Vacuum

Writing to remember, writing to forget

This weblog is an unpolished open notebook. It's primarily full of two things: things I want to remember, and things I want to forget. Let me explain.

A weblog is an augmented memory for those fleeting moments of life where you really wish you had some record of, and where you know that if you don't write it down now it'll be gone forever. It's the capture place for that initial review of a piece of software you might or might not grow fond of, the record of what was talked about at a particularly interesting lunch meeting, or the color of a late spring sky (grey, with low clouds; good strawberry picking weather if the rain holds off, but not good for ripening the strawberries). When you go back to reread what's been written down, some part of the memories come back. If you're lucky and captured some particularly salient point, the entire memory - the entire conversation - can return and you'll be transported back to another time and place.

A weblog is also a place for the things that you figure out through dogged attention to some terribly inconvenient detail of something that's not working. When you figure it out, you want to write it up so that you can repeat the process if it ever happens to you again. You'd really rather never have to go through the ordeal again but just in case someone else happens on it you'll have that capsule of hard-won knowlege written down. You'll write it down so that you can forget it except when you need to refer to it again, when you'll relearn it as from new based on your old notes.

I'll cheat from time to time, going through old posts and updating them with new information or with recollections that match the time. Every so often I'll unpublish a piece that sounds like it doesn't want to be something that I want to remember and that isn't forgotten yet, or that has such atrocious grammar that I don't want to be remembered by it. My drafts folder has over 200 such articles, ones that neither qualified for remembering or for forgetting, but that I can't easily bring myself to completely deleting.

Some blog to remember, some blog to forget (apologies to the Eagles).

Jay Gatsby - the Wikipedia page from 2009, as edited by Dan Murphy, before the wikivandals took over

Dan Murphy wrote this biography of the fictional character Jay Gatsby for Wikipedia in 2009. Since then, the anonymous hordes of Wikipedia editors have not improved upon the page. Here is the 23 October 2009 version of "Jay Gatsby", which is much better written than the current edition.

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Jay Gatsby is the titular character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character has become an archetype of self-made American men seeking to join High society and the name has become synonymous with successful businessmen with shady pasts in the US.

Character biography

James "Jimmy" Gatz, a bright young man from a poor family in North Dakota, despised the imprecations of poverty so much he dropped out of St. Olaf College in Minnesota after only a few weeks because of his shame at the janitorial job he had to take to pay his way. While training in 1917 to join the infantry and fight in World War I he meets and promptly falls in love with the beautiful Daisy, who represents everything he is not: she is rich, from a patrician East Coast family and born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth. After the war, from which he emerged as a hero for his participation in the bloody battles of Marne and Argonne, he attends Trinity College, Oxford. While there he receives a letter from Daisy telling him she has married the equally aristocratic Tom Buchanan. Rather than admit defeat, he commits his life to becoming a man of the sort of wealth and stature he imagines could win her love.^[1]

Gatz returned home to an America transformed by prohibition in 1919, a period in American history in which gangsters earned the sort of vast wealth previously the domain of the connected upper classes, an era in which "all the old boundaries that separated the classes were being broken, and a new wave of instant millionaires, like Gatsby himself... mingled with the polo-players who inhabited the stiff enclaves of the established rich of Long Island's gold coast."^[2] This era later came to be known as the Jazz Age, after Fitzgerald's own coinage.

Gatz, who renamed himself Jay Gatsby, made a fortune in bootlegging thanks to his association with gangsters like Meyer Wolfsheim (patterned after real-life American gangster Arnold Rothstein) and sets himself up in a mansion in the fictional West Egg, Long Island, a haunt of the nouveaux riche and across from the old-line money East Egg, where Tom and Daisy Buchanan live. Gatsby hosts wild parties, open to all comers, there every weekend, in the hopes that Daisy will attend and he can win her heart. He eventually catches up with Daisy, but fails to convince her to leave Tom. After his failure to change Daisy's mind is clear to all but him, Daisy drives Gatsby's car with Gatsby in the passenger seat and she accidentally strikes and kills Myrtle, the lover of her husband Tom, in a hit-and-run accident. Myrtle's jealous husband George tracks the car back to the Buchanan home, where Tom lies and tells him that Gatsby was the driver of the car that killed his wife. George goes to Gatsby's house, finds him floating in his lavish pool, and murders him before taking his own life. Almost none of Gatsby's high society friends attend his funeral and in the meantime Gatsby's underworld connections begin picking through his belongings in his mansion.^[3]

