04.18.08
the last word
I hate when I get it.
Is that odd?
04.04.08
Bogus…
Heinous! Most non-triumphant!
They’re remaking Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
I mean, seriously – what are they thinking?
04.03.08
first drafts are forever
I shudder to read through my previous post….it is indicative of a hyper-active, unfocused state of mind. And yet, it contains nuggets of thought I think, “now that would be fun to dig into some more.”
There’s a certain not-to-be-named blogtroll whose online presence can be summed up as “drink, post, sober up, delete.” Thing is, deleting goes against blog etiquette; we tend to leave our mistakes in place except in extreme cases (and granted, “404″ is Extreme Case personified). Those who post in haste and delete at leisure are often nailed harder for the attempted “cover up” than for the initial offense; traditional-media types are often the hardest hit by the mores of this new medium. You post, you take your lumps, you respond, but the whole exchange is chiseled in stone for those who care to excavate.
The irony is that what prompted me to post in the first place was to become less hesitant to post what I wrote…to “publish” on a schedule, rather than when I thought it was worth reading (because I NEVER thought it was ready, and thus never got published). Dean Wesley Smith had spoken at a conference I attended, and he pointed out that consistently fast writers get the most work, because they could be relied on to FINISH. A Pynchon or Heller might write classics…but how many? If you want to make a living writing, he said – and you can – then learn to write quickly. As you do so, you’ll learn to write WELL, or at least better, quickly.
Well, it takes practice, and consistent effort. And the rules have changed – where once I thought I was doing well to post a thing a week, the better blogs are updated multiple times per day…and each post has a horde of readers/commenters giving you something new every bloody second.
It leads to different types of reading. I can plow through 1-2 thousand articles a day for “getting my news”, though many of those don’t get more attention than the headline. Other things I read a bit more slowly, so I can comment with something approaching relevance.
And then there’s the kind of reading I do with my wife, when we were on vacation. I read the novel aloud, slowly and with feeling. Even after a full week of driving 6-8 hours a day, we didn’t get through it all. But that was some leisurely, meaty-juicy word feasting.
It takes time to put together a good piece of fiction. I can churn out a couple thousand words a day in first draft…of which, maybe a few dozen are of any worth. A phrase here, a concept there. Internet writing doesn’t necessarily mean low quality, but it’s an odd combination of eternal (archived, indexed, discussed to death) and ephemeral (instant reaction, first draft).
Sometimes it makes sense to “drink, post, sober-up, face the consequences.” or even to “post, sleep, wake up, edit.” Sometimes we want that instant analysis, which gives us a chance to offer some of our own. For that kind of conversation, I’m no more or less relevant than, say, Greta van Sustren. But we still crave the more thoughtful, reasoned, slept-on, edited, argued-over, THEN posted material, which takes the time to digest, time to mull, time to react to appropriately. Room for blog posts, AND for the books that take years to go from first draft to hardcover goodness.
I’d like to write a bit of both.
I need to learn to distinguish between the two.
or not. It wasn’t until I started posting, “ready or not,” that I got the kind of feedback that led to the other kind of writing.
It’s just been a while.
Music, 1998 to 2008 and beyond
I caught a post on the Crave gadget blog that asked what we’ve gained, and sacrificed, in the drive toward digital music. The first MP3 players arrived in 1998; it was a year or so before I got my first player, but I was listening to music on my computer long before that. The article raises some interesting points about the pre-digital culture of music, such as this:
I miss borrowing CDs from friends. Like lending out a good book, lending music used to mean the lender actually gave up something, and that sacrifice imbued the music with personal meaning. Borrowing physical media also involves face-to-face interaction, oftentimes leading to great conversations. The modern age of copying, uploading, and linking to music has allowed me to discover new music at a much faster rate, but those discoveries seem much less personal.
I recall the days of lending and borrowing albums/cassettes/CDs, of making mixtapes, of recording radio shows off the air (1970s-era Dr. Demento) in all their static-laced glory. The frontier days of MP3s were not far off – my hard drives of the time were lucky to be over a gigabyte, so I was ripping my music down to 32kbps – great for audiobooks, terrible for music – to 96kbps. My early Audible downloads were even more compressed, to 8kbps [Ma Bell quality] and even lower; anyone still have “format 1″ titles? Barely better than two tin cans and a length of string – yet another relic of my childhood that probably doesn’t get used much in a decade where even infants have cell phones. I can’t stand to listen to Format 1, and yet it’s hard to part with those old lectures – it’s like having an Edison wax cylinder. Which, in a sense, it is – it’s a relic of streaming digital audio’s earliest generation. Somewhere I may even have one of the Real Audio (version 1 and 2) files, which were designed to stream over a 28.8kbps dial-up connection, and the first-generation internet voice chat application i worked on in the mid 1990s. The quality stank, but it paved the way for today’s Pandora, Hulu (streaming HDTV), Skype, etc.
