Austin Kleon – Page 617

IPOD VS. CELL PHONE

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Clyde Haberman from the NYTimes interviewed a bunch of MacArthur Genius Fellows about cell phones, Ipods, and other gadgetry disconnecting us from physical reality, and this is what Jonathan Lethem had to say:

“Nonconnectivity becomes a commodity, something to cherish….You won’t hear different, particularly from novelists. You need so much ruminative time to build these elaborate alternate realities. Every novelist is running away from the telephone. Has been for 100 years.”

Not me. If anything, I run towards them. I see a crazy woman walking down the sidewalk wielding a cell phone? That’s the one I follow. She’s bound to say something nutty. Just the sort of thing that might spark a story.

My rule: save the Ipod for the car. On foot, follow the cell phones.

THE ORGANISTS (PT. 2)

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

New fancyness: leave comments, search, etc.

Here’s an illustration from my new story:

organist

THE ORGANISTS

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

A long time ago in Cincinnati, in hopes of enriching his service, a minister built a parlor organ, the first organ ever built in the city. On Sundays, one of his boys played out of the hymnal. Even the Indians, loitering about the streets, came in to see the attraction. The red men sat quietly through the entire service, just listening…

– for a new story, “The Organists”

THE WRITER AS CARTOGRAPHER

Sunday, September 25, 2005

HookingUp
(from HARPER’S, June 2005)

I’ve been taken lately with maps and storytelling. It started at Cambridge, where I did these rough “psychological” maps of London in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, continued during my senior project, and it got started again when I read a book called Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. In Maps, Peter Turchi, (who edited a book with Charles Baxter and teaches fiction at Warren Wilson College), writes about fiction using the metaphor of making maps. The sociology article containing the above graphic can be found here, and a collection of crazy network maps, here.

L O S T

Thursday, September 22, 2005

The New York Times recently interviewed the makers of LOST, writer Damon Lindelof and executive producer Carlton Cuse. They discussed the pitfalls of writing a serial drama.

CUSE: Twin Peaks looms large to me as cautionary tale. That was a show where the mythology sort of overwhelmed everything else, principally the construction of believable, plausible characters.

LINDELOF: It’s all about character, character, character. Everything has to be in service of the people. That is the secret ingredient of the show.

Supposedly, the creators do know how the series ends. “The survivors will not learn they are part of some dastardly experiment, or discover they are in purgatory, or wake up from a bad dream.”

CUSE: These guys get off the island.

LINDELOF: If it’s an island.

X-Files + Twin Peaks + Weekly World News + Stephen King = Best Show on Television.