What Do The Cigarette Girl, Shopgirl And A Random Diary From Ebay Have In Common?

Despite a variety of good reviews, I avoided Shopgirl by Steve Martin for a long time. I avoided it not because I thought Steve Martin couldn’t write a novella, but because it seemed a little unfair that he was a great comedian and a great serious writer.

But, eventually, I picked it up and it is a terrific read (short, to the point and observational). What I liked best about it was the way that Los Angeles is evoked. In that sense, it was super similar to The Cigarette Girl by Carol Wolper, which was also excellent.

What about the diary? Well, on eBay there is a brisk trade in other people’s diaries (true story) and I bought one once. It was written by a woman living in LA in the 30s and I have to say that the LA she describes produces some of the same images (albeit 30s style) as both Martin and Wolper.

Web 2.0 Social Networking Is A Giant Time Vortex?

I am not sure if Milan Kundera has ever heard the term “Web 2.0”, but in his book (though, he was likely writing it before the term was coined anyway) The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (that I first wrote about here) there is a quote that strikes me as related.

Kundera is referring to a “long forgotten” 1930s Czech novel called The Internal-Combustion Monster by Jaromir John. Kundera says that John’s story is about the maddening sound of cars when they first appeared on the scene (of course, a fraction of today’s cars that we don’t even really hear anymore).

Using this story as a starting point, Kundera points out:

We can deduce a general rule: the existential import of a social phenomenon is most sharply perceptible not as it expands but when it is just beginning, incomparably fainter than it will soon become. (121)

He goes on to give an example from Nietzsche and then writes:

Bureaucracy in Kafka’s time was an innocent babe compared to today, and yet it was Kafka who revealed its monstrous nature, which since then has become routine and no longer commands anyone’s interest. (122)

Kundera is writing about “social phenomenon” in the context of art in general with the novel as the centerpiece specifically. I am not aware of a novel that uses Web 2.0 as a backdrop, but Kundera’s observation made me think about “Web 2.0 social networking” as a phenomena that is just beginning. How is it different from what came before?

When the Web browser was invented a lot changed, but one of the characteristics was that the Web made many economic activities more efficient and time more productive. Granted, “surfing” used up a lot of time and instant messaging was a time black hole for sure (though, a pale comparison to the time black hole that is Twitter), but, for the most part, the “broadcast Web” and many of the first applications saved time.

Last Fall I attended the Web 2.0 Summit. At the Summit they had a panel of late teens and early twenty-somethings talking about their Internet-related habits. A number of the participants claimed that they spent about 4 hours per day on mySpace. I mentioned this comment to several people that I know and the reaction was “what do you do for 4+ hours?” Someone responded with, though in jest, what is probably pretty telling “oh, they are making purple ponies fly across their page”.

So, there is the rub: Web 2.0 takes a lot of time (more than television?). Endless bookmarking and blogging and futzing with mySpace or Facebook, takes a lot of time. But, it isn’t really productive time. It is truly “social” time.

From a literary perspective, I wonder what the novel would say about Web 2.0 here at the beginning of this social phenomenon. For that matter, what would it say about the Web in general?

A last thought for this post, Kundera writes:

The novelist’s ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say. (15)

What has not been revealed?

Some Of The Best Of Immortality

Milan Kundera published a work of non-fiction called The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts.

Let me start by making it clear that I love every word Milan Kundera has ever written. I think he is brilliant and his books (since the ones that I have read are translations) are almost enough for me to devote a large part of my day to learning Czech (almost).

I do have a friend who learned to read German so that she could fully appreciate and enjoy the writings of Franz Kafka. After reading The Castle, I decided that she must be partially insane, because it must be even worse in its original form. Or, at least, make the reader more nuts.

Anyway, back to Kundera, The Curtain is a non-fiction book about the art (or the place?) of the novel (I won’t regurgitate the synopsis here, but it sounds great) and I will read it in short order.

In the meantime, I will provide a couple of my favorites from Immortality (over the next weeks or maybe months, I’ll quote the others, but, for no particular reason, I am starting with Immortality).

On burning old letters and diaries:

Imagine yourself in her place: it isn’t easy to burn intimate documents that are dear to you; it would be like admitting to yourself that you won’t be here much longer, that tomorrow you may die; and so you put off the act of destruction from day to day, and then one day it’s too late. Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death. (74)

On politics, terrorism and lines:

He never expressed his opinion about Palestinians, Israelis, the October Revolution, or Fidel Castro, or even about terrorists, because he knew there existed a border beyond which murder is no longer murder but heroism, and that he would never be able to recognize just where that border lay. (105)

On self-perception:

He suddenly realized, too, that people saw him differently from how he saw himself or from how he thought he was seen by others. (124)

On perceiving others:

She was therefore certain that she knew him by heart and that nobody had ever known him as well as she. The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other. (132)

Another on self-perception:

As for her, she saw her inappropriate behavior and rash words as marks of her personality, as the charm of her self, and she was happy. (147)

On history and death:

I refuse to die with this day and its cares, I wish to transcend myself, to be a part of history, because history is eternal memory. (164)

On time and youth:

When someone is young, he is not capable of conceiving of time as a circle, but thinks of it as a road leading forward to ever-new horizons (275)

One that is just plain interesting:

Episodes are like land mines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you. (305)

Next up, quotes from Identity.

Best Story Of A Book

Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: the Reasons Behind the Rhymes is an exceedingly funny and entertaining book that tells the history of some of the most common nursery rhymes (London Bridge, Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty etc.).

So, while I absolutely love this book, I like the tale behind it even more. It was written by a London-based tour guide who realized that (during his tours) the background on nursery rhymes was incredibly popular.

He set out to write a book and was forced through a variety of circumstances to self-publish. The book went global, attracted a publisher and is on the shelves (both virtual and otherwise) today.

It is every self-publishers dream, yes?