You’ve got to hand it to him. My good friend Kevin Smokler is like a one-man cheering section for the publishing industry. Throughout all their travails over the past few years, Kevin has been in the midst of things, shouting encouragement and (often) exhortations. His day job (CEO of Booktour.com) involves helping authors and publishers find ways to connect with readers in real space, and now he’s doing the same thing for magazines. Sort of.

Kevin’s organizing the first annual “National Magazine Day,” to be held Saturday February 27, 2010. There will be an “official” event in San Francisco, held at an independent bookstore. Readers will congregate and read to their hearts’ content all day, followed by a lively panel discussion. But you don’t have to be in San Francisco, or even in the USA, to participate. Kevin’s encouraging all of us to “attack the stack” of unread magazines we have lying around, and I intend to take him up on the offer. I’ve always loved magazines, and subscribe to quite a few:

• Harper’s
• The Walrus
• Iceland Review
• The Big Takeover
• Little White Lies

I also have loads of issues of Film Comment, Cineaste and the latest Oxford American to get through. There’s no way I’ll get through all my unread stuff, but by encouraging us to set aside some time just for magazines, Kevin’s helping us reconnect to what made us fill our houses up with this stuff in the first place. With the advent of the iPad, who knows how many magazines will survive in printed form. Let’s show our magazines some love this weekend.

By the way, all this has me curious what magazines other people read. Jump into the comments and let me know what mags you’re reading these days on paper. And here’s an idea. If you’re coming to South by Southwest in a few weeks, as I am (for the 10th year!), bring along an issue of something unusual that you’re finished with and let’s have a swap. I’ve already promised Kevin a copy of Canadian magazine The Walrus, and am hoping he’ll bring me something unique as well. Let me know in the comments if you want to participate and I’ll try to find a few things you might not have seen before.

from Consolation Champs

(Inter)National Magazine Day

The Geography of Bliss, by Eric Weiner

A few days ago, I got a call from the public library informing me that a book I’d put on hold had become available. I’d completely forgotten what book it was, but the timing couldn’t have been better. Eric Weiner‘s book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World reached me at the beginning of a new year, at a time when I’ve been thinking about my own life and happiness quite a bit.

I’d discovered the book after reading about it on my Icelandic friend Alda’s blog. Weiner, a correspondent for National Public Radio, had visited Iceland and met with her in his research. As it turns out, Icelanders regularly score highly on surveys of the happiest people in the world, despite their isolation, unforgiving climate, and the fact that they spend most of the winter in perpetual darkness. Hopefully, the economic meltdown won’t dampen their spirits too much. But it fascinated me, Weiner’s quest to find the world’s happiest people. He traverses the globe, writing chapters about specific countries/cultures, both happy and unhappy, to see how happiness is defined elsewhere and how it is pursued. Though he’s a self-professed “grump,” he’s also a very entertaining writer and someone I wouldn’t mind sharing a beer with. But that’s hardly surprising, since over the years, I’ve always seemed to attract friends who seemed less happy than I did. Which is to say that I’ve always considered myself generally a very happy person (perhaps an 8 out of 10). The thing that has me thinking about happiness so much lately is that over the past year or so, I think I’ve dropped to about a 7 (or even a 6 some weeks). Now this could be the dreaded “mid-life crisis” but I want to understand it a little more.

It turns out Weiner is around my age, so I find his questions similar to my own. I burned through 90% of the book yesterday and hope to finish it today. In addition to being a highly entertaining travelogue (he visits Iceland, Bhutan, and Moldova, among other places), the book is a very honest and personal quest to understand happiness, if not to seek it out directly. Weiner provides a good overview of the relatively new field of “happiness studies” (or positive psychology as it’s more formally known). Instead of simply trying to understand damaged psyches, why not try to find out what makes a healthy one so healthy? A quick peek at Amazon tells me that books about happiness are all the rage right now, but what I liked about this one is the author’s wanderlust and desire to find out what makes particular cultures happier than others. I think he hits it on the head when he says that it’s our relationships with other people that ultimately determine our happiness, and that sometimes you have to remove yourself from your own culture (by comparing it with others) to understand it better. I’ll surely have more thoughts after I’ve finished the book, but I can give The Geography of Bliss my heartiest (happiest?) endorsement.

from Consolation Champs

The Geography of Bliss

I never wanna write short stories again. They suck. They’re incredibly demanding. A story can be perfect. No novel can be perfect. Novels are awesome. Novels are like us.

