The Future of Reading for Learning

In the Instructional Design community, there’s been a lot of talk about Content as a Service (CaaS) as a method of enhancing Reading for Learning (as opposed to reading for pleasure). The idea is that removing text from formal constraints such as bound books or white papers – divorcing content from form, in other words – lets us provide avenues for collaboration. In short, you give people the opportunity to collaborate and add value to the text – personal reactions, connections with the material, the ability to have your questions answered outside of class, etc.  As David Grebow puts it:

“Add an app [to an eBook] that has been developed to help you learn. … It almost magically knows you. You are connected to your fellow students and even students who have already taken the course. Your notes, highlights, and questions are all collected in one place. The eTextbook is there to help you learn. The app and the content are providing Content as a Service. It’s the dream of Relationship Centered Learning!”

CaaS is an way of acknowledging that our knowledge is constantly changing. By providing students and teachers the ability to continually react to and complement the original text, you provide a dynamic level of engaging interaction to the book that helps it keep up with current thinking while also helping people learn in the manner unique to them.

Of course, simply providing students collaborative applications will not ensure that they get used. The apps need to be well-designed so that they complement the text, not overwhelm it. In addition, an efficient, easily searchable way of storing all of this collaborative data seems essential to its success. But none of these are insurmountable problems.  My suspicion is that a successful CaaS book would need two things:

1. An original text that is truly engaging. IMO, too many scholarly text are filled with needless jargon that make them all but inaccessible to the reader that isn't immersed in the field. Teach while telling stories, add suspense to the narrative, and don’t be afraid of sensational details. Reconnect with your inner storyteller and construct your text in a way that keeps the reader engaged.
2. Presenting collaborative data in an organized way that compliments but doesn't overwhelm the original text. I picture some kind of dashboard where the main portion of the screen is devoted to the book, while a side menu includes sub-windows that potentially includes a chat to other students, search engine (for hard words and learning more about details), and a place for notes (and accessing not only your note history but the notes of everyone else that read the book).

CaaS for textbooks seems like it's a great idea. I'd love to see how effectively it drives knowledge transfer in practice. Ideally, it would closely match William Germano's poetic vision for collaboration in scholarly works:

I’m advocating for a riskier, less tidy mode of scholarly production, but not for sloppiness. I’m convinced, though, that the scholarly book that keeps you awake at night thinking through ideas and possibilities unarticulated in the text itself is the book worth reading. It may be that the best form a book can take—even an academic book—is as a never-ending story, a kind of radically unfinished scholarly inquiry for which the reader’s own intelligence can alone provide the unwritten chapters.

Writing Advice from the Jazz Age

I'm not a big fan of "how to write" books, but Brain Pickings has posted two letters of writing advice from F. Scott Fitzgerald to two aspiring writers - one of whom is his daughter! - that are witty, intelligent, and moving. Money quote:

"You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell."

Seriousness in Fiction

"When we speak of "seriousness" in fiction ultimately we are talking abut an attitude toward death–how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate. Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever brought up with younger writers, possibly because given to anyone at the appropriate age, such advice is widely felt to be effort wasted."

- Thomas Pynchon, from his introduction to Slow Learner

Revenge of the Tab Dump

As always, interesting articles that I indended to write about, but never found the time.

1. I spend most of my professional life working in PowerPoint. Slide:ology helped me to learn how to design better slides. It could help you too.

2. Justin E.H. Smith argues the, to me, obvious point that marriage is work:

One might suppose rather that love and work—or at least a distinctly modern, capitalist conception of work—are two sides of the same coin: both emerge together at the same moment in history, and both carry with them the ungrounded belief that each of us has our destiny in our own hands, that our happiness is entirely a consequence of our life choices, and our misery a surefire sign that we are doing something wrong. In this connection the contemporary use of "passion" serves as a revealing misnomer. For how many can recall that, originally… to undergo a passion was to suffer an affliction over which one had no control? … in the modern world, in both work and love… we are expected to treat the things that happen to us, that cannot but happen to us, as a result of the way our society is structured, as if they were the result of our own sundry projects of self-creation.

He’s a bit too cynical and determinist for my tastes, but there’s some truth in there: many, many people do not hold their destiny in their hands, for one reason or another.

