multimedia

Today I'm playing with music. I'm putting CDs, those ancient relics, onto my iPod. I have an iPod? For shame! Thanks, Sam. But I was thinking about my favorite music, and got into a list-making mood. So two top-10 lists here, just for the hell of it, and in no particular order.

List #1 = Best CDs of All Time (Or, ones that I have had a continuous love affair with for many, many years)

1. Beastie Boys "Hello Nasty"
2. Faith No More "Angel Dust"
3. Dave Matthews Band "Crash"
4. Violent Femmes "Add It Up"
5. Fiona Apple "Tidal"
6. Live "The Distance to Here"
7. Toadies "Rubberneck"
8. Beck "Odelay"
9. FatBoy Slim "You've Come a Long Way, Baby"
10. System of a Down "System of a Down"

List #2 = Best CDs -- Runners Up (Or, ones that I hope to still be in love with for many, many years)

1. Girl Talk "Night Ripper"
2. The Killers "Hot Fuss"
3. Dresden Dolls "Yes, Virginia"
4. Duffy "Rockferry"
5. Amy Winehouse "Back to Black"
6. Queens of the Stone Age "Songs for the Deaf"
7. Eagles of Death Metal "Peace Love Death Metal"
8. The White Stripes "Elephant"
9. Outkast "Stankonia"
10. Jem "Finally Woken"

I admit to leaving out a lot of awesomeness, but when I limit myself to 10, I have to let Pearl Jam, Cake and Stone Temple Pilots step aside. Yes, even Tori, but she's a special case. I also admit the last few on the latter list were difficult to type there. Basically that means I haven't fallen in love with enough new music lately. Individual songs, sure -- but entire albums? That's much more difficult. I'm close to adding Gogol Bordello. Now that I have my iPod, perhaps it will be time to expand my horizons some more. More Raconteurs, more Justice, more Feist ... I'm sure someone super-important (and I don't mean The Beatles) is missing from these lists. It's time to spend some quality time in New Music Land.

nourishment

So it seems that my semi-daily blog has become a monthly. I aim to remedy that. The transition occurred because I came to New York and took on a chaotic lifestyle that has forced me to be "currently reading" "Eat, Pray, Love" for more than two months. Pathetic? Probably. Fixable? Definitely. I swear I am almost done with the book now, with a mere 60 pages to go. The long subway rides are helping a lot, though! But I am totally in love with the book. I can think of two people I will be buying copies for. Somebody told me the first third of this book (eat = Italy) was the best, but I'm loving the more philosophical portions, too. I've been inspired to make meditation a part of my life, especially because I feel like I need some time every day to really clear my head.

I like the way Ms. Gilbert thinks. I like the way she takes what could be an over-your-head philosophical memoir and spreads it out like she's icing a cake everybody wants a piece of. Here's a big lesson she's revealed on page 260:

Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't, you will leak away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.

I also like how the book is winding up. The author has come full circle, from self-indulgence to self-discovery and finally reaching a point of balance. Balance is what she is seeking in Bali, and yes, she makes me want to go see that place just as much as she made me want to see Italy. Every person I tell about this book wants to know how she managed to take a year off of life and travel the world. She says right in the beginning that she used the advance for the book to take the trip that inspired it. What an amazing thing. I know Liz had her troubles in life, but how fantastic to be able to reach "enlightenment" and share the story with those of us who can only dream of spending four months in culinary heaven followed by four months in deep meditation with no responsibilities ... and then four months to figure out how to apply it all to real life.

It has been nice to stretch out this book, though, because the author does manage to transport me to wherever she is at the time, even if that place is the inside of her mind. I'd like to find the inside of my head one of these days ... I'll be working on it.

laziness

Now that the Summer Publishing Institute is over, perhaps I can reflect here some on what I learned during the book portion of the program. I have to start by pointing out three phrases that kept popping up in lectures.

1. Balancing act
2. Sea change
3. Soup to nuts

Can the whole of book publishing be summed up in that triad of linguistics?

Unfortunately, the book-publishing lecturers didn't provide quite such quotable fodder as did the magazine lecturers. However, here are a few choice words.

"Don't listen to people who say what you want to do won't work."

"An editor is like a midwife."

"Do not put your cleverness in front of the communication."

"'Google' is at risk of becoming generic."

"Publishing is like a lifelong private university."

"Above the fold" can refer to content at the top of a Web site, too.

"[That one] is a slut of a publishing house."


Update: I've had this post (well, the beginning of a post) sitting on my computer for too long just being neglected. Is it laziness? Perhaps just distractions. Certainly the latter, plus the fact that my notes are now more than a thousand miles away, and I won't have them again until next week. I promise that before the end of this week, though, I'll post something good for "Eat, Pray, Love." Then maybe I can get back into my blogging routine. Something about a summer in New York really has had my mind in too many places to concentrate on inward reflection.

Top 100

[via The Publishing Curve, with alterations]

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has an initiative you may have heard of called the Big Read. According to the Web site, its purpose is to "restore reading to the center of American culture." They estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

For fun, let's see how many of the top 100 books we've actually read. My list is below. How well did you do? Have you read more than 6?

