Have you ever done something just because you thought it would make a good story?

Have you ever done something just because you thought it would make a good story, and you were pretty sure you could turn said story into a winning book proposal?

And if so, is that OK?

That’s what Joyce Wadler asks in her yesterday’s piece in the New York Times, about Kyle MacDonald, aka ‘The Red Paper Clip Guy,’ a 27-year-old ’slacker’ who famously swapped—through a shrewd series of trades—a red paper clip for, most recently, a modest house in Kipling, Saskatchewan, Canada.

MacDonald’s book, “One Red Paperclip,” goes on sale this week. In the meantime, what do you think? Have you ever done something just because of the story potential involved? Does the idea of undertaking an adventure go against the code of storytelling honor?

Have you ever gotten someone else’s email by mistake? It happens to K. Miller all the time.

“I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried,” writes the blogger, who notes that “Miller” is the seventh most popular surname in the United States. That’s a lot of crossed wires—luckily for those of us who are looking for some midday lols.

Just in time for the hottest season of all, I stumbled across this public service from New York magazine: Week-long sex diaries from six real, live New Yorkers. It’s from their recentish sex issue. I wish that I’d bought the whole thing.

My favorite diary? “The Frustrated Single Girl,” naturally.

“DAY 3: 8:30 A.M. Have long, inappropriate conversation with male colleague. Am proud of myself for doing as magazines say and practicing flirting on a less attractive man.
NOON: Construction worker screams a comment about my ass. I yell obscenities.
2:30 P.M. Read e-mail from a one-night stand from the U.K. Is coming for a visit in May. Put in saved-box.
3:45 Who am I kidding? I respond that I would be happy to “meet up.”
6:00–11:00 Grade papers.”

That’s so real it hurts.

In all seriousness, features like this remind me about the value of this kind of sociological journalism (anthropological story-collecting?). Knowing other peoples’ stories around the things that matter simply makes us all feel more sane, and those stories have to be collected, distilled, and distributed anew, decade after decade. So thanks New York, for the slice.

The evil geniuses at