Where the Brain Goes, So Go I. Sort Of.

This is interesting -- unintentionally inspired by news that Google Reader is leaving the house. (Don't worry if you don't know that story. Not needed here.) (I've so far tried four alternatives to GR. Haven't settled on a replacement.)

Here's the part that intrigues me:

Today I realized that I'm devoting a relatively large amount of time to finding a replacement. I'm surprised that it's that important to me. Apparently it's a tool that's as valuable as my wordprocessing program, my Mac, my iPad. Big punch-in-nose jolt of awareness of how much both my life and the way I "spend" time have changed.

Then tonight, while hunting for something unrelated to my search for a GReader replacement, I discovered, by accident, that Wordpress offers a "reader." It's easy-peezy: Import your sites from Google Reader, and 60 seconds later: Voila! You're good to go with your new Wordpress Reader.

Its interface is mesmerizing. It delivers each item in the feed in "magazine" style: Large, colorful "cover images" introduce, as it were, each story on the Reader. (#1) It's lovely.

But - there's always a but - within 12 or so seconds I'd rejected it as a potential replacement: my brain needed five times longer than usual to process necessary information about each item in the feed ("necessary" meaning: gleaning just enough information to decide if I want to read the entire piece). Magazine-style presentation, visually rich and image-laden, is too rich to be useful for a Reader. (*2)

Dear reader, my brain has changed in response to my online interactions. It's learned to process "screen"-based information at hyper speed.

What's slightly scary is that I didn't realize just how efficient this part of my brain had become until I looked at the Wordpress Reader.

That discovery prompts this question: What would our net/web encounters be like if we moved at a more leisurely pace? What if we lived like elite, way-upper-class Romans did, lounging in togas, dipping into plates of grapes cultivating leisure in the way that they did? (*3)

Because whatever else we moderns, do, we don't cultivate leisure. Elite Romans treated leisure as an art form. We moderns, especially we Americans, cultivate labor and utility. They're our art forms.

But they're art forms that we enjoy at the expense of a more textured life. We've taught our brains to move at warp speed whenever we're "online." But are we doing enough to balance that warp speed with a slower, more leisurely place when we're "offline"?

Yes, that sounds embarrassingly cliched: we're all moving too fast. Slow Food, etc. etc..

But experiencing that warp speed in such a  . . . tactile, immediate way startled me. Made me a bit wary. (And made me glad that I long ago made a conscious decision about how I'm living my off-line life.) (*4)

Anyway. My two cents, or less, on Life In These Times. More to come on leisure, work, and so forth in the days to come (now that I'm out of Meat History Manuscript Prison).

___________

#1. I would be remiss if I failed to mention what I was looking for when I ran across the WordPress Reader: A way to support Wordpress more directly than the fee I pay now. It's a valuable resource for me. I don't want to do volunteer work for them, but I'd give them some dough. Anyway, I found nothing. No "help us" buttons. I gather that means that they've moved beyond that stage, and I'm glad for them.

Also: It's interesting to note how accustomed I've become to practicing socialism. You know: Spreading my money around. Great thing about the net/web is that I can find interesting ways to do that. I love the ease with which I can give ten or twenty bucks to someone working on "work" that's outside the conventional strictures of "work," jobs, mortgages, etc. Yes, I pay taxes to various governments and I buy stuff from big companies, etc. Because in that sense, we're all socialists. (Socialism = traffic lights, people.)

*2: New project! New project! I gotta learn to "read" that specific kind of info much more quickly. Not there yet. Wonder how much faster a 27-year-old can read that kind of visual stuff? Seriously. I'll be sixty this year. My brain and reflexes have slowed from when I was in my twenties. New project! Learn to speed read magazine style!

*3: Oh. Wait. We iPad-owning, thought-pondering modern ARE like Romans....

*4. I've made a conscious (not always easy) decision to seclude myself from the world -- to retreat as much as possible -- when working.(*5) I don't go out, don't talk to people, spend an inordinate amount of time looking out the window and staring into space. Intentionally avoiding anything and anyone who moves faster than I want to move. So part of my brain is definitely operating on low gear. But apparently part of it is able to crank up to warp speed in an instant. (And yes. I'm fortunate. I know that. Odd thing is that I suspect many of us could afford far more leisure of this sort if we made decisions in that direction. And I say that as someone who lived a long while on other side of the fence I'm on now.)

*4: My husband used to fret that I was becoming agoraphobic because it's not unusual for me to stay in the house for days on end, except to walk or run (and I often do that late at night). It's not agoraphobia. I choose to avoid, as much as possible, unnecessary signal noise, if you know what I mean. That includes television, for example. I watch less now than ever, because it's so ... noisy (and I don't mean its decibel level).

