TheWritings and Musings of Kent Winward

30 Years in 30 Seconds

2011-08-14T13:00:00.001-07:00

Thirty seconds or possibly a minute was about how long I had.

Hello.
I remember you and no, I didn’t have to look at your name tag to cheat (or I did).
Wow, haven’t seen you in a long time.
Where are you living now?
What are you doing?
That’s nice.
How many kids? Grandkids? I have one.
It really has been a long time.
Very nice to see you.

Time to move on.

It wasn’t so much as a reunion as it was a perverse form of sincere speed dating. You really had a connection with these people many years ago and the thrill of being remembered, acknowledged and smiled at, created an immediate and pleasurable sense of belonging. It was surprisingly powerful and it was the hope for these types of experiences that brought me back to the unfamiliar halls of what is now known as Davis High School. The evening provided countless such experiences.

The pleasurable was countered with the realization that for whatever reason one or two of my classmates had de-friended me on FaceBook for -- I’m supposing -- my perceived offenses in expressing my ambivalence towards the reunion. If meeting people I hadn’t seen in 30 years for 30 seconds made me briefly feel really good, the rejection on FaceBook, was the equivalent negative reaction.

The rejection pain makes me realize that I have undoubtedly committed countless acts of hypocrisy. I rejected people throughout the evening. I recognized it as soon as the evening was done and it was too late to do anything about it. If I didn’t engage you, didn’t talk to you, didn’t acknowledge you and it hurt your feelings, I’m sorry. You really want to talk to me send me an email and I won’t bite. This is my version of a plea for forgiveness for both the knowing and the unknowing assaults I’ve committed on social connection.

Acceptance into a social group is critical for human survival and we are all hard wired to want to belong. The desire to belong is so strong and the negative emotional responses of not belonging are so painful, that we do whatever we can to eliminate the potentiality of rejection. This can take the form of rejecting first, avoidance or collapsing into the clique we remember as “safe”.

I watched as people I knew fell back into the same groups as high school. Maybe they’ve maintained those relationships, probably not, but those social connections, even after 30 years, have weathered time. Think about who you spent most of your time with during the reunion. It was with those former friends who provided you with the most safety and comfort. Maybe the reunion was a nice reminder of a time when you had a group of friends who kept you safe from outside social rejection.

The desire to create a social group in which there was perceived safety manifest itself in the oddly placed prayer that launched dinner. The retreat to the predominant religious culture surely felt safe and comforting to the majority believers. But religion of this sort may comfort the majority, but when bringing back together a secular high school class, the prayer ran counter to its intended purpose, a divisive, rather than inclusive act. For something whose purported goal is to create a community of one heart, one mind and one soul, religion is a poor tool. Compassion and empathy are much better tools if they are employed.

Aging was another theme of the evening, which is probably inevitable, since all of us are being faced with the specter of mortality, at the very least in our parents. Bringing up mortality creates all sorts of unanticipated emotional responses. Yet, we will all die. All we have is our current lives, less 48 years.

Of those 48 years, each person carries memories that are as unique to them as the person themselves. Throughout the night I was reminded of events, circumstances and classmates of which I had no recollection. Did those things really happen? Probably. I had the reverse thing happen to me when I would recall something about another person and they had no recollection of the event. These memory gaps were the more subtle rejections of the evening, “This was important to me, but not to you -- ouch.” And I daresay they were prevalent. Given the lapse of time, they were probably more prevalent than having two memories collide head-on on the same event.

So none of us remember anything the same from 30 years ago. We cling to the groups that make us feel the safest against the onslaught of time. We overdose on the saccharine sweet reconnection and acceptance, trying our best to ignore the aftertaste that lets you know that everything is just a little off kilter.

The act of reconnecting ironically turned into a reminder of how disconnected we have all become.

Now, Myron Casdorph told me that I was -- and this was last night, and I’ve already forgotten, just imagine what 30 years did to me -- grumpy, crabby or some similar epithet. He was joking and I was laughing and in a way it was true -- I am a little darker than most in my outlook. The dark outlook for me illuminates those things that are truly giving off light. Myron exuded the light and life of someone doing what they love and completely comfortable in his own skin. I saw a lot of that last night. Those were the people who inspired me the most because they seemed to have their life figured out. They were real, genuine and most importantly, themselves. To all of you who gave me that glimpse -- thank you. Makes me a little less crabby and a little less grumpy and a lot less dark.

A life has a trajectory and it is propulsive force. Like the space shuttle, we launched into our adult lives in 1981. Several have experienced spectacular explosions and screw ups, while others have headed straight, never wavering, laser guided towards an intended goal. My life, as with many others I’m sure, has felt more like a Lagoon ride gone off the rails.

Ultimately, the best thing the reunion gave to me was perspective on my current life, causing me to examine where I am heading and what is driving me. Having my wife with me at the reunion provided that connection and base to my real world existence, throughout the fantastical, brief and surreal reunions. The reunion came to a crashing close for me when real life text messages from children began pouring in. I walked out of the halls of Davis High and remembered the feeling 30 years ago after graduation when I walked out of the school in the same general geographic vicinity, wondering where my life was going. I had no idea, I felt scared, lost and giddy with the excitement of the unknown.

Last night, I walked out the high school doors again, but my step was more sure. My wife sat waiting for me on a concrete abutment in the light of the full moon. I took her hand and we walked to our car. I realized that I know what drives my life. I realized that about the best you can do with life’s controls is point them in a general direction and (to utilize a cliche because it works) hang on for dear life. No longer, lost, scared or directionless, I was again giddy with excitement of heading into the unknown as I walked out the doors of my high school.

The Digital Tipping Point: Why 12% is more like 80%

2011-07-06T12:57:00.000-07:00

Statistics can be such a misleading thing -- take the latest: 12% of the United States has eReaders. Not very many is it -- only 12%. Yet, something nags at my mathematical brain -- a stat I remembered hearing. I found a lot of reference to it, but could never verify it, yet it has that ring of truth -- namely, 80% of American households didn't buy a book in the last year (could never find the original source, so it may be apocryphal, but it smacks of relevance when 30% don't know who the US declared independence from in 1776) . Now, that 80% chunk of the population is not going to buy an eReader and even assuming the other 20% buy an equal number of books, eReaders have tipped and most books are now bought in digital format. Amazon's public announcements also mirror this.

Bottom line -- the relevant stat is not what percentage own an eReader, but what percentage of book buyers buy digital books -- and I know that is much higher than 12% . If you want to sell a book these days, you better get it in digital format.

Digital Genres

2011-07-06T10:35:00.000-07:00

What are the new digital genres? New lingo is springing up — “cross-platform” or in the phrase that shows up no where in Google, so that must mean I coined it (not saying I did, just that Google can’t find it — “re-sourcing digital content”, by resourcing digital content, I mean that when an artist or author creates digital content, how do you use that resource. Each digital publisher needs a Digital Resource Department that operates like a Human Resource Department — assigning the digital content out to its numerous potential incarnations. Digital genres aren’t so much new genres as new genres that have the potential to be monetized.

Some Potential Digital Generes:

Interactive fiction: A merging of the gaming genre with the literary world. Many forms of game have long contained a form of interactive story telling — for my generation, Dungeons and Dragons.

Non-linear fiction: Using hyperlinks to create a non-linear narrative. This genre could easily split into multiple genres — romance, mystery, erotic, literary. Traditional publishing has gone down the non-linear rabbit hole. A memorable non-linear text for me was The House of Leaves. James Joyce at least feels non-linear to me and almost anything by David Foster Wallace proves that footnotes are the print version of hyperlinks. Poetry is replete with non-linear type images and narratives (thus the success of T.S. Eliot “The Wasteland” App on iTunes) .

Multi-media Fiction: This seems to be the genre that gets the most attention, but also the one that I think in a way is a little overblown. Is the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, multi-media fiction because it contains a chapter that is a PowerPoint presentation? What about DVD extras that include text? Audio books? The written or spoken word changed into digital form moves seamlessly across media, that isn’t genre, that is flexibility.

The difference between the artist and the publisher is the publisher’s concern over how to monetize a new digital genre. The digital world only seems to exacerbate the century old conflict of cash and artistic purity. Yet, the potential for profitably monetizing artistic efforts in the digital realm that expands your potential market into the millions and billions, you only need a micro-percentage, a relatively small tribe of followers to patronize the artist to artistic freedom.

The palate of digital expression is larger than any artists or writers have had at their disposal in the history of the earth. The critical question is how do you sell what you do digitally. Where is your audience going to read it — a phone app, on their iPad, Kindle, Nook or computer screen? How are you going to get them to pay for it? I want exciting digital genres, but like any artist, you need to pay attention to your canvas and the gallery where you can sell your wares.

Sex, Politics, Gender, Morality and the Publication of the Private(s)

2011-06-12T11:43:00.000-07:00

Sex and politics have always been strange bedfellows where the trysts and couplings of political ideology and sexual mores end up resembling either Dr. Doolitle’s Push-me-Pull-you or a Caligulan orgy, neither of which allow delineation of what belongs to whom. Unfortunately for Anthony Weiner, he tweeted on to the zeitgeist’s resonant frequency.^[1]

Politics has a constant right/left shift. Sex oscillates between the male and the female. Our social ambivalence to technology veers between (betweet?) analog and digital. Gender issues battle over power and weakness. Religion, at least among the monotheists, is a three way tug-of-war between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Race and ethnic biases still pulse with the historical tension throughout our society -- Loving v. Virginia^[2] is not as old as I am and the election of a black president has only illuminated the strong racist undercurrent that still exists in this country^[3]. We shut our blinds to watch reality TV, as the public and private battle it out.

The easy jumping off point for most people was the punny -- Weiner’s weiner and the slew of puns that are, uh, hard to pass up. The first phase however was political. Politicians and politicos have long used the sexual proclivities of their political opponents to try and gain a political advantage. Andrew Breitbart is only the most recent in a long line of *uckrakers^[4], beginning with James T. Callendar, who went after none other than the drafter of the Declaration of Independence. Did Thomas Jefferson’s fathering of children by Sally Hemming impinge on the morality of the truths that we hold to be self-evident? I don’t think so. Apparently all men are created equally in the struggling with sexuality department, too. ^[5]

Politics and sex have been over exposed so I’ll move on to a more important question: Are women turned on by the site of a man’s junk or is women porn really a guy vacuuming? I would say inquiring minds want to know, but the discussion digresses into a slew of jokes about which head is doing the thinking and devolves into flat condemnation of men’s brutish sexual flashing.
I’m more interested in the flip side, which is the defusing of female sexuality. Sexual imagery is arousing to both sexes, yet in a Kinsey-ian flashback,^[6] our culture seems unprepared or unwilling to acknowledge that, yes, women too are sexual beings. Sexism is the attribution of a supposed negative aspects to a specific gender. Saying women are not as bright as men is clearly a sexist comment, but so is saying men are more sexual than women. Not to belabor a biological point - but you are reading this and that means your mother did it.

The ambivalence to female sexuality (most of Weiner’s texts/chats/pictures) were sent in the context of mutual sexual cyber-play with women, who presumably have the ability and wherewith-all to locate the send, enter and power buttons on their computers. Yet there is an undercurrent on the Weiner story of his “attack” on these women. Nothing overt, just a sense of a Weiner attack. More horrific than Weiner’s picture seems to be the fear that any of these women were sexually complicit.

Enter race and stereotype -- Philip Roth’s lascivious Jew, Portnoy complaining as he defiles the family dinner. A horny, dirty swarthy Jew is sending dirty pictures to middle America white, wholesome, pure, virginal girls! Look at that nose. Pretty damning stuff, so how do you hide racist motivations?

Marriage is what brings the racists together.^[7] The Jew was married -- and his wife is pregnant! Not only is he defiling wholesome mid-western porn stars, but traditional American institutions as well -- marriage and motherhood. He probably Portnoy-ed the apple pie in a Chevy, too.

However, in post 9-11 America, nothing is so simple. The paragon of motherhood and virtue -- a powerful woman of Saudi Arabian (Is she Muslim?) descent, Huma Aberdin, right hand “man?” to Hilary Clinton. Huma is the embodiment of political and traditional male power, marriage and motherhood all rolled into one neat and ethnically diverse and confusing package.^[8] Her husband? A name subjected to adolescent sophomoric humor that he will now never escape -- Portnoy’s Complaint made flesh.

Amidst all of the political and sexual machinations, a question begs to be asked. What of the personal should be exposed? The compulsion to seek approval of one’s male virility makes men’s sexual actions often seem foolish and non-thinking. Should that be subjected to public scorn, ridicule and judgment?

Regardless of one’s thoughts on sexual morality, the public-ization of the private is a balance that the law and society has constantly struggled to maintain. A common euphemism for genitalia is “privates” and if you ask the Congressman, I’m sure he would tell you that he would have liked for his private purveying of his private private pictures to remain private. Yet, technology has made the private more public and if anything, the Weiner incident (scandal is overblown) illustrates the rapidity with which the private can go public and viral. And as with any virus, those most infected will experience the crushing emotion of ostracization and societal scorn, while the observers can rest in the ease of knowing their private shame and privates remain private. No need for compassion when it is not your life being ridiculed.

I’ve seen and heard a lot of commentary, but not once did I hear anyone suggest that Weiner, should have simply said when asked if it was his photo -- “None, of your damn business.” Of course, everyone would have taken that as an admission, which ultimately came anyway, but it would have drawn a line between the private and the public. No tearful, Breitbart co-opted press conference required.

Weiner’s waggle in the public eye combined sex, politics, gender and morality, but most overlooked, it held up a mirror to our uneasiness with technology and social media, where the private can become the public with a push of the button. And as the private personal fantasy enters public reality, the consummation gives birth to the surreal.

[1]“Resonant frequency” is the physics term describing the frequency at which a system oscillates at larger amplitudes than the normal frequencies. It is the reason your car will shake at certain speeds, but will smooth out if you go a little bit faster or a little bit slower.

[2]Loving v. Virgina is the 1967 anti-State’s right, 14th Amendment case in which the Supreme Court outlawed the type of marriage that allowed current Justice, Clarence Thomas, to marry his right wing, tea partying wife. Insert irony here.

[3]And the racism crosses cultural boundaries, from the notorious New Yorker cover to the birthers.

[4]F or M, you decide.

[5]Footnotes appear to be in my ironic blood today. Judging from the treatment of David Vitter by the Republican power network, including Utah’s own hymn writing senator Orrin Hatch, Weiner would have been better off getting his sex the oldest fashioned way -- paying for it.

[6]Congressional inquiries were made into whether Kinsey or the Rockefeller Foundation were Communists. The sexualization of women had to be a Communist plot. Newspapers and editorials lambasted Kinsey for his attack on “American womanhood”, all while he was telling them to pay more attention to the American woman’s hood.

[7]My apologies to A Princess Bride.

[8]And she didn’t literally “stand by” her man.

Dear Voters

2010-11-04T05:16:00.000-07:00

Dear Voters,

If you are as anti-deficit as you say you are and as fiscally conservative as you say you are, then you should have no problem raising revenues on the richest 2% of the country. They don't pay those taxes now, but boy are they creating lots of jobs. (That is sarcasm for the literal minded.)

