It includes a rented movie, three video and audio podcasts, two thousand songs, five Amazon Kindle ebooks, 10 games, 125 unread RSS items in NetNewswire plus dozens of cached articles in Instapaper, the New York Times and WSJ apps. It would literally take me months to go through it all. Plus once I landed my magical pocket computer filled up with even more - emails, tweets, feeds, etc.
Travis, likewise, itemizes what’s on his devices while taking a train to Denali National Park in Alask:
Instead, here’s what I had to content myself with: On my computer: hours of video: movies and TV shows and Web documentaries. Entire books, downloaded from Amazon. Computer games with shifting maps and dozens of levels. Yes, my battery would run out; there was undoubtedly an outlet on the train for me to recharge. But I wouldn’t bother Why would I, when I also had….
My iPhone: thousands of photos, hundreds of songs and a few audiobooks. And of course, offline email, SMS and a phone. Even if you hobble it: no Internet, no phone access, no GPS, there’s still plenty there to amuse and distract and fill your time.
I’ve been on six flights in the past week, and, like Travis and Steve, I’ve got a box of anti-boredom tools. I previously wrote about FORLORM: fear of lack of reading material. I used to carry an armload of books and magazines to combat the tedium of flights. Now my tools are a mix of the analog and the digital.
My usual regimen is, in order from boarding lounge to landing: read newspaper, complete crossword, read half a magazine, watch an hour of TV on my laptop, review notes (as I’m often flying to or from a speaking event), play games on the iPhone (mostly RSoccer09, a remarkably deep soccer game) then read the other half of the magazine. That’s usually more than enough for any domestic flight.
We are witnessing the death of boredom. On the other hand, we’re in an age of distraction. I don’t necessarily want to get all contemplative on an airplane. But we do need to be aware of the habits we’re forming, and how they might discourage healthy introspection.
Watchmen is not as much a movie as it is a nearly-three hour treatise on post-modernism in the superhero genre. It’s two hours of back story followed by 45 minutes of story.
I use the word ’story’ there because the movie unfolds with barely a causal event. A writing prof taught me that story was “the king died and then the queen died”, while a plot was “the king dies, and then the queen died of grief”. Because of the movie’s dense exposition and constant flashbacks, we see Watchmen’s story unfold around the characters, instead of them making the plot happen.
This makes for a remarkably dull movie. The film’s themes–is vigilantism an effective replacement for organized justice?, is the survival of the many worth the sacrifice of the few?, how does the threat of nuclear annihilation change our behaviour?– were pretty revolutionary in 1986, when the comic book was released, but they’re utterly familiar to comic readers and movie watchers today. That’s to writer Alan Moore’s credit–the comics are kind of a Citizen Kane for the industry. Watchmen have been so influential and imitated that the originals have lost some of its effectiveness.
There’s a lot to like in the movie. It looks great, and the cast is refreshingly free of household names (save for the excellent Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan, who spends most of his scenes nude and glowing blue). It’s also intensely violent–we’re talking Sin City in full colour. Some of the dialogue is clunky, but I imagine we can blame that on adherence to the original comics.
The movie also takes itself way too seriously. I’ve said it before, but (with rare exceptions) great movies always find ways to make us laugh. This ought to be doubly true when the film’s about a bunch of vigilantes running around in latex.
Metacritic gives the film a 56, which feels about right to me. There was plenty of eye candy (beginning with Malin Akerman, if she could lose the indie bangs), and some entertaining tropes, but too often I felt bored and fidgety. What did you think?
Somebody pointed me in the direction of this quote from poet and monk Thomas Merton. I thought it spoke to the current vogue for over-sharing (in which I’m a willing and guilty participant):
How tragic it is that they who have nothing to express are continually expressing themselves, like nervous gunners, firing burst after burst of ammunition into the dark where there is no enemy. The reason for their talk is: death. Death is the enemy who seems to confront them at every moment in the deep darkness and silence of their own being. So they keep shouting at death. They confound their lives with noise. They stun their own ears with meaningless words, never discovering that their hearts are rooted in a silence that is not death but life. They chatter themselves to death, fearing life as if it were death.
