Donavan’s Brain

Issue number two of The Angler is now available for purchase in the Angler Press online store. If you are a regular subscriber, your issue will be going in the mail this week, so sit tight. If you are not a subscriber and want to be, check out our rates.

Here’s the blurb for the issue: “Without Representation” is the second issue of The Angler, a magazine for drinkers, thinkers, and idlers. In this issue you’ll find Donavan Hall’s essay on politics, social democracy, race relations, immigration, localism, and culture. There are essays on smoking by Peter J. French and Lin Yutang. Also, you’ll find original fiction by Justin C. Witt, Charles D. Phillips, Jamie Iredell, Courtney Kelsch, and Mike Damascus.

I promise to get out the second issue of The Angler soon, but in the meantime I’ve been adding some new stuff to issue three which will start on the topic of open source and how copyright is killing (or at least stifling) culture.

Check this out. Excellent images to go with music by Jonah Dempcy.

I’ve been reading a lot of Proust lately. Also, I’ve been thinking about the activity of reading, its connection to daydreaming and as the entry point into the discovering the true joy of boredom. Here are a couple of things I’ve gleaned from The Boston Globe.

In a culture obsessed with efficiency, daydreaming is derided as a lazy habit or a lack of discipline, the kind of thinking we rely on when we don’t really want to think. It’s a sign of procrastination, not productivity, something to be put away with your flip-flops and hammock as summer draws to a close.

In recent years, however, scientists have begun to see the act of daydreaming very differently. They’ve demonstrated that daydreaming is a fundamental feature of the human mind - so fundamental, in fact, that it’s often referred to as our “default” mode of thought. Many scientists argue that daydreaming is a crucial tool for creativity, a thought process that allows the brain to make new associations and connections. Instead of focusing on our immediate surroundings - such as the message of a church sermon - the daydreaming mind is free to engage in abstract thought and imaginative ramblings. As a result, we’re able to imagine things that don’t actually exist, like sticky yellow bookmarks.

from “Daydream Achiever” by Jonah Lehrer, The Boston Globe, August 31, 2008

And this:

But are we too busy twirling through the songs on our iPods — while checking e-mail, while changing lanes on the highway — to consider whether we are giving up a good thing? We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life’s greatest luxuries — one not available to creatures that spend all their time pursuing mere survival. To be bored is to stop reacting to the external world, and to explore the internal one. It is in these times of reflection that people often discover something new, whether it is an epiphany about a relationship or a new theory about the way the universe works. Granted, many people emerge from boredom feeling that they have accomplished nothing. But is accomplishment really the point of life? There is a strong argument that boredom — so often parodied as a glassy-eyed drooling state of nothingness — is an essential human emotion that underlies art, literature, philosophy, science, and even love.

from “The Joy of Boredom” by Carolyn Y. Johnson, The Boston Globe, March 9, 2008

I hope you have a truly boring day.

Technorati Tags: daydreaming, marcel proust, boredom

I don’t want to write another word that isn’t fiction.

“Why do you write?”

“So I’ll have something that I can read.” I said the word read with special emphasis so that he would know that I meant something more than just looking at one damn word after another.

Allen Ginsberg said this: “Writing is like piano playing, the more you do it the more you know how to play piano. And improvise, like Bach.” (This is a funny sentence. No matter how much I type I never get any better at the piano. But I know what he means. Language works even when it’s broken.)

The people who will tell you how to write a damn good novel will also tell you to write mechanically. It’s mechanical writing that people want — so the experts say — and they are probably right.

“Why do you read?”

There are a few true readers out there who want writing that we can really read — and we form this little underground society, that thanks to the Internet, are not so disconnected as we once were. I’m not saying that the publishing industry isn’t giving us what we want. Truly, there is a lot of good writing out there if you search. But nothing beats the experience of creating the book you are searching for. Everything out there is only an approximation of the book that you can really read. So we have to do it ourselves.

Technology provides new forms. Who will be the first to Twitter a novel? It’s been done already.

St Allen responds to the experts: “Not a mechanical process: the mechanical and artless practice would have been to go on writing regular novels with regular types form and dull prose. Well, I don’t know why I’m arguing.”

Technorati Tags: electronic literature, reading, writing

I started reading Swann’s Way something like three years ago. My plan was to read the whole Novel (all 7 volumes) in one year (that would average out to about 10 pages per day in my English language edition). I just finished reading the second volume, Within a Budding Grove, last weekend. So I’m not really keeping to my reading schedule. I’ve started reading The Guermantes Way this week.

By way of introduction to the Novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, take a look at the Wikipedia entry. There are a number of places online where you can read the whole text in English and in French. The University of Adelaide has a nice online edition of the Novel.

One of the things I think is missing is a good multi-volume print edition. The print edition I have is a reproduction of the Moncrieff translation in 3 volumes. Each volume is a little over 1000 pages. My left hand was in pain after a two hour reading session the other night. There is an old edition that published the Novel in 12 books. Much easier to hold if you ask me. Also, I think there are a number of notes missing from my edition. Evidently the Pléiade edition (in French) has/had lots of notes that were not reproduced in the English translation. I’d love to get my hands on those notes.