My Writer's "Retreat." And How The Sausage Gets Made

This morning's New York Times Book Review included an essay about how writers struggle with online distraction --- even at "legendary" writers' retreats. For those who don't know (and count yourself lucky: these retreats are legends only in their own minds...): some writers apply to to spend time in isolated locations so that they can finish their work without distraction.  

The setup presumably varies from place to place, but essentially the writer gets living space (think small cottage) for a span of time (a month, three months, whatever) and they can write all day without worrying about the phone or making food (it's often delivered to their door). At night, if they like, they can go to a communal space and talk with the other writers on retreat. (*1)

The point of this essay in today's NYTBR is that a) the people who run these retreats struggle with how much digital access to provide; and b) writers find that despite the idyllic circumstances, they slip over to the "wired hub" so they can go online to check Facebook or whatever. The person who wrote the essay discovered his phone got access from one isolated spot on his porch. There went his productivity.

The author also noted that some writers, in their "regular" lives, use software to keep themselves offline:

Many writers try restrictive regimens, whether at a residency or in the outside world. Michael Chabon and Meghan O’Rourke, for example, have installed software programs like Freedom and SelfControl, whose very names evoke a self-help cry for intervention.

I use Freedom and have now for maybe two years? I also use its sister program "Anti-Social," which gives me online access to sites that I want to access, while restricting access to those I don't: So the university library is "on," but Facebook, Twitter, the New York Times, and my email are "off" while I'm working. (*2)

So where am I going with this? Writers' retreats. And how I inadvertently had one in February.

This last push to finish the meat history manuscript was grueling almost beyond belief. I'm not complaining; just stating a fact: I had about eight weeks of work to do in roughly four weeks.

The only way to do it was by working about ten hours a day. And I don't mean what passes for most people's workdays (meaning people who work in offices with lots of other people): go to work; spend ten minutes chatting, spend another fifteen going down the hall to another person's office; thirty minutes at lunch; twenty minutes on the phone. Etc. (That's not a criticism of those people. That's simply how the eight-hour-workday works.)

I mean: ten hours (some days twelve) at my keyboard. About ten minutes for lunch. Peeing when necessary. Otherwise: nothing but focus and concentration. (*3) No housework, no cooking (that part I'd prepared for in advance: I did a lot of cooking and filled the freezer), no errand running, no nothing. (THANK YOU, HUSBAND!)

But here was the beautiful, wondrous aspect:

For ten days of this last push --- ten days during which I still needed to write the final chapter and the introduction and the conclusion and verify hundreds of notes --- my husband was out of town. (*5)

That meant: I TRULY didn't have to deal with anything or anyone. Only the work.

I spent those ten days in a mental cocoon, isolated almost completely from the world around me.

I took my usual mental health breaks (that's "coffee breaks" to the rest of the world) for a few minutes here and there, often digitally. Otherwise: no phone. No going outside (I went out of the house to the end of the driveway to empty the mailbox, and went to the grocery store one time). No socializing. No nothing.

At night: virtually no television (it was too intrusive). I read parts of a novel. Mostly I stared into space. (I'm not kidding. I couldn't handle the mental distraction of, say, a sitcom or CNN.)

It was amazing and wonderful and so fruitful. I was on a free writer's retreat. In my own home. Free! In my own home. Did I mention it was free?

You've NO idea how lucky I was and am to have had those ten days unimpeded. I told my husband when he got home that it was just as well he wasn't there because I probably would have made him leave anyway.

Okay, now back to that point that you sharp-eyed readers noticed a few sentences ago: Once or twice a day during those ten days, I used my iPad to look at email and Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes I posted something. I communicated with a reporter who emailed about a question. Missed out on a talk radio opportunity because I got to my email too late in the day.

And now --- finally! --- the main point:

None of this was the me of, say, six years ago. Back then I struggled to manage the online part of my life. I was addicted to email and writers' forums and the whole nine yards of life online.

There were days when I feared that I would never again know the joy (okay, it's more like ecstasy) of creative "flow" and complete mental immersion.

That prospect terrified me. And I don't use that word lightly.

So I faced up to the issue. I taught myself how to manage the "online" part of my life.

How? By recognizing that it had become part of life. It wasn't something separate and "out there." It was here. It was everywhere. And I HAD to learn how to live with it, rather than in opposition to it.

I had to master this intruder.

