* It was a cold bright day in April and all the clocks were striking eleven-thirty.

* Call me Mike.

* It was an okay time.

* In the beginning, God created Yahtzee.

* Happy families are all alike; unhappy families are also alike.

* Howard Roark picked his nose.

* Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—- Fuck this fucking shit.

As of now, September first, 2008, I’m the first me in Google. This is a great honor.

I’m also the second, third, fourth and fifth. All the first five Jonathan Silbers, Google says they’re me. It feels great. If you ask Google, there is no denying who, in this entire world, is Jonathan Silber. (It’s me.)

The Google results are as follows: the first is my Linkedin page, in which you can read my entire resume, and also find out where I work, so you could come over late in the afternoon with a shotgun under your coat. The second result is my other blog, a digitalist, where you can find reasons you’d want use this shotgun on me. On the third link you get my Facebook page, where you can make sure you know what I look like, and so avoid the embarrassment of shooting strangers.

My resume, my blog, my Facebook page: indeed, these all prove that I am here, that je suis, that j’existe, that I posses life and history and friends — I can’t fade away, I will never disappear from memory, not entirely. As long as there is Google there is proof, firm, solid, that I was here. On those interminable nights where I feel myself fading away into nothing, all I have to do to remain alive is Google myself.

Well, George Orwell has a blog.

(via Tomer Lichtash)

Does what you’re writing on change the things you’re writing? If I’ll transfer this first sentence from WordPress to my MS-Word, will the second sentence be different? What if I change the size of the window? Will a story written in a tiny space be smaller, will it feel claustrophobic to read? What if I write on paper? How much can you fine-tune it? Can we discern in the text, like the very of finest wine tasters, the version of Word the author used?

A lot of writers seem to think like that. It’s the central theme in book about typewriters, which I’ll buy as soon as I remember its title. The century or so of typewriters has certainly changed literature, but was it the typewriter or the pulp magazine that changed it? The descent of the pen or the rise of the short story? Many writers felt that the machine is dragging the story out of them, that the clicking and chiming of their typewriters lulls them into a daze from which their stories emerge. The clicking keys, the breaks from the story you have to make to put a new page in — they set a rhythm and a pattern. Does it color in some way the music of your sentences?

And computers: now most of us write prose in a desktop publishing software such as Word, and that means that every once in a while we can stop writing to play with typefaces and colors and the margin size. That has certainly changed writing for bad writers: like that god-awful fantasy novel where the bad guys and the demigods all have their own font. Does the fact our writing platform also plays songs and surfs the Internet and every once in a while interrupts to ask if it can start the anti-virus search, and starts it even when we click no, changes our writing? It must; there’s so much it does to the rhythm around you when you do. If you are the very finest of writing-tasters, you may have noticed in this last paragraph I changed applications again.

And copying and pasting and deleting sentences: for the first time in hundreds of years, we have complete control of the page. I can take this sentence and put it in another paragraph and change around some words so it would fit there, and you will never know. Or will you? Is great writing the product of having to conform to limitations? Is my new power over the page ruining my poetry?

I thought about it for a long while and then J. J. Abahrms solved it for me. In a talk about his movies and that Lost thing he pointed at his Apple iMac and said, “every time I sit to write at this thing I think, what can I write that’s worthy of a Mac?”

He got it. Writing is so hypothetical and lonely — you’re not telling jokes to an audience that can laugh or not laugh, you’re not feeling the canvas with your brush. So your something tangible is the page and the quill in your hand, the new 1954 Remington you just bought, your shining new Mac. It changes the way you write because writing is relating, and your pen pal in this case is your pen.

Someone got in Quotendquote by searching for “flowers, craniums”. This makes such beautiful, senseless sense. Flowers, craniums. Like cloud, dollhouse. Like singe, swim. It sends the brain in two opposite direction so it stretches between them like a rubber band, until it recoils and tears both meanings away and sends them crashing together. Yeah, flowers, craniums: I can see that now.

