The Sad Part Of Too Smart

Ever think that maybe we're too smart for our own good?

By smart I mean too "sophisticated", or too wise or too jaded. Or all of these. The thought occurred to me when I was mindlessly spinning through the interwebs looking at paintings and photographs by artists of some renown.

I came across a painting that brought back something to mind I hadn't thought about in a very long time. I had always told myself... of all the famous, iconic things this painter has done, THIS - lesser known piece - will always be my favorite.

I think I made that little declaration to myself somewhere in high school, right at that time you start to realize that - this is real... the rest of my life is coming... and all the naive yet frightening questions about the future you ask yourself begin to form. And what's more - for the first time in your life - you can verbalize them. That time when your creative mind, collecting what little you know and marching on with the fresh energy of your youth, sees many possibilities and approaches. I saw this painting in a book and decided right then and there that this almost unknown work was the real masterpiece the world had missed. Of course it wasn't all that unknown. And though the artist is an icon and so many of his paintings are forever emplanted permanently into the culture, I decided (in the hubris only an 18-year-old can muster) the experts blew the call. Or, at least, the same old things the world considers his greatest paintings - made mundane to my mind by the sheer expected usualness of their choices - were not as great as this one. And - though certainly it isn't UNknown, to be sure, the world missed calling THIS ONE the greatest he had done. Yeah I was a piece of work at 18. You should have known me.

I admit I'd forgotten that declaration I made - almost forty years ago now. This declaration that was part of what informed my outlook and my worldview that I'd left so casually on the wayside after such a pompous announcement.

Well... I saw the painting again tonight and felt that old starlight inside. And the first thing I wanted to do was share it with everyone. Silly.

But then the scourge of the modern reared its head and I thought - well this is pretty much nothing at all. It's Van Gogh - and Van Gogh is a damned cliche to so many now. The initial rush is over. People have moved on. The internet changed everything. People don't even READ the same way anymore, why should anyone care about this?

It was like - way to go RW. Dredge this thing up and watch the eyes roll. He's at it again. That's old news. It's been done. FAIL.

Which is when I sat down and began to type... "Ever think that maybe we're too smart for our own good? The line that begins this post. Because I would hate to think we lose this ability to enjoy something so old school as a silly painting because of our rushed time frames, our apps, our devices, our social networks. Why - when I go to an art gallery (and Chicago has one of the best) I get all huffed about how quickly everybody walks through.

Oh well. I'm a damned old fool to be sure.

But anyway, in case you're not so wise and jaded... this is the one I'm talking about. I purposely shrunk it so you'd have to click it in order to really see it (I think that's how it works). And maybe if you do you will see what I see. The lesser known Van Gogh masterpiece. To my feeble brain, better than any of the standards.

Indulge a fool.

The Red Vineyard.

What The Heck?

The photo is from a "town-hall" meeting held by Congressmen this past summer and not related directly to my issue. But it is part of the same continuum. I have become convinced I am watching the cruel descent of the conservative revolution into frozen dogma and populist stasis.

Please reference article: Mass Live

My Blogosphere Is Shrinking

(Brian - I will test your words out on the MacSpeech Dictate coming up here, haven't had a chance yet but I want to know too).

A little before I started making the Christmas Train and posted nothing else besides that for weeks, I started a project outside and away from the internet (mostly, though I did some test runs on what I was writing elsewhere). Sometime last fall I got very serious about it and by December I pretty much was keeping most of what was developing to myself. In fact there were zero posts last October, for example. Odd for a motormouth like me.

The copious notes and fragments and snippets and dialogs and scenes were beginning to pile up and I attempted to work it all together (while still doing the Train when I couldn't stand the writing anymore). The overwhelming amount of notes I created for the story I was doing got so unwieldy that I got the speech-to-text thing I told you about last post and that is helping a ton, though I'm still having trouble tying up all the bits of scenes that don't seem to go together no matter what I do.

But anyway, the point is, somewhere along the way I stopped visiting a lot of blogs. I mean just cold - dead. The funny thing is that I don't think i was alone. Around this holiday season I noticed less and less participation at some of the blogs I checked in on from time to time. As if the blogosphere was taking a collective time out. Probably not a bad idea. But it was odd how it all seemed (to my perception anyway) to happen at the same time.

