Rich Mintz  

Just finished Kevin Kelly’s newest book, What Technology Wants. I expected it to be a pile of singularitous drivel, but in fact it was a relatively serious, perceptive, and legitimately argued book. Kelly’s central claim is that the global body of all human technology (viewed broadly), which he calls the “technium,” represents the continuation of the evolutionary process that led to the human brain, and is subject to the same tendencies and laws, including tendencies toward complexity, ubiquity, etc.

At points Kelly tends to the hippy-dippiness of his Whole Earth days, but much less frequently than I would have anticipated, and the book is readable and serious, respectful of technology (including such core technologies as cotton cloth and paper) and the choices it has afforded modern people, without being dismissive of the complications. In fact, the ramifications of those complications take up much of the second half of the book. Kelly is obviously a “technologist,” but he makes a persuasive case that any given technology, in itself, is value-neutral.

Still, at heart this is an optimistic book. Kelly observes that in context, most technological advances are inevitable, in the common sense of the word: the checking-off of prerequisites generally leads in fairly short order to the simultaneous inventing of the next principle in the technological chain by multiple people. (Compare the tree of technologies in a game like Civilization IV, which works more or less the same way.)

… I loved this interview with poet, writer, and photographer Mary Jo Bang. I think the way she describes the coming of slow mastery is, though expressed in prose, quite poetic:

And I saw how, if you steadily worked at something, what you don’t know gradually erodes and what you do know slowly grows and at some point you’ve gained a degree of mastery. What you know becomes what you are. You know photography and you are a photographer. You know writing and you are a writer.

I’ve been struggling off and on with Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way over the past few months, as I’ve mentioned a few times on Twitter. The book feels a little dated — I bought it ten years ago, and it was already ten years old then, born in a time when there was no iPhone and no social media and barely an Internet at all. But the principles are sound, and as a method for unlocking your creativity and freeing your inner voice to say what it wants to say (regardless of what medium you wish to say it in, what it is you do for a living, etc.), it seems to make sense.

I like the program’s pragmatic focus — its first principle is to get up in the morning and write, establishing for yourself a routine of compliance and forward motion — and I like the fact that it’s a workshop and not a bunch of platitudes. But I’m still finding it hard to carve out the life space necessary to be creative.

(By way of digression, I should say here that I’m not particularly sure what flavor of creativity I’m seeking, I just know that the periods of my life when I’ve been “producing” have been the most fulfilling ones. At various points in my life I was writing poetry, essays, short stories, the bones of a novel; at another point I wrote and designed a catalog; at another point I learned Perl and wrote an extended module of a larger text processing system. In my childhood, I drew maps and imaginary cityscapes. All of that felt creative and fulfilling in a way that I’d like to recapture.)

Part of the challenge is that I’m busy, with a queue of work- and avocation-related “obligations” a mile long. Part of it is that I live in a one-room apartment, with another person who is usually home when I am. (It’s a large room, with five or six distinct “areas” that a person can be in, but ultimately it’s one room, and everything that happens in any part of it can be heard everywhere.) And part of it is simply that I’m not single (by choice!), and another person and his interests and needs have a claim on my time.

But if you want to do something, you need to do it. People with far more crippling constraints than mine have done it (Wallace Stevens bla bla, Kate Chopin bla bla, fucking David Foster fucking Wallace bla bla). And so I’m reading Dear Sugar’s amazing “Write Like a Motherfucker” column again, in which she says

Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

What she said. Also, here’s Michael Copperman’s “Letter To My Talented Writer-Friend A., Who Fears She Will Never Be Published”:

Nobody else needs your work, though some may be moved by it or even changed it—but that will only happen if you stop waiting for someone to beg you to speak. To crib some lines from a poet I heard read a few months ago, “There is no one coming to save you. There is nothing from which to be saved.”

So, you know, dig the goddamn coal already. Make a workspace that makes sense, remove or set boundaries around distraction, buy pretty pencils, brew some coffee… but don’t (unlike so many) stop there. Take the next step and do something.

