18304

This is the number of messages I have in my Gmail account. Of course, I delete. I do. Daily. But I've always led a highly verbal life. As a result, I get to get an email form Google Help Desk letting me know that my "web mail quota has exceeded the set quota which is 3GB. [I am] currently running on 3.9 GB." Forgive me Google for I have exceeded the quota. I've dared go past the permitted parameters. What now? Will I be marginalized to the outskirts of the emailing world? Is there such a thing as an email Inferno or something? Which circle will I end up in? The email did get me to thinking about my writing habits and my usually verbal life, however. For years I've been giving/receiving a whole lot of words. And words add up. 3.9 GB is a lot of words. I take a few minutes to look at some folders. Some are too passe. Especially at 2:15 AM they feel passe. I delete a few folders. And still, not a dent. I need to get a good course of action. I need to put my words on a high-protein, low-carb diet. I wake up on account of a bad dream. I open up my email to get my mind off of the disturbing images of the dream. Why was that scary behemoth of a dog chasing me like that?! I mean, I even fed it and everything. I gave it my Starbucks muffin. What gives, dog? But, I better stop talking about the dream and get back to the google chastisement. I have to face the bottomless well that is my highly verbal life and start editing much like I edit my closets. It's easy for me to edit clothing. I only own a very few items of clothing that are older than one year. The reasons are simple. I'm hard on what I wear. In no time I'll manage to ruin the sturdiest and best-made sartorial contributions any closet would love to have. Why is it to hard with words, though? In my academic career, most of my lectures and writing were about concise speech and how difficult it is to master it. As a matter of fact, for all the courses and syllabi I've developed so far, I have an assignment I called: "capture." Often, especially in literary theory courses, I'd accompany it with another one I called "James Joyce auf Deutsch." i.e., "James Joyce in German," i.e., writing a-la-James-Joyce. So, for the latter, the students would be encouraged to just keep on writing and let the words flow as naturally and freely as they could, one association at a time. And in a matter of days, the next assignment would be a one-page 'capture' intended to make them think carefully about every content word chosen. Many of the comments I would put on most papers would say, "How could you say more with less? - Economy of speech: employ it more often." It's time I heed my own advice. I've always been in love with economy of speech. Some people tend to love difficult things. And I've always loved a good speech economy. The kind that's managed right. Once in a blue moon I encounter it and, when I do, I delight in it like a diabetic at a gelateria who's been allowed to go nuts on ice cream for one blessed day. And, here I am. Looking at the number 18304. Wondering how I could have accumulated a Tower of Babel in such a short time, with much deleting and all. I start to delete a few. But then my eyes get heavy. Surely, this can be done later. I put the computer aside, turn to the left side, close my eyes, and hope I don't get tormented by the awful nightmare that woke me up in the first place and sent me to my email.

Jason Schwartzman's Bored to Death

Another reason to continue to like Jason Schwartzman is his new show on HBO called Bored to Death.

You will especially react to the show if you're in the creative business. And you'll definitely appreciate the humor if you've ever been in the pangs of writer's/artist's block.

Also, if you already like author Jonathan Ames, you will definitely like this as, well,it is created by him and Schwartzman's character is called Jonathan Ames.

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The Best Writers Don't Always Speak

An active interest of mine is the behind-the-scenes of writers and composers. I like learning about their quotidian mannerisms and experiences. Hence, what I read today on the Times did indeed tickle my fancy.
Excellent article by Arthur Krystal!
"...when the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt told a friend, a Parisian doctor, that he wanted to meet a certifiable lunatic, he was invited to the doctor’s home for supper. A few days later, Humboldt found himself placed at the dinner table between two men. One was polite, somewhat reserved, and didn’t go in for small talk. The other, dressed in ill-matched clothes, chattered away on every subject under the sun, gesticulating wildly, while making horrible faces. When the meal was over, Humboldt turned to his host. “I like your lunatic,” he whispered, indicating the talkative man. The host frowned. “But it’s the other one who’s the lunatic. The man you’re pointing to is Monsieur Honoré de Balzac.”

Read it all here.

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New Music: Kings of Convenience

Kings of Convenience come from Norway and I approve of them.
Much of my writing, the nascent phase of it at least, happens when I'm under the influence of mellow Indie. I might have mentioned before that I wrote my dissertation and book monograph listening mostly to Mandalay.

My current writing projects are different from one another currently. When I work on my medieval research I tend to listen to a lot of Verdi. A lot of Aida and Requiem. Seems apropos to me.
The more modern writing tends to be accompanied by much Indie and the band that's monopolizing that playlist these days is The Kings of Convenience. The reason why I enjoy them is because they manage to make their musical point quietly without distracting the listener. They make me think of those people you love having around you because they quietly do their own thing as you go about accomplishing your tasks. They add a measure of quietude that serves as a powerful extrinsic motivation. That, in a nutshell, is what the Kings of Convenience do for me.

You, guitar aficionados out there, might enjoy this band as well.

Here's their track Failure:

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graph per wiki

Sorry, Your Art Is Lacking...?

Members of the creative class rely on a fundamental support they get by virtue of being close to one another. Location, in this context, is everything. Or much of everything. The main reason behind clustering, after all, is the creative support and feedback that the creatives generate for themselves and their community.

Inspiration is key to productivity and without the clustering effect and some key external motivation it would be rather difficult to create.