Coming back into the blogosphere after the holidays, picking up again as the fiction work got less intense (and there were days it took over completely) I have found that either my tastes have changed or the same energy that was out there isn't out there anymore. I'm down to reading 6 1/2 blogs. Don't ask how the 1/2 got there. Just trust me on that. My blogroll is sadly neglected, in that as I used it for my "feed reader" I've found I barely use it anymore except to go to the handful of places I still visit and participate in.

Don't take it personal ok? My head got in a new place this winter partly brought on by the train project and partly brought on by the intense, other-worldly thing that happens when I get into the fiction mode.

But I don't know... is the blogosphere shrinking in reality or is it just my impression because I'm distracted?

MacSpeech Dictate: The Movie

Okay every word that you read here is what MacSpeech Dictate hears me say. I'm going to just give an example and talk about this product and then copy the results from word [Word] exactly as they peer [appear] and paste them to the blog.

The first thing you have to know is that every time you see punctuation that is actually me saying a command for the program to create the punctuation. So every time you see a. [period] That's me saying. [period] I can't figure out yet how to get it to type out the word.[period] That is one of the quirks.

Any time during the course of this entry you see a word or words in brackets that's me going back and entering the word it should've heard. So right away you see there are some small issues.

The MacSpeech Dictate program is a version of a PC based program I think called Dragon, I'm not sure. But all the reviews I've read for the PC version say it is somehow better than the Mac version. I can't speak for that, I can only tell you about this one. Oh and by the way when you see the punctuation mark that is, [comma] that's also me saying, [comma]. To get to a new paragraph I say "new paragraph". To get it to type "new parargraph", the words, I have to pause between the words new and paragraph.

Here's the thing. The best use, obviously, of this equipment is for people who are unable to use the keyboard for whatever reason, and there is a component to MacSpeech Dictate that allows that person to control their computer and use other programs. So for anyone compromised in any way to using their computer in the way we may be used to, this is an added boon. I have not delved into that part of this product, and it would be wrong of me to explain how that works, or if it works.

I long ago recognized that the way I write was somehow inadequate to the points I was trying to make. I found that typing dialogue out of the silence of the room and the noise in my head somehow translated a stilted version of a conversation onto the paper. You read that conversation later, and it doesn't sound real. Some of you may know my actual schooling, early career, and training was in public performance, and part of the lessons of public performance in tale [entail] improvisation. So it is not a foreign thing to me to be speaking aloud into a microphone to obtain an effect. It also helps if, like me, you are a total psychopath and don't care if anyone knows that you're talking to yourself in an empty room.

Therein lies, I think, the biggest stumbling block for a lot of people who might find some use for this application. And if you have no problem visualizing or hearing or sensing words in your mind and then transferring and translating them through your fingers onto a keyboard in silence or with the aid of music, but certainly not with the aid of your voice, then you basically have no need for this. But sometimes the ideas come too fast for you to express them through standard typing. I have also found that speaking the text into the microphone allows me the luxury of moving into that practice that is a dream for writers; namely, the need to get it down on paper before it flits away on you. I find I'm not bothered by the editing process when I'm telling the story. There's more on the paper to work with when I look at what I've said rather than what I've typed. Fleeting ideas don't escape this way. You just say them. And of course this doesn't produce a finished product. If you're a good writer, there's never a finished product anyway. So no issue there.

Because of my theater background this makes dialogue sparkle for me. I can catch a voice the way it really sounds, because the voice is really speaking. There is always editing going on regardless, so you may as well flood of [the] paper with ideas and thoughts now, because you're going to go back and edit it anyway. For some people the act of physically writing, if not impossible because of the [a] condition, is simply too slow. So the drawbacks -- like for example whenever you say a command that creates punctuation and you had a different meaning for the word it still gives you punctuation rather than the word -- are bothersome that [but] are easily overcome, really.

You can set up MacSpeech Dictate in 5 to 10 minutes. Once you install it you go through a process where you read a prepared text so that it can translate your speech pattern and begin to recognize the way you speak compared to the text it knows you are trying to say. There are further exercises like this so that it can learn more about how you speak. Presumably the more times you practice with it the better it gets at reading you.