From an interview with CBC News reporter Sarah Liss

I’m reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao right now and really enjoying it. Perhaps I’ll write a review when I’m finished. Perhaps not. Either way, it’s worth reading.

from Consolation Champs

Junot Diaz on Short Stories

About a month ago, Terry was nominated for the 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, in the company of such literary luminaries as Douglas Coupland and Will Ferguson. The happy ending came this morning, when he found out that he had won. Bravo, Terry!

from Consolation Champs

Terry Fallis Wins Leacock Medal

I did know how, once. Just like every other kid, I signed up for the driver education classes at my high school and did perfectly well. Except for one thing. It was probably at my very last lesson when my driving instructor advised me not to book my test appointment until I practiced my parallel parking. A lot. At this point in the story, my memory gets a bit foggy (this is, after all, now more than 25 years ago). I did NOT practice my parallel parking. In fact, I got a bit annoyed with his advice. And when it came down to it, I guess I just didn’t care enough. All of my friends were getting licences, and some of them were even buying cars. I was happy, like Iggy, to be the Passenger. Until now.

It’s not that Klosterman has made me crave the experience of actually driving thousands of miles. The physical and mental effort of keeping the car safely between the lines and away from the cars in front and behind strikes me as exhausting. But there’s just something about the particular kind of solitude with musical accompaniment a “road trip” offers that a bus journey with an iPod just can’t match.

Even if I were to practice my parallel parking, after all this time, and successfully obtain my driving licence, I doubt very much whether I’d be able to take off on my own with a trunk full of music. I suspect that there would be some marital payback which would involve me doing every single bit of driving for the next ten years, and beyond. And as a much older new driver, I could never build up the self-confidence that would let me roll down the window and rest one arm on the doorframe. Instead of the freedom that I have in mind, more likely I’d be squinting at highway exit signs, nervously changing lanes and trying not to fall asleep behind the wheel.

If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll get back to my vicarious road trip now. At least when I start to get sleepy, I can just put the book down and go to bed.

from Consolation Champs

Vicarious Road Trip

Good to know.

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Ligers and Tigons and Bears, Oh My

Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, by Steve Martin

Brooke picked this book up for me a few weeks ago, knowing I’d been a huge fan of Steve Martin during his standup years. You could even say that as a teenager, I idolized Martin. To this day, I’m in awe of people (including myself!) who can make others laugh. But I’ve always been slightly bemused by some of Martin’s latter-day forays into melancholy (Shopgirl, for example) and wondered what had happened to the sense of the absurd that fuelled his edgy comedy routines of the 1970s. I think I was 13 when I saw him perform at Toronto’s cavernous Maple Leaf Gardens, and it still boggles my mind today that a comedian could fill a 20,000 seat arena. It almost seems unreal now. But Saturday Night Live, his appearances on The Tonight Show, and for me, his comedy albums made Martin a bonafide superstar. But as Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life reveals, he was not quite an overnight success.

In fact, in this book he writes with a sometimes dewy-eyed sentimentality about all the hard work it took for him to look “wild and crazy.” A driven perfectionist with a Protestant work ethic, Martin grew up studying magic tricks and practiced for hours upon hours until his act looked effortless. Martin’s seemingly absurd routines were fuelled not by the ubiquitous drugs of that period, but by a ruthless intelligence and curiosity. He was a student of philosophy, and of comedy.

I smiled with recognition as he recalled some of his more inspired bits, but Martin himself seems still somewhat detached from this period of his life. He admits that after he left standup for the movies in the early 1980s, he rarely thought about that time. Only now with this book does he realize that it was the most fruitful, exciting, and just plain funny period of his long and (now) distinguished career. He’s honest enough to admit that he was never really after fame, and became very uncomfortable with it pretty quickly. But he loved performing. Although he seems at peace with his life, he still seems to look at his standup self as if he were looking at a completely different man. I find that a bit sad.

