1/3/10
PRESENT ATTENTION
In a burst of work over the Thanksgiving holiday between a kitchen table in Brooklyn and a dining room table in Palo Alto, I got the spam book into shape. It was a magical experience, disparate parts assembling, like watching a loose pile of salt thrum into a pattern on a Chladni plate: my 30-odd index cards of topics, events, and ideas extracted from my dissertation turning into an introduction and three main historical sections (1971-1994, 1994-2003, 2003-2009) with a logical flow of different events developing in parallel. Hanging things on a chronology lets me show this crucial simultaneity of developments. I used to have a bias against chronologies, because the shape of a thought or an argument could be badly distorted by the grind of year-by-year. In this case, though, the chronology emerged quite naturally from the distinctly different phases spam took (and not coincidentally looks like a kind of shadow history of the Internet).
“Grouping” is the process of developing the structure of a book: sections, chapters, paragraphs. It’s surprisingly complex, a shape above the level of immediate prose, and hard work that calls on a different kind of thinking from the act of writing — think of the difference between playing chess, as I always have, move to move, and the “chunking” that expert chess players engage in, where they can associate whole groups of pieces and sequences of moves to strategize the board and the game as a whole. It’s this grouping process that has made the book proposal so long in coming. I’m hoping to have it entirely complete and off to publishers by about the middle of January — in two more weeknotes.
I’m preparing to teach on my own for the first time, “Intro to Digital Culture,” 22 students. I’ve been obsessing over the syllabus; last night I made 25 new text files, one for each day I’ll need to have a lecture prepared, and started pulling my notes into each one. My first day is 20 January, and I want to have the first ten ready by then, which should leave me enough of a head start to prepare the rest with plenty of time. From Turing and Vannevar Bush and Engelbart to MMOs and mobility and right-bang-now as Paul Shepheard used to say. I’m excited and a little terrified. I’ve bought a tie.
Also on deck: I’m presenting at three conferences this year, and all three need papers — yes, two can be largely hewn from already fallen trees, but I’d like to use them to explore a bit. I read somewhere that Will Oldham agreed to go on tour opening for Björk if he could use his performances to learn a new instrument (autoharp, I think), and I love using papers to test stuff out. So the first one’s in March, and I need to have a draft for people’s review by, say, mid-February. And I’ve got to finish a draft of a paper right away for a long-gestating project here at NYU; the ball’s been in my court for about six weeks too long on that one.
(Do you want good omen for the coming year of writing and teaching about technology and design? How about returning from the laundromat, here in Brooklyn, on a bitterly cold afternoon, and finding on the sidewalk, waiting redly in your path like a fox, an immaculate Olivetti Valentine typewriter? Ettore Sottsass is one of my heroes, and this is his typewriter. I’ve never touched one before. Now it sits beside me on the desk, burning like a torch in this grey New York winter, smiling with its metal teeth at 363 days of writing to come.)
(And yes, I’ve been inspired by BERG to make this a New Year’s resolution.)
IDEAS
Textbooks should printed as multiple slim softcover volumes, slipcased together, so you only need to tote one folio about the thickness of a moderate fashion mag with you at any given time.
An RSS reader-type tool that provides the negative image, gathering the unnoticed, ignored, and unpopular — what’s being produced and receiving no notice? How would you disaggregate this information from all the noise?
A lot of social network problems seem to stem from people not knowing which audience they’re addressing. It would be neat to have a visual guide for that — like tiny silhouettes of people at the bottom of the screen, representing everyone who will receive / can see what you’re publishing given your privacy settings and network at that moment. A chat can have one person down there, a photo or status update for a certain circle a little group of varied heads and upper bodies, an entirely public post a line of silhouettes all along the base of the window. Immediate visibility of the to-whom.
CURRENT READING
Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins: On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton (MIT, 2009). Never less than demanding and fascinating — not least when talking about the then-nascent digital future where computation and video meet. “Things find their true shapes most readily as they look at themselves.”
Dino Buzzati: Poem Strip (NYRB, 2009). Myth as a poetic Pop Art comix fairy tale. “Perhaps even the Earth is tired / and slowly it deflates on God’s knee.”
Eames Demetrios: An Eames Primer (Universe, 2001). “Charles had a trick of being able to throw a pushpin into a wall. Sometimes a visitor would see him do it. Then Charles would suggest that the visitor try it. How? Just do it. And very often the visitor would get it the first time but would not be able to repeat it.”