As regular readers know, we’ve been slaving away at a book on social media marketing for about a year now. It’s coming out in August of this year, and after much negotiation, we finally have a title. Wait for it:
Friends With Benefits: Online Marketing with Blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and More
We went back and forth with the publisher for a long time. We even convened a brainstorming group of our peers to devise the perfect one. The publisher seemed to want something mundane, and we wanted something, perhaps, overly clever. We eventually agreed on this one, which I’m pretty happy with. It’s a little cheeky and memorable without trying too hard.
And Now, a Cover Image
We’ll have some input into what goes on the cover of the book. Do you have any great ideas? The publisher, No Starch Press, seems a little edgy in their cover designs, so that’s encouraging.
Let me put the kibosh on any “you and Julie in bed” ideas right now. That’s not on.
We can try out some cover ideas on FriendsWithBenefitsBook.com, which is currently just a ported version of SocialMediaReady.com, our ebook site. We’re going to leave it that way for a couple more months (to sell a few more ebooks), and then change the design to reflect our forthcoming book.
At Northern Voice, Rob from Techvibes introduced me to Frank, who (I gather) created ZinePal. Here’s the elevator pitch on ZinePal:
Use zinepal.com to create your own magazines or zines for short. Select content from your favorite blogs, websites or RSS feeds and put it in your zine. zinepal.com creates an online version and a printable PDF. Then you print it and read it in your favorite coffee shop, e-mail it to your friends or just let them subscribe to your online zine feed.
There are bunch of these print-your-blog services out there, but what I liked about ZinePal was the sample Frank handed me. It was a two-page version of the recent posts from Kitsilano.ca (another of the aforementioned Rob’s projects). I snapped a photo:
Kitsilano.ca is a hyper-local blog, covering a particular neighbourhood of Vancouver. It’s easy to imagine that they could produce monthly “best of” editions of their blog using ZinePal, and distribute them to local businesses. They could replace the charming but goofy Coffee News (I recently took a photo of that publication as well). Local businesses could buy a combo advertising package, with their ads appearing both online and in the print edition. Briana from Tenth to Fraser (a blog about New Westminster) should check this out.
I created a quick ZinePal edition of my own site, picking entries that didn’t have embedded video. ZinePal provides a dedicated page for each, uh, zine, or here’s the direct link to the PDF. I didn’t go to the trouble of uploading a custom header or deploying a few other bells and whistles.
In an age of embedded audio, video and other Flash-powered widgets, ZinePal certainly isn’t for every site with an RSS feed. However, I do like the idea of extending a hyper-local blog’s audience into the offline world.
One of the first pieces of writing advice you ever hear is “write what you know”. This is valuable, if imprecise wisdom. It means both “write about that with which you are familiar” and “do your research to learn about the rest”.
As a young writer, I always felt a little hamstrung by this advice, because what I knew seemed so ordinary. Douglas Coupland was an author who delivered me from the fear of writing about my utterly ordinary life. After all, what was more familiar and ordinary to a middle-class Vancouver kid than Generation X and Shampoo Planet?
I don’t write fiction or drama all that often–I find it very difficult, and I’m lazy–but I still take reassurance when I read great writers writing about the ordinary. This winter I read Joseph O’Neil’s extraordinary Netherland, the best novel I’ve read in years. I just heard an interview (meh, RealAudio on that page, but here’s a link to an MP3 version) with him, and was struck by how similar his own life is to that of his protagonist in Netherland. They both grew up in Holland, they both love cricket, they both lived in New York’s Chelsea Hotel and so forth. If O’Neil can write a masterpiece built on such familiar plots and premises, then there’s probably hope for the rest of us.
I should mention that I took my own advice back in 2006 when I wrote a play called Bolloxed (I gave up the domain a while back, and the squatting page there now is very odd). It was about a Canadian software developer living in Ireland.
