NYR

Recently a friend told me my social media presence (TM) (no, she didn't use those words) was becoming weirder by the tweet. I told her I couldn't possibly take social media seriously and that I was sick of all the self-important bullshit that goes on there. The weirder, I said, the better.

I stand by this. If I have a new year's resolution for 2012, that's it.
 
The weirder, the better.

Apologies in advance to those who want sense.

So this is what it's come to

Apparently The Monthly doesn't need to explain what a job entails in order to hire for it:



Imagine the emails Ms Costello must be receiving. Imagine!

In Little Ireland

I've been describing the place where I'm living now, Little Ireland, as being like an episode Breaking Bad set at the Bates Motel. This is far from wrong but I realised tonight that it's more than that.

I'd gone out to pick some fennel by the train tracks because, well, that's where it grows. I thought of Nina Simone, of Trouble in Mind, as the wind caught the trees and the grey skies slipped interminably overhead.

Hatted, in a shirt and pinstripe trousers, the caretaker of my place looks like a Cohen Brothers character. He was climbing the stairs to his cottage at the crossroads, and I had a sudden vision of him ushering someone, hands tied, into the dust of a deserted road before shooting them in the back of the head with a double-barreled shotgun.

He turned and saw me; waved.

The vision shifted: he was in his living room, the hat on the arm of his chair, the barrels in his mouth and his eyes turned to heaven.

The streets were empty; thunder troubled the fresh-mown plains. Mist crept across the hilltop and although there weren't Twin Peaks, the trees at the summit vanished like spectres of teeth in a broken bottom jaw.

The fennel grows in thick green foams by the railway, where the only sound was the thrum of wind in the powerlines. I picked in listening silence, but I couldn't tell the tune.

The hotel looked closed, but it always looks closed: it was open, I knew, because the town dog sat waiting by the door. For some reason, every time I near it, I think I hear saloon-style piano tinkling through its leadlight windows. Of course, there's no piano there. There never was.

Rain was coming. It made the soil sing the scents of death, made the road smell of stone. A forgotten barn sagged before rowed pines; its empty door and windows shot a vacant stare across the new-sown barley. And when the rain finally came, the sky was the colour of tender flesh, and the birds made, fast, for the safety of the leaves.

Not the block

So I don't really go in for writers' block, as you may have noticed. The secret, as far as I can see, is to have something to say. If you have something to say, you can generally find a way to say it. Simple.

But there are, very very occasionally, times when I find that, although I have plenty to say, the words just don't go together.

The last time this happened was in October, 2010, when I had a fairly intense contract that exercised my "creative muscle", as they call it, to the point of strain. It was fine, I got it all done, no one was let down and no deadlines were missed, but the work started taking a whole lot longer, and when I wasn't writing, my brain sort of exploded into atoms. I couldn't really think much any more. I did a lot of staring.

Like an actual physical muscle strain (to continue that trite metaphor), it just took time to pass. Patience and less pressure were required. I could still write; I just couldn't write endlessly at breakneck pace on any topic day in, day out for a while.

So too now. I keep thinking to myself, "I just need to get through one more week," but all the telltale signs are there: the trouble constructing coherent sentences, the mindless blankness when not before a screen. Last night I sat for an hour staring out the window with a more profound vacancy than I feel it decent to relate...

Jesus, I'm doing it right now. Man, I really have to stop "warming up" here and get some shit done.

5 Articles on writing I never want to read again

The amount of rehashing that's done by writers writing about writing is really beyond the pale. And indescribably ironic. But not in a loveable kind of way—in a well-Christ-why-don't-you-just-set-my-hair-on-fire-and-be-done-with-it kind of way. Here are five cases in point:

1. How to write for the web.
If you consider yourself a writer, and you can't think how you'd write for the web yet, well, Joe, you've pretty much missed that boat on that one.

2. How to break writer's block.
Really? Isn't the answer obvious: stop reading, start writing? It doesn't take Einstein (or a submissions editor) to work that out.

3. Words you shouldn't use online.
One more whiney, sour-grapes, "weasel words" listicle and I'll stick this pencil in my eye. Or throw up. Possibly both, at the same time.

4. How to write better(er).
Surely the answer's obvious here, too: stop reading, start ... oh, you know where this is heading. (For the love of God, people, what part of this equation are we not getting?)

5. Writing is hard, let's talk about that for a while.
This is a growing field of content, and one that panders exclusively and, I postulate, insultingly, to those who can't write. Do you really want to read 2,500 "inspiring" words of another "author's" "journey"? Or do you want to read Fowler's Modern English Usage and find out, say, what a gerund is(n't)? I dunno kid, the choice is yours.

Mainstream Capote

As you may have noticed, I. Love. Capote. So last night, in need of respite from Franzen's terrible Corrections, in which the sense of impending doom is just about brain-exploding, I decided to give Breakfast at Tiffany's a try.

I've seen it, long ago, but I can't remember much about it. I don't know what it is about the writers of that time making heroes nothing but narrators, like walking megaphones (look at Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway in Gatsby), but I'm not at all for it. I want a narrator with something more than a keen eye. Like a motive or some impetus.

Anyway, that's point one. Point two is that the characters are so unlikeable. Anyone who thinks Holly Golightly is, as she would say, darling, is simply unable to see past Audrey Hepburn in the film adaptation. This character is a nightmare. There is nothing soft or lovely or even very interesting about her as far as I can see. But then maybe I'm put off by the way the men seem to idolise her for no reason other than her glamour. She objectifies herself as much as those around her do, and it's wearing thin already.

Anyway, these are my first impressions. Really, when you compare it with the glorious decline of Other Voices, Other Rooms or the sweet, simple sorrow-joy of The Grass Harp, Breakfast at Tiffany's is all a bit mainstream and boring and, dare I say it, dated, don't you think?

Yeah, maybe it's just me.

UPDATE: Yeah, no sale on B at T's. Early on, Holly tells the narrator that his stories will never sell because they're all description and nothing happens. I couldn't help but wonder if this was something someone had told Capote, and which he'd acted on in the case of Tiffany's, in order to get a book made into a movie. Sceptical, yes. But if you ask me, Capote (from In Cold Blood) makes an infintely more compelling movie that Tiffany's did. Sorry, Audrey.

Email epics I have known

There's a lot of whining these days about the truckloads, the veritable landslides of email that today's information workers (TM) suffer each morning when they log on (TM).

I don't suffer such deluges and when I do, my usual response is just to delete a few. Or a few hundred.

No. The kinds of email epics I have known are a joy of the written word.

They include the late-night tailoring of a client email from "bitchy" to "charming", a slow honing of sharp edges to rounded, graspable curves along with a sprinkling of sundry smiley faces.

They include the serialised dramatic reportage of what seems on the face of it to be an ordinary task that blows out into a months-long real-world ordeal that demands—yes, demands—to be shared with someone I know will find it amusing.

They include small portions of the multi-media, multi-part, sentence-snippet-by-irrelevant-sentence-snippet communications I have with various friends who, while erudite, witty and intelligent, appear incapable of stringing together a coherent thought in the written form.

And they include actual, take-it-in-turns stories written over weeks, and over email, in boring desk jobs where one could easily turn out half a novel in one's mountainous downtime, in installments interleaved with those of a suitably bored and thesaurus-armed partner in dissentful thinking.

This, my friends, is epic email at its best.

Holiday dos and donts for writers

No, not "the holiday season" holidays. I'm just talkin' 'bout ordinary holidays.

