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The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu

Probably the best (or at least, most vital) book I read in 2016 was The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu. This book should be administered like a vaccine to all internet users. Some lingering effects for me have been deleting Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn and Instagram from my phone. It was itchy. But I feel like I’ve regain a little bit of my volition and certain a lot of my time.

A choice quote:

While the goals of reclaiming our time and attention are easy to praise, they can prove surprisingly difficult to achieve. Even for a weekend, it can be painful to resist deeply ingrained habits like checking email, Facebook, and other social media; browsing random news stories, let alone more titillating clickbait; or flopping onto the couch to channel surf for a few hours. The difficulty reflects years of conditioning and the attention merchants’ determination to maximize, by any means possible, the time spent with them. When engrossed in work, reading a book, or playing with children, we may as well be stealing the attention merchants’ lights. They want– need –us to be constantly poking around for dibs and dabs of their entertainment, to be tuned to commercial breaks in their programming, or be catching up with friends in a manner that can also serve some branding effort.

#attention merchants #tim wu

cretin

I remember a professor telling me once that cretin came from Cretan and something about minotaurs and shit. But no!

ORIGIN late 18th cent.: from French crétin, from Swiss French crestin ‘Christian’ (from Latin Christianus), here used to mean ‘human being,’ apparently as a reminder that, though deformed, cretins were human and not beasts.

Which is is just charming as fuck.

#cretin #crietan #charming as fuck

Franzen vs Kunkel - Who Wore it Better?

From Freedom,

“Definitely!” Joey said. He was sounding to himself like one of Socrates’ young interlocutors, whose lines of dialogue, on page after page, consisted of variations on “Yes, unquestionably” and “Undoubtedly, it must be so.” “That sounds great,” he said. “I’ll definitely apply.”

From Indecision,

"Sure." But she was making me feel like one of those dumb-assed yes-men in Plato's dialogues who just keep on going Yes, Socrates, right Socrates until they've been led unwarily by their own dull answers into serious extremities of contradiction.

#jonathan franzen #benjamin kunkel

camouflage

ORIGIN World War I: from French, from camoufler ‘to disguise’ (originally thieves' slang), from Italian camuffare ‘disguise, deceive,’ perhaps by association with French camouflet ‘whiff of smoke in the face.’

#camouflage #word origins #disguise with smoke in the face

How It Feels To post the first post in How It Feels To.

The first post is up. Fingers crossed for more.

#how it feels to

Silence Once Begun - Jesse Ball

Another excellent book from Jesse Ball.

And here is my theme for 2015: reading with the intent to steal. Consider this passage:

We passed through several neighborhoods, each poorer than the one before, until we came to an extremely humble street. This one, said Joo, and led me up the steps of a converted building. Her flat was on the top floor, at the back of the house, and looked out onto a small untended patch of ground, and beyond it, a series of other ramshackle buildings running down a long slope.

Is this passage descriptive? Or is it bare? There is something vague in each of the adjectives (ramshackle, untended, extremely humble) and yet it feels vivid. Everything that Ball offers requires that reader fill it in. Were there a way to look into a person's mind, I suspect that any two readers would have different constructions. But then again, they would have matching moods: poverty, a sense of being sequestered (top floor, back of the house), anonymous.

#jesse ball #silence once begun #stealing

I have a new side project. I am pretty pumped about it.

You should come. It'll be fun.

Ancient Light - John Banville

In reading this John Banville novel, I was keenly aware of writing tactics.

He has so many tricks and they all seemed to be steal-able.

For example:

I waited with interest for Dawn Davenport's response– not a minute ago she had seemed ready to hit me with her handbag –but of course she is a professional to the tip of her little silver pen, which she produced now and scribbled on the menu that red-faced Fabio had proffered, and handed it back to him with that slow-motion simile she reserves for close-up encounters with her fans.

The way he introduces that pen! It comes out of nowhere and yet it seems perfectly natural.

#John Banville #ancient light #stealing

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

This was perhaps the forth time I've read this book. Already, I know that I will read The Moviegoer again. This book possess a strange quality in that it is gripping and yet it it does not stick in the memory. There is an urgency to the plot, and yet it is ephemeral.

One thing that has stuck with me is the way this novel changes with each reading. When I first encountered the book, I was amazed by the way the author was able to confront metaphysical issues. I could not remember an american author straight-up riffing intellectual in a smooth, fluid way.

This time, I was surprised by how clunky all the names were. Percy doesn't make any apologies for forcing you to grab a piece of scrap paper and draw out the family relationships. This is bold. It's something I would never have the confidence to do.

A passage:

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.

#somewhere not anywhere #the moviegoer #walker percy

Missing Out - Adam Phillips

Lately, I've been on a psychoanalysis kick. (Weird, right?)

This book is incredible, both in content and in style. And that style is one of profound repetition. There seemed to be one or two main points in this book, and because they are subtle and profound, the are repeated in many many many variations. And somehow, this is captivation.

A passage:

Sometimes, perhaps more often than we realize, we live as if we know more about the experiences we don't have than about the experiences we do have. And sometimes we need to be able to do this in order to free ourselves... Usually the omniscience about what one is getting of from colours one's sense of what one is getting out for.

#missing out #adam phillips #psychoanalysis

The Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner

The awesome used bookstore near my apartment is deep on California-centric fiction. And so I've been jamming on Wallace Stegner.

