From The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, via PBS’s 2006 documentary (with Jeff Koons as the voice of Warhol)

I’m a writer, and while I’m overpaid to write television at present, the truth is that the prose world from which I crawled — newsprint and books — is beset by a new economic model in which the value of content is being reduced in direct proportion to the availability of free stuff on the web. In short, for newspapers and book publishers, it has lately been an e-race to the bottom, and I have no desire to contribute to that new economy by writing for free in any format. Not that what is posted here has much prolonged value — or in the case of previously published prose, hasn’t soured some beyond its expiration — but the principle, in which I genuinely believe, holds: Writers everywhere do this to make a living, and some are doing fine work and barely getting by for their labor. Anything that says content should be free makes it hard for all writers, everywhere. If at any point in the future, this site offers more than a compendium of old prose work and the odd comment or two on recent events — if it grows in purpose or improves in execution — I might try to toss up a small monthly charge in support of one of the 501c3 charities listed in the Worthy Causes section. And yes, I know that doing so will lose a good many readers; but to me, anyway, the principle matters. A free internet is wonderful for democratized, unresearched commentary, and it works well as a library of sorts for content that no longer requires a defense of its copyright. But journalism, literature, film, music — these endeavors need people operating at the highest professional level and they need to make a living wage. Copyright matters. Content costs.

Coincidentally, I happen to be reading a wonderful collection of Arthur Schopenhauer’s essays and aphorisms in which the dour German philosopher directly contradicts this view:

Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain. The greatest works of the greatest men all belong to a time when they had to write them for nothing or for very small payment: so that here too the Spanish proverb holds good: Honra y provecho no caben en un saco [Honor and money don't belong in the same purse].

My first thought, on seeing this photo of the New York Review of Books office shared yesterday on Twitter, was that, by comparison, my own work space seems rather bloodless. I keep my cubicle as clutter-free as I can manage, in part because I find that straightening my desk is a good way to procrastinate before settling down to a writing or editing task, and also because I associate a clear expanse of desk with a clear mind. But there is something undeniably romantic about the office piled high with manuscripts and galleys, pasted over with sticky notes, and sprinkled liberally with souvenirs, curios, coffee cups, and liquor bottles. If my desk symbolizes a clear mind, the NYROB office represents a mind stuffed full of ideas—and a worker who is too busy reading and writing and thinking to worry about such trivialities as cleanliness and recycling. It’s clutter as workplace status symbol. At my job, when people remark on how clean my cubicle is (which happens with some regularity), I get the feeling that they are also thinking, He can’t be very busy or important with a desk like that!

I started this personal blog two months ago, thinking it would be good place to post news about my forthcoming book (so far: no news) and to write about things that I normally wouldn’t get a chance to write about, like sushi documentaries and Kraftwerk tickets and that cooking show I used to like in college.

In preparation, I spent a good deal of time looking at other writers’ personal blogs. Many of these are OK, a few are pretty awful, and then there are maybe five that make you really like the author and want to buy his or her book, search out his or her latest magazine article, and maybe even attend a reading—in short, that give you that particularly Internet-age feeling of wanting to be friends with someone you’ve never met.

Chief among this handful of enviable writers’ blogs, for me, was Elif Batuman’s My Life and Thoughts, where, since 2007, the author of the essay collection The Possessed has posted charming, rambling dispatches from her life as one of “our nation’s more junior producers of literary and memoiristic fluff journalism.”

Now Batuman has announced that she is abandoning the blog for Twitter. The impetus for this sudden shift? A New York Times Book Review item pointing out that Batuman was one of the “notable holdouts” still keeping a personal blog while most every other author had already made the leap to 140 characters. “OK human history – I can take a hint,” she wrote. “You can find me on Twitter @BananaKarenina, unburdening my heart according to the dimensions dictated by my time.”

This made me feel rather foolish. Here I am just starting a blog and meanwhile even the notable holdouts are moving on. But if you neglected to read the comments to Batuman’s farewell post, you missed just how much she was looking to escape blogging rather than embracing Twitter. In a response to commenters’ laments, she wrote:

But listen, valued readers, to my horrible, horrible confession. I am fully as skeptical of Twitter as anyone, but – I’m going to come out and say it – this blog has become a WEIGHT ON MY SOUL. Not just the robot term paper army, but the constant nagging feeling that I haven’t posted for a long time and am running out of students to outsource to. . . .

So this is an experiment – I’m actually hoping to blog more/ better/ less effortfully on Twitter, free from the demands of paragraphs and cascading style sheets.

Surely anyone who has done any kind of blogging can relate to the weight-on-my-soul feeling. Starting a blog seems like an obviously good idea. Of course you will have enough to write about! You have interesting thoughts all the time, and without a blog they’re going nowhere. And it’s just a blog—it’s not like you need to produce finely crafted essays. Just knock out the occasional post.