It isn't Entitlement that I want from my government, it is Protection. Regulation that protects Wall Street from creating risky financial instruments that suck all the money off of Main Street, out of employer's pockets and puts it into Goldman Sachs bonuses. I want protection from predators trying to take away my hard earned money. We were so worried about the terrorist wolves abroad that you have allowed the economic terrorists at home to take your jobs, your money and your retirement funds.

Now those recently elected are promising us less government. Let me spell it out for you simply -- less government, equals less protection for you, the citizens.

I don't know about you, but I work with people employed by the government every day. It is the individuals working for the government that make my life much easier and much happier. Our local economy here would be devastated if you eliminated municipal workers, Hill Air Force Base, IRS employees, teachers, police officers, firefighters, court personnel, public defenders, prosecutors and the local university. If you eliminated all of those great people, who I guess you could say are on the government dole, the whole system would collapse and three quarters of the population wouldn't have a job.

What exactly are you railing against? If you are an independent business person, where are the wages coming that are buying your goods and paying your services? This isn't a pyramid scheme, this is society and civilization.

Most economists I've read feel that given the great economic engine that is the United States, the debt is fixable. The biggest problem we face and why we look at huge budget deficits is because for the past ten years we've been spending our money on blowing things up and pissing people around the world off, rather than building productive things.

Everyone seemed to have such glee watching Tomahawk missiles spray down on Baghdad, but we all seem to forget that each one of those missiles cost $1.4 million dollars. And when you spend that $1.4 million all you have left is a pile of rubble. What could your community do with just say, one Tomahawk missile? Granted the folks in Tuscon that make them see some of that benefit, but it is still $1.4 million gone in 60 seconds. What if you had used it to build a community center or park? The income would still have gone to Tuscon workers, but you'ld still have the community center. Or even better, loan the $1.4 million at little or no interest to local entrepreneurs to build a new business in the community, then you get the money back and have a new business.

And what would this argument be without all the health care scare tactics. The health care reform bill is an imperfect piece of legislation because that is what our system is designed to create. The compromise isn't creating bigger government. Apparently you are OK with large private insurance company bureaucracies that are designed to make money and deny you health care. That is the free market economy at work, but make damn sure you never get sick or have a chronic condition -- or at least make a lot of money so you can pay for your health care. I don't see why we should differentiate between police and fire protection and health care protection. These are necessary for all of us. The health care reform was a small step in eliminating some of the corporate bureaucratic costs associated with health care.

Here is the best argument I can see for heavily government regulated health care system (like you can't be denied for pre-existing conditions and rates are subject to government review, like we got in the new legislation) -- I can't vote for a new Insurance Company. I can vote for legislators to refine the health care system to make it even more equitable and affordable.

Do not forget, while propounding the Founding Fathers, that this is a government by the people and for the people.

We are the government and we have it to do things for us.

I say that we have it do some nice things for us (and to borrow a two year old phrase) for a change.

Saul Bellow to Philip Roth

2010-10-23T06:34:00.000-07:00

An interesting missive on why author's write. I give much thanks to my brother Dave for sending me the letter. I'm going to go get the book of all of Bellow's letters.

To Philip Roth:

January 7, 1984
Chicago

Dear Philip:

I thought to do something good by giving an interview to People, which was
exceedingly foolish of me. I asked Aaron [Asher] to tell you that the Good
Intentions Paving Company had fucked up again. The young interviewer turned my
opinions inside out, cut out the praises and made it all sound like disavowal,
denunciation and excommunication. Well, we're both used to this kind of thing,
and beyond shock. In agreeing to take the call, and make a statement I was
simply muddle-headed. But if I had been interviewed by an angel for
the Seraphim and Cherubim Weekly I'd have said, as I actually did say to the
crooked little slut, that you were one of our very best and most interesting
writers. I would have added that I was greatly stimulated and entertained by
your last novel, and that of course after three decades I understood perfectly
well what you were saying about the writer's trade - how could I not understand,
or miss suffering the same pains. Still our diagrams are different, and the
briefest description of the differences would be that you seem to have accepted
the Freudian explanation: A writer is motivated by his desire for fame, money
and sexual opportunities. Whereas I have never taken this trinity of motives
seriously. But this is an explanatory note and I don't intend to make a
rabbinic occasion of it. Please accept my regrets and apologies, also my best
wishes. I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about the journalists; we can only
hope that they will die off as the deerflies do towards the end of August.

- Saul Bellow, Letters

So what are your trinity of motives for writing?

Packing Books

2010-10-19T05:51:00.001-07:00

I'm moving my physical library. I'm at 30 boxes and not even half done. I've read countless articles on digital books and I love my 350+ digital library that is with me all the time, but I've never once read anything about whether an important metaphor will be lost with the digital flood.

Words are so heavy.

Words overwhelm me, press down on me. I pick up a box of books and the muscles strain and my breathing quickens. I hold in my arms the lives of people -- authors, actors, translators, editors, typesetters, booksellers. Their words are heavy.

Dust has accumulated on the shelf were they sat. No book burning ash, but they have returned to dust. I could start reading my library today and if I did nothing else, I would be dust before I finished.

Tomes are tombs where we bury our dead. And the tombs are made of heavy granite.

Everyone Has Ink By the Barrel

2010-10-18T06:09:00.001-07:00

Now everyone has ink by the barrel, the power will go to those who can hold our attention.

The changes in publishing are exciting, but how do you get past the narcissism of an audience of one? The CEO of Border's stated, " “Everyone has a story to tell, pictures to share or advice to give." Yes, we want to hear other people's stories, but even more so, we want our story heard, often to the exclusion of everyone else. The paradox is we want connectivity and individuality.

Facebook quickly turns into numbing sameness. Everyone may have pictures to share and advice to give -- and most of it is bad or mediocre at best.

Places like Borders, Amazon, B&N, Apple that allow us to self-publish are cashing in on our narcissism -- post your stuff for people to buy. Maybe only 3 people will buy it, but hey, that is OK, because we publish everyone and 3 times everyone is a lot of money for us. This is vanity publishing exploded into tiny little profitable bits.

I am in the race, but not the publish everything race. I'm in the filter race. Even the filter world will be fractioned, but the filter pie is the pie I want to eat -- not the crumbs of self-publishing.

The Problem with Retail

2010-10-15T07:18:00.000-07:00

I wanted to buy something, so I went to Best Buy, Staples, Office Max, and Target.

Every response was the same: " This is only available on-line. I could order it for you."

Uh, I can do that myself. I wanted it today, not tomorrow. Retail needs to be re-thunk.

The Publishing Pendulum

2010-10-11T06:13:00.000-07:00

Traditional publishing is restrictive. The restriction comes from economic constraints on the publisher. Publishing has always been a few hits to lots of misses and the only way to eliminate the economic risk was an extreme conservative approach. Yes, many authors are feeling the liberation of not having to answer to those conservative publishing enclaves, but economics still govern.

The problem isn't being "branded" as a self published author, but rather the author never gets a brand. JA Konrath has a brand, "the self-publish" brand, which he has been cultivating for a couple of years quite successfully. This is why his books sell. Everyone knows who he is, even people who don't read his type of books.

Somewhere there is a happy in-between, a sweet spot where the author has freedom, the publisher allows it and readers get what they want and a lot of books get sold as everyone plays off each other's strengths and needs. I think that is the future and that the self-publishing pendulum will swing back until it is resting somewhere in the middle -- which is good news for the middleman.

Content, Content, Content

2010-10-07T06:54:00.001-07:00

What makes a book last?
To play off the old real estate adage -- content, content, content.

I can't even keep up with the stuff I write, let alone anyone else, and I read -- a lot. As a publisher, I hope I can direct my readers to the types of content they desire. Desired content is as varied as humanity, so directing the reader to what they may be interested in feels like an overwhelming task.

I feel the tension as I've begun the publishing company in a whole new way. Immediate gratification seems to drive the human compulsion to buy. And motivating the compulsion to buy is what a business is all about. Content, however, is what gives the book legs. A great book is not like a great feast. A great book can sit on the shelf for decades and it will still be a great book. A great feast can sit on the table for about four hours before it starts to go bad. The battle between immediacy and longevity is just one paradox the writer and the publisher must face, but it is a biggie.

As a publisher, I hope I can provide great books and great feasts.

The Flood of Words

2010-10-06T08:55:00.000-07:00

Authors and writers are finding themselves in a similar position to musicians, except that is hard to go on tour and play to large crowds. The entire blog tour idea is somewhat analogous, but no T-shirts and beer.

I'm not so sure how it will all work out either. It is a great time to be a reader is a little bit like saying it is a great time to be swimmer during a flood. I'm not sure what the landscape is going to look like after the flood, but everybody needs to be finding an ark.

I think the easiest way around the pandering of self-promotion is a straightforward, outright declaration of what your self-interest is. I just got finished reading Christopher Hitchen's memoir and his friendship and relationship with Martin Amis and Salaman Rushdie didn't stop him from commenting fully on those authors or praising their work.

Taste is taste. If you like someone's taste, odds are someone with similar taste will like yours too. Think staff recommendations at the indie book stores. It won't matter if it is a book written by them or a friend or relative. Influence comes from the reader's taste and finding other reader's with similar taste. Think of it as the log you grab as the Titanics of publishing sink.

So What Does It Take To Be Officially a Publisher?

2010-10-06T06:53:00.000-07:00

I'd say four books is a start.

The crazy thing -- this is going to be over ten within the next week or so. I will also be adding four or five more authors.

I love my new job (and I still have that attorney day job).

Books v. eBooks: A Non-Argument

2010-10-02T07:10:00.000-07:00

Too much time is wasted on the argument over books versus eBooks. Formatting has always changed. The fact that Shakespeare may have wrote with a quill and his plays were originally preserved in folios doesn't much matter today. The only thing that mattered is the words that dripped off his pen -- and the word's impact on audiences, culture and the language.

What matters today is the same as the 1600s -- whether the words will last. Any real writer will strive to have words that impact. The only real discussion about formatting should be about how to reach the widest possible audience for words that truly need a wide audience.

This comment brought to you by my sponsor: Binary Press Publications

You can buy the first two publications: here and here.

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A Classic from The Trial

2010-09-26T09:04:00.001-07:00

Defining Publishing

2010-09-26T07:38:00.001-07:00

From a purely utilitarian standpoint, the attempt to label a publisher is an attempt to categorize quality for marketing purposes. The more accurate the label, the better indication of the quality of the product.

The problem isn’t with the vocabulary. The problem is that publishing is an industry in flux. At one stage in publishing history pamphleteer was a pejorative, but pamphleteers also produced classics, ie Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” Recently, so called traditional publishing applies as much to celebrity drek as to quality literature, so this isn’t really about quality either.

The identification by the public of the publisher “type” is the duty of the publisher. The publisher has to communicate to its audience who they are and what they do. A good publisher will be able to do that. A poor one won’t.

Publishing is about providing words to the public. The hope remains that despite the categorization of the publisher, in the flood of words, quality will still float.

How To Read And Drive Safely -- At The Same Time

2010-09-21T05:31:00.000-07:00

The bus driver caught in Portland reading his Kindle while driving his bus originally peaked my interest, because I read my Kindle all the time when I'm driving. I didn't see what the big deal was until he turned the page. This was a dead giveaway that the bus driver didn't have a clue how to use his Kindle. If you are going to drive and read, let the Kindle read to you with its text to speech function, then when you are done driving, you can just start reading where the text to speech voice left off. It turns the pages for you, so you can drive.

Maybe Amazon can do that for the next commercial -- How To Safely Read Your Kindle and Drive At the Same Time.

5 Benefits of the Kindle over the Nook

2010-09-20T05:01:00.000-07:00

I bought a Nook this weekend so I could compare it to a Kindle and so I could review the books we will be publishing in both formats. All in all, I still prefer the Kindle.

Touchy Touch Screen. My biggest beef with the Nook is the touch screen. Oddly enough, when I was buying the Nook, the sales person at B&N tried to convince me that the Kindle had all these buttons that were easily pushed and made stuff disappear. I've used the Kindle now for two years and haven't had a problem, ever. The touch screen on the Nook was so touchy that I lost an entire Sudoku game, just as I was about to finish it. My fingers were too big/clumsy to type as quickly as I can on the Kindle, plus I had to keep changing the keyboard to access numbers, which made typing in my WiFi password a monumental pain.
The Digital Toggle v. A Real Toggle. The other thing the sales rep told me was it didn't have Kindle's annoying toggle switch. Yet, I had to push about four buttons on the touch screen just to get to a touch screen toggle on the Nook.
Ease of Purchase. I guess if you are trying to conserve your book purchasing dollars, the Nook might be better for you, because it takes a bunch of clicks to find and buy a book. I'm into click conservation and the Nook is click heavy. Amazon is evilly brilliant in its ease of purchase.
Color Touch Screen. I'm offended by the Nook's implication that I need color. As a reader, color isn't high up on my need list. The clarity of print is in the black and white, I'll go to the meaning of the words for color, ambiguity and depth. I'm a reader and I have an imagination. If I want color and computer graphics, I'll buy an iPad. I don't need the smell of a book, I just don't need distractions on my reader. I guess that makes me a traditionalists out of the eBookers.
Selection. The selection of Amazon blows B&N away. I know they say they have a million books, but that is only thanks to Google Books which gives everyone a million books, including the Kindle. I ran a few quick searches and for what I was looking for I was glad I had the Amazon store.

On the plus side for the Nook, it is a functional electronic reader and a great Sudoku game (when the touch screen works).

The Future of the Book -- And It Is Now

2010-09-18T07:56:00.000-07:00

I read an interesting article by Hugh McGuire in Forbes about the future of the book. In the article, he mentioned numerous things you can’t do with a book that you can do with a web page on the internet. McGuire muses that books must merge with the Internet and in so doing will become even more valuable.

Much of what he posited as needing to take place is happening. I can easily cut and paste anything I’m reading digitally and post the quote to Twitter and Facebook. Amazon is more than happy to direct anyone clicking on my quote right to the page to buy the book. This is cut and paste. This is deep linking to the book. And it maintains an economic novel that rewards the individual author.

McGuire gets lost in his own argument however when he writes: –You cannot query across, say, all books about Montreal written in 1942–even if they are from the same publisher. Wait a minute, I thought books and the Internet would be interchangeable. What McGuire is actually arguing for here is a more refined search, not the merging of books and the Internet. These are two different things. The digitization of books will merge books with the Internet. Accessibility will be the duty of the author and publishers.

The new job of a publisher is SEO. As McGuire pointed out, API’s are applications to make sure that people access your data and not someone else’s data. The future of books is incorporation into the digital mass of information. In an age were anyone can publish anything and have it remain forever, the future of publishing is search engine optimization.

Publishing 0101

2010-09-16T06:48:00.000-07:00

One month ago I began an adventure. All my life I've loved books. I'm not even sure how many books are in my personal collection. I know I haven't even come close to reading them all. When people ask me how many I've read, I say "About a third." But I really have no idea.