You are reading the results of MacSpeech Dictate only having experienced one exercise with me. So after reading two paragraphs of prepared text so we can compare my voice to the words it sees it's really not doing too bad. For your information I am not looking at the screen as I say these words. So whatever it looks like is what it actually looks like.

Two issues. You do have to speak clearly. So I find that if I'm going to be drinking while doing this I have to speak slower. That's one thing. The other thing depends on the kind of writing you do. I use all the words in the English language in the stuff that I write for fiction. I use swears. Here's what happens when MacSpeech dictate hears swears...

Shift this thought. Shipped this talk.

Shift.

This.

Flock.

You see what I'm saying? Those were supposed to be three bodily functions that occur between your waste [waist] and duties [your knees]. It didn't get it. It's a Puritan.

So MacSpeech Dictate has manners, is naïve, and will not accommodate your inner Bukowski. But I'm giggling a little because I had to see if it got the name Bukowski, and by God it did. I'll be a son of a bitch. Oh wait -- it just got bitch information [exclamation] point!

It has a lot to learn if it's going to be a member of this family, but I wonder if I do the further exercises that help but [it] to know me better compared to prepared words its performance will be enhanced. Plus, again, I have to say that sometimes my own speech patterns and pronunciation probably don't help it. So this program and I should probably do the exercises once a week, or until we run out of them.

Anyway, I did promise a little review of the product. It's obviously not for everyone, but it is certainly a benefit to me. Sometimes I will write things out longhand, or I will have snippets of things collected on various pieces of paper, and transcribing them is difficult because though I am a fast two fingered typist, I am still a two fingered typist. After long bouts of transcribing I need a lot of alcohol to deal with the neck pain. So I found that what I can do is gather my stuff together, put on a headset and microphone, go to the place in the text I want to add the latest thing, walk back and forth as I rifle through my written notes, and string together a soft [thought] or image or story I want to convey. Yes it has a very long cord from headset to plug that allows you to do this. I am assuming because of this feature it was designed intelligently, as if someone understands that sometimes a person travels when they dictate.

So if nothing else you now know how I talk. Understanding that every bit of punctuation you saw is a word I said for.,!; and etc. and that I can't say the word.,!; kind of kisses [pisses] me off, but that might just be that it isn't as used to me as it should be, yet. I also did not edit this for grammar, which obviously would have to be done for [before] any formal submissions.

This is an expensive program. I've seen it sold for $199. I don't know if it's cheaper for the PC. But I do know if you look around you can get a deal. Mine was listed at $169, and they [I] found an online coupon that reduce [reduced] debt [it] by almost half. So I got a deal. But I do know that deal is [has] expired. I also know that most of you have PCs, but I have no idea what the Dragon engine -- I think it's called -- costs.

It sure is fun when you're drunk.

And if you want to create avant-garde poetry, and just let it write what it thinks you're saying, and have that be the creation, well you've got it made.

That might be allowing you to [too] much access into the way my addled brain works, but what the hell?

And by the way, that's over 1400 words spoken in less than fifteen minutes. That represents a real value in not letting anything escape. You can always cut back later. Anyway that's the ideal scene.

Friday. It's Not Just Thursday Anymore

Paticus has an entry for the "Old Man and the Apple" thing we were doing right here. I like this one because there are obvious sounds in it that really point to more story available. That's win.

We were mistaken when we assumed the issues in Washington were about Health care and jobs and the economy and stuff. It turns out that's not what anything is about. I swore the ongoing debate and discussion was about stuff to help the country. I was wrong. What all this has been about the last year+ is the mid-term elections and either retaining or reclaiming the White House. None of this has anything to do with you or me. What was I thinking?

What I want to hear now is all my libertarian friends sort-of border-line rationalize the Austin lunatic pilot crashing into the IRS office down there. I'm not looking for your feedback here. But instead - I've got an idea - go explain your views to the people he hurt and the family who lost one of their own. Tell them about your philosophical filter on this and the IRS, not me. K? Thanx.

I have a meeting for our 40th high school reunion shindig tomorrow. For the complete outsider who out of 500 people in my class I really only hung out occasionally with maybe 2 on a good day, I have no idea how this has now happened to me twice in 10 years. But hey SLIGO? People are already talking about wanting you to MC. Contact me soon!!

