Apt. 11D

Blogging Death

What would you do if you had a long time blog and something really bad happened in your life? Would you blog about the "bad thing"?

Many bloggers have been at it for six or seven years now. They're blogging about books, politics, parenting, whatever. And then something terrible happens in their personal life - a death, a foreclosure, a divorce, illness. It's inevitable, really. Some blog about it and find the blogging process cathartic. Others make veiled references to the "bad thing" and then go about business as usual.

I've read about tragedies before on the blogs. I remember when Sam lost his son, Aidan. I've also been following Katie Granju as she grieves over her son's death. Right now, she' s nine months pregnant with her fourth children and nearly bedridden with grief. She's blogging a lot about the horror of losing a son.

The Future of Content

Last week, Yahoo bought Associated Content, a five year old company, for $90 million. There's a rising demand for content on business websites to help build a company's image and to increase the Google rank of the company. AC provides the content, but without having any writers or editors on staff. What?

You're the owner of a small chain of pool filter shops and you need to punch up your website. It doesn't make sense for you to waste time writing information yourself. You're too busy, and you aren't that great of a writer. So, you go to Associated Content or to one of its copycat competitions, search for content by a keyword, find the best article for you, and purchase it.

These companies have hundreds of pre-written articles and blog posts that writers have submitted with the hopes of getting published. While there is a huge demand online content, there is a bigger supply of unemployed writers who are desperate to put publications on their resume and are willing to give away their words.

I spent some time looking at these businesses and geeking out over how smart they are. These businesses are simply a big database. They don't need to employ writers; the writers come to them and lend them their words on consignment. They don't employ editors; the clients do the quality control themselves by looking through the articles. They don't interact with the client at all; the database and the tags do all the work. They really act as brokers and take a percentage from both writer and business owner. The only employees have to be computer geeks who designed the database.

I am partly in awe of the genius of these content databases. It's pure profit. I'm partly horrified by them. They take advantage of that huge pool of unemployed literature majors. They provide content for companies that don't care too much about quality. There's a cynicism underlying this business model that's a little disturbing.

Photographers complain that digital cameras, Flicker, and stock photographer companies have reduced the cost of a photograph so much that they can't earn a living. Amateur photographers are producing professional level photographs and are selling them cheaply. These new content companies are going to have the same impact on professional writers.

Squeezing Lemons

Writing is certainly death by a series of small cuts.

I think someone famous said that, and I should be giving him/her credit, but I'm too lazy to google it.

I finally finished off a project that I've been wrestling with for the past month. It took me one week to get up enough energy to finish off the last two hours of edits. I just HAD to do a load of whites, because nobody had any underwear. I just HAD to write some blog posts, because they were on VERY IMPORTANT issues. I just HAD to make Moroccan salted lemons, because they were a KEY ingredient in a recipe that I wanted to make. Then I needed to make another batch of Moroccan salted lemons using an entirely different system, because I wasn't sure if the first method was correct.

Honestly, I don't even know what Moroccan salted lemons taste like. And I won't know for another month, because that's how long it takes to make Moroccan salted lemons. They have to sit in a jar full of salty lemon juice for a month before they are done. And, yes, I had to go out and buy the correct kind of jar for those Moroccan salted lemons.

I squeezed about twenty lemons this week. All to avoid two hours of edits.

I have no problem spitting out rough, typo-ridden first drafts. Evidence A = Apt. 11D. It's all the neatening up and tying together arguments and clarifying that I find so tiresome.

Sigh.

Well, it's done and now I'm celebrating. First, there will be loud music on the stereo. Second, there will be a flowery, rushing-the-season sort of dress. Third, there will be a car trip into Manhattan and some meat eatin' at Virgil's. Lent be damned.

The Internet and Writing and the Foils on the Goddam Subway

Susan Orleans and Kurt Anderson talk about the process of writing in an Internet Age. Orleans says she likes using the word count function to give herself daily goals, but that the Internet is a tempting distraction when she should be writing. Not terribly earth shattering, but I love hearing writers talk about writing.

Kieran Healy points to another writer who tells people to stop whining and just write.

There have been some wonderful things written about J.D. Salinger in the past week. Check out Lillian Ross and all the New Yorker links.

My dad's favorite passage of The Catcher in the Rye is:

We’d gone in to New York that morning for this fencing meet with McBurney School. Only, we didn’t have the meet. I left all the foils and equipment and stuff on the goddam subway. It wasn’t all my fault. I had to keep getting up to look at this map, so we’d know where to get off. So we got back to Pencey around two-thirty instead of around dinnertime. The whole team ostracized me the whole way back on the train. It was pretty funny, in a way.

Leaving the Party Early

Every night before bed, Steve and Ian read Calvin and Hobbes. It's Steve's old edition from when he was a kid.

Watterson, who is apparently a big recluse, just gave an interview. When asked why he chose to end the strip when it was still really popular, he said,

By the end of 10 years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say.

It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for "Calvin and Hobbes" would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason "Calvin and Hobbes" still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I've never regretted stopping when I did.

Blogging a Book

A few weeks ago, Laura of Geeky Mom announced that she was signing up for NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo is a month long on-line competition, where participants vow to write a certain number of words per day. At the end of the month, participants have the rough draft of a novel. Laura used the competition to get a rough draft a non-fiction book.

I liked Laura's plan and was thinking about copying her. I was having a tough time getting started on my own project this fall. But I ended up going in a different direction.

