Lilian Nattel's Blog, page 45
April 14, 2011
book signings in the digital age
ipad photos, email messages, stylus scrawl, see the link for details. http://ow.ly/4A50B
Filed under: Miscellany
April 13, 2011
petition: money for people not destruction
How much hunger and disease could be eradicated by the trillions spent on military endeavours that just complicate problems? How many children could get books and after school programs? How many people who are mentally ill or disabled could get support services? How much friendship could result from hand-up to schools in the 3rd world?
Use Military Spending for Human Needs: Sign the Petition.
Filed under: Concerning
April 11, 2011
Thoughts on Technology and Writing II
Continuing from where I left off yesterday, by the time I sold The Singing Fire, I was tired of the conflicts and passions on my list serves and had signed off most of them. (As an aside, the best and most reasonable list-serve I've encountered is one devoted to people who collect and fix vintage sewing machines.) It had been more exciting than Solitaire, but like Solitaire the obsession waned. No more procrastinating that way, but something new was coming. Motherhood and high speed.
My hardy old Toshiba worked, and in fact still works, but Windows 95 was obsolete and inadequate for many websites. It was time for a new laptop and my own internet account. At the start of 2003 I was the mom of a new baby and a pre-schooler. No more dial-up for me. With dsl service, I discovered real time chat, and it was better than a list serve for overcoming isolation. More absorbing. All consuming. To this day, A remembers how attached I was in those years to the aggravations and camaraderie of that online community. Sadly, he called it the new normal. I was involved then in an intense period of dealing with the unmet aspects of my past. But eventually healing happened and the chat obsession waned like the others. By the time it did, I'd worn out my keyboard, and, rather than spend several hundred on a new one, got another laptop.
These were the years that blogging and then social media exploded. Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Skype. I checked back into the old list serves I used to follow and discovered that activity had dwindled from hundreds of messages a day to a handful. I became a blogger around the time that blogging was said to have had its day and twitter was all the rage. I joined twitter when it, too, was no longer cutting edge. But I'm not aware of any new online service that's displaced it. Rather what's new is mobility: the smart phone, the IPad. You never have to be away from the internet. Now everyone, from kids to their teachers, can enjoy the same privilege of procrastination that, as a writer, I've enjoyed for years. I wonder if they'll experience the same sort of trajectory I have, getting absorbed and then eventually bored.
Their smart phones are a more honest device than my laptop because they don't purport to be a significant work tool. You see most of what my laptop can and does do now isn't work related. It is tangentially a work tool and that is confusing. People are advised not to work in their bedrooms (though I do) because it's said to mix up sleep mode with alert mode. And yet shouldn't that apply to our work as well? How can anyone expect to focus on work with games, shopping, music, videos, pictures, news and information about everything in the universe right there in front of her?
I just got a new laptop. For the first time I didn't buy a computer a generation out of date to save money. I was so excited! I fretted, waiting for my order to be made and shipped from Lenovo in China. Would it work? Would it be as good as I thought? (The voice of wisdom inside said, "It's a tool".) But I couldn't wait. Finally it came and I spent a couple of days getting it up and running, transferring files, fixing up my last laptop and the one before that (with a new keyboard bought cheaply on ebay) for my kids.
My new computer is fast and beautiful. I'm enamoured of it. Right now I'm listening to classical music, feeling the perfect pressure of the keyboard, admiring the purple taskbar and the thumbnail images that smoothly pop up when my cursor passes over the icons of open programs: Firefox with "edit post", Word with "draft 1″, Windows Media Player with "Cello Sonata."
But here's the thing. To my surprise, I'm turning it off more than I have any computer I've had except for that first old Texas Instruments 286. I am still reading blogs and news via twitter and checking email, but then I want it off. There isn't any new obsession. Is it over? So it would seem, at least for now. Common sense would suggest that researchers are working on the next big thing in virtual reality. Could simulated environments become the next rage? Perhaps–or something else. But not for me, not today. I've got a dentist appointment this afternoon, which I hate even though it's just a cleaning, and no smart phone can do it for me.
Spring is here. The air is changing. The 3d world beckons. Taxes are coming due and I have papers to sort. On Sunday I rollerbladed to the library with my kids and I wasn't as scared as the day before. I can sort of stop if I'm going slowly. My first draft is open, a blank page calling me. Scary, yes, but I can sort of stop on my inline skates–surely I can cut a deal with a blank page.
A radical notion struck me while reading James Wood's How Fiction Works. What if what people are really looking for is literature? Absorption, sympathy, engagement with a cast of characters, the rise and fall of emotion, horizons broadened from an easy chair. You know what makes me smile? The thought that the next big thing, eventually, might be books.
Filed under: Interesting, Literary, Personal Tagged: technology and writing
poo power
last week a Paris primary school started heating itself with poo. The school recovers heat from nearby sewer pipes
via grist.org
There is also a plan afoot to heat a public housing project with the heat generated by smushed up subway riders. No joke. It can generate enough power to heat 17 apartments. See link above.
