Dennis Cass Wants You To Be More Awesome

Some days I work very hard to help you be more awesome. Other days the Internet does it for me.

Essential Reading:

Thanks to Lars for directing me to the Mystery Man on Film. He has an exquisite post about the leaked transcript of the first Raiders of the Lost Ark story conference.

In addition to his analysis, he provides a link to the transcript. If you care about telling stories, then you must download that transcript.

Essential Reading + Barfing:

When does a blog merit the attention of HarperStudio, one of the coolest, most forward-thinking imprints in publishing? When it’s clean, simple and has pictures of this:

White Castle Casserole from vulturedroppings.com

Congratulations to This Is Why You’re Fat on the book deal. My goodness it can happen fast.

Not Essential (but Interesting) Viewing:

I stumbled across this video while looking for something else on Kotaku and I can’t stop thinking about it:

It’s likely done by professionals. It’s likely part of a viral marketing campaign for a video game or a movie. It’s likely that I’m going to be disappointed when I get the “reveal.”

But it’s just homemade enough to feel like maybe somebody did it just for the hell of it. A college student. A fan. A suburban mom with three kids.

Okay, probably not the last one, but in five years, who knows? Every day it gets easier to make stuff. Every day the bar gets raised a little higher on “amateur.”

From U AND I:

” . . . I compared myself miserably with an amazing performance by Updike on Dick Cavett that I recalled from the late seventies, where he spoke in swerving, rich, complex paragraphs of unhesitating intelligence that he finally allowed to glide to rest at the curb with a little downward swallowing smile of closure, as if he almost felt that he ought to apologize for his inability to even fake the need to grope for his expression . . . [and] I compared my awkward public self-promotion too with a documentary about Updike that I saw in 1983, I believe, on public TV, in which, in one scene, as the camera follows his climb up a ladder at his mother’s house to put up or take down some storm windows, in the midst of this tricky physical act, he tosses down to us some startingly lucid little felicity, something about “These small yearly duties which blah, blah, blah,” and I was stunned to recognize that in Updike we were dealing with a man so naturally verbal that he could write his fucking memoirs on a ladder!”

Somewhere someone said, “Hey, let’s make a three-minute online science show for people who would read the Science Times if it weren’t so punishingly square.”

The result: Grand Unified Weekly

First, congratulations to President Obama. If there is anything that I can do to help, please let me know.

Second, tonight’s the night for my library talk. Think of it as DCWYTBMA Live! Or DCWYTBMA on Ice!

Here are the deets:

The Always-On Artist: Technology, Creativity and Making Meaning in the 21st Century

Pohlad Hall

Minneapolis Central Library

300 Nicollet Mall

7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

I hope to see you there!

As a writer and journalist, I couldn’t be happier with all the research options at my digital fingertips. There are days when the Great Almighty Screen provides all the information I could possibly want, information that used to require that I get off my ass, leave the house and talk to people.

But for my latest project I’ve started to get physical. One of the books I’m working on is set in 1954, and I’ve started to collect artifacts (mostly magazines) from that time. There is something about the Gestalt of an old issue of Cosmopolitan that is even more illuminating than the article about a man who put his wife in a mental hospital because for some reason she didn’t like being a suburban housewife (this happened a lot more than you think).

I’m talking about how the paper feels, and the art direction of the advertisements, and the strange causes of outrage in the letters to the editor, and the sensation of holding something that someone else held a long time ago and picking up the echo of their heart and of their mind.

Take, for example, this Wired photo essay of classic instruction manuals. Even though the subject matter isn’t dear to my heart, I got a thrill at seeing the binder for the first civilian nuclear energy plant in the US, as well as the Project Gemini “familiarization manual” (image left). The people who used these booklets didn’t give them a second thought, and yet from where we stand they witnessed a partial core meltdown and a trip to space.

Ideally you’ll put your mitts on the real thing, but in a pinch a picture or a snippet of video will do. I now make a Google images search and a YouTube search a mandatory part of everything I’m working on. Doing a Google blogs search is another way to pick up thoughts, images and impressions. You never know what you’ll find.