“Remarketing” is the phenomenon by which a retailer or commercial business that you’ve visited online (but not yet purchased from) chases you around the Internet encouraging you to come back and buy whatever it was that you were looking at.

To those of you (and I realize there may be a few) who don’t work in the Internet marketing industry, this may seem like an appalling invasion of privacy — “how do they know who I am?” but, within the bounds of the degree of anonymity that’s de facto accepted on the Internet, it makes sense. They don’t actually know who you are; they (or, more precisely, Google, which is serving up your ads) simply know which computer and browser are yours, and they contract with Google to serve ads to you later. (I’m not an expert in this by any means, I just generally understand how it works.) The ads show up on whatever page you happen to be visiting later: as you can see above, a Dragon Dictate ad followed me to YouTube.

It’s simple and brilliant, and in the right circumstances it is cost-effective — the ads perform better than the retailer’s other ads, and help them close sales that would have been lost. We at BSD have not used it extensively, but we’ve tried it, and seen it work, and others are reporting the same thin. Which is probably why I’m seeing a huge uptick in remarketing in recent weeks.

Just in the last 24 hours, that I noticed, I’ve been remarketed by Dragon Dictate, Google Chromebooks (or perhaps it’s Samsung doing the marketing), and Nau jackets, three product websites that I did indeed visit.

Often, as a potential consumer, I kind of like this. It keeps bringing my mind back to the whatever-it-is I was considering buying. The Chromebook remarketing ads might actually push me over the edge to buying a Chromebook. On the other hand, no matter how many times Nuance reminds me to buy Dragon Dictate, I won’t — because I already did, from Nuance, two weeks ago, from this very same browser! So someone needs to do a bit of tweaking.

I read Seth Godin’s blog every day. I’ve been roundly mocked for this by at least three smart young people (all of whom, I note, are themselves pushing thirty at this point and so may well soon be out of touch with the actual young people, but that’s another story), but I persist.

Twenty years ago, as Godin was starting to gain his public following, I absolutely could not stomach the guy. I’ve never much liked trend-forecasters, fame-chasers, or the irrepressibly optimistic. I prefer my Singularity-talk in science fiction, not on the business shelf.

Godin’s books often feel like compilations of obviousness and empty exhortation, his online personality gratingly self-promoting, he shows up everywhere like Forrest Gump. (As they say in Spanish, “A vos cualqier colectivo te deja bien,” i.e., “any bus will take you.”) The people I knew 15 years ago who were most into him were the people I respected least for their creativity and originality: the online used-car salesmen, the desperate dreamers, the confused followers of cultish hope dealers.

But persistence matters. And Godin has seen enough and been through enough self-reinventions over the past two decades to have been part of every Internet marketing trend there is. Not to mention that the Seth Godin marketing machine, still going strong 20 years later, is itself something to learn from.

Besides, just because something’s obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t true. In a distracted and distractable world, Godin does have a knack for getting to the root of things, and all of us could do worse than to do more of that in our daily lives. So I keep reading.

It’s not even November yet, and outside our window this Saturday morning, lumps of goopy snowy muck are falling. It’s almost pretty, as long as you’re inside.

I have no idea where the year went. I mean, I did a lot of stuff and all, but there was no sense of time marching forward in an orderly manner, season by season; it all just went by. I guess that’s what happens when you pass the chronological midpoint of your life — you start falling toward the precipice, like a little red wagon full of rocks on a steep mountain road.

The reviewers said that Jonathan Raban’s new essay collection Driving Home: An American Journey was uneven, that it could have benefited from a bit of pruning. And after grazing my way through it I can assure you they were right. But his essays on the landscape, culture, and history of Seattle are spot-on. That’s the reason I soldiered on to the end of the book, and it was worthwhile.

