Epistemographer

It’s been five months since I defended my dissertation and started work at George Mason; four months since I last wrote anything substantial beyond book/research proposals or short, unsigned book reviews for Publisher’s Weekly. I’ve spent that time recovering from the whole dissertation process, mulling over what went right and what I can do better next time (the mere presence of the phrase “next time” there is telling), and justifying my relative unproductivity as a necessary recuperation after writing a dissertation. One month slipped into two, and now four months have flown by, much more quickly and effortlessly than I’d anticipated.

I’ve been busy, mind you, immersing myself in the world of humanities computing and pushing the “making technology” part of my brain harder than it’s been pushed…well, ever. My job’s fantastic, and I’ve been thriving in an environment where I’m expected to spend time reflexively analyzing information technology, then actually implementing those analyses in tangible ways. Put simply, I’m in a great place, with great people, and I still can’t believe how much I lucked out. But, I’ve lately been feeling like there’s something missing. There’s this sensation that I’ve been getting for the past month or so, a very tangible and almost physical pressure building somewhere between my eyebrows and the crown of my head. After a week of taking Tylenol to no avail, it occurred to me that this might not be a physical symptom, but a mental one.

I started paying attention to how I was spending my days, and I quickly realized that there’s something off-kilter in my life – in short, I spend my days soaking up information: from blogs, from books, from journals and newspapers, from colleagues, from conferences. This isn’t something to which I’m unaccustomed; after all, I spent the better part of two years in a research mode, learning about the video industry in preparation for writing my dissertation. But there’s a key difference – all the information I was taking in was directed, filtered for an eventual goal. I weighed every note, every line of an interview, every trade journal article with regard to its place in the final product.

These days, I’ve been taking in huge amounts of information, but I don’t have somewhere to direct it. To put it simply, my mind seems stuck on input, and I need to start outputting or I’m going to overload. I spent so long working on one huge writing project, I realized, that I’m somewhat adrift without it. Maybe the best indication that something’s up is the fact that I’m not writing on a daily basis – this blog’s more or less lain fallow, and I haven’t touched my journal since the summer.

At about this point, I get fed up with myself. “Waaaaah,” a nagging voice in my head mocks. “Life’s so hard. Suck it up and do something about it. You’re feeling like you’re all input and no output? Start writing.” This is the switch that luckily (or unluckily, depending on your point of view) is a core part of me, the safety valve that transmutes mopey navel-gazing into purposeful action. So, here’s where I am: my writing’s gone to shit and I’ve let myself slide into undisciplined patterns; I’ve basically been indulging in information gluttony. Needless to say, this is not a state of affairs that sits well with me, and it’s damn well time I did something about it.

So, here’s my New Year’s resolution: in addition to any miscellaneous things that might crop up, I’m going to write at least one substantial post every weekday, built around an idea and doing something vaguely interesting with it. I haven’t decided who my imagined reader will be yet (someone in my field? a layperson?), but I’ll figure it out at the pace of at least 250 words per day. And hopefully, I’ll shake off whatever malaise seems to have taken root under my forehead.

Just saw (via Joi Ito) that Chris Anderson is expanding his Wired Magazine article on “The Long Tail“ into a book-length project. He’s set up a Typepad blog and writes of his topic: “It’s a rich seam. This is the place where I’m going to collect everything I can about it.” Looking through his entries thus far, it seems like he’s already doing more than that, using the blog not just as a container to hold found material, but as a public space in which to wrestle with ideas and engage in a dialogue with readers before writing the book. I’ve come across a few other examples of this sort of thing (most notably The Red Couch, where Shel Israel and Robert Scoble are pitching, researching and writing a book in as visible a way as possible), and it raises a few questions about The Way Books Are Written.

The book writing process is traditionally a long, messy, and solitary one, and writers are often loath to let anyone take a peek at how their particular sausages are made. Moreover, there’s a certain fearful ethic of privacy that many hold dear – if I spread my ideas everywhere, why would somebody want to buy the finished book? Worse, what if somebody steals my ideas?

I’m reminded of a conversation I had a year and a half ago at the 4S conference in Atlanta, in which I argued for the usefulness of a blog as a primary form of discourse, not simply a support for traditional scholarly forms like journal articles or manuscripts. The response was that those traditional forms are the currency of the scholarly world; quite literally, they buy you tangible things like jobs and funding, and if you don’t throw all your effort into creating those articles and manuscripts others will use your ideas to do so, usurping your reward. My counter-argument was that people can only take credit for your ideas if you haven’t laid claim to them first, and that blogs offer a much quicker and efficient way to “own” an idea than the slow, cumbersome publishing process. Moreover, you shift the focus from ideas as commodified entities in and of themselves to yourself as a thinker and writer who creates such ideas (in essence, a shift from a focus on goods to one on services), which resonates with some other ideas I’ve had.

This, in essence, is what I see Chris Anderson doing. His new “The Long Tail” blog isn’t merely ancillary to his eventual book; rather, it’s a distinct and separate first step in a project that is greater than any one book, his project to build and “own” an idea, with potential rewards that far surpass mere book sales.

SCMZZZZZZZ.jpg” border=“0” style=“float:left; margin:5px;” /> About a week ago, I received a copy of Jennifer Traig‘s new memoir,

Devil in the Details : Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood. You can read the basics elsewhere – basically, the book’s blurb frames it as a story about a girl growing up with obsessive-compulsive disorder who latches onto the elaborate practice of Jewish ritual (particularly the kosher laws) in a funny yet unhealthy way.


That’s kind of what happens in the book, but the plot isn’t ultimately what matters here. Traig bounces back and forth chronologically, and it’s difficult to find a straightforward narrative – anecdotes are superficially clustered together around a given theme (laid out in the beginning of each chapter), but she just sort of roams through her childhood, telling entertaining stories and laughing along with us at her own exploits.