Gatsby as a reference point

The figure of Jay Gatsby became a cultural touchstone in 20th century America. Chris Mathews in his book American even forgives Gatsby his serial lies. When the poor native son Gatsby tells Nick Carraway, his only true friend and a relative of Daisy's, he was brought up wealthy and that he attended Oxford because "all my ancestors have been educated there" Mathews sees him as the eternal American striver. "Gatsby needed more than money: he needed to be someone who had always had it... this blind faith that he can retrofit his very existence to Daisy's specifications is the heart and soul of the The Great Gatsby. It's the classic story of the fresh start, the second chance."^[4]

"Jay Gatsby... appears to be the quintessential American male hero. He is a powerful businessman with shady connections, drives a glamorous car... and pursues the beautiful, privileged Daisy," Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson write.^[5] In the Handbook of American Folklore, Richard Dorson sees Gatsby as a new American archetype who made a decision to transform himself after his first chance encounter with his mentor Dan Cody, who opens the door to riches in boot-legging. "The ragged youth who some months later (after Gatsby drops out of St. Olaf) introduces himself to a degenerate yachtsman as Jay Gatsby has explicitly rejected the Protestant ethic... in favor of a much more extravagant form of ambition."^[6]

Referring to real life figures as Gatsby has been common in the United States, usually in reference to rich men whose rise to prominence involved an element of deception. In a story on R. Foster Winans, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street column who was fired after it was discovered he was giving advance knowledge of the columns' contents to Peter Brant, the Seattle Post Intelligencer described Brant as "Winan's Gatsby." The article noted that Brant had changed his name from Bornstein and said he was "a man who turned his back on his heritage and his family because he felt that being recognized as Jewish would be a detriment to his career."^[7] The Heard on the Street column often effects the prices of the stocks it mentions.

The character is often used as a symbol of great wealth. Reporting in 2009 on the collapse of home prices and tourist spending in the exclusive Hamptons on Long Island, not far from the fictional setting of Gatsby's home, the Wall Street Journal quoted a struggling hotelier as saying "Jay Gatsby is dead."^[8]

 

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teaching your fingers to think

I do a lot of writing in vim these days, in part because my fingers already know how to make words move around on the page. I find it easier to do the work in a place where I can rely on muscle memory for routine changes rather than have to laboriously guide the mouse around to do edits.

Once upon a time there was an outlining tool called MaxThink (it still exists, for Windows only) that applied the same kind of keyboard-heavy work to outline editing. MaxThink is unique as far as I know in that in addition to the typical kind of outline commands it also had powerful operations like "bin sort" that operated on the outline as a whole. If you had learned the system (and it was non-trivial to learn) you could re-sort a collection of headings faster than you could pick up any one of them with a mouse.

If you can get to the point where your fingers know how to get the desired results onto the page, writing and editing can be very quick. I'll admit to only learning a working subset of vim - there are lots of commands that I never use - but the ones that I do have in my brain really don't require thinking to take on.

Losing the categorical imperative

For a long time - over 2000 posts - I have been putting blog entries into categories. The categories used to live in a long list on the right sidebar. I've taken them out of the sidebar, and now they're much less visible in the user interface to the point of being invisible unless you happen to search for them.

I have touched enough categories to not be authoritative on any of them. A good, tidy, modern blog that is comprehensive in some narrow sphere would have a tidy list of categories and would post in each of them regularly enough to be helpful. In contrast, a laundry list of one-time enthusiams just makes it pointedly clear when my interests have waxed and waned.

Another problem is that Typepad doesn't have a straightforward way to "pin" a blog post to the top of a category, the same way that it can mark a post to stay on top of the main page. That makes it trickier to create permanent navigation within a category.

I do hope to put together some better navigation, so that someone coming to the blog for the first time can read some more popular posts or ones that I like. The whole thing has long since gone from a narrow, coherent narrative and turned into an unpolished open notebook, gathering scraps from here and there and not always pieces that have an obvious relation to the work as a whole. If it were a real scrapbook it would have tape-tags sticking out of it at all angles in all colors flagging things that deserve to be seen again; that doesn't have to be done with categories.

More reading: Do your categories still make sense?, from Blogger's Secret.

Related articles

I want to put you in a category

blogger vs journalist, day 5

Category:Categories

Categories, What's the Point?