3. I’d Rather Be Writing ponders a good question for all writers.

I was talking with my wife’s uncle last week about writing strategies for fiction, and whether it’s better to outline everything ahead of time, or figure it out as you go. The former is apparently called a “plotter” method and the latter a “pantser” method (called pantser because you fly by the seat of your pants).
He said there’s no right way, but if you’re planning to figure it out as you go, it’s still a good idea to write your last chapter ahead of time. This way you know generally where you want to end up. If you don’t know how your novel is going to end, he said, you often wander around and eventually end your novel in fanciful/unbelievable way. Further, pantsers often lose motivation because they don’t know the point or meaning of their story.

He goes on to connect this to his life as a Technical Writer. I always enjoy his posts; he’s a thoughtful writer who has some great insights in the details of technical communication.

4. AGNI interviews Johnathan Lethem about sampling and creation. I love how Lethem thinks. Some samples:

• On using quotations in his work: “Girl in Landscape is relatively free of cultural reference. The voice is in the third person omniscient and stays relatively close to a thirteen year old girl who’s not a voracious reader or music listener, who lives in the future, and on this other planet. Yet I know there was at least one moment when some descriptive passage of the desert landscape under the sky slipped into a tiny bit of a Joni Mitchell lyric. It was irresistible, it was like a throb in the voice that just felt right, and there’s no reason in the world why I wanted to resist that. There might have been five words of quotation, but direct quotation, and I just let it be. But that’s notable because it’s so exceptional inside that project."
• On Dylan and his sources: “This whole question of quotation and theft in Dylan tends to be looked at in arguments in favor for or against his unique genius, as though he himself were introducing the very problem that undermines his own claim. In a way it’s giving him too much credit to call him an original thief. He’s a typical thief. So can we now please just leave that question behind? When an ideology exists, no one is free of it. He’s spent a lot of time defending himself or obfuscating about sources because he has absorbed the same frameworks that people are using to judge the work."

Ultimately, if art is working then it’s done something and you only need to become interested in sources if they interest you. Nothing more needs to be said. When art succeeds it’s its own law, it’s its own reason for being.” I know that the few “original” things that I write almost always spin off of something else that I’ve read, either consciously or subconsciously, and certain phrases that I use have been used in that way before. If this should be called “sampling” so be it – I believe that the modern world is better off for it.

5. The world's smallest known vertebrate. I miss having frogs in the house.

6. Gotta say, a movie called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace sounds fascinating: Adam Curtis, the director, describes it as "...This is a story about the rise of the machines/and how they made us believe/we could create a stable world/that would last forever."

7. In her essay collection In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Margaret Atwood splits hairs and describes her Science Fiction - The Handsmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood - as "speculative fiction" rather than scifi.

8. One of my favorite albums is the Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society, and probably the most rocking tune off this understated album is the majestic "Big Sky." Adam Fieled overthinks the songs implications.

Fall Running Fragment

I recently found a fragment I wrote about running during the fall that I was going to use as a springboard for a longer post, but now that that the window has passed, i'll simply present it here without any fluff. Enjoy!
---
Fall has arrived, and as the leaves pile up on the ground, the sounds of far-away trains and motorways travel farther through the skeletal trees, bringing otherworldly mechanical hoots and dull hisses that fight for prominence with my breath as I run down suburban roads. I say suburban, and there are certainly traditional suburbs on my running routes – too many houses on streets named for the trees that were cut down to make way for them. But one of the reasons that I love New England is the small scale of everything, and so my runs are punctuated with small portions of wilderness as nature fights her way through the structured settlements. Hence the scene as I run through southern Framingham, and as I transition from one suburb to another I find myself, if only for a quarter mile, on a country road, a small spit of pavement between two ponds, fall colors on the trees and also mirrored back to me on the still water, with only a few ripples coming from a shockingly white swan drifting about in the first light. Or jogging up a slow hill that divides a golf course, pale light floating down all around me through the early morning mist, not a car or person in sight.

Cross Posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox

So You Want to Be a Writer

So You Want To Be A Writer by Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

- Quibble: I'd argue that even the most inspired writing benefits from some rework and wordsmithing. But the sentiment still stands, and who can argue with the great line "the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind."