Some time back I found an interesting piece in the New York Times (April 13, 2000) on the resurgence of interest in Proust. It’s called “Why Proust? And Why Now?” and it’s by Dinitia Smith.

One of my favorite books on Proust and his Novel is Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life. I would put that as required reading for anyone picking up the Novel for the first time. I was skeptical about investing the time in reading Proust’s big Novel, but after reading de Botton’s introduction, I decided that reading A la recherche du temps perdu would be time well spent.

A few of us on Francophilia will be reading the Novel together. Join the Proust’s Way group if you’d like to join in.

A friend sent me this link to an article in the NY Times Magazine about Freeman Dyson and his views on global warming. I’m a keen student of this subject and try to keep an open mind. At time though, I feel pessimistic about the future of our planet; however, I’m reminded of the words of my friend, Chuck: “Each generation has imagined that they are the last who will walk the face of the Earth.”

Our species has a love/fear fascination with apocalypse in all forms. It’s no wonder that in this age of science that at the moment we tire of our fear of the Bomb and thermonuclear annihilation, that we imagine global destruction via a runaway greenhouse effect.

This may or may not be the beginning of the end. We might surprise ourselves and survive the excesses of the twentieth century, but forgive me if I remain skeptical that there is a technological solution that’s going to bail us out of this one. The only solution that I see is a human one.

After nearly a year of tinkering, I’ve finally got a draft of my “third” novel, The Italians, ready for my “first readers.” This draft is a revision based on two novels, one called Forty Days and the original The Italians. The original The Italians was narrated by Lee Austin (a character in my “first” novel, Goodbye Green Day). The problem is that Lee is one of these larger than life characters and he can’t be content just to be a narrator of someone else’s story — he tends to hog the stage. So Adam Fisher, the protagonist of The Italians, had to wrestle the authorial pen back from Lee and write his own story, bringing over material from Forty Days (but not everything) in the processes. I’m much happier with this version of The Italians and can’t wait to get my draft copies from my POD provider for all you lucky readers who have volunteered to be my literary guinea pigs.

I hate losing material, so the stuff from the original The Italians (narrated by Lee Austin) will become part of my hypertextual experiment, Into the Labyrinth. I’d like to be able to offer the first volume of the Labyrinth series before the end of the year. You won’t have to wait though. I’m posting lexia of Into the Labyrinth on my web site right now.

This morning I started working on the corrections for what will probably be my “fourth” novel, Re: Search. There’s quite a bit of labyrinth material in that book as well, so I might excerpt some of that for Into the Labyrinth. Re: Search is another Adam Fisher novel, part of the Lost Time series.

One of the wild ideas (well, wild for me anyway) I had last December was to e-publish my novel Into the Labyrinth. I set up the engine that will serve up chapters of the book as I release them. You can read along as I post chapters or you can wait until I start releasing collections of the e-published material in book form. (Subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss anything.)

If you are just getting started with Into the Labyrinth, you could start at the very beginning. The two columns “metaphor” and “image” lead to a fragment called “Under the Sun” with has a single link to the “second beginning” — what I call the reader’s thread (a kind of “choose your own adventure” meta-narrative that links together various parts of the story web.

Into the Labyrinth is meant to be read in any order. At the moment there are only a few lexia actually posted, so you won’t get too lost. I think it would be really cool for readers to post comments to the story. I’ll be editing the comments to weed out stuff like “you spelled ideosyncratic wrong.” The sort of comments that interest me are those that will expand the story and link it to other parts of the web.

The end result of this project will not just be an ever growing collection of lexia which reveal an unfolding story or web of stories, but will spawn a collection of short book-form arrangements of the story web. I hope you enjoy the project.

February was a hard month for me. Maybe it’s the lack of light or the cold, but I find myself wishing for Spring and warmer, brighter times. Now that March has kicked off, I woke to find Long Island buried in a foot of snow. I’ll be shoveling most of the afternoon, I suppose.

This morning though, I’ve been reading through a draft of my novel, The Italians. Making corrections. Tweaking sentences and phrases. I’d like to get this novel finished and out the door. I’ve got so many new stories I want to write and these old projects are piling up like crazy. Time to get some of them out into the world. I’ve also been thinking it’s time to get serious about getting out the second issue of The Angler.

I’ve received a bunch of submissions for The Angler in the last two months. I’m afraid that my system for handling the submissions is not the best. As if by magic, there appears this email from something called Ecostamps: “online submissions made simple”. It looks like writers have to pay to submit their work. The fee is $4 per submission. I’m not sure I like that, but I could pick up the submission cost for the stories that I publish, plus pay the writers something extra.

The benefit would be a simplified process for handling the reviews. I’m afraid submissions are getting lost. Ecostamps would keep everything organized and make sure that I don’t miss things. That’s good for the writers who submit their work.

Take a look at Ecostamps and let me know what you think. I’m especially interested to hear what writers think about such a system.