Steve Martin is less funny these days, and I think he knows that. But he’s had tremendous success as a writer of essays, fiction, plays and screenplays, and as an actor. For me, though, Steve Martin will always be the man who let me know it was OK to make a smart joke that nobody else got. Along with Monty Python and, later, the Coen Brothers, Steve Martin’s “bits” were the currency that was shared among me and my friends. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been thirty years. Now, before I start becoming the dewy-eyed sentimentalist, I’ll wrap up. If you’re of my generation, and actually saw Steve live on Saturday Night Live, you’ll want to read this slim but rewarding volume. Although the real Steve is considerably more complicated than the “funny” Steve, this was still a great read. In fact, I read the whole thing today.

from Consolation Champs

Born Standing Up

What The New Atheists Don’t See

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Theodore Dalrymple on the Neo-Atheists

Jesus Land: A Memoir, by Julia Scheeres

It seems that I’ve been immersing myself in stories about toxic Christianity lately. Julia Scheeres’ memoir of growing up with her adopted black brother David in a hellish “Christian” home hasn’t made me feel any better about the evangelical subculture. In fact, I am beginning to wonder if Christianity itself might be broken beyond repair. Though a harrowing read, the book is a beautiful testament to the power of hope and love (and the corrosive power of twisted faith). Scheeres and I are around the same age (and even attended the same college), and I found myself nodding in recognition of some of the trappings of Christian life in the 1980s: Keith Green, Sandi Patti, Petra, the mistrust of anything “secular”, the obsession of our youth leaders with sexual immorality and especially abortion. The difference is that I spent my teens in a safe, happy place, and Julia spent hers in a tyrannical Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. Julia and David cling to each other during this time and her descriptions of both the horrors of the school’s “Program” and her rare moments of freedom with her beloved brother are written in the immediacy of the present-tense, like a teenager’s diary. This is powerful stuff, and by the end, I was amazed at her and her brother’s resilience. With the traditional safe places of family and church twisted into abusive prisons, her relationship with David is a lifeline for both of them.

At times I was shaking my head in disbelief, but on her website, she includes supporting documents from Escuela Caribe, the reform school she was sent to by her parents after a little too much teenaged rebellion. And she links to a site for “survivors” of the school’s regime, which may bring some much-needed catharis and hopefully shut Escuela Caribe down and other places like it. Yes, incredibly, the school is still operating. I’m happy and amazed that Julia has been able to make a life for herself as a writer, and a good one. She is happily married and has just had a baby girl, and though her faith has been completely shattered, I know that her daughter will receive a far more “Christian” upbringing than she ever did. In these days when the rise of the Christian Right seems to have caught us all by surprise, it’s good to see that these dark undercurrents have been there all along.

In more happy fun religion news, next month’s Doc Soup screening will be Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple. Another story of religious madness in the Caribbean jungle. Can’t wait.

from Consolation Champs

Jesus Land

1. Grab the book closest to you
2. Open to page 123, go down to the fifth sentence
3. Post the text of next 3 sentences on your blog
4. Name of the book and the author
5. Tag three people

Here’s mine:

“I had built a reputation for preaching and writing , both at the local level and beyond. I had done everything I knew how to do to draw as near to the heart of God as I could, only to find myself out of gas on a lonely road, filled with bitterness and self-pity. To suppose that I had ended up in such a place by the grace of God required a significant leap of faith.”

Barbara Brown Taylor — “Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith”

Wow. Neat.

I am tagging Brad, Kevin, and Jay.

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The Book Meme

Powells has a very interesting interview with him on their site.

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God Laughs and Plays

My review of Andy Budd’s new book, CSS Mastery, has been posted over at Digital Web. Enjoy!

from Consolation Champs

CSS Mastery Review

I’m very excited about the release of Simon Reynolds’ book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. This is exactly the period I’ve considered writing about before, though only about the local Toronto scene. This was not only an incredibly fertile period for music in general, but it corresponded with the exact years I was most receptive to it (13-19). There’s a good review in the NYT today (free registration required). Check it out. And if you’re coming to SXSW, make sure you get one of my annual Compilation Champs CDs. I guarantee several tracks of postpunk goodness!

Bonus points to anyone who can tell me where the title of the book comes from.