Those of you who are fans of MrsRW - if she hasn't contacted you on Facebook or through your regular email chitchat with her - she just got back from holding a seminar in Dallas, was in San Diego for a week two weeks ago and finished her work at the Mayo Clinic (and then changed jobs again) last month. Yes. I married well. What? I am actually MrMrsRW now. :-)

I AM going to make a review of the MacSpeech Dictate speech-to-text device I've been using for my fiction stuff in the near future (don't worry, it's a Mac version of the PC product which a lot of folks think is even better). It has its quirks but it has also opened up a whole new style of getting the writing done. You may be interested in how it changes the creative process. More to come on that.

All I got.

The World Has Some Explaining To Do

So, over the past week they've discovered - or I should say uncovered - another one of those ancient street things. You know, the kind where they're digging and digging and then - oh, holy shit - there's a TOWN under here.

Only this time they did it in Jerusalem.

This is the kind of story that reads like this... "Working from the historic map, archaeologists three months ago uncovered the section of the wide, white stone street 14 feet (4.5 meters) below the current street level." I'm sure you've seen these things before.

And you can find the article here.

Anyway I don't know about you but when I see things like this I get kind of pumped. I'm one of those oddballs who gets off walking around in that kind of thing. I drove my wife NUTS when we were in Ireland a few years back - I just had to stop at every. last. castle. or. ruin... or for that matter anything that even remotely looked old that you could walk through... we passed. I got off on climbing up and down circular steps in a castle tower, or standing where the guidebook said "at this end of the room was the nobleman's table during the feasts". Even with the roof gone and the room exposed to the elements, in my mind I could cover the space and picture tapestries and people chomping mutton joints and having women like this sitting around coyly sizing up people's codpieces and stuff. I get off walking around in Ulysses S Grant's house in Galena. And I gotta tell you - there ain't much to that. But I go reverie anyhow. It's weird. I know.

Long time readers already know how I get nostalgic for eras I didn't even live in. It's an old malady.

But there's always been something that bothered me. Always that something in the back of my mind that I just can't seem to reconcile. I never see a new story or a new set of pictures from a "recent discovery" without having it worming around up there. And no matter how much I try I can't seem to explain it to myself or anybody else. Not so much on things like Grant's house and all, but the ancient stuff they find.

It's always buried.

It's always buried and it always bugs me that nobody else seems to mind or want to know how this happens. It's one thing when they find stuff in the desert or in a remote area of South America or Mexico or the deserts here in our southwest. People leave or get wiped out or a civilization ends and they're gone. So nature takes over. There's no anal housefrau to dust the shelves anymore. I get that.

But how in the hell do we lose entire STREETS? Not only entire streets but entire streets right under other streets we're living on right now. And it's 14 friggin' feet below.

Excuse me?

You can say everybody collectively forgot about it, sure. But somebody had to willfully and on purpose build something ON TOP of it before that could happen. And who the hell builds anything on top of anything? Can you point to a builder right now who has just decided... "ok I'm going to build my project 14 feet above this old street nobody is using"? Can anybody even show me a town being buried by nature even as we speak? I can't even come to grips with how we even "forget" something is there and build on top of it. Build on top of it... wtf??

Are you trying to tell me the earth is getting bigger? As time goes on layers and layers of garbage and crap just happen and it covers whole houses and streets and nobody notices... in the middle of Jerusalem.... and then we just build on top of it? Is that what you're saying??

Nobody notices? I'm asking that because if I drove home from work every day and kept passing a neighborhood that was slowly getting buried by dust and overgrown with weeds I think I'd notice. Somebody would notice. Amirite?

"Oh, we just discovered a street we didn't know was there. It's 14 freakin feet under your neighborhood." But nevermind, that just happens.

What?

It must be some kind of conspiracy. Those damn Templars!

What Ever Happened To...

Dee-Lite - Groove Is In The Heart
Uploaded by Discodandan. - Explore more music videos.

Why... she's right here!

Old Man and The Apple

Steph Waller brought her entry into the challenge HERE.

Some... guys?... named Kiefer and Emo brought theirs to the party also... HERE.

BE Earl gave forth HERE.

I'm going to leave this post up on top for a few days. If anyone wants to participate I'll edit to make a link to you here. I encourage everyone to read the entries. There's no contest and no one thing is better than the others. But I think all the tries given at this point already point out the possibilities of a simple idea, and the "old man with apple" study is a lot of fun.