Our latest phone book arrived today. I picked it up off the welcome mat, carried it through the house, out the back door and deposited it in the recycling bin. Pulling the plastic wrap off the thing, I noticed a little card affixed to the front of the book. It’s called the “ecoFinder”:
It’s a little card with advice on how to dispose of things like batteries, old phone books and the like. Apparently it’s also promoting a directory of “over 1,500 environmentally responsible businesses” that’s new to this year’s phone book. Or maybe the directory is just a pilot project in Quebec? I’m a little unclear, based on the media release. Hang on, here’s a hilarious release mentioning the directory in Victoria’s phone book, as well as the “noteworthy” news that “the residential and alphabetical business listings has been increased from 6 to 7 points”.
This is a classic case of greenwashing. Aware of their reputation as a big waster of paper, the Yellow Pages Group is trying to deflect attention toward their ham-handed efforts to ‘green’ their brand.
I was at a friend’s place last week. They lived in a big apartment complex, and the phone books were arrayed around the edges of the foyer like sand bags holding back a flood. If my own Yaletown apartment is any measure, dozens of those phone books end up in the recycling bin.
You Can’t Opt Out Yet
This is the first phone book we’d received at our current address. I decided I’d call the Yellow Pages Group and opt out of future phone books. Here’s the thing: you can’t.
It’s 2009, and you can’t choose not to receive the phone book. In July, 2007, Annie Marsolais, a Yellow Pages Group spokesperson said there were no plans to implement an opt-out program: “The print book is here to stay because there are advantages to the format.”
Less than two years later, the Yellow Pages Group has changed their tune. Ms. Marsolais recently said (and I’m translating with my dodgy French), “since certain people expressed a desire not to receive our directory anymore, in 2009 we’ll put in place a mechanism which will permit people to remove themselves from the list.”
It’s pretty shameful that it’s taken them until 2009 to apparently consider an opt-out process.
The Arguments For Phone Books are Dwindling
A couple of years ago, I remember wholeheartedly agreeing with Lee’s proposal that phone books should go from opt-out to opt-in. There’s some interesting debate in the comments, but just like newspapers, the writing’s on the wall. The yellow pages needs to transform itself, or die.
One of the more robust arguments is that phone books are a basic service that everybody, even those without internet access and cell phones, enjoys. That’s true, but it gets less convincing with each passing year. Consider that, in 2007, 73% of Canadians had internet access. That’s up from 57% in 2003. I suspect that we’ve nearly reached 80% in early 2009. At what point does the phone book simply have too few users?
To a lot of Canadians I know, the Yellow Pages is just a huge brick of junk mail that arrives all at once. I recognize that they use recycled materials to print the book, but there’s still a ridiculous amount of waste in the manufacturing, distributing and waste management of the books. The Yellow Pages Group is proud of the face that they publish about 30 million directories. That’s pretty much one for every Canadian. I wonder how many of them never get opened.
How long do you think the Yellow Pages will last? 2012? 2020?
I recently started listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers: The Story of Success. I’ve enjoyed his other books, and a New Yorker Conference video on the same subject as this book, so I downloaded this one from Audible.
I’m not very far in, but I’m quite enjoying it. I do have one little complaint about a shocking mistake that Mr. Gladwell makes. He opens the book, to my bemusement, with a story about the Vancouver Giants and their recent Memorial Cup victory. Have a listen and see if you can spot the problem. That’s the author narrating:
“Third quarter”? “Third quarter”? Seriously, Malcolm. Surely you attended at least one or two hockey games while growing up in Elmira, Ontario. And maybe a young Malcolm glanced up from his McLuhan studies to avoid a wayward puck and note that a hockey game has three periods. Truth be told, he does correctly reference the “second period” in the previous sentence, so I expect it was just an oversight. Or an over-zealous sub-editor. But it set off my born-in-Canada alarm.
This got me wondering about the production process of the audio book. When do they record it? What is Mr. Gladwell reading from when he narrates the audio book? And when did they identify and correct this tiny yet egregious error?
