Category: Editorials

In this age of rampant blogging and opinionated writers, would-be journalists, and snob professionals, it makes me wonder if we Americans can count beyond three. Lets face it, Microsoft Word and Powerpoint have done more than enabled us to make our points, they have also ruined our fluid expression and made it conform to nothing more than a heading followed by three points of emphasis. Great intellectual thought somehow escapes us, the story becomes reduced, the points alas irrelevant or worse: redundant and boring. Let me think for a minute, do we know what good writing is anymore? Perhaps we need to remember?

Stranger In A Strange Land

What comes to mind is The American, that novel by Henry James. Before Jerry Seinfeld’s Newman, there was Christopher Newman. The New World Man. Yes, that is also a great Rush song, but I still prefer Subdivisions, but New World Man does indeed summarize the character Christopher Newman. Imagine the mythical man, The American, a man of nature, of wealth, of strength, of careless mind, and powerful will: a noble man, but not of cautious mind. A great character? Yes.

Though, A better intellectual author is what concerns me now. Henry James does something which we forget too often today, which is to not take sides. Too often we confront issues from the beginning from unfounded facts and personal bias than from pure intellectual neutrality. In The American, Henry James describes a social world in which right and wrong has no favorites, everyone has faults and admirable traits. Reality is often grounded in complexities that lead to interesting arguments, or at least humorous irony. You love her, but she loves you not, you hate her, and yet she still loves you more. Obsession, desperation, inspiration, tragedy, for all romance is irony.

You Do Not Talk About Fight Club!

And I wanted to smash his beautiful face to pieces as well. If you watched the film Fight Club, or better yet read book, it comes to mind. You need to feel it, see it, sweat and bleed the same space. Form your own conclusions, but do not just take some pseudo-intellectual’s word for it. Be there in the moment and live it as they say. I have watched too many pundits on cable news shout louder and louder to make me believe they know what they are talking about. But that is not news, that is not brilliant intellectual thought, that is just some guy speaking louder, making me think that because he acts mad it must be true. But they have never been to Fight Club, they have never bothered to show up and pick their man out, stood there shaking, holding their fists up, getting ready to be beaten senseless for the next three to five minutes. Good intellectuals, be it writers, painters, or performance artists describe the world to us, they do not sit there and preach to us as if we were watching television or did not know how to read the book of Genesis ourselves.

Great art, great thought is not about passionate belief, it is about describing the world, perhaps it is never our world, but it is a world, and if we see it without bias, without stupidity, and have the fortitude to have the vision ourselves, then perhaps I will think that I have not wasted my time.

Over the past week, something really started bothering me. The whole nature versus nurture debate really came into focus and sometimes life has a way of repeating things until you pay attention. FOX has this show called House which I started watching because it is everything that good television is suppose to be, namely 48 minutes of sarcasm, drama, with a dash of cheesiness that makes you know it’s television and not real life. The lead character on the show is a genius doctor who is bitter, sarcastic, and not the kind of person who takes things on faith; this is exactly someone I can relate to at last! Anyway, on this week’s show he asked the question, “Can all cancer kids be saints?”, which seems like a very insensitive thing to say about kids that are on the brink of death, but the question was really one of averages and one which ignored the whole Nature v/s Nurture question, by saying that on average some cancer kids just are not good kids based on purely statistical sense, you have to have some rotten apples in the basket. Although the end of the show answers the question, I started to remember why I was annoyed lately about, which has to do with fat people laughing.

We have all seen classic examples of fat celebrities like Roseanne and how humor is their trademark, and there is that whole high school thing where the fat kids always walked around laughing at everything, even when other kids played cruel jokes on them, but my point has to do with some people who are fat, and who even in their adulthood still laugh at everything. After a while the laughter becomes part of their personality and you almost assume that they are naturally upbeat or even hyper, when in reality this is nothing more than a conditioned response! And this is what really annoys me! That there are people who laugh constantly all day long at everything, and it is society who has forced this upon them, they are not suppose to be cheerful like that, there is nothing in their genes or more importantly anything really comical about them. They are just fat and they have learned humor as a defense mechanism, but that still does not change the fact that not everything that a fat person saids is actually funny, but they still laugh anyway!