I do know one thing. Reading has changed me in a fundamental way. At one point in my life, something like five minutes ago, I would have said that the changes were "metaphysical", but I've read too much neuroscience to say that it is metaphysical. Reading has created me in a physical way, carving out my neural pathways in a way that is unique. The authors who have influenced me have allowed my brain to run down their neural paths, so I'm part Aristophanes, part Chaucer, part Shakespeare, part Philip Roth, part Henry Miller, part Jack Kerouac, part Dostoyevsky, part Tolstoy, part Camus -- well, you get the idea. I would be remiss if I didn't mention my wife, JulieAnn, the author that I met because of her book and writing -- talk about positive and passionate changes in my neural pathways.

So as an attorney and lifelong bibliophile, I decided to do something. I decided to start a digital press. In a way it was my response to the problem I saw that was addressed in Book Glutton this morning. How do you write and read in the age of Facebook and Twitter? The interplay of ideas and thoughts are what make us and I wanted to pass out the building block of deep, rather than superficial ideas. My press is barely a month old and we will begin publishing within the week. (Website, a week or two away) I have the rights to publish over 40 books, all by authors who have been previously published.

I feel the weight of trying to wrestle even a small portion of the unruly stream of words into a channel that can be used to irrigate the thoughts, feelings and lives of potential readers.

Writing for Money

2010-09-06T07:39:00.000-07:00

Question and Answer with Christopher Hitchens in the New York Time Magazine:

Did you write the book for money?
Of course, I do everything for money. Dr. Johnson is correct when he says that only a fool writes for anything but money. It would be useful to keep a diary, but I don’t like writing unpaid. I don’t like writing checks without getting paid.

I'm reading Hitchen's memoir, Hitch-22 and found the above quote about why he wrote the book. Now, if writing for money means I get to hang out and play word games with Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, then definitely, I need to make sure that I write for money.

For an author, money can be a motivating force to improve your craft. In our society is also the economic indicator of how many people the writing reaches. More money = bigger audience. Hitchens the journalist understands this well.

Yet, I personally like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen's reason for writing fiction, because I think they are correct.

[Fiction is the] ‘neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being’: this, we decided, was what fiction was for. ‘A way out of loneliness’ was the formulation we agreed to agree on.

Writing is about creating a connection with other people. No writer I've ever met is content with their words being stuffed in a drawer or a hard drive (although they often end up there). Pleas to artistic desire or writing compulsion are nothing more than screams for connection. No artists writes a book so no one else can read it.

No audience, no art.

No audience and it is artistic masturbation, while possibly pleasurable, much more productive and fun if shared. So in an indirect way Hitchens is correct, money means more connection and that is what writing is all about.

Hell

2010-08-22T09:32:00.000-07:00

I finished a book this week -- Hell by Rob Olen Butler. I don't write much about the books I read, probably because I read more than I write. My brother (who is also reading it, as is my wife) described the book as Dante's Inferno for the 21st Century -- a more accurate description after finishing the book would be Dante's Divine Comedy for the 21st Century without the terza rima.

A theme throughout Hell is the inability to actually get inside someone else's subjective, interior thoughts. Satan in all his anticipatory sadistic power can't do it. The denizens of Hell certainly can't do it, but with Butler's post modern irony, the reader of Hell gets to spend a lot of time in everyone else's head -- well at least Butler's head.

This isn't the first time Butler has played around with the concept of what is going on in someone else's noggin. An earlier foray takes the phrase "in someone else's head" quite literally in Severance, a compilation of short 240 word epigraphic epitaphs of the last words going through the minds of the beheaded (apparently you have enough oxygen after being beheaded to get through 240 words before it is lights out.). Butler goes a step further in Intercourse giving the reader the internal monologue of participants in the sex act.

Writing itself is an act of disclosure, an act of placing at least a portion of one's thoughts on the screen or page. Imagine your last 240 words after the knife slices through your neck. Remember your last internal monologue in the throes of passion. Imagine what your own hell and your own redemption would be like. Remember the darkest or scariest thought you don't dare speak.

The writer's hell is the rejection of the interior. The writing gets thrown out in a desperate attempt for readers to accept the internal and often fractured offerings of the author. Every time I type a word, I want someone to read it and even more importantly, understand me, but somehow writing and reading is more transformative. Intaking the words through reading alters the words into a new subjective reality that is far beyond the author's control or ability to anticipate.

My wife is a writer. She's married to me because she is a writer, because she put her words out there for me to read. For a bookish soul like me, maybe that was the only way to change me, by getting her thoughts inside my head in a form I was used to. This week she finished her latest novel, TDTM. The book has been created from out of the mist of our daily life together and those pieces are scattered throughout. Our discussions about the book have influenced the plot. When I read it, my internal thoughts will register something different because of that experience, but it will connect me to other readers as we share the communal aspect of having heard the same story.

A book is the closest a human can come to entering someone else's mind.

Great writing organizes the subjective thoughts of the author, but remains true to the interior mind as the thoughts are edited on to the page. The trick of great writing is to create enough flow with the reader that you hijack their thoughts. The writer also wants to create a parallel thought pattern in the reader -- See, here I am writing, you are reading, we think similarly and you know where this can go and you know what it means and you listen to what I write, knowing this isn't your thought, but mine, but you understand because you think like this too at times. Pulling it off with one stream of conscious sentence if easy. Maintaining it for the length of a book is hard.

JulieAnn's friend, Emily Pearson, has written a memoir, Dancing With Crazy. Of all the writing, a memoir is by its nature the most personal. Every word in the memoir has impact and meaning for the author, because the author knows what every word represents -- an entire interior reality is constructed around each word, each paragraph, each incident. The problem is that the reader doesn't have access to all of that interiority. As the three of us discussed her memoir, there was agreement for the need for an edit from the right editor to give her work its full impact. The editor would help bring her distinctive voice to a much wider audience.

I'm nearly 50 years old and for the first time I think I finally understood why an editor is so important for a book. The great editor, like the great writer, helps organize the words so the interior thoughts of the author come through on the page. The editor points out the author's own internal blind spots and brings to the book something the author doesn't have -- an external point of view. The combination of the editor's external and the author's internal is the bridge from the writer's mind to the reader's interior.

Again, with a writer for a wife, I get to see this editor/writer dance. JulieAnn recently finished line edits on her book that is about to published, Falling Back to Earth. The editor's comments and changes at this juncture are the fine tuning on the book's ability to connect to the reader. The occasional editorial aside that a scene is suspenseful or moving makes me realize that something magical is taking place with JulieAnn's words, someone else is seeing the beauty, depth and struggle that I have become so familiar with in our marriage.

Which brings me back to Hell. All week long a phrase that I have uttered often and with heartfelt meaning has been transformed by another human being. Robert Olen Butler has taken up occupancy in my head. He appropriated a word and amplified it for me, so that I hear nuances I was deaf to before. I don't know that this is what he intended or even if it is what he meant, but it is what he did to me. For a writer and for a reader, this type of Hell is heavenly.

The Bankruptcy of Publishing

2010-06-06T07:05:00.000-07:00

Ok, I'll admit that the title of the blog is for one primary reason -- I'm testing out how Google works. I really do want to talk about how I perceive the publishing industry is changing from my perspective in Ogden, Utah, but I also want to see how titles and labels effected Google's search engines. Which actually is a great segue way into what this post, inspired by a blog post by my lovely and talented writer/wife, is actually about --- How does a writer get heard in the digital age?

When I was growing up (a long, long time ago in a county pretty dang close), musical taste was dictated by two things -- Kasey Kasem's American Top 40 (the morbid Seasons in the Sun at the top of the charts week after week) and the Friday Night Battle of the Records which lead to the perennial champions -- Goodbye Yellowbrick Road, Cherokee People and much to my adult chagrin and childish delight, The Bay City Roller's Saturday Night. It frightens me that I remember that.

Musical tastes were spun out of the mass media, record label machine into my head through the only radio station that played anything remotely young and pop-ish in the early 70s. If you wanted to make it big in the record biz, you were going to need to sign with a big label. Today, we have Pandora and the record industry is a lot like a very nice vase that got dropped on a very hard floor from a very high height. Forget labels, American Top 40 and Friday Night Battle of the Records and think DRM (Digital Rights Management), iPod, indie and bit torrent.

From what I can see, the publishing industry is also a vase that is hitting the floor and it is as if I'm watching the pieces scatter in slow motion. Terminology has not caught up. The Wall Street Journal just this week called digital publishing "Vanity Publishing." Digital publishing is the same as regular publishing at least to the extent that it has vanity and non-vanity versions. J.A. Konrath sells some self-published books, but authors have often self-published and that is technically different from vanity publishing. Konrath is also published by -- and this is a very important point -- Amazon Encore.

What did traditional publisher's do? They prepared the product for mass marketing. They mass marketed the product through the current media -- TV, print and radio. They sold the book to libraries. Libraries were the repositories for the community's books. We shared books as a community. The books we read were determined by teachers, friends and word of mouth.

Amazon is acting just like a traditional publisher. Only a couple of things have changed. The cost of distribution has shrunk to pennies if it is digital. The mass market is disappearing. Traditional advertising has diminished and fractured. Libraries have shrunk. Amazon steps in and is not only the publisher, but the book warehouse, the delivery truck, the book store and the promotional advertising media promoting the books and even a really massive pay as you go library -- all rolled into one digital company. Amazon also changes the community so that you can connect with a community of your very own idiosyncratic tastes. Your friends and word of mouth aren't relegated to a quiet little rural town in Utah. The writer's reviews and Amazon rankings and referrals carry more weight than the publishing equivalent of American's Top 40 -- The New York Time's Bestseller List.

The rules of the game have changed, but the ultimate game for the writer has not. The writer must write. The writer must write words that other people want to read -- and other people need to talk about it so that the writer gets read. The task of writing (and reading) is as David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen concluded -- an act to assuage loneliness and separateness of being human and provide connection with someone else, somewhere at sometime who felt the same way.

The words are the only salve for mortality.

A 220 Volt Plug

2010-05-29T05:55:00.000-07:00

The compulsion to write is really a compulsion for connection. My initial thought was that I'm a 220 plug in a 110 volt world -- no connection is actually possible. In the scrambled mass of neurons that is my brain, this thought took me to one of my more ill-fated home improvement efforts.

I was working on a basement apartment in a house I'd just bought. I turned off the power to the entire house at the circuit breaker because I was going to be working around a 220 volt electrical outlet. Why? I have no clue, it was too long ago. What I do remember is that I stuck my rubber gripped pliers on the wires and got knocked back across the room from the electrical jolt. I hurt my hand landing on some tool, but was otherwise unharmed physically. An inspection of the pliers showed that the live wires had melted a nice pattern on the metal pincers. For some unknown reason the house had been wired with this solitary 220 plug separate from all of the power at the circuit box, thus leaving the wires live unless turned off at another circuit box hidden on the side of the house.

Long story for a stretch of a metaphor, I suppose, but I'm coming quickly to the conclusion that writing is a lot like that 220 plug. You throw words out there and you don't know if the power is connected or not and whether the words will shock and repel the reader, melt themselves onto the reader's psyche or if there really just won't be any juice in them at all.

Nothing like hanging out at a writer's conference to question whether words can conceivably have any impact at all. Mostly we are all hanging around, hoping for the happy accident of writing something that can melt metal.

The Author as a Commodity

2010-05-25T19:15:00.001-07:00

This week I'm attending a writer's workshop in New Orleans with my wife, who is the real writer in the family. I rather hate being the living cliche of attorney who is a wannabe writer, but I'm finding that it is easier to aspire to be an author than it is to take the attorney out of my psyche.

For example, the instructor of our class is filling in our little workshop group on the travails of the publishing world. Specifically, She claimed that authors are "brown leather pumps" to the publishers. She said it to make the point that authors were mere commodities to the book industry and the fickle reading public will burn through a book and it doesn't matter much whose book it is. If you don't write it, someone else will. My poetical version: authors are the meat that is ground up to make book sausage.

I don't doubt the wisdom of the instructor's comments. From what I can see, commercial fiction (and non-fiction) on a visceral level work in this way. The formulaic novel, the ghost written celebrity book, the tough life memoir and the motivational/spiritual tome really could be written by anyone and consumed by the undiscerning hordes as the corporate book manufacturers scoop up the majority of the cash.

The best example of this is James Patterson, who doesn't even write all his own books. He hires would-be authors to write them for him. This is the final end game of creating books as entertainment (a game that has sadly been encouraged by "cut and paste" technology -- How much of the Harry Potter series was cut and pasted back story?) The brand supercedes the art. Sure there is quality control and a formulaic sameness that soothes the reader, that is why it works.

Looking at the entire process through the legal lens, I see a supply chain of author to agent to editor to proofreader to printer to book distribution company to book retailer with every participant sucking off the teat of the writer's words. In much the same way a lawsuit bleeds the litigants dry, the publication process bleeds the author's work dry.

And if this really is how it works, why would an author (attorney or not) want to be treated like a pair of brown leather pumps chewed on by the book industry puppy?

Sunday Morning Musings

2010-05-16T07:33:00.000-07:00

It is so quiet -- birds chirping, sun rising as I see the contours of the ridge line cut across the scrub oak as the mountain's shadow sneaks towards me. Unbelievable as it may seem to those of you who know me, a little kitten is perched on my shoulder, purring softly, asleep. Maybe not quiet so unbelievable is that the kitten's name is Henry Miller.

This week I've been thinking a lot about writing. My wife, JulieAnn, is an exceptional writer -- and she writes. Boy, does she write. One of her greatest skills as a writer is her tenacity. I've watched her develop her talent and watched her in practice. I envy her ability to just dive in and work on her novel of the moment. Her first published novel is why I'm married to her in a very real way, since it was the catalyst to our meeting.

Books (and thus writing) seem to be headed in the same direction that music went ten years ago. Books are becoming more and more a commodity and the price for the book is dropping, creating an economic pressure on both authors and publishers. They can be easily copied and transferred, even with some DRM encoding. I find myself gravitating towards author's I know and still pick up on new authors and hot books from the Sunday New York Time's Book Review, so I'm strongly in the traditional publishing realm as a consumer.

Yet, I can feel it all changing underneath my feet. I'm worried about it from a dual perspective -- as a potential author and as the husband of an author. Who do you listen to if you want to get a good recommendation for a book? How do you develop an audience? How big of an audience is enough? How do you hone the writing craft when the ability (and the compulsion) is there to spew out your thoughts onto the Internet in a blizzard of uncensored typing?

I'm sure my day job makes me look at writing from an economic perspective. Writing takes time. Time equates to money. How much money do I need for myself and my family? How do I increase the time I have for writing?

Sunday morning and I have all the questions and none of the answers.

The Future of Reading

2010-05-07T06:22:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite new blogs that I read daily is Kindle Review. Anyone who knows me at all, knows that I am in love with my Kindle and in love with books. Today there was a post on the future of reading -- or more accurately the future of books. (I don't think reading is going anywhere, books appear to be in a state of flux however.)