It's a "study"... not a short story... not a finished piece of art. It's what writers should do if they are serious. Painters do it all the time. They do it and toss them aside. Same thing here.

And yeah... maybe I SHOULDA been a writing instructor.

Oh well.

God Help Me

I almost hate to admit it, but I am morbidly attracted to train wrecks. Not actual trains that wreck as trains, per se, but trains that aren't trains that smash up right before your eyes. People, mostly.

I know I should want to help, and sometimes I do help, but most times I sit and silently watch. I silently watch and then I compare their train wrecks to my train wrecks. I watch people self-destruct and note how, suddenly, my own self-destruction doesn't look quite so bad. And when I can see a person headed for a train wreck and it is obvious they are oblivious to it, there's a certain transfixed gaze that comes on. I should be ashamed of myself.

And mostly I've stopped waving my hands and shouting. I've told so many people the bridge was out up ahead and they ignore me that I'm kind of numb about it by now. Everybody seems to know better. Oh well. They act as though "my train wreck is my train wreck and you stay away from it mister. I own my train wreck." So I watch as in slow motion they go headlong into the ravine six hundred feet below and there are no survivors.

Sometimes it's all about the morbid. Like that luge guy from Georgia who smacked into the iron beam at 90+ miles an hour the other day. Man. He just stopped. He flew off his little whatever and toppled through the air and he was just suddenly stopped cold by an iron beam. And the flying and stopping cold wasn't really the thing. The thing was the sound he made. Like somebody taking a rubber mallet to a steel girder and giving the girder one good whack. It made a note. Like in music. And it's disgusting and awful but it's also compelling. God help me.

Then there are people who seem to have a train wreck every other week. I know I should be compassionate and feel sorry for them. But it's a little like - doctor it hurts when I do this... and the doctor says... well... you know. Then they do it again next week. Running into the same walls. Falling into the same traps. Needing to be scraped off the sidewalk. Again. For the tenth time.

It should be quite obvious by now that I am, in actual fact, the asshole of the world. I quite enjoy the odor, thank you very much. I admit it. But I'm not completely heartless, you see.

I don't have pets and I don't want a pet and I don't even like the idea of having a pet but I think people who abuse animals should be seriously erased from the gene pool. I get weary of seeing the same people run into the same problems month after month like a treadmill but that doesn't mean I don't sometimes look up - or down or over perpendicular - towards God and ask whatever that Entity is to ease the burden over there a bit. Please for God's sake already yeah?

I think I get this secret enjoyment watching other people's train wrecks because it makes my train wrecks easier to accept. I wonder who is sitting there watching mine and going "whew, that makes ME feel not so awful."

Somebody I bet.

Billboard In Minnesota

Uh... no. You can take your teflon suit and go back to the shit hole you crawled out of. Actually.

Writing Challenge

Painters will do a "study" for the sake of the doing. Still life. Fruit. Sunflowers. It is an exercise that often releases art itself. The best instructors I ever had, and the only college I ever attended was Columbia Chicago, thought of writing as the same thing. Write about a car. Write about a wall.

I've always tried to use the same concept when I do stuff. So what about this?

Minimum 1600 words / maximum 1700 words on an old man eating an apple. You tell us why it is important.

If you are playing, publish it on your blog and leave us a link. I will publish mine after.

Start.

Every Minute Of Every Super Bowl There Ever Was

I've seen it. I have never missed one minute of any Super Bowl, even from before it was ever called a "Super Bowl".

When Vince Lombardi's Packers played the Chiefs in the first "AFL-NFL Championship Game" on January 15, 1967 things were slightly... different. Besides me being 14, that is. (EDIT TO ADD: Yes I know that's a picture of George Halas not Vince Lombardi, Mr. smartass with the email. It's a picture on a blog, not an article in an encylopedia.)

• Coaches wore a tie with their sport coat or suit. Some came in three-piece suits. Most wore hats, not caps. The coaching staff was 1/4 the size it is now and they did not all wear matching team shirts or sweaters as if they were from some Christian men's bowling league from Rancho Cucamonga. Team logos and "team wear" existed on jackets - maybe - and you mostly had to be on the team to get one. There were no stores dedicated to silly knock-offs of team colored shit you could waste your money on. Once in a while you could find a sweatshirt at a store somewhere. Mostly you had to be at the game to find them.
  