Pick a Label - How to Categorize the World - April 23, 2013

Locality vs notability

 

Localwiki

In Wikipedia, every article is measured against a broad global sense of "notability". An individual or a topic has to be notable and newsworthy enough to be included, and though the standards vary there is some global consensus to what it means. If an article doesn't meet the grade, it's subject to deletion.

 

On a Localwiki, every article is measured against an individual sense of "locality". An individual or topic has to be relevant to that location that is being covered. Standards vary widely, but the general feeling I get is that if you put the subject's dot on a map and the dot is too far from the center of gravity of the Localwiki, it will be rejected.

This gives curious and interesting results. It means that the closing of an otherwise un-notable buffet restaurant in a strip mall is notable enough for a Localwiki simply because it's local, but also that people making worldwide headlines don't have a place in a Localwiki (unless of course they have some particular and peculiar tie to a single location). 

I find myself wishing that more places had local wikis - the process of editing is much less demanding when you simply need to identify that something is of local interest vs. going up against the global test. And locality is still ambiguous, but not so much as to be impossible to gauge.

note to self on the writing for the day

One cup of coffee generated about 1400 words. Of those, I needed about 1000. It took three hours to write the 1400 words, and two hours more to remove 400 of them. I hope I removed the right ones.

It only took forty five words to summarize the day.

Deletionism, or the grim reaper

There is a tremendous appeal to the deletionist point of view.

I spent some time this evening improving Wikipedia by suggesting that some of its less well written articles be removed. The task was relatively simple; hit the "random page" button, read the article, decide if it is so horrible as to be unencyclopedic, and if it is then paste in the "please delete this" template and hope for the best.

Combing through a series of random pages on Wikipedia is more grim than I had expected. Many of the articles were very short, to the typical tune of "X is a village with 42 inhabitants" or "Y was an indifferent soccer player on a minor league team". A surprising number of articles were years old and read "Z will be a television series on a minor television network" with no one bothering to follow up to see whether the series was kept or cancelled.

I haven't always been a deletionist. There was a time when you'd find me in Wikipedia more often than not improving some minor but notable page to make it incrementally better in the hopes that it would not be deleted, or arguing to keep some minimally important article from being deleted. The experience of working through random pages was sufficiently enlightening about the general quality of the work there that it seemed more productive to argue instead to wipe out some of the less well considered contributions.

My weblog is similarly full of indifferent contributions, posts which seem to have been a good idea at the time but which don't have much to argue for themselves now. For a long time I had a habit of writing very short and poorly edited posts just in order to get something out quickly, and I'd love to revisit those and improve them by taking them offline.

A help to solid improvement of a large body of work is some way to randomly index your way through the system and work on the next random piece that comes up in front of you. The standard Typepad system does not have any sort of "random post" structure, so I'll need to somehow improvise. What I think I can do is export the entire contents of my blog, write a script to pull out just the titles and URLs of the posts, then generate something that pulls a random line from that list. If I can do that then I can go back randomly and be ruthless in pruning out things that don't belong any more.

Ideally there's some basis for the notion that rather than writing new words all the time, I should be looking at ways of improving some of the old ones instead. That germ of a good idea, half explored in 150 words 5 years ago, might make a good 750 word essay now. That poorly executed quick post of 7 years ago might be deleted to make room for a better issue now. No one will miss the old words, and I might be able to free up space in my memory for something more positive.

The deletionist point of view, when applied too aggressively, can also be pretty grim. The grim reaper decides that one person's hard work is unworthy of inclusion and attacks everything they do until that contributor goes away. If you get hit by a deletionist of that type, your only best approach is to move your contributions to some other medium where you can contribute without attracting undue attention.

My randomized approach to editorial review is much more like the "chaos monkey" used by some cloud-based online services to ensure that their carefully constructed and complicated system is resilient in the case of failure. The chaos monkey takes down parts of a redundant system at random, forcing it to respond in the way that systems designers had planned for an outage. Because you are exercising the failures in a controlled way you can be prepared for uncontrolled failure at some future time.

I was able to download the entire blog corpus, and to write the little script that pulled out a random title from the total. It's now also time to start doing other textual analysis on this word-hoard, looking for words that are used unusually frequently, or subjects that come up more often than I had imagined. With the right tool set there should be lots of good meta-information that I can reuse and turn into new ideas. After all, there's more than a decade worth of stuff buried in almost 10 megabytes of text, and I'm sure that at least 10% of it is deletable without the slightest loss to anyone.

