IPOD VS. CELL PHONE
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)
New fancyness: leave comments, search, etc.
Here’s an illustration from my new story:
THE ORGANISTS
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
(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.