Do:

• take all those books you've been trying to finish for months
• take a notebook (as in paper) for writing (as in personal writing)
• take some new stuff to read
• take pencils
• prepare self to read the local press
• prepare self to avoid the web
• prepare articles to publish in our absence: you'll need that income when you get back
• consider, but not commit to, second-hand book shopping

Don't:

• take those books you've been trying to finish for months, but can't because they are actually too boring to bother with
• forget a few copies of New Scientist: easy to carry around, always wildly entertaining
• even toy with the idea of glancing over your email while away
• think you need a guide book, you fool
• post boring photos to Facebook while away
• think you're even taking your computer, anyway, bucko, I don't know why we're even discussing this!

Mind-blowing lines #29

Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps is a holiday in a book. When you think things are rough, travel with Greene and his lady cousin on their first trip outside of Europe: to trek through Liberia in 1935.

Things will still seem rough now, but hey: you will have a way to escape them, to 1930s Liberia, as Greene's breathtaking prose transports you almost bodily to the crushing heat and dull jungle of Africa's West coast.

If you've never read Greene, he has an awe-inspiring way of making astute, circumspect observations at the ends of paragraphs, just so you need to pause for an air-gasping, what-but-wait-but-what moment before you read on.

Here then, are the mind-blowing lines that give his justification for the whole affair. As relevant now as in 1935, I think:

Today our world seems particularly susceptible to brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they have begun living again at a level below the cerebral. We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and these half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay for ever at that level, but when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.

[when our words ruled the world]

[I dreamed that I met you in Auckland, in a light-blind city street. I was scared you wouldn't speak to me, but when you saw me, all those lost years fell away.

It was as if nothing had happened: I was still the prime collaborator and confidante. As if I'd only been gone for a moment. As if, in conversation, I'd simply paused for breath.

You, with your big career and champions, still treated my mind like a beautiful thing, a mystery, a delight—like you had when the sun had shone on the two of us, and our words ruled the world.

And when I woke up I realised I was back at square one: at the start of the race for distance, at the impossible start of leaving you behind]

Word association

A proliferating trend is to refer to good things as "nuggets". I don't know about you, but I'm seeing this everywhere online: people are "hitting on nuggets", "picking out the nuggets", "looking for the nuggets" and on and on.

Etymonline indeed proves that the term "nugget" is intrinsically associated with gold, which should be promising. But at its root is the word nug, of dubious dialectical origin, and as lacking in form as the thing it describes: a lump.

Where's all this heading? Every single time someone uses the word nugget I think "...of crap". No kidding. I'm sure some young wag probably created this association for me in high school sometime, but regardless of its pathetic origins, I can't get away from it now.

To all you crazy metaphorically gold-panning technopreneurs out there, though, good luck with your nugget-finding! Hee hee. etc.

The nano

I always shunned NaNoWriMo for reasons more to do with a dislike of organised events, team sports, and we're-all-in-this-togetherness than the idea of writing 50k words in a month outside of the other writing I do.

As it turns out, nano is an allegory for life.

All you need to turn out is 1.5k words a day, and let's face it, we can all do that. If you're struggling today, and you're pretty sure everything you've put down sucks, who cares? With this exercise, as in life, at some points the sheer act of writing trumps quality.

Sometimes, the act itself is all that matters.

If you ask me, more of those whiners endlessly complaining online about "the difficulties of writing" would do well to try nano and see what lengths they're actually willing to go to to write. If you claim to be a writer, and you can't manage 1.5k words a day, then, er, the writing's on the wall, chump. No pun intended.

Grammar ... almost

Technically, it should be "To which", because the answer to "what?" is "A URL, dummy, just like you said!"

That aside, I couldn't help but be charmed by the coy formality of this blogger.com dialogue box. Tee hee hee. It makes me giggle even now.

On glue (or: The 0.1%)

James W. Pennebaker's The Secret Life of Pronouns should compel every single content writer online. (And those reading New Scientist in print.)

A precis? Sure.

James W. (who I can't help but refer to as such) tells us that it's not "content" words—verbs, nouns, and so on—that matter so much in communication.

It's "function" words—pronouns, articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, negations, conjunctions, quantifiers, and adverbs, verbal glue—that create style, and underlie the personality of a communication.

"These words account for less than 0.1 per cent of your vocabulary but make up more than half of the words commonly used. Your brain is not wired to notice them but if you pay close attention, you will start to see their subtle power."

His article expounds duly upon such power. Let us focus instead on what this means for web and digital writing.

It's James W.'s 0.1% that makes style, that reveals subtleties of personality. I'm taking that to mean that, therefore, it's his 0.1% that creates rapport, empathy, and the digital holy grail: engagement. Indeed, James W. himself says:

"Function words require social skills to use properly. The speaker assumes the listener knows who everyone is and the listener must know the speaker to follow the conversation."

It's the 0.1% that makes this text sound like it's talking to you. This is important for web writers. Imperative, even.

James W. makes the point that people who write using a large proportion of I-pronouns tend to be more formal, concerned with social status and power, and less reflective.

A little box alongside the printed article suggested that a preponderance of I-pronouns in one friend's written communication with another indicated that the I-pronoun-user was lower in the social hierarchy.

I could go on for paragraphs, but for the sake of concision, here are the literal and metaphorical bottom lines:

• This research supports a reader-first approach.
• It indicates benefit-focused writing (all about you) will have greater personal impact that feature-focused prose (all about me/us/we)—but not just because of the content words it contains.
• It champions the careful use of function words in text.

Bored yet? Okay, let me get out the big guns:

• Do not cut function words when you're trying to reduce the word count of digital content. Function words are the tools of reader/user engagement.
  
• I-pronouns can subconsciously imply the brand's respect for the reader/user if used with care. (If not, they can make the brand sound like a stuck-up bore.)
  

Crazy? Maybe. It's a good thing this blog doesn't live and die by peer review. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, though.

[all the reasons why]

[The country thing is about horizons and emptiness and finding completeness in annihilation. It's about being real when you vanish, and real only then.

Yeah, you know what I mean. You know it. I can see it in your eyes.

The country thing is about the part of you that ceaselessly seeks reference. Here, we cleanse with soil. To cultivate, we cut. To fortify, we remove the fences. And to befriend, we find the other in ourselves.

Illogical? Maybe.

The country thing is about slow history, a painstaking obliteration of the past. You watch it happen by the year, by the decade. Even when it's gone, it's still there, an unreachable echo across the hilltops.

Here in the forests and river valleys live ancient gods—hawk-gods and possum-gods, parrot-gods, lizard-gods. Inscrutable as nature. Slow as evolution. They pay me no mind.

Who denies a place that absorbs your separateness imperceptibly, without question? That completes you without changing you? Maybe you, sucker. But not me.]

Plotless

It seems like I've been avoiding nanowrimo, which I literally cannot be bothered capitalising in the way its creators would like, forever.

I know that sounds contrary, and it is. I just don't like organised stuff: team sports, national novel-writing events, musicals, you name it.

The other reason I've been avoiding it is this: I am hopeless at plotting. Hopeless. The world's worst plotter. I never have writers' block, but I always, always, always have plotter's block. I can't plot a story to save myself.

Despite these gross intellectual limitations, I sort of volunteered to participate (off the grid, you understand: there will be no signing up for this little plotless moron) in this year's Big N with The Second Canadian. When he asked someone to talk sense into him, and stop him from participating, I told him I'd do it if he did.

So, here we are.

And by some miracle I came up with a plot on the weekend. A plot that doesn't seem too cheesy and, simultaneously, isn't born of my darker urges, those personality flaws with which we all wrestle. See? I told you it was a miracle.

