I Have a New Gig
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3 September 2009
As of September, I have officially joined The Millions as a regular contributor.
If you don’t already know it, The Millions is an excellent literary blog. Founded by Max Magee in 2003 — one of the first, and one of the best of the lit-blogs, in my humble opinion — one might go as far as to consider it The New York Times of lit-blogs. Which I suppose means different things to different people, but the quality I’m trying to convey with the analogy is its indispensability, in the universe of literary news, reviews, interviews, and book-topic explorations.
The truth is that when I first began exploring literary blogs, I was overwhelmed. There were so many, and I didn’t have either the wherewithal (those of you who read this blog regularly know that I am a person distinctly lacking in wherewithal) or the time to read 10 blogs regularly. So I did the rounds for a little while, and The Millions clicked for me — the topics, the writers’ voices and insights, the wide range of reading tastes; it lacked the pretension and huber-hipness that sometimes turns one off from certain literary communes. It did not seem so in love with its own smarty-pantsness, and yet, man, such smarty pants’s.
So I started reading it regularly, and then eventually foisted myself upon Max Magee as a guest poster (gracious, clear-headed Max). Five posts later, and here we are; literarily consummated.
You’ll find my posts there about twice a month. I’ll post links here, and if you’re on Facebook, I’ll post there, too. Come on by, tell your friends.
Filed in e-reading, media, social networking, The Millions, the writing life
Tags: Facebook, On the Media, The Millions
22 July 2009
There’s something strange, and a little discomfiting, about being a first-time novelist right now. The public-personality expectation seems greater than it’s ever been. Making yourself “available” to readers, connecting personally on every front, is a foregone expectation. I understand the many cultural and economic forces that have made it so, and I am grateful for the opportunity to share my novel with readers; and yet… sometimes, I think: if I’d craved a life of public events, extroversion, and displaying my life and thoughts regularly on the Internet, I may have gone into politics instead.
This bit from novelist Jonathan Evison, author-personality-promoter extraordinaire (full text at Three Guys One Book), illustrates the point:
As far as writers who keep their readers at a distance, I can’t say that I really understand them. Hell, I invite stalkers! I have a number of women fans who regularly send me little emoticoms–farting unicorns, leprechauns sliding on their asses down rainbows, that kind of thing. They send them for every conceivable occasion– Happy Wednesday! Happy Saint Abernathy’s Day, whatever. I love them! I send them back pictures of my bunnies! …
…I connect with a ton of readers at events. I always invite everybody in attendance to go drink beer somewhere nearby afterward. Drink beer with your readers and it’s a safe bet they’ll buy your next book and your next. I’ve probably attended 30 book clubs for Lulu, too. If you want to build readers for life, go sit in their living room and drink their beer for a few hours.
He goes on to describe the work he does to ensure attendance at readings, including communicating with his 4,000 MySpace friends, inviting people personally, and playing host, literally: “I baked hot dog cake and brought coolers of beer to my events. I made hundreds of jello shots.”
I understand this is easier for somebody like me with a talk radio background who has a really social nature. But… if it’s not in you to do the highly public stuff, well, then, you damn well better blog, because there’s no free passes.
In an interview in 2001, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro spoke about a different time in publishing and in the life of the writer, and how the book tour — the first incarnation of the personal-connections-between-writers-and-readers marketing strategy — affected the writer’s creative process:
I started to publish novels in 1982 and then it was a very different kind of literary world or book world… The established authors of the day didn’t tour. They might occasionally give a lecture at some august institution but they wouldn’t go on these book tours. They were very private figures. The whole publishing world changed… Somewhere in the equation I think authors started to get used as the main marketing tool…
These are the things that actually affect the environment in which the writer thinks, creates, writes. I’m not just talking about the busyness of the tour. It’s a process by which, whether you like it or not, you’re made very aware of why you write and how you write, who your influences are and where you fit in vis-a-vis other authors. How your personal life fits into what you write. That’s a good thing in many ways. It’s very good that you’re sensitive to your audience. But nevertheless it has an effect and it probably does change the way you write. You become a much more self-conscious writer…
And here I am, of course, self-consciously sharing on this blog my thoughts and bits of personal data and happenings, highly aware of the reader. But every day, every post, I find myself wobbling on the balance beam, trying to gauge the middle path between public and private (I’m not sure I’d be so enthusiastic about stalkers, for example). I find that Susan Sontag’s early journals are a good companion along-side the blog-life:
“X” is when you feel yourself an object, not a subject. When you want to please and impress people, either by saying what they want to hear, or by shocking them, or by boasting and name-dropping, or by being very cool… The tendency to be indiscreet — either about oneself or about others — is a classic symptom of “X.” [Curing herself of "X" is a persistent theme for Sontag in her journals]
It is not necessary to deliver oneself to others, but only to whom one loves. For then it is no longer delivering oneself in order to appear, but only in order to give. There is much more force in a man who appears only when he must. To go to the end, that means to know how to guard one’s secret.