Here's what you do:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you own but haven't yet read.
3) Put a star by those you intend to read someday but don't own.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy*
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller*
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I've read some!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell*
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy*
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini*
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan*
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez*
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac*
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville*
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce*
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath*
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

half full

While the last thing that should happen to a book lover is a bout of words escaping her, I have this blank box and not a clue how to fill it. So much is happening so fast, and I'm trying not to simply be pulled along in anticipation of what's yet to come. Three weeks are down, and I have almost three more to go in school, with two to follow. As much as my head is swimming now (mostly because there are not enough hours in the day), I'm hoping to use those two weeks of NY freedom to engage in some hardcore "fully presentness. "

I've known of this concept for quite a while now. It was at church with my brother at least four years ago one day that I witnessed what my brother would tell me was a style of "preaching" not much to his liking. The "sermon" was more like a class lecture, with the congregation following along in a book other than the Bible. I suppose it was supposed to be contemporary. Regardless, what was spoken of that day has stayed with me like a mantra. "Wherever you are, be there." It's being fully present. It's being aware of now, not bemoaning the past or worrying about the future. It's recognizing the significance of every moment in a way you can almost physically feel. When a manuscript proposal for a book on "mindfulness" came my way in the form of an editorial assignment last week, I was, for lack of a more creative phrase at the moment, pleasantly surprised. I read it with much enthusiasm, and I hope it goes to press.

I have many more things to say, but I'm going to have to leave it at this tonight, because I haven't been getting enough sleep this week, and my brain power is low. Save me, morning latte!

wisdom of the pages

So the big question is: "What's new in New York?" Well, I've been hard at work reading nothing but magazines and blogs, listening to awesome lectures and exploring the Big Apple. I've seen Wall Street, Ground Zero and the Statue of Liberty. I've eaten a huge slice of pizza at 1 a.m., and listened to mariachi music on the subway. I have not gotten lost, mugged or honked at. That's all good news.

I've gotten free copies of New York magazine, Bust, Wired, Rolling Stone, SELF, Esquire, People Style Watch, Parents, Women's Health, Conde Nast Portfolio, More, Traditional Home, Vogue, InStyle and Time Out New York. I've decided that once I settle into a job and a pad, I'll be subscribing to Bust, CN Portfolio, Blender and Adbusters. I think it's a good combination that exhibits my personality, but mostly they are just the only magazines I've read cover-to-cover and wanted more. I haven't had a real subscription in a while -- at some point I was getting RedBook, although I don't know why. I used to get Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Spin, Lifetime and Cosmo, and long before all that of course it was YM, Seventeen and American Girl. It's about time I invested in some magazines I really care about. Especially because I feel a lot more emotionally attached to the medium than ever before -- and even more so than I ever was to newspapers.

I've picked some favorites from the speakers, but they've all been pretty fantastic. I've learned so much stuff that I wish had been addressed in college. I can't wait for universities like Auburn to catch up to the publishing future. There's so much more excitement now. When I think Auburn journalism, I think black and white; when I think new media, everything is in color. I'm either brainwashed or just really, really, really doing the right thing for myself. I know newspapers do lots of great things on the Web, but they have definite limits. They can't stretch those limits like magazines can. Even the book business is experimenting with video "book trailers," which I learned today on GalleyCat.

I have so much going on in my head right now that it's hard to keep it all straight. So I think I'm going to spend some time typing up my notes from the past two weeks. But not before I share some more wisdom from magazine pros. This time more on the serious side, if you can decipher it out of context.

Young people are "heat seekers."

New magazines fill a "white space" in the market. (Not unlike how Athena filled her "blank spaces." Hmm ... )

You can hire a "voice doctor" if your writers have the wrong tone.

Editors are sometimes disappointed to realize "it's still just a magazine."

A magazine is a "meal" for readers. What would you rather eat?

You can enjoy a story without even reading it if it's designed well.

"Ads are like children. They're all beautiful."

"Anything can be done. You cannot be held back by what you don't have."

The well is a sacred space.

"People want to know more than what's on the surface. The deserve more because they are smarter."

Don't live in the past.

Search-engine optimization is a "cult science."

"The classic image of the blog is the 22-year-old sitting at home in pajamas saying bitchy things."

Comments are much more interesting than letters.

Flash looks cool, but it doesn't drive traffic.

"It's a very sober environment."

Consumers have been empowered to advocate brands.

"Choice is not the enemy."

"Don't assume tried-and-true will continue to perform."

"TV is icky."

You have to compete with yourself so no one else does.

People don't want supermodels anymore. They want celebrities they like.

People don't read web content at home in their precious leisure time, they read it during stolen moments at work.

There is a difference between telling someone, "Stop eating before you're full," and telling them, "Leave three bites on your plate."

"Tri-quarterly" = we "tried" to be quarterly, but it didn't always happen.

"Knitting is a lot more lucrative than feminism."

publishing immersion

So although I don't have time to go into much of what's going on in NYC right now, I did want to note a few choice words from today's sessions led by magazine-industry professionals.

"People with money have limited imaginations."

"Jesus sells."

"Print it all out. We'll recycle it later."