Intellectual Curiosities and Provocations

January 2009

Glass Houses

Beat Generation,
News,
Poker,
Politics,
Publishing,
Technology

1. Jerome David Salinger was born on January 1, 1919 -- ninety years ago today. Charles McGrath offers some new observations about the relationship between J. D. Salinger and his second most enduring character, Seymour Glass, and wonders what might motivate Salinger's ongoing and unyielding pursuit of solitude and silence. I have no answer, but I would compare Salinger on one hand to Beat poet Bob Kaufman (who was similarly obsessed with silence) and on another hand to Kurt Cobain, who like Salinger was dreadfully afraid of being phony.

2. It was nice of Books Inq, AuthorScoop and Jason Boog of GalleyCat to call attention to our 2008 Action Poetry randomizer. GalleyCat even excerpted some verses from a sonic nurse ode to Billy Joel.

A Memoir In Progress

 

I was a frustrated software developer and unpublished novelist working at a Wall Street bank in 1993 when I first heard of a strange and exciting new phenomenon taking place on our computer networks: email, Usenet newsgroups and the World Wide Web. A new communications technology was about to change the world, and I quickly made up my mind that I wanted to be part of the change ...

Being A Writer,
Economics,
Internet Culture,
Litkicks,
New York City,
Personal,
Psychology,
Publishing,
Technology
I was a frustrated software developer and unpublished novelist working at a Wall Street bank in 1993 when I first heard of a strange and exciting new phenomenon taking place on our computer networks: email, Usenet newsgroups and the World Wide Web. A new communications technology was about to change the world, and I quickly made up my mind that I wanted to be part of the change.

I left the banking industry to join Time Warner's new media division, where I played an integral role in the now-famous disaster known as Pathfinder. I also launched my own website, Literary Kicks, was hired to build Bob Dylan's website, and had my own first taste of creative satisfaction and personal success. In 1999, I finally struck it "rich", cashing in on one of the biggest IPOs in stock market history, just as my marriage broke up and my workaholic tendencies reached a hysterical peak. A year later, the high-flying dot-com stock market began to crash. My paper wealth disappeared along with my job and much of my remaining sanity. I was beginning to gather my resources back together in 2001, only to face new shocking events of a completely unexpected kind. This is the memoir of a software developer who learned how to be a survivor, and a record of the life lessons learned along the way.

This article is part of the The Memoir series. The next post in the series is THE BREAK.

Reviewing the Review: January 4 2009

Based on about two hundred recent conversations with (or tweets from) literary friends and colleagues, I'm guessing that 2009 will be a big year for two important trends: e-books and international literature. The New York Times Book Review is still shutting its eyes real tight so it won't have to see e-books (I assume they'll schedule an endpaper essay full of bad Kindle jokes in the next few months, and start taking the trend seriously a year later).

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: January 11 2009. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: December 21 2008.

THE BREAK

 
Levi Asher in the early1990s with a Sun workstation
 

Chapter 1 of Levi Asher's Silicon Alley memoir. Summer 1993: How I became a computer programmer ... Why I was working on Wall Street ... A co-worker alerts me to the existence of the Internet.

Being A Writer,
New York City,
Personal,
Technology,
The Memoir

(This is the first chapter of my new memoir of the Internet industry.)

I didn't become a computer programmer because I wanted to. It was the door that opened for me.

I was a Philosophy student at Albany State, but my stepfather Gene kept reminding me that I was eventually going to graduate and nobody was hiring philosophers. Gene (a successful businessman who still gives me good advice whenever I need it) made me a better offer after my sophomore year -- a summer job in the software department of the aerospace electronics division he managed, at General Instrument in Hicksville, Long Island. My brother Gary already had a summer job with Gene, so I decided to tag along. It was a better paycheck than McDonalds.

Back at Albany State for the autumn semester, I noticed a strange and growing convergence between the Philosophy department and the Computer Science department. My Symbolic Logic professor (who'd given me an A+) James Thomas suddenly resigned his full professorship in the Philosophy department to become a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant in the Computer Science department. I asked him about it and he said "Are you kidding? This is what's interesting in logic right now. This is where I want to be." The fact that he was demoting himself from professor to grad student didn't bother him at all. That's the kind of "logic" I admire.

This article is part of the The Memoir series. The next post in the series is FINDING THE INTERNET. The previous post in the series is A Memoir In Progress.

Let the Talking Begin

Classics,
News,
Politics,
Publishing
We die over trivialities. The leaders of both Israel and Hamas refuse to make the faithful concessions that would allow peace talks to begin, because each side has labeled the other side beyond the moral pale, inhuman. This principled refusal to begin the process of peacemaking only provides a disgraceful excuse with which to continue to oppress the people of Israel and Palestine (all of whom are suffering under circumstances they didn't choose).

Auditing the Review: January 18 2009

Economics,
News,
Publishing
It's terrible news that Book World, the Washington Post's Sunday literary supplement and one of the New York Times Book Review's few remaining near-peers, may quickly cease to exist. Like the equally important Los Angeles Times Book Review last year, Washington Post Book World does not appear to be able to generate enough ad sales to justify its editorial and production costs.