I'm usually pretty psyched after I come up with a plot. This time, I'm actually looking forward to writing it, though...

Where do you want to go today?

Every morning, I wake up in India. In Mumbai, to be precise. It's all the work of the fantastic Aravind Adiga and his Last Man in Tower, which, along with The White Tiger, is the very definition of transportive fiction.

Can't afford the time or cost of an exotic holiday? Try these:

• Southern states USA: anything by Truman Capote
• 1940s Spain: Fabled Shore by Rose Macaulay
• Pre-commercialisation Corfu: Prospero's Cell by Lawrence Durrell
• Contemporary American West: The Last Cowboy, by Jane Kramer
• 1940s Alexandria, Egypt: The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell
• Occupied Norway in WWII: The Moon is Down, by John Steinbeck
• Japan, from 1963 to the 1980s: Lost Japan, by Alex Kerr

Of course, if you just want to be lost at sea somewhere warm, there's always The Life of Pi. But I don't need to tell you how to suck eggs, right?

Egomania and creativity

"I'm not an egomaniac," said a friend recently, "so I don't have a blog." It reminded me of that thing that so many writers say about writing out of loneliness—that it's a constant attempt to reach someone, to be understood.

Yet I've been talking to a lot of bloggers lately—some egomaniacs, some not—and many of them claim to hate writing. To me, that sentiment is like physics: nonsensical. Incomprehensible. Maybe blogging and writing can be two different things.

I write because writing gives me a scanty mirage of a chance to say what's meant, in a way that's understood as it's intended. To me, that's the most important thing there is.

But in real life, that's a dream, a fiction, a fake carrot on a phantom stick. I literally never say what's on my mind. Ever. If that's your starting point for communication, you'll always feel like you're screaming into the void.

Also, in the moments that really matter, I find words obsolete: a limited toolset with severely restricted applications.

In effect, I think writing, along with all other kinds of creativity, is a playground for those too scared to face the truth. Which is all of us, right?

Staying in business

Rental inspection 1: Drive 40 minutes, arrive on time. Agent 25 minutes late, forgets to bring keys to property.

Rental inspection 2: Drive 30 minutes, arrive on time. Agent on time, brings keys for some other property.

Rental inspection 3: Drive 10 minutes, arrive on time. Agent 20 minutes late, but brings right keys. I apply. Three days later I check receipt of my application: not received. Spend 40 minutes applying online. Call agent back because the email address they registered with the application site is incorrect. "Oh, don't bother," they say. "We found your application. It was here, it was just that no one had opened it."

At times like these, I wonder how some people stay in business.

At times like these, I wonder if I'll stay in business, given that such wrestling saps all the energy one would usually apply to getting work done for paying clients.

Select this

Direct from the Apple Store, I give you a button worth beholding:
Can you guess what we're selecting here? A financing option? A shipping option? An exterior fucking finish?

Nope, friends. Oh no. As it turns out, this button is in fact two different buttons that achieve two completely different goals. When you click on Select, you go to a page with more information about the product. Great!

The only problem is that little arrow to the right, which makes it look like "Select" is an instruction, and you must use the arrow to make your selection. When you click on the arrow you get a drop-down with two unlikely options: Share on Facebook and Share on Twitter. Confusing, no?

This is why I'm always going on about buttons.

[No way home]

[A glittering hill of city lights
fireworks and lightning
break up the night
We'll stay up late
and rise to the fight
there's no way home from here.

A lonely lit window
in a world of dark;
three tossing trees
in a stony meadow
Those easy days:
long-gone, long-past
there's no way home from here.

That dusty road
and the dented car
and the way we drove
(too fast, too far)
The blown-out tire
and the raging truck
there's no way home from here.]

Mind-blowing lines #28

The end of Bright and Distant Shores unhinged me for reasons I find myself unable to explain adequately here. This passage, in particular.

He thought abut the Kanaka boys in the sugar plantations of Queensland and the stories of them dying from homesickness. Actual death from longing. They would stop eating, work listlessly in the fields all day, speak to no one, then quietly slip away one night. Death of the soul, he thought. What good are we without a candle burning behind the glass?

Word of the day #11: boondled

boondled, adj. To have bounty cast upon one, or enjoy good fortune, at random.

The usage of this term was restricted to the English moors around the turn of the 21st century. First recorded in Mayor Matthew Vice's May Day address to constituents in the town of Pickering for the year 1887, the latest remaining usage appears in a letter from Bessie Smythers to her sister Anne, now held in the archives of the Museum of London:

...But finally the nag was sold at twice the price we bought her! The auctioneer really was most perturbed, but Archie had put in such work to get her to a saleable standard, and she still has two or three years' field work left in her, he says. Dearest Anne, I really cannot tell you how boondled we felt! I was near faint with glee...

The word was briefly resurrected by little known rapper Baby C, in verse three of his 1983 release, "F*ck L*ck":

Ain't won no lotto
So I'm gonna get blotto
Don't tell me I'm boondled
You f*ckin freak
Just turn up
(turn up, turn up)
Them funky beats

This, C's last single, vanished into obscurity immediately upon its release.

So long, long copy

In recent times I've been writing 80-word blurbs for print collateral. Yeah, print—it's dead, right? Anyway, the thing is, I keep getting to 45 or so words and thinking, "All this other information's kind of superfluous. No one needs to know that. Why can't we just stop here?"

Also, this: those narrow columns they print in New Scientist are so charmingly narrow, and the paras are so delightfully short, that one barely needs to move ones eyes horizontally to read them. Run your eye down the column and your peripheral vision will pick up the words you're not looking at directly. That, my friends, is freaking handy.

So what? So what is that shorter is better in practically all media (if you ask me), and the less it feels like reading, the more I'm likely to enjoy, er, reading (or for that matter, writing) it.

I know what you're thinking: everyone knows this. Well, if everyone knows it, then why are we still being tortured with long copy, poorly laid out? Hmmmm?

Ironic tears

Currently I'm working on a project about productivity, and it's all one big fat irony. To prove it, here's today's schedule:

• 6.30am: Arise to prepare for a research interview (read: drink much coffee and clear throat endlessly in the vain hope that voice will sound less gravely than it inevitably does at this time of day).
• 7.30am: Interview an American about productivity from my treetop hideaway. Celebrate remote freelancing "workstyle" with more coffee while doing so.
• 8.15am: Interview ends. Scan to-do list. Weep ironic tears.
• 8.16am: Commence content management.
• 4.30pm: Content management ends.
• 4.31pm: Write print blurbs for client. Fail to complete.
• 6.30pm: Realise I still have shitloads to do. Stop writing print blurbs in a panic. Print and proof a small portion of collateral for another client. Mark up errors on PDF. Curse technology. Fail to call testy family member.
• 7.30pm: Put who-knows-what from bowels of freezer on burner. Commence research for interview with another American productivity guru in a mere 12 hours.
• 7.52pm: Write this post as a distraction from the cold, hard reality that I should be writing interview questions.
• Afterward: All I have left to do tonight is finish this interview prep, proofread 23 pages of print collateral, mark up the changes on the PDF, upload a blog post for another client, and weep some more ironic tears before setting my fucking alarm. Oh, and eat whatever it is that's bubbling on the stove.

For information's sake

What is it with "article authors" these days?

Once, back when I was but a slip of a girl, people used to write articles for websites because they wanted to build their authority, gain credibility by association with the brand, build some standing in the site's community, and get a link back to their site from their bio.