The post raised a couple of questions, especially when it was combined with my wife's post about literature yesterday. So here are a couple of questions and my random musings on them.

1. What is literature?

Harold Bloom, the literary critic, sees the literary tradition as agon -- a conflict or contest of artistic style and morals. (Agon is the same root as agony, which seems completely applicable to the writer's craft.) Being the male combative that likes rugby and the law, this theory of literature appeals to me greatly. Obviously literature is a game and as a writer it is fun to play the game. The problem is that there are no rules -- or at least you need to pick the literary game you want to play. Literary fiction is a different game than writing mystery novels.

Before you answer the question as to what is literature, you must look to see that you are comparing tradition to tradition.

2. Will books become more than words on a page?

No -- and yes. No, because books are words on a page. Yes --think David Foster Wallace. His books become words on different pages through an old technology, footnotes. eBook technology is going to open up artistic possibilities to authors that have been tried before, but the tools weren't really there until now -- split narrative streams, collage, asides, merging of various texts/authors, alternate endings and whatever an artistic mind can come up with to use the brush strokes of eBooks and digital technology. Depending on what literary tradition forms around these uses of technology, then yes, books will become more than words on a page, but it won't replace the century old progression of other literary traditions. This is an addition, not a subtraction.

3. Time to go to work

The problem with books is not the form, but the quality.

The $ Value of Words

2010-04-30T09:02:00.000-07:00

Contingent and non-contingent interests in the estate of a decedent -- mysterious words like these are responsible for my livelihood. I joke around with my clients that if it weren't for words like this attorneys couldn't charge outrageously hourly sums. If you ask someone do you have any contingent or non-contingent interests in the estate of a decedent, the eyes glaze over and catatonia ensues. If you ask the question this way: Is anyone dead or dying that is going to leave you money or stuff? The eyes light up, the laugh comes and often, they gush, "No, I wish." To which I respond with a chuckle, "Glad I'm not your relative."

Computers and Google make words much less mysterious. I don't know that words are how I'm going to be able to keep making my income. The change is that people are not going to want to pay simply for my ability to interpret mysterious words. I get paid not for my understanding of legal jargon, but for my ability to pilot people through a legal system that I just happen to know from doing it 8000 times. Nothing mysterious.

Pricing Ourselves Out of Existence

2010-04-22T08:27:00.001-07:00

One of the struggles I've had with being a lawyer from the very beginning is how much we charge. Usually, the cost of legal fees far exceeded the benefit we provide. This is probably why I ended up in the consumer bankruptcy realm where the cost/benefit analysis of fees and benefit to the client is so clear and so definitive -- I feel like I'm worth every penny of fees based on the benefit to my client.

I was speaking with another attorney yesterday and told him that a couple of my daughters are considering law school as an option. He shook his head and noted that by the time they got through law school, attorneys will have priced themselves out of existence. He then went on to quote several other attorney's hourly rates and noted how ridiculous those rates were. I bit my tongue because one of the rates is what I charge -- and earn.

The demise of my profession may not be eminent, but with technological advances, the free flow of information and the infiltration of money and power into the legal system, financial access to the attorneys for the poor and middle class is in fact threatened. Solutions need to be found, so that the Courts remain Courts of the People and not Courts of the Corporate.

My Love of the Kindle

2010-04-17T05:31:00.000-07:00

The last week or so has had plenty of hullabaloo about the new iPad and everyone seems very concerned about what Apple is going to do to the Kindle. Hate to break it to you Apple folk, but you are a little late and on the wrong side of the eReader game.

I'll never use the iPad for reading. I use plenty of Apple products, but the Kindle -- at this juncture is the dream book.

Those issuing the death knell of the Kindle obviously don't read, so they don't have a clue. The virtues of the Kindle have been expounded by its acolytes, but I'd like to offer five great reasons that the Kindle is here to stay in a Gutenberg-ian sort of way --

1. Real bibliophiles are ecstatic about not needing to lug thirty books with them when they travel. My carry-on is so light these days.

2. I actually get the newspaper delivered to me without the annoying and unreliable paper boy -- and it is the New York Times.

3. As I'm reading my NY Time's Book Review on Sunday Morning in my slippers and bath robe, I see a book I want to read and I click the convenient shop button, type in the name of the book and two clicks I'm reading the book instead of the review. I spend more money on books (and I spent a lot before).

4. I can lay in bed and read without flipping back and forth like a rotisserie chicken -- just hit next page.

5. Oh, did I mention that I like being read to -- even in the mechanical voice?

Actually I think one problem with the Kindle and "Death of the Kindle" crowd is the people saying this aren't really readers. How the hell would they know what a good reading experience? This is the same crowd that was saying reading was dead just before Harry Potter sold a gazillion copies and every adolescent girl on the planet purchased Twilight.

Seth Godin in his marketing blog encourages marketers to "disaggregate" and he starts off his blog post with this gem, "The typical American buys precisely one book a year". He points out the obvious that based on the statistical analysis, between Seth and me at least 950 Americans didn't buy a single book last year (Seth bought about 400 and I bought about 450-(250 on the Kindle)). Ok, that may have been a little hyperbole.

The people who say the Kindle is dead or dying are the same people that haven't bought a book of any kind for a long, long time.

More Writing and My Job

2010-04-11T07:36:00.000-07:00

Most of what I write is crap.

"I love my job."

Now that sentence is simple to the point and probably crap. It loses all nuance in a bold, white declaration of affection. I do get a thrill out of my work, but love is a word that is devoid of meaning in this context.

When people ask me what I do, I tell them "I Robin Hood for a living, taking from rich, evil creditors and give back to the poor and destitute, while skimming a little off the top for myself."

Now, that is a more accurate description than saying I love my job, but again -- crap. Not all creditors are rich or evil. Not all clients are poor and destitute. I don't really skim, but take court ordered and disclosed fees for my work. I am trying to create a persona, a facade -- to make my job and myself, way more glamorous than I really am. I know, because when I tell people I am a consumer bankruptcy attorney I get one of two reactions -- 1) Eyes glaze over and the subject is changed or 2) A smile, a nod and "Wow, you must be really busy these days. Glad someone has work." Much better to describe my profession by turning Robin Hood into a verb, but while greasing the social skids, the words are still crap.

Writing is an attempt to connect with other people on a non-physical plane of existence that removes time from the coordinates and takes the physical and transforms it into the mental. Maybe this is why I think everything I write is crap. Writing is a modified and socialized form of what the psychics call "remote viewing." I think psychics are crap.

Take the word, "crap." I am using this word in a metaphoric sense, as well as the colloquial meaning of "not good." As a metaphor, physical crap is the detritus of biological functions and metaphoric writing crap is the detritus of my mental functions. This is also why we refer to excess material possessions that have become useless as our consumerist version of crap -- the shit we have left over from our spending.

Another thing about crap is that no one is really interested in crap -- their own or others. Although you may check out your own crap or grouse about how much crap you have or how your writing is crap, you never check out anyone else's crap or care how much crap someone has (unless it is bigger and nicer crap than yours) or you rarely read someone else's crap, because after about two sentences, or if the writer is lucky, two paragraphs, you say, "This is crap" -- and stop reading.

So I'm stopping -- for today.

A New Book

2009-12-06T10:21:00.000-08:00

Everything has changed. At nearly 47 years of age, I stand on the precipice of the future and realize that the dreams of my youth have been made irrelevant by life and technology. Things are changing so quickly and I’m adapting with the speed of a slug – mired in salt.

One problem with the rapidly changing world is no one realizes how much it is changing. We whir along and change without even thinking about it. I realize that hardly anyone reads what I write on this blog, but I think nothing of the fact that I sit here on a Sunday morning in slippers, typing and in a moment my thoughts will be accessible to anyone who cares to listen. This is were you get humility, because no one is really listening. We are all too busy talking and worrying about ourselves to give anyone else much thought.

Writing Dream: Be published. When I was thirteen, being a published author was the holy grail of all I wanted. Instead of pursuing writing, I ended up in the law, but I’ve clung to this dream of being published. Publication brings about serendipity. Your words get out there and you have no idea who will actually connect with them. My wife gets to put up with me because she was published. So all seems right with the world, my dream to be published is still alive and kicking.

Wrong – sort of. The infrastructure of the past and the machinery of publication still spits out books. Every Sunday in the New York Times I can read reviews of the latest and greatest. I’ve developed a fondness and attachment to particular authors, living and dead, reading almost everything that they write – Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Saul Bellow, Douglas Coupland, Chuck Palahniuk – the list goes on and on. I read them, connect and think I want to be like one of those guys. (Yes, honey, I realize that they are all white males and about half of them are Jewish, but I still read women authors, too. You being my favorite woman author and so much more than just a friend.)

I realize why I have no friends to speak of – my friends are authors and their books. Being friends with an author is easy. They don’t ask of anything other than you spring for the price of the book. In fact they tend to hate creepy stalkers and emails, so they prefer it if you put their book on the shelf and leave them alone. If you are busy and ignore them, they don’t care, as long as you keep reading.

Publication always felt to me like the one sure way to obtain immortality. A book bound with your name on it could speak after you were dead. Now, it is possible to literally speak after you are dead with recorded voice and video. Nearly any aspect of our lives can be reduced to digital format and “published” for the future. The philosophical implications of the ease of publishing are seemingly endless with one of the biggest questions being does the urge or desire to publish one’s life interfere with living one’s life?

Author’s by nature must be at least a little exhibitionistic and simultaneously reclusive, J.D. Salinger any one? They flash us with their words, not their presence. And they want us to look at the words, but they love the barrier the book and word creates between themselves as people and the reader.

I know because it is that desire for connection, understanding and dialogue that has compelled me throughout my life to want to write. I want to talk to my friends the authors and the social structure is such that I talk to them by putting out my work for others to read. My value in the conversation is determined by the audience I develop, not by what I say. I want to be published because I don’t want to violate the social norms of author-hood.

And yet, the world is changing. I can see it, feel it and realize it and the dream is fading with every Google search I commit or every “friend” I add on Facebook. There are better ways now to connect with the authors, the friends of my life than books. Publication was all about access, public knowledge and public acceptance. Access to text has gone from extremely difficult to instantaneous and easy. My original desire to be published was so that others could have access to my words. Technology has eliminated that need.

The problem has shifted from access to letting the public know and care about what I write. The previous social milieu of books was a sub-genre of the celebrity culture, a culture where our heroes walked on Olympus, dropping words like lightening on us mere mortals. The digital age is crumbling Olympus and words are flying everywhere. The old guard remains fortified by publishing houses and Barnes and Noble, but the attack on them is relentless and continuing unabated.

Carnegie Libraries, public libraries, law libraries and school libraries are fading into the digital abyss. Why go to the library, when I can find any book at home on my laptop or Kindle? When an entire library of a University is digitized by Google, why pay all that money and take up all that space? It doesn’t make sense and cities and schools will stop doing it.

Suddenly, my desire to be published seems silly. Throw out a book into the enormous and never shrinking, constantly expanding digital slush pile. Within my lifetime it appears that most, if not all books ever published will be available digitally. No single person can ever attempt to read or comprehend all that material. The Renaissance Man or Woman has been killed by a tidal wave of text and information.

With the publication of a book, there was always the possibility that someone would stumble upon it at a much future date. Publication was about social recognition and a stamp of approval from the society that there was at least some merit to the words. The pesky one and zero that digitized everything changed that – the one and the zero don’t discriminate, they accept all comers. I’m laughing a little bit this morning when I think back to the dismay I used to get walking into Barnes and Noble and wondering how even if I managed to get a copy of my book on the shelf would it ever get read, there were so many choices. I had no clue. It is a million, possibly a billion times worse than I ever imagined. (Translation technology is improving at such a rate that it is going to be easier than ever to translate books between languages, so for us English writers, the competition is about to jump by about 4-5 billion more potential authors.)

So I’ve dreamed a new dream. I haven’t always followed through on adapting to rapidly changing things, but I still have the same desire to be published, but I’m going to do it for a new digital age.

1. First I’m going to take a page out of Facebook and look for friends for my writing and friends for me. This is the replication of my own author focused friendships I’ve developed over the years.

2. I’m going take a page out of Blogger and Word Press and use the ease of publication and search to create a digital persona for myself that will hopefully stick around for awhile after I’m gone.

3. I’m going to take a page out of Google and include everything and make my digital persona searchable.

4. I’m going to take a page from the publishing industry and provide human editorial control over the content. Having everything is cool, but time consuming for a reader. Editorial control allows for different layers of friends from the mere acquaintance to the best friend that knows everything about you.

5. I’m going to take a page out of cloud computing and move my information, writing and digital persona out of my laptop and office and on to the cloud of the new Olympus, a digitally replicating and growing Colossus of new information. It is out of that Colossus’ Chaos that a new world is being created.

6. I am going to take a page out of my upbringing and look for integrity in my digital persona, so that it matches up completely with the flesh and blood version. Those who know me will wonder how this is even conceivable given the numerous facets of my identity, but I’m becoming more convinced that privacy, especially as an author, is a rapidly dying concept. Creating an integrated digital persona is the only method to eliminate privacy concerns. We are all celebrities now.

So far my new book is only six pages of infinite length or at least the length of a lifetime.

In Memorium: Steven Bendinelli

2009-11-24T16:35:00.000-08:00

I had a client in April of 2008 who had to file a Chapter 13 bankruptcy due to various bills that included medical bills. At the time of filing, he did have medical insurance. However, he subsequently was laid off and subjected to the horrors of COBRA and no insurance. At the age of 37, less than two years after filing bankruptcy, Steven Bendinelli passed away.

We publish the names of our terrorist victims and mourn the loss as a society. We do not mourn or publish the names in the media of those people who die because they lacked health insurance. We leave the mourning and anger to the deceased's immediate family.

I'd known Steven and his family for many years since coming to Ogden and they are great people. I have the highest regard for them. I met a friend of the family today and learned what had happened to Steven.

He had been unemployed. He had no insurance. He got a cold. He didn't want to go to the doctor because he didn't have any money and he didn't have any income. His father went to visit him and no one answered the door. The cold had progressed, possibly to pneumonia and Steven had passed away.

There remain some uncertainties about exactly how he passed away, but one thing appears to be certain-- Steven Bendinelli died because he didn't have access to health care.

Health care should not be left to markets. If it is, experience shows that the free market kills. Health care should be the concern of society as a whole. I challenge anyone to show me how any other belief is in the slightest way moral.

To Steven's family, I give my deepest regrets in their time of sorrow and my own apology, that I couldn't do more to relieve that financial pressure.

On Focus

2009-11-23T06:27:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in my earlier post that I needed to focus.

Life tears us in numerous directions and I find myself trying to look at ten different things at once. My focus is distracted.

Monday morning is a new day at work and struggling through the day trying to solve problem after problem distracts, but doesn't focus.

Focus comes from concentration. While I have the capability to concentrate, I'm plagued by a nagging feeling that I'm focused on the wrong thing. A feeling usually described as "forgetting something."

