Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
Vertically walleyed: A new affliction, an occupational hazard for the digitally connected and cool, a neologism of sorts coined right here and right now.
“My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.”
That’s from a great NY Times article by Sherry Turkle, “The Flight from Conversation.” And this advice has expanded my notion of what’s fittin’ and … Read more
I’ve suggested some typical hazards that writers face, aside from the traditional death from starvation, and more lurk here in my files. But the following wheeze is easier than writing one of these up just now.
I’m supplying links to those that have gone before, and invite ideas from you—“you” being that mythical creature, the real, live visitor to Collin’s blogsite—for other occupational hazards that afflict writers. Contributions from writers, writers-to-be, readers and the general public welcome.
“The Joy of Quiet,” a story by Pico Iyer in the NY Times (29 Dec. 2011) resonates with something I proposed a week ago at a Christmas party.
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I’d been talking about plans to go away for a few weeks to finish a novel in draft. As usual, when such an idea is broached, people were quick to say things such as, “Hey, I know a great place on the coast down south” or “My uncle has … Read more
The demise of the novel? This has been predicted again and again over the decades, if not the centuries, yet people keep reading novels. Here’s a recent vote of confidence in their persistence:
… Read more“The book-length text is coded in our DNA and will never go away; it is the written version of the oral myths and histories told on consecutive nights around campfires for 80,000 years. In each new generation, roughly the same percentage of people is born with
Iktsuarpok: an Inuit word more useful to us citizens of the digital universe than umpteen expressions for varieties of snow.
Here’s how the blogsite Mental Floss characterizes the expression:
… Read more“You know that feeling of anticipation when you’re waiting for someone to show up at your house and you keep going outside to see if they’re there yet? This is the word for it.”
And it occurs to me that iktsuarpok might enrich modern English, where it could just as
Lonely Planet has long made everyone an adventurer, IMHO, thereby sapping much travel of any real adventure. The Discovery Channel and National Geographic, from what I hear in the street, have made nearly any experience you can imagine accessible from the comfort of your own armchair.
“So you went walking in Antarctica? (Yawn.) Whatever. I saw Antarctica on TV last week. Yeah, it was awesome. All those fuckin’ penguins, eh?”
Etc.
And now Google Goggles will make anyone with … Read more
Print books are still alive, despite continuing attempts to ruin them with digital enhancements. Digital bells and whistles are appropriate for textbooks, e.g., but, if anything, they’re destructive of works of fiction. According to this story in The Bookseller, early moves to klutzify fiction with such gimmicks as hyperlinks and video have not proven a commerical success, and are unlikely to.
In other developments, someone has found a wildly imaginative way to non-digitally enhance print reference books. Call … Read more
1 April 2011. I’m trying to beat a self-imposed but important deadline with The Proteant Enigmass. A few people have said they’d like to see the working ms., but I’m waiting till I get to a certain point in the story so they can get a better sense of what I’m trying to do. And I’d really, really like to do that before Tuesday’s operation. (As it stands, no one has seen any part of this thing, and I need … Read more
Leary here. Wherever that might be (not to mention when).
Current affairs written on the wind (“mere ephemera,” according to my editor, which I didn’t ask). Right now, many of you folk back in 2011 will be fretting about political events in Egypt. The papers should be full of it. (You could still read newspapers back then, and they were often full of it.) No doubt the TV networks will be talking it up like they discovered Egypt only last … Read more
One writer, however much tongue in cheek, has actually expressed admiration for addicts:
I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster, or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He’s taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of death from being a total surprise. ~ Chuck Palahniuk
Overall, though, even Palahniuk would probably concede … Read more