These days, a time-worn content manager has to explain in no uncertain terms the reasons why she wants to maintain objectivity in an article to said article's author. Multiple drafts later, she resorts to simply rewriting the fucker (technical term) to get the desired, factual, realistic information into the article so that it may be as helpful to the readers as possible.

What ever happened to giving information for the sake of giving information? Put what you think is your precious "personal brand" aside for five minutes and do yourself a favour by doing someone else a freaking favour. Sans attached strings. Call it "content altruism" if you will.

This is exactly, precisely, and unarguably where it's at.

Four unrelated facts

1. I went past an orthodox church yesterday and wanted to sleep in its belltower, overlooking the parched wasteland west of the city through its small, round windows.
2. I'm passing up on the next semester of philosophy, entitled "Love", because I have too much work to do. For a range of reasons, this is the irony of ironies right now. Jesus.
3. I'm unconscionably enamoured by the giant crocodile they found in the Philippines. For some reason, that animal is enormously inspiring to me.
4. I'm reading almost nothing right now. I have two books on the go, but they're stalled.

I hope, friend, that if you have a collection of unrelated facts, it's more coherent than this.

On pitching articles ... and taking your own advice

I'm always trying to tell people how to do writerly stuff, including how to pitch posts. Here, though, is incontrovertible proof that I can't take my own freaking advice.

These are the key elements of three article ideas I pitched to a publication recently. Read them and weep...

1. "A wildly fascinating piece looking at the way brand language works online..."
2. "An equally scintillating piece (who's with me?!) on creating brand personas as a means to facilitate consistent communication across multi-part and/or multi-media messages ... It's a pretty cool concept ... and the clients dig it."
3. "Hold onto your hats: what about the Flesch Reading Ease score?! This unputdownable piece would look at the Flesch Reading Ease score (and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level), so highly regarded online, and consider the challenges involved in meeting those requirements when balancing word counts/space, brand vocabulary (such as product names), and the digital marketer's desire for compelling, search-optimised copy. I'm currently working with this for a client and in the moments when I don't want to hunt down Flesch and torture him/her, I'm thrilled by the prospect of manipulating the language to meet the right tone, brand and comms mandatories, space and word count requirements and Reading Ease score."

I think it's fair to say things got slightly out of hand. And for that I'm eternally apologetic. But, really, how could they not get out of hand? Look at these pitches, people! They define intrigue, don't you think?

I know what you're thinking: "Torture? Really?" Don't worry: I originally had "kill" but had the feeling it'd take my precious pitches from the echelons of the merely "out of hand" and throw them well and truly overboard, so I toned it the hell down. How terribly astute of me.

Is there nothing it can't do?

The return of nonfiction

By rights, this post's title should be lit up in title case because, Jesus, it's been a while.

The last nonfiction thing I read was glorious The Return of the Crazy Bird, but it was long ago. It feels like I last read nonfiction when that little chubby chubster was still dawdling around Rodrigues.

But on Friday I came across The Best American Essays, 2008, which really are something else. I've read four:

• Patricia Brieschke
  
  
• John Updike
• Joe Wenderoth
• David Sedaris

Updike and Sedaris were known, and great. But Brieschke and Wenderoth? Who (dare I say it, apologies in advance for my vast vast ignorance, people, reallyI'msorrybrace!) the hell are they?

I have no idea but boy they can set the pages on fire. Jesus. I know you think I'm overreacting, but wait till you read these essays. My God. Honestly.

I'll be needing some time to get over them.

The moral of this nonfiction story? If you don't know, I'm not about to point it out.

Addendum

Furthermore, let me outline for you what appear to be today's main objectives:

1. Assess incoming work opportunities with the question, "Would I be happy to do this at midnight?" Because in all likelihood, that's when I'll be writing over the coming weeks.

   If I say yes to your project in that time, you can be assured that I keep a deep and abiding love for you locked in a secret corner of my heart, and/or that your project ticks twelve (or more) out of the ten boxes on my Will I Get A Kick Out Of This? checklist.

2. Avoid at all costs setting up interviews with a cherrypicked collection of the world's most prominent digital marketing and writing gurus, to whom I have, overnight, miraculously obtained access.

   At all costs.

3. Stare mindlessly at my Rand McNally map of The Political World, circa 1991. Then make more coffee.

Blind hope

Every so often, a blizzard of work hits my desk. Between now and late October, it looks a lot like I have to:

1. write 165 pages of web copy for a site redev
2. write an ebook
3. rework a second edition of an ebook
4. tech (ha!) edit a print book
5. write a weekly column
6. keep two sites churning with brilliant and insightful content
7. write sales pages and emails for maybe three product launches
8. write another website
9. maybe write a suite of print collateral
10. maybe write another website
11. finish my secret side-project

WTF?

Also, if you're a writer in Melbourne who needs contract web work, I know of a few 5+ month contracts going this week. No kidding.

Given that item number one on that list is estimated to take 420 hours alone, how will I get it all done? Blind hope, my friend. Blind, ignorant, unjustified-ly optimistic hope.

[the kindness of strangers]

[had become practical. There was no room for tenderness or pause. It was all about doing: action on action, brick on brick, day upon burnished, unyielding day.

In those months it was the kindness of strangers that kept him afloat. Speaking to an old woman on the train, or the man who ran the fruit shop, gave him a sense of corporality. He still existed; he was still flesh. He still had whatever it was that made people turn to regard him when he addressed them, and smile politely, and respond with gentle interest.

He was not a ghost. He was not a machine. He kept making these promises to himself in spite of]

What are dictionaries good for?

I'll tell you, kid, because I can only guess that you, like everyone else in the world, thinks dictionaries are for spelling.

That's not it.

Dictionaries are for meaning. Not so much meanings you have no idea about, but meanings you think you know.

If you're constantly stretching for words that are slightly beyond the scope of common conversation—and who isn't?—then dictionaries are extremely helpful.

If you catch yourself every time you stretch—every time aren't quite sure of a word's meaning—and look it up, I promise you you'll find that you know less of even more common words' meanings than you realise.

This is what dictionaries are good for: learning how to express things accurately.

Book concept #743: Copywriting and Gin

Copywriting and Gin (or possibly Copywriting & Gin, depending on the typeface chosen for the cover art) would be a book full of puns, anti-agency witticisms, and general ridicule of the seriousness of copywriting work interwoven—interwoven, I say—with tidbits on gin, gin brands, gin cocktails, and gin drinking.

It would appeal to a miniscule sliver of the book-buying market, namely me. And anyone I could convince at point of sale in my local book shop to buy a copy.

However, in literary, writing-class circles it would achieve near-legendary status as a title full of little but stupidity that somehow made it big. Classes would be formed to analyse it. Syllabus would be bent to fit in discussions of its themes. Students would refer to its innards as containing "deathless prose". Oprah would feature it in her book club.

Chapter titles may include:

Starting out: Come to my garrett, and bring the Vickers

Agency party etiquette: don't dis the Bombay Sapphire

A rather diverting selection of celebratory cocktails

Hendricks and other late-night writing gins

More cocktails (for copywriting after 3am)

Pages: ~350

Writing time: this book should be drafted by September, which would mean it could be released in time for the Christmas shopping season.

[excerpted]

[flames on the fields,

cold flames contained:

yellow in the horses' eyes

leap, flames, flicker

dark scent of burning,

grass made stubble

timber turned to bitter ash

burn, flames, flare]

Domains for men and lesbians

No? That's not what this ad says to you? It's not supposed to appeal specifically to people who like—as in, are turned on by—breasts?