Focus by its nature is exclusionary. You can't be focused and scattered. You can't pay attention to something else. In a writing practice, the words demand the attention. In family life, the children demand the attention. At work, the client.

Focus requires creating priorities. A requirement for obtaining and maintaining focus is creating priorities. If something comes along to distract (Internet anyone?), then you have to ignore it to maintain focus and that means you prioritize your attention.

Focus brings clarity. I focus for clarity. If you don't have focus, things are blurry. I never tire of seeing things more clearly, more precisely and more deeply.

On the Brain

2009-11-20T08:51:00.000-08:00

I've always had an abiding curiosity for how the grey matter in my skull operates. Two recent books, Talent is Overrated and The Talent Code, deal with how humans, and brains in particular, develop talents. The current scientific consensus is that myelin is an insulating coating that covers the neurons and facilitates any human skill or activity. The more myelin in an area, the more skilled.

My curiosity into the workings of the brain has turned into something of an obsession after my oldest daughter suffered a head injury in the fall of 2005. It is hard to believe that it occurred just over four years ago. I've learned about neuroplasticity, seizure disorders and the long and short term implications of a traumatic brain injury.

The recent books on talent are just the most recent step in this exploration. How do you create myelin? How do you develop skills that you want to have or that may have been lost due to an accident in the extreme or simply through complacency?

The answer appears to have a current consensus in the scientific community that resonates with my personal experience: deliberate or focused practice creates skill. Basically, hard work. The hard work does require focus on the particular task at hand, however. Just working hard won't do it, you have to focus and learn from repeated mistakes. Without the mistakes, no myelin gets produced, you are just using an already well-paved neuronal highway.

I know my wife and children have had to put up with me deliberately practicing to be a good husband and father. I make lots of mistakes while I parent. One of the hardest skills that I struggle with is letting my children deliberately practice in their own lives. This means letting them struggle and learn through their own mistakes and that is the only way to build the myelin and build the skills that will help them when I'm not available.

On Deliberation

2009-11-15T12:16:00.000-08:00

I'm completely sick of the commentary that is running rampant in the news media about President Obama's deliberation on what to do in Afghanistan. When did the act of acting deliberately and with thought lose credence?

Bad things can happen if you act too quickly without considering the long term implications of your actions. The more important the decision, the more important the deliberation. If you are talking matters of life and death, deliberation becomes even more important.

Every day I talk to people who are in serious financial straits. They have agonized and suffered over what they should do until they finally feel they have no choice and they come and talk to me to see if I can help. No one looks at their own personal financial situation without a significant amount of thought and deliberation as to what they should do.

Why do so many begrudge the Commander in Chief for taking a deliberate approach to making the right decisions about whether to put soldier's lives in jeopardy.

I think there should be an addendum to all the yellow magnetic ribbons:

On Writing, Deliberate Practice and Renaissance Excellence

2009-11-08T08:54:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Geoff Colvin's book Talent is Overrated and I was struck by a couple of points, particularly in regards to blogging and writing. As someone who has had a lifelong ambition to write, I found Colvin's book to be both inspiring and despairing.

The one sentence summary of the book is as follows: Talent means little compared to ten years of deliberate hard practice if you want to achieve greatness.

Inspiring because it means I have to work hard -- despairing because it looks like I've got about nine years and eleven months to go on my writing goal. I went back and discovered that in the past I've done a little over 350 blog posts on various sites, not to mention comments and discussions on-line and the reams of digital paper that I've filled up on my computer.

The other inspiring aspect of Colvin's book was I realized the huge amount of room I have for progression and improvement. Much of what was suggested I already knew, but it is always nice to get a booster shot for reinforcement.

One of the least discussed aspects of blogging is the ability for blogging to act as a method for writing practice. As you can see there have only been about 17 posts on this blog, so my other posting forays have been spread out over numerous sites and different times. I'm particularly interested in developing a writing style that invokes engagement with the audience whether through duration of reading or through direct response and comments. Stat counters feed the feedback loop with their mountains of data on where the audience comes from, how long they stay and how they leave.

Given the huge amount of information and entertainment competing for our precious time, developing a writing persona and style that attracts an audience seems to be the most critical.

After reading Colvin's book I wonder if I shouldn't take my writing practice and devote it to concepts of bankruptcy and personal finance, since I've got more than ten plus years in legal practice and countless hours of talking to people about how money and debt is ravaging their lives. If nothing else, it would help my legal career -- if not my writing.

I've always wished I could be a Renaissance man with excellence brimming from everything that I touch, but the realm of knowledge has expanded so rapidly that there is no chance I'm going to be excellent in relativistic physics, quantum mechanics, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, 17th Century French Literature, 20th Century Japanese literature of Abe, Murakami and Mishima, criminal law, constitutional law, history, computer science, philosophy, politics, business management or even current events. I don't even have time to work out properly, let alone become a master of the intellectual universe. No one has that kind of time. All we are left with is varying degrees of ignorance and a fairly poor concept of epistemology. It seems at 46, going on 47, that I need to focus.

Which brings me to my lovely and beautiful wife. She has resisted Colvin's ideas as I've tried to discuss them with her. She has a strong sense of innate talent dictating how well people perform at certain tasks -- for her, painting and writing specifically, since those are her passions. I would definitely describe my wife as a talented painter and writer, but that is not what separates her from the thousands of painters and writers that are also "talented."

If Colvin's book inspired me, I've been living with an inspiration. I've never seen anyone work as hard and deliberately on writing as my wife. I'm not sure where she is on the whole ten years of hard practice before achieving world class excellence and 'overnight' success, but I can tell she is close. She has seven or eight books completed and the last one she has just finished is her best yet. I hope you all get to read Away from Eden soon and if I don't get lost in my quest for being a 21st Century Renaissance man, look for my novel in about ten years.

The World's Best Health Care -- If You Can Make It

2009-11-05T12:20:00.000-08:00

I was reading Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times this morning on my Kindle (I love my Kindle by the way) and I was struck by something that really rang true for me because it mirrored what I see everyday in my office.

Kristoff wrote, "Moreover, there is one American health statistic that is strikingly above average: life expectancy for Americans who have already reached the age of 65. At that point, they can expect to live longer than the average in industrialized countries. "

Yes, America has the best health care if you can make it to age 65, you just have to hang on until retirement and then you have universal health care. As I said in my earlier post, as a bankruptcy attorney I am the current national health care plan. I realized that there was an important caveat. I don't file bankruptcy for people over 65 for medical bills -- lost income, yes, medical bills, no. This is because American citizens over the age of 65 have the best health care system in the world.

Maybe we should figure out how to extend that system to everyone else.

Some Thoughts On Health Care

2009-10-29T18:57:00.000-07:00

I must admit that I'm frustrated by the nature of the health care debate. I have some extremely strong feelings about what should be done, but the debate slants violently toward minutiae and arguments over how each party should label the public option.

I rather enjoyed Alan Grayson on the floor of the house:

Yet, the problem with his comments were they were simply taken as partisan.

The debate has lapsed into partisan squabbling when more care should be taken at how the debate is framed. I would start any health care debate with this question:

Should people have a right to health care if they are suffering from an illness or injury?

In the law under certain circumstances, people are given the right to legal representation because our belief structure as a society requires it. Do we think that people should have the right to health care? Any discussion should begin at that point. The reason that this should be the starting point is that if the answer is "Yes" then you have to figure out how to make it happen. It is certainly ironic that as a society we feel it is imperative to provide health care to the very individuals whose actions have landed them in jail and separated themselves from free society, yet those of us who are free are given no such protection. My gut tells me that most people are decent and would not deny health care to those in need.

Everyday I see a parade of individuals brought to financial ruin by our "health care system." I see the pain and despair. I ask them to look at their bankruptcy attorney and I ask them,
"Do you know what I am?"

Inevitably the answer is "No."

I tell them, "I'm the national health care plan."

When a bankruptcy attorney is your national health care plan, something is seriously wrong with a system that should be providing necessary care to those in need.

Some Old Words

2009-02-08T13:30:00.000-08:00

I wrote this in July of 2001, almost eight years ago. As I'm finally plugging away at my novel that has languished in my digital storage for years, I thought my old musings on digital writing and publishing were as relevant and disheartening as it was back at the turn of the millenium.

July 7, 2001
The Problems with Being a Reader/Writer in a Digital Age
The printing press isn’t that old. From a global historical perspective, Gutenburg barely got the Bible published. In 500 years, we’ve gone from typesetting to word processing. Even 20 years ago, most writers still plucked away on typewriters. I didn’t use a computer to type my school papers until law school in the mid-1980s. Now, my writing has proliferated as much as the technology. Any rant, any rave, any errant thought can be captured and held. Storage space is small for words and the editing is easy. No need to discard the old drafts or maintain stacks of paper. Old habits die hard and paper is still strewn all over my offices, but the stacks in files in my word processor alone, boggles the mind. I’ve authored thousands of pages and I have yet to fill a CD.
1. Publishing has lost its mystique.
Nothing can be as overwhelming or disconcerting as stepping into a Barnes and Noble and strolling through the mass marketed isles, understanding that on my desk at home is an even more voluminous warehouse of books on the web site, ranked, critiqued and ready for my shopping cart. The volumes, the pages, the sheer mass conjures thousands of individuals at word processors, sitting at desks, pecking or scrawling their thoughts, their stories, their recipes, their how-tos, their histories and their life stories to be processed and consumed.
The entire process seems not unlike farming. The farmer toils and produces food, growing each year out of the land, as massive machinery, picks and harvests the grain only to start the process over next year. The writers have become consumables, not unlike food. We stuff our heads and return to renew our feast another day as cranial hunger ensues. For over a hundred years, this has been done through the newspapers, mass produced, read and discarded. No lasting art from the paper. The proliferation of web zines, the ease of self-publishing with a computer and laser printer, takes the cost of publishing and puts it into the hands of those to whom it might otherwise have been inaccessible. Anyone can publish. Anyone can see their words in print.
Twenty years ago, being a published writer was a Holy Grail that at times seemed unattainable. Even now, the rejection slip stories are proliferated and propounded. The only reason people don’t get published today is if they have a rejection fetish and enjoy the rejection. The difference between being successful and making a living writing and publishing is vast.
For a case in point, I look at a poet whose workshop I attended in Salt Lake. Apparently, she is highly regarded and well thought of in academic circles. I purchased a book she had published on her philosophy of art. The thing that amazed me was the length of her personal bibliography contained in that book – 14 pages of books, essays, journal articles, published poems, video recordings, sound recordings, interviews and biographical/critical studies. She has a fourteen page bibliography and until I signed up for the workshop, I’d never even heard of her. I thought of my own bibliography – non-existent. I thought of all the writers with longer and shorter bibliographies that I’ve never even heard of or thought about.
Maybe this is where the food analogy falls apart. Books are worse than food. They may become dated, lacking those illusive literary qualities of universality and verisimilitude. Unless they are burned or the hard drive crashes or the CD scratches, the written word becomes the perpetual consumable. We can eat and eat and never be filled and the thing we consume still exists. This gives rise to the ubiquitous discount book shelf. Super Buy blue stickers. 50% Off or More. Prices as Marked. The book, having lost its economic efficiency, can still be consumed by the deal and word hungry. I used to yearn for literary recognition. Now, I yearn to one day find my book on a discount book shelf.
There are no used food stores. What happens when one consumes a book already consumed by another? My house, my office could be used book stores. I have more books than I’ll ever read that I own and I still buy more. I am not a library. I am not wealthy. I think I could start at one end of my personal library and never read it all in a lifetime. What does that mean to a writer? I’ve eve bought the books and the author may not be able to get me to read it. The task seems insurmountable – a triathalon of biking up Everest, swimming the Atlantic and running across a continent. How or why in the multitude of voices, will anyone bother to hear what I have to say? Why is what I say important in comparison to the words that have gone before me? Am I just looking for a flash, a moment in time, where for a second I become consumed, rather than ignored?
2. Too much information, so little time.
Filter. The only option at our disposal is to filter. The problem is that in this ocean of
words, to borrow a tired metaphor, the reader is adrift. My personal reading style could be described as the synchronicity of the accidental encounter. I read something. It leads me down a path. I follow it, finding others along the way. I drift, apparently baseless, reading vociferously and indiscriminately.
The great promise of the information age is that all our information will be filtered. We will receive only those items we wish to receive. We can make ourselves myopic by choice or multi-optic. I can write a piece on reading and writing in the digital age and it can be directed to those who wish to read it, by an expressed preference. If I can generate an audience, Amazon.com will send them an email every time I publish a new book. I can subscribe to email lists that effect my own interests. On top of the bombardment of books and paper, I receive electronic missives at a rate that could eliminate my entire need for books at all. I could simply spend my time reading what is sent to me on my computer.
The question is how do you select what you read – obviously, if you have reached this point in the article, you have read this far. Case in point – why have you chosen to read this article? The answer is complicated, but lies rooted in the answer to two deeper questions: Why do I read? and Why do I write? If this was a flow chart, these two questions could be followed back to the initial question of all questions – Why?
Certainly it may be overkill to suggest that metaphysics lies at the heart of reading a magazine article. Yet, the choice of what to do with the precious commodity of life, is inherently tied in with the desire to write. The writer realizes that the written word, if preserved (thus the appeal of the ‘published’ author), is a perpetual consumable. The perpetual motion machine of interacting in the world. Even when the machine of a body dies, the perpetual motion machine of words carries on.
The more eccentric and outrageous science fiction fantasies discuss the potential to download our thoughts and mind into the computer. We scoff. We realize the absurdity of capturing the entire consciousness in a machine – or at least the incredible complexity of such a task. Yet, I sit in my apartment on a Saturday morning, not dressed, a computer on my lap, pouring my thoughts in as fast as my fingers can act as a conduit to the screen, so that this moment or at least a portion of this moment is preserved to be consumed and consumed again by an audience. The life seems not to come from simply saving the thoughts on the hard drive, but by having that hard drive accessed by other conscious beings. My thoughts in your head give me a sense of immortality. Every writer must at some time fantasize and hope that the body of work is discovered after they are dead. I want to be discovered while I am alive. I want to connect with other human beings. This becomes the answer for me to the two questions and ultimately to the Why? question. I write to connect with other people. I read to connect with other people. I live to connect with other people.
If this is the purpose, then why not just converse? Why not just hang out with my friends and family? As a basic answer, the need to connect is broader. I need to connect with like minded souls. I need to connect on my own selfish terms. Some compulsion spurs me to create art. Art is a connection that is deeper than simply conversing. Art reaches at the deeper issues in life. Art gets into the depths that daily life seems to miss. Art speaks to a spot that seems often ignored. We have trained ourselves to see the artistic only when we are reading, looking at art, watching film or engaging in some aesthetic activity. To connect on that level, we must play on that stage. Art is a conveyor of emotion. We speak of an emotional connection, yet we experience the connection in a poetic image or a story.
3. Lack of direction in our information choices.
Where do we look for art? Academics can kill the artistic impulse. Capitalism can kill
the artistic impulse. The exceptions are obvious. Academics occasionally out of all the dryness and banality, create amazing artistic creations. Capitalism and consumerism similarly have produced out of the over-dramatized and highly sentimentalized dross, sparkling gems of artistic expression. Even in the fledgling artists and fledgling publications, much is highly lacking. and amatuerish, yet the novice creates great art. The percentages, if they were kept, I have a feeling would be remarkably consistent. The percentage of junk versus the percentage of brilliance is probably quite consistent.
To some extent, when I write, I always want to tap into the brilliance, the amazing force of creating great art. However, in a discussion of art, its purpose and the nature of being a reader and a writer, I do not intend this to be great art. I intend this to be a jumping off point for discussion, a more direct appeal to the community created by writing – to discuss and illuminate what we mean when we say we find something great. The discussion becomes critical in the sensory overload of the digital era. Time needs to be spent, simply to determine where or what is deserving of our time.
I abhor at times the pure chance system of what I read. At other times it takes me wonderful places that I would have never gone. I have become wishy washy, lacking any absolutes. I learn of history and influences and the web becomes a convoluted mixture, folding in on itself and folding out, lacking and filled at the same time. It is a very personalized mixture of knowledge and it is unique from anyone else’s.

