The Olive: the Tumblr of Harper Perennial

Got a question for Mary Karr? She’ll be livestreaming before her NYC event tonight and is ready to give you all of the answers. To everything. Ask ask ask!

You can read an excerpt from An Innocent Fashion on @rookiemag!

[photo from Obvious State]

austinkleon:

Kenneth Goldsmith, Wasting Time on the Internet

I got to read a galley of this earlier in the year and enjoyed it. What it does is rethink the internet as a creative activity, re-contextualizing it in terms of previous 20th century creative movements, something KG talked about in his recent interview in the NYTimes: 

The DNA of the web is embedded in 20th-century movements like Surrealism, where artists sought to live in a state like dreaming, or Pop Art, where they leveraged popular culture to make bigger points about society. Postmodernism is about sampling things and remixing them, and that is made real in this digital world.

When I teach my students about the historical preconditions for what they are doing when they waste time together — things like Surrealism or Cubism — the theoretical framework helps them know that the web isn’t a break, it’s a continuity with earlier great thinking.

So while you get KG’s thoughts on the internet, you also get introduced to folks like Burroughs, Warhol, Benjamin, Cornell, etc. 

My favorite parts of the book are when KG simply writes about what happens when he goes online and what it does to him. 

He talks to Siri when he’s running around the city: 

I say the word “comma” every time I want to insert a comma and the word “period” every time I want to end a sentence….I recall a voice message that I left for a friend recently, where I said the words “comma” and “period” just as if I were speaking to Siri.

He describes reading online: 

Reading the web has a different type of physicality than reading on the printed page…. I find that when I read a web page, I tend to nervously mouse over the words I’m reading, highlighting them, pawing and dragging them around as I read.

And taking photos of kids with digital cameras that have near-unlimited memory: 

We never took just one picture of them but took dozens in rapid-fire fashion, off-loaded them to the computer, and never deleted a single one. Now, when I open my iPhoto album to show them their baby pictures, the albums look like Andy Warhol paintings, with the same images in slight variations repeated over and over, as we documented them second by second.

Watching people talk into Bluetooth headsets:

Once, the only people who spoke to themselves were drunks; today, armies of people spout great soliloquies whilst traversing the sidewalks.

He writes about observing his sons using technology, and how human they remain:

Even my seventeen-year-old son, awash in social media, still demands that we “talk” in the darkness of his bedroom each night before he goes to sleep, just as we have done his entire life. It’s a ritual that neither of us are willing to forego in spite of our love of gadgets.

This is an essentially optimistic book—there’s a sort of “the kids are alright” tone to it that I find refreshing. He’s particularly optimistic about writing and the web: 

We’re reading and writing more than we have in a generation, but we are doing it differently—skimming, parsing, grazing, bookmarking, forwarding, and spamming language—in ways that aren’t yet recognized as literary, but with a panoply of writers using the raw material of the web as the basis for their works it’s only a matter of time until it is.

On writing and Twitter: 

People often grumble that on the web we’ve lost the craftsmanship of writing. But on Twitter, I often see a great deal of craft going into the composition of tweets. The constraint alone brings craft to the fore: how can I say something with such limited real estate? And then there is the game of the compositional method itself: watching the character count dwindle, then precisely editing and revising the tweet so it will fit into its allotted space. We substitute ampersands for “ands,” delete commas, double spaces, and redundant words, use hashtags, and employ URL shorteners to craft the most compressed language possible.

He sees the internet as a place to harvest ideas for writers. He has an epiphany while watching a video of Keith Richards talking about how he gets ideas for songs: 

He says that when he’s in restaurants and overhears conversation coming from the next table, he simply writes down what they’re saying. “Give me a napkin and a pen,” he says, smiling. “You feel that one phrase could be a song.” Although the video is only a minute long, it’s packed with wisdom. Really? Could his process be that simple, that pure? After listening to Keith, I feel inspired. After all, I feel like I spend tons of time eavesdropping on Facebook conversations. Might I be able to wring a song or a poem out of those as well.

He notes how his browser history is a kind of autobiography: 

If you want to know anything about me, what I was thinking, what I was interested in, exactly what I did or was going to do, check out my browser history: my passions, my hatreds, my crushes, my hopes—my intellectual and emotional life—all there before me, going back years and years, in all its embarrassment and all its riches.

This is the kind of book for which life writes a new chapter every week. (Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is another.) Take the Pokemon Go phenomenon, which KG recently described as “pure surrealism. It’s something out of a Magritte painting.”

I liked it. See also: Uncreative Writing & Seven American Deaths and Disasters

Filed under: my reading year 2016

Wasting time on the internet with Wasting Time on the Internet.

washingtonpost:

We all waste time on the Internet. This guy became an expert on it. 

prairielights:

Some of today’s new releases, part 3

That cat is just stealing my heart.

harpercollins:

On sale now, reissues of JT LeRoy’s Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.

you vs. the YA ship she told you not to worry about

Wasting Time on the Internet is here! (…she typed in a tumblr post.)