Rogue Dictionary

the anti-literary internet

David Foster Wallace committed suicide about a week ago. This is sad, if not entirely unprecedented. He was a towering talent, and, in memoriam, lots of his writings have begun springing up online. They're worth digging up—the man could dance with the English language.

One article in particular got me thinking: Federer as Religious Experience, published August 20, 2006 in the New York times. Obviously it's full of great, Wallacian sentences like these:

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

And these:

He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona, and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces. Particularly in the all-white that Wimbledon enjoys getting away with still requiring, he looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light.

And even (my favorite) these:

Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform — and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.

Sitting in my chair, reading these words on my computer screen, I realized that I was enjoying a fundamentally different experience from all the other reading I've done in this position.

Think about it this way. The internet is still a fundamentally text-based medium. I worked it out once, and I consume between fifty and a hundred pages of printed text per day off the internet every day, factoring in news, blogs, RSS feeds, and everything else. And that's exactly what it is: consumption. The words come in, the ideas come out, and I move on. Almost none of it really sticks.

But reading this article, written by a real honest-to-God gifted-to-the-sky writer, I realized that I've been doing the equivalent of consuming a thousand calories per day of Powerbars. Sure, it'll keep you alive, and even give you most of the energy/information/whatever that you need, but it's a fundamentally joyless experience. It's more about the end product, what you learned, what you can do with it, rather than the reading itself.

The internet makes it very easy to passively acquire information, to let it pass through us like so much water. And it is crucial to note that this is fine. Water is necessary for life, and, let's be honest, it would be exhausting to wade through an article like this one every time we wanted to find out what's going on in the world. But the English language is capable of so much more than this. In the hands of a master like Wallace, it can be made to turn backflips. The water can become a tidal wave and sweep us off to some wild and new island full of wonders we could never imagine on our own. It can requires our whole brain to parse it, grab us by the eyes and show us something new. And I'm concerned that, in the word-flood of the modern internet, the occurrence of such works is becoming rarer and rarer. After all, it's much easier to bang out a blog post (irony duly noted) or, heaven forfend, a Twitter than it is to put the blood and effort into really writing something.

So I find myself reconsidering all of those daily RSS feeds and newsposts and things. If I trim some of those out, I'll have more time to read things like this. And while I may know less, in some quantitative sense, I'll have acquired something less tangible, but ultimately more real (at least in terms of sticking in my memory).

And I am left wondering: These days, has our increased ability to know somehow come at the cost of our ability to be?

mobile photo post

Just a quick test of the new phone's ability to post images and format text (wow that's annoying).

Note the new glitch category: those are posts from the new mobile device.

it's no jetpack, but...

Bill Gibson once wrote something like this: "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."

As I sit here under a tree on Stanford campus, tapping out this blog post on a smooth pane of glass that responds to the lightest tap of my finger, and that is simultaneously playing The Who's Baba O'Reilly, I start to think that maybe he had a point.

Boom de yada indeed.

about me (sort of)

Brian *redacted* was born and raised near (and occasionally within) *redacted*. Our hero's travels begin with a journey south, to *redacted* in *redacted*, where he received training in physics (with minors in math and English). After a brief stint at *redacted*, Brian returned to the nation's capital, where he had many adventures. On June 23, 2005, Brian decided to attend law school; fourteen months and 500 miles later, he found himself at *redacted*. His studies focus on laws constitutional, criminal, and technological, and he is both an articles editor for the *redacted* and the managing technical editor for the *redacted*. He has spent summers at *redacted* and at the firm of *redacted*. Brian enjoys rock climbing, fencing, photography, reading, science and math of all kinds, and long walks on rooftops. He also fights crime.

—bio submitted to one of my journals.

thoughts on the lessig method

"you would think that in a room full of people who worship lessig *someone* would know that slides with more than five words on them are almost always a mistake"

The above quotation appeared in the IRC backchannel (#cc on Freenode) during the Creative Commons Technology Summit, an event I was fortunate enough to attend. It was full of brilliant people talking about amazing things, with one glaring problem: far too many of the presenters used the venerable (and horrible) technique of using slides as a background for endless bullet points, which they then proceeded to read through. For highly technical fare, this seems reasonable--the more complex the information, the more structure you need to get it across. But even the less technical talks employed this form of presentation, and so we finally circle back to the above quotation.

Larry Lessig is known for employing a highly dynamic, fast-moving presentation style, where each slide is little more than a short phrase or picture that supplements his talk, rather than outlining it. It brings the focus back to the words he says, rather than whatever he's showing on the screen (which, taken alone, would probably come across as nearly meaningless). It's entertaining, engaging, and it keeps the audience present. This is what I mean when I refer to the Lessig Method (for more detail, click here).

For my part, I was left wondering--is there a maximal amount of information that the Lessig method can convey? Tech talks are, in many ways, the trivial case--you can't get code snippets or graphs or mathematical equations across in five words or fewer. But past that, it seems like there is a vast gulf of people who have fallen prey to siren song of PowerPoint bullets because it's EASIER than scripting and choreographing an entire audiovisual performance (which, make no mistake, is what talks given according to the Lessig Method are).

Then again, I've never given a talk like this (yet). For all I know, the amount of work required to put together a successful presentation in this style vastly outweighs the benefits derived, especially for informal endeavors.

But we'll see. I've got Keynote, I've got P22 Typewriter (one of Lessig's signature fonts). I'm going to try this at next month's New Media lunch. We'll see how it goes.

Oh, and for a visual example of the Lessig Method, watch Dick Hardt's presentation at OSCON 2005.

For a more professional take on the evils of Powerpoint, read this article from Wired.

what's a rogue dictionary?

I once heard (unverifiable by Google or Westlaw, which in some ways makes this even better) that Justice Scalia, known for citing dictionary definitions in his opinions, once called Webster's 3rd a "rogue dictionary." I have no idea what that means, but a rogue dictionary seems like a place where you'd find some pretty interesting stuff.

Besides, there's a cheerful narcissism in starting a blog, an underlying belief that what you're saying is worth hearing. So you might as well be honest and hold forth that promise in the title itself.

So let's see where this goes.