Not much has changed, with the possiblity that things have gotten worse for the publishing industry and the choices have exploded exponentially.

Words -- it is all just words.

Thinking

2009-01-11T10:22:00.000-08:00

I wonder, "Where is the thought?" "Where is the contemplation?"

I’ve had so many ideas, so many thoughts I wanted to write about and I’ve ended up with one sentence deletion after another. Ideas and concepts bombard me so rapidly that I don’t have time to process them or even create something meaningful out of them. So I’m attempting to create meaning out of the madness.

I look at people. I try to imagine their lives – work, eating, television, Internet, family and social connections and stress. I fail.

Last night, I attended a birthday party of one of JulieAnn’s friends from high school. It was a party, a celebration. I really didn’t know anyone there very well. All of the party accouterments were present, including a live band, shrimp and cocktail weenies (of the human and pork vanities) and rumor had it a comedian was going to come and perform later. I mourned me inability to simply relax into the frivolity. I couldn’t do it. I had nothing to say. I had nothing to contribute to the party euphoria.

This is when I lapsed into trying to figure out the people I was observing. I had the same thing happen to me the night before at an Italian restaurant, Zucca, near our house. My thoughts on the human condition intruded on my ability to enjoy the Margherita pizza, as I marveled at the sociality of my fellow humans.

I’ve never been much of a social animal, preferring to remain on the outside looking in, but I also crave to belong and be part of the crowd. I would like to be able to lose myself at a rock concert, banging my head in time with the moshing masses. I would like to immerse myself in the birthday party, dance and sing and speak of what? What were people talking about? I’m inarticulate and unable to speak the language of Party.

Music seems to be a mechanism for forming these communities and music hasn’t effected me much since my adolescence. Heavy metal gives me a little teen testosterone memory, but the music of parties baffles me – you can’t communicate over the noise. Karaoke baffles me. I can’t connect without words. The music that moves me is often in the words (ala Leonard Cohen), more than the rhythm, beat or melody. My I-pod is filled with spoken words, not music, an Apple aberration.

I want to connect to people. I want a society, a group to which I belong, but I don’t. I ache for a community like the Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Snyder) or the literary cliques in Paris in the 20s (Joyce, Hemingway, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co.) or 30s (Miller and Nin) or D.H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keefe in New Mexico.

Technology seems to offer an opportunity for such connections, but then I go back to my gaze at the crowd at the party and at the restaurant. There is a small likelihood I’ll connect at any level with those crowds through technology. In fact sprinkling my blog post with references to Apple, Microsoft and Amazon is more likely to get me a connection that anything I might write in a blog post, but I’ll be connecting with a computer, analyzing what I write for marketing purposes.

Yet, I hope. I feel connected reading. Books have always been the connective tissue joining me to the outside world. Occasionally, I’ve had the thrill of being connected by my writing and a reader who acknowledged the connection. The connection of words is the language I understand. I don’t understand the language of rock concerts or parties. I’d rather batter an idea with someone than smack at a pinata. I struggle with the banter of social websites, but crave legitimate debate and discussion.

I’m going to go to my Facebook page now. When it asks me what I’m doing, I’m going to tell it I’m thinking.

The Politics of Reconciliation

2008-12-21T10:04:00.000-08:00

Reconciliation is not a popular political choice apparently. I wasn’t going to write anything today, but I noticed the article on Pastor Rick Warren defending his choice to give the invocation at Barak Obama’s inauguration, despite the fact he is openly hostile to the concept of gay marriage. The "left" as characterized by the news report is up in arms over the choice.

I’ve never completely understood the religious animosity towards liberal thinking. I’ve always believed that true Christian beliefs were more conducive to liberal, rather than conservative thought. You know – feed the poor and the hungry and do unto others. Somehow divisiveness over abortion, homosexuality and feminism, led the Christians away from New Deal politics.

I applaud Obama’s attempt at trying to bridge that gap in his bookend pastors for his inauguration – the anti-gay marriage pastor and the pro-gay marriage pastor. Anyone that is truly concerned about getting away from politics as usual and in favor of progressive government policies on an economic level, need to encourage their political representatives and political parties to remove the "moral" and "family value" issues and address what should be the real issues of politics: how best to govern and how best to protect all members of the society. Leave individual morality to the churches and religions and promote a society that isn’t divided, but reconciled towards common goals that we can all agree on.

Political discussion can actually have some benefit when it is about how best to accomplish a goal, rather than fighting over what the goals should be. The goals of a government are simple in theory – "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice and insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense and secure the blessings of liberty for us and our posterity." Let’s go back to step one – a more perfect union can only be created by knowing when we can agree to disagree. This is the message of Obama’s pastor choice. We must have a society that can agree to disagree.

Our political debates should be about how to better serve justice, peace and liberty with our government, not how with religion and belief.

ON DIGITAL PERSONA, FLESH PERSONA, AND PRIVACY

2008-12-14T09:50:00.000-08:00

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of persona lately, whether it be a literary persona, a work persona, a dramatic character persona, a psychological persona or the new incarnation of the digital on-line persona. I find myself constantly donning masks to the point of wondering who I am. Am I the husband? The parent? The lawyer? The writer? The sinner? The saint? Am I my digital persona? Who the hell am I?

Social networking sites like FaceBook and MySpace are exercises in persona creation. I get to pick and chose the facade I give the digital world. The more devout afficionados of the digital world create their own websites. The real world is reflected in the digital world, but it is a funhouse mirror warped by the design and desire of each person posting.

The creation of a persona or societal mask is nothing new. High school is where every adolescent cuts their teeth on persona creation and the high school personas are predictable – the hot girl, the bookworm, the jock, the drama queen, the rebel. Go rent a copy of The Breakfast Club if you need a refresher course. Adults aren’t much better in the lawyer’s suits, the houses on the hill, the cars (or big trucks) and the entire fashion and makeup industry.

Digital persona are frighteningly easy to create, desperately hard to maintain and control. Fleshy manifestations of persona aren’t easily copied or replicated and due to years of culturization more easily interpreted. Changing one’s flesh persona took time and effort and was a gradual process. I’m no Luddite, but the digital persona swoon can make me light headed.

Another downside is the Narcissistic quality of digital persona, basically a "look at me" culture. Maybe that is why it always feels like high school – it is the adolescent technology screaming for attention. How will digital technology mature? Or are we to be always mired in MySpace and FaceBook?

As I was writing that last paragraph, I realized that I was a little bit off put by the fact that the geeky technology, which used to provide anonymity and protection to my anti-social side has turned into an exhibitionistic orgy with the explosion of social networking sites. I’m the nerd with glasses again being simultaneously turned on and socially overwhelmed by the cheerleader.

The technology has advanced to the point where maintaining a digital life is a little bit like being an adolescent whose diary is always accessible to their parents. Whatever you post, whatever you say, whatever floats off your keyboard into the internet ether is probably and in most instances lost forever, yet on occasion, it comes back transfigured into something unrecognizable or terrifying, often carried by the panting mutt, Google.

Google sounds like goggles and those Google goggles are peering at your every move trying to reduce your fleshy persona into a consuming, buying, advertising accessible animal whose data is slowly being filled in. Google is trying to clone you and anticipate your every move and like Pavlov’s dogs we salivate because Google gives us what we want. Google is the digital Big Brother watching our every move.

My predisposition has always been towards privacy – be it digital or earthly. Yet, I’m starting to wonder if privacy is such a great thing. I’m still very interested in protecting things that people want kept private, but I see a benefit to the lack of on-line privacy. The benefit is by being constantly googled, goggled and gapped at, the mature development is to create an on-line persona with integrity that includes the various flesh incarnations’ strengths and faults. In a world of ones and zeros, the digital persona that best reflects the real person will give the real person the most value in the real world. Become one with your digital self.

The other factor in this privacy debate is that the Internet is essentially the marketplace. Humans have always congregated for social and economic exchange and the two have always gone hand in hand. Posting on-line is supposed to have an economic impact for the participant. Do any of us really expect privacy in the marketplace? The two are incongruous. You enter the marketplace (and I envision street bazaars or farmer’s markets) and nothing is private. To resurrect a cliche, people who live in glass blogs shouldn’t post stones – or something like that.

Simply realizing that the on-line world is a big market free-for-all changes all sorts of perceptions about on-line privacy.

We now convey information more freely, but we are still working on the infrastructure for how that is to function economically. Our libraries are manifestation of the willingness to pay economically for ideas, but the pricing of those ideas has always been a conflict. I’m writing this sitting in my library at home, cocooned in books. Many of the authors died impecunious – Thomas Paine and Oscar Wilde are a couple that spring to mind. Great ideas and great writing have not always ended in an economic payoff. Dying has often been one of those great mechanisms for validating an artistic position. The point is the old system wasn’t always that great at allocating economic resources to benefit the writer and artist and the new system suffers from the same problem, but also offers some unique solutions.

The main solution I see is that it allows us to create social networks that match our own predispositions. I’m no economist and I’m a little bit upset that they made economics such a dry topic when I took it in college, because I’m fascinated by it now, particularly as it pertains to writing and art. I read a short story by Tolstoy, "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" this week. The moral of the story is essentially don’t forget your mortality in your acquisitiveness.

How much income does an artist need? This is the question I find intriguing in light of the internet culture. I wonder how much income would I need from my writing to pull the literary equivalent of a Gaugin and chuck it all and move to Tahiti and spend the rest of my life swimming in the warm tropical words. I do the math. 1000 fans at $10 a month and I think I could probably do it. Math is an evil thing, because 10x1000 is such an easy equation. You see someone with 850 friends on FaceBook or you see the amount of traffic other blogs receive and it almost seems do-able.

The problem is that the art suffers if you turn from artist to huckster to get your thousand, so the art must come first. Which brings me back to the original thrust of this post – what is a digital persona? Is it the huckster selling? Is it the tortured artist? Is it the social butterfly? Is it the bitter misanthrope? Who am I and why have I donned this digital mask and entered this new frontier? In the past, I’ve always been just a little bit fearful of what I’ve posted on-line, wondering about the what ifs were a client, a potential reader, a judge, another attorney, my siblings or my parents to read this. The answer is amazingly simple and amazingly difficult all at the same time – be a person of integrity and it doesn’t matter.

ON THE POWER OF THE WRITTEN WORD

2008-12-07T12:21:00.000-08:00

I’ve always loved books. The word written down on a page or a computer screen – it hasn’t mattered. The power of the Word has influenced me throughout my life, transformed me as a person and shaped my life in ways I probably haven’t even imagined. I’ve read countless books from first grade on and how I think, how I feel, how I love, how I parent, how I make a living have all been shaped by the written word.

Now, I’ve spent an entire Sunday morning wallowing around in words, trying to make digital connections (and failing mostly). The irony is that as I listen to the words of the Christmas songs wafting down the stairs, I realize that my whole life is now connected to things I’ve written. I met my wife because she writes. I read what she wrote. I wrote about it. Now we are married and she lets me stay downstairs on Sunday and play around with words.

The playground of words is so broad and so encompassing, it is easy to feel lost, like I do now. You scream out the words, but no one hears. Words are most beautiful when they are heard, acknowledged and understood.

The power of words comes from their ability to connect us (or in the context of the law – control us). I think I prefer connection over control. I ache for my words to connect and sometimes they actually do.

ON TIME AND INTERDEPENDENCE

2008-11-26T05:40:00.001-08:00

It is appropriate that I am writing this on an extreme deadline – I have less than an hour before I need to get ready to start my day of picking up children, meeting with clients and going to court. Almost every tick of the clock today is going to entail me interacting with and depending on the people around me. Just the simple act of getting out of bed, walking downstairs, reading the paper, drinking and preparing a warm glass of liquid and sitting down to write this little blog post and I’ve relied on countless individuals.

I usually only get these thoughts when I have a moment for quiet reflection and the effect is always extreme humility. I can’t do anything by myself without help. I sit now at a table that I don’t even know who manufactured and built, who shipped the table and which store sold the table to my wife before I was ever even in the picture. So my laptop is propped up by factory workers, lumpers, and a retail sales staff – not much independence there. I did not even mention all the parts of the laptop, the history of computing and science that developed the technology to allow me to write this in the hour before I go to work in the morning and post it for essentially the entire world before breakfast compliments of ISPs, digital theoreticians, Hewlett and Packard, Thomas Edison and my seventh grade typing teacher, whose name I can’t remember and who taught me how to type in a room full of Selectrics from IBM, so I guess IBM deserves some credit (or blame) as well.

Time keeps ticking. As totally dependent as I am on the entirety of human existence that has preceded me, the dependence on the ticking clock is what really enslaves me. I want to contribute to the massive flood of interdependence that is the human condition and to make the slightest ripple on the surface of surging existence I need time – and I don’t have any.

Nurturing relationships takes time. Making a living takes time. Raising children takes time. Developing a career takes time. The simple act of reading the paper takes time. Getting Thanksgiving dinner takes time. Getting into shape and staying healthy takes time. Reading takes time. An all time great thief of time – writing.

Time is all about taking.

I’m always humbled by the fact that if someone is bothering to read this I’ve taken their time. This morning I’ve read Philip Roth, various articles in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman and JulieAnn (my wife and author) – all before 6:30 a.m. In fact it was the New York Times that inspired this riff on time and interdependence. Sometime before 5:00 a.m. my Kindle downloads the New York Times on my digital doorstep with a digital thunk on my bedside table. I’m compelled to read the paper. I want to read Friedman on the latest economic meltdown. I want to read about the Obama transition team’s exploits. I want to read about how Philip Roth’s publisher has placed a moratorium on acquiring new books and how his Roth’s last three books sold less than 75,000 copies in hardback. I want to think about what that means to an aspiring writer who is masquerading as an attorney and happens to be one of the less than 75,000 that bought Roth’s books.

I’m caught in the cross currents of time and interdependence. Time constraints pull me in various directions, while interdependence goes in another and the swirl can require every effort to try and create a modicum of self-determination in the direction I’m heading. Right now, I’m headed to the showers – a cliched sports metaphor and the reality of my day.