In terms of the writing, this is a damned funny book, plain and simple. Traig nails an authorial voice that echoes the amused mortification of David Sedaris, and the portrait she paints of her home life crackles with vitality. The thing to keep in mind, however, is that she never really lets down her guard and stops laughing at herself long enough to take herself seriously, which is a shame because buried in this book is a hyperbolic example of a problem that many (if not most) younger Jews face today.


Traig introduces herself as a girl who grew up in a town with no real Jewish community, in a home which was, in many ways, conflicted about religion, and when she began to try to figure out her Jewish identity, she was more or less on her own. Of course, her particular spiritual journey (at least, as she frames it) was driven less by a desire to explore the religion than by an unhealthy obsession with practice, but by emphasizing practice to the point that it becomes meaningless outside of her own idiosyncratic blend of tics and compulsions, she highlights the tension between doing things and the underlying reasons for doing things.


This is something that is more than just a laughing matter, and something which I’d wager resonates as strongly with other Jews my age as it did with me. We grow up as minorities, aware that we’re different somehow; wanting to be like everyone else and yet not comfortable with the idea of completely assimilating. Traig’s memoir reminded me of Lisa Schiffman’s recent book Generation J, which chronicles the author’s attempt to reconcile her own ambivalence about being Jewish and doing Jewish, and the two books complement each other nicely. The difference here is that Traig wasn’t acting purely rationally – she avoided mixing milk and meat, or doing work on shabbat, because these rules offered a justification for her OCD. Her story is food for thought, reminding us that most of us are making an actual choice to practice (or not practice) religion by introducing us to an endearingly odd young girl who didn’t have that luxury.

So, I’ll be getting married, most likely sometime next year. I’ll save the details for more personal spaces, but I will say this: it involved good friends, a street corner in the West Village and a cupcake from our favorite bakery in NYC:

Coming up as part of the latest Virtual Book Tour, I’ll be posting on the general subjects of obsessive-compulsive tendencies, the personal idiosyncrasies of keeping kosher, and other subjects raised by Jennifer Traig’s painfully funny new book, Devil in the Details : Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood. Stay tuned…

My favorite website discovery: Le Moleskine A Beleg. Found via BoingBoing, where Xeni explains:

On this wonderful little blog, a young man in Bordeaux, France sketches his way through life in a series of moleskine journals. He scans the results, and posts them online for all to see.

The beautiful thing about this “blog,” to me, is the way in which the traditional blog architecture is used as an interface to a fundamentally different experience, one which is elegant in its design and almost tactile in its implementation. I almost wish the designer had gone a step further, and had the “Archive” option link to nothing but a series of thumbnails of each day’s entry…

So, as best as I understand it, Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution reads:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers

Now, as a resident of the District of Columbia, I have no congressional representation (either in the House or Senate). Since the Constitution explicitly links representation and taxation, why am I obligated to pay Federal taxes? What happens if I decide not to?

It’s such a simple approach that it seems like it must have been tried before, but a few quick searches haven’t turned up much in the way of solid information…anyone?

Update: Okay, I spoke too soon: the Supreme Court addressed this issue in the 19th century. I’m not sure that the answer is satisfying, though…as lawyer George S. LaRoche wrote during a washingtonpost.com live chat a few years ago:

Ever since, the law has been unshakable: there is no claim under the Constitution for “taxation without representation.” But legal claims are not the only way to make “cases.” The taxation issue, however, is easy to discuss, not to mention popular, but when it comes time to do something, you’d be surprised how quickly everyone backs away from being the one to not pay taxes or even add a written protest. So to do something through the “taxation” issue, you would have to put yourself on the line, big time.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an uncomfortable relationship with sleep…to put it simply, I just don’t get tired when normal people seem to. That’s not to say that I don’t every get sleepy; I do, it’s just that it happens when the sun comes up, rather than when the sun sets. It runs in my family, too…my Mom is worse than I, and her dad was just the same.

That’s not to say that I just toss and turn – one might say that I learned my limits early on in life, and embraced my nocturnal nature. As a child, I used to spend hours each night reading by flashlight, a practice which gave way somewhere in high school to the late radio broadcast of Larry King. In college, the one-two whammy of a heavy courseload and 2 am reruns of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Comedy Central meant that I was more likely to see 4 am than I was to see 9 am, and by the time I got to grad school, it was A&E’s 3 am episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street and journal articles with which I whiled away the early morning hours. When I needed to be up early, I would take a sleeping aid of some kind (Sominex et al), which usually got the job done but left me feeling all sorts of groggy the next day.

Then, while doing a research on insomnia a few years ago, I discovered melatonin supplements. It was a revelation; I could take a pill and within a half-hour feel the easy sleepiness that everyone around me seemed to take for granted. I’ve never been formally tested, but it seems pretty clear that the supplements make up for the melatonin that my own body doesn’t seem to produce once the sun sets. For more than three years, melatonin has been a part of my nightly routine, and I’ve actually enjoyed a regular, dare I say “normal” sleeping schedule.

That is, unless something happens like tonight; I opened the medicine cabinet to find the bottle empty. “Crap,” I thought. It was too late to go to a drugstore, too late to replenish my supply. See, the odd thing is that melatonin doesn’t build up in your system, so if I don’t take it one night, it’s right back to my old tendencies. Thus, it’s close to 4 in the morning, and after spending several hours clearing my inbox, fiddling with blog templates and catching up on other work, I’m still uncomfortably wide awake.

I’ve got to admit, it’s an extremely familiar feeling, and one that I don’t miss in the least.