unbillable hours

"'I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.' I never heard it, this extra degree of hush that somehow traveled through walls and ceilings to announce that my seven-year-old self had become about as absent as a present person could be. The silence went both ways. As my concentration on the story in my hands took hold, all sounds faded away. My ears closed. Flat on my front with my chin on my hands or curled in a chair like a prawn, I'd be gone. I didn't hear doorbells ring, I didn’t' hear suppertime called, I didn't notice footsteps approaching of the adult who'd come to retrieve me. They had to shout 'Francis!' near my head or, laughing, 'Chocolate!'" Francis Spufford, The Habit, in The Best American Essays, at 274 (2003 ed.).

Bestofme Symphony

A reminder: I'll be hosting the Bestofme Symphony on Monday, Feb. 2, 2004. For those interested, please get your entries in (via email to [email protected]) before Sunday night (I'll amend the entries for stuff that comes later, but you won't have that "fresh-baked" appeal). Once again, here's the rules for entry.

All right. I'm out of here. I hate having Saturday lectures. It completely ruins my Friday nights.

Stay of Execution: Dialogue

I've been reading depositions, and I think they should be required reading for any fiction writer trying to learn about dialogue. The way real people talk, even in a situation that is somewhat formal and artificial, where everyone comes into the room prepped and slightly hostile to one another, is peppered with false starts, interruptions, and great colloquialisms. Nobody actually talks in complete sentences. People say "Yup" or "Yeah" or "Unh Huh" instead of "Yes." The answer to a question like "Did the price go down after that?" won't be one of the above -- it'll be "Like a rocket." (Rockets go down?) And at least in the depos I've been reading, people really seem to want to be liked, and understood. Lawyers, the deponent, everyone wants to explain.

A good piece on the language of depositions over at Stay of Execution. I've found that working on depositions frequently has influenced a lot of what I write. The reverse is true as well. I have changed how I ask questions at depositions based on how I want my questions to read on the printed page. My ideal circumstance is to ask a question and receive an answer that is a logical, complete quotation without ever needing the context of the rest of the deposition.

I received this email today, and figured it was worth a public query:

Hello. I want to offer an exchange links between your blog and my own blog. My blog (URL ) : http://trolles.blogspot.com/ If you have agreed to exchange links with my blog, than post my link (HTML code) on your blog My link (HTML code): Troll's Blog

I don't know. Something smelled funny about the email. I checked out the site, which seemed to be direct quotations of news articles with no commentary. Wonderful, I thought, a lively addition to the collection. The site had no emotion to it.

A few hours later, I received another email for another site, also asking for links. It had the same blogroll as the above site (except for the fact that included the above site). It had basically the same posts: news clippings without emotion.

I checked on the domain of the emails, and traced them back to a Micronesian domain that served Russian customers, in Russian.

Now, perhaps the con is obvious to others, and I know there's a con going on here, but I don't see it yet. What is the purpose of setting up fake anti-US news sites and emailing bloggers for publicity? Is this some sort of bizarre PR con job against the US? Is it a virus-oriented scam (i.e., malicious code on the sites? in the emails?)? Anyone else get these emails?

apophenia: venting my contempt for orkut

A lot of writers are commenting on Orkut. Most seem to be attacking it, even in Beta stage, for being a bland, superficial system (see the apophenia link above).

I've actually developed a growing curiosity with Orkut, if because I see it as being a business resource. I don't see it as a social network. In fact, it's not terribly social at all. However, I would love to have a system by which I am linked to my experts and consultants, my colleagues and peers, and my friends, so that there can be an element of personal trust in seeking out, say, a consultant in a field when I can say "well, if they're good enough for Bob, they're good enough for me."

I don't really understand why Orkut, Friendster, and others are focused on these social networks as a way of dating. I don't really think that's a good use for the data. It's insufficient to give someone the idea of whether they want to enter into a personal relationship with someone. However, if someone needs to find a one-off business contact (i.e., an out-of-state attorney, a forensics expert, etc.), Orkut provides a good basis to do so, much like Martindale does.

I'm surprised X at the Whuffie Blog hasn't commented on this.

Critic's Notebook: Enraged Filmgoers: The Wages of Faith?

A.O. Scott has a great essay on the travails of those that have attempted to make films that address Christ, obviously tying into the upcoming film, Passion. He makes an interesting comparison to the cinema verite style of a Marxist filmmaker of the sixties and seventies, Pier Paolo Pasolini (and also to the pastoral style of Godard). I have to say I'm looking forward to Gibson's Passion. I think it's good to see stories told and re-told so that the notion of perspective and subjectivity is brought to the forefront.

To join in on the meme (just by virtue of my travel obsession, I couldn't help), here's my visited states and countries maps. Until seeing the states map, I didn't realize how little I had left.

This, incidentally, is a result of the fact that my family rarely used air travel. My father hates planes as much as BA Barracas.

I need to fill in more red on this one. Someday.

"I'm stuck in that day. And I'm simultaneously stuck in the night before she died. She wasn't conscious. I didn't have a view about her unconsciousness. For the moment, I thought only of the night. I lay down beside her. I talked to her and told her she should rest tranquilly; we were there and were taking care of her. I said, On te soigné. Sleep. It's all right. I'm stuck in the day on the beach and in that night. Being stuck, I suppose, is a way of dying with the dead by stopping when they do. Yet the mother of the child I saw being born, in whose silence I had sensed a universe outside life, said, when I told her I was stuck in the night of my friend's death, that she was stuck in the night of her child's birth. You get stuck, then, when you meet up with something that makes the limit of your perpetual motion just too obvious." Myra Jehlen, F.P., in The Best American Essays, at 144-45 (2003 ed.).

die puny humans: Orkut

Writer Warren Ellis (it's funny; if you've only done a blog, you'll not likely see "Writer, ...... [your name]" as your introduction. Do a bunch of hip comic books, though, and you're a writer; discuss) takes a shot at Orkut, the social networking system in the works from a Google alum.

A friend of mine invited me into Orkut this weekend, and I played around with it for a day before it was taken offline. Like Ellis, I'm still trying to understand the overall point of social networking hubs.

It's faster than Fuckster and Tribe, but it shows that all these friend-of-a-friend things have really hit a wall. I mean, what can you actually do aside from invite all your friends and piss about on a couple of small message boards? Message boards that, unlike Tribe, allow anonymous postings and therefore devalue the message board experience? What happens after that? After you've gotten all your friends in -- whom you send email to or IM regularly in any case, presumably. That's it. All done. Until, I guess, yet another social network system opens and you start all over again.

I agree that the linking of IM to the social network would be beneficial, insofar that I think IM could ever be beneficial (in truth, I tolerate the existence of IM, at best). I really think the best way to make a social network useful it to tie it to an ebay-like bartering system. The social network is your means by which trust can be established. The bartering system - particularly for professional services - is the means by which the network becomes useful.

it's a big building with sick people in it, but that's not important right now

Dodgeblogium: Bestofme Symphony #8 !!

Bestofme Symphony #8 is up at Dodgeblogium. I will be hosting the Bestofme Symphony's Ninth, which shall be accompanied by great choral fanfare and the release of marsupials into the wild (ah, yes, the great sub-arctic marsupial release of '04, soon to be followed by the great frozen marsupial clean-up of '04 {brought to you by Gladware}). For those interested in finding out how to submit to the Bestofme Symphony, please consider this piece here, by Jim at Snooze Button Dreams. Unlike the text of the Ninth Symphony which is by Schiller.

And which has nothing to do with this, whatsoever.