UPDATE: I just found Simon Reynolds’ blog! Via the excellent Silence Is A Rhythm Too, which has been featuring MP3 downloads of various postpunk classics. Reynolds also has an author site with more info on the book, and recently hosted a panel discussion which included Steven Daly of Orange Juice and No Wave pioneer James Chance (of James Chance and the Contortions). It’s a big download but looks to be worthwhile.

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Rip It Up and Start Again

My pal Kevin Smokler wrote a book called Bookmark Now: Writing In Unreaderly Times, which I talked about a while back. Now his publishers are sponsoring a contest where they’re giving away a library of books recommended by the authors featured in Kevin’s book. The contest entry asks you to recommend a book as well, so there should be a pretty good list compiled somewhere.

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Win Free Books!

Number of Books I Own:

This is why I was hoping to avoid this one. You see, nobody knows exactly how many books I own. They’re spread all over the known universe. In my current living space, I’d estimate around 1,000. But between books stored in our storage locker, at my old apartment (thanks Brent!), my dad’s, and a friend’s parents’ place, it’s closer to 2,000 and might very well exceed that. You see, I used to have a bit of a problem. I loved books. I still love them. But I’m getting used to the idea that I don’t need to own every book ever printed. There are things like libraries. And now, when I finish a book, I try very hard to give it away or sell it. It’s tough, though. Don’t even get me started about my wife. She loves books, too. She buys them. She just doesn’t read them. So, we have a lot of books. (Whew!)

Last Book I Bought:

It just happens to be the book I’m reading right now. It’s called What Just Happened? and it’s by film producer Art Linson. It’s a short sharp account of some of his Hollywood adventures. It looked funny and it was on sale. I bought it along with a whole bunch of books on learning Italian.

Last Book I Read:

I just finished Craig Unger’s book House of Bush, House of Saud which is a pretty damning indictment of America’s (and in particular, the Bush family’s) relationship with the undemocratic, authoritarian and fundamentally brutal rulers of Saudi Arabia.

Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me:

• Traveling Mercies — Anne Lamott
• The Sacred Journey — Frederick Buechner
• The Seven Storey Mountain — Thomas Merton
• A Wrinkle In Time — Madeleine L’Engle
• The World According To Garp — John Irving

(Five is a very tiny number, though…)

Who’s Next?

• Brent (he has been around books a lot and has great taste, except for his sci-fi/fantasy nerd streak)
• Paul (because he needs some new content!)
• Lia (new to blogging!)
• Lissa (because she’ll say something kooky!)
• Brad (needs new content and actually works in the book business)

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Curses! Tagged Again!

Amen!

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Favourite Quotation from Bookmark Now

Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times

Once upon a time, I thought of myself as a poet. I began writing poetry in my teens (one early effort considered the Kennedy assassination as appropriate subject matter) and filled many notebooks with my self-conscious scribbling. I was single-minded in my determination to be published, too. I gathered around me a group of like-minded friends and was part of several writing groups throughout high school and beyond. I took creative writing workshops in university, including one with a Governor-General’s Award winner. I even did have a couple of poems published in some university magazines, but somewhere in my late 20s, my dream faltered.

Until the web came along. If you look carefully, you can still find a link to some of my work on this site, but it’s mostly a remnant of my original “homepage” from 1997, and not much has been added since then. Instead, my writing ambitions turned toward a more journalistic style. I spent a couple of years writing book reviews and some other light technology pieces for online publications like CanadaComputes.com (now HUB Digital Living) and Digital Web. There is even a link to a section on that work, if you search for it.

The truth is that writing has always been important to me. And although I’m not writing as much as I would like these days, it’s not like I have an excuse. This very weblog has allowed me to publish more than a thousand entries since its genesis in 2000. The web has allowed all of us to write and publish for audiences that range from a few family members to thousands of paying “micropatrons”. But how has this publishing explosion affected the “other” publishing world? You know, the dead-tree guys?

My buddy Kevin Smokler was sick of hearing about the “death of publishing” for which the internet was supposedly responsible. So he went out and rounded up more than two dozen actual dead-tree writers to prove that it’s just not true. The result is an enlightening and entertaining look at how a new generation of writers has come of age in the “digital” era.