My father’s family is from Seattle. To be precise, my father’s mother’s family is from Seattle. My grandmother (who is still living out her destiny as queen of the family hive) was born in Seattle a bit more than a century ago, was the first valedictorian of the then-brand-new Garfield High School, grew up in a house on Yesler Way where her brother ran out to catch the streetcar as they heard it clang past. (My father’s father grew up in Spokane, and came to Seattle to court and marry my grandmother. Two Jewish families in Washington at the turn of the century, go figure.)

My grandparents moved to Los Angeles in 1927 (my Spokane-born father was barely out of swaddling clothes when they caught the train south), and most of my remaining family left Washington long ago, mostly for California; but one branch of cousins has stayed on to this day, and others have returned to Seattle in their old age, preferring to live out their last years in a familiar place. Seattle isn’t a place I visited frequently as a child, but it was symbolically important to my family, I did experience it enough times that I have memories of it from each stage of life, early childhood and tweenhood and young adulthood and, more recently, my twenties and thirties and forties. I have only the most rudimentary Seattle geography in my head, but the directions toward mountains and sea and canal are usually clear, and on each adult visit I get better oriented.

After spending longer in the East than in my childhood California, the Seattle landscape always surprises me with its Western brightness and crispness. It’s an evergreen city, with surprisingly traditional houses on secluded hillside streets and unexpected water views everywhere. Portland is like that, too, but Portland is somehow softer, gentler; Seattle is angular, craggy, proud.

I loved the way Raban captured the aspirational cosmopolitanism of Seattle in these essays, not just now, but throughout history. It’s a big city with an unusually large rural catchment area — Raban claims the hinterland of urban Washington State reaches to North Dakota, barely 600 miles from Minneapolis, the next place of note as you travel in an easterly direction. This may sound absurd, but I must point out that my great-grandparents, before moving to Spokane at some point in the nineteen-teens, came from the Pale (from a village in present-day Belarus) first to Fargo, North Dakota, where my grandfather attended elementary school. Someone or something they encountered in Fargo drew them west to Spokane.

Seattle has always had an unusually large proportion of midlife arrivals (Raban points out that early explorers like Vancouver and Puget were among them), disproportionately non-American immigrant in origin, disproportionately Scandinavian (perhaps matching the weather). People who don’t know Seattle are often surprised at how international a place and how self-consciously cosmopolitan a place it was from the very beginning, which is reflected in the architecture and in the healthy civic life and self-consciousness. People call it provincial, but it isn’t, really; it’s merely a frontier city (as Raban, through someone he quotes, observes), with all the positives and negatives that that implies.

Charleston, South Carolina (another city I have some experience with, which is worth its own post) is another bright and cultured, internationally aware urban settlement at the edge of the wilderness, or at least it was 300 years ago. But Charleston faced directly toward both England and more established Caribbean colonies such as Barbados, giving it a cultural connectedness that a place like Seattle never had in its earliest days. Even in 1900, before the Panama Canal, when the typical rail journey from Chicago to Seattle took three or five or seven days, the place must have felt awfully remote. And so it built its own heimishness, which is still much in evidence.

My dozen or so visits to Seattle are seared in my memory. I think of the trip to the Kingdome I took in 1977 to see the Mariners, with my great-uncle and some cousins, and I remember everything I saw and heard and tasted and smelled. I remember taking two elderly relatives (both now deceased) to dinner in Pike Place Market five years ago. I remember visiting my great-aunt’s modest house in View Ridge in the mid-1970s, a traditional-style home that’s common in any city built before 1950 but which in my childhood I thought incredibly romantic. I remember driving around trying to find the location of my grandmother’s childhood home on Yesler Way in early adulthood and realizing it was probably buried under Interstate 5.

I’m a week into it, and Dragon Dictate still rocks. For all practical purposes, when composing extended passages of text, the voice recognition is perfect. This means that the rate-determining factor in my Dragon-driven composition is not how fast Dragon can recognize, but how fast I can think.