Oh, sorry. I guess I'm just the kind of bitchy straight chick that'll actively avoid buying from a company that advertises by pushing breasts in my face on principle. Again, sorry: I just think it's fucking dumb. (Think of all the cool executions you could create for this brand! Also, newsflash: hetero women buy domains too.) Call me crazy ... but not Crazy Domains.

Subtext: if this ad appears at the top of your homepage, it's likely to put people like me off your site. Sorry, chump, that's just how the world works.

Coda: Sometimes I fantasise that digital advertising for the masses would dispense with sex-for-the-sake-of-it advertising. Really, I do.

Mind-blowing lines #27

Bright and Distant Shores is an irresistible title, don't you think? Dominic Smith is an American, and this is not his first novel—information which I trust will pique your interest.

I admit it's a bit of a tome (700 pages) but it's one hell of an easy read—compelling, involving, likeable, dramatic, and, best of all, vivid. Over these last months of frigid winter, grey air and sickness, this book has been something of a holiday, a retreat. Why? Let me show you.

Introspection was unavoidable at sea. The immense sightlines had a way of turning a man inwards. Up in the rigging, Owen watched a progression of coral atolls and saw his life in outline, a lineage of bare rocks that stood for future events—marriage, children, even his own death could be reckoned in the crags that dotted then diminished above the ocean. He saw the other men in the cross-trees, each of them sunk in his own reverie between tacks. Somehow, the sea offered a reprieve from the turning wheel. He could see the workings of his life more clearly, felt a fondness for it that he seldom felt ashore. Time slowed and the days were graspable things, bright objects waiting to be taken up.

Dumb and dumber

This week has been laden with dumbness. It's like the web has gone to Hawaii and left filler content in its stead. No kidding. Ready?

Dumb #1: Really, really big buttons

Okay, it's not new: there's always been a brand of online marketer that thinks big means more clickable. And sure, if your call to action is so small that no one will ever see it, then yes: bigger might be better. But placement comes into the equation, too. And at some point, everyone's seeing your call to action, so bigger is just more ridiculous.

I hope you're ready. These social media buttons are freaking enormous.

Case 1: sidebar buttons

I found these in a sidebar. They were pretty freaking big.
Case 2: header buttons

Kids, kids, kids. Get your hoof off the accelerator, okay? These buttons were on the right of a site header. On the left? The logo. In the middle? A brand image. On the right? This.

Images are shown at actual sizes. Actual sizes. At 100 paces from my monitor, I can still make that freaking f out.

Okay, we get it: "engage" with you on social media. Alright ALREADY!

Dumb #2: Sheer idiocy

I know, I say everything's sheer idiocy. But tumblr takes the cake. Yeah, some people put new stuff on their tumblr blogs. But 99.9999 repeating per-uncreative-cent do nothing more than rip other people's shit. Like repost, with no added anything. What's the point? Seriously?

This makes me wonder: has the glittering gleam of uncontrolled self-publication lost its tantalising shine already? Have people forgotten the war?*

Dumb #3: Lacklustreness. And yes, that's a word. Because I said so. Don't start with me now.

Look, beautifulswearwords was smile-worthy for the first three minutes, but after that? It's nowhere near as compelling as whatthefuckshouldImakefordinner.com, let's face it.

And as for the endlessly creative 404s, they were cute the first time, but really, who has time to read two hundred words and watch a video, for Christ's sakes, when they get to a lost page? I was wanting to waste time by following the link in the first place, but even I couldn't be bothered dealing with all that content. People want to get shit done, okay?

Dummary

In conclusion, I'm finding there to be more dross—but more highly-produced dross—on the web at the present juncture than previously. Where we will go from here, oh weary pilgrims, is anyone's guess. I recall a time when the thought of publication through uncontrolled channels filled hearts with both joy and inspiration. I know that makes me sound like I'm 80. But whatever.

On the plus side, do good work, and boy will you ever stand out. Boy.

*Sorry. I was just feeling a mite stalwartish. Apologies.

Word of the day #10: chaocosm

chaocosm, n. A place of ordered randomness, or organized disarray. chaocosmic, adj.

From the Greek chaos, emptiness, and cosmos, order.

A term now largely reserved to describe a certain psychological state where an individual is insane, but predictably so, chaocosm was originally coined by physicists in the early days of the Space Race, and used liberally when referring to the universe's mysteries:

"This previously undiscovered black hole further vindicates Thewall Brewster's views on the chaocosm inherent in our universe." (From a paper presented to the Minsk Confederacy of Cosmologists, April 1952)

"...and I feel above all that this theory will lead us to discover new chaocosmic aspects that contribute to the as-yet unexplained orbit..." (Excerpt from a letter dated 7 June, 1953, from the great Sir Blenhem Shipley, Head of the London Space Agency)

"Please do not touch chaocosmic strobe without seeing Prof. Green first." (Memo, Cosmological Science Unit, Utah University, circa 1956)

Ultimately, however, the notion of chaocosm is regarded by many academics as underlying the basis for scientific research and experiment, given that its implication of ordered chaos in fact points to the unknown, but tangible and discoverable explanations that exist for all apparently inexplicable phenomena.

That's all we know

Cute. And not just because it's a 404 for Internet Indexing Giant Google, the Oracle of All Things Web. I especially like the greyed "subtext" here, as if Google is whispering to you in a lecture:

Lecturer: 404

Google: He means "that's an error."

Lecturer: The requested URL could not be found on this server.

Google: That's all he freaking knows. Like, no idea. Hey, check out the guy on the right down there: he's going to pieces! Talk about a meltdown! Jesus. Wanna get coffee after this?

Don't worry: I'm just as anti-Google as always. But I thought this was a bit of a gem.

Info + clarity = communication + conversion

Not long ago, I suggested (caustically, I admit) that we do need to tell people about the service they're signing up for in order to secure said signup.

Today, I came across this little gem, in which 37signals explain that and A/B test of a long page and a short page saw the long copy win (that is, garner more signups) by 37.5%.

I can't endorse the letter-style sales page. I really can't. That 37signals "signature" makes me want to set my hair on fire.

Similarly, given the comparison here, it's difficult to tell if it's the sales-letter style that's making the 37.5% of difference,* or the fact that the long page is neater, clearer, and far less demanding on the eye than the short one—and appears to present more information on the service.

While only a screencap of the short-form page is pictured, at first glance it's something of a dog's breakfast, don't you think?

However, what we can say is that this test indicates the following:

• Information aids conversion.
• Clarity aids conversion.

At its root, this means:

• Information aids communication.
• Clarity aids communication.

Balancing those two factors is, of course, the challenge.

*The fact that 37signals have moved away from the sales-letter style in their current sales page (accessible when you click through from the homepage) speaks volumes, to me at least, on this point.

Consolidation

Since that whole social network debacle, I've been thinking a lot about consolidation.

The web has always wanted us to be everywhere. The notions of signing up, of having an account, of being on imply a need to be here. You can be there, too—or anywhere else you like—but you really must be here. On this site. On this service.

If you're not, then what?

It's quite an indulgent question for the long-time subscriber to ponder.

Breaking points

Google+ seems officially to have broken some kind of logic rule in my psyche. Signing up meant I was on three social networks (four if you count LinkedIn)—a realisation that finally made my brain explode.

Since then, I've essentially stopped caring about anything social-network-related. Yeah, so this should be a tool for networking and ... is that a rabbit? No, wait—I think it's a hare.

Oh, so as I was saying, I can, you know, like share my stuff with followers who, when you get right down to it, are supposedly people who are actually engaged and give a shit about ... oh, by the way, I have this great Edward Gorey card sitting on my desk. Sorry, I'm trying to focus. But Gorey is one cool illustrator. And really, this card just seems more important right now.