My favourites among the 24 essays include the one where Paul Collins reads through 121 years of the proto-blog “Notes and Queries”, and the one where Neal Pollack discovers fan fiction written about himself. Also, the one where Nell Freudenberger talks about reading her short stories to students in China while reading her father’s teenaged journals from his trip to Communist Yugoslavia and Hungary. And the one that alternately mocks and adores the Eggers/McSweeney’s/Believer magazine cabal. Oh, yeah, and the one where Glen David Gold confesses to Googling himself obsessively. Meghan Daum’s essay about the vocal tics of the NPR set was interesting (though it would have made more sense as a spoken word piece), and Pamela Ribon’s tale of how she accidentally became a “real writer” kept me smiling and reading. There were a few dead spots, though, mostly the stuff about whether an MFA in Creative Writing was a useful detour or not. In fact, the pieces I liked the most had the least to do with writing as an academic subject.

Overall, the book has a higher-than-average ratio of good essays to not-so-good. It will give you an idea of the current state of the “writing life” and will bring you optimism where you may have been feeling none. If anything, there is more writing (and more importantly, more publishing) going on than ever before in human history. The challenge to come will be to filter through all this information to find the writers that are truly gifted and to help them use these new tools to reach audiences that they never could have imagined in the last century.

Kevin’s book has shown that writers are finding a way. In fact, they are finding many ways, and that makes Bookmark Now an essential read. Even if it is printed on dead trees.

Note: Kevin is taking his book on a Virtual Book Tour this week. He’ll be guest-blogging in a few places and doing other author-type stuff. Be sure to check out some of the other stops.

from Consolation Champs

Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times

Thanks, Neil!

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Latest in O’Reilly’s Hacks Series

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New Book Reviews

Actually, the book (Screening Party, by Dennis Hensley) is quite hilarious. I hope he sells boxloads (P.S. Buy It). The premise of the book is simple: Dennis gathers a group of his highly-opinionated friends together to watch (mostly-bad) movies, and then he records all their pithy, snarky bon mots. If you’ve ever been riffing along with a group of your closest friends, and wished somehow you could record it all for posterity, then this is a book for you. Since there is only one straight guy in the whole group of six, the choice of films is a bit skewed (Glitter? Flashdance? Pretty Woman?), but I guess that contributes to the overall hilarity.

Brooke and I have been holding our own “Screening Parties” for a couple of years now, but ours tend to be a little more serious. Not pretentious, just serious. But I think after reading this book, we ought to throw in a few crappy movies now and then just to spice things up.

Follow the tour at Allconsuming.net.

from Consolation Champs

Virtual Book Tour II

While we were in Poland, Brooke interviewed the pastor’s mother, who had been deported from her home in Bialystok, Poland to Siberia by the Soviet army at the beginning of the war. She’s going to be writing an article about the story. In the course of her research, she’s discovered a great site called TimeWitnesses, which has assembled recollections from people who lived through some of these horrific events.

I am reminded again to be grateful for the ways we can use technology to make sure that we never forget the past. And then I wonder who (if anyone) is collecting these stories in Iraq or Afghanistan.

from Consolation Champs

War Stories

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Welcome to the sixth stop on the Virtual Book Tour for Mary Roach’s book.

I loved the book. Mary manages to impart a lot of scientific knowledge while never quite losing her “holy crap, I’m sitting here with a dead guy” attitude. She’s very very funny, but never disrespectful. So many of the situations she finds herself in while researching the book are just inherently strange and therefore ready to be mined for black black humour.

She explains in the introduction that “this is a book about notable achievements made while dead.” Here is an excerpt that highlights a not-so-notable achievement, but which made me laugh. Roach is talking about gas, and how it’s caused by bacteria in our gut feeding on what we’ve eaten. After death, the bacteria begins to feed on us:

The difference is that when we’re alive, we expel that gas. The dead, lacking workable stomach muscles and sphincters and bedmates to annoy, do not. Cannot. So the gas builds up and the belly bloats. I ask Arpad why the gas wouldn’t just get forced out eventually. He explains that the small intestine has pretty much collapsed and sealed itself off. Or that there might be “something” blocking its egress. Though he allows, with some prodding, that a little bad air often does, in fact, slip out, and so, as a matter of record, it can be said that dead people fart. It needn’t be, but it can.