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: January 25 2009. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: January 11 2009.

FINDING THE INTERNET

 
Cover of The Whole Internet by Ed Krol, 1993 edition, a vital early text in emerging Internet culture
 

Chapter 2 of Levi Asher's Silicon Alley memoir. Summer 1993: How I became a computer programmer ... Why I was working on Wall Street ... A co-worker alerts me to the existence of the Internet.

Internet Culture,
Music,
Personal,
Technology,
The Memoir

(This is chapter 2 of my memoir of the internet industry, which begins here.)

The Internet was born in November 1969, just after an exciting summer that included the Woodstock festival, the Charlie Manson murders and the Apollo 11 moonshot. The first successful demonstration of the Internet went much more quietly. A computer at the University of California at Los Angeles exchanged a series of messages with a computer at Stanford University in Palo Alto, 360 miles away, and at this moment -- well, one can only imagine that champagne bottles were popped, colleagues in various corporations and universities and government offices were giddily notified, and several West Coast nerds went home very happy. It didn't make the evening news.

The Internet grew, slowly and steadily. By the time I graduated with a Computer Science degree from Albany State in May 1984, the Internet was still nothing but a rumor to anyone I'd ever met. I worked for an aerospace firm and a robotics firm in the late 80s and never once saw a TCP/IP packet that didn't come from inside my building. We all knew that the Internet was somewhere out there -- I read about it in magazines like Byte and InfoWorld -- and in late 1992 I noticed a strange new book called The Whole Internet: User's Guide and Catalog by Ed Krol. It was published by O'Reilly, the most respected technical publisher in the Unix field, but it had a strange sort of 60s-ish San Francisco feel to it that was unlike any other O'Reilly book. I thumbed through it and read about Telnet, FTP, Usenet, Archie and Gopher, but it didn't make much sense and I didn't know where to find the Internet anyway.

This article is part of the The Memoir series. The next post in the series is BECOMING LEVI ASHER. The previous post in the series is THE BREAK.

Chuck Palahniuk Does Not Live In My Basement

 
A letter from a kid to Chuck Palahniuk
 

I have no idea why this happens, but I get letters from kids to famous writers. But they don't send the letters to the writers, or to their publishers (which would probably be the best approach). They send the letters to me.

American,
Being A Writer,
Drama,
Fiction,
Internet Culture,
Reading

I've been scanning old photos and documents for my memoir-in-progress, and going a bit scan-crazy as I dig into my archives. Here are a few interesting literary items I've found.

Does This Happen To Other Litbloggers?

Reviewing the Review: January 25 2009

Lit-Crit
I've always wondered if New York Times Book Review chief Sam Tanenhaus paid attention to my weekly postings. I wasn't planning to ask when I showed up at a downtown Book Review event this Wednesday featuring Tanenhaus, novelist Joseph O'Neill and critics Dwight Garner and Liesl Schillinger.

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: February 1 2009. The previous post in the series is Auditing the Review: January 18 2009.

BECOMING LEVI ASHER

The Memoir

(This is chapter three of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry)

By the time I stumbled onto the Internet in 1993, there were a small number of literary sites available. Ed Krol's 1992 guidebook The Whole Internet listed exactly two literary magazines on the Internet:

Athene and InterText, electronic magazines devoted to short fiction, are archived here.

Access via: ftp quartz.rutgers.edu; login anonymous; cd pub/journals

I went to the FTP site and found a directory for the magazine called InterText (I never found a directory for Athene, and never heard of it again). About a year and a half worth of past monthly issues of InterText were available for free download in either PDF or ASCII text format. I checked a few out and liked what I read. These were clever stories, somewhat collegiate in tone but serious and well-edited. Several of the pieces had a Twilight-Zone-ish feel. I sent an email to the editor, a Berkeley journalism grad student named Jason Snell, announcing that I planned to submit a story.

For the last couple of years, my then-wife Meg and I had both been submitting short stories to literary journals like Story, Glimmer Train and Ploughshares. Sometimes we got back stiff rejection letters, and sometimes we got nice notes saying "please think of us again". The carrot and the stick. I considered sending InterText one of the stories from my rejection repertoire, but I had a better urge to write something new.

This article is part of the The Memoir series. The next post in the series is LOST IN THE SUPERMARKET. The previous post in the series is FINDING THE INTERNET.

Jamelah Reads the Classics: Ulysses

Reading

It took me a little over a year of stops and starts and deliberately reading other books that were not written by James Joyce, but I have finished Ulysses. And now, what to say? This is one of those books, you know? You either have read it or will read it or you have no interest in reading it or you’ll read ten (or 90 or 500) pages and think whythefuck and move on with your life. Whatever works for you, really.

This article is part of the Jamelah Reads The Classics series. The previous post in the series is Jamelah Reads the Classics: Ulysses, Part 2.