The second quote (from Camus?) reminds me of the weird morphing of the word “friend” in the age of Facebook and MySpace. Some of us may be capable of loving many, many people (4,000!). Some of us much fewer. It seems a good guideline: reveal yourself when it is truly a form of giving.
Filed in book biz, media, social networking, the writing life
Tags: Facebook, Jonathan Evison, Kazuo Ishiguro, MySpace, Susan Sontag
16 March 2009
Follow-up to March 8 post….
It’s over-stating to use the word “sin” in regards to Facebook, of course — but the notion of Facebook (as a symbolic stand-in for social networking in general) as a social “good” going “bad,” in a way that calls for a break — a veritable spiritual cleansing — gives one pause.
(Another FB friend reports “taking a break from the Internet” in her Facebook status update. “Call me,” she writes.)
In the NYTimes Sunday Mag this week, Peggy Orenstein writes about the generational dynamics of Facebook. For 30-and-40-and 50-somethings, Facebook has become a way of reconnecting — for better or for worse — with past selves, via old friends and acquaintances from youth. For today’s youth, Facebook might end up being the way in which one never loses touch with that self — or those youth-associated relations — in the first place. Facebook’s “most profound impact,” she writes,
“may be to alter, even obliterate, conventional notions of the past, to change the way young people become adults… college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?”
My guess is that for us older folk, the novelty of Facebook wears off after the initial surge of participation — exploring features, finding old friends, satiating that hunger for instant social gratification. Hence the need for a “break.” A bit of binge-and-purge, then hopefully a leveling off to a more reasonable and managed and individualized participation.
One of the great and profound hallmarks of adulthood is the capacity to both pursue and experience “difficult pleasures” — reading a book that requires some intellectual effort, for example. The concern might be that Facebook, for the younger generations, would encourage perpetual adolescence; that instead of serving as a kind of fun side-story to a fully-realized adult life, it will in fact supplant adult life, will become the very architecture of a life, and preclude the possibilities of more difficult pleasures.
Today, I’m going with an optimistic outlook (spring is in the air, after all). Social networking is evolving so quickly (remember Friendster? Orenstein writes), it’s certainly possible that Facebook will simply “grow up” along side its users. Interestingly, the status update has just recently changed from the default “Mary is…” (What are you doing right now?) to a blank box with a new header question:
“What’s on your mind?”
Be thoughtful human beings, the Facebook people seem to be saying. Take a moment to think about what you want to report.
Filed in analogians anonymous, religion, social networking
Tags: Facebook, NY Times
8 March 2009
A friend has just reported to me that he’s given up Facebook for Lent.
There are so many levels of resonance to that — especially as I blog here about the strangeness and dissonance of social networking — and I can’t seem to stop thinking/musing about it…
Maybe what it’s triggered for me is a whole psycho-sociological thought-path that is now leading into spiritual realms, i.e. the layers beneath the expression “guilty pleasure” and what it is that millions of people really “get” out of Facebook.
More soon, after I stop giggling… (if you’re reading this, JC, you know I’m not laughing AT you, I’m laughing WITH you.)
24 February 2009
So my friend Mimi, Facebook Queen Extraordinaire, has informed me that the default “is” of Facebook status updates has just been eliminated. Ha ha!
See my February 20 post for details on the prescient profundity of this change vis-a-vis the tyranny, I mean ascendance, of micro-blogging. An active-verb revolution has begun…
Filed in analogians anonymous, social networking
Tags: Facebook, micro-blogging
20 February 20009
So I’m recovering from yesterday’s post, still considering the apparent fact that not only is the novel dead (passé, at the least), but blogging’s got one foot in the grave as well. The”now” now, the “it,” is micro-blogging.
I’ve not Twittered, but I’ve observed and tried out the Facebook “status update”: Sonya is surfing Amazon, one might write on her Facebook homepage, for all her “friends” to see. Sonya is combing her dog for fleas. Sonya is off to bed now, good night! The updates I love-to-hate are the ones which simultaneously thumb their noses and make poetry of Facebook’s default (passive) “is” in the posting box: Jill is Puerto Rico! Jane is every day is a winding road!
I have my doubts about a story-in-micro-blog-fragments, a la Goodreads.com; but who knows, the haiku form has flourished and inspired verses of depth and breadth and mystery for centuries.
But the greater literary potential of the micro-blog, I think, might be found in Virginia Woolf’s notion of “moments of being” (from her book of the same title). Moments of being are those flashes of insight, of heightened spiritual and sensual awareness, which grace us from time to time in the midst of lives which are comprised mostly of “non-being” — that greater part of life which is ”not lived consciously,” but instead embedded in “a kind of nondescript cotton wool.” Artists may experience moments of being as they work, or as inspiration to work (we writers keep our notebooks on hand for just this purpose).
And now, Facebookers-and-Twitterers-all can take moments out of the day for “being.” How about suggesting to Facebook to replace the default “is” with a moment-of-being verb like wonders or envisions, sensory verbs like sees, hears, feels, hungers. In that Facebook world, I might actually read all my news feeds.
