Oatmeal on the Coffee Table
via theoatmeal.com
Wow! Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) has a fancy book deal! That’s impressive and inspiring. Find more information here:
via theoatmeal.com
Wow! Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) has a fancy book deal! That’s impressive and inspiring. Find more information here:
Photo via copyblogger.com
Brian Clark (@copyblogger) had me at, “confidence is compelling and downright sexy… I’m not talking about arrogance. Arrogance is an indication of fear, not assurance.” If you agree, you might want to read another one of his postings in which he proposes three helpful hints for bloggers, writers, etc. Don’t take criticism/disagreement personally. Finish each writing project. (Get it done!) And push yourself!
After using Dragon NaturallySpeaking on my PC for years, I was pleased to discover that Nuance was buying MacSpeech. This evolution was one of the final motivators to switch from PC to Mac this fall/winter. Of my two concerns, newly released MacSpeech Scribe solves a big one: transcribing digital voice files to text. This is key for those of us who dictate on-the-go into a handheld device and dump the files into our computer later for transcription. So big plaudits to Nuance for catching MacSpeech up in this regard. The remaining concern is that I’d like to be able to import the vocabulary/pronunciation data that I’ve amassed over the years with Dragon NaturallySpeaking into MacSpeech rather than teaching it from scratch. No matter how much Nuance brags about 99% speech recognition, long-term users know how important this data is. Bottom line, the software becomes more and more valuable the longer you use it, recognizing words and pronunciation better with each new correction you make. But as far as I can tell, MacSpeech Scribe still doesn’t allow me to do this. Is Nuance working on an upgrade that will make this possible? Should I give up home and start from scratch with MacSpeech?
“Too often, memoir seems to me an excuse to be fragmentary, incomplete, narratively non-rigorous. Lemon and Flynn’s books are guilty of all three.” ~ Taylor Antrim via The Daily Beast
Taylor Antrim considers whether Happy by Alex Lemon and The Ticking Is the Bomb by Nick Flynn wouldn’t make better novels than memoirs. Both rekindle his sense that “Memoir writing is cheating. I’ve always believed this,… And, anyway, by cheating I don’t mean exaggerating the truth. Of course memoirs contain misrepresentations, even outright lies…” What Antrim means is that they are cheating the reader out of a good story. They are cheating by compiling collection of vignettes, of sketches and passing these hodge-podges along to us without ever bothering to develop their narratives. “I kept wanting Flynn to do more, to apply his imagination to these insights, to tell me a story. But Bomb is content to be a sketchbook, a collage of ideas and scenes—a memoir.”
Antrim contends that memoir (at least these memoirs) is the lazy storyteller’s alternative, and that a novel – at least sometimes – is a more compelling vehicle to tell the same story more thoroughly, more engagingly and with a more deftly crafted narrative. It’s a provocative assertion, one that I’ve been grappling with while writing a memoir about renovating a historic property on Lake Champlain. Memoir may fall short of the novel’s narrative finesse, but there is something fascinating about traipsing through the artifacts firsthand, exploring the sketches and conversations, rather than being swept along a Disneyfied storybook interpretation. Much like the best novels, successful memoirs sweep the reader up in a story and carry the reader from beginning to end without losing them in awkward fragments, without abandoning the logical wonders that the narrative trajectory provokes, without suggesting the reader should have waited to read the final draft. And yet, the current obsession with reality storytelling does seem to shift this assertion slightly. Is there a growing wariness if/when memoir becomes too narratively slick? Is there a higher tolerance for scrapbook storytelling?
J.D. Salinger died today at 91, and like so many writers and bloggers and journalists reflecting on his writing, life and eccentricities, I am stumbling.
He was a gifted and esoteric writer. He was an inspiration. He was a mystery clinging to privacy. It seems that this latter characterization has intrigued the public almost as much as his craftsmanship. I you count yourself among this lot, you might enjoy a wander over to Kenneth Slawenski’s post “J.D. Salinger’s Untold Stories: Tales Of A Recluse“. If you’re experiencing Salinger’s passing as a sort of memento mori you might be find company in Ron Rosenbaum’s June 1997 article for Esquire, The Man in the Glass House.
The silence surrounding this place is not just any silence. It is the work of a lifetime. It is the work of renunciation and determination and expensive litigation. It is a silence of self-exile, cunning, and contemplation. In its own powerful, invisible way, the silence is in itself an eloquent work of art. It is the Great Wall of Silence J.D. Salinger has built around himself. (Ron Rosenbaum, Longform)
Like his infamous antihero who briefly yearned to wander west pretending to be mute (or deaf? I don’t remember which) Salinger horded silence. Words are written, not explained. Perhaps they can’t or shouldn’t be explained. Perhaps this is Salinger’s legacy, the reminder that words like graffiti on a cave wall are at best an imperfect roadmap for fleeting truths. No, that’s not it. That’s a haul of bollocks! Let’s try again…
Words are enough. Too much, even. They are the best we can do, and asking them to morph into reality — either through the magic of cinema or the exegesis of the author — is self indulgent voodoo. Looks like I’m off the rails again.