When working in a layout-intensive environment–processing Gmail, for example–Dragon is a little slower than working with keyboard and mouse. (And there are a few quirks about field switching that sometimes trip me up.) But for simply composing extended copy, as long as you don’t mind looking ridiculous to whoever is in the room, this is a great alternative to typing. It’s especially nice if you like leaning back in a comfy chair rather than sitting upright in front of a desk, and given that I spent most of my high school and college homework hours lying on my side across the bed, I find this particularly fortunate.

I like the microphone I chose, a noise-canceling Andrea model. It has the feeling of something practical rather than sexy (no one looking in on me would have any doubt about whether I’m wearing a headset, and even the USB connector is chunky and utilitarian). But it works very well. Right now I’m dictating in a low voice into the microphone in the headset, sitting in my bedroom, while someone else is playing a loud and disruptive videogame about 20 feet away. There isn’t the slightest bit of interference from the game visible in the transcription.

I decided to bake some bread last night, because I’m home for the next 10 days or so and it makes me feel domestic. What a good choice — I made two small loaves in the French bread pan, kneading after dinner and baking about midnight, and we gobbled one up hot and buttered right out of the oven before bed.

As usual it was an impromptu affair, without a lot of careful measuring or tight tolerances. Here was last night’s recipe, which was so successful we’re going to try to replicate it again today:

Dissolve 1 envelope of yeast in a large bowl with 2 cups warm water, about 1/4 cup olive oil, and a generous squirt of honey. Stir. Leave for 15 minutes.

Dump in about 2 1/2 cups white bread flour, about 1 1/2 cup whole wheat bread flour, a generous half-cup cornmeal, a big handful of oats, and a big handful of crushed wheat (I think it was crushed wheat — some grain from the cabinet). Toss in quite a bit more kosher salt than you think you’ll need. Mix with a spoon until it starts to turn into dough.

Knead into a ball (in the bowl) with your hands. Realize there’s too much flour for the liquid and add a bit more water. Knead knead (in the bowl — fold over, rotate 1/4 turn, squish, fold over, rotate 1/4 turn, squish…) for 5 or 10 minutes.

Place on top of the fridge with a wet towel covering. Wait about 2 hours while it rises. Punch the ball down and form into loaves in the French bread pan. Score the tops with a knife. Put in the oven (cold, or still warm from dinner, but off) for 30 or 45 minutes.

Turn the oven on to 450 degrees. (Bread will continue rising as the oven begins to warm up.) Bake for about half an hour, then turn the oven down to about 350 and bake for another 15 or 20 minutes.

You’ll get a bread with a very thick, chewy crust and a moist inside. If you take the bread out a bit too early (as we did), the inside will be moister; if you bake a bit longer, it’ll be crumbier. Either way, it’s delicious.

When I was in London, I stopped into Gosh!, the bright comic and graphic novel shop at the foot of Berwick Street in Soho (right down from Foxcroft & Ginger). I picked up a couple of gifts, and my eye was caught by the title and cover art of Gemma Bovery, so I threw that in too.

Simmonds (whom I never heard of before) is a British children’s book author and a cartoonist for the Guardian. Gemma Bovery is one of a short list of adult (by which I mean “for grownups,” get your head out of the gutter) books she’s written, and I think it was first serialized in the Guardian.

It’s a reimagining of Madame Bovary in a different context, populated (largely) by contemporary middle-class English people. The Bovaryness is a little heavy-handed, but this isn’t a book you read for the plot (although there’s more plot here than in some graphic novels) — I love the style, which combines first-person storytelling, omniscient-narrator editorializing,  flashbacks, illustrated tableaux, and diary entries. You never know from page to page what you’re going to see, or in what combination. And she is excellent at precisely mocking the absurdity of social-climbing English people (one nouvelle riche is drawn with a perfect horsey mouth, and her appalling French is precisely rendered).

I’ve already ordered Simmonds’ Tamara Drewe, which is apparently based on Hardy. For some reason that one’s easier to get in the US, and cheaper, so maybe you start there.