We were in the McNally Robinson bookstore in Nolita yesterday. It’s an excellent store, full of great books. As it turns out, it’s Canadian-owned (other stores are in Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Toronto) and shares a space with a tea house owned by Moby.
Inside, I noticed a couple of book-selling ideas that were new to me. Neither was particularly original, I guess, but they struck me as clever ways to repackage the dead tree tome.
The first was a series of tree thematically-linked books, pre-wrapped as a ready-made-gift. Very handy for the lazy gift buyer (and wrapper):
I also spotted these attractively-packaged bundles of a DVD and the book on which it was based:
Neither idea is earth-shattering, but if I were a book seller these seem like to handy ways to sell more product.
This, incidentally, is an ancient but still very useful marketing tactic. I’ve written about it before: visit country X, steal clever ideas and implement them in country Y.
We’re on our way back to Panama City tomorrow. I’ve read some more books, and will spend my first hours in civilization desperately seeking English language literature. Following on from part one, here’s what I read:
Little Brother - This is a Cory Doctorow novella for young audiences. It tells a gripping, Orwellian tale of terrorist attacks, hackers and civil disobedience in our uber-surveilled world. It’s a righteous indictment (from a Canadian, I’m proud to point out) of torture, police brutality and how 9/11 has restricted personal freedoms in the US. It’s also full of cogent mini and micro essays on a slough of digital rights issues: file sharing, online privacy, cryptography, DNS and so forth. They read a little like EFF propaganda at times, and only present one perspective on these thorny issues. I almost always agree with that perspective, but it’s so vigorously argued I’d want young reader to consider some alternative points of view.
Next - Michael Crichton’s novel was one of the bloated, mouldering books on the shelf here at Punta Laurel. I hadn’t read a Crichton book since Jurassic Park in my adolescence, so I thought I’d give this one a try. He might as well have skipped the novel and gone straight to the screenplay. That’s what the book reads like–action sequences interspersed with a lot of pseudo-science. I did appreciate that both Doctorow and Crichton included extensive bibliographies at the end of their books–I wish all novelists would do this.
Everything’s Eventual - In the past, I’ve found Stephen King’s short stories to be his creepiest work. Not so much with this set of 14 stories. Most of them seemed a little flawed, or incomplete, or wrong-noted somehow. I was pleased to read “The Little Sisters of Eluria”, which featured Roland, the gunslinger from King’s excellent “Dark Tower” series of books. I kept hearing Leonard Cohen’s “Sisters of Mercy” in my head while reading it. I haven’t seen the movie made from the stand-out story “1408″, starring John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson. While I often find that short stories lend themselves to novels, there isn’t really enough meat on the bones of this one for even a 90-minute movie. Judging from the trailer, the screenwriters fleshed things out quite a bit.
Tribes - Seth Godin’s latest book is, to quote Stephen King, “a little fingernail paring of a book”. It’s his bite-sized take on leadership, and largely feels like a distillation or tweaking of the ideas from his previous books. One of Godin’s gifts is, I think, identify truths that should be self-evident, and articulating them in an inspiring and consumable way. His ideas are worth revisiting (”safe is risky and risky is safe” is a mantra around Capulet), and Godin does make some astute observations about leadership in an Internet-enabled world. However, the book feels a little rose-tinted, under-structured and incomplete for my liking. I think it under-estimates the difficulties of leadership, and is pretty light on the how-to’s. Still, many should find it inspiring, and I’d recommend it as a quick primer in Godinosity.
The Interloper - A first novel by Antoine Wilson. It’s a mixed bag, really. There are some terrific bits, and some lovely characterization. On the other hand, the diction feels overly fussy in places, and the plot is pretty predictable. I’m often frustrated by the work of young artists when it’s too concerned with the process of their art form. Full of letters faked by the protagonist and rambling diary entries, The Interloper seems overly interested in the act of writing. I did like a quote in the novel that apparently comes from another source “writing is like trying to dance with a bear who only wants to wrestle”. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it somehow resonates.
. I’ve enjoyed his other books, and a New Yorker Conference video on the same subject as this book, so I downloaded this one from Audible.
