Joel’s Improved Personal Website
I came across another church web site today, with the line “We are not perfect, but Jesus is.” Since when did anyone, inside or outside the church, care about Christians being perfect?
Christians really need to stop using “we are not perfect” as a promotional line. It comes across like a hot dog vendor on the street saying “I’m not a billionaire CEO.” What kind of admission is that? Everyone knows it already.
What would mean something would be if, as a whole, Christians acted as though we knew we’re not perfect, as though we knew we were living in borrowed clothes. There are too many of us arguing too loudly and obnoxiously (under the guise of “contending for truth”) for any of us to be able to use the line “we’re not perfect” with any credibility. We’re already suffering for our own faults; to add “we’re not perfect” is just to rub it in.
Orange Chocolate
(Download the MP3 audio – 11:59, 16.7 MB)
Radio address for August 17, 2010: ‘Orange chocolate’ is one of those things that ought to be simple, but ended up being, for a long time, gnarly and dreadful. These are the kinds of things we need to get clear of.
Music theme is Farewell to Stromness by Peter Maxwell Davies – beginning with the Caliban bassoon quartet, and ending with the Philharmonia Orchestra version. A PDF transcript of today’s address is available if you’re more the visual type.
(You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS, or see all past episodes on the web.)
Facebook and RSS readers: This post is part of a podcast, syndicated from the original episode at jdueck.net where you can listen online.
How to Write a Good Site
A lot of this may seem old hat, but please bear with me until the end.
When you first start browsing the World Wide Web, things look kind of like this:
Diagram 1: An eyeball browsing the World Wide Web
The little squares are websites, out of which new information, ideas and pictures bubble and trickle like water from a spring.
Diagram 2: The eyeball becomes more discriminating
Eventually, the World Wide Web separates itself out into two distinct categories. The first, shown on the far right, is of sites you only occasionally remember or check on, or run into because someone sent you a link – the spare-time blogs, the news sites that only occasionally produce an article that catches your attention, the odd Vimeo channel.
The second, shown in the middle area above, is of sites you visit nearly every time you open your web browser. If your web browser is a palantír then these sites are rather like Barad-dûr, in that once you’ve visited them once or twice, they hold your attention, and you keep coming back to them.1
For people who use the web for reading, for Items of Interest, this middle group includes more than just Facebook or Yahoo Finance or online shopping. It includes sites like kottke and Tumblr and Lifehacker – sites that mainly collect interesting links from other sites, rather than being creative in their own right. They act as a filter. You keep coming back to them because they do all the work of finding the interesting items for you. These “filter sites” are represented by the long thin rectangles. To the reader, they are a mile wide and an inch deep.2
Diagram 3: The eyeball is habitually drawn to a web site with original content
Here you see a different kind of site now in the middle area. It’s in the middle, but it’s not a filter site; it is “interesting” in and of itself. Whoever maintains it is mostly writing his own content, taking his own pictures, and generally fueling the endeavor with his or her own creativity. Of course, there are lots of these kind of sites on the far right, but the difference is that the ones in the middle are both good at creating interesting things, and at doing so regularly.
If you’re still reading by now, you’re probably someone who has an interest in creating a site like that polka-dotted one above, or in moving your site from the right to the middle. You’re actually the ones I’ve been talking to all along in this post. So all of that was to say this:
The people who make the polka-dotted sites are able to do it only because they have time to create, healthy attention spans, and the focus to actually finish what they start. And – here’s the kicker – they have these things because they spend less time reading other websites, particularly the other sites in the middle.
All other things being equal, the more you feed off of others’ creative output, the less of your own there will be.
UPDATE, see also Consumption: How Inspiration Killed, Then Ate, Creativity
1 It still seems funny to me how, these days, you can draw analogies from Tolkien and a decent majority of people will understand them.
2 I don’t mean that as an insult (although building a site that way doesn’t appeal to me personally); these sites are their own kind of interesting and have large audiences for a reason. The web as a medium tends to favour this kind of format, actually, since the slices of attention the reader must commit to them are far smaller. Whether or not that is a good thing is beyond the scope of my thought here, but I do believe it is detrimental to personal creative activity.
The Exceptional Causes of My Absence
Radio address for August 9, 2010, written mainly so listeners will have a dim idea of what keeps me away in town these days.
The whistling bit is my own amateur cover of Such Great Heights. The last piece is a violin/cello duet from Musical Evenings in the Captain’s Cabin.
You can download a PDF transcript of today’s address, and print it out and keep it in your filing cabinet like I do with the originals.
Facebook/RSS readers: This post is part of a podcast, syndicated from the original episode at jdueck.net where you can listen online.
(You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS, or see past episodes.)
Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks at Aspen Idea Festival about women in the Islamic world. Interview begins at about 2:20.
I heard this on MPR on the way back to the office from lunch today and had to listen to the whole thing, sitting in my parked truck until it was over. I’m one of those people who find articulate discussion on either side of an issue fascinating, and Ayaan is incredibly well-spoken. I would have liked to hear it followed by more response from opposing perspectives.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali native, a member of Dutch Parliament, producer of the movie Submission, whose director was subsequently murdered, and the author of Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations.
