Buttermilk & Molasses

A Classic Come Back

I noticed Simon Owens' re-review of the seminal classic The Cluetrain Manifesto and made a mental note way back in the spring to hunt down the 10-year anniversary edition. While my subconscious was looking for the trademark orange jacket, the local bookstores were stocking the shelves with a new yellow jacketed edition.

It's finally on my desk, waiting for a few spare hours to re-devour it; I gave my first copy to the current COO at my former place of employment way back in 1999 and never got it back.

At any rate, Simon Owens spoke to the three of the book's four authors earlier this year about the staying power of the quasi-manifesto on information and culture. Here's Rick Levine's take on Twitter:

I think what's happening -- what Twitter does is it's forcing you to start a conversation. When there's a company on Twitter, on the other end of that wire there's a person typing 140 characters. They work for a company, but it makes it much harder to have a corporate pre-digested official response. So what we were talking about in Cluetrain was saying there had to be a real person on the other end of the line who is participating in the conversation.

With just a blog, it's still possible to be a corporate shill doing blog postings. And that's not human, no more reflection of a real person's voice than any PR exercise. So it's possible to masquerade in a blog and have some lip service to corporate PR. It's much harder with Twitter because it is a real conversation, it's happening more in real time, and the good news is that it's forcing companies to have a human voice in the conversation.

Lost in "Domino Men"

I've found that most evenings -- after waking before dawn with the toddler, cobbling together a new business, returning home to give Nikole a break from said toddler, dinner time, bath time, our dinner time -- I'm too tired to work more and too brain dead to blog.

Which leaves plumbing the depths of recent science fiction or fantasy genre books. Four hundred pages, two hours. Like clockwork.

This weekend, I devoured the strangely mysterious and mostly compellingly written new novel by Jonathan Barnes. "Domino Men" gets a bit caught up in its own story here and there, but otherwise was a fun, and almost gripping, read. Nothing like a modern day Britain seized by the supernatural and super-secret to get the juices flowing.

It wasn't quite as author Christopher Bram descibes it -- "A comic extravaganza, deftly plotted, fiendishly clever, and wonderfully funny. Jonathan Barnes combines a love of Victorian absurdity worthy of Edward Gorey with the surrealistic invention of a London-obsessed Garcia Marquez. This parody penny-dreadful is one of the classiest entertainments I’ve read in a long, long time." -- but it's close. It's also a bit disconcerting at moments.

Earlier this summer, I had a similar experience with Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's vampire-esque thriller, "The Strain". Plowed through the dense tome, drawn mostly by the pace set by the eerie tale of a plague emerging from an airliner to infect the continent. The first few chapters were genuine page turners.

Being A Geek Has Never Felt So Good

Let it be said that I spent the weekend reading Brandon Sanderson's epic, 592-page tome "Warbreaker" -- because it was fun, interesting and well-written. It's also found in the Science Fiction/Fantasy section of your local library or bookseller.

Point in your favor, Lev Grossman.

Grossman (thanks for the tip, Boing Boing), writing in the Wall Street Journal, suggests that among the reasons Young Adult novels (like "Twilight") are so popular is the simple fact good, easy stories are hard to find. (Another reason to hate Modernism and its over-complication of all that is good about the world. Sort of.)

They wrote great novels, Grossman admits, but they raised the bar exceptionally high for the future writers of the world. And they broke plot. They killed the novel.

But the novel is making the comeback, Grossman says:

All of this is changing. The revolution is under way. The novel is getting entertaining again. Writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Richard Price, Kate Atkinson, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke, to name just a few, are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, romance. They're forging connections between literary spheres that have been hermetically sealed off from one another for a century. Look at Cormac ­McCarthy, who for years appeared to be the oldest living Modernist in captivity, but who has inaugurated his late period with a serial-killer novel followed by a work of apocalyptic science fiction. Look at Thomas Pynchon—in "Inherent Vice" he has swapped his usual cumbersome verbal calisthenics for the more maneuverable chassis of a hard-boiled detective novel.

This is the future of fiction. The novel is finally waking up from its 100-year carbonite nap. Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing. The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place. Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century.

Thank God.

I've been tired of skulking in the Young Adult and Science Fiction aisles.

In the meantime, a new Star Wars novel has just come out...

JOAN'S ARC

Slate takes a look at Joan Didion's new book, "Where I Was From." The verdict is that Didion's latest is not a memoir -- as it is touted to be -- and effectively maintains a veneer of universality around the famed writer. Didion's talent has always been her style, her approach. It invites the reader to adopt Didion's perspectives, and the writer rarely gets in the way. Her approach is great for political and cultural journalism; it's less effective as a biographical tool.

If there is a great deal of personality in her essays, there is very little that is personal. Even in her most superficially revealing essays, like her much-beloved "Goodbye to All That," autobiographical facts give way to typologies. Her crying in Chinese laundries becomes "what it's like to be young in New York." New York becomes "an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself." In the end, for all the spare, vivid details about her walking down the street peering into the windows of brownstones, about drinking gazpacho when she is hung-over, the essay is about moving to New York and about being younnot about Joan Didion moving to New York and being young. This is, in many ways, her gift: She leaves space for thousands of similarly disaffected readers to enter her prose and passionately identify with it.

Her stylistic tics add to the illusion of personal revelation. Didion frequently addresses the reader directly, as if we have entered an intimate form of conversation. She writes, "When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams." And her idiosyncratic cadences, her use of a kind of lulling, incantatory repetition, reinforces our sense of connection to her. Take this passage from The White Album: "It was Morrison who had described the Doors as 'erotic politicians.' It was Morrison who got arrested in Miami in December of 1967 It was Morrison who got up there in his black vinyl pants with no underwear and projected the idea, and it was Morrison they were waiting for now."

And yet even after reading every single word Didion has ever published, how much does one know about her? One knows what she packs on a trip to interview a subject, one knows about the jasmine she smells on the way home from the airport in Los Angeles, but one knows almost nothing about her family, say, or her marriage, or her daughter. The personal information she imparts is so stylized, so mannered, so controlled that it is no longer personal information. The "I" in her essays is an elegant silhouette of a woman.

IDEAS ARE A FORCE

I recently read journalist Christopher Hedges' "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning," which pulls his several decades of war reporting together into a meandering discourse on the nature of war, and its self-sustaining power. Hedges spoke at Rockford College in Illinois in late May, creating a bit of a tiff among the graduates with his liberal read on Iraq and his humanist view of war, power and conflict.