It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

–Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable“

What we’re approaching here is what was once “content” being stripped of its nutritious value and being processed into “content product”. See where I’m going with this? I could see, over time, readers realizing how many empty calories, in the form of news “snippets” or meaningless photos, we’ve been consuming on the web and there being a counter movement. I’ve seen the term “slow blogging” show up a few times around the web recently in different contexts, and it definitely comes to mind now. I could see a parallel on the web to what we’ve seen in the food industry, where the early adopters seek out whole, local, organic… content. From the source. On the site it was designed for, from the person who wrote it. Or at least prepared in a way that shows respect to the ingredient.

–Laura Brunow Miner, founder of Pictory (via Space Miner).

I consider myself one of those who made this realization about empty calories this year, and the “info-fast” during this past Ramadan was the perfect moment to put that realization into action.

Books

• Karen Armstrong, The Case For God
• Roberto Bolaño, 2666
• Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
• Neil Gaiman, Coraline
• Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World
• Geoff Manaugh, The BLDGBLOG Book
• Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise
• Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Movies

• Coraline
• Devdas
• District 9
• Paranormal Activity
• A Serious Man
• Taare Zameen Par
• Up

TV

• Freaks and Geeks

Music

• Anjulie, Anjulie
• The Bad Plus
• The Beatles
• Diego Bernal, For Corners
• Coldplay, Viva La Vida
• Miles Davis, Bitches Brew
• Eric Dolphy
• Duffy, Rockferry
• Karl Hector & The Malcouns, Sahara Swing
• Jazzanova, Of All The Things
• Norah Jones, The Fall
• Alicia Keys, The Element of Freedom
• K’naan, Troubadour
• Lil Wayne, Tha Carter III
• Maxwell, BLACKsummers’night
• The Swell Season, Strict Joy
• The xx, xx

Architecture, as a discipline, can itself be used to tell stories. In fact, some of the most interesting student work today comes complete with elaborate plots and story lines, supplied for no other reason than to explain why a particular building should exist or require designing. These stories very often exceed today’s mass-market fiction in imaginative strength—to such a degree that I might suggest, only half-jokingly, that the reason fiction sells so badly in the United States today is because all of the people with real ideas have moved on to study architecture or urban design. American fiction has been left languishing in the hands of people at summer workshops in Iowa, obsessed with the morality of suburban fatherhood.

–Geoff Manaugh, from The BLDGBLOG Book.

Anthropologist Wade Davis of National Geographic in an absolutely mind-blowing TED talk from 2003. I’m floored. I caught a bit of this guy today on the radio while driving back from the garage and wanted to find out more. He’s giving this year’s Massey Lecture.

The whole TED talk is fantastic, but the ending pushes it over the top for me to something transcendent:

“It’s pretty obvious, at least to all of us who have traveled in these remote reaches of the planet, to realize that they’re not remote at all. They’re homelands of somebody. They represent branches of the human imagination that go back to the dawn of time. And for all of us, the dreams of these children, like the dreams of our own children, become part of the naked geography of hope. So what we’re trying to do at the National Geographic, finally, is, we believe that politicians will never accomplish anything. We think that polemics are not persuasive, but we think that storytelling can change the world. So we are probably the best storytelling institution in the world: we have 35 million hits on our website every month, 156 nations carry our television channel, our magazines are read by millions. What we’re doing is a series of journeys to the ethnosphere where we’re gonna take our audience to places of such cultural wonder that they cannot help but come away dazzled by what they have seen, and hopefully, therefore, embrace gradually, one by one, this central revelation of anthropology: that this world deserves to exist in a diverse way, that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural, pluralistic world, where all of the wisdom of all of all peoples can contribute to our collective well-being.”

His summary of the craft of storytelling takes the career longings and yearnings I’ve been having to a higher place, to a truer place. It transcends mere journalism and enters the realm of something almost holy. It seems to unify the spiritual searching I’ve had all these years and expressed in my exploration of religion, along with the need for relevance through journalism, my own persistent desire to write, and the urge of humans 10,000 years ago to sacralize the hunt by painting it on cave walls. Really. His vision is celebratory of the human adventure, cherishes it, and is in love with it in all its forms and manifestations.