In fact, everything seems more important.

I think that's the point here. One too many social networks and you start to think, who really cares? What does this matter? These are just the same people talking the same shit (only some of it interesting or funny) in different places. I think those places and people are, in combination, called the Social Web. And it's getting kind of boring.

It's all just the same. And in the end, none of it matters.

What matters is Edward Gorey and the hare.

[dark]

[In the roiling darkness, the wind torments the plains.

A tirade. A violence. A blind eradication. Nothing is spared, and nothing matters but pressure.

Force.

The animals are vanished; birds void the air. The darkness buckles and warps, and trees scream dumbly as pinprick lights explode across the sky.

Alone in the grass, you are no one, and the only one. Ignored and exposed; muted and championed; timeless against the night.]

Literal vs. logical: content in context

Recently, I commented that "Conclusion" is a really boring heading for an online article's conclusion. Some charming writerly/usability friends suggested that, boring as it may be, if the heading preceded a conclusion, then it's both appropriate and usable.

Of course, I wanted to explore that further. Who wouldn't?

It's true that calling your conclusion "Conclusion" is a great way to indicate to users what they'll get out of that part of the content. But it's also boring. Yes, if your content is an academic piece or a formal document, then by all means, go ahead and let it end with a "Conclusion".

But what of these articles?

• Dye Your Cat for Christmas!
• How to Play the Spoons in Six Simple Steps
  
• The Banjo and the Buffoon—My Unforgettable Weekend
  

In these cases, a conclusion heading that reflects and rounds out the content will be more coherent for users than one that reads "Conclusion".

In fact, if that cat-dyeing article is any good, "Conclusion" is likely to be among the more jarring heading options, viz.:

H1: Dye Your Cat for Christmas!
H2: Why dye?
H2: What you'll need
H2: Let's get dyeing!
H3: Step 1: Wash the coat
H3: Step 2: Rinse the coat
H3: Step 3: Apply the dye
H3: Step 4: The second rinse
H3: Step 5: Dry the coat
H2: Have a very meow-y Christmas!

Yes, we could have called the conclusion, "Conclusion". But doesn't "Have a very meow-y Christmas!", while extreme (and extremely corny) for the purposes of example, seem more contextually relevant to the content here?

Isn't it likely to speak more directly to—and perhaps further endear our brand/the article's publisher to—the cat-dyeing readership?

True, "Have a merry Christmas" is a festive farewell, and that makes it an especially suitable closing heading—a heading that actually implies the article's ending, and thus a conclusion. But headings that imply a conclusion subtley, without stating it outright (and thus boringly), can be found for all content topics.

On the much-lauded social web, writing in context, with the sensibilities of readers in mind, should be seen as a good thing. It doesn't need to undermine the content's usability if it's done well. On the contrary, I think it can be used to enhance content usability.

Okay, got it

I know you thought I was off my freaky rocker when I pushed out Hello, Buttons. So this is something of an I-told-you-so, courtesy of Google.

You could question whether "Okay" was superfluous here, and if you did I'd say "yes", but let's put our differences aside momentarily and simply bask in the glory that is the growing Hello Buttons groundswell, shall we?

20 Conflicting questions on creating disposables

I think it's time we called consumer culture what it really is: disposable culture. In a world that's all about disposables, and the value of things lying in their obsolescence, what lasts?

More pertinently, how do we make content last?* How does content retain its value? Conventional wisdom implicates:

• Evergreen content: re-churnable, "timeless" content.
• Print: let's face it, a book you read six months ago is almost always easier to find than some article you read online on the same day.
• Epublishing: in theory, although my computer's directory structure appears to be some kind of vortex that sucks such content in and destroys it through what I suspect is a previously undiscovered form of massive, sub-atomic implosion.
• Searchability: will social search put paid to the conventional notion of "value", or bolster it? And what about supposedly less-restricted search, like Duck Duck Go?

But really, what is the value of content? For most people, it seems to be that you can stick it in your head -- you can gain knowledge (even only short-term knowledge, like news), or a semblance of such.

What are the alternatives to disposable content? Are there alternatives? If a central part of the human psyche believes that the most valuable things are those we can lose, and/or that what matters is what's "now", then perhaps obsolescence is to be reveled in.

Perhaps the value of content -- to people who sell it, and people who read it -- is proportional to its ability to churn.

Why am I arguing? Obsolescence will keep writers in jobs, and by rights I should probably be cheering. There'll always be more to write, and more to read. But Jesus, it's exhausting.

*Substitute for "content" the name of the product you make if you wish.

You tell me

I don't know. I really don't.*
Let's look at that again, shall we:

It was a lay-down misere.

In fact, a lay-down misere is a game which is played to lose: the loser is the winner. How these people are losers is a bit beyond me; perhaps it has something to do with riot shields.

Celebrity agent signs riot kissers.

Difficult to glean the meaning on the first read, but you can get it by the fifth or so if you concentrate really hard.

Now, Melbourne romantic's bringing lover home.

What? Honestly, it took me a good forty seconds to glean the meaning of the previous phrase. After ten minutes or so I assumed this bit meant that one of the kissing couple is from Melbourne and is bringing the other party to this city. According to the article, however, he is in fact from Perth.

What's going on with the news and the writing and the reporting and the coherent English, then? You tell me. Cause I have no freaking idea.

*Yeah, we could talk all day about the image content and the intent of the couple (that's a "comforting kiss"? I think I got thrown out of a nightclub once for doing the same thing...) but that's a discussion for another time.

Doing your dash

My grandfather lived until he was 95 or some such, and died only when he ripped the drip from his own wrinkly arm, flung himself out of his own bed, and let himself die of pneumonia.

Yeah. We have some hard arses in our family. Two: him, and me. My sister says I'm like him in that I give the world only so many chances. Once someone's done their dash, that's it. She's right.

Unfortunately this applies to authors I edit just as it does people I know personally.

How does an author do their dash?

• Fail to be polite.
• Decline to humour my suggestions for edits or rewrites.
• Neglect to attend to my requests for additional information.

Tweeting me a day after they've sent me an article or pitch to ask when I'll get to it sails pretty close to the wind, too, but even I can see that failing to nurture such eagerness is less than ideal for all concerned.

Pitching authors, don't do your dash. Be helpful and accommodating, and I'll be the same. Okay? Deal.

Word of the day #9: agoropolis

agoropolis, n. a city comprised entirely of retail outlets, and lacking the public services, homes, and other facilities that would support its citizens.

From the Greek agora, marketplace, and polis, city.

The concept of the agoropolis was created by British writer Monty Monteith, who wrote futuristic fiction in the 1940s.

Monteith had enjoyed the depth of classical education appropriate to his class, and during his time abroad, spent many months on Mykonos and Crete, as well as mainland Greece.

Few know if it was this, or the mysterious months he spent in Lapland during the winter of 1938—a period for which he was largely unable to account upon his return to England—that prompted him to conjure the agoropolis. Many believe it was a combination of the two.

Monteith's agoropolis was a cold, fractured anti-idyll, where the citizens had no homes or shelters, and were trapped in a maze of shops from birth (usually on a street, beneath a tree manicured by the Keepers of Streetscapes—the retail equivalent of council workers, employed by wealthy merchants) until death (usually in some dank bargain basement).

So entrenched, the citizens could do nothing but pursue purchases. They spent their days trawling market stalls, eating street food as they walked between merchants' stores, trying things out and on, and attempting to gain the attention of uninterested store clerks.

