the tweney review

Posting an unedited transcript, as I just did, is a disconcerting experience. It feels a little like taking off my journalistic clothes in public. For one thing, it reveals just how inarticulate I am when talking. Unlike Brian Lamb or Michael Krasny, I rarely ask questions that sound well-informed, well-rounded, and eloquent. Instead, my questions sound like this: “Well, so, um, what about that other thing?” And then the respondent goes on to talk for ten minutes.

Part of that is intentional: I figure I’m there to interview the subject, not the other way around, and once they start talking, it’s better if I just shut up and get out of the way. (The other part is that I’m just not that eloquent when speaking, in person — I’m much more comfortable expressing myself in writing.)

In the published version of an interview, I clean things up and insert questions that sound smarter — but they also help the reader, by setting up the interviewee’s replies better. Frankly, I find unedited transcripts a little hard to follow sometimes — you miss out on a lot of the nuance and gesture that forms the context of a live conversation. Editing attempts to make up for that, and that’s one of the reasons I like to let the edited interviews stand on their own.

But there’s a deeper reason why I don’t usually post transcripts.
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Cory Doctorow fans and others might be interested in the full, unedited transcript of my interview with Cory Doctorow.

Doctorow is a fast talker, so even though the interview lasted less than 45 minutes, this transcript is almost 8,500 words. I’ve done almost no editing — it’s pretty much a straight transcription of the audio recording. I didn’t record every single “um” and “you know” but otherwise the transcript is pretty faithful.

The edited version of this interview was published on 1/23/2003 by SFGate.
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Washington Post book columnist Michael Dirda indulges a fantasy that afflicts nearly every book lover at some time or another — the desire to run a literary magazine. I know this temptation well. Sure, I know, the Internet gives everyone the equivalent of a printing press and blogging tools are the equivalent of a free photocopy machine with an unlimited budget for stamps — in other words, a zine publisher’s dream come true. But there’s still something compelling about a nice, chunky literary quarterly printed on a nice, off-white, toothy paper and deep black ink. It’s a form of nostalgia, I suppose. Dirda understands the impulse and gives it free reign here. Then he closes with an unapologetically sentimental hymn of praise to the literary arts.

I do believe in the great W’s: the whimsical and the wistful, the witty and the worldly. But then knowledge of the arts really should be a source of personal amusement and satisfaction. You memorize poetry, said Anthony Burgess, so that you can belt out appropriate verse when drunk, just as art in general, as Samuel Johnson reminded us, should allow people to better enjoy life or to better endure it. (via bookslut)

Meanwhile, if you want to see how some poets are using the web to revitalize (vitalize?) language poetry, check out what poet Ron Silliman has to say. (via Blogistan)

I’ve been working with RLG for the past couple of months, writing and editing content for their web site and print publications. RLG is a consortium of research libraries, archives, museum libraries, and the like. One of the things I like about this gig has been that I get to learn about the high-tech information management tools that lurk in the background of these big libraries.

RLG is trying to take some of the library world’s background technology and bring it to the fore with a new Web application (still in development) dubbed RedLightGreen. If it works, it could do for the library stacks what Google did for the Web.
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My interview with Cory Doctorow for SFGate.com has just been published. Take a look!

It would make me pretty happy if this book contributed in some way to the idea that reading books on the screen is good. I know that there’s a meme that floats around that says, oh, reading off a screen is hard, and no one wants to do it and so on — despite all the evidence to the contrary. Most of the people I know read off a screen for 12 hours a day.

Science fiction writer, EFF evangelist, BoingBoing blogger, and former dot-commie Cory Doctorow has just published his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It’s a real book that you can buy in bookstores, but he’s also making it available for free download in a variety of formats on his web site. Doctorow says that there’ve been more than 20,000 downloads since its Jan. 9 launch, which qualifies as a smash hit in the SF novel world for sure.

MICRO REVIEW added 1/20/03: Doctorow’s novel (topping 50,000 downloads now) is like a love letter to Napster, Google and Walt Disney World. It’s a rollicking, fast-paced story and is entertainingly inventive without bogging down in the impressive array of future technologies it imagines. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is set in a future where death has been eliminated, energy and raw materials are freely available in limitless quantities (much like MP3 files on KaZaA today) and people’s nervous systems are wired directly into the Internet. The protagonist, Julius, works at Disney World, and the novel chronicles his struggles to protect the theme park’s Haunted Mansion from being shut down by an ad hoc group of designers who have developed a technology for “flash baking” theme-park experiences directly into parkgoers’ brains.

The novel gets off to a cracking good start, it’s a fast, entertaining read, and it manages to be entertaining and thought-provoking at the same time. Doctorow is a whiz at description, plot, and inventiveness. I’m looking forward to his next book.

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