Dennis Cass Wants You To Be More Awesome

Over the course of the year I bookmark lots of articles, websites, and whatnot with every intention of turning those choice items into even choicer blog posts.

For a variety of reasons (which, by the way, my voice recognition software often interprets as “for a Friday of reasons”) many of these items never make the final cut.

And so let us take a moment to recognize and to celebrate what was almost good enough in 2009.

1. Authonomy

HarperCollins is experimenting with an online slush pile/social network/American Idol contest called Authonomy. While trying to write about this site I could never figure out if it was the Future or merely a curiosity born out of fear and desperation. (I suppose it could be both!)

2. Will Work For Praise

This BusinessWeek article caught my eye because it talks about — at least in a tangential way — part of the dark side of being a writer. As the article notes, we’ll happily do creative work for free as long as it gets us a little attention. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to take this concept and talk about larger economic and cultural forces or merely riff on how sad our profession has become, so I just let it go.

3. Self-Publishing Review

For a while I was working on a trend piece about the coming legitimacy of self-publishing. The point I was going to make was something about how if mainstream publishers continue to offer their authors less and less — and if self-publishing can acquire the rigors of traditional publishing — then our whole conception of what “real” publishing is will change. But I only got as far as finding this cool link for a website that seeks to elevate the standards of self-publishing.

4. The Book is dead, the Book will live on, blah, blah, blah

Somewhere in the middle of 2009 I decided to swear off the whole FUTURE OF THE BOOK conversation. (Too many cooks!) That said, the Institute for the Future of the Book’s if:book blog is a nice clearinghouse. And the unsinkable Jonathan Karp’s article This Is Your Wake-Up Call: 12 Steps to Better Book Publishing is a nice, um, wake-up call.

5. Good and Bad Procrastination

Sometimes you set out to write a post and in doing research for said post you discover that someone else has done a good enough job of writing it already. My post on good versus bad procrastination falls into this category. Hit it, Paul Graham!

6. Will My Video Get 1 Million Views on YouTube?

Still other times you set out to write a post (like, say, what the number of hits on your YouTube video means) and quickly find out that in order to write said post you’d have to do so much legwork that it wouldn’t be worth it. Then two days later Slate up and publishes a thoughtful, well-researched piece about the very same subject. Problem solved.

7. 10 Hallmarks of Amateur Recording

The final entry for my 2009 anti-roundup roundup comes courtesy of Des McKinney’s Hometracked blog. His post on the ten hallmarks of amateur recording had me inspired to do a similar post about the 10 hallmarks of amateur writing. Except I wasn’t going to merely copy his idea but instead create some kind of cross-disciplinary bridge between his world and mine. Then I remembered how smart you are and realized that given the opportunity you could figure it out for yourself.

Thanks again to all the readers of this blog for a memorable 2009. Here’s to the increased furtherance of awesomeness in 2010.

When I think of collage I think of Hannah Hoch and punk band flyers that look like ransom notes. In other words collage as reflection of a fragmented culture and society.

What I like about this Sour video is it’s collage as integration of a fragmented culture and society.

The people in the video are all fans, and each made their little piece all by their lonesome in front of their lonely webcam, and then directors Masashi Kawamura, Hal Kirkland, Magico Nakamura and Masayoshi Nakamura pulled it all together and made it beautiful.

You could totally do that if you wanted to.

In response to Louis Menand’s article in The New Yorker about the writing workshop, I’m pleased to present notes (repeat: NOTES) on my dream MFA program.

BASIC STRUCTURE

Two-year program, trimester system, three classes a term for a total of 18 classes.

REQUIRED COURSES

The almighty page

The Sentence

The Paragraph

The Scene

Basic Dramatic Structure

Research, planning, and project management

Introduction to Project Management

Basic Research Techniques for Writers

The business of writing

Introduction to Magazine and Book Publishing

The Internet for Writers

The writing life

Introduction to the Writing Life

How to Have Something to Say

ELECTIVES

The almighty page

Experimental fiction, tricky structure, voice, comedy writing, genre writing, literary fiction, etc.

Research, planning, and project management

Historical research, scientific research, planning a novel, how to collaborate, etc.

The business of writing

Pitching, media training, managing your web presence, etc.

The writing life

Psychology of writing, managing creative energy, developing your relationship to the world, how not to become a drunk, etc.

WHAT WE WON’T COVER

There will be no assigned reading or critiquing of literature in class. The school will publish a list of foundational books, films, plays, poems, etc. References to these works may or may not come up in class. Act accordingly.

There will be less of an emphasis on critiquing completed work in class. Class time is dedicated to developing specific skills. Integrating those skills happens on your own time, as does how your peers, your professors, etc. react to said integration.

GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS

The school runs three publications staffed by independent editors who are advised by faculty and alumni.

The publications are broken into three tiers, a highly competitive publication that also publishes established writers, a mid-range publication that also takes outside submissions, and a student-only publication that is the most forgiving, but that still reserves the right to reject your work.

In your first year you’re eligible to be published by the two lower-tier publications. The top-tier publication is open to second-year students only.

To graduate you have to get through the publication process once at the top tier or twice at the second tier or three times at the bottom tier. (Graduation requirement is waived in the event you get a book deal, publish with a national magazine, etc.)

You can take as long as you want to graduate. You get your shingle when you make it into print.

Beliefs about teaching as information/skills transfer

I am the teacher. You are my student. I have life knowledge in my head computer. Your head computer does not. As my student, you expect to download my life knowledge from my head computer directly into your head computer.

Failure of the direct download at the personal level is attributed to either the teacher or the student.

Failure of the direct download at the system level is attributed to the impossibility of teaching the subject.

Results take so long you lose track of cause and effect

Gregory Blake Smith was one of my teachers and mentors. Over twenty years ago, he likened point of view to a kite on a string. The more string you paid out, the higher the kite flew and the broader (and more distant) the point of view became.

When I heard first him say this I thought, “What do you know, old man?” During my apprenticeship I wrestled with that metaphor. Today it’s part of my daily practice.

Did Gregory Blake Smith teach me about point of view that day? No. Did he teach me about point of view eventually? Yes.

Genius obliterates reason

Geniuses are like airplane crashes. Statistically you’re more likely to die a car crash or a home accident than in an airline disaster, but when a plane goes down it’s a lot more dramatic than someone slipping in the tub. Those rare talents scramble our brains in the same way. A “silver gleaming death machine” comes along and we say, “You see! Writers are born, not made.”

Pride and ego makes us take credit for what others have given us

If you’ve ever worked in an office, then you understand the phenomenon of the boss who takes your idea and passes it off as his own. Writers are the same way, if not worse. One of the reasons we don’t believe writing can be taught is because writers are too close-lipped (or self-blind) to talk about how they were taught.

Beneficial “secondary benefits”

Whenever human beings are around you always want to look out for the secondary benefits to a belief. If writing can’t be taught, then teachers are off the hook for not teaching, and students are off the hook for not learning. We don’t have to think critically about our writing programs. We don’t have to risk having uncomfortable conversations about what’s working and what isn’t working (or, more pointedly, who isn’t working). In other words, we all have “plausible deniability” and nothing has to change.

While doing my monthly ego search (go ahead and make your frequency jokes) I stumbled across the following link:

Download free HEAD CASE: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying To Understand My Brain

Having never heard of the reputable-sounding 4ebooks.org (my bad) I clicked through and found this delightful marriage of attempted digital piracy and spam gibberish:

Dennis Cass, “Head Case: How I Almost Lost My Mind Trying to Understand My Brain”
HarperCollins | 2007-03-01 | ISBN: 0060594721 | 224 pages | PDF | 1,5 MB

Infiltrating the concern of neuroscience, Dennis Cass offers up his possess mentality to “research,” subjecting his nous and embody to automobile shocks, mind-numbing tending experiments, cigarettes, pronounce tests of his possess devising, and the comedy of Bill Maher. Like a slightly off-kilter martyr Plimpton, Cass, in his adventurous exploits, reveals the intricacies of fear, attention, stress, reward, and knowingness from the exclusive out. Along the way, he weaves in the news of his stepfather’s wild incurvation and take addiction, in constituent to his possess problems–which are many. Cass attacks the person of the manlike mentality with humorist and candor, motion favourite power into something distinctly human. Head Case is an clamant feature for anyone who has ever wondered, “Why am I who I am?”

I’m trying to imagine the person who has the technical savvy to sell stolen encrypted computer files, but is unable rip off the sales copy from the HarperCollins website.

Do they have some kind of Soviet-era laptop whose cut-and-paste function introduces error?

Was it dictated by a crack addict . . . to an opium addict?

Or am I just jealous about not having the chops to describe my own work as a “clamant feature?”

Last December, as you may recall, Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi threw a shoe at former President George H. W. Bush.

I happened to be online when it happened, and I remember thinking, “Goody. This is just the kind of freaky, bite-sized news story that revealingly wends its way through the culture.”

The story broke on December 14, 2008. This was a Sunday. By Monday, what you think would happen had happened: late-night talk show jokes, op-eds about the significance (or insignificance) of the moment, reactions and counter-reactions in the blogosphere.

Then, on Tuesday afternoon, I found these:

(GIFs are courtesy Top Ten Awesome Bush Shoe-Toss Animated GIFs from the Riff blog over at Mother Jones.)