As you can see, this is a great book. And even though fans of Six Feet Under might know a few of these things, there’s much more for them (us!) in here. The history of embalming, dissection, grave-robbing, human crash-test dummies; it’s all here.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is not really about scatalogical humour, despite my choice of excerpt. It’s a funny and insightful book born out of the morbid curiosity about death that all of us share.

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Dead Funny

I just got my copy today, and I’ll be participating a week from now, on Monday July 14. I hope you’ll come back to see what I thought of Stiff.

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Virtual Book Tour

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Lists of Bests

I’m thinking of setting up a notify list for this sort of thing. Does anyone have any experience with setting one up?

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New Writing

from Consolation Champs

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Here are the rules for the Eric Meyer on CSS Haiku Contest:

1. Readers will submit a genuine haiku (using the comments link below), consisting of three lines. 5 syllables in each of the first and third lines, and 7 syllables in the second line.

2. There is a limit of 3 entries from each person, and at least 10 entries must be received for the prize to be awarded.

3. The contest will run from today until August 15, or until it gets boring.

4. Entrants need not post their entry on their own site, but must post a link to this entry to be eligible. Those without web sites are obviously exempt from this requirement.

5. Anyone in the world may enter and win, but those outside of North America might need to help with shipping costs if they are prohibitive.

Good luck, everyone, and please help spread the word! Oh, and yes, it’s a good book. You can read my review at Digital Web.

from Consolation Champs

Eric Meyer on CSS Contest

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Strange Voyage

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Amazon Open In Canada!

It’s hard to know what to do to help, but at the very least, we can make some noise about this. The blogging community celebrates a diversity of voices online and we should also help to defend that diversity offline as well. Stay tuned for (hopefully) some action steps.

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Save Canada’s Small Publishers!

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Everyone In Silico

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Alternate Histories

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Library Wish Lists

And now, to help do my part, I’ll mention some books:

• Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser has changed the way I look at the entire prepared food industry. More than just a critique of fast food, it documents the processes behind the “malling” of America (and the world). Compelling reading.
• The Global Soul by Pico Iyer looks to be a sort of postmodern travel book in which our author globetrots and then philosophizes about the world. I picked it up mostly because it has a chapter on Toronto called “The Multiculture” which supports the generally-held assertion that my city is one of the most multicultural in the world. The reader reviews on Amazon, however, aren’t too kind, and so I might have to read something else first.

from Consolation Champs

Bookwatch

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BookCrossing

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New Writing

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Mann Alive

If you wanna build a site,
You can’t just code with impunity;
If you wanna get it right,
You gotta read Design for Community.
There were two honourable mentions:

Wanna build an online community?

You don’t have to be a power tech

Just take this fine opportunity
And buy the book by Powazek

–marya

I didn’t quite win your zeldman book
but back to your community I wandered
I suspect that I’m still out of luck
I’ll just buy copies once remaindered.

–Lloyd “Always a Bridesmaid” Wood

I must assure Mr. Wood that it is not the high cost of shipping that is keeping him out of the medals, but rather his failure to really mention the topic, though I laughed some. Thank you to all our entrants and special congratulations to our winner and runners-up!

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Powazek Poetry Contest Winner

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Powazek Poetry Contest Deadline Approaching

• No more than two entries per person
• At least 10 entries must be received
• If you have a site, you must post a link back to this entry (publicity is required for this to be fair)
• Contest closes when it begins to get lame

Click “comments” and get rhymin’…

from Consolation Champs

Powazek Poetry Contest

I don’t just want to throw this stuff out, I want to burn it, too.

There were some bright spots, the poetry of Christopher Smart being one of them. Smart was a poet who was committed to a mental hospital when he suddenly insisted on saying his prayers out loud and in public. He composed his masterpiece “Jubilate Agno” while confined, and it contains one of the most charming odes to a pet found anywhere:

And so it continues for another 70 lines or so. Marvellous stuff.

from Consolation Champs

Eighteenth Century Literature

Haiku good model
Zeldman disciples like the

standardization.

There were three honourable mentions:

“zeldman you fucker!”

no better a fan letter?
- dean allen was drunk.

–tbit

Upgrade browser now
or i’ll block you from my site!
(upgrade THIS, Zeldman!)

