I’ve noticed two things [are different since publishing my last book]. One is that I’m able to observe via Twitter the global launch of the book. I’m able to simultaneously see for the first time that the English language editions, which have been exported from England into Europe and Australia, are released a week and a half before they’re released to the rest of the world. I kind of vaguely knew before but didn’t think about. The other thing is the number of Twitter users asking me questions that I’m usually woefully unable to answer about formats and editions.
I am [experiencing a greater level of fan engagement]. It’s much more direct and much more pleasant than I would have expected it to be.
Category Archives: Quotes
Familiar and unfamiliar
The rental house on Cape Cod where I’ve spent part of nearly every August since I was 9 years old has an amazing library. It’s one of the appeals of the place: the opportunity to dig around in all those books, familiar and unfamiliar at once. They’re not my books — and yet, after all this time, I know them so intimately that it almost feels as if they were.
…
I first read [Slaughterhouse Five], after all, in this very house, when I was 12 or 13. To return to it 36 years later was to confront viscerally the central point of the book, which is that time is not a continuum but a collection of simultaneous moments, that everything we have ever done and everything we will ever do co-exists within us all at once.
40 years going to the same vacation home? And the same books have been there the whole time? The continuity! I just can’t get over it. I wonder what it’s like to have a place like that…?
Up a creek
The average woman has about six friends. The average man has one, a wife or girlfriend, and if he loses her, he’s up a creek.
The reality of the Web, not the dream
This original conception of hypertext fathered two lines of descent. One adopted hypertext as a practical tool for organizing and cross-associating information; the other embraced it as an experimental art form, which might transform the essentially linear nature of our reading into a branching game, puzzle or poem, in which the reader collaborates with the author. The pragmatists use links to try to enhance comprehension or add context, to say “here’s where I got this” or “here’s where you can learn more”; the hypertext artists deploy them as part of a larger experiment in expanding (or blowing up) the structure of traditional narrative.
These are fundamentally different endeavors. The pragmatic linkers have thrived in the Web era; the literary linkers have so far largely failed to reach anyone outside the academy. The Web has given us a hypertext world in which links providing useful pointers outnumber links with artistic intent a million to one. If we are going to study the impact of hypertext on our brains and our culture, surely we should look at the reality of the Web, not the dream of the hypertext artists and theorists.
Emotional Attachment
There is much more emotional attachment to the paper book than there is to the CD or the DVD. It is not logical — it’s visceral.
Actually, it is logical. (It might not matter to you, but the different response is totally logical.) You don’t sit across the room from a book; you interact with it—hold it, look at it, turn the pages, etc. A book is not just visual; it’s also tactile + olfactory (old book smell!) + a little bit aural (think: sound of the pages turning). You don’t interact with music and movie media in the same way. You listen to music. You watch/listen to movies. But you don’t smell or touch the medium while you’re watching or listening. You might not even be in the same room with the device delivering the movie or music. I started a post on this eons ago. I should finish it!
Out there by herself
The problem is that doubles is played by partners. Two people simply should not stand on the same side of the net. Part of the reason tennis is so compelling is that a player has to confront the fact that she’s out there by herself. A doubles player does not. Consider the Bryan brothers, the best doubles team playing, one of the best teams ever. One is left handed, one right; one is Bob and one is Mike. Otherwise, they pretty much share a life. The zygote did not fully split. They always have each other. They are never, ever alone.
(I have no explanation for the sudden quoting of tennis commentary. I don’t even watch tennis.)
Life can be disappointing
Tennis is aspirational, like certain other distractions in life, and most people who play it recreationally, and who may have started as kids, in their dreams always dreamed about becoming great singles players, not great doubles players. In their dreams they held up the singles trophy on Centre Court. Doubles reminds them that they’re no longer young, that life can be disappointing, that not all dreams come true, and that not anything is possible.
What makes them enjoyable
For me, to deny books their physical structure simply ignores far too much of what makes them enjoyable. The commitment they require, the way they force you into a state of simultaneous calm and focus — these are things I have yet to duplicate by any other means. Not to mention other factors that I’m terrified have been lost in the transition from paperback to screen: the mood it puts you in to carry a particular book in your bag all day, or the giddy/strange feeling of seeing your favorites on someone else’s shelves.
Making Stuff
All those years ago, I didn’t think it unusual to spend so much time making stuff. This had a lot to do with my grandmother, a woman who, when she was not preserving produce, was ceaselessly creating other kinds of goods. She spent her evenings at her handwork: The needlepoint and cross-stitch samplers she’d frame and hang on walls; she hooked rugs and sewed the odd quilt, made Christmas ornaments and wine cozies and doorstop covers. As a little kid, I followed her lead, pulling thick yarn through big-holed plastic patterns of butterflies and strawberries, later graduating to friendship bracelets, some small needlepoint and, briefly, origami.
Kindness
It’s a lovely moment at the end when [David] Letterman comes to the most human question of all, which is just this: “Boy, I feel like I want to do something for you. Can I do something for you?” And when [Michael] Douglas says, “Awwww, gimme a hug!” you realize that they’ve actually each offered a kindness: Letterman gave him the hug and Douglas let that be the thing that Dave could do for him.
The Remainder Table 