In an intriguing twist, the citizens of Monteith's agoropolis had no money—since they had no employment—and thus were destined to window-shop for their entire lives.

They were able to obtain food by using a complex system of accounts, like modern-day tabs, with a restricted number of food sellers.

Yet they were never able to purchase or own the items that they were forced, by circumstances beyond their control, to spend their lives focused upon.

Scholars have since addressed the similarities between Monteith's agoropolis and Dante's Inferno in papers of varying merit.

I love the way she tells stories

Mind-blowing lines #26

From The Death of Bunny Munro. Which is prettymuch all the preamble you need on this occasion.

Soon Bunny Junior will sit back in his seat and stare out at the white, weather-bitten cliffs and the flocks of seagulls that feast on the newly turned earth in the fields that line the coastal road. He will think that even though his mother would come into his room and hold him and stroke his forehead and cry her eyes out, her hand was still the softest, sweetest, warmest thing he had ever felt, and he will look up and see a flock of starlings trace the angles of her face in the sky. He will think that if he could just feel that soft, warm hand on his forehead again then he would he didn't know what.

[nothing]

[what is good is the trees and the garden
the quiet
and the sound of wind in the trees
like rain, like waves, like breath, the leaves:
spiralling onward
outlasting death]

Seeya sweetcheeks

Hey, you.

A few things have come up. I may not be around as much. But don't think I've forgotten you.

Alida

Linkety link-link

Remember the "user experience"? I know—what with FaceBook verily screaming up the popularity charts, it's easy to forget that these kinds of off-the-wall notions still matter.

Contrary to popular misconception, text also contributes to the user experience. Text can, for example, be "usable" or "unusable" (often it's just plain "useless").

Case in point: imagine that, in writing a text link to your website, you exclude the site's domain name in favour of the category keywords, like so:

"Visit PetBlog.com pet and animal blog."

Why would you do such a thing? Why, search rankings, of course.

Of course! Why else would anyone do something so clearly, obviously, unconscionably counter-intuitive? Why would anyone purposely reduce the usability of their content like this? Why would they obfuscate their own message?

Nope, I can't think of another reason.

Come on, Internet. Think! Think: scanning. Think: common sense. Think: human decency.

Maybe you don't care whether or not people to remember your domain. Maybe you don't care if they can scan the article for it or not. Maybe you think we're all chumps and all that matters is fickle, fickle search rank. Well, fine, moron. Good luck to you.

...and yes, if you like, you can tell me I'm being overly pedantic and taking this a little too personally in the comments. Whatever. I'm off to write some half-decent link text.

New-concept reality television

I can't think why I didn't come up with this astonishing new, blockbuster-worthy reality TV idea the last time I got on this bandwagon, but suffice it to say I didn't.

The new concept takes Masterchef and turns it on its head:

Master Leftovers-Chef

Anyone can make something decent from a nice loin of pork, some pear, pomegranate, balsamic vinegar, good olive oil and rocket. Anyone. If you fuck that up, you don't deserve a kitchen.

But who could make something decent from the ingredients with which I was faced this evening?

• cold mashed potato
• cold cooked linguini
• dried broccoli (yes, that made you sit up, didn't it?)*
• leftover salad
• a shriveled capsicum
• approximately half a cup of the green tomato chutney I'd just made but couldn't fit in the jar
• boring table cheese (although to be honest, interesting cheese would probably only have made matters worse)
  
• wilted beet tops**
  

I know what you're thinking: why didn't you thaw some frozen eggs*** and make a meal of it, sister?

I don't know why I didn't. Really, I don't. I would love to see George Colombaris and Gary Whoever-he-is make something edible from that lot. I dare them to. On Master Leftovers-Chef. Just try and tell me that doesn't have arse-on-seat appeal. Everyday cooks the country over would cheer. Cheer. I promise you.

And yes, dinner was actually pretty good, thank you for asking.

*In case you're wondering, I'm not kidding about any of this.
**Still not kidding.
***See above.

Subtext

Today I received this email:

Hi,

If I interview [web superstar], [internet rockstar], and [technology bigwig], will you accept these as guest posts?

Best,
[name]

I replied with charm and patience: that would depend on what you asked and what you wrote, etc. The subtext to my reply appears below.

Dear [name],

You call that a pitch? Even if I knew you personally, there's no way in hell I could give you an answer about the suitability of these would-be articles from what you've told me.

Big names aren't what I need here, see? They won't get you over the line. I need content, man, real material that says something. An interview with [technology bigwig] about his love of skinks (or whatever it is you have in mind -- clearly I have no idea what that might be) won't cut it.

Surely you realise this. So what's really going on here? Hmm? Are you trying to drive me to self-inflicted harm by sending inane emails masked as "article pitches"? Please, stop torturing me. I mean it. And I beg you.
Alida

Recently, in the backstory

Scene:* int. taxi, late at night. The Indian driver's eyes reflect rain and the dash lights as we discuss the state of the nation and the future that lies before us...

Taxi driver: [mournfully] ...but my spoken English isn't good enough. I will fail the residency test.

Alida: [with growing outrage] What? What?! That's crazy! What are you talking about???!?!

Taxi driver: I'm saying MY ENGLISH ISN'T SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED FOR ME TO PASS THE TEST.

Alida: [gasping] I just don't believe this! What's wrong with the world?! I don't understand!!

Taxi driver: It's my SPOKEN ENGLISH...

...etc. etc.

[curtain]

*Okay, I may have taken some poetic license with this particular event. Actual results may vary.

Happiness

A tweeted chart, hence the smallness. But when a content site's traffic graph looks like this, and you've managed content on that content site for the last 7 months, it's not the size of the graph that matters—it's the size of the happiness.

[between breaths]

[and silence. But for once, patience and silence took no effort at all. They had, overnight, become second nature. They had become home.

There was, clearly, a need to stop and take it in. He'd learnt very early to accept things at face value. It would take time to understand that there was more than this, and to know what that more was.

He'd always thought that what could be relied upon were things that could be seen. There were facts—indisputable facts. When you saw them, you knew what to do, and you did it. Simple.

He'd hinged his life on that understanding, and it had worked. Nothing concrete was so overwhelming that it would keep you from your bed that night, keep the sun from rising the next day. Keep your heart from beating. Keep you from toast and Vegemite and scanning the headlines while the kettle boiled.

Now, it was as if the space between his breaths had been extended—like he'd exhaled, fully and finally, some time ago, but hadn't yet taken in more air.

A certain tide had rushed out, revealing the pure, empty beach where he found himself alone. Now he was waiting for the next tide. The next wave. Waiting patiently, silently, for the next breath]

Minor crisis

Damn you, Jees-vis.

Coming as it does hot on the heels of a spark (actually, more like a jet-propelled space-rocket) of hope ignited by having a pitch accepted for an article on a social issue dear to my heart, and then finding out that the basis of said article pitch was naught but smoke and mirrors, this news from Advertising's ex-Jesus/Elvis has plunged me into minor crisis.

I'll let you in on a little secret. I'm not a very good writer. I can put a sentence together, and I can write prettymuch anything you like (from tagline to 375-page book) within a spectrum, given a half-decent brief. Yes. But these things do not an actual writer make.

For no little time I have been writing to briefs. But recently (okay, not that recently) I began to wonder if I could use my powers for real, undeniable good, rather than evil or evil-veiled-as-not-badness or even okayness-but-nothing-specialness.

I began to wonder if I could say something important, rather than merely prattling.

And now? Now art's buying mass media, which is, frankly, a dream we all (come on, admit it) must have had for as long as we've been sentient and subjected to advertising.

Which raises the question: what the fuck am I doing?