This of course leads me to myself, because the opposite of a sunny disposition is a sarcastic and downright pessimistic one which I am so totally guilty of enjoying on too many occasions. Can my great pessimism be nothing more than just a conditioned response too? Perhaps some of it is, but I still want to believe that I made the choice to be grumpy about life and not that life made me this way.

I guess we can all take comfort that even if our environment shaped our personality, it was still our choice to run with it, and eventually we conditioned ourselves as much anyone else, but still it bugs me till no end.

Every now and then I write a post and have my friend over at Coffeebear.net review it. His comments most of the time end up being that I missed something or did not include extra information, and then of course there are the “you are totally freaking wrong!” comments, but by and large I have the same conversation with Manzabar, which is that when you write something, you should not write to impress people who know more than you, but to help your intended audience. I am a big believer in that anyone can do anything they want if they put some effort into it. I’m not saying you can conquer the world with your skills, cause definitely not having skills is going to make your results a tad unsuccessful, but the point is not that you are the greatest, but that you did it. Failure is part of life, and just because you failed at what you tried does not mean your efforts were not worthwhile. In my life time I have tried many things, like playing guitar, learning to play basketball at 32, cooking chicken marsala, etc…, and even though I know what I am good at, I still try different things, cause boredom is after all the greatest of all evils. This leads me to the point of this rant, which is that people make things a lot harder than they really are. At the bookstore you will find hundreds of new books on how to do something, but my personal favorites are all the technical books written about how to use Windows, Linux, how to make a web page, how to do everything. Did not all these things already include documentation? If I remember correctly, every piece of software I have used had some documentation, most have manuals, yet when you open these up and take a look at them, they are not in English! They are written in some weird technical jargon that you need to understand before you even can know what the author is trying to say. This is why I love using Macs, and Apple’s documentation while being short and very uninformative for most technical people, it is exactly what regular people can understand. In other words, Apple really does write their documentation for its customers and not for programmers or computer people. This is the reason why some geeks hated Macs and exactly the reason why I think Apple has such dedicated users.

But this does not apply just to computers, but to everything.  I hear people all the time talking above their knowledge, trying to impress me and convince me of their argument. Sometimes these people are what I call Pseudo Intellectuals, people who are not really intellectual, but just want to appear like they are. These people bore me to the point that I discard automatically 99% of what they say. However the ones that I truly have no patience for are religious advocates, people who quote The Bible to you as if they actually understood it, and all the time, I keep thinking that religion is like water. It can be clear and good for you, or dirty and contaminated, but regardless it is always free, unless someone bottles it and calls it something else. Religion is something you try to sell people, spirituality is something you choose for yourself.

Today I came upon this blog which talked about how business people talk like idiots, which they certainly do at times, but it is exactly what I was thinking about when it comes to writing:

When we’ve seen authors we work with fall into a trap, it’s almost always out of fear or the inability to imagine another way (the just-do-what-everyone-else-does syndrome). The fear is about imagining what reviewers and readers will do if the author doesn’t cover every possible base and be as technically complete as humanly possible. They imagine that if they try to simplify things, someone will think they aren’t expert enough.

You’re worrying about the wrong people! The people most likely to criticize you for lack of completeness aren’t your target audience anyway. The only people who matter are your intended readers. So it gets back to the other points I’ve been making in the bestseller posts — are you writing for how you’ll be perceived or are you writing to enhance the reader’s life? The answer changes the content.
Get you out of the way, and chances are your readability will go WAY up. (Unless you’re already a good writer. But for the rest of us, like me, this doesn’t come naturally.)

Essentially you have to write not for yourself or your critics, but for your audience. This is what makes your writing effective and successful.