind of inside knowledge of "polite society" that she enjoyed. Writing from the inside, she delivers observation and commentary in perfect measure, never once succombing to the urge to editorialize. We see Wharton's characters as they would see each other.

Altogether, an amazing read and a great way to start off the reading/listening year. I'd used librivox to listen to another Wharton books -- The Age of Innocence -- and while it felt a little more like a Gilded Age melodrama, Wharton's ear for dialogue and the secret conversations hiding in plain sight made it a great story as well.

Someday, when I get to go back to college, I would love to do some work that examined the dystopian side of the American dream. It would involve a critical reading of Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Drieser and Edith Wharton to see what similarities existed between their three worldviews.

Specifically, it would delve into the psychology of the striver -- the individual who wants to advance him- or herself within a social contruct -- and how "Old Money" responded to the striver during the period between the end of the Civil War and the First World War. There's something facinating to me in the way literature documented how Money responded to the rising middle class during this time. Further, that set of assumptions and behaviors seems to have direct analogues in the ways that we (Americans) treat and view the rest of the world as power (geopolitical, financial) shifts from our hands into those of "upstarts" like China, India and Malaysia.

Whether my dissertation ever sees the light of day, House of Mirth is a hell of a story and easily deserves its vaunted position as one of America's "important" books. Too bad there aren't books groups out there that reconsider old works instead of muddling about with crap like The Westfalian Cheese Ladies' Literature and Harmony Club Explains It All to You Over Cups of Tea in Urkutsk.

Thanks for reading.

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Books

Saturday

30Jan2010

First thoughts, uninformed by fact, on Apple's iPad

Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 7:14PM

Like the rest of you, I waited with bated breath for news of Apple's newest magical mystery device. And Tuesday's announcement did not disappoint. As his events typically do, Jobs' intro of the iPad gave us a polished whirlwind tour of the new device, focusing on the object itself and its world of possibilities. The general consumer press and Wall Street love this stuff.

I'm hardly as jaded as much of the blogosphere by Jobs' One More Thing Wonderstuff Revivals. But Tuesday's keynote left as much unanswered for me as it whetted my appetite to actually see one of these things and rub its aluminum & aresenic-free glassiness against my cheek.

Here are a couple of thoughts and questions about what the iPad will and won't do for us when it actually hits the streets a little fewer than 60 days from today.

File systems and exchange - We've been promised iPad versions of Apple's lickable iWork productivity apps, including Pages (word processing) and Keynote (presentation building and presenting). What we didn't see was how documents created on the iPad will sync with desk top machines and laptops.

So I draft a Keynote at the office and have a flight to Walla Walla that evening. The iPad promises editing capabilities on that Keynote along with the ability to present from the machine. What will I do with that file when I get back to the office? EMail it? iChat it? Or will Cupertino give us a better way to share those files within our own personal area network? Which leads me to...

Proximity-based syncing and sharing - outside of Apple's iPhone native apps which sync seamlessly with their desktop counterparts (iTunes/iTunes, Photos/iPhoto, Calendar/iCal, Contacts/Addressbook), apps that create new content (recording apps specifically) require a desktop sync application that allows the new content to be moved from the iPhone's file system to that of the lap/desktop machine. What I'd like to be able to do is know that pix that I shoot on my iPhone will sync with BOTH my laptop and iPad without my having to tell it to.

In order for this to happen, an application like iSync will have to evolve yet again to provide easily configurable directional syncing. Too, as users, we'll have to start thinking differently about "where" we put our self-created content and how we might want to be able to access it.

An incredible consumption device, but how much of a creation device? So take word processing - Will it be handled by an app? (Yes. Pages). But what about people who use Word, OpenOffice, TextEdit and the trillion other ways to capture text and display it on a page? Will Microsoft deliver Word for iPad that allows .docs to be opened, edited and saved? Or would we look to something more cloud-based like Google Apps to provide a web-based application that allows me to write in a Google doc.

And if this is the fix, what will my capabilities be when my entry-level WiFi-only iPad is running outside of a network? How will I access cloud-stored documents?

In my little digital Nirvana, both the stuff that I create and the stuff that I own is available all the time, everywhere, regardless of the device I happen to be using. My iTunes plays anywhere, anytime on either my iPhone, iPad or MacBook. And it wouldn't care if I lived in a mixed ecosystem (Windows machine at work, iPad in my backpack and a Blackberry Storm in my pocket). The copy that I drafted on my laptop machine at work would be available to me to edit on my iPad at home or, if I were in a pinch, on my iPhone.

Based on what the keynote told us, the iPad occupies a very legitimate ground between the desktop and the pocket. But in order for it to become the magical device Apple envisions it to be, we'll have to learn more about how it will live in harmony with my other two platforms.

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Don't Be a Lying Asshat On-Line - My Personal Ethics Statement

Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 12:11PM

I think Walt Mossberg and the crew over at www.allthingsd.com have done a great job in outlining their individual ethics policies. In addition to laying out the ground rules by which he and his colleagues live, the policies make for a refreshing read. It's an interesting exercise to go through for anyone who makes things and shares them on line, in books or over the air in that it forces you to think hard about what you will and won't allow in your content, as well as how you view the issues of content ownership and attribution.

So snowed in on a sleepy Saturday, I've drafted my disclosure statement. It's the promises and premises I make to the six people who read my blog.