Facebook and RSS readers: click here to view the original post where you can listen to the audio.
Within the past week, I created a book-style index of everything I’ve ever written on my website, going back to 1999. I’ve been thinking about doing it for so long (years), that when I finally decided to do it it took about an hour.
The project had the unintended consequence of relighting in me a fire to write for this website1 again, mainly from having been re-exposed to all my old writing styles and voices for the first time in years. I may have been experimenting and striving for originality, but most of what I wrote now sounds stuffy and constipated, and there is much of it (the opinion pieces especially) that I either don’t agree with anymore, or don’t think was worth saying. I can’t afford to keep that up anymore, so I’ve decided I won’t.
I like the index because it allows you to re-explore things after they drop off the front page. It keeps things from disappearing forever. And I’ve never seen anyone else do something quite like it before. But also, it acts as a low-focus source of ideas; a way to connect random things and concepts without having a preconceived idea of what you’re connecting with – a little spawning-ground of serendipity.
As I tinkered and coded and watched it take shape, I thought, I want to participate in the conversation again. Not the conversation between me on a soapbox and all creation, but the conversation between me and my muse that we held in the darkness when I still knew that no one was listening but myself. Because there is nothing quite like knowing anyone could be reading the things you wrote when no one was watching.
1 Can I just call it a blog now?
We Will Haunt and Hunt Our Own Creations
Listen to this smattering of writing advice from the book No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty:
“Pick out a character that’s causing you no end of grief, and do something reckless with them. Have them exiled out of the story or get swallowed by a wormhole while waiting for a bus. If you’ve hit a standstill in your efforts to bring two obviously perfect romantic leads together, kill one of them. Your readers won’t see it coming, and in figuring out how to fix the mess you’ve just made of your story, you’ll give your imagination the fertile improvisational environment it needs to thrive.”
What we have here, in miniature, is the ‘problem of pain’ made simple. When we take up our pens to write our own stories, a god-like quality shows through. What so many people deride in God as unjust – his willingness to allow, or even (dare I say it) to introduce pain and suffering – they blithely and even jokingly accept as best practice in the stories they write for their own fame and enjoyment.
Here’s another example. In author Janet Fitch’s recent Top 10 Rules for Writers in the LA Times, her tenth tip is:
10. Torture Your Protagonist
“The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.”
When we write the story, we sit in the seat of God, and our understanding of God betrays itself too well. We will haunt and hunt our own creations to the limits of their lives, and set lions on them to spur them running in fear the last mile to victory – our stories would not be worth telling if we didn’t. But not God. Surely not God.
This post is part of a podcast, syndicated from the original episode at jdueck.net where you can listen online.
Music cues are Neptune, the Mystic from Holst’s The Planets, and The Pines of the Appian Way from The Pines of Rome by Respighi.)
(You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS, or see past episodes.)
The Tape of Nature's Anomalies
Radio address for March 27, 2010: a weather report of sorts. Nature always skips skips skips the beat. Ending music is from a recording of Nadaka & the Basavaraj Brothers: Live in Paris.
You can download a PDF transcript today’s address, and print it out and keep it in your filing cabinet like I do with the originals.
This post is part of a podcast, syndicated from the original episode at jdueck.net where you can listen online.
(You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS, or see past episodes.)
One Take Only
I had an opportunity of doing a letterpress workshop at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts again on Tuesday.
I had only three hours to set the type, buy paper, do my printing and clean up, so I thought I would aim low by setting up one of my marquee fiction pieces, a series of short fictional vignettes each exactly 256 characters long (so they could fit in the Windows “Marquee” screensaver). Next time I am so limited for time, I will just do a business card.
As it was, with a three-hour limit, I was scrambling to get the type set and by the time I was (barely) ready to print, I had only an hour left. I bought and cut my paper, snatched some chocolate brown ink out of the cupboard, locked the chaise into the press, and slapped my paper in without really aligning it except by eye, and started printing. I think the attendant was a little appalled by all the details I seemingly cared little or nothing for, but I was in too much of a hurry to sit down and talk it over with her.
I was especially fortunate that I had no bad letters and no typos. As you can see, it has a kind of hurried, authentic quality to it (” – he said, ironically”). I’m thinking of another run, more carefully prepared, but only if I can sell them, since it would cost me more to rent time on the press. As it is I may end up just putting all the pieces away and make this an extremely limited edition.
Good Night Irene, Scene Four, set in 18pt Goudy Roman, 16/18pt Bembo Italic, and 36pt “Unidentified” type, printed on Crane Lettra 300gsm paper
Thinking in Ribbons and Smudges
Radio address for February 17, 2010, guest-starring my Smith-Corona Super Sterling (not, as it might sound, a gun, but a typewriter). The excerpt at the end is from Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, Book I, ch. XV.
A smudgy PDF transcript of today’s address is available.
This post is part of a podcast, syndicated from the original episode at jdueck.net where you can listen online.
(You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS, or see past episodes.)
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