One of the books most responsible lately for filling up with buzz that series of tubes that make up the Internet is Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail: Why the Future Is Selling Less of More. Anderson’s argument, in a nutshell, is that online vendors like Amazon, Netflix, and the various purveyors of digital music are providing a welcome (and lucrative) alternative to the blockbuster approach prevalent in brick-and-mortar venues like, well, like Blockbuster. Freed from the limitations of finite shelf space, online merchants can offer a much wider array of goods and services that cater to niche tastes and interests.

More to the SMITH point, he also contends that as sales volume becomes less of a critical issue for the seller, and as barriers to publication fall (think desktop publishing and blogs, podcasts and YouTube videos), the opportunities for individuals to tell their stories will only grow.

Recently, Anderson spoke about all this at one of the Long Now Foundation’s Seminars About Long-Term Thinking. If you haven’t checked out this spectacular series, either in person or via the post-talk audio downloads, Anderson’s presentation is an excellent and timely place to start.

And while you’re there, be sure to investigate the other excellent talks, especially those by Kevin Kelly, Sam Harris, Stewart Brand, Roger Kennedy, and the inimitable Bruce Sterling.

Back in the ’60s, when people under thirty were loudly distrusting authority, the psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments at Yale aimed at finding out just how far that distrust (and its corollary, resistance) went.

“The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.” (1974)

You can read more about that here.

Anyway, in a weird, Webby update of Milgram’s shock experiments, the owner of ShockTheMan.com has committed himself to wearing a dog obedience shock collar (an Innotek ADV-300, for all you gadget freaks) for the next three months.

Visitors to his Web site are invited to pay a token amount to either shock him or prevent a shock from happening.

During this period you have the choice to shock me or prevent a shock from occurring. There are four levels of intensity to choose from, each progressively more painful. The price is represented by the Intensity level, $1-4. This is about dog karma. I used this on my dog and after testing it on myself, I realize this #%$^ hurts. So now it’s my time, shock the man or save him. …

10% of all monies collected each month will be donated to a local animal rescue, placement, or shelter center.

Follow the action here.

A few weeks ago, The New Yorker ran a lovely profile of the late composer Morton Feldman, who discovered his “voice” and talent late in life, largely as a result of his friendship with fellow musician John Cage. Cage’s “chance operations,” a radical obedience to happenstance and the now, had an electifying effect on Feldman, who found the permission that Cage’s approach offered him creatively liberating.

Though ostensibly about Feldman, the piece is more about the creative process, and what happens when one submits to it.

You can listen to some of Feldman’s haunting music here.

“Isobella Jade, a model who has been living out of a suitcase in New York, is pitching a memoir, Almost 5′4″, about her struggle as an aspiring, height-challenged starlet. And she’s apparently been using the communal office that is the Apple Store on Prince Street in SoHo to write it.”

So begins a fascinating story on the blog FishBowlNY, which also posted a follow-up interview with Jade the next day. (Note: As you ponder the details of Jade’s writing process, your credulity mileage may vary.)

From the model/designer’s pitch to Mediabistro, which runs FishBowlNY:

“Where Isobella wrote her book is a story in it’se self [sic]. She wrote her whole memoir which is over 250 words [sic], while standing in heels infront of an Imac 17inch computer at the Apple Store in soho.”

I’m guessing she meant “250 pages,” though saving and/or printing her chapters was likely to have posed some problems.

Donald Antrim’s exquisite memoir of his mother and her dying, The Afterlife, is an unblinking look at what it is to be the son of an imperfect mother.

She was sixty-five and had coughed and coughed for years and years. There had never been any talking to her about her smoking. The news that she had cancer came as no surprise. It had grown in her bronchi and was inoperable. Radiation was held out as a palliative–it might (and briefly did) shrink the tumor enough to allow air into the congested lung–but my mother was not considered a candidate for chemotherapy. She had, during the course of forty years of, as they say, hard living, progressively and inexorably deteriorated. The story of my mother’s lifelong deterioration is, in some respects, the story of her life. The story of my life is bound up in this story, the story of her deterioration. It is the story that is always central to the ways in which I perceive myself and others in the world. It is the story, or at any rate it is my role in the story, that allows me never to lose my mother. …

People are fond of saying that the truth will make you free. But what happens when the truth is not one simple, brutal thing? I could not imagine life without my mother. And it was true as well that only without her would I be able to feel alive. I had had enough of Louanne Antrim and was ready for her to be gone. I wanted her dead, and I knew that, in the year of her dying, I would neglect her.