Here's how I did that (other than just plain ol' willpower): I bought a second computer. One was connected to the 'net. The other was not. I wrote on the one that was not. When I needed to switch tasks and do, say, research rather than write, I turned on the wired machine. But I made the decision to do so with care and sparingly.

And something happened.

I encountered the obvious: There's nothing that's SO URGENT that it requires our immediate attention. Nuthin.'

And once I got that; once I understood that my presence or absence at, say, Facebook, or a writers' forum I once frequented, or Twitter make zero difference to the rest of the world --- well, my addiction simply faded.

Now I use one computer. And yes, I use Freedom. Less because I can't restrain myself than because using it alleviates that sub-cranial, nagging sense of irritation that is the digital world.

But: I've learned that the irritant, or the sense of the irritant's presence, sets in most often when my brain and eyes need a break. (*6) I've learned to walk away during those "I need a break" moments; walk away rather than go online. It felt much like giving up smoking: Do something else when the urge hits. (I quit smoking in 1986.)

And in that respect, having an iPad is something I could not have done four or five years ago. I had to kick the addiction first. Otherwise --- well, I'dve been on that damn thing constantly.

And, yes, once again, I've led you down this twisted path to a non-earthshaking conclusion: I got a free writer's retreat and how great was that!?

But really? It's probably better to figure out how to get along without a retreat in the first place.

______________

*1: This is where the "legendary" stuff supposedly comes in: Writers talk. Writers drink. Writers hop in the sack. Writers make connections. Writers get better contracts. Etc. Frankly, it sounds to me like a) a total snore; and b) egos in collision. But that's me. And I'm a true loner. (Heh. I initially typed "loser" rather than "loner." The former likely more true than the latter.)

*2: I generally only use Anti-social at specific times in the process: Toward the end, for example, when I was revising and needed to verify citations for my notes. At times like that, I need to use the library's online catalog. But when I'm actually writing (composing), I use only Freedom.

*3: What was I doing? The final, final revision. The "no kidding, this is it, this is the text, this is what goes into print" revision. No mistakes. No typos. The right word in the right place. The ideas expressed clearly, succinctly, and convincingly (meaning they're backed up by shitloads of evidence). Making sure the sources for every quotation --- and there are hundreds of quotations --- are correct, down to the page number and date of publication. I know that doesn't sound like much, but that kind of labor requires a herculean level of mental concentration. It's not the kind of work that can be done on such a tight deadline. At the end of each day, I was completely, absolutely, thoroughly drained of all energy. I wanted to do nothing but sit as still as possible and stare at a wall. Which is what I did at night for a few hours until I crawled into bed, so I could get up and do it again the next day. The one luxury I allowed myself was sleep. I needed it. (*4)

*4: Last time around, the beer history book, I had a horrific episode of insomnia (a ?ailment that I've had since I was seven years old (alas)), a case that ran on for two years. Toward the end, I slept two hours a night, from about ten or eleven to midnight or one. Then I'd get up and work until about six pm. It was so awful. I vowed I would not go that road again. THIS time as I neared the end, about six months ago, I began taking a half a sleeping pill. For this last month-long trek, I took a full pill every night. I was able to sleep six hours, enough to keep my brain focused and fresh.

*5: The first draft of the manuscript was seven chapters. My editor said she wanted a new last chapter. She was, of course, right about the need for it, so I spent December and January writing and researching what is now Chapter Eight. But when Push Time came, that chapter was still in a first-draft version. It needed LOTS of work. In effect, I had to write a new, new chapter.

*6: I've gotta say: this last push was MURDER on my eyes. Wow. They took a beating. Valuable lesson: Look away from the screen and out the window every twenty minutes. At least. I'm working making that a new habit. But I may have to use some kind of chime or timer to remind me until the habit is formed. Do yourself a favor: LOOK AWAY.

What It Looks Like At The End

I thought about finding a photo of a runner breaking through finish-line tape. Then I looked around at and realized --- there lay the image with which to encapsulate the final, extraordinarily stressful push to the end: My office.  

Although these photos don't do it justice. It looks MUCH worse in person. (My friend Anat Baron would reel in horror and run away as fast as she could.)

But toward the end, that's what I was doing: rummaging through file crates hunting for a document (because for most of this long slog, scanning, digital files, etc. weren't readily available; the amount of paper I accumulated dropped off significantly in the final phases as the number of databases and sources increased by a geometric amount). (*1)

It's a mess, isn't it? But a mess has NEVER felt so good.

There's still much to be done as the manuscript moves into production: dealing with copyedits, proofreading, creating the index, compiling a media list, and so forth. But it's a book, folks, it's a BOOK. (Okay, not technically. Technically it's still a manuscript.)

