Category Archives: miscellaneous

By Hook or Nook

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Okay.  So I broke down and bought a Nook.  And trying to get it to work properly has just about broken me.

I like to read paper books.  But, since the nature of book marketing is changing rapidly, I figured that it was time I tried to join the twenty-first century.  Given the number of people now reading books this way, as a writer, it behooves me to learn about how humanity now browses and shops for books.

Except for the screen’s visual blip that makes me blink when I tap the Nook to change pages (I’m not sure that’s good for the eyes, long-term), I rather like the actual reading on the Nook.  However, the technology involved in setting it up has been and still is DRIVING ME INSANE.  I’m sufficiently frustrated and angry that, if I weren’t so stubborn, I would have returned the device or stuffed it down someone’s throat.  Perhaps I’ll write more when I figure out to what degree the problem is the device and to what degree it is my problem with technology.  Suffice it to say that, between purchase and exchange, I’ve had to go back to Barnes and Noble four times in one week, and in that time charged the batteries of three difference devices.  The batteries in those devices do not work at all the way it is claimed. (Three or four hours to charge?  Try ten–or overnight. And then, the batteries of at least two of them drained ten percent the next day, without use.  Ten percent per day will not result in the ability to read for the claimed two months without recharging.)  Furthermore, I couldn’t buy and/or download books by connecting it to my computer (I assume that’s because you’ve got to have wifi–and if you are me and don’t happen to have wifi at home, you are stuck.–that of course, is assuming the lack of wifi is the problem, and it’s not the device itself.  One thing’s for sure, the instructions are not sufficient and the thing is NOT user-friendly, except for the reading itself).

The little I could tell about how one must shop or browse books on these devices, I actually rather hate.  You can download samples, but you can’t flip through them the way you can with paper.  You can’t look at a little of the beginning a little of the middle, a little of the end to see if it really interests you, only the first x-number of pages and, even if that’s a good number of pages, it is a marketing hook, not a browse.

I don’t like the intrusion of marketers doing my thinking for me; imposing their recommendations of “best sellers,” as if that’s what everyone wants to read.  I don’t like having books I have no interest in pushed on me by an automated medium that’s decided because I like one book, surely I want these others; that decides for me what books should be grouped together as my potential choices.  In addition to the annoying mediocrity of those choices (at least on my device thus far) there’s the limitation of it.  One is deprived of the chance to discover that unexpected book you can happen across when browsing along a shelf.

I need to master the Nook.  Or the Kindle.  Or some other reader–in order to understand how people are starting to find their books.  But I don’t have to like it.

 

 

My Grand Experiment?

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my cubicle

My little writing space

In a prior post, I noted that silence makes me restless; that I need a bit of noise, the strange–or at least the different–to stimulate my imagination when I write.  Lately, though, I’ve just been restless, plain and simple.  So I’ve decided, for at least the first three months of 2013, to embark on an “environmental” experiment.  I’ve started writing at The Writers Room D.C.

Created in the fall of 2012, and apparently modeled on the writers’ rooms they have in New York (quite a few in Brooklyn, I must say!),  the Writers Room D.C. is one large room, a wall of windows on one side, with 18 two-sided cubicles containing desks and lamps, in which serious writers (published or emerging) can have their own little writer’s space away from home and home’s distractions.  There’s a small open space where one can take a break to relax and read, and an anteroom with a little kitchenette (with a supply of coffee, tea, a small refrigerator, and a sink–restrooms are down the hall); lockers (where you can store your computer and/or work rather than carry them back and forth each day); a printer (for small jobs); and a small side room in which to make phone calls.  Oh–and you can bring coffee or tea into your writing space, but food must be consumed in the kitchenette.

For me, who usually needs the sense of freedom that wandering gives and the ambient noise of coffee shops–not to mention nibbling as I write–this is a new way of working.  The    immediate difficulty for me so far, of course, is the utter quiet in the work-area.  Though it may be a self-imposed reaction on my part, it feels like an enforced silence–like if I laugh at something I’m reading, I have violated it.  And sometimes, going feels like obligation, like I’d rather be out having an adventure.  But then again, who’s making me go? –Me.

On the plus side, going there does seem to be getting me to follow more of a regular work-schedule, and working side by side with others doing the same does alleviate that sense of isolation I feel when trying to work at home.  In addition, people will chat for a bit when they break to get coffee, and the founders are creating some small social events to help us to get to know each other.  Also, I don’t have to pack up my computer every time I need to go to the ladies room–a more important plus than one might think.

So how is the experiment working out for me?  It’s early days yet.  I’ve only been at it for about three weeks.  The proof will be in the pudding, as they used to say.  We’ll see how much I get written (of quality) in these three months.  So far, I have found that, although the silence is generally disturbing when I come in, once I get into the work, I can, to a degree, get engrossed in what I’m writing and forget that it is so quiet.  I do think that, for me, a writers’ room’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. That is, working side by side with other writers removes that sense of isolation, but when one is surrounded by other like-minded people, one is deprived of access to the unexpected encounter that provides new ideas.  Eventually, I will have to find some way to balance my time there with my need for the creative stimulation wandering gives.  I’m not used to bifurcating my time in that way.  But that doesn’t mean that I can’t learn to.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

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Okay.  So I am late with my first-Tuesday-of-the-month post.  I could plead that I whooped it up on New Year’s Eve and it took all of New Years Day (the first Tuesday of January) plus a few days more to recover, but the truth is that I spent New Year’s Eve (and the few days before it) clearing the decks for action in 2013–weeding out old papers and notes, and organizing my workroom to better support my writing while the Twilight Zone Marathon played on the t.v. in background.

