Books – Page 6 – Don't Gel Too Soon

GOOGLE ME THIS

I worked for Excite when it was a brand new search engine. The idea was to write 20 word descriptions of every site and differentiate Excite as the search engine with quality descriptions to help guide the searcher. I wanted to learn about the Internet (it was around 1995 – near the beginning of search) and they were paying $5/review. It was a blast. Why am I telling you this?

I just finished a book called THE SEARCH: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle, who is a remarkable pioneer – one of the founders of WIRED, the late INDUSTRY STANDARD and blog advertising syndicator Federated Media Publishing, Inc. among others.

As the title suggests, it’s about considerably more than the brilliant and turbulent birth and ascent of Google. Battelle makes the very good case that the rise of search as a web application was essential to more than the future of the Internet as the universal tool that it is. In addition, says Battelle, “Search is no longer a stand-alone application, as useful but impersonal tool for finding something on a new medium called the World Wide Web. Increasingly, search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world, and our place within it. It’s how we navigate the one infinite resource that drives human culture: knowledge.”

In other words, search is changing us, our culture and our world. It’s a very exciting examination of something that’s become so automatic and familiar that it’s easy to forget just how transforming a force it is. The book is out in paperback and if you’re a web rat like me, you’ll really enjoy it.

WONDERFUL WILLIAM STYRON

In 1968 I was a volunteer in the Eugene McCarthy anti-war presidential campaign. Most of the time I took care of the press, riding on the press bus and handling logistics for filing stories and getting to the plane on time. Frequently, when celebrities were campaigning with the Senator they’d ride for a while on the press bus, so I got to meet some pretty amazing people, from Robert Lowell to Tony Randall to William Styron, who died this week.

I had just read The Confessions of Nat Turner, his 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a slave revolt in Virginia in 1831, which I had loved. I knew of his close friendship with James Baldwin, whom I really admired, and imagined that the book was written partly as a cry for justice for his friend and other black Americans. (OK I was 20, what do you want?) I sat down beside him on the bus and was able to let him know how much I admired him and his work.

The next day, literally, there was a horrible piece about the book and Styron’s “racism” in some lefty publication (can’t remember which one) He walked down the aisle of the bus and dropped it in my lap – “see — see what they’re doing to me?” he said sadly. I have never forgotten that day – the punishment he took for imagining the rage and longing for justice on the part of a charismatic slave — and the sweetness of the man himself. Only later did I learn of his battles with depression. I don’t know if it’s true that one must suffer for one’s art, but he certainly did.

Of course, people know him better for Sophie’s Choice and the Meryl Streep film — again about the unimaginable persecution of a minority. I guess it’s no accident that his wife Rose was so closely tied to Amnesty International for so long.

Anyway I am thinking of him today — of his deep moral sense so well communicated in his work – and of the amazing privilege of knowing him, if only for a little while.

9/11 AND ART

One of my favorite books is William Gibson’s PATTERN RECOGNITION. It’s the story of a "cool hunter" named Cayce Pollard . Her job is to help worldwide companies evaluate their logos and design for "coolness ." She’s a gypsy, finding Pilates studios in the cities she visits and completely engaging the reader (at least this one.) Behind her quite remarkable self, however, lies her grief of the loss of her father in lower Manhattan on September 11. It’s a shadow that haunts all the elegant activity, spectacular writing and remarkable plot lines that are part of any Gibson work. Published in 2003, it was one of the early novels dealing with the horrors of that day in 2001.

There have been several since then, as well as, in the past year, three movies including Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. IMDB lists 11 altogether, not counting Stone’s new film. Apparently, at least to those I know who’ve seen them, several of these films are pretty good.

Last night I finished a book saved, in its last chapters, by that terrible time. THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN, by Claire Messud, got spectacular reviews — front page in the Sunday Times Book Review — and sounded great. What it is is a kind of lesser BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES about lefties living on the West Side (the Beresford is on the cover — not too subtle, right?), their offspring and several other 30-somethings who went to Brown. The whole point of its 431 pages is to reveal the phony side of the lives of the politically correct with their Central Park West apartments, their kids – haunted by parental successes they can’t match, and the rest of the crew ten years out of college and aimless. It’s all OK – but not great. Then, in the middle of a serious act of betrayal by Grand Old Man liberal and a friend of his daughter, two planes hit the World Trade Center — right outside the window of her apartment. Everything that felt so false for all those pages is rendered just as superficial as we thought it was.

I’m not sure it’s enough for me – maybe if I hadn’t lived 20 years on that very West Side and admired many of those people myself – all the while realizing that maybe many of them weren’t who I wanted them to be, it would make more sense. I’m not sure why the book irritated me so and maybe that makes it better than I’m telling you it is – but it’s in my head and it’s making me mad. Can someone else can help me figure out why?

WHOSE LIFE IS IT, ANYWAY?

At BlogHer there was a great debate among the “mommy bloggers” about how much to reveal about one’s children. Much of what was best in my career (as well as, of course, my private life) came from my kids – literally. They’re why I finally wrote a book [for kids.] They’re why I got interested in kids’ books and began writing book reviews for the New York Times and Washington Post and eventually served as early children’s book editor at Amazon. They’re the reason I did some of my best TV pieces – about kids learning to ski, learning disabilities, etc. You get the idea. BUT

Once they were over 7 or so I always asked before I mentioned them in anything I wrote. I kind of felt that it was my gig and they had their own lives. Now this is a problem. Michael Chabon says:

“Telling the truth, when the truth matters most, is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn’t court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.

He’s right I think – I can feel myself hanging back when those “other people’s secrets” begin to emerge — and if affects my writing. It’s true even of the most innocent things: something really lovely was said to me this week by one of my kids but it would expose HIM and I can’t do it.
Granted, most moms who blog have far younger kids than my adult sons but it’s an interesting question. Any thoughts?

Whatever we think about this though it gave me an excuse to share one of my favorite Michael Chabon quotes. (of very very many…)

HOW THIS BLOG GOT ITS NAME

REPOSTED FROM VOX Aug 14, 2006 at 9:08 PM

“There are two kinds of people,” she once decreed to me emphatically. “One kind, you can tell just by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self, but you know you can expect no more surprises from it. Whereas, the other kind keep moving, changing. With these people, you can never say, ‘X stops here,’ or, ‘Now I know all there is to know about Y.’ That doesn’t mean they’re unstable. Ah, no, far from it. They are fluid. They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive. You must be constantly on your guard, Justin, against congealing. Don’t be lulled by your youth. Though middle age is the traditional danger point, I suspect that many a fourteen-year-old has congealed during the long history of this world. If you ever feel it coming, you must do something quickly. . . .” GAIL GODWIN, THE FINISHING SCHOOL