I was floored. It’s one thing when people dash off a blog post or Photoshop gag, or put up a quickie video response on YouTube, but these GIFs are so slick and so good and so artful. And even if this is an admittedly minor phenomenon, it all happened—collectively and unconsciously—in less than 48 hours. Most important of all, even though these GIFs were made by amateurs, they are funnier and more pointed than anything I saw done by professionals. Seeing them made me wonder if I can still be competitive in this culture.

I have since calmed down, even if lingering questions remain:

If I’m going to try to be “up to the minute” then what skills/resources/attitudes will it take to keep up?

If I’m not going to try to be “up on things” then what is my relationship to the cultural timestream? Am I a week behind? A month? What are the risks/rewards of being outside of conventional time?

Regardless of my relationship to time, how can I make sure that my ideas are as transformational as they need to be in order to make an impact? What is too far? What is not far enough?

The purpose of this site is not to provide an outlet for my television disappointments, but I cannot resist.

Last night’s Top Chef finale broke my heart.

It was fan (and personal) favorite Carla’s to lose. Not only did she lose it, but she lost it for the worst possible reason. To come so far on the merits of your own work, your own passion and your own voice and then to go down because you listened to someone else is unconscionable.

Season Three Loser Helper was there to be your dog, Carla, not your co-captain. You said you’ll never make this mistake again. I hope you get the chance.

Let’s me get this right out of the way right up front: I have no beef with this kind of movie or the much-maligned “chick lit” genre from which it came.

I bear no malice to either version of Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic. In fact, I’m a huge fan of light, frivolous entertainment. (I’m not even going to qualifying that statement with a face-saving “if done well.”)

No, the reason I cringed all the way through this preview had nothing to do with the movie and everything to do with the economy.

• Because it’s weird to see a department store so full.
• Because it’s weirder still to see women fighting over shoes they don’t need that they’ll then pay for with money they don’t have.
• Because when she’s desperately chopping her credit card out a block of ice, instead of laughing knowingly (I can’t control my spending either!!!) I’m rooting for her to put the whole mess back in the freezer before she ends up on the street.
• Because when she says, “You speak Prada?” I expect the camera to cut to a homeless guy who says, “No, but I used to . . . I used to.”

I realize that Confessions of a Shopaholic is a comedy, and that it’s making fun of conspicuous consumption. But the context is all wrong. Funny how you can make a solid piece of entertainment, and then the world around you suddenly makes you seem completely slightly tone deaf.

So what does this mean for you?

If you’re reading this, then I’m guessing you’re not part of the old zeitgeist. Which means you have an opportunity to be part of the next one. Confessions of a Shopaholic will probably do just fine, but two years from now we won’t be telling stories like this. We’ll be telling stories like this _________. (Where the blank goes is where you go.)

As I mentioned back in December, I’m teaching creative nonfiction at Carleton College this winter. (The course description is in this post.) Recently we were talking about how to attribute quotes and I said:

“In ten years, all this talk of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ will be gone. People will spend so much time online—and computing will be so ubiquitous—that people won’t bother making the distinction between a Facebook friend and a ‘real’ friend. It’ll all just merge together . . . but for now you’ll want to call out that difference.”

Most of the students laughed, but it was an uncomfortable laughter. A couple of them looked horrified, as if they didn’t want me even joking about it.

I was probably 25% kidding and 75% serious, but after the brief discussion we had I may have to revise those numbers. Conventional wisdom says that young people and technology go together like peas and carrots. But it’s not that simple.

If you really start talking to young people about computers, the Internet, etc. you’ll find it can be just as complicated for them as it is for us.

Score one for the humans.

I’m generally not one for sudden outbursts of digital enthusiasm, but I’ll say this:

Hooray for Tina Brown!

With newspapers cutting back, she is cutting up? with Book Beast, the new Daily Beast book site. If you haven’t checked it out, I encourage you to give it a look.

Here’s what I took away:

“Long tail” mentality

The “Rediscovery” tag says it all. Thanks to the persistence of the web, there is hope even for obscure, dead Norwegian novelists. That thing you wrote only dies the day you give up on it.

Video saved the literary star

The conventional wisdom says that books and TV are an awkward match. But books and Web video work surprisingly well. Maybe it’s the size of the image. Maybe it’s the fact that you can showcase Chuck Klosterman, John Grisham, David Denby and James Baldwin all in one clickable party strip. Either way, if you’re an author you need to get on board.

Art + Commerce + Whatever = fine by most

There is no reason why serious criticism, service-oriented reviews, profiles, features, gossip, scandal and publishing news all can’t inhabit the same page. While you always want to stay focused, you’re also freer than you ever have been. So go mix that sh*t up, yeah?