 

A salute to Oulipo, providing inspiration since my keyboard is missing a key and I wonder if anyone will notice if I don't use it

A France-based school of writing called "Oulipo" embraces a use of constraints in formal writing in order to obtain an interesting result. A most famous case is an entire novel written missing a letter "e", and a lot of work done on writing long, elaborate palindromes. By work's end, you are just amazed it's possible to meet constraints of a stringent writing format.

A constraint I am working under now is an absence of an "h" key on my keyboard. A little nubbin under a keycap still works, so I can use an "h" regardless, albeit a bit more slowly and self-consciously. Imagine writing, every time you use a particular letter your finger got a tactile reminder of a letter you were using is special, and you're pretty close to my result.

If I were in an Oulipoean mood, I'd write exclusively omitting a letter from my text, and compose words only missing it. Absent a definite article, my efforts will refer only to one of many possible versions of a work, and never pin it down to a particular one. It's not so difficult, so long as you are willing to investigate synonyms as you run into words requiring a forbidden letter.

A style of Oulipo allows a writer to be self aware of a constraint, and to comment on it as one goes about doing work of writing. Formal restrictions on your work force you into creative patterns omitting or adding certain types of typical constructions. It also slows you down quite a bit, since a forbidden letter at a center of a keyboard is always a tempting target, and a large void to be avoided.

I'm glad for a task of needing to do some interesting avoidance of a key. It is a distraction from a temporary and transient annoyance, sure to be solved by a trip to a nearby Genius Bar, a place of keycap magic. I was careful to save all parts lost in my endeavor to do a self repair, alas at least one of my magic bits of plastic may be broken. I'm certain a fine Apple employee will be able to set it back to its original state.

Is it possible to keep your own voice as you try to write and always skip a missing key? Writing is like talking to a page, and if you are required to omit a fraction of your vocabulary as you do it, a great bit of easy spontaneity is lost. Surprisingly, a key in question albeit a frequently used one is not difficult to type around. A real obstacle is a need to be indefinite about objects referred to, but it is not impossible, just strange.

In general, a world we live in always admits a possibility of doing well by not always possessing precisely an item we are used to. If a car is not working, it's easier to take a bus, walk, or bicycle. If power goes out, we visit our friends from next door more easily. Dietary restrictions like a ban on milk products spur creation of delicious vegan treats. It's not always easy to make a transition away from routines, but new routines fall into place as backups to our usual well trodden ways.

I am writing in 750 words, a clever tool in its way of keeping track of not just words being typed but also sentiment and tone of a piece of prose. Seven score more words to write, and it's starting to feel like a burden just to get out words to make sense. So far a difficulty is a feeling of disjointedness, not so difficult to come to decisions on individual words, but connecting words are strangely missing and require odd constructions to work around. In a way, it's a struggle just to make sense at all. Of course it's also a bit late, and I'm tired, and it's a new year of its own.

My struggle is not a unique one in our family, as one additional keyboard is also missing keys. I believe a "c" and an "x" are missing from said keyboard, again posing compositional difficulties of late as I am led to believe. Working your way around a void is at first a struggle, until you obtain a pattern and meter allowing you to carry on regardless. I'll feel quite a bit better as soon as a new "h" key is put into place.

Related articles

Two Keys Shy of a Keyboard

Oulipo and Other Oddities

Lazerwood Wooden Keycaps For Apple Keyboards

Repairing My Keyboard: 1st DIY Project

750words.com - a writing environment for a daily writing exercise

In sitting down to write this, my goal is to write exactly one thousand words.

In sitting down to write this, my goal is to write exactly one thousand words.

I exhort you to sit down and write long about something you are interested in rather than always confining your writing to the 140 character space that dominates contemporary social networks. Keep at it until you have reached some sizable target word count, and then trim it to size. It's ok to repeat yourself along the way.

I weary of scanning the net looking for the next space to insert a little bit of pithy commentary. Write long to find some free space to wander around in and write on and then edit before it is launched out into the world. If there are pithy bits buried inside, so much the better - but the goal is not to string together a sequence of quips and quotes but instead to explore a possibility space and bump up against some creative edges.

Writing long is a contemplative activity. Sort through the main theme and find other related ideas to explore. A short paragraph invites adding an extra sentence in the middle to clarify, expound, or to share some added insight. Allow space to type in to allow for some wandering through the world of ideas without necessarily having to come to the point right away.