–Dan

javascript turned off?

can’t win book on web standards
Zeldman’s blind spot too.

–Lloyd Wood

You’ll notice a critical tone in two of the honourable mentions, but I assure the authors that that was not held against them in the judging. Valuable criticism in the form of haiku is something in short supply on the web and we’re glad to receive it and pass it on. Congratulations to our winner and to the runners-up.

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Zeldman Haiku Contest Winner!

Please read and comment over there! And you have until midnight Eastern to submit your entry for the Zeldman Haiku Contest. Good luck to all!

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Zeldman Review Posted

The best part about seeing Atlantis last night? The trailer for Monsters Inc. Enough said.

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Get Your Haiku In Gear

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Help Me to Give!

The twist? Today I just received another review copy of the book. So I’m using the happy accident to run a contest. Since the shipping will probably cost me $10, I’m hoping to get good mileage out of this. So here are the rules for the Zeldman contest:

1. Compose a Zeldman haiku and post it using the comments feature here
2. Strict meter applies (5-7-5)
3. Limericks, sonnets, villanelles also acceptable, but haiku preferred
4. Your poem must conform to all Web Standards
5. At least 10 entries must be received, therefore…
6. If you have a site, you must link back to this post to be eligible to win (publicity is required for this to be fair)
7. Zeldman, his family members, and employees of Zeldman Inc. are not eligible to participate
8. Void where prohibited by law
9. Contest closes when it begins to get lame

Please help spread the word!!!

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ZELDMAN CONTEST!

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Experience Design

“It is thus: we human beings are all in the same difficulty. We are all torn asunder, all of us, by this disintegration of our flesh and spirit. And so if in this book I am appearing more spiritual than credible to some of those I have loved, let them examine their own consciences. I think they will discover, as I have done, that they also are torn asunder and that they also have desired to be made whole.”

The biography’s title, by the way, for anyone who wants to try tracking it down at the library or whatever, is Eric Gill: A Lover’s Quest for Art and God, by Fiona MacCarthy (New York: Dutton, 1989).

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Eric Gill

Here’s an idea for Heather. How about a Friends of Jeffrey Veen site? As long as everyone buys a copy of his book, I think Jeff would be OK with it.

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Friends of Jeffrey Veen

Oh, and BlogVoices is back, so chatter away…

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Tropic of Hockey

• No Logo – Naomi Klein ($12)
• The Code Book – Simon Singh ($12)
• Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson ($4!!)
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon ($19)

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Crazy Book Sales

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Not So Cowardly

• Traveling Mercies – Anne Lamott (heard lots of good things about this book)
• Swing Low – Miriam Toews (discovered this Canadian writer through Open Letters, where she wrote for a while as “X”)

I have a lot of reading to do. In addition to these books, I’m reading:

• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee – Dee Brown

which has been incredible so far (incredibly sad, too). Next up, even before my newest purchases, is:

• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers (Brooke bought it as an anniversary gift for me)

Plus, I want to re-read The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. It’s hard reading books when I read so many magazines (5-6 a month), plus all the reading I do on-line. I worry that my attention span (as well as everyone else’s) has atrophied beyond rescue due to the web and television. We get our information so many more ways now. But I miss having the time to curl up with a good book. And there are still so many of them!

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Catching Up On My Reading

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El Lissitzky (1890-1941)

I guess I’ll go ahead and link to the Dave Eggers’ interview with The Harvard Advocate just like everyone else has. I’m still waiting to read his book, but I’m really looking forward to it. I just finished Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor and it was really fascinating, a great satirical novel about consumerism, fame, and packaged “religion.” It did remind me a bit of Paul Theroux’s Millroy the Magician, though. Next, I’m on to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. Small trivia item here. My girlfriend Brooke talked to Malcolm on the phone at The New Yorker for a story she was doing for the Ryerson Review of Journalism last year. He’s from Canada, you know…

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Open Letters

I just downloaded Preview Release 2 of Netscape 6. A little bit faster than PR1 on my Mac, but still feels bloated. My main interest is whether it will be as standards compliant as IE 5 for the Mac. It’s definitely better than the nightmare known as Netscape 4. Has anyone else had any experience with it?

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Long Weekend