a peculiar definition of success

The website I write for and edit was just described on a blog as “the most readable of the two must-read regular electronic publications devoted to [particular issue].”

I’m most readable! Out of two! Two things that people have to read for their jobs!

I’m totally declaring victory anyway.

Will Pay to Work

It is getting so ugly out there for us media types that people are literally spending their own money just to be employed. At something. Anything. Seriously, anything. The Huffington Post!

Engaging with the absurd

Allison Arieff’s By Design blog at the NYT is one of my favorites because it combines the one thing I really loved about working at the magazine (being able to spend lots of time looking at beautiful things people make, like George Sherlock couches and Rathbone rugs) with the best of sustainability (thinking about how those things shape the world we live in).

This week’s post, Searching for Value in Ludicrous Things, is a great example. The story focuses on  Steven Johnson, a cartoonist and inventor who likes to design all kinds of things that may or may not work, but are interesting either way: “Many of his musings are simply whimsical, existing primarily as a source of inspiration or delight. Others tackle very real issues, from environmentalism to alternative transportation to homelessness.”

Like a rocket-bus:

He’s also designed skylight ovens, self-shortening sedans, dashboard toasters, human-powered trains, and “treadarounds.” (The transit focus probably has to do with his time as an urban planner.) This one looks REALLY appealing at 2pm on a Tuesday:

But what’s most interesting is the way he describes his thought process. In order to create, he says he needs to be away from a desk, from a ‘responsible’ lifestyle. “‘I wish instead,’ he writes, ‘to be irresponsible, rash, associative, dreamy, impish, brainy, intuitive, and stupid.’”

Stupidity saving the world. How else would we get this? And these? And these (which are so simple in their brilliance that it’s insane it took us this long to think of it).

Working With Joy

Mike Rowe has been on my list of crushes for a while. Here he talks to TED about work, happiness, Greek tragedies, and lamb castration.

Back in my Brickpile days, I read this from Khalil Gibran: “Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love, only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.” It made so much sense, I rewrote my resume on the spot and emailed everybody I knew who was working on something worthy of respect. I think Mike gets it.

Why universe, WHY?

As if this particular Monday weren’t hellish enough, Gossip Girl is STILL on its unexplained, cruel hiatus. If it is just so that the cast can all get front row seats at fashion week and get photographed instead of shooting a resolution to the weirdest two episodes in the history of GG like they are supposed to, I will lose it like Agnes and start burning dresses until Jenny cries.

I’m just saying.

So few words per day

I’ve been hibernating lately, but I hope you don’t think I’ve abandoned you. I’ve been reading a lot, and thinking a lot, and have half a dozen posts gasping around somewhere, but when I do write, it’s all for work, so much so that even when I’ve got a decent idea for the blog, I often don’t have it in me to compose a post. A reporter friend said to me recently, “I only have so many words in me a day,” and that’s exactly how I’m feeling. What’s really a shame is how many of mine are wasted on pointless emails.

So I’m trying to write and say less, but hopefully better, simply because I’m daily becoming more sure that I don’t know anything about anything. Andre Gregory once wrote, talking about artists:

We began to speculate that your early years, say your twenties, should be all about learning — learning how to do it, how to say it, learning to master the tools of your craft; having learned the techniques, then your next several years, say your thirties, should be all about telling the world with passion and conviction everything that you think you know about your life and your art. Meanwhile, though, if you have any sense, you’ll begin to realize that you just don’t know very much — you don’t know enough. And so the next many, many years, we agreed, should be all about questions, only questions, and that if you can totally give up your life and your work to questioning, then perhaps somewhere in your mid-fifties you may find some very small answers to share with others in your work. The problem is that our society (including the community of artists) doesn’t have much patience with questions and questioning.

I don’t like to call myself an artist, because I’m not, really. But I do write, and want to continue writing, and right now I’m actually making a living doing so, which is kind of incredible. But as Gregory describes, I find my own questions to be a giant distraction, and I have no patience for them. It drives me crazy that I don’t know enough, that I’m not already a genius, that I’m having these fractal-like debates in my brain all the time, and it’s enough to convince me that I am assuredly much better off listening to someone else, and letting that whole big mess just sort itself out on its own time. I’ll check back in when I’m 52. Maybe by then I’ll have learned something. (It almost makes me wish the mentor-apprentice relationship was still a thing, because I think I’d like that.)

So instead I’m trying to focus on the tools themselves:  on story, on lines, on language, even when I’m writing things for work that don’t mean a whole lot — hopefully learning some kind of skill with the limited amount of words in me. Trying to have patience with the process.

Media Deathwatch

Crap, even Google’s CEO doesn’t know what to do with the newspapers.

The problem is, as he says, more people than ever are reading, but “information wants to be free.” So, the traditional news corps are hemorrhaging money, and will continue to do so, unless someone decides news outlets are so necessary to the world they are going to subsidize them, almost like the way Nature Conservancy does with green spaces. News as a nonprofit: this would put journalistic integrity in danger, depending on whose pocketbook we’re talking about, but I’m starting to wonder if that is the only sort of thing that could stop the reaper.

But hey, over here some essentially meaningless data has been construed to tell us that people are reading books again! Um, yay?

Reason #492 Why Journalism Can Be Really Stupid

This is why I don’t admit to reading the NYT Sunday Styles section. (Although I do spend a fair bit of time on other parts of the paper!)

How to write a bogus trend story: Start with something you wish were on the rise. State that rise as a fact. Allow that there are no facts, surveys, or test results to support such a fact. Use and reuse the word seems. (As a writer, I can attest: The word seems is magical, like unicorns! -Ed.) Collect anecdotes and sprinkle liberally. Drift from your original point as far as you can to collect other data points. Add liberally. Finish with an upbeat quotation like “My cat takes priority over the new relationship. Realistically, unless there’s something absolutely amazing about [the woman I'm dating], he wins.”

Maybe Shafer shouldn’t get this indignant. It’s all just shoveling coal for Satan, right?

Success is…being in the NYT before you’re 25?

You guys, I’m famous!

Next step: world domination.

Or, you know, my life pretty much stays the same. Likelier, but less exciting.

PS. You should read that blog. It’s pretty incredible.

Shell-Shocked

So, I just got back from my Barbados trip, and am slowly slogging through my work emails and news feeds. Apparently, the banks all collapsed, Europe is melting, my friends’ jobs are disappearing, and the world is about to end. Geez, can’t you all manage without me for TWO SECONDS?

I kid, I kid.

Will be back to post photos and stories soon…right now I’m feeling the need for distractions from the return to my everyday life (and apparently the impending apocalypse ) in the form of cupcakes and Tina Fey.