It's the wandering in your own thought-space that is appealing, even if you decide for the sake of the reader that you need to eventually trim a paragraph that doesn't fit. Write that extra paragraph in order to get to the good paragraph that awaits after it's been written. Write some extra words so that your inner editor has something to improve at the end of the effort. Adding in more words lets you explore a variety of turns of a phrase, and the slow process of selecting from multiple alternatives may suggest additional lines of reasoning.  Surplus words are there for a purpose, even though their purpose may only be to be removed.

The careful slow process of editing works better when there's a lot to start from. It's not enough to have the right words; they have to be in the right order. Collecting lots of words give you a chance to sift through them with a clear eye after the original collection is made, and pull out the better ones and leave some others for a later time. In the process of doing this, you might end up rewriting the same phrase multiple times. Keep trying until the suitable phrase emerges, and then collect up the debris that remains around it to see if there's one more thing you wanted to say.

Editing is a process of adding or deleting words to meet a set of constraints. If you have too many words in a sentence, too many sentences in a paragraph, or too many paragraphs on the page, the constraint leads you to omit needless words. If the page is empty and you have a goal to fill it up, the need is to expand, augment, and add to the words on the page - even if you have some eventual hope of hitting a word limit which will motivate you to trim back the extra verbiage. Once you have hit your word count, there's a balance point where every extra word demands that another word be removed.

I've been ruminating over the phrase "adjacent possible", which stems from Stuart Kauffman who useds it to think about the world of evolutionary biology. The world builds on what it has, and the more aware we are of all of the possibilities in our world the more adjacent opportunities can present themselves. From the perspective of writing, the adjacent possible word is every word that could be added or subtracted from a partially finished work to make it better. 

This lends itself to thinking about writing via the adjacent possible. Get some words out on the page, and then use that as your raw materials to remix, rework, or rearrange until you have something better than the original. In your first draft, don't obsess about getting every sentence perfect. Use the initial writing effort as a chance to explorate some phrases and to try out a few unfamiliar terms of art. Write some extra words, so that you can delete them later. 

If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times: repetition is the very soul of the net. If you have a good idea, why say it only once? Repeat it over and over again in different guises until your reader is thoroughly struck through with the notion. Say it, change a word, and say it once again. Delete words to make room for others that are better.

The slow process of accumulating words takes time. If you are fortunate, you start out with a set of ideas that allows for exploration of a variety of perspectives and alternatives, and a structure that gives you some guidance for what comes first and what happens next. Even a mechanical exploration of that possibility space can generate the necessary length of a first draft that works to reach the distance, with a few extra words to spare that can be trimmed later. Keep writing until you discover what it is that you should have been focusing on from the first, so that you can go back later and carve out the good parts for more prominent display.

At some point, the page is full, and it's time to bring the exploration to an end. You have more than your fair allotment of words, and it's time to cut, not add. The extra words that you drop out are scaffolding, the extra space that you built in order to find the permanent space that you really wanted. Even if the total is over what you had originally planned to write, count on the process of addition by subtraction and carve out the good words from the big pile that you have built.

How to write for multiple social media channels at once

I connected my Twitter feed to my Facebook feed; now I need to learn to write for both at once. Hard to do. Is there a way to be selective?

One suggestion, from long-time blogger Prentiss Riddle, is to write things first in your weblog and then syndicate them out to wherever you want them to go. This is said to behave well with systems like Facebook that reward outbound clicks. You can then push out whatever you want to write wherever and whenever you desire, and still own the original content in a place that you can control.

Bill Manning suggests Streamified, which is an aggregator that pulls together a variety of inbound streams and presents them attractively. "Add all of your social streams and watch them all come together in one place."

Ryan Burns suggests Buffer (bufferapp), which lets you write once and then push out those posts to multiple places. "Easily add great articles, pictures and videos to your Buffer and we automagically share them for you through the day!"

Julie Weatherbee notes (quite correctly) that simply replicating the same text in Twitter and Facebook is folly, because it doesn't play to the strengths of either medium. Twitter's @ references and # hashtags look foolish in a Facebook status, and if you have someone following you on both systems, they'll find the duplicate efforts irritating. Twitter's rapid fire, real time updates can overwhelm a Facebook feed easily.

The real challenge, though, is in designing for the writing style. The enforced 140 character limit of Twitter forces you to be pithy, but it also gets in the way of writing coherent sentences and paragraphs. Perhaps, as I have tried to do here, I can repurpose the original Twitter posting and use it as the lead paragraph of a longer essay that lives on Typepad and is excerpted for a Facebook post. As a writing design that's a hard constraint, but as usual, the discipline of constraints lends itself to better writing if you can pull it off.