Great video about the making of Neil Young’s new album. Producer Daniel Lanois notes that it was recorded over four full moons because, “Neil has noticed that he’s written his best songs during that potent time.” He also talks about his use of “dub sonics” to arrive at a rich sound. As he has said elsewhere, “I extract from the track—I’ll take an available ingredient, extract it, process it, do what I want with it, and then stick it back into the song surgically.” Lanois says that Young “very kindly encouraged me to supply him with sonics that were descriptive to the landscapes that he was building with his lyrics.”
The question is whether the enormous force of technology, and its insistence on speeding up time and compacting space, will reduce the human need for narrative—narrative in the traditional sense. Novels will become user-generated. An individual will not only tap a button that gives him a novel designed to his particular tastes, needs, and moods, but he’ll also be able to design his own novel, very possibly with him as main character. The world is becoming increasingly customized, altered to individual specifications. This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people speak, write, and read. Here’s a stray question (or a metaphysical leap): Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page? Does the beauty and variability of our language depend to an important degree on the medium that carries the words? Does poetry need paper?
Is the internet killing our brains and driving us to distraction? Or does it promote creativity and innovation? The trailer for the forthcoming book, Where Good Ideas Come From, addresses these and other questions. (Via Kottke)
There’s no rule on how it is to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it is like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
One day I’d like to construct a writing seminar, maybe just two or three hours long, drawing lessons from the songs of Joni Mitchell. I’d include “For Free” — such a great song — for its subtlety and structure, its narrative arc. I was listening to it recently after reading Vivian Gornick’s book, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. I love the way the song describes such a mundane situation — seeing a street-corner musician – while also telling a story about the narrator’s conflicted feelings (Joni’s, I’m assuming).
I’m a big fan of travel writer Paul Theroux, whose books often chronicle train trips while exploring culture, politics, human nature, you name it, in a shrewd, unflinching way. And lately, I’ve been been reading another kind of train travel book, “The Little Engine That Could, ” to my daughter, who just turned 4. We both love the book. And so it was that one evening, after reading the book to my daughter and putting her to bed, I began to wonder what Theroux would have written were he aboard the train in the children’s book. And then my imagination went a little nuts. Which is how this happened. Bay area illustrator Bill Russell supplied the art we published with it, which I love.
They don’t make Surfer magazine covers like they used to — for many years now, whether it’s on the cover or inside the magazine, it’s all close-ups all the time. But there was a time when the covers evoked a real sense of place. Here’s my favorite — waking up to a perfect right-hander in Baja. It’s available as a giant poster.
Interesting piece about reading books in which the author asks, if you can’t remember most of the details in a book even a month after you’ve read it, then why read books at all? Is there value in reading a book beyond the sheer pleasure of it?
The answer from Tufts University neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf is encouraging: “I totally believe that you are a different person for having read [a] book.”
She goes on:
There is a difference between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.
Kind words from USA Network, which just gave World Hum its “Character Approved” stamp, reserved for “innovators in their field who are influencing our opinions, our style, and our view of the world.”
Reading Worldhum is a different experience than reading a traditional travel magazine with lists of the best museums in Paris or places to shop in Rome. Worldhum’s Character Approved approach to travel writing makes me feel like I’m standing on the street with the writer. I can see the colors, and I can smell the air. As I read Tom Swick’s story, “Mr. Suitcase,” I even shared the emotional experience of lost luggage–and I loved every minute of it.
I’m a big fan of 