I am a copywriter by day, employed by Griffin Technology. In addition to being bound by a mutual NDA signed with that company, I also operate under my company's shared policy on social media which says, to paraphrase:

don't share private stuff (defined here as just about anything I see, hear, create or do related to Griffin)
don't say libelous or slanderous stuff
be clear in the fact that the things you say and post outside the company do not in any way represent the opinions and views of Griffin Technology
don't be an asshat on-line.

When I do talk about Griffin products or those of our competitors, I will try and make clear the fact that my opinions are mine.

I moderate comments only to ensure that discourse remains civil. This here is a respectable establishment. We'll have no name-calling, hate speech, or flinging of mud, poo or other gross brown things or their digital equivalents.

Opinions found herein, except where noted, are my own. That means I take responsibility for what I say here. I try not to get the facts wrong. When they are wrong, or incomplete, or misrepresented, I welcome the reader to point them out. I will do my best to rectify anything in need of rectification, retract anything in need of retraction, and in general, be honest and forthright.

I give credit where credit is due. The internet has made possible the wholesale use and repurposing of content in ways so flexible that it falls to the individual creator of content to try and respect the wishes on other content creators in how their stuff gets used. I will link back to articles when I quote them. I will link and cite photos and other graphics whenever I use them. And if you're the owner of any content that I use and you don't want me to use it, I will remove it if you ask me to.

So what I'm about. How about you?

Thanks for reading.

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Reading, Writing and the Pursuit.

Sunday

17Jan2010

Rejected by McSweeney's I

Sunday, January 17, 2010 at 12:27PM

Excited to announce that I've already knocked out one of the To-Dos on my New Year's Accomplishments ...

5) Write a story, submit it somewhere for publication and get my first real rejection letter out of the way.

So I wrote a list for McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

I've been listening to librivox's free recordings of books in the public domain, specifically the third collection of Sherlock Holmes stories The Return of Sherlock Holmes; it was the inspiration for

Twelve Suppressed Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

1. The Case of the Bawdhouse Midget

2. The Finaler Solution

3. The Crooked Merkin

4. The Case That Wasn’t Really a Case So Much As it Was Yet Another Instance of SOMEone Showing Off His Powers of Deduction and Making Someone Else Look Like Quite The Ass

5. The Case of the Twatford Jugglers

6. The Albermarle Menses

7. The Spoilt Spotted Dick

8. The Washerwoman’s Pessary

9. The Case of the Patient Knife Grinder

10. The Account of the Thrice-Violated Scullion

11. The Workhouse Matron’s Awful Sausage Machine

12. The Baker Street Abattoir

After about two weeks, I received word back from McSweeney's.

Yay me! 2010's is off to a great start. Seriously. This was a big step for me. Who knows where this will lead?

What I'd like to do is keep submitting, though I wonder how often one submits before one's emails get summarily routed to the Trash rather than getting read and considered?

I'll make a point to post the rejected ones here once I receive word that they've been rejected so you'll get to watch. Lucky you, right?

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The Similarly Obligatory New Year's Eve/Day Post

Friday, January 1, 2010 at 11:50AM

Hear that low-pitched hum accompanied by the high whining shriek of locked-up mental gears? It's the sound of the (self-imposed) pressure on People of the Blog everywhere to make their last/first post of the old/new year pithy/somber/witty/reflective. The older I get, the less interest I have in parading my failures for the whole world to see, especially if I can'y squeeze any comedic value out of them.

So instead of resolutions, I'm going public with some guidelines for 2010 ... some personal milestones that, for one reason or another, I've decided are important to me. Take 'em or leave 'em. I pay the registration and hosting fees on this bitch and I can do as I choose.

1) Get started on my Music City 1/2 Marathon training and keep it going post-race. When I finished last year, the multi-month endorphin rush made me talk crazy talk ... wanted to run it next year, wanted to run 5Ks for kicks. If you were one of the people I said this to, my apologies. I was out of my head. My goal is to finish, maybe with an even better time.

2) Keep an accurate list of the books I read. I don't know why this is such a big deal for me. But I want to do a better job of tracking how much of the written word I take in.

3) Learn how to use a flash, and start taking pictures of people. Don't get me wrong. I love shooting 300 frames of a pile of rusty metal as much as the next OCD fauxtographer out there. But a recent visit to the Memphis Books Museum of Art and viewing a collection of WPA photos (disappointingly fewer than I would have liked to have seen) suggested that what my oeuvre has in obsessive detail it lacks in soul. @griffintech photographer @bradleyspitzer publically set out last year (or the year before that) to "learn how" to shoot people. I think he's more than succeeded. It's time for me to nut up and ask people if I can take their picture.

4) Be a better friend. Facebook friends are fine, but few of them would actually pick you up at the airport late at night on a rainy Sunday. I want to give more time to the people who really matter. And spend way less mental and emotional energy on those who don't.

5) Write a story, submit it somewhere for publication and get my first real rejection letter out of the way. To celebrate my 20th college reunion, why not actually write some fiction and send it off somewhere to have it looked at and summarily rejected. "I haven't written in way too long. I need to get back into that." Or "Well, the New Yorker rejected a story about middle-class white suburban angst I sent them. Said something like "did not fit their needs at this time." Which sounds better?

6) Let my kids grow up. They're going to whether I want them to or not.

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