-"So, what inspires you?"
This is a question I get often. I gave it some thought the other day and what's actually served as a true inspiration in the recent past is photography by the artists around me. And I don't just support them because they contribute actively to my own creativity. The more I live the more I think that we attract the kind of art that is, in nuce, congruent with our basic understanding of life, the arts, and the general human experience.

Now I'm pretty fortunate to have plenty of creative input and the work of the dear ones is inspiring. And what's inspired me the most in the recent past is photography, more specifically, literature as represented in photography.

But what can one say when confronted with a piece of art that doesn't necessarily ooze high quality? One needs to give an answer especially when actively encouraged to do so. So, what could be said?

Consider this as I thought it was worthy of reaction.

"Dear Prudence,
My dear, highly educated husband has written a book. While he has many talents, writing isn't among them. He paid someone to edit the book, which helped it somewhat, but it's still awful. I've gone through it as well and cleaned it up the best I could without completely rewriting it. The problem is my attitude—I don't feel it's my place to crush my husband's dream but find it hard to just sit there with a smile on my face while he goes on and on about how life will change when he's a best-selling author. It's not going to happen. I realize that at one point a publisher (or a stack of rejection letters) will make the point without me doing so, but I'm not quite sure how to act now. I love him and want to be supportive of him following his dreams, but I don't want him to waste his time. Do I stand by and lie, or break the news to him somehow?"

How would you deal with this scenario?

Tip of the hat to MR for the pointer.

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A Nobel Laureate's Words of Wisdom

Tip of the hat to Vipul for the pointer.

Paul Krugman was awarded the Nobel prize for Economics. Business.timesonline writes:
"An American academic was named as winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics today only hours after publishing a column in The New York Times suggesting that Gordon Brown may have singlehandedly saved the world financial system.

Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University and columnist for the NYT, won the award for his analysis of international trade and economic geography. He is equally well known for his frequent columns in the newspaper analysing the global financial crisis."

Krugman has a specific way in which he operates. His basic rules for research are:

1. Listen to the Gentiles

2. Question the question

3. Dare to be silly

4. Simplify, simplify

What I mean by this rule is "Pay attention to what intelligent people are saying, even if they do not have your customs or speak your analytical language."

He opens his excellent narrative with the following:

"My formal charge in this essay is to talk about my "life philosophy". Let me make it clear at the outset that I have no intention of following instructions, since I don't know anything special about life in general. I believe it was Schumpeter who claimed to be not only the best economist, but also the best horseman and the best lover in his native Austria. I don't ride horses, and have few illusions on other scores. (I am, however, a pretty good cook)."

A most excellent piece. Read it all here.
graph per business.timesonline

More for Dylan Fans

This, I'm looking forward to owning.
A bit from the NY Times says:
"Mr. Dylan, then in his 20s, arrived in Hollywood, examined the photographs and wrote his own prose poems to accompany them.

No one involved in the book can recall exactly when Mr. Dylan wrote the poems, which are by turns sparse, playful, witty and sarcastic. But the words faintly recall “Tarantula,” Mr. Dylan’s book of prose poems (or “Dadaist novel,” as some would call it) that was written in 1966, and they bear a strong resemblance to the “11 Outlined Epitaphs” in the liner notes of “The Times They Are A-Changin,” his 1964 album.

As the “11 Outlined Epitaphs” begin:

“I end up then

in the early evenin’

blindly punchin’ at the blind

breathin’ heavy

stutterin’

an’ blowin’ up

where t’ go?

what is it that’s exactly wrong?"
graph per ny times

Overwritten Books?

When it comes to most books I read I feel like the writers could have made better and more concise choices. Economy of language does not seem to be espoused by most writers and who could blame them. It is, in my opinion, the hardest thing to master.
So, Kevin Drums article on the topic is particularly interesting to me.
Drum observes:
"And yet.....having said that, spending a lot of time on the internet, as I have since 2002, has rubbed my nose in something that hadn't really bothered me before then: namely just how overwritten so many books and magazine articles are. Seymour Hersh? He's great. You could also cut every one of his pieces by at least 50% and lose exactly nothing. And I'm not picking on Hersh. At a guess, I'd say that two-thirds of the magazine pieces I read could be sliced by nearly a third or more without losing much. That's true of a lot of books too."
Full feature here.

Do you have any examples of overwritten books?
graph per wshingtonmonthly

Writing Blog

Good bit...


"I received a copy of my new book ...in the mail today from my publisher ... Opening the package was half anti-climactic, and half frightening ... in three weeks, it is going to be out there for the world to read. That's a little scary, because to date, almost nobody has read it, so I really have no idea what to expect as a reaction ... And this says nothing of the fear of how the book will perform. That is the great unknown that haunts every writer who wants to continue to try to eke out a living as a writer - every project is based on your last performance. How well your current work does in the marketplace often dictates whether you will be given another opportunity to write in the future (this is why it is so important to buy books from writers you like, and buy magazines that you support - your purchase is a way to make sure that those writers and publications continue to produce in the future).

From my first book ... I've learned to get used to some of these feelings - but I'm told by more seasoned writers that you never really get used to it...ever. Writing - and media in general (especially progressive media) - is a very tough business. It requires regular 16 hour days to scratch and claw into the debate. This book represents 2 years of those 16 hour days - so I guess it's natural to feel a little nervous."
Read full feature here.