Too many thoughts are springing forth from this. I see connections in the career I’ve sought, in what I’m writing now, in what I wrote years ago, in values and ideals I shape and form and hold dear. I, I, I need to think this through more. Not enough tags for this post! Not enough! Ahh, this is so going in my personal manifesto box. “The naked geography of hope.” Argh! And I marvel once more at the poetic capabilities of the human spirit. (Falls over)

Writing every day is my only important form of – I always hate the word “discipline,” I try to get around it. “Habituation” is much more how it feels to me. I love to dwell in the space of a novel — I don’t find writing uncomfortable, it’s something I really love doing. Writing a long novel, especially, it means that I’m creating this whole other set of people that I’m interested in, and this whole other world I get to go into, and I try to stay there. I try to go every day, not just to see the word count amass, which is helpful, but because then my subconscious is kind of living there. If I write every day, even if it’s just a tiny bit – sometimes it will be just a tiny bit, I’ll work for 45 minutes and just check in with it – then I never stop, I’m always immersed. That seems to me to be the best way to do things. Then your unconscious process begins collecting happy accidents, everything seems to be relevant to what you’re working on, because your brain is just harvesting language and incidents and images on its own. There was one period at the peak with “Chronic City” where I worked on this book without missing a day for over seven months. I always feel very smug about those kind of runs when I get on them. I’m not that fast a writer, so I have to be there every day to write a long book quickly at all. I don’t count words or pages. If I get a great paragraph, or I get two pages – two pages is a great day. I think of that as a real success. But I try not to trouble myself if I don’t do so much – as long as I’m working, I’m satisfied.

The most pretentious film in my view was therefore 2001: A Space Odyssey, which purposely sought to lord its own extraordinary intelligence and impenetrability over the audience. I’ve since cooled down and have come to appreciate 2001 more, especially in light of my love of impenetrable works of modern and postmodern fiction like those of Thomas Pynchon, or the romantic appeal of painter Jackson Pollock. io9′s Charlie Jane Anders sums it up in her great essay “Escapism is the Highest Form of Art”: “Realism is like art that attempts to be purely representational: it can’t show any deeper reality beneath the surface, nor can it reflect all of the stuff that’s happening just beyond the frame of our perceptions.”

So “good” art has to be challenging and non-representational, says I. But I have the opposite pole that says art has to be irresistible, mesmerizing, enrapturing. I have to enjoy it, in some sense. But that’s all light fluff, right? It’s not serious. Schindler’s List will always be more important than Up, right? Anders again: “We have a bias — myself included, on occasion — against works that allow people to burst out of the bonds of unpleasant reality. They’re automatically less smart or interesting than works which seek to confront you with the real world’s unpleasantness, to impress on you how unsavory our world really is.”

But as Alex Ross said beautifully in The Rest Is Noise, talking here about the state of serious post-war classical composition and those who struggled against it: “Proximity to terror does not obligate the artist to make terror his subject.”

Later, talking about 20th Century composer/intellectual Theodor Adorno, Ross says that Adorno “saw modernism and kitsch as polar opposites, yet even he admitted that modernism can bring forth its own kind of kitsch–a melodrama of difficulty that easily degenerates into a sort of superannuated adolescent angst.”

That adolescent angst is exactly what I was reacting against in university. It’s still important to me, something I’ve written about time and again in my blogging, and it’s a central theme in my book, too. Anders also plugs Michael Chabon, the highly respected Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay who also wrote what was, arguably, one of my favorite reads of the past year: the unapologetically escapist genre novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Seems he also edited two anthologies of “mock-pulp science fiction stories,” which is precisely the kind of thing I was tempted to write earlier this summer (but have yet to come up with a convincing idea for). I’m definitely going to have to check that out sooner rather than later.

“The most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work, do a huge volume of work, put yourself on a deadline, so that every week or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story, you know what I mean, whatever it’s going to be. [...] It takes a while, it’s going to take you a while, it’s normal to take a while, and you just have to fight your way through that, OK? You will be fierce, you will be a warrior, and you will make things that aren’t as good as you know in your heart you want them to be. And you just make one after another.” (Via lifehacker)

The employees proceed upstairs without looking around them. To feel at home in the office is not to notice the strange silver sculpture in the lobby and to forget how alien the place felt on the first day. The start of work means the end to freedom, but also to doubt, intensity and wayward desires. The accountant’s ten thousand possibilities have been reduced to an agreeable handful. She has a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other people — and, more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her — that she is a Business Unit Senior Manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe. How satisfying it is to be held in check by the assumptions of colleagues, instead of being forced to contemplate, in the loneliness of early hours, all that one might have been and now will never be. She has a meeting scheduled with a team from an insurance brokerage in half an hour, leaving her time to buy a muffin and coffee from the cafeteria. The start of the day in the office has burnt off nostalgia as the sun evaporates a coat of dew. Life is no longer mysterious, sad, hanunting, touching, confusing or melancholy; it is a practical stage for clear-eyed action.