This house is seldom quiet. In the morning, before the city settles into its humdrum workday, it rattles with the subway cars tearing the tracks beneath it and the cars pushing and screaming their horns in the thick traffic. Then, when the city does settle, every two or three moments are marked with an old car dragging its transmission on the gravely road or kids shouting after a lost ball or a great truck moving slowly and bellowing in a giant’s voice. In the evening it’s the same: the subways cars shaking the foundations of the earth and the many cars above grounds rattling and crying like a mob in an earthquake. In the late evenings it’s the kids with their loud cars stereos: in the night, the drunkard hobos fighting over the best benches. Always someone around, making sound to let you know they’re there.

Then it gets quiet, for an hour, for a morning if you are indeed in luck. Maybe it’s a Sunday and nobody goes to work; maybe the snow fell thick last night and all the cars are stranded. In those rare moments you can hear the many birds chatting in that one tree next to the house, and they are nothing like the birds you knew as a child in the country. They’re louder and they all chirp at once, never conversing in their bird tongue, as if oblivious to the sound of others. In those moments you realize that in this constant city noise, all the birds have gone deaf.

I want to write in this blog, but more than that I’d like it to be old and huge and forsaken. Imagine it: Quotendquote, a tome of ancient net lore, shut forever in 1998 like the best of the internet. Or like the Mundaneum, a proto-internet one hundred years old , slowly rotting in a freezing Brussels building and covered in geological eons of bird droppings. You’d have to climb in through the eighth floor windows to get in. You’d have to use a candle to light the long, dark corridors. The root directory will be shut, the navigation too old to work. You’d inch yourself though the posts by hacking the URLs, by guessing page names, by hunting obscure hyperlinks. There’ll be hundreds to read if you wanted them bad enough, but you’ll never get the full picture, never find who I was, or why I wrote Quotendquote, or why, suddenly, one day in April 1998, I stopped writing.

On Thursday they announced they were able to distill passion. They would bottle it and sell it in little vials. It would taste terrible, but you could mix it with orange juice. On Friday the world ended.

It was a while since I’ve been to his house. As I enter I record everything that has changed: the new piano by the library and the table pushed next to the wall, abd the fresh flowers in the vase, and the new, pretty woman in the foyer.

“Where is he?” I ask. She wears a black dress that doesn’t become her. But she’s pretty; enviably pretty. She doesn’t answer at first, just gives me a frosty look that accents the distance between us: me at the door, she by the table next to the wall. Her hair is red. He always had a taste for bizarre women, I think, and then she answers: “don’t you know?”

“No,” I say, “I don’t”. I suddenly notice how sombre everything is: her black dress, the white flowers, the darkness in the house. She looks away and then at me.

“Hurt?” I say. She nods: no. “He’s gone now.”

The room is now colder, darker; I say, “surely…”
(more…)

“I,” says the man who stands by the pilot, “am unlucky in love”.

They nod and mumble in appreciation: they are all holding now-empty glasses. The bottle they left on the ground, and it is growing steadily far in its carafe, swimming in a bed of ice water. Just the thought of it growing so far away — a meter a minute — is enough to give you motion sickness. Above them the engine roars a muffled roar in the thin, windy air.

“And I am unlucky,” says an obese man, well-dressed in his wheelchair, “in health”.

“I’m unlucky all around on Mondays and on Thursday nights,” says another man. The airship sails, up, up, up; the men all whisked away in its shaky embrace.

“I am unlucky in my sciences,” says the man who invited them all. He wears a white suite and a monocle, the staple of a scientist. “Yet I am positive we shall succeed. I know not all of you have faith. But the best researchers are all united in agreeing in the theraputic effect of high altitudes on the Fortune gland beneath the cortex…”

Somewhere on the ship, a man in his shirtsleeves says, “I am unlucky with my children.” The man he talks to says his investments all started to falter the year previous, after he had fallen from an apricot tree. Then there’s a sudden wind that blows hard and rocks the airship, sending wine glasses overboard, and it exhausts all conversation — the confessions, the stories, the science lectures.

“I,” whispers the pilot, but they all hear anyway, “am unlucky in sailing”.