ON BEING HUMAN

2008-11-16T13:26:00.000-08:00

I’m having serious issues with the tenth commandment. I am coveting someone else’s words. Few authors make me covet their work – at various times Dostoevsky, Philip Roth, Shakespeare, Kerouac, T. S. Eliot and Kafka have made me slip into paroxysms of jealousy and desire. Yet one author stands above the rest for me – Henry Miller.

Miller has a strange and glorious cosmology, mixing mortality and philosophy into a down and dirty humanism. Miller has the ragged and romantic streets of 1930's Paris as a back drop to much of his writing and he takes full advantage of the squalor and decadence to state his case on creating art and being human. Look at this writing:

When the eyes waggle then will I hear again Dostoievski’s words, hear them rolling on page after page, with minutest observation, with maddest introspection, with all the undertones of misery now lightly, humorously touched, now swelling like an organ note until the heart bursts and there is nothing left but a blinding, scorching light, the radiant light that carries off the fecundating seeds of the stars. The story of art whose roots lie in massacre.

I read that and I honestly don’t feel worthy to hold the moniker of writer and think my voice is not Art. An anger and frustration wells up inside me and again a voice from the grave sings to me. Henry has felt the anger and frustration and fought back with a vengeance. He is more alive now, even though he is dead. He is dead and lives. I live and part of me feels dead. Yet he fights and dances on my living corpse on a Sunday morning when his immortal words out live his worn out and decaying flesh.

Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse . . .

Henry was persecuted and prosecuted for his blasphemy that being honestly human is the most difficult of tasks. Yes, he used naughty words, but the repulsion to the dirt, the rejection of the dirt is the rejection of the dust and Earth where Henry rots and dances. The fight to be human and to create art out of being human and out of surviving is the dance against death, against inevitability, against the dust we sprang from and to which we again descend. As usual, Henry writes it and it is not off key:

If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back. There are always too many rotten pillars left standing, too much festering humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of centuries there does appear a man with a desperate, hungry look in his eye, a man who would turn the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge. If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defense left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.

Did he know when he was furiously writing out those words seventy years ago that his page would explode in my face and wring tears out of my eyes? Is existential desperation required to write words that explode and wound? I want to feel desperate. I read Henry’s stare down on art and beauty and my world transformed.

I’m not scrounging for meals or food. I’m slathered comfortably into my suburban home surrounded by loving wife and children. My extended family wraps around the outside of my cozy shell of existence, insulating me from Henry Miller’s rotting Paris. Yet . . . Yet . . .yet I want to blaspheme. I want to rip the skin off of the face of society because underneath I don’t think I’ll find a skull and certainly no brain.

Ogden, Utah is the scrubbed up and prettified version of 1930's Paris, but it is worse than Paris, because the rot, the decay, the putrefication hides behind gleaming scrubbed houses and manicured lawns. Miller spoke and I finally inherited those X-ray glasses off of the back of the comic books and I can see. I was blind and now I can see. The facade of clean brick turns to dust to reveal a burned out, toxic waste site that would make the EPA run screaming from the room.

Maniacally we work. Manically we consume. The economy is rotting because we don’t consume, but the human locust leave nothing living behind its consumption, other than the rotting carapace shells of the growing insect and the defecating waste. Like good little locusts, every Monday we parade our consumptive trash to the curb so that the waste and destruction we are committing is toted away in a communal exercise of denial that is known as "garbage day." Consume and show your patriotism. Consume and be happy. Consume and consume, don’t tread on me, I’m eating my own tail. The serpent has come to the American Eden and offers up no fruit, but begs Eve and Adam to consume themselves out of existence. Obligingly we fall. Just make it look like paradise, even though it is a rotting swamp, and we will consume. We will walk through the Garden of Wal-mart and eat whatever the serpent would have us eat. If we keep eating the forbidden fruit of consumption, maybe we will never realize that we have left Eden and paradise is the fantasy of the deluded.

I’m a little monkey typing on a keyboard. Pounding letters onto a screen and no one is listening. The absurdity of me sitting here and typing in the cool fall light about the desperation I feel with existence, with the consumptive rot I see around me as I realize that the writer screaming at the world doesn’t have a place to stand and my body is drawn and quartered, pulled in four directions at once, leaving my heart to beat once or twice in the dust before it is done, but it is the only drawing and quartering ever done as a suicide. I can’t let go of my paycheck. I can’t let go of my comfort. My toes turn blue grasping at physical comfort and solace and at human acceptance. I grasp the reigns of the horses that tear me apart, even as I feel the legs and arms pulling out of their sockets and all I can think of is there something I could bite and grasp with my teeth that would pull me into five instead of four pieces – drawn and quintupted – with my head rolling along in the dust behind the apocalyptic horsemen that have graciously pulled apart my flesh, my teeth grinningly biting into the rope that pulled off my head.

Words have become just another commodity to be consumed and eating only makes the hunger grow worse. Lives and words repeat and the hunger grows because the soul is malnourished. The skeletal soul can’t take in nourishment in the Dante-ian hell of eating without any cessation of the starvation. Words slip down the mental gullet and slip out in an explosive diarrhea leaving emptiness and hunger – nothing sticks. Words are cheap. Here are my words. You have my words. You have nothing. I’ve read and read books and all the words are gone. I remember nothing. You’ll remember nothing of this.

Being human means that we forget. Being human means that we don’t really look at what our life is. Being human means that we don’t realize our life is nothing but a feast of death, that we live by eating other life. Being human is desperate. Being human is being mundane, predictable and agonizingly the same as everyone else. Being human is to decay and grow old and die. Being human is to hurt, an agonizing schism of opposites.

Being human means that we remember. Being human means that we can really look at what our life is. Being human means that we realize our life is nothing but a feast of death, but somehow we still manage to respect life. Being human is being hopeful. Being human is being unusual, unpredictable and gloriously unique. Being human is to grow and expand and become immortal. Being human is to feel exquisite pleasure, in an orgasmic ecstacy of opposites.

Mostly, being human means to covet the beauty and try to add to the beauty we find amongst the horror of existence. Thank you, Henry.

ON CONFLICT AND RESOLUTION -- CONCLUSION

2008-11-09T14:27:00.001-08:00

So, negotiation power is not just based on brute physical or economic force. On occasion, power is derived from conviction. Power can be derived from an imbalance of desire. In the case of same sex marriage, the strength of the status quo is derived in part from how much those favoring same sex marriage desire to change the system. The desire for change – in and of itself – grants the status quo power, more than it deserves.

I know this is a little bit of an obtuse point, but it can be illustrated by a simple example from interpersonal relationships. I’m referring to "puppy love" power. The young, ardent admirer who is smitten with puppy love for the love object has submitted to the power of the love object, whether it be the teeny-bopper celebrity (and their marketers) or the kid next door. By desiring an object or a person, the power is bestowed upon another that can either provide or not provide the desired object. Once power is acquiesced, the conflict begins: Does he like me? Can I see him? Oh no, he doesn’t like me. I’ve had teenage daughters. I know how it goes.

The resolution of conflict, then, is in part surrendering the desire for a specific outcome. Being wedded to the outcome adds to or creates the conflict and prevents attempts to find alternate solutions. This is not to say that ardent support of a concept is inviting conflict, just that being wedded to a solitary outcome hampers discussion and problem solving. Demanding a set outcome is an invitation to conflict. Desire the outcome, but desire resolution more.

Invigorated is the emotion I’ve been feeling most since the election. The arguments and the conflicts remain the same, but simply having the hope that my voice could be heard makes me want to speak out more. While appearing counter-intuitive, an environment that encourages disagreement and dialogue is more likely to foster conflict resolution than an environment that discourages, limits or most importantly ignores dissent.

I hope that is the spirit of this blog – a forum for respectful and heated discussion that are argued from foundational principals. Conflict can’t be resolved unless you start from a place of agreement. Finding disagreement is easy. Finding the area of agreement within the disagreement is the first step towards resolution. Follow this first step with an understanding of the power dynamic of the disagreement and with an eye to areas of unused power or improperly surrendered power and resolution becomes more likely. The conflicts of fall and winter can progress seasonally into the resolution of spring and summer and the seasons of conflict and resolution can begin yet again.

ON CONFLICT AND RESOLUTION

2008-11-08T10:15:00.000-08:00

The crisp, sun-filtered air of November is in sharp conflict with my skin as I stepped out this morning to run a Saturday morning errand. The cold bite against my warm skin woke me up a little bit. The sunlight of the fall morning had a blinding clarity. I have a rental car, since my car lost a fender bender conflict with a Jeep. The tire of the jeep was above my bumper and managed to smash my hood and radiator back into my car’s engine. The rental car is new, less than five hundred miles and free of much of the debris and detritus that accumulates through living with a car. My imprint, in fact no human imprint, is present other than the thoughtful design. How do I know that holding down a number button on the radio will set that station? Yet I know it and I set about to program the stations off of the static the buttons are currently attached to.

I hit the search button. There is an interview with a Muslim women, who is stating that the West is incorrect if the West thinks that change in the Muslim world will come from the women. She said you don’t ask the prisoner for liberation. I thought I’d found NPR. I hadn’t. I had found a Christian talk station that was broadcasting its Friends of Israel program.

After the interview, the answer began with a news story about the Simon Wisenthal Museum of Tolerance that was being planned in Jerusalem that had temporarily been blocked by Muslim groups who had objected to the site of the museum when Muslim graves had been found on the construction site. The case had gone to the Israeli Supreme Court. The Center for Tolerance was embroiled in litigation. The irony resonated with me, bouncing off the ceilings of current events, personal discussions, politics, work, and relationships.

I’m afraid that most of our Museums of Tolerance are just like the Museum in Jerusalem – a Museum where we place our tolerance to look at and admire and a good place to battle to show just how tolerant we are. Tolerance is not passive. Tolerance requires a discipline of thought. You simply can’t tolerate, you also have to understand. True tolerance must include compassion and empathy for the opposing viewpoint. Tolerance requires looking for active solutions for the resolution of conflict. You can’t be tolerant when you are fighting. When the fight breaks out, tolerance has left the building.

The entire country has been living in conflict over the past few months during the Presidential elections. The conflicts have not dissolved with the election. Discourse has failed to be productive. Conciliation and cooperation have been lacking. I was encouraged by President-elect Obama’s appeal to find solutions and for cooperation. My impression is that the issues we need to deal with today – war, the economy, health care, energy and living wages – cannot be solved by ideological banter, but only by solutions outside traditional political thought and more complex than believed by the punditry.

A huge complication in this mix is the inability to resolve the most divisive issues, which are also not the most important. I find much of the concern over so-called moral issues or family values in politics to be counter productive and a colossal waste of time. The argument devolves into a discussion of what is right and what is wrong and completely avoids the areas in which the dispute could be resolved. Inevitably both sides fall into the conflict and dialogue breaks down. Conflict resolution requires patience and conviction. Anger simply cannot resolve conflict absent violence of the sword, the pen or the word. I find my words lapse into abstraction that would be better served by the concrete example.

The obvious choice for this discussion is the same sex marriage dispute that is raging on the front pages of the paper today. To me this isn’t even a discussion about marriage. The tolerant view is to allow everyone to hold their own belief in marriage. The real conflict and the arena for solution is not two diametrically opposed viewpoints, but a solution that allows equal protection for everyone under the laws of the land and also allows for the free exercise of religion. Much of the confusion lies in how religious morality is equated with civil enforcement. Laws that are necessary for an orderly society often coincide and overlap with religious doctrine and confusion ensues. Thou shalt not kill is punishable by prison, but is this dictated by religious belief? At this stage in our history, I think it is safe to say that the proscription against murder is accepted by believers and non-believers alike.

The State should exist to provide an environment that promotes diversity and peace, while protecting individual rights. As was echoed in Barak Obama’s acceptance speech, we need to work to create a "more perfect union." A union symbolizes inclusion, not exclusion. The moral standard I hold out for a government is the one that can be the most inclusive, a more perfect union. The arguments on divisive issues should start at this juncture and be argued from this viewpoint. The tenor and the effectiveness of the argument changes if both sides are arguing from common ground.

I know I make an assumption that everyone believes that the United States should work towards a secular Zion. (I mix my religious and political metaphors, partly as an illustration of how easy it is to confuse the two.) My experience in dealing with conflict is that you need to begin from a common belief. There is no resolution to "marriage is only between a man and a woman" versus "marriage is between two consenting adults regardless of gender." No amount of argument can resolve that dispute. The argument only becomes resolvable if you start from common ground and agreement.

Another problem in conflict resolution is the issue of power versus powerlessness. If a result is imposed on you by those who hold power, the instinct is to rebel and fight back, increasing the exercise of power against you. Power can come in the form of the police, the majority, money or simply the imposition of an opposing view. I happen to believe that the human spirit thrives more in an environment where it does not feel oppressed.

I’ve been thinking about power this morning, because I’ve always been anti-death penalty. This isn’t intended to be a discourse on the death penalty, but almost all defense lawyers I know are anti-death penalty, partly because they know that despite the procedural and Constitutional protections that create a phenomenal system, the flaws are numerous and profound. The headline in the paper this morning is that the Utah Supreme Court issued a ruling that the death penalty in Utah was in jeopardy because there isn’t competent legal counsel to represent the indigent defendants. My first thought was I should get qualified so I can handle such cases. My second and more lasting thought was of a defense attorney boycott. What would happen if the defense bar refused to defend death penalty cases? My idea was a power move, trying to grab power in a dispute in which argument and persuasion had failed. I like the idea still, because I’ve felt so powerless to stop State sanctioned killing. You win the death penalty cases by refusing to fight. It could be accomplished if like minded attorneys decided that it was time to make a stand.

To Be Continued . . .

On Quality and Quantity

2008-11-06T09:53:00.000-08:00

Obviously blogging is about attempting to create a voice and to be heard. I've been struggling with the need for quality in thought and quality in writing on a public blog versus the constant demand for attention that is the Internet.

Fundamentallly, the biggest constraint against having both quality and quantity is economic. To have high quality writing and high quantity writing simultaneously, the writing has to generate income or there has to be an alternate source of income. For me there is an alternate source of income -- my legal practice -- but it sucks up all my writing time.

I've been reading Henry Miller this week and I'm envious. I'm in awe of his writing. I'm in awe of his brazenness. I'm in awe of the beauty and clarity of his words. The symbol of the starving artist, creating the masterpiece out of poverty and degredation, is embodied by Miller in Paris in the 30s. I live in a different world. I used to think that I could only create out of lonliness and in fact my most prolific times have been when I was lonely. You can only read so much. You can only write so much. If you are reading this, I'm honored because I don't think many, if any, will.

Finite time equates to finite attention and that attention needs to be allocated. Yet, I'm finding a new burst of creative energy out of companionship and stability. It isn't loneliness that leads to creativity, but the attention. Being an artist and lonely is easy, because you don't have demands on the attention. Being an artist in comfort requires that effort be made to make time to give attention to the art, to the twist of the phrase and to the flow of the sentence.

