[S]omewhere around 2003 the texture of daily life inside Western media-driven societies began to morph, and quickly, to the point where, a half-decade later, it’s now obvious to people who were around in the twentieth century that time not only seems to be moving more quickly, but is beginning to feel funny, too. There’s no more tolerance for waiting of any sort. We want all the facts and we want them now. To go without email for forty-eight hours can trigger a meltdown. You can’t slow down, even once, without becoming irrelevant. Music has become more important because it is a constant. School reunions are beside the point because we already know what our old classmates have done. Children often spend more time in dreamland and cyberspace than in real life. Time is speeding up even faster.
While out surfing today, I chatted with a guy who’d been given a GoPro HD Hero video camera for Christmas. He’d mounted it on the nose of his board, and every time he paddled for a wave, he reached out and flipped it on. “I’m going to Kauai this summer, and I just hope it lasts that long,” he said. I’ve been poking around online. It’s amazing what these $270 cameras can do. Here’s a promo video, offering a perspective you don’t often see inside the tube at Pipeline.
I love This American Life, so I was happy to come across video of its brilliant host talking about storytelling. In the first of four videos, Glass describes the building blocks of stories for radio and TV. In the other three short videos — you can click from one to the next — he discusses the quest for great stories and the importance of killing a story you’ve worked on when it doesn’t pan out. Also: “If you’re not failing all the time, you’re not creating a situation where you can get super lucky.”
I construct sentences. There’s a rhythm I hear that drives me through a sentence. And the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality. They form odd correspondences. They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look. The rhythm of a sentence will accommodate a certain number of syllables. One syllable too many, I look for another word. There’s always another word that means nearly the same thing, and if it doesn’t then I’ll consider altering the meaning of a sentence to keep the rhythm, the syllable beat. I’m completely willing to let language press meaning upon me. Watching the way in which words match up, keeping the balance in a sentence — these are sensuous pleasures.
I’m so sorry to hear about the death of Denis Dutton. The writer, philosopher and academic founded one of my favorite websites, Arts & Letters Daily, which links to thoughtful and challenging writing, much of it long-form. (The New Yorker just dubbed him “the intellectual’s Matt Drudge.”) I occasionally exchanged emails with Dutton when he linked to essays on World Hum. A link on ALDaily sent a flood of readers, and it made me happy, because I always wanted World Hum to be read by the same people reading Harper’s, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and other sources for Dutton’s site.
I love this quote from Dutton that the Los Angeles Times just dug up:
A few years ago, Bill Gates was boasting that we’ll soon have sensors which will turn on the music that we like or show on the walls the paintings we like when we walk into a room. How boring! The hell with our preexisting likes; let’s expand ourselves intellectually.
Dutton helped many of us aspiring to do just that.
I like the way former U.S. poet laureate Charles Simic puts it in this interview:
Prose is like walking to the store to buy a holiday ham; poetry is like standing on the corner and whistling. It’s a difference between wanting to tell a story or express a series of ideas, and wanting to speak in the fewest possible words about some experience for which there do not seem to be any words.