First Lines of Negotiating with the Dead

Writing, Writers, The Writing Life--if this last is not an oxymoron. Is this subject like the many-headed Hydra, which grows two other subtexts as soon as you demolish one? Or is it more like Jacob's nameless angel, which whom you must wrestle until he blesses you? Or is it like Proteus, who must be firmly grasped through all of his changes? Hard to get hold of, certainly. Where to start? At the end called Writing? Or the end called The Writer? With the gerund or the noun, the activity or the one performing it? And where exactly does one stop and the other begin?

- Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead

For more on this fascinating woman, you have to see her take on the hockey goalie.

Cross posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox.

Writing Fiction in Four Easy Steps!

Teresa at Making Light has a a simple four-item formula for turning story into fiction:

1. Move and keep moving.
2. Make it consequential.
3. Recycle your characters.
4. See if you already have one.

Details here. Like anything complicated, this simplifies the matter entirely, but could serve as a good jumping off point. Plus, as a commenter notes, it's usually a good idea to know what the rules are - or to at least think about them! - before deciding to break them.

Wharton's Writing

TNC has been writing recently about how great Edith Wharton's prose is. Specifically, he's enamored with The Age of Innocence, which I read in college back before I knew anything about life. I should read it again at some point, but his writings were fresh in my head when I encountered a copy of her novel Twilight Sleep novel at the local library sale, inspiring me to toss down the 50 cents for the softcover.

While i'm only three chapters in, I  already wouldn't characterize it as a great book - the mere fact that it's about the upper-crust of NYC society in the Jazz Age means that it's basically antithetical to what I look for in a book - but my oh my has she presented some great turns of phrase so far. To wit:

"But she had had glimpses enough of the scene: of the audience of bright elderly women, with snowy hair, eurhythmic movements, and finely-wrinkled over-massaged faces on which a smile of glassy benevolence sat like their rimless prince-nez. They were all inexorably earnest, aimlessly kind and fathomlessly pure; and all rather too well-dressed, except the “prominent woman” of the occasion, who usually wore dowdy clothes, and had steel-rimmed spectacles and straggling wisps of hair. Whatever the question dealt with, these ladies always seemed to be the same, and always advocated with equal zeal Birth Control and unlimited maternity, free love or the return to the traditions of the American home; and neither they nor Mrs. Manford seemed aware that there was anything contradictory in these doctrines. All they knew was that they were determined to force certain persons to do things that those persons preferred not to do. Nona, glancing down the surried list, recalled a saying of her mother’s former husband, Arthur Wyant: 'your mother and her friends would like to teach the whole world how to say its prayers and brush its teeth.'" p. 11

"Poor Arthur—from the first he had been one of her failures. She had a little cemetery of them—a very small one—planted over with quick-growing things, so that you might have walked all through her life and not noticed there were any graves in it." p. 25

I'm not sure i'm going to make it all the way through this one, but I've sure enjoyed what I've read so far. What more do you want out of a book?

Cross-posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox.

Journalistic Hyperbole

Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run is a fun, fast paced, dramatic story about a lost tribe of super runners. It’s incredibly entertaining and thought provoking, but has been criticized by many people for including too much “gonzo” journalism, for letting exuberance overwhelm the facts, as seen by Ed Ayres detailed criticism, summarized as “The first [of the book’s] two stories are somewhat misguided and misinformed, though entertaining.  The third is well researched and, I think, profoundly important. I don't know if I have ever before read a book that is so wrong and so right between the same two covers.”

Peter Richmond’s article on Ryan Fitzpatrick is similar. An interesting portrait of a thoughtful man, it nonetheless includes such pronouncements such at this: “It kind of makes you wonder if, in a graphic-novel alternate universe, Fitzpatrick has been predestined to visit failing American post-industrial towns until one of them recognizes his mission as Savior and anoints him.” The Goose’s Roost – a thinking man’s Buffalo Sports blog – takes him down by pointing out the ambiguities behind the hyperbole.