In addition, I finally reread at one go (well, over the course of three days) a lifetime of family letters, a visit to the past that somehow seemed appropriate at the end of one year and beginning of another.   Even more so, now that I think of it, since 2012 would have been my mother’s hundredth year.   An anniversary of sorts.  How strange.

My parents were always so modern and progressive in their thinking that it is sometimes hard for my mind to encompass the fact that their lives traversed such a long-gone period.  (In 1912, there was no radio, no t.v., no airplanes, certainly no internet and no cell phones.)  At the same time, being raised by them (I was a late child) gave me a strong affinity to the struggles of the progressives in the early 1900s as well as a New Deal perspective on the world that has been my anchor and, over the years, often made my approach and thinking about that world quite different from, though ostensibly parallel to, that of my peers.

And as we leave 2012 (the hundredth anniversary of my mother’s birth) and enter 2013 (come September, the hundredth anniversary of my father’s birth), I am struck by two trite truisms:  “what goes around comes around;” and “the  more things change, the more they stay the same.”  There have been remarkable, wonderful changes in the world, of course–a black person becoming president speaks to that.  (Although, when we have reached a point that we only need note that he is a brilliant man, then we can say there has been a real change in the world and in humanity.)  At the same time, we are fighting (or shall I say, re-fighting) the exact same battles as were fought by progressives in the early part of the 1900s.  The issues of corporate greed and war profiteering that Dos Passos addressed in USA (completed in 1936), the hypocrisy of religion-as-business that Sinclair Lewis addressed in Elmer Gantry (published in 1927), and the picture of middle Americans who both buy the capitalist corporatism fed to them as an ideal, and are trapped by it, that Lewis portrays in Babbitt (published in 1922) are engulfing us again today.  As an example, one short paragraph from Babbitt, from a chapter describing what different citizens of Zenith are doing after Babbitt goes to sleep:

At that moment a G.A.R. veteran was dying.  He had come from the Civil War straight to a farm which, though it was officially within the city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the backwoods.  He had never ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save the bible, McGuffey’s readers, and religious tracts; and he believed that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and that the United States is a democracy.

Who can read this, published in 1922, and not think of the world the “Tea Party” and right- wing Christians want to take us to, a mere ninety years later?  Or, in reading that so lightly tossed forth but potent phrase in the last line (pairing U.S. democracy with a belief that the earth is flat), of the Citizen’s United case and its effect on democracy, or of the efforts to suppress people’s ability to vote?  And of those people today who are the victims of this but don’t see it?  (I highly recommend Babbitt, which I am in the midst of reading now.)

But, enough of this bout of nostalgia, borrowed or otherwise.  The world changes, but our human battles stay the same, albeit with slight variations.  I wish a belated happy new year to one and all, and to my writer friends–as a friend once said to me:  “all power to your writing elbow!”

 

 

 

Where do YOU write?

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The Chinese Arch through Starbuck’s windows.

3:15p.m. 10-1-2012

As I write this, I am sitting at a long community table in the Chinatown Starbucks on the corner of 7th and H streets, N.W.  Two older gentlemen in sweaters that make them look like academics are sitting to my right, having a lively discussion in Spanish.  A part of me is trying to pull back enough of my high school Spanish to follow it, but all I can pick up  is some sense that they are discussing education of Latinos (their word) in the United States, and perhaps something about Latino-Americans and Christianity.  Across the table to my left, a man with tufts of hair pointing straight up at the top of his head, his lips pursed in concentration, is working at a computer.  At the end of the table, a homeless man is drinking a coffee and reading a newspaper.  Outside the large windows are D.C.’s Chinese Arch and the landscape of the 7th street corridor.  There’s music coming from a speaker, heavy blues.  And I am stoked for action.

Some people need to get away from all distraction to obtain the peace of mind that allows them to create.  Not me.  Silence makes me restless.  It’s while I’m walking through city streets that I work out bits of plot or dialogue, stopping, as they come, to note them down on a yellow pad before I move on.  It’s in restaurants and coffee shops, where I can stop in the middle of a thought to stare at some interesting sight or let my mind temporarily wander over to some interesting conversation, that I develop and write parts of stories I’m working on.  I don’t know a single soul around me; what I write will have nothing to do with them; but sitting in their lively company helps me to concentrate.  So give me the company of strangers.  The stranger, the better.  There’s nothing like it to pull the ink from my pen.

Gotta go now.  Gonna write a story.

p.s.  What works for you?

Art, Prose, or Politics?

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Today, I went, with a friend, to Barbara Kruger’s exhibit at the Hirshhorn Musuem here in D.C.  It is located at the bottom of the museum’s escalators and fills the entire lower lobby.  The exhibit is comprised solely of words and phrases:  “MONEY MAKES MONEY,”  “WHOSE POWER?”  “WHOSE VALUES?”  “WHOSE BELIEFS?,” etc., plastered on the floor, the ceiling, the walls, and the sides and undersides of the up and down escalators.  The print is very clear, but some of it is so large that you must walk along it, reading slowly, concentrating on each letter as you go, sounding out the words in order to comprehend the phrase.  Much of it is clever, but even where the phrases reflect well-worn thoughts, for example, about our consumer society (eg. “you want it, you buy it, you forget it”), the manner of display forces you to take it in slowly, focus, concentrate and think about the meaning rather than quickly pass it off as slogan and move on.  Some, like “BELIEF + DOUBT = SANITY,” seem particularly appropriate for this time of extreme views and little tolerance.  Clearly, the exhibit is political, or at least, consisting of social commentary.  But is this print a visual art?  Or prose?  Or both?

Whatever it is, it is impressive, and I encourage any who find themselves in my city to take a look.  And if you do, let me know what you think, and why.

Posted by Jessie Seigel at 10:07 p.m.