• Things were just different. Coaches swore at everybody and did not much care if they were "relating" to their players. They were not your Mommy. It's an order, not a suggestion.
  
• It wasn't over-analyzed by 47 guys back at the station and down the sidelines shoving microphones in the faces of guys who are exhausted, pissed off and probably have bad breath because they've been running around sweating and drinking that putrid gatorade garbage. It's football, dumbass, not rocket surgery.
  
• There were no End Zone Dances, and there was no Jumping Up In Front Of The Camera after you made a routine tackle. There was celebration, and guys had their fun. But it didn't go to chest-thumping, head-wagging apeman walks so the camera follows you after you make a play. It wasn't that people were more polite to one another back then. This kind of thing didn't happen because if you did them, the next time you were under a pile three guys from the other team would stick their fists up your ass, pull your colon out, and feed it to you when the refs weren't looking. You'd be the recipient of every kind of cut block imaginable (aimed at your knees) and nobody would hide the fact that they were trying to end your career so you could go sell shoes instead. If you were a "Showboat" you were a dead man. It was "self-policed".
  
• The commercials were when you got up for a beer or to take a leak. Commercials, no matter how creative, were always best when they were avoided. Strictly because they were commercials. And watching commercials is actually pretty stupid because all it is is somebody trying to get you to buy something. They are still what they were, but people like them now - which is stupid. So much has the culture changed that there are people now watching the Super Bowl strictly because of the commercials; where that would have been a laughable thing to be doing in the past. Because they're trying to sell you something. And we didn't want to listen to some crap about shaving cream or beer. We wanted to see the game. Hurry up and get that shit off my TV.
  
• The only women who watched the game were the cool ones. Women who understood and watched the game for the game were always somehow cool and even a little mysterious. This was, remember, still the age of the Friday Night Fights brought to you by Gillette from Madison Square Garden where you sat next to your Dad at the neighborhood tavern and watched "the boys" beat each other senseless. So your Mom and your sister were off somewhere else and they didn't bother anybody with stupid questions or root for the commercials. It was a guy thing, with a handful of very cool women on the periphery, and it was about football. Not mercantilism.
  
• There was a rarefied aspect to the match-up. This is a concept not many people get anymore. Because everybody can play anybody during the "regular season" there isn't the same kind of uniqueness as there was when two teams who represent completely separate leagues squared off in a final championship. Inter-league play is novel and fun in baseball, for example, but it tends to reduce the weight of the World Series just a little. There isn't any "our league and their league" schoolyard mentality as much as there was. Same thing in football. It used to be the American League against the National League, and the American League was a bunch of upstart young owners who stole these players from the National League who always considered themselves better and more established and it was a whole paradigm. Now it's all one big league and it's just two teams with different schedules.
  
• The half time shows were marching bands that made stupid shapes on the field. Which was an extended opportunity to make a sandwich or boil up some hot dogs. It didn't consist of has-beens like The Who or over-rated posers like Bruce Springsteen punctuated by retired football players with their what it is you were just watching the previous two quarters crap and "what. they. must. do. to. win" in the next two quarters nonsense.
  
• "And the home of the brave" had six syllables, not 127.

Don't get me wrong. I like buying the squares to try and win some money, and being with a crowd of people having a good time, and plowing into virtual mountains of beer-and-finger-food all day long. It's just that more and more I hear less and less about football, which is a guilty pleasure of mine, and have to wade through an ocean of bullshit with stuff that has nothing to do with the game.

Now get me a beer and shut the hell up.

Do You Want It Long And Slow Or Short And Furious?

Saying the subject or genre was something you liked...

What are the chances you would ever read a book that had traditional chapters and went on for over 1200 pages? Saying the writing was good but it just went on forever. Or maybe a better question is would you even start something like that?

Do you find yourself reading in smaller "bites"? What do you think multi-tasking across a range of technology has done to our attention spans? Would you have an easier time convincing yourself to start a book that was ponderously large like that but presented in one and two paragraph "hits" or contained sparse lines of dialog? Does it matter if you open a book and see blocks of dense text looking back at you - and would that dissuade you from reading or even starting it? Saying you'd read it if it was an author you liked, would you try it from an author you hadn't ever heard of?