I was hoping to appease that sentiment while simultaneously earning an income. No, I am hoping to do this. But perhaps now, along with the ESL qualification and philosophy and those two novels I started (oh, and work), I should commit myself to actually doing something that actually achieves that appeasement.

Yeah, don't worry, this is totally cool. All I need is Google calendar, a scotch, and a little quiet.

The people have spoken

...and what they said was, "Sweet Jesus, it's lying down, for Christ's sakes! What the fuck is wrong with you people? For the love of God..." etc. etc. etc.

That old chestnut

Last night I dreamt I'd set a chemical bomb to blow up the upper stories of a skyscraper. The combined chemicals gave me a certain amount of time to escape, but there was a party on the top floor and I couldn't leave because there were so many people I wanted to talk to. The bomb, the time, the conversational possibilities. How could I choose between life and life?

But then I woke up, and it was all a dream.

Mind-blowing lines #25

While I was away I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. Prettymuch every one of his lines is mind-blowing, but here I've picked a couple for you. Consider them an invitation if you've never read him before.

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping the public in mind, means living in lies. Sabina despised literature in which people give away all kinds of intimate secrets about themselves and their friends. A man who loses his privacy loses everything, Sabina thought. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster. That was why Sabina did not suffer in the least from having to keep her love secret. On the contrary, only by doing so could she live in truth.

And:

In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it. It fact, that was exactly how Sabina had explained the meaning of her paintings to Tereza: on the surface, and intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through.

I'm beginning to think that all truths are unintelligible, and are, therefore, unacceptable to many people. Perhaps that's why this book appeals to me so much.

Incidentally, The Unbearable Lightness of Being revived that old, forgotten urge to throw the book across the room. It had been a while. But it's good to know I'm still alive.

New rules

1. No more content that needs editing.
2. No more caving on #1.
   
3. No more bullshit.
4. No more fucking whatever.

This is what Monday does to me.

Mind-blowing lines #24

You know, Man Booker Prize-winners are usually pretty reliable reads. I've come to this conclusion after buying (yet another) one on the strength of the prize (because you can never trust either cover notes or review excerpts, in my experience) and being bowled over.

The White Tiger is the first novel of the young Aravind Adiga, who's got the odd writing credit to his name. (Yes, that tone is one of envious adoration. I'm conflicted. Let's move on.)

The thing is, it's one of those books that isn't about glitteringly beautiful prose, but about a glittering story, fabulously told. That makes it a tough candidate for Mind-blowing lines, because the mind-blowing is in the whole book, not just its lines.

However, I couldn't live with myself if I didn't scream its virtues from the rooftops. So I wanted to give you a little excerpt with a lot of backstory.

Context is everything with Adiga. Everything.

Here, the lovable protagonist, the servant Balram, is in an extremely sticky situation because of his employer. He explains that India is a land of entrenched servitude, using the metaphor of the market rooster coop, which is tight-packed with birds terrified by the smells arising from the warm poultry carcases and entrails that lie about their cages. They know their fates, but they don't fight. They're trapped, they know it—and they accept it.

In this particular scene, his boss's wife has just left him, and Balram is comforting his drunk, sick employer on a roadside in Delhi:

I put my hand out and wiped the vomit from his lips, and cooed soothing words to him. It squeezed my heart to see him suffer like this—but where my genuine concern for him ended and where my self-interest began, I could not tell: no servant can ever tell what the motives of his heart are.

Do we loathe out masters behind a facade of love—or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?

We are made mysteries to ourselves by the Rooster Coop we are locked in.

Emotional rollercoaster

Boy oh boy. After seeing:
I began to doubt the likelihood that Gmail even employed anyone who'd ever marketed anything for any other reason than numbers, numbers, numbers! It was a terrible thought. The rollercoaster bottomed out pretty seriously and my entire life flashed before my eyes, along with, oh, my education, life intentions, and career. But then:

appeared and everything seemed okay again. The coaster turned upwards, and a pale-blue sky unfolded before me, gradually expanding to fill the entire universe.

Playing fair in public

Okay, that's it. I've had it with these new wank words. I'm not saying that "content curation" isn't a thing; I'm not saying it's a wank. I am saying that it's not a word to be used in polite company with people who aren't consciously involved in filtering shit online. To do so is a wank.

Backstory: I just read a blog that had the tagline "Curated by [name]". A big-name blog by a big-name Internet Personality with a broad readership.

To me, this is the definition of unjustifiable. It's indecent. Come on, people. Play fair and pick your freaking audience.

Just as I wouldn't go to a family lunch and start talking about unique selling propositions and concept vocabularies, people who make it their business to filter information should not utter the words "content curation" within earshot of anyone who is not themselves a content curator, or asking about it specifically.

Why not? Because it's unbecoming.

It's embarrassing for us innocent bystanders. It's as if you're so proud of your intellectual and industry credentials that you're determined to show them to everyone, regardless of who they are or how intimidated that might make them feel. While you're at it, why not just take off your pants so we can see you wear Calvins? Or take off your Calvins so we can see your...

Anyway. You get my drift. If you're talking with me, we can talk about content curation, by all means. If you're talking with the general public, please: have a little decency. Keep your self-congratulations to yourself.

Unexpected assailations

This recent Radiolab podcast dealt with two subjects dear to my heart: addiction and creativity.*

Of particular note was the idea that creative outputs exist as separate entities waiting for an outlet—a human—to make them tangible. (There's also a whole lot of stuff about those ideas being demanding, and that they will assail us when it suits them—but you'll have to listen to the podcast to get all that.)

On listening, I was gently scornful. It seemed too nice an idea, and one that divested us all too easily of our own responsibility in the creative process. But then how do you explain times that produce good work, work you don't ask for, and can't replicate at other times? Nights like this. When the produce looks like that:

This is a description of a country. And a key character. And a collective attitude. I'd give you more, but Jesus, I just started the thing, okay? There's a plot and some characters and other bits and pieces. Also, a beginning.

The point, really, is just that this isn't what I was hoping for when I pulled up the covers and turned out the light. Nothing like it.

*Extra-weird, because recently I overheard a friend say he thought humans had evolved to use drugs, at which I thought, "look around, people—we've evolved to create."

Word of the day #8: moronoia

moronoia, n. a state of dull-mindedness. moronoid, adj.

From the Greek moros, dull, and noos, mind.

Psychologists around the mid-1800s were fond of referring to the mental state of both depressed and intellectually disabled patients as moronoiac. The public swiftly adopted the term to deride those who seemed silly or stupid.

Evidence is given in Scene Four of the stage play Bertie's Battle, by Englishwoman Winifred George. George's main character, Bertie, is described as suffering moronoia after being bowled out at the village cricket match:

[Bowler bowls; Bertie misses and Wicket Keeper catches the ball.]
Fielders: Cor!
Bertie: Egads!
Miss Finch: [aside to Miss Gibbons] Oh, Valerie. Do you think Bertie's got the flu? He's not playing nearly as well as he can!
Miss Gibbons: [rifling through purse in search of opera glasses; she finds them and peers across at the pitch] It looks more like moronoia to me, my dear.
Miss Finch: Oh! Do stop. He is smart, I tell you. And terribly clever.
Miss Gibbons: [regarding Miss Finch over the tops of her glasses with gravity and a raised eyebrow] Yes, dear. I'm quite sure he is.

Historians comment that the audience would have laughed heartily at this little scene, it being typical of the teatime humour of the era.

Today, of course, audiences would likely have died of moronoia induced by Miss George's tedious writing long before this point in the play was achieved.