Read more here.

“On June 3, 2006, I began my week of eating nothing but monkey chow: ‘a complete and balanced diet for the nutrition of primates, including the great apes.’”

So begin the Monkey Chow Diaries, Angryman’s attempt to survive on monkey feed for seven chow-filled days. How’s it going?

Day 3

Stats
Height: 5′11″
Weight: 169 lbs
Mood: depleted
Poop: none so far today (will update)
Monkey-like Attributes: Do monkeys have superhuman olfactory senses? Because I can smell every hamburger barbequed within 5 miles of my house.

In his deeply strange and unsettlingly provocative new book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Daniel Pinchbeck quotes Walter Benjamin on the sad decline of storytelling:

The loss of the art of storytelling corresponds to a change in our experience of time. “The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it and explain itself to it without losing any time,” Benjamin wrote [in "The Storytellers," which you can find in the collection Illuminations]. “A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.” He compared stories to those “seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day.” Information, on the other hand, is always accompanied by explanation–”no event any longer comes to us without being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information.” It is almost our tragic fate as modern people to long for meaning and receive only explanation.

SMITH, with all due respect, is here to prove him wrong.

I was in the pet store today, buying two bags of birdseed–one of black-oil sunflower, one of mixed. Our avian visitors don’t seem to prefer one or the other, but I like to give them a choice.

As I went to check out, the guy in front of me kept ducking out of line and then back in, as if he couldn’t remember what he was there for. As we got close to the register, next to the Greenies and pig ears and canine breath films, I watched him pocket a candy bar made for humans. I thought about saying something, until I saw what he’d brought for purchase: a half dozen mini cans of tuna made for cats. The cashier turned away and waved his hand in front of his nose, and when the guy turned around I could smell him, too.

I could also see his face, as red as a radish, and his bloody eyes, and figured quickly that the food (both the candy and the tuna) was for him. It’s probably the only solid stuff he’ll ingest for the next few days.

So.

my crime-witnessing
+ my righteousness
x the guy’s public drunkenness
/ the cashier’s sales-class disdain
(over) the guy’s likely pet-food eating

=

what, exactly?

Bonus Question 1: Is this algebra or trig?

Bonus Question 2: Are you sure the birds have no preference?

George Crile was, among his many other virtues, one of the best storytellers I’ve ever known.

He knew the facts and the angles and the characters and their connections. And given his profession and the way he pursued it, it’s not surprising that many of his dinner-table tales were the sorts of things you’d see told blandly and anonymously (if at all) on the front pages of morning newspapers and as the lead stories on the evening news: about half-truth-telling military men, rogue CIA agents, decaying Soviet nuclear plants, an Afghanistan full of déjà vu, and, most presciently, about growing anti-Western sentiment in the madrassas of the Muslim world.

George was a television-news producer and a writer, the son and grandson of surgeons. His curiosity was as doctorly and thorough as his manner was charming and expansive. Once, on a trip to South Africa, he arrived at JFK without a passport. He talked himself onto the plane, off of it and out of the airport in Frankfurt, into the American consulate on a Saturday, back onto the plane, and out of the airport in Johannesburg, where a new passport was waiting.

George was an ardent student of world affairs, and knew more about who was really moving the puzzle pieces around than, well, again: more than anyone I’ve ever known. And given his convictions and the way he upheld them, his pursuit of the story often put his own life at risk.

One of his filmed reports shows him eagerly driving off in a taxi to meet with the man who arranged the killing of Daniel Pearl. (George left Pakistan only after his main and longtime contact there confessed that he could no longer feel optimitstic about George’s safety.) The last time we had dinner, George told a story from Egypt. He’d been taken to a picnic on a riverbank, where one of his three escorts told him he’d been brought there to be killed. The man admitted that his wife had threatened to leave him if he participated in the murder. So he helped to make sure George got out of the country alive.

Though it may seem selfish to say, the saddest part about all of this is not the perpetuity of tendentious generals and unaccountable intelligence agencies and a tenacious Taliban. It’s the word was.

As many people have quoted, the Buddha said that life is suffering. But the word he used — dukkha — is better translated as unsatisfactoriness or, less fancily, as sadness.

And The Saddest Thing I Own is a lovely meditation on this.