Hypothetically, if an individual blogs for many years, and while the blog attacks a number of topics, it comes back to certain topics again and again. Let's just say, that if one is fairly diligent about tagging the posts that writing a book becomes an entirely different process. One might cut and paste posts, arrange them in a coherent order, bridge topics, edit out the blogese, and find a simple, unifying message. One might have a book with very little new writing involved.

Just saying.

Protecting the Pitbulls

Malcolm Gladwell wrote one of the best essays of the year in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. In Offensive Play, Gladwell begins by describing the terrible brain injuries that linebackers get from repeatedly hitting each other. Their job is to use their heads as battering rams, and the repeated bangs in the head, sometimes as many as a hundred in a routine practice, add up and lead to dementia similar to those of people who suffer from Alzheimer's disease.

That bit of reporting was interesting on its own, but Gladwell subtly adds another layer to the article. Using Michael Vick as a bridge, he turns to the topic of dog fighting. He discusses anthropological research about dog fighting. The dogs are bred to keep attacking over and over despite terrible injury. Due to their intense desire to please their owner, they fight with broken bones and blood gushing from their neck.

He makes clear comparisons to the football. Is football just as cruel and blood thirsty as dogfighting? Are we destroying these athletes? And are football fans just as diabolical as those who sit around the dog fight rings and put money on the fighting dogs? How different are my son and my husband who watched the football from a friend's sofa last night from Michael Vick who did jail time for cheering on the pitbulls?

He ends the essay with a discussion of the current situation for Vick's pit bulls. Instead of being euthanized, they were sent to an expensive and intensive rehabilitation center to learn how to trust humans again. Most of those dogs will never be the family dog in a suburban home. They have been too thoroughly ruined, but Gladwell said that we still feel that their expensive care is morally justified, because we have an obligation to care for dogs that heroicly fought for the love of their owners.

Perhaps we have a moral obligation to care for dementia-ridden linebackers who also heroic fought for their owners without regard to their personal safety.

I haven't been a huge fan of Gladwell's books, but this essay is a triumph. I love the gradual and layered transitions. Fine writing.

In Harvard Magazine, Louis Menand writes about the PhD problem. Students, especially those in the humanities, spend a decade getting a PhD that doesn't prepare them for teaching or for gainful employment. The system results in homogeneous, over-prepared teaching staff; it uses ABDs as cheap labor. Like Gladwell, he questions the cruelty of the system that destroys hard-working, young people. Instead of using their heads to slam against the opposing team, they slam their heads against the books, dissertations, fickle advisors, and an impossible job market. They face repeated assaults from nasty peer review letters and snide discussants at conferences.

One pressure on universities to reduce radically the time-to-degree is simple humanitarianism. Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process. Many people drop in and drop out and then drop in again; a large proportion of students never finish; and some people have to retool at relatively advanced ages. Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get. Unfortunately, there is an institutional efficiency, which is that graduate students constitute a cheap labor force.

One of the commenters said that after getting a Harvard PhD, he/she has been unable to find work and was on the brink of homelessness. Certainly the system has an obligation to help these individuals who gamely fought the losing battle of graduate school.

UPDATE: Great response from Lillian.

Good-Bye To All That

Susan Dominus has a nice essay in the New York Times about the demise of the writing industry. She refers to an essay by Joan Didion, "Good-bye To All That," a fun read that describes Didion's gradual weariness of the New York fabulous life. Dominus writes that all writers are going to have to say good-bye not only to the cocktail parties and phoniness, but also to earning a living at their trade.

She writes,

Learning Through Blogging

Tyler Cowen writes,

Chess players who train with computers are much stronger for it.  They test their intuitions and receive rapid feedback as to what works, simply by running their program.  People who learn economics through the blogosphere also receive feedback, especially if they sample dialogue across a number of blogs of differing perspectives.  The feedback comes from which arguments other people found convincing.  Do the points you wanted to hold firm on, or cede, correspond to the evolution of the dialogue?  This feedback is not as accurate as Rybka but it's an ongoing test of your fluid intelligence and your ability to revise your opinion. 

Not many outsiders understand what a powerful learning mechanism the blogosphere has set in place.

Ezra Klein tweets, "The blogosphere is like a graduate seminar that never ends."

Commenters and other bloggers keep me on my toes. If I through out a quick, stupid thought, odds are that someone will tell me that I'm a moron and then explain why. This is a very good thing.

Also, I'm constantly reading other bloggers and articles in the paper looking for blog fodder. Much more than I did pre-blog. I'm writing every day, way more than I did pre-blog. I'm forcing myself to take sides on controversial issues and justifying my decisions.

It does take me away from work on longer, more polished prose. But when I carve out the time to finish my projects, I sure have a lot to say.

Susan's Chickens

I've been following Susan Orlean on Twitter for a while now. Her tweets are self-deprecatory and whimsical. She also tweets quite often about her chickens. So, I was quite happy to fold open the New Yorker to a full story about them. I was reading about her chickens this morning, while shepherding Ian onto his little bus.

The first line of the article is awesome. 

If I had never seen Janet Bonney reenact the mouth-to-beak resuscitation of her hen Number Seven, who had been frozen solid in a nor'easter, then was thawed and nursed back to life -- being hand-fed and massaged as she had watched doctor shows on TV -- I might never have become a chicken person.

Sadly, you need a subscription to read the whole thing. 

Here's the video: