managing newness

In a profile in The New Yorker on Apple's design maestro Sir Jonny Ive, Ian Parker declares, "Ive manages newness." Managing newness. It's a daunting challenge, I am sure. And when you are in front of the forefront of the avant garde, as Apple is, it is even more of a task. But when you come right down to it, isn't that the daily challenge for you and for me? Newness unfolds in every moment. Nothing is permanent. The world is being created anew as I type this and as you read it. Newness abounds, physically and metaphysically. How do we manage it? With what tools or resources? With wild abandon or strict discipline? Toward what end? Managing newness. As it is written, "Behold, I make all things new."

9 Things I Learned in 2008

2008. Already it is so yesterday. Before I close the portals of the last year, I offer you an inevitable year-end tally (though you will see no inevitable resolutions for the new year in this space), an accounting rooted in things personal, more or less, less or more.

1. Yes, we can; yes, we did.

2. One can reinvent one's work life, given the grace of talent, opportunity, and others' graciousness and generosity -- all critically important givens.

3. Loss happens. Sometimes it's surprising, sometimes it's unfathomable, sometimes it rewarding. It is always inevitable.

4. The 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. scenario, give or take a few hours, is something I may never return to.

5. I like my MacBook; had hated laptops; never owned a laptop until my newly formed business called for one.

6. My office can extend to anywhere I am. This is not news, but it is something I understood empirically in 2008.

7. Follow-up, even of the most mundane prior minutiae, is one of my most daunting challenges each day.

8. It's all on paper, but is it real?

9. Words like "socialism" and "capitalism" either mean nothing or mean things we never were taught.

The Sounds of Spring

No, not the sounds of springs (plural). That's what you hear when the neighbors are doing the nasty on an old bed. And our house is so close, about two yards, let me tell you. It may be a long summer.

We bloggers tend to post photos as well as pictures via words. Images.

Sounds seem to take a back seat, if sounds can sit anywhere.

But I've heard the purple finches, the robins at morning and evening, was that a mockingbird, a mourning dove, the clarion chirp of Mr. Cardinal, a distant train, rain on the roof and on the new sidewalk (the jigsaw crack is fixed).

The sound of fingers on a MacBook keyboard.

Memories Are Made of This

I know, I know, you were expecting my regular-octane juvenile humor: "Mammaries are made of this HAHAhahaha."

As for dissecting memories, it's been a recurring theme, not dream, of The Laughorist blog (soon to celebrate its first blogiversary). As surely Marcel Proust illustrated lushly to the extreme, our memories are tricky, subjective, and flirtatious; we rarely know what doors they will open. And we don't know if we dare believe what we see, hear, taste, smell, or feel when we walk through those memory doors. That was part of the thesis of Stumbling on Happiness: the human propensity to color, or discolor, past (or future) events.

I just read an interesting take on this sort of thing by Alec Wilkinson, in The New Yorker issue of May 28, 2007 (do we really not write "19" anymore? does anyone remember writing 19XX [well, not really the X's] on checks, essays, reports, summonses, divorce decrees, baptismal certificates, marriage licenses, postcards, and letters of resignation? I do).

The article is about one Gordon Bell, who is lifelogging. He is creating a personal archive, a database of everything he can scan into a computer about his current and past life. MyLifeBits is what the project's called. He now works for Microsoft and wears a special camera as part of this all-consuming venture and experiment (experiventure, call it).

We bloggers think we're obsessive?

Think again.

It's all rather intriguing. Bell, 72, one of the founders of the Internet who has been called the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers, and Microsoft want to see how computers act when they establish a responsive relationship with our memories, or what we digitally tell a computer is our memories. Thus, a computer could easily say, "Watch out, Pawlie, you are entering the trough you typically enter after 17.268954 days. And it will last 3.000012223 days."

Or so I gather.

There's all sorts of potential ramifications to this sort of thing, some wonderful, some frightful. Microsoft's Jim Gemmell says in the article, "People argue about the need to forget things, but if you look at business discipline -- advising that you write everything down, your goals and objectives, and return to them to see how you did, examining what went wrong -- I think the same thing could happen with our personal lives. Being able to say, 'Now I realize my tone of voice was threatening' -- I think there's a real positive aspect in having the real record of what things looked and sounded like, and sequences of events, because we often end up believing things that are not based on facts anymore."

Really, Jim? Great. That's all I need. Computer as Grand Inquisitor. Computer as Torquemada.

Leave it to a software engineer to quantify memory.

Imagine this after-the-so-called fact bedroom debriefing: a blow-by-blow analysis on the fruitfulness (or dearth of ripe yield) in the garden of earthly pleasures, id est, orgasm or its lack. Let's cal this the Sixth Circle of Hell. And the Seventh Circle of Hell would go beyond anyone's worst nightmare of "he said, she said." It would be a recording with painful precision not only of the words but also the feelings and motives of the players.

We don't even what to imagine applying this beyond the home to the workplace or the public arena.

O spare us, HAL 9000.

This digitalization of memory gives new meaning to that line by James Joyce, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

Maybe it's me. Maybe I'd rather take refuge in the facts as I remember them, filtered by my psyche, not HAL's.

(Wouldn't you?)

(Say, what would Steve Jobs and Apple say to all this?)

Is it all agonizingly Orwellian? Or enticingly Proustian?

Wilkinson, a fine writer (I once read an essay he wrote about the legendary New Yorker editor William Maxwell, whom I met, briefly, in the 1980s, wherein Maxwell told the young Wilkinson to send a manuscript by means of letters to Maxwell; brilliant), writes: "Memory revises itself endlessly. We remember a vivid person, a remark, a sight that was unexpected, an occasion on which we felt something profoundly. The rest falls away. We become more exalted in our memories than we actually were, or less so. The interior stories we tell about ourselves rarely agree with the truth."

Whatever that is.

May you remember This.