Those early efforts to digitize my music collection were repeated, again and again, as I upgraded my computer hardware. I bought into Microsoft’s “WMA-96 beats MP3-128″ for a while, and reripped everything…which was fine, until I got my first iPod. When I finally had more disk space than I could fill, I settled on 192 with variable bitrate – beyond which I couldn’t tell any difference – and went to town yet again. I did some experimenting with WMA lossless, Apple lossless, and FLAC, but for the most part I’m happy with MP3 at 192VBR – it will play on anything I copy it to, and it sounds plenty good enough, where those earlier rips at 64-96 do not. Unless I’m really paying attention, even the MP3-128 files are perfectly adequate, especially for playing at the gym; when it’s competing with the crappy adrenaline mix blaring through the loudspeakers, the noise of the treadmills and stair climbers, and the beating of my own hyperventilating heart, all I care is that it’s loud enough.
My biggest issue with digital music is…proliferation. Too many hard drives, each of which has full or partial copies of my music folders…and some content unique to it. When I had so little space I had to rip at low bit rates, I had the advantage of knowing everything on the drive, and what I’d have to burn to CD to free up space for something else. Now? Meh. I still try to clean up the collection from time to time on whichever drives are connected, but when iTunes, Media Monkey and FooBar2000 can’t handle the umpteen-thousand entries in order to whittle theem down, it’s easy to just give up.
So…I often find myself skipping my collection entirely. I have a Rhapsody subscription, so most of what I feel in the mood for I can search for and download (or stream) faster than it would take to search my own stash – usually at better quality. Rhapsody’s channels feature also has the advantage of discovery: “here’s the style I want, but as to the details? surprise me.” And sharable playlists offers a similar benefit, along with a bit of fantasy networking. “this? Oh, just a mixtape I got from Dave Navarro…”
And let us not forget YouTube, the archive of all the memorable (and forgettable) things ever committed to video, ever, by anyone. 99.999% may be absolute crap, but that still leaves more actual entertainment than you’ll have time to view in your lifetime. 80s music videos (“Rick rollll!”), classic TV moments, Broadway bootlegs, Jonathan Coulton’s twisted (and Creative-Commons friendly) genius, sneezing pandas, Flight of the Conchords’ “Business Time”, Chocolate Rain, British sitcoms, silly Ikea commercials, that unspeakable Jimmy Kimmel/Ben Affleck “love” song…I’m listening to – in many cases viewing – more music than ever, and sharing it with friends on five continents.
This is not a medium for the audiophile purist, but for the folks eager to take their place at the global water cooler. We’ve democratized content (not always legally, granted) to the point that when the TV writers strike hit, many of us didn’t even notice; we were too busy entertaining ourselves. It may not LOOK like the Gay Nineties with folks hovering around a piano, singing along to old standards–but Guitar Hero and Wii Bowling and Rock Band console games aren’t that far removed. What we’re playing may be different, but THAT we’re playing, together, is a healthy trend….and much needed in the parallel and less healthy age of people perpetually plugged into their iPods, cut off from those around them. (Though that beats the heck out of the angry dork on the bus with the angry-music boombox.)
Technology – making us more, and less, social. More, and less, socially adept. More, and less, participators v. mere spectators. More than ever, it’s our choice…and more than ever, the choices we make matter, because the hours available to us haven’t changed. Sometimes, you want to increase the rate at which you absorb the same information…and sometimes, you just want to shut it all down, take a few deep breaths, and enjoy the silence.
James Wierzbicki wrote, “Silence is a prime ingredient of music; it always has been, and presumably it always will be….If music is indeed organized sound, then silence is the necessary absence of sound that surrounds it. Like a frame around a painting, silence marks music’s edges.” In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis makes a similar point, that the Dark Lord would love to fill the world with noise, leaving no room for silence and the contemplation it invites. We could choose to fill our waking hours with wall-to-wall noise…but in silence, that which resonates has the TIME and SPACE to resonate.
In this, the author of the Crave post has a point. We have lost the (forced) pace of the past in Internet Time. I remember spending hours at Tower Records, wondering how to spend that fifteen bucks from my paper route. Two newer albums? A half-dozen K-Tel compilations? Some 45 singles? One record and an Orange Julius in the food court? The search was half the fun – having to choose, but getting to choose, which is the first tentative step from childhood to maturity. The decisions aren’t earth-shattering, but learning to choose wisely…that was. The choices kids must make these days are far different: the limit is only in the space available in flash memory, and even that is vast. Dealing with scarcity is an almost alien concept.
Okay, this has rambled like crazy. Time to deal with a scarcity of caffeine for a while.