Filed under: Miscellany
April 10, 2011
Thoughts on Technology & Writing I
I have to say upfront that I am not a technophobe. I'm the go-to person in this house for computer related issues. I'm not a bad hand at cell phones either, though my experience is limited, having a dumb phone rather than a smart one. So when getting a new laptop spurred me to think about the evolution and devolution of the uses of technology in my life and its effect on my work and leisure, it is not in a context of fear or aversion. Quite the opposite. I want to think about it because I'm enamoured of my new laptop. I like the feel of the keyboard, the luminescence of the transparent taskbar in royal purple, the shuffle of playful and gorgeous images on my desktop. But do I write any better for it? Really. How did I get here?
My first laptop was a hand-me-down Texas Instruments 286. Anyone remember those? The screen was monochrome, amber against black. Operating on DOS, my computer had no programs except Wordperfect. (Remember reveal codes?)
That was 1994. For the summer I took a chance on devoting my time to writing. I had my laptop, travelling to Canada's smallest province, Prince Edward Island. Also in the plane, in the special compartment reserved for small beings, was my cat, Snowball, a big timid guy who didn't like travelling at all. He spent the first three days in PEI hiding under my bed.
Taking a couple of my short stories as a start, I wrote a sketch for The River Midnight, first longhand in a notebook and then transcribing it to my laptop. I spent the summer walking, watching, writing.
There was no internet then. Computers were work tools processing text and numbers. But it was marvelous because you could move text around and erase and it was so much easier than my typewriter had been. You could mysteriously lose a day's work (or more) by pressing the wrong key. But you could carry backup in a pocket. (I met a writer on the island whose house had burned down, turning 4 years of her work into ash. She planted a garden in it.)
I didn't want to leave and at summer's end I had an intense spiritual experience, during which I wept and felt directed home though I questioned what home meant. Back in Toronto, I tossed 90% of the sketch while figuring out how to write a first draft. A couple of chapters in, feeling disoriented by the noise and smell of the city, I met A. The next few summers we went to the east coast together. I wrote my first novel; he wrote his doctoral dissertation. At times, alone at home writing, I felt isolated.
Lest you think I didn't procrastinate during those golden days of DOS when all I could do was write on my laptop, I'll quickly disabuse you of that notion. Pre-internet, I watched all the talk shows to avoid a blank page. I got rid of cable. I got rid of my tv, keeping only the small b&w one (I said) in case I was sick and in dire need of tv. The portable black and white served just as well. The only thing that displaced it was digital solitaire.
After RM sold, I bought a laptop with a colour screen, operating on windows 95. No internet yet, but I was able to procrastinate by a) changing the colour scheme on my colour screen and b) playing solitaire. At that time a lot of people were spending a lot of time playing solitaire on their new windows systems. (Other times people tore their hair out. That was because unlike DOS, windows did weird things you couldn't see. This was the beginning of tech support.)
Email became a thing while I was writing The Singing Fire. At first A and I resisted because we thought email would be distracting (ha! little did we know from distraction yet). But eventually we caved, feeling out of the loop, especially since he could get online free with his university account. I acquired a card for my laptop that slid out with a little opening to plug in a phone line.
For shy people, email felt like a gift though it did take up gobs of time when I signed up for list-serves. No more writer's isolation. I got hundreds of emails relating to interests and connections other than writing. I became embroiled in flame wars, siding with one side or another, gossiping with A about the people on the list serves. But as I think about this, and then think again, I have to say that I experienced the same thing in 3d when I was on the board of a synagogue in my pre email years. In fact we got an email account because we were late to hear about the latest episode in the skirmish between factions.
What was different was that online gossip and conflict went on at a hectic and around the clock pace. There were new messages every minute (rather like texting nowadays) and I felt compelled to check, not wanting to miss anything, and it was a new way to procrastinate. No more solitaire! That passed by the wayside.
The function of my computer had shifted from a work tool with solitaire to a work tool and communication hub. More tomorrow.
Filed under: Interesting, Literary, Personal Tagged: technology and writing
politics and brain size studied
A study from University College London published this week in Current Biology has discovered that there are actually differences in the brains of liberals and conservatives. Specifically, liberals' brains tend to be bigger in the area that deals with processing complex ideas and situations, while conservatives' brains are bigger in the area that processes fear.
via good.is
I wonder whether the brain differences are due to experience, nature, or both. I've read that conservatism increases in anxious times–does that mean that those who have larger sections of the brain sensitized to fear are more influenced by it then?
Filed under: Miscellany
April 9, 2011
Rollerskates
The subject came up today when my younger d, H, came up with the bright idea that there should be rollerblades with four wheels arranged like this : : with velcro straps. There was such a thing, I told her, when I was a kid, or nearly so, and there was a song about it.
Filed under: Fun, Personal Tagged: roller skates by Melony
why poetry?
people's love for poetry is measurably greater than their love for any other activity. Poetry fans don't just love poetry a little; they really love it.
via nytimes.com
David Orr, author of "Beautiful and Pointless:A Guide to Modern Poetry", googled "I like x" vs "I love x" for a number of interests, baseball, cooking, gardening, movies, etc, and poetry. His finding? People like movies but when they like poetry, they love it. (I love poetry.) Full story at link above.
Filed under: Miscellany
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