Filed in analogians anonymous, poetry, social networking, the writing life
Tags: Facebook, goodreads.com, micro-blogging, Twitter, Virginia Woolf
19 February 2009
Goodreads.com is having a micro-blogging writing contest:
The novel is passé. The short story is outmoded. Even Lonelygirl15′s videoblog is yesterday’s news. The new medium of creativity is the status update. Aficionados of Twitter and Facebook understand the power of instant communication. We’re taking it one step further: Can you tell your friends a story using only your Goodreads status updates?
I am a little speechless. More on this as I micro-process it in my micro-mind.
Filed in analogians anonymous, media, social networking
Tags: Facebook, goodreads.com, micro-blogging, Twitter
13 February 2009
An article in the January 19 issue of Wired magazine by Steven Levy captures my feelings about social networking — “Author’s Online Activities” — aptly. He writes about the inevitable cycles of under- and over-participation:
…driven by guilt, I try to pitch in. I post Facebook status reports, send iPhone snapshots to Flickr, link my Netflix queue with FriendFeed. But as my participation increases, I invariably suffer another psychic downside of social networking: remorse… It’s one thing to share intimacies person- to-person. But with a community? Creepy.
Creepy, indeed.
And yet, here we are. I’ve not yet read Susan Sontag’s recently published journals, but here’s a pull-quote I’m chewing on:
In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself.
Is the blog the modern journal? Sontag might say so: One of the main (social) functions of a journal is precisely to be read furtively by other people.
Do we think, then, that blogging can be generative in itself, and not just the chatter which comments on or points (links, etc) us to substance? I wonder: do bloggers — in putting themselves to the virtual page almost daily, for others to behold and ingest — actually build a thinking and creating self?
(Literary memoirist David Shields has been thinking and writing on this — the phenomenon of “reality” writing — for a long time and has much smarter things to say about it than I. I’m not sure how much he’s explored (divulged) the effects/experience of self-revealing writing on the writer himself… but check out his forthcoming book, Reality Hunger.)
Filed in analogians anonymous, media, social networking
Tags: David Shields, Facebook, Flickr, Netflix, Susan Sontag, Wired
8 February 2009
So I’m late to the Facebook party, and, as a words person, the first order of business is mastering the lingo…
One of the most palpable and, for me, unnerving, effects of online social networking is the redefinition of the word “friend.”
In Facebook parlance, “friend” is both verb and noun. To friend someone is to propose connection of your Facebook worlds (profile, photos, Friend lists, updates, etc), granting full access to one another. The friending action must be confirmed by a click on the other side, must be mutual.
So far so good. But most people will tell you that a Facebook-friend is a specific phenomenon, not to be confused with a friend-friend; that Facebook is in fact an effective way to non-communicate — to communicate in a flat, by-passing sort of way, in a hey, in case you were wondering, but, you know, it’s cool if you weren’t wondering kind of way — with people who are by and large not your friend-friends…
Which is strangely alluring, of course, especially if you are a busy person. To communicate without having to individuate. To communicate while also circumventing communication. To simulate communication. Not unlike, oh, I dunno…writing fiction?
But it’s the flattening that throws me. What to say — and how to say it — to “everyone”? I tell my writing students that particulars and specifics make up the stuff of good fiction — because life is specific, not generic. Not abstract. In that spirit, here’s a particular from L.’s post to my Facebook “wall”– a tip for a new FB-user — that made my day:
The “become a fan” feature can be cool. Every morning your headlines tell you that someone has become a fan of Angela Davis, or Aretha Franklin’s Inaugural Hat, or Kafka or Rilke. Sadly, it also informs you if someone has become a fan of “Bacon.”
Bacon?! Mmm… bacon.
Now, one wonders: what does it mean exactly to be a ”fan”…?
February 2009 – Here We Go… The First Post
Well, hello. Thanks for visiting. This blog is mostly about my forthcoming novel Long For This World, but is also padded with a healthy dose of literary miscellany.
In January I received from my editor’s assistant a 55-question Author Questionnaire. It’s the source document they will use “to present your book to our sales and marketing teams,” she wrote. Most of the questions inquired about group affiliations and potential market audiences; the last 13 questions fell under the category “Author’s Online Activities.” Uh-oh, I thought.
Are you on Facebook? Do you have a Web site? These questions seem to have replaced What do you do? and What’s your sign? or even How’ve you been? in our social interchanges. (I can’t help but consider the contrast with traditional greetings in some African cultures–How is it with the children?–or Korean culture–Have you had breakfast?)
There are so many reasons why mass online social networking, blogging, and instant messaging (instant anything) feel just plain wrong to the writer of literary fiction. Not wrong in a moral sense; more like an ill-fitting-shoes or bad-haircut sense.
But more on that as we go along. (I’d get into it now, but, well, I should try to keep posts short, right?)
For now, here we go. Once upon a time there was the book tour. Now we have “Author’s Online Activities.” Please come along on this wild ride with me.
See below for most recent posts, or click here for more about this blog.
Filed in analogians anonymous, book biz, Long For This World, social networking
Tags: Facebook