Then you discover—or rediscover—that writing anything is difficult and time-consuming, even a quick post about your cat. But is Twitter a better alternative? So far, Batuman’s tone seem naturally well-suited to miniature confessions and exclamations:

Honestly, I’m a little jealous. I have tried to embrace Twitter but just can’t sustain my enthusiasm. In a way, I find it more demanding of my time than blogging. If I can check in every day, I enjoy it. But let a few days go by and it’s like I’m walking into the middle of a lively dinner-party conversation where everyone else already knows each other and has seen the same movies and read the same books. I occasionally try to slip a word in, but it gets lost in the din. (I am, obviously, not one of the NYTBR’s “authors with distinct voices, preferably funny ones, who can toss off pithy observations or one-liners.”)

So I’ll stick with the blog for now. For me, it’s still an experiment. Part of what I loved about My Life and Thoughts was watching a D-list writer make “the arduous transition to the C-list” and beyond. As an aspiring junior producer of literary and memoiristic fluff journalism, I would love to pull off something similar here.

When I bought my first iPad last month, I never thought it would be useful for writing. I wasn’t going to kid myself about that. As far as I was concerned, the iPad was an exceptionally well-designed (and very expensive) toy. It would be great for travel, and there might be some handy productivity apps. But it would not help me work. If anything, I worried that it would become yet another distraction from writing in an apartment that is already full of them.

Happily, I was wrong. It took me a few weeks to discover it, but I love writing on the iPad. To my surprise, it is the best device for concentrated writing and editing in my mini-arsenal of consumer electronics.* Unlike my few-years-old Windows laptop, it takes no time to start up and launch a word processor. And then once I’m in a document, all I see is the document. There’s no task bar at the bottom, no file menu on top, no helpful paperclip—nothing but the blank page and the iPad’s unobtrusive system indicators.

Even better is the lack of a mouse. I thought this would be a problem—and, admittedly, it can be difficult to get the cursor where you want it—but it has proved a tremendous boon. On a laptop or desktop computer, with a mouse always at hand, it is far too easy to click over to another document or program. For me, this compulsive clicking seems to happen at an almost pre-cognitive level. When I sit down to write on my laptop, I have every intention of working on a single Word document and that’s all. But then I get stuck and the next thing I know I’m reading about pollen counts on Weather.com or inspecting my checking account balance or (worst of all) replying to an e-mail. It is frighteningly automatic; my finger clicks before my brain even has time to consider whether it’s time for a break.

With the iPad, there is no mouse. If I want to switch tasks, I have to physically reach out and manhandle the thing. It’s just enough of a hindrance that I find myself doing it much, much less frequently during writing sessions—almost never, in fact. This is where the one-app-at-a-time nature of the iPad proves extremely useful. On a laptop or desktop, you can glance at a browser window without totally putting your text document away. On the iPad, that document gets shunted off to god-knows-where. There’s no kidding yourself about just taking a quick peek at the headlines. You’re either working on you’re not.

Obviously, the iPad is not going to save anyone from writer’s block or procrastination. (That device would be worth much more than $500.) But for me it has brought about a real reduction in the small bouts of semi-conscious, joyless e-flailing that formerly dogged my writing sessions, and for that I’m grateful. Thanks, iPad!

 
* Cleary, the scenario I’m describing requires a Bluetooth keyboard. I was happy to discover that the Microsoft one I had lying around works perfectly well and I don’t have to buy the $69 Apple version.

If I were ever to open a vintage-Polaroid shop in Berlin, I would want it to look exactly like this.

Sometimes when you tell people that you’ve been busy, they will reply with encouragement: It’s good to be busy. That’s true as well, and occasionally I have to remind myself of this fact. Unlike some people I know, who seem to thrive on frenetic schedules, I have a temperamental aversion to too much busyness. I like to have enough mental space to focus on one or two things at a time; having lots of various commitments throughout the day or week makes me feel scattered and ineffective.

But being idle, having nothing to do, is certainly worse. Apparently behavioral science has even managed to prove this conventional wisdom. Last year, on the New York Times, I ran across a blog post by the writer Theodore Ross, who linked to a research paper titled “Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness” (PDF). Check out this abstract:

There are many apparent reasons why people engage in activity, such as to earn money, to become famous, or to advance science. In this report, however, we suggest a potentially deeper reason: People dread idleness, yet they need a reason to be busy. Accordingly, we show in two experiments that without a justification, people choose to be idle; that even a specious justification can motivate people to be busy; and that people who are busy are happier than people who are idle. Curiously, this last effect is true even if people are forced to be busy. Our research suggests that many purported goals that people pursue may be merely justifications to keep themselves busy.

This is both encouraging and kind of depressing. On the one hand, being busy makes you happier—and it doesn’t even matter if you’re inventing reasons to be busy. On the other hand, all those important goals you’re pursuing may be nothing more than “specious justifications” to keep yourself clear of the morass of idleness.

Alas, as much as I would like to pursue that last thought, I’m afraid I must turn my attention to some other pressing matters—no, seriously, they are very important!—and leave it at that for now.

