unbillable hours

"Busyness is our art form, our civic ritual, our way of being us. Many friends have said to me that they love New York now in a way they never did before, and their love, I've noticed, takes for its object all the things that used to exasperate them - the curious combination of freedom, self-made fences, and paralyzing preoccupation that the city provides." Adam Gopnik, Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli, in The Best American Essays, at 111 (2003 ed.).

Michael Chabon has a good website, full of content. Amy Tan's on TV, rippingly funny, and I just got a Barnes & Noble gift card.

Life is good.

moleskinerie

Armand Frasco sent me an email pointing me to his website, Moleskinerie, which is devoted to the little black notebooks I use for my stories and blog entries. He has some interesting screen shots of some moleskine users' notebooks. I wish my entries were more artistic, but it's usually just scribbles, cross-outs, arrows, and post-it notes.

The Curmudgeonly Clerk: January 2004 Archives - Good Moral Character and Fitness

The Curmudgeonly Clerk asks some interesting questions about whether convicted criminals can meet the moral fitness requirements of the bar. For those not practicing law, all (as far as I know) bar associations require attorneys to meet certain minimum standards of ethics and character. For example, when I applied to become a member of the New Jersey Bar, I was questioned by the Ethics Committee of the Supreme Court about my relationship to a lawyer who had represented me in a personal injury matter. Apparently, after doing so, he was disbarred for unrelated ethics violations. Thus, the Court wanted to know whether I had any ethical problems (strangely, they found none).

With regard to criminals, though, as I commented on the Clerk's blog, I ask the following questions: What place does the notion of rehabilitation play in whether someone is morally fit to be a member of the bar? If we say a former felon is morally fit to enter society, and therefore to enter into a contract (presumably even a fiduciary contract), what higher standards do we expect of the members of the bar? If there are higher standards, I have to wonder, are we really enforcing them against the bar? Perhaps we ought to weed out those morally unfit non-felonious members of the bar.

"Perhaps, though, this very act of typing is what will linger one day in my mind's reliquary. Voice-recognition software is pounding at the gates; videomail seems every day more feasible. How much longer will our computers even have keyboards? Typing may someday survive only as another sense memory. A writer, while composing with his voice, will still tap his fingers on the desk like an amputee scratching a wooden leg. Rather than the ghost of a particular machine, it will be this metacarpal tapdance, an apparition of the way we used to express language, that will haunt him." Marshall Jon Fisher, Memoria ex Machina, in The Best American Essays, at 66 (2003 ed.).

XSet: Bestofme Symphony

The 7th Best Of Me Symphony is up at X Set for your perusal. I believe I will be hosting one myself.

"[C]are only about one's work, judge people only by their skill at their own work, and permit nothing else outside one's work to signify in any serious way. View the rest of the world as a more or less amusing carnival at which one happens to have earned - through, of course, one's work - a good seat. Judge all things by their intrinsic quality, and consider status a waste of time." Joseph Epstein, In a Snob-Free Zone, in The Best American Essays, at 57 (2003 ed.).

Sometimes Howard's taste in music is just a little bit questionable. Still, he gets bonus points for comparing the Congressional Research Service with KRS-One. That's a very high score on the Dennis Miller scale.

On Bill Bryson and the Responsibilities of the Traveler

Saturday Profile: A Colonial Is Welcomed Back by Mother England

The NY Times on Lost Continent and Notes From A Small Island author Bill Bryson. I envy that man's career. Anyone who has the ability to travel - like Bryson, Ian Frazier, and Robert Kaplan - for a living has been given the most amazing gift. Bryson, though, warns of the growing desire of travelers, particularly American and British travelers, to desire sameness wherever they go. Starbucks on street corners in Caracas, just down the road from the nearest McDonalds. That desire for sameness is ruining places.

Just last year, I attempted to write my travel story about Aruba. It was a decent vacation, made slightly irksome by the passive aggressive way a relationship of mine was crumbling like an out-of-fashion Vegas hotel. The part that drove me utterly batty, just sixty miles off the coast of Venezuela, was that it was easier to get a sandwich from Subway or a cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee (Aruba is particularly popular with New Englanders, who I blame for the prevalence of Dunkin' Donuts and Krispy Kreme chains; what is this fascination with lard-smothered, fried bread?) than to find a place to listen to calypso, to eat traditional sopapilla or to see something that wasn't, in some way, a distorted reflection of self.

The Arubans, I suppose, have the right to chose to homogenize (I'd say "Americanize," but it goes beyond that; America, itself, used to be varied; when one traveled through the Southeast, one got wildly different food, culture and experiences in comparison to what one would experience in the Desert Southwest or New England). It makes life easier, and there's less concern about satisfying needs. After all, when things are homogenized, people are mostly satisfied. No one's thrilled by the world, and no one is greatly horrified, but everyone is mostly content.

The thing I think they lose from such a choice, though, is an element of their souls. Culture, tradition, passion, and pride - these things have no place in the homogenous world. Somehow, the economics of travel must allow for the continued existence of the beautiful and the non-corporate. While I don't believe that governments need to do this, that we need to regulate out the influence of "the man" or something as silly as that, I think that, as travelers, we need to recognize and support those differences that we believe are valuable. At the very least, we need to drink them in, for tomorrow, it might be replaced with a dunkachino and a cruller.

update Bill Day has some thoughts on travel writers as well.

"If you are a bricklayer, then this feeling will be in the bricks, and the way they have been laid, and it will be sensed, though rarely understood, by the people who walk on them. If you are a photographer, you will only take pictures of your city, and even your photographs of fruit on tables will still be pictures of the city. And if you are a poet, then there is some chance that you will become the poet of your city, that people will come to see the city that you became." Rachel Cohen, Lost Cities, in The Best American Essays, at 47 (2003 ed.).