This is the basis for my angst. I believe consistent quality will breed readers, but you also have to have the time to give the attention that is necessary to create quality. Maybe it is enough that I'm concerned, but a blog isn't a book.

I always had a goal to be a published author. I have been published in periodicals. I have yet to have a book published. I take five minutes and suddenly whatever happens to spew off my keyboard is suddenly published to where anyone can read it anywhere, but so what? Why the hell would you want to read this?

The artist isn't lonely. The artist isn't about attention. The artist is about the audience and connection.

I'm torn with by the pragmatism of my father and the seeming futility of this writing. The alterations that have been wrought on my psyche by reading other writer's words has been transformative, but the cumulative effect doesn't allow for any clear allocation of responsibility (other than the impact that one author had on me by getting me to marry her). So since marriage as an impact of my authorial endeavors is off the table, how can I even know if I have an impact?

I happen to be born into a time when the spigot on authorial output is opened so wide that writing now feels like -- to borrow a metaphor that I most recently heard from my wife -- peeing in the ocean.

Writing is in stark contrast to the concrete and judgmental world of the law. The words float out and no concrete words come back, just imtimations of effect, intimations of influence, intimations that at one time the words existed. Legal words come back and bite. Legal words move things -- money and people. No one is going to call me on the telephone because I made this blog post, but I can write a letter and I can almost guarantee the receipient will call me back if I'm threatening legal action and if my legal words are ignored, I bring in the guns to force the action.

Legal writing is visceral and immediate. Artistic writing is amorphous and ephemeral.

The harm of the legal word is immediate. The harm of the artistic word is unclear and morally ambiguous.

The law is words on crack, jacked up, wide-eyed and violent. The poem is words on anesthesia, dripping slowly over the cerebrum and insuring forgetfulness.

The quality (and quantity) of legal writing is easily quantifiable. Who ended up with the most money? Who is the most free? The quality (and quantity) of novels or poems isn't necessarily decided by the number of sales or the number of readers.

The power to immediately harm makes me fear legal writing more than the novel or poem. Yet, the words of belief, the words of fiction, the words of encitement, can in the most powerful forms transform millions. The legal word is the laser quided smart bomb, where art can be the atomic bomb annhilating nations.

Combine the two?

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all are created equal."

Sometimes it only takes a sentence.

The First 100 Days

2008-11-05T17:04:00.000-08:00

After any election, the new presidential administration sets up their plan for the first 100 days of governing. My inclination at this time is to create my own first 100 day plan for becoming politically active. I don't need to put together a transition team. I just need to allocate my energy. Some of the plans and ideas I have on my own first 100 day agenda (I'll start on January 20, 2009 as well, which gives me an extra eighty days) are the following items:

1. Reform of Utah's Pay Day Loan laws.
2. Amending Utah's Exemption Statute to allow for the earned income tax credit to be exempt from collection.
3. Lobby for appropriate reform of the bankruptcy code.
4. Encourage reform of much of the legislation from the Bush Administration that led to a reduction in civil liberties and ignored the Consitution.
5. Encourage sound health care reform policies on a state and national level.

From President-elect Obama's speech, I quote "The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America – I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you – we as a people will get there."

What difference can one person make? I hope to find out.

Election 2008

2008-11-04T11:34:00.000-08:00

I decided to start my non-anonymous blog today because of the election. I was thinking back to the events of my life over the past eight years and the elections of 2004 and 2000 were emotional pivot points. In fact, for my first post,I'm going to put up my thoughts and feelings from election night 2000 and juxtapose those thoughts with my reflections on eight years of the Bush Administration, which coincided with my eight years of being single.

Election Year 2000

November 7, 2000

I don’t want to feel emotion. I don’t want to be human. I don’t want to desire anything. I find myself craving a touch, a caress, a hug, and some comfort. I am tired of being hated and despised. I am tired of feeling like no one thinks like me. I don’t feel like I belong anywhere. I don’t like feeling so alone. Sometimes it gets so discouraging. I feel like I am Sisyphus and I’m not enjoying pushing the rock up the hill. What can I do to enjoy myself?

ELECTION NIGHT

I wanted to vote today.
I wanted my voice to mean something.
I wanted someone to care about things the way I do.
I wanted help.
I wanted hope.
I wanted to make a difference in someone’s life.
I wanted to make the world a better place.
They said I wasn’t registered.
My ex-wife was registered.
She didn’t vote.
She didn’t care.
My friend lost by 32 votes.
No one won that I wanted to win.
The world seems to be tilted against how I feel.
I was registered.
Why did they take me off the registration list?
What does it matter?
How could my solitary voice have even been heard?
Who would have cared?
When will I feel part of something again?
I feel myself going down.
I can’t stop it.
My electoral college is well short of 270.
I’m just losing.
The votes just aren’t there.
I’m a fourth party candidate in a two party system.
How can you even make a dent in this life?
What difference can one person make?
How do you get to a position to make a difference?
Why do I want to make a difference?
How many times can I take the voters saying they don’t want me?
How many times can I take the women saying they don’t want me?
Nothing seems to go the way I want it to.
I mess it up if it does.
I opted to be alone.
I can do alone.
Just don’t let me see everyone else together.
When will my storybook existence arrive?
It won’t.
No happily ever after.
I just can’t want or desire.
Then I won’t suffer.
No suffering if you don’t want anything.
I’m too tired.
I’m going to bed alone.
I live my life alone.
What is going on with me?
I thought I could believe in the symbol.
I thought I could resurrect.
I thought I could be saved.
I thought I could have faith.
I believe in something, I just don’t know what it is.
I don’t know what I believe in.
I’m supposed to find eternal life in the moment.
It is a pretty dismal eternity.
I suppose it could be worse, I could not be here.
Why would that be worse?
I wouldn’t hurt.
I’m so tired of hurting.
I’m so tired.
I’m so tired.
I’m so tired.
I’m so damn tired.
I kill myself for what?
A hope that sometime in the future I might have a little money.
I’m so tired I can’t even work.
Why the hell do I want money?
I don’t need money.
I can starve with the best of them.
I drive a car I didn’t pay for with a busted windshield.
I gambled in Vegas and lost.
I spun the dice and got snake eyes, a 1-1 on the 11th floor.
I landed on green in roulette.
I went bust in 21.
I lost it all.
Worst of all I lost hope.
I don’t know why I lost hope.
My desk is swamped.
I can’t even seem to get through it.
I’m being sued.
They want my money too.
I can’t even turn around without someone’s hand in my pocket.
I can’t sleep.
I can’t work out.
I can’t run.
I can’t function.
Everyone is mad at me.
I added 100 new clients and I don’t know how I am going to handle them.
I’m dying.
Day by dying day.
I go down with the sun.
When do I just blow up and give up?
I can’t believe that I can’t keep it together.
I can’t maintain this.
I can’t function.
I can’t do anything right.
My life is a joke.
I am paralyzed half of the time.
I’m supposed to instill confidence in my employees and I have none in myself.
Why am I appealing?
Why would anyone want me?
My money?
My ex has that.
My love?
My ex had it.
I’m not funny.
I’m not inspirational.
I don’t know anything.
Why am I in crisis again?
I haven’t felt like this forever.
I’m angry because I seem to be a biological animal, reacting to chemical reactions in my brain.
I’m not even autonomous.
I’m a chemistry experiment in some warped universe.
No one else even sees the world the way I do.
I don’t want to feel so damn alone.
I don’t want to be so damn tired.
I don’t want to only feel the cold of my sheets at night.
I don’t even have anyone to talk to.
I can’t let anyone read this.
It would be some manipulation on my part.
Some cry to just love me.
Hi, I’m in pain, please love me.
Nothing else seems to work.
I can’t get anyone to love or care about me by just being me.
I love women who sleep with other men.
I sleep alone.
Alone.
A-1 one, solitary.
I don’t think anyone has cried about me.
I don’t know why.
A Republican president.
The end of the world approaches.
Maybe we can have a nuclear war and in a blinding flash of light – happiness.
In a moment, the pain would be gone.
Burned away in an explosion of instantaneous pain numbing pain.
Happiness.
I’ve been trained against greed.
I’ve been trained against pride.
I’ve been trained against lust.
I’ve been trained against loneliness.
I manage to buck my training.
I have a full day tomorrow.
How am I going to function?
I’m not even sleeping.
I can’t sleep.
One a.m. and I have to be in Salt Lake by 10 a.m.
I have so much to do before I leave.
I get to go to Salt Lake twice today.
If I’d planned, I could have gone and stayed.
I can just feel myself getting my ass kicked in court.
I feel like an idiot.
I like to live in my little fantasy world that I am good.
I like to live in my little fantasy world that I do a good job.
I like my fantasies.
I believe that there is something to have faith in, but I don’t know why or who.
I admire faith, envy it, and feel as Tolstoy in his Confession – how can they have faith?
I must understand.
My mind won’t let me not.
What am I?
I am a sad case of a human being.
I look around me and I look at the people living out their existences.
I don’t watch TV.
I don’t much care about anything.
I am worthless.
I could be gone and within a year no one would care.
Gone.
And no one would care.
No one would miss me.
No amount of good I’ve done would count.
The pain I caused would live on.
Sometimes it is really hard to believe that my life has much meaning.
I want it to have meaning.
I don’t feel like it does sometimes.
I want to be loved and respected and I’m not.
I am a nut case.
Why is it so important for me to have my life mean something?
I look at the world and it is so large.
I am so insignificant.
It just seems bleak and pointless.
It is as if my brain is large enough to capture it all, but it can’t capture any meaning out of it.
Having some other human being say they want me, that would suffice.
Actions spoke louder than words.
Man, the actions are screaming.
Screaming that the only thing important is selfishness.
It makes me cry.
I don’t know why I’m upset over being unselfish.
I thought it was a virtue, but it feels mostly like a curse.
I’m unselfish.
I could list off the deprivations.
I indulge myself by buying books.
I have no house.
I have no legitimate car.
I give most of my disposable income to my ex-wife.
I pay her twice what I pay myself.
I’m getting fat.
I don’t run.
I’m out of shape and I can’t get the inertia to start again.
Oh yes, I write.
Whoppity Damn Do.
I write.
No one reads it.
It isn’t anything that makes any sense to anyone but me.
I write and write, hundreds of pages, but no finished product.
I am a writing masturbator.
Jacking off with the word processor.
Coming on the page.
Totally infertile.
No meaning growing out of this page.
I am alone.
I come back to that because I am.
I’ve written nearly six pages of sentences tonight.
This is one strange piece of writing.
I spout off and feel better.
It doesn’t feel better.
I just hurt.
Ouch.
Ouch.
Ouch.
I hurt.
I don’t feel better.
I’m just as alone as I was ten lines above.
Still all by my lonesome.
Sometimes it just feels overwhelming like there is no point.
Suicide is an option.
Not a very good one.
Most people would laugh at me suggesting that option.
Maybe I just want to be selfish.
Maybe if you don’t do any selfish acts, you manifest it in the most selfish act of all.
The thing is suicide doesn’t seem all that selfish.
The line seems so fine.
I could walk into the back room – climb out on the landing and jump.
Headlines and splatters.
11 stories right on to my head.
You won’t even grieve me for very long.
My therapist would get a kick out of this suicide note.
Mabye someone will read this and think I mean it.
I kind of do.
It scares me to go to work almost.
Funny, a kiss would make it all go away.
No one is going to be kissing me in the near future.
You start to feel unattractive after awhile.
I’m tired of taking all the blame.
I have big shoulders, but it is so heavy I’m about ready to dump and go on.
I’m just afraid I’ll get dragged over with the refuse.
George W. Bush – president.
Orrin Hatch – senator.
Mike Leavitt – governor.
Mark Shurtleff – attorney general.
Jim Hansen – Congressman.
Kent Winward – Alone.
Alone and with no popular vote.
I try and help people and I get killed.
The world is not set up to allow people to be kind.
Kind – hah.
Kind equals getting destroyed.
He’s nice, let’s sock it to him.
I’m so hurt.
But I’m kind -- damn it.
I need to scream.
It comes out silent.
Things just roll off my back.
Nothing bugs me.
I think about Rent.
I love that show.
The writer who can’t use words.
The songwriter who cannot hear, the filmmaker cannot see are my heros.
They are me.
I want to see that show.
I will go it alone.
I am always going to go it alone.
Here I am folks.
Here is your son.
I got 4.0 average in high school.
Cum Laude in college.
William Leary Scholar in Law School.
I’m flunking out of life.
I’m alone.
I piss everyone off around me.
So, here I am.
I am alone.
I am God.
I am the God I don’t believe in.
I don’t know how to put God at the center of my life.
I can put on a good show.
I can say that I feel something akin to your perceptions of God, but that I don’t believe in God.
I am a heretic.
I am a lunatic.
I am an unregistered voter on election day.
I am overwhelmed.
I can’t catch up.
I can go crazy.

Election Night 2008

I'm at home with my wife. I just put my son to bed after he fell asleep as I watched election results. My daughters are growing up. Bonnie voted today and is living on her own. Jessica is on the verge of adulthood and at her Mom's house. Megan is on her own and thriving in Salt Lake. Emma sprained her arm today and we spent an hour and a half in Instacare while she got x-rays and an arm splint.

I'm not crazy. I'm not overwhelmed. I voted early.

America is phenomenal. I'm crying.

This is unbelievably beautiful. I'm so -- I can't even articulate the beauty.

The symbolic significance is unreal.

All things can heal. Pain and discord can be reconciled.

I am not alone. I am surrounded by those I love and who love me. I voted.

The United States won. I won.

THE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

Yes, we can.

The election is won and the work begins. I wept because the work is hard. I wept because the work can work. I wept because ideals won out over fear. I wept because hope is beautiful. I wept because I felt joy. I wept because I do believe in this country and what it stands for -- liberty, freedom of press, freedom of religion, due process, trial by jury, no unlawful search and seizure, no cruel and unusual punishment, checks and balances on power, the power to vote, equal protection, and a right to an appeal. I wept for joy. I wept for the pain of others. I wept that I have a duty, an obligation to improve the country, to protect fundamental liberties and rights. I have a duty and I took an oath as an attorney to defend the Constitution.

I saw a man, essentially my age become President of the United States. Is this a right of passage I had forgotten about -- the confusion and unsettling emotion that part of the American Dream, to become President, has actually happened for another young boy born in the 1960s. And what have I done with my life? I am envious. I am in awe. I am honored that I got to vote for the man.

I am excited that we have a professor of Constitutional Law that is going to be our President. I am excited that we have a civil rights attorney as our President. I am excited to have someone who graduated from Harvard Law School as our President. I am excited to have an attorney as a President.

The spontaneous celebrations breaking out across the country -- Pennsylvania Avenue, Times Square, Grant Park, Harlem -- are the physcial manifestation of my emotions. I am the crowd jumping up and down outside the White House. I am packed into Time Square to ring in the new four years. I am black and white. I am America, torn and sad, unified and joyous.

I am 2000 and 2008. I cried both nights.