There is a small, lingering controversy about this book, about whether it was a fair use of a family's history (and in my reading of it, Stegner did everything above board), but don't let that distract you from the glorious, glorious prose.

Her heart was thudding from the momentary alarm of the snagging skip; she quivered from the unexpectedness of that encounter. It was as if a shutter had opened and a wild face looked in for an awful moment and then been shut back into its blackness. It terrified her to think that the whole riddled mountain crawled with men like that one. Under her feet as she walked in sunshine, under her stool and umbrella as she sat sketching, under the piazza as she rocked the baby in his cradle, creatures like that one were swinging picks, drilling holes, pushing ore carts, sinking in cages to ever deeper levels, groping along black tunnels with the energy of ants. It raised the gooseflesh on her arms; it was as if she had suddenly discovered that the conduits of her blood teemed with tiny, busy, visible vermin.

#wallace stegner #angle of repose #bibliohead

refrain; refrain

This morning I noticed that refrain seemed to be an auto-antonym, where it meant both to not do something and to do something repeated.

To the dictionary!

refrain: stop oneself from doing something; Middle English (in the sense ‘restrain (a thought or feeling)’): from Old French refrener, from Latin refrenare, from re- (expressing intensive force) + frenum ‘bridle.

refrain: a repeated line or number of lines in a poem or song, typically at the end of each verse; late Middle English: from Old French, from refraindre ‘break,’ based on Latin refringere ‘break up’ (because the refrain “broke” the sequence).

So that's kind of neat, right? Two different words with different (although possibly related?) origins? Eh? Eh?

Maybe if you'd had more coffee you'd think this was cool.

#refrain #words

Short Thoughts on Short Plays

Whelp. Apparently doing the Neo-Futurists destroys all time for updating this site. UNTIL NOW

Behold, a blurry picture of me after getting hit in the face with a pie.

But so, quick synopsis of what I've learned on two-minute plays vs. writing fiction.

- Normally, I write in the mornings before work and on the weekends. These pesky plays, what with the need for new ones every week, cannot be as coddled. And so I've pleasantly discovered that I am in fact able to write in the evenings, after work.

- Same for drinking! I can write a draft of a play with a beer (or two) keeping me company at the desk. Not so with fiction. The stage direction says glug glug glug!

- Ceremony. This one is a bit harder to explain, but... When writing fiction, I think I waste a lot of time writing the things that feel like they need to be written. For example, imagine a short story about a game show. I could see myself working up a description of how the cameraman pans across the studio before focusing on the tweedy jacket of the host, about the stage lights, about the credit card dreams of the audience, and etc and so forth. But if you've only got two minutes, you start with, "Who want's to win a dollar!" and boom, that's everything you really need.

- Lyrical writing. It is hard to take lyrical fiction (whatever that means, but I think it means the type of writing I love) and make it something play-like. This is My Current Struggle.

- Props. Are fun. And so far, I've been amazed how a single prop (like an enormous paper airplane) can achieve so much more than the description of a similar object.

- Writing as a task. With deadlines and a narrow format, I've started to try to think of writing as a task. Here is what the page looks like

Title

[Two minutes of play goes here.]

Curtain

And it is my job to fill in that middle space. This makes it less of a creative-existential-crisis and more of a job. A job of making play words get on the page.

Okay, that is all for now. As I am due at my desk.

#short thoughts #short plays #Neo-Futurists #pie

I'm in starting February 14th

Guys! Guys! It's finally here! It's Neo-futurist time! I finally rotate into the ensemble! Look at this ridiculous picture of me!

The show: Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind

What? It's 30 plays! It's 60 minutes long!

When: Every friday and saturday night at 9:00 at the Boxcar Theatre.

Tickets? Tickets!

Are you saying, "Wait. Remind me what that is again?" Well, here's a great review.

Are you saying, "That is too many words?" Then here is a choice block:

In their hands, theater is the future, and the future is now.

#too much light #Neo-Futurists

The Write Stuff is a series of interview profiles conducted by Litseen, where authors give exclusive readings from their work....

#the write stuff #i hate seeing myself on video #supposedly predates prohibition

Write Club vs. (or combined with) Neo-Futurists

All the things I do in public have been combined into one thing I will do in public! Neo-Futurists and Write Club are fighting and merging and performing and doing glorious things!

Full Description:

The Neo-Futurists have been experimenting with performing 30 plays in 60 minutes for 25 years now, but the San Francisco Neo-Futurists are brand new. We like that. We were brand new once, too, and like them we're the second franchise of a Chicago outfit. Let's make them feel welcome with a little brotherly bloodsport the WC way: 3 rounds of 2 writers with 2 opposing ideas for 7 minutes each You decide the winner! Winner's charity gets some $$$! 6 Neo-Futurists. 3 winners. 3 losers. The math does itself. The bouts: — Adam Smith with FUTURE vs. Will Caldwell with PAST — Megan Cohen with LONG vs. Matt Pine with SHORT — Steven Westdahl with REAL vs. Ryan Good with FAKE $10 [$5 off with iTunes podcast review] 21+ cash bar, ATM available Doors at 7pm Show at 8pm Music and dancing by 9:30pm The Make-Out Room 3225 22nd St., San Francisco, CA, 94110

Hey, why not Facebook?

#Neo-Futurists #write club #I am going to crush megan cohen

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