Salinger’s Holden Caulfield is at once an archetypal storyteller and audience, a warrior against hypocrisy and a guardian of childhood innocence. He embodies the inevitable contradictions of adolescence and of the writing life. I suspect this literary anchor has inspired and encourage a great many storytellers.
Jonathan Safran Foer has stated that, ‘many readers were created by The Catcher in the Rye, and many writers, too. He and his characters embodied a kind of American resistance that has been sorely missed these last few years, and will now be missed even more.’ (The Penguin Blog)
Where from there? I’m tossing darts in the dark and missing the bulls eye. Missing the dartboard altogether. No doubt Salinger would have been mortified with the swell of memorials.
That last quotation is a suitable closing note. As wouuld be any of the thirteen short stories that Salinger published in The New Yorker between 1946 and 1965 including “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters“. (Available online to subscribers.) Or better yet? Read or re-read The Catcher in the Rye.
N.B. With so many pretensions Latin-isms (In memoriam, Memento mori) cluttering a single, brief blog post, I’d better lather on one more, Nota bene: I pinched this photograph of J.D. Salinger from Soup, but it appears to be a stock photo since it appears all over the place. (In other words, the credit unknown. Apologies.)
Julie Roads is a writer, a blogger, a speaker. Writing Roads proclaims her wares, and her blog captures the whims and woes of the writing/copywriting/momming existence. Julie Roads is on twitter too, if you want the even more unfiltered soundtrack. And the website design? Clever and organized albeit slightly cluttered. In a good way. Like a writer’s desk…
Aaahhh yes… This was too good to pass up. I’m going to pass along a Talk to the Newsroom snippet from New York Times Executive Editor, Bill Keller’s response to a reader’s complaint about badly written news leads. Read. And then re-read. And then print it, pin it up next to your desk and read it again every day. Am I speaking to myself? Perhaps.
Q. The colorful lead is the bane (or at least one of the banes) of my time spent with The Times. So often, I have tried quickly to get the gist of a story (this happens in the Sports section more often than in the news sections) only to find that I must read something like ‘it was a dark and dreary night’ before finding the point, or the score, or even a notion of what the article is about.
Whatever happened to the inviolate rule that a lead was 35 words or fewer, telling us where, why, what or who? (Peter C. Boulay, Bronx, N.Y.)
A. As the sun blazed above the snow-lacquered peaks of the Hindu Kush, the weary editor flipped down his clip-on sunglasses and booted up his laptop.
It had been a long week, a soul-sapping, disorienting and yet strangely satisfying week.
Past the simple campsite where he awaited his digital connection to the modern world flowed all the human mystery of the East: the women shrouded in burqas of azure, or possibly cerulean, he was not too good on blues; the camel-borne warlords draped with belts of bullets; the shoeless boys in filthy ‘I Heart New York’ T-shirts; and all the rest, all separated by semicolons and swaddled in colorful clichés.
The computer flickered to life. The keys clicked. (Bill Keller, New York Times Executive Editor, Bill Keller)
Note: This is an excerpt from a story I wrote while living in France at turn of the millennium. A story about blue jeans and a woman who designs them. And wears them rather well. To read the full story contact me and specify “Jeans” in the your message.
Maybe I should just break the narrative after the e-mail. Cut straight to the café where we met tonight.
She was late. I was already sitting at a table outside with a beer when she arrived. Christ, she was great looking. Really beautiful. One of those ultra-tony, model types. Tall and willowy; dressed to dazzle. BCBG—bon chic, bon genre. Movie star sunglasses, a flowing white linen shirt that looked like it was from North Africa or maybe India, and jeans clinging to amphetamine legs.
“You like them?” she asked, pulling her shirt above her wasp-like waist and turning around slowly, pointing out the Paparazzi label above her right buttocks. She tucked the burgundy hip strap from her thong underwear back out of site below the denim and let her shirt fall. “This style is Napolitana,” she said and sat down next to me.
Note: This is an excerpt from a story I wrote while living in France at turn of the millennium. A story about rain in Paris. Among other drizzly things… To read the full story contact me and specify “February Rain” in the your message.
It had been about half an hour since she dropped him off. Maybe a little longer. He hadn’t actually checked his watch then, nor could he see the clock now. Not from where he lay, slumped on the couch.
He had promised himself not to take a nap as he waited for the elevator in the lobby. He was shaking the water from his raincoat and waiting for the right elevator to descend to bring him up to the seventh floor and thinking, “I really shouldn’t fall asleep when I get home. I really should do something productive.” The right elevator because the left elevator was out of commission for a month. An entire month seemed an unreasonable amount of time for repairing an elevator, and he’d said so to the concierge. But the concierge had only shrugged…