Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
photo credit: Sally_12 via Creative Commons license
The most challenging thing about writing this blog is not the deadline every week, nor is it generating the snappy content, nor putting an edge on the sharp wordplay. It’s the damn title. 500 words is a cruel master. (Thursday is OK, though.) Some readers have noted that this writer often fails to hit the 500 word mark. Not this time. The word count is on, the clock is ticking, and I’m writing about writing about 500 words. But not about 500 words. Exactly 500. So here goes.
As Mark Twain once said, “If I had more time, I would have made it shorter.” Brevity is not only the soul of wit, it’s damned hard and it’s slow work.
Ernest Hemingway once became known for writing a six word epitaph:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Sad, even brutal, but surely effective and short. And nobody really knows if he actually wrote it, but I’m buying it for now. So did the editors of a book called “Not Quite What I was Planning,” a collection of six-word memoirs. Yes, just six words to capture an entire life. That’s worse than Twitter’s 140 characters and it has to be meaningful. Here are a few who had a go at a six-word memoir:
“Nobody cared, then they did. Why?” - journalist Chuck Klosterman
“Well, I thought it was funny.” – Stephen Colbert
“Brought it to a boil, often.” - chef Mario Batali
“Fix a toilet, get paid crap.” – from a plumber
“Cursed with cancer. Blessed by friends.” - nine-year-old Hannah Davies
“Yes, you can edit this biography.” - from Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia.
If I had to write my six-word biography on a nametag, I would write, “I’m not really a nametag guy.”
If you want to get fancy, you can look at six-word memoirs that contain palindromes, that is, words that read the same way forward as they do backward. Racecar. Deed. Radar. Madam.
One of the most famous is, “A man, a plan, a canal – Panama.” It describes Theodore Roosevelt, the driving force behind the Panama Canal and it reads the same to the front as to the back. Sadly, it’s seven words. No good.
We could look to Demetri Martin, comedian and palindrome constructor, who wrote a poem that is a palindrome, and is titled with a palindrome. It’s called, “Dammit, I’m mad.” (Check it out – same way backward as forward.) Alas, that’s only three words, unless you say it twice, “Dammit, I’m mad, dammit, I’m mad,” and that’s getting a little emphatic.
Creating a palindromic six-word memoir is too hard, and anyway I can feel my 500 word limitation breathing hard behind me, as though we’re running a 10K together and I’m the pacer. I see the finish line ahead, so I will leave you with my six-word memoir for the year.
Enough of 2009, bring on 2010.
500 Words will be on vacation next week. See you in 2010. Happy New Year everyone.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Do blogs have too many links? Links are someone interrupting when you’re trying to talk or worse, your own thoughts interrupting you when you think. Something like this happens when you sit cross-legged in yoga and the aching knees start talking to the mind. Your consciousness loops back upon itself and you work to quiet what is known as the “monkey mind.”
But I digress.
In 1960 Ted Nelson, a graduate student at Harvard, created Project Xanadu. The project was going to be a word processor capable of creating nonlinear documents. Every quotation would be linked to its original source and every thought annotated. Funny thing, Ted Nelson never finished the project. That tells you something right there about nonlinear thinking. Ted Nelson would have liked Yogi Berra, who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Links dare me to click to see where they’ll go. If I don’t have time to write about the British post office employee who developed the technology of the link you’re using now, I just link to him. Links are an intellectual weapon. If I write about differential calculus and you have to click, you prove you don’t know what kind of calculus that is. By linking to special relativity I can seem really smart. But I’m not so smart if I link to Wikipedia. Here’s why.
I was interviewing a pharmacology expert about the stuff voodoo priests use to turn people into zombies. Armed with my Wikipedia fact sheet, I began talking about witch doctors gathering neurotoxins from puffer fish and toads and feeding those chemicals to their victims. But as the professor kindly explained and the camera rolled on my discomfort, no puffer fish are required. He told me, correctly, that you turn somebody into a zombie by feeding them jimson weed, a plant that grows wild in California and has a lot of scopolamine. Huh. If you click on Wikipedia and How Stuff Works the wrong answers are still up there.
Elements of the original Xanadu Project thrive today and its acolytes propose that your documents come alive with an electronic storm of Post-Its.
http://transliterature.org
Some contend that such multi-tasking is great for parallel processing computers, but not so efficient for people. I’m not sure: I haven’t actually read those books. I’m just linking to one of them so it seems like I’ve done the research.
Good writing has its own hypertext. Edgar Allen Poe wrote about “the tintinnabulation that so musically wells … from the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.” With tintinnabulation in the poem, derived from a Latin word for bell-ringer, you get to hear the bells without clicking on anything. James Joyce wrote about “the light music of whiskey falling into a glass,” which makes me want to get a cocktail.
Before I go into the kitchen, let’s stay on track. I believe I am passively using technology but in fact technology is using me. Using a computer to help me think changes the way I think. Clicking on links as I read changes the way I read. I started this with Yogi, yoga and the monkey mind and hyperlinked near and far. I’ve realized that if I want to read a sentence to the end, I might need to do it with a book.
Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
