BOOKS AND MAGAZINE ARTICLES AS POLYMERS
I still try my hand at newspaper and magazine articles but increasingly it’s a hard sell because I’m not presenting individual ideas I’m presenting journalism’s equivalent of polymers, cut the chain of topics back to one thing and it seems marooned for me these days: I don’t isolate any more, I see, and note the links. If I’m online the links are active and clickable. In print they might be allusions or quotes.
Online it’s easy to click and cut and copy and quote and link. I still try to verify and find something I can trust, something solid to build the chain of links upon, just as I did when writing for newspapers was my main activity.
I keep an e-mail address that’s like a newsstand: I have blog feed updates, My New York Times Select newsletters, etc. delivered there, and that’s where I go first, over coffee in the morning. I’ve come to rely on Treehugger’s daily update. Treehugger operates as a polymer: pointing out things its editors have read elsewhere, building its own articles in a way that makes the sources and source material evident.
Today Treehugger posted a link to a blog by Seth Godin, whose concern is how to leave no footprints. A Treehugger article referenced a Seth Godin article that linked back to a New York Times article about a couple in New York City trying to live the whole year without leaving a trace. This in turn is linked to William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s cradle-to-cradle concept covered in their Durabook that I’ve written about:
In addressing their small share of this urban problem, the Beavans have embraced William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s concept of “eco-effectiveness”: “We will … figure out what our world can productively offer us rather than considering only what we want.”
What fascinated me in Seth Godin’s blog is this article, Art That’s Not For Sale, which ties in with my zen concept of custom bookbinding as a way of making less books.
Art that’s not for sale
Jordan Tierney and her colleagues have been working for months on the Periodic Tableaux, a one-of-a-kind art book that’s not for sale.
Why invest the hours and the sweat and the talent in a piece of art you can’t (and won’t) sell?
Two reasons. The best reason is that when you practice your craft for yourself, not for the market, it drives you in new and important ways. And the other reason is that people are going to talk about it.
Ideas that spread, win.
The 8.5 x 11″ sketchbooks are Jordan’s most important tool. They are records of anything and everything – overheard snippets of conversations, news clips, sketches and photos from travel, plans for finished work. This is where all the ideas big and small are gathered, distilled, recombined and either trashed or nurtured into art.
I’ve almost entirely stopped keeping scrapbooks: there are a few technical, practical articles that I need to keep in plain sight but everything else, now, is going into a de.licio.us file, and I’ve started a “secret” blog that’s a scrapbook experiment that I’ve called The Pound, where I keep stray bits of writing, newspaper clippings, etc. and it’s where I post potential newspaper and magazine articles, for editors, so that they have a sense of what I’m trying to achieve. It’s much easier these days to write the whole thing rather than trying to describe the polymer, and if an editor wants it he or she can adopt it from the pound. This is a new enterprise for me, and there’s only one of my own pieces of writing there at the moment, Drought, which is a polishing and paring down of my study The Food Chain, which has been commissioned by an editor, and will probably be reduced to just a profile of Justin North and his restaurant Becasse:
The philosophies of biodynamic farmer Patrice Newell, chef Justin North of Becasse, and Melbourne catering firm food&desire. The connections between the land and the city, the drought and what we eat, and, as lofty as it sounds, an aesthetics of food.