Title is IN MEAT WE TRUST: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America. I'm not crazy about it, but as a compromise (and publishing is one compromise after another), it's not horrible. (*2) The new jacket design will be along any day now and I'll post that when it arrives.

So: what am I doing now? Catching my breath. Sleeping a bit more than I have been. (That last slog was grueling in a way that I won't attempt to describe.) Thinking about my next project and enjoying the anticipation of diving into that. (Because anticipation can be as pleasurable as the act itself, right?)

Oh --- and cleaning up this mess. You've now idea how good it feels to organize the chaos and move the crates to the basement when I'm finished. I'm looking forward to going paperless for the next project, but I'll miss the concrete, in-my-hands, tangible act of packing away hours and weeks and years of reading and thinking and writing.

___________________________

*1: I switched to a Mac ten months ago and my life got SO much easier, organizationally speaking --- although as noted above, the documents I was able to read digitally rather than on paper or on microfilm soared, too. For my next project, I've already begun amassing a strictly digital database. I'd like to get away with no more than one plastic crate full of photocopies.

*2: PLEASE do not zip off a comment or email telling that I REALLY need to self-publish so that I can have full control over the entire work. I know all about it, okay? I don't want another brouhaha like the last time I commented on the virtues of working with traditional publishers. Here's what many people don't get about "traditional" publishing houses: They subsidize intellectual work in a way that almost no other group or institution does. This new book took six years to research and write. My publisher in effect served as my patron while I worked on the project.

Let's Try a Little "Crowdsourcing," Shall We?

Okay, people. I can't say I'm wild about the whole crowdsourcing concept --- but I've also never tried it. And now's the perfect reason to do so.   Here's the deal: As some of you know, I HATE the title my publisher gave my forthcoming book.

IN BEEF WE TRUST:

AMERICANS, MEAT, AND THE MAKING OF A NATION

The problems with it are a) it sounds like it's only about beef, but the book cover beef, pork, and poultry (as well as cattle, hogs, and chickens); and b) the word "history" is nowhere to be found and this is a book work of history. (I should say there that I definitely don't hate the subtitle. It's okay, although obviously it would be better if it included the word "history.")

That title, in turn, spawned an equally icky proposed jacket design (hardly surprising that the one followed from the other).

I REALLY didn't like the title or the jacket, so I had a convo with my agent and he it turn talked to my editor. The upshot is that my editor indicated that she's willing to change the title IF I come up with something better. By which she apparently meant something better than the dozen-plus titles I've already run by her.

So. Want to help?

Here's a brief description of the book:

 The unexpected history of meat in America and how consumers, entrepreneurs, farmers, and food activists wrestled with the land and each other to build the world’s most elaborate, and controversial, meat supply system.

Here's a slightly longer description:

The moment European settlers arrived in North America, they began transforming the land into a livestock and meat-eater’s paradise. Even before revolution turned colonies into nation, Americans were eating meat on a scale the old world could neither imagine nor provide: an average European was lucky to see meat once a week, while even a poor American man put away about two hundred pounds a year. In BOOK TITLE, Ogle takes readers from that colonial paradise to the urban meat-making factories of the nineteenth century to the hyper-efficient packing plants of the late twentieth century. From Swift and Armour to Tyson, Cargill, and ConAgra. From the cattle bonanza of the 1880s to modern feedlots. From agribusiness to today’s “local” meat supplies and organic counter-cuisine. Along the way, Ogle explains how Americans’ carnivorous demands shaped urban landscapes, midwestern prairies, and western range, and why the American system of meat-making, for so long a source of pride, became a source of conflict and controversy.

Okay, people: give me a new title. If I decide to use any or all of something you suggest, you get your name in the acknowledgements. Right, right. Not a big deal, I know. But, hey, it's all I've got.

PCs, Memory, and Paranoia: Ringing In the New With A Dose of the Old

Meh. Just realized that between double Mac backups every day and Dropbox, I've become [frighteningly] complacent about backing up. That ain't good. That's one result of being a desktop/PC oldster: I can remember when Things Crashed. Badly. As in: mainframes crashing and taking every damn thing within range down with it. (Bye, bye 30-page essay...)

Been paranoid ever since. Rule one re. using an electronic date storage device is: those babies will crash, spin, rotate, smash, and die.

So. New Year's Rez: Backup, baby, backup. Or, okay, some more catchy version of that. (Brain fry here, as I close in on the REAL end of this manuscript.)

Title? Meh....

IN BEEF WE TRUST: AMERICANS, MEAT, AND THE MAKING OF A NATION Maybe it'll grow on me.