“I’m in love with N.Y. It matches my mood. I’m not overwhelmed. It is the suitable scene for my ever ever heightened life. I love the proportions, the amplitude, the brilliance, the polish, the solidity. I look up at Radio City insolently and love it. It is all great, and Babylonian. Broadway at night. Cellophane. The newness. The vitality. True, it is only physical. But it’s inspiring. Just bring your own contents, and you create a sparkle of the highest power. I’m not moved, not speechless. I stand straight, tough, and I meet the impact. I feel the glow and the dancing in everything. The radio music in the taxis, scientific magic, which can all be used lyrically. That’s my last word. Give New York to a poet. He can use it. It can be poetized. Or maybe that’s a mania of mine, to poetize. I live lightly, smoothly, actively, ears and eyes wide open, alert, oiled! I feel a kind of exhilaration and the tempo is like that of my blood. I’m at once beyond, over and in New York, tasting it fully.”
—Anaïs Nin to Henry Miller, 3 December 1934
“Only parts of us will ever touch parts of others – one’s own truth is just that really — one’s own truth. We can only share the part that is within another’s knowing acceptable, so one is for most part alone. As it is meant to be evidently in nature — at best perhaps it could make our understanding seek another’s loneliness out.”
—Marilyn Monroe, quoted by Maria Popova.
“new tools in general, and Twitter in particular, greatly challenge the binary dichotomy of attention as something that is either given or taken away, distracted. Instead, these tools allow us to direct attention to destinations where it can be sustained with more concentration and immersion.”
—- Maria Popova, In a new world of informational abundance, content curation is a new kind of authorship
Go read the whole piece: it is truly brilliant.
I also find it extremely interesting that Popova is using a technique in this piece that I have developed here, where I call out the most critical statements in my work. She’s using bold, while I make the fonts larger. In this way, a cursory scan read will still hit paydirt. She’s writing about the change in our attention and the job of curators, and certainly pulling out the central themes is one such job.
“every Sunday night at 11 pm, I'll declare "Google Reader bankruptcy" by marking all of my items as "read" -- and then I'm able to start afresh on Monday morning.”
—Maria Popova: What I Read - Business - The Atlantic Wire
I need to start doing that. Also, her life sounds like a far busier version of something I’d find fun to do. But then again, also not.
Today Yesterday: 5 Vintage Visions for the Future of Technology
by Maria PopovaInstapaper circa 1981, or what medical wonderlands have to do with making cash entirely obsolete.
One of the things that sets our species apart from others is our ability to imagine the future in remarkable detail. We do this every day on a personal level and have been doing it since time immemorial on a cultural level, and do it across the entire spectrum of ludicrous misguidedness and uncanny accuracy. Revisiting these predictions in retrospect can be a source of both fascination and humor. After last week’svintage versions of modern social media, today we revisit five such predictions for the future of technology, envisioning — with varying degrees of correctness and comedy — everything from the workplace to the wardrobe.
How We Will Read: Maria Popova
This post is part of “How We Will Read,” an interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. Read our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here. And check out our new homepage, a captivating new way to explore Findings.
How do you do most of your reading and annotating these days?
I prefer digital — Kindle on iPad is my weapon of choice. (Despite its many design and usability flaws, which are the subject of another conversation.) I’m an active marginalian and like being able to switch between my reading and Evernote, where I save quotes from and notes on the reading material in question. I also read a fair amount of longform on Instapaper, mostly at the gym during my morning workout. It’s safe to say I only ever use the iPad for Instapaper, Evernote, and Kindle. In fact, reading is the sole reason I got one.
That said, I read a lot of old books, most of which are not available on Kindle. Because I didn’t grow up in the U.S. and only moved here for college, I’ve always felt like I have this vast literary debt. I try to do an old book for every “new” book I get. And because most of my reading springs from the wonderful mesh of allusions and references of which literature is woven, this creates an interesting bipolar rabbit hole of past and present driving my discoveries and decisions on what to read next. It’s a beautiful process of controlled serendipity, but it can also get very overwhelming.
Because I’m a writer as much as a reader, I often take notes with the awareness that I’ll be writing about what I’m reading. I think this changes the lens of reading significantly, and marginalia play an enormous part of that. As I mentioned, I save a lot of clips and quotes and notes, but that’s a surprisingly — or perhaps unsurprisingly — laborious task. On the one hand, when I’m reading on paper — which tends to be the case with all the vintage books I read — saving something to Evernote means manually transcribing it. I do that a shameful amount, sometimes transcribing entire pages I know I’ll need to refer to. I estimate I type anywhere between 1,000 and 5,000 words a week just transcribing what I’m reading. (I eagerly await the day our technology is good enough to automatically and perfectly transcribe text you take a photo of. Until then, an intern would suffice.)
On the other hand, with digital, DRM regulations are making it extremely difficult, or purposely impossible, to export highlights. (This is partly why Findings makes my life easier.) Which means we’re either back to manual transcription or, my recent embarrassment of choice, taking a screenshot of the highlight on the Kindle iPad app, then emailing the photo to my Evernote email. Evernote has optical character recognition, so searching for a keyword will also fetch results from images of text, not just typed text.
How has reading become more social for you?
It hasn’t.
I have a friend who “skims” books by turning on the popular highlights feature in Kindle and only reading those. It works for her, but to me that’s the death of reading.
Reading is a bootcamp for developing and exercising critical thinking. Without that — intellectual apocalypse! And critical thinking is about developing a point of view, and all writing is — or, should be — about arguing a point of view, implicitly or explicitly. When you bring the crowd into the equation, this concept completely disappears — because a crowd cannot have a point of view, at least not one that is simultaneously focused and authentic to each individual in the crowd.
I don’t need a focus group of strangers to tell me what I should be reading or, more dangerously, how to read what I’m reading. Decision by committee doesn’t work in creative labor, and it certainly doesn’t work in intellectual labor.
Mortimer Aldler, in the wonderful How to Read a Book, says that marginalia are your private dialogue with the author, the intellectual tug-of-war that is really the greatest compliment you can pay an author. Being guided by other people’s marginalia is like letting a thousand voices into your head while trying to hold a challenging debate. Have those conversations, by all means, but do so over dinner or tea with people whom you respect and only after you have read the very thing you’re going to discuss and made up your mind about it.
“Listen, then make up your mind,” Gay Talese famously said about the secret of writing. It’s only logical that this should be inverted when it comes to reading: “Make up your mind, then listen.”
That said, I find it intriguing to see what and how individual people I respect — as opposed to an amalgamated “crowd” — are reading. I subscribe to Steven’s findings via RSS, for instance, and have made it a game of trying to figure out what his next article or book will be based on what he’s reading. I often add those items to my own reading list — I think there’s nothing wrong with complementing your own literary diet and curiosity with discoveries from individual readers you respect.