Do you find yourself saying you don't have "time" to read?

When you read, if you read, do you have the television on? Is your laptop nearby and turned on? Phone handy? Do you accept interruptions from these devices and then head right back into the book or do you find yourself distracted, having lost your place?

How do you read? Is it only something you do in bed now? Did you ever sit under a lamp, not in the bedroom, and purposefully read just to read, say with a cocktail handy but nothing else?

If books were well written in short "bites" and still progressed a story in an engaging way would you be more likely to read it? To pick it up at the bookstore or online after previewing it?

Are you willing to pick up a book where the author doesn't always follow the rules or makes her/his own? Especially if that would force you to pay more attention to what they're doing with the artform? Or would you simply not even start something that might present that kind of thing? Would you continue if a book of 5 or 600 pages started like this...

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.

Would you keep reading? Would you feel you could devote the time to get into that? Even if it gets still more of the same later? Reading that just now - do you see something like that as overwhelmingly, impossibly obscure or as something that looks humorous?

How do we read? What do we read? Are we shortening our attention spans? Have we convinced ourselves we can concentrate on three things at once and get something of quality out of them all?

Will John return to Mary? Will Tannenbaum find the bomb in time? Will Spikey find his dog, or Olivia her groove?

It's Snowing And I Need To Harvest My Crops

• I know someone who lost at Farmville.
  
• Speaking of Facebook, I'm amazed at how many people I've cut the feeds off from. Some people aren't as interesting in one place as they are in another.
  
• I got sucked into once again working on our reunion committee. This is two high school reunions in a row. I'm not sure how this happened. Again. I spent the last two years of high school tripping my brains out with people who didn't even live in my town, seriously avoiding school functions, and when I graduated I skipped the commencement ceremony altogether and spent the day doing something I can't even recall. The lettermen and jocks thought I was a commie scumbag (we're talking Viet Nam era, folks), the car mechanic muscle heads bought dope from me, and not a small number of parents of girls my age lived in open fear that their daughter would show up with me. I actually knew two young women whose parents ordered them to never have anything to do with me. I was alternately just stupid, seen to be mean, a closet gay, a raging deviant, a pot-head, a "nigger-lover", or just another dippie-hippie on any given day - depending on whatever fear my critic was vocalizing about themselves at the time. I'd blame Facebook for this reunion thing except the last reunion found me helping as well and ten years ago I wasn't on Facebook. So I dunno wtf.
  
• I got MacSpeech Dictate a couple of weeks ago and I think I'll do a product review of it. Period. I use it for my writing and it's a lot of fun. Period. New Paragraph. It takes a while to learn the commands. Period. And it doesn't swear very well. Period. But from what I understand the more you use it the more you "train" it to understand you. Period. Well maybe not the swears. Period. And yes that link takes you to the product that, if you buy it, I get a cut of. What?
  
• Yesterday I made a dinner I invented. Some orange bell pepper, yellow bell pepper, some sliced mushrooms, a bit of red onion, chopped garlic, a can of stewed tomatoes (with the juice), oregano, and broccoli florets all warmed up in some olive oil in a pan poured over some whole wheat spaghetti and sprinkled with Romano cheese. I'm sure that has a name and I didn't really "invent" it, per se, except that I just did it as an ad lib instead of reading a recipe. It was good. Gaining confidence in the cooking area I guess.
  
• It's snowing. It'll be pretty for the next two hours. Then we'll drive on it and ruin it. I think when it snows there ought to be a law that says you can't drive cars on it. Everybody just stay home and let the kids make snowmen out back while you and the wife/husband/mate/friend with benefits sit around and drink all day. Then I'll make that pasta thing.
  
• I think about the people who will be on earth when the sun blows up. They say that's millions of years from now and so what do we care. I don't actually care and I'm not losing any sleep. But - what about the folks that are here then? What do they do? Yeah hopefully technology saves them and they migrate and terraform - or have already done that. But, geez, what about those folks? Poor fuckers.
  
• The stuff on my iPod is not making any sense lately. Lately I've been on a Motown kick (yes, again) and added some Smokey Robinson. But then I went and got some English Beat. But I couldn't stop with that, and pulled in some Lenny too. Yeah, I know, wtf once again, right?
  
• Yeah that's all I got.