These two writings shine a light on an interesting question: What exactly should be the relationship between telling an entertaining story and being faithful to the facts? I don’t have the answer, but like everything, the answer falls somewhere in between. On one side, you have someone that tells a story with no regard for the truth, aiming for nothing more that entertainment. On the other hand, you have someone who strives for the most accurate representation of reality as possible with no regard for storytelling. (This along with incomprehensible jargon is why so many academic papers are so unreadably bad – they have no concern with telling a story.)

Personally, I find the prevalence of hyperbole these days to be mildly disturbing, simply because we negate the power of words if we don’t use them for their intended purpose. For example: it’s entertaining to use the word “epic” as a synonym for “great” (as in “That was an epic game, man!”) but what it means is that you now don’t have a word to use when you want to say something was truly epic (by definition “heroic; majestic; impressively great”) I’m as guilty as the next person of doing this, BTW, and I’m not sure it’s going to go away anytime soon .

As for representing nothing but the truth in text, well, the truth is always more complex than any narrative you can create. The mere tactic of picking and choosing facts and presenting them in a certain order by definition leaves things out and thus doesn't paint a complete picture of a thing. It’s like the old story about the only accurate map having a 1:1 scale that includes everything you could ever want – like something out of a Borges tale. So if you accept this fact, why not make your story entertaining? Why not stay as accurate to the truth as you can, but have some fun along the way?

And so in the end, I fall on the side of the entertainers, with the caveat that a little bit of hyperbole can go a long way. What do you think?

Learning to Write Cursive

Both of my sons are in a Montessori school, which means that they are being taught cursive as their first way of writing. There's a whole theory behind it which makes sense when you read it (the main benefit is that the kid doesn't have to lift their pencil from the page), but I've always been concerned that cursive a bit of a waste of time; after all, who writes in cursive these days. Even for those that know cursive, reading it can be a bit of a chore: I know my Mother's and my Grandmother's handwriting very well, but even so it can take a bit to decypher their cursive.

So it was with interest that I read this article by Danielle Magnuson. Among other things, she writes that:

...handwriting is not an antediluvian method of communication to be tossed aside in favor of e-learning, reports the Los Angeles Times (June 15, 2011). The motion of writing out letters and words and sentences by hand stimulates the brain in a way that keyboarding does not. Perhaps it is not so different than the way reading a book activates the brain differently than hearing the same information or watching it on a television screen. None of this is to say that computers and TV can’t be educational, but the tactile, memory-creating relationship between you and your language lessens once the re-creation of the letters by your own hand is taken out of the equation.

That's all well and good, but I just can't shake the feeling that both print and cursive are just as good for recognizing the benefits that Magnuson writes about. I have nothing to back this up, just my gut.

A Fragment

An older man with droopy shoulders walked through the parking lot. He wore a faded LL Bean cap, a white collared T-shirt, and rumpled jeans. His eyes were hidden behind thick square shades and mouth was filtered though grey stubble. Taking deliberate steps with his hands clasped carefully behind his back, he measured his way up the right side of one row of cars, slowly turned around, and returned on the other side of the row. He walked this way for the better part of an hour, never talking to anyone or making any sounds, the inscrutable sentinel of the parking lot.

Sexting

A while back, I made a promise to stop paying so much attention to politics. I find the mechanisms of power fascinating in its mixture of high-mindedness, venality, and manipulations, but the current political culture is so vapid and polarizing in its pursuit of gotya moments that I checked out. However, some events are too ubiquitous to miss, and so I found myself reading up on Anthony Weiner’s sex tweets.

I’m not going to write about the obvious points here, but let me list them for my peace of mind: 1) namely that for someone who is supposedly Congress’ social media expert, Weiner showed a remarkable lack of judgement by not realizing that it was only a matter of time before any picture he sent was discovered, 2) as always, the cover-up is worse than the deed, and 3) you really can’t pick a better name for the politician in this scandal than Weiner. Seriously: you just can’t make this stuff up.

No, what interests me is act of sexting. Given that emails and texting have become so commonplace as to almost become a form of speech, I’m not suprised that sexting is so common. The problem is that these texts and pictures are transmitted in a public domain and can be copied any number of times. In the past, sexy pictures or letters physical objects whose discovery and dissemination was limited at best. But now once a text or picture is out there, it’s free game.

Which is sad. Texting as a form of communication is freeing in a way that emails and even speech is not. I know that as much as I talk and email with my wife, our texts have a completely different feel to them; they’re fun and immediate and – best of all – quick. An instant capture of the moment. I’m not on twitter, but I imagine that the act of tweeting is similar. Now enter sex into the equation and the allure is almost irresistible for people in long-distance relationships, who travel, or even those who like to share the random things that pass through their heads during office hours...

There’s a lot of other things that go into sexting, but Penelope Trunk’s take - How Adults Can Sext their way to Happiness - is worth reading. Among very amusing stories about sexting at 40 and the freedom that it gave her, she notes:

Sending a naked photo of yourself is an emotionally intimate act because of the implied trust you have in the recipient. When you act in a trusting way—like trusting the recipient of the photo to handle it with care and respect—you benefit because being a generally trusting person is an emotionally sound thing to do; people who are trusting are better judges of character.

She also writes that “sending nude photos is so common today that lawmakers are forced to treat it as a mainstream courting ritual and legalize it for all ages.” It’s important to remember that Weiner broke no laws – everyone he tweeted was of legal age – his only fault was lying (to his wife, his constituents, etc. – no small matter, but not illegal). IMO, it would be a better world in which more people spent their time thinking about sex rather than other things – at least it’s healthy! The problem is that at the moment the forms of communication aren’t private, and so the risk of embarrassment and humiliation are high. Until something changes, it’ll be a risk that sexters will have to run. Perhaps that makes it more exciting?

A Fragment

They yelled; they tied their shirts around their heads; they drank. This went on for many hours. Eventually, one passed out, curved upright on his barstool like a question mark, and the rest blinked silently at each other: now what?

Defending the Short Story

Yesterday, Joel wrote about his dislike for stand-alone short stories, and as the two of us have discussed before, we’ll have to agree to disagree about this. To me, the best short stories are like Tapas to the full-meal of the novel. When done well, they present one of several things:

- A completely focused mood piece. Think of some of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, capturing what it feels like to have your first girlfriend break up with you, or to be stuck with insomnia thinking about death. Other examples: Stephen King’s most excellent stories in Skeleton Crew and Night Shift.
- Pondering an idea. Perhaps done best in SciFi, these short stories present an interesting idea and the consequences of that idea. Philip K Dick was the best at this; he’d present an interesting idea that might not hold up over the course of a novel and explore it in a short story. (Note that both Total Recall and Minority Report were adapted from PKD short stories, not novels.)
- Experimenting with form, voice, etc. Authors just fucking around to see what works.

In short, I see a short story as a more informal, concentrated taste of story telling. Potentially containing the possibility of something that could be explored further, but not necessarily. (Of course, I've always been attracted to flaws more that perfection - I wrote a bit about this over here.)

I also think that there are authors that are better at novels and those that are better at short stories (and the rare few, like Stephen King, that are good at both). For instance, I love Haruki Murakami, but (after the quake excepted) his short stories are awful - he needs the space of the novel to present his themes and wandering narrators. I wonder if Ondaatje is one of this authors whose writing favors the novelistic form?

(Cross Posted at Reading, Running & Red Sox)

Translating Corporate Speak

As a writer, nothing bothers me as much as unclear language. Specifically, people that consciously use words in ways that are designed to either obscure the truth behind what they are saying or to protect themselves from the PC police. To list just two examples off the top of my head:

- a Day Care center whose staff is not allowed to use the word “problem;” they need to use “issue” instead
- Calling the habit of motorists slowing down to view roadside accidents “Curiosity Delays” rather than the much more interesting “rubbernecking”

Not to mention the unique linguistic feats of lawyers, legislators, and corporate writers, all of whom seem to develop their own language designed to keep outsiders from understanding what they’re really trying to say. With regards to the latter, I got a huge kick out of this New Yorker article and the tool that it describes: “Unsuck It”. Money quote:

The minds behind Mule Design Studio have channeled their rage against corporate jargon into the creation of a delightfully hostile (and vulgar) translation device called “Unsuck It.” (Many thanks to Laura McClure over at Mother Jones for bringing this to our attention.) You type in a particularly odious word or phrase—“incentivize,” say—and “Unsuck It” spits out the plain-English equivalent, along with a sentence for context. (“Incentivize” means “encourage” or “persuade,” as in “In order to meet our phase 1 deliverable, we must incentivize the workforce with monetary rewards.”) One feels a certain cathartic glee as well-worn meeting-room clichés are dismantled one by one: an “action item” is a “goal”; “on the same page” means “in agreement”; to “circle the wagons” is to “defend an idea or decision as a group.” I looked up one that had baffled me recently—“onboarding,” as in “I’ll start onboarding you onto payroll within the next week”—and learned that to “onboard” is to “prepare an employee for a new job or project.” Why settle for a dusty old adjective when you can have a shiny new verb?

Sex and Writing

I remember very clearly when my dream of becoming a novelist died. It was in my mid-20s, and I had been struggling with a few book ideas for a while and, like every other young American literary wannabe, was even attempting a coming of age novel. Looking back on it now, there are some good parts, even if I was trying too hard to be Thomas Pynchon (minus, of course, the intimidating erudition and the metaphorical skills), but I just couldn’t bring the different parts of the book together. In writing a novel, you need to be able to depict anything, and I was struggling to write about deeper subjects that involved more than the comic and absurd situations that filled my collegiate life. Specifically, I remember trying to write about the strange sexual tensions that filled my undergraduate years at UVM; in writing my "through a mirror darkly" version of my college years, it needed to include living amongst these beautiful, athletic women in a drunken party atmosphere also trying to form my identity, build self-confidence, and also get an education. It was not easy, and taught me that writing about these emotions - including sex - is ridiculously hard; you have to not only have a skill for writing physical descriptions, but also the rapidfire emotions that go into any sexual experience, no matter how big or small. The whole thing was way beyond my meager skill.

I relate all of this because came back to me when I read Alexander Chee’s “Sex and Salter” article in The Paris Review. It’s about James Salter, a writer that I’ve never read, but Chee had some astute observations that are worth sharing:

On its own terms, sex is information. ... Reading Salter’s sentences, I saw what I knew of sex, that sex is a moment in which you are known and knowable. Whatever it is you desire appears from behind the veil of shame or fantasy or nostalgia, or sheer impossibility, and in its presence, you are revealed to yourself. ...
It seems to me that the writers we love most are those who manage to capture something we ourselves have thought and rejected, for being forbidden, dangerous, elusive, something that if we made room for it would undo something else we want to keep, so we force it away—literature as a catalogue of rejected thoughts. For the way they can hold onto what the rest of us would put away as dangerous, they become heroes, the ones who emerge with the one thing we hoped to keep secret, but know we need. When I say to you James Salter is one of my heroes, that is what I mean.

Yes, I say. The best writers I know, the ones I admire most, are not only the ones that can capture truth in a bottle – capturing a truth in a crystal-clear sentence or description – but those that are fearless in that they are not afraid to follow a thought to its fullest. For example, part of the reason I love Thomas Pynchon so much is that he’s not afraid to be absolutely disgusting if it makes the point he’s trying to make. And when it comes to sex, while Americans are inundated with it – sexual images and metaphors dominate our television and music – we’re taught so little honest information about it that we have no common sexual vocabulary short of either humor or porn. Writing about sex involves digging through a ton of crap, both societal and personal, to get the essential core of the matter. It requires honesty and bravery to do right, and I'll have to see if Chee's right about James Salter in that respect.

A Good Idea

Michael Chabon's Lesson 5 for good writing: "Marry a strong, talented, vocal, articulate and above all persuasive reader."

Quote of the Day

Paraphrased: "However" is simply "But" in a tuxedo.

Washington Post Neologism

Every year, the Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly neologism contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternative meanings for common words.
The winners are:

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.
6. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.
7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle (n), olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

The Washington Post's Style Invitational also asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year's winners:

1. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
2. Foreploy (v): Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
3. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
4. Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
5. Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
6. Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
7. Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.
8. Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
9. Karmageddon (n): its like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
10. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
11. Glibido (v): All talk and no action.
12. Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
13. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
14. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
15. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating.
And the pick of the literature:
16. Ignoranus (n): A person who's both stupid and an a-hole.