Thoughts I had while watching Jiro Dreams of Sushi yesterday: I will never eat sushi this good. And even if, someday, I get to eat sushi this good, I won’t have the finely attuned palate to fully appreciate it. Also: As hard as Jiro’s understudies have it—and they have it pretty hard—there is something very appealing about the old-fashioned apprenticeship system. How many people today get to refine a single set of skills over the course of a lifetime? Also: Even though everyone in Jiro’s world is relentlessly hard on themselves and bent on achieving ever greater levels of perfection, no one seems stressed exactly. They are focused on their work and absorbed by it. Jiro says that he feels “ecstatic” throughout the dinner service. Jiro is lucky and he knows it.

I liked several things in the New Museum’s second triennial, The Ungovernables, which had its members’ opening last night (it’s on view until April 22). But, for me, the standout piece was Ressaca Tropical (Tropical Hangover), by the Recife, Brazil–based artist Jonathas de Andrade. The installation pairs more than 100 photographs of Recife—Brazil’s fifth-largest city—with reproductions of pages from a diary that Andrade found in the trash. It was the diary that drew me in. Writing in the late 1960s and the 1970s, the anonymous male author records the beginning and end of love affairs, his frequent trips to the cinema, nights out on the town. There is the occasional bout of “great anxiety” or self-scrutiny, but for the most part the entries are charmingly matter-of-fact. “Beginning of my romance with Maria de Fátima.” “In the evening I went to the sailboat with Henrique.” “Met with Fernando at the Costa Brava, had some pudding, then he gave me a lift to the Pina.” The accompanying photos include blurry snapshots of beach vacations, black-and-white aerial views of Recife, and portraits of its decaying modernist architecture. The combination feels, by turns, nostalgic, melancholy, funny, and vaguely sinister. You can’t help but think of all the unknowable private dramas unfolding on impassive city streets.

Read more about Resacca Tropical on the artist’s Web site.

This Wednesday at noon, tickets go on sale for MoMA’s Kraftwerk – Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, which will find the legendary German electronic band performing eight of its studio albums on consecutive nights starting April 10. The competition for purchasing tickets online is likely to be fierce, so fans like me will have to make some difficult choices. Do you try for Trans-Europe Express, Kraftwerk’s most widely loved—and arguably its best—album, but risk getting so hung up in the online purchasing crush that you lose out on tickets altogether? Or do you give up on your favorites and go for a slightly less classic album—say, 1981’s Computer World—or even one of the decidedly-not-classic albums from the 2000s, boosting your chances of seeing the band at the expense of the ideal Kraftwerk experience?

It’s going to be a tough call. In the meantime, here is a timeline of Kraftwerk live performances over the course of its 40-year career, from a short-lived early incarnation of the band to one of its last tours with founding members Ralf and Florian. 

1971

MoMA is promoting the Kraftwerk retrospective as “a live presentation of their complete repertoire,” which is not exactly accurate. It’s true that the band will be performing the eight studio albums that it released between 1974 and 2005. But Kraftwerk released three albums before 1974’s Autobahn. Watching the above clip from German television, you can see why the band has since disowned those fledgling efforts. Early Kraftwerk bore little resemblance to the highly synthesized “machine music” that the band would later make famous.

 
1973

A little bit of history: Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider founded Kraftwerk in 1970. The band had a number of early formations before it settled into the lineup featured on its most famous albums. In 1971, Ralf even left the band for six months to go back to school. The first video features a short-lived version of the band from this period, with Florian (on flute) joined by guitarist Michael Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger, who would go on to form the band Neu! By the 1973 performance above, Ralf was back in the band and Wolfgang Flür had added electronic percussion.

 
1975

By 1975, Kraftwerk had recruited Karl Bartos and developed its signature sound: propulsive electronic rhythms paired with layers of keyboards and harmonized, heavily accented vocals.

 
1976

I couldn’t find a video of Kraftwerk performing a song from Trans-Europe Express around the time of the album’s 1977 release. But this recording of a 1976 concert in Amsterdam is the next best thing—even if, to my ears, this particular rendition of the title song lacks the subtle funkiness of the album version.

 
1978

Enter the mannequins. It’s amazing that even by this point Wolfgang was still playing the electronic percussion by hand. Listening to the albums, I always assumed they were using programmed drum machines.

 
1981

From Computer World. Sadly, you don’t see the boys dancing like this anymore—nowadays, they pretty much just stand motionless at computer consoles.

 
2003

An example of late Kraftwerk, from an appearance at the MTV European Music Awards. This is from 2003’s Tour De France, the band’s first album of new material since 1986.

 
2007 (?)

This video was uploaded in 2007; the date of the performance is not clear, but this appears to be the band on one of its last tours with founding members Ralf (far left) and Florian (far right) playing together. Florian retired in 2008. Ralf is now the only member of the band’s classic lineup still touring—which, admittedly, makes the prospect of seeing Kraftwerk at MoMA a little less special. Not that that’ll stop me from clicking the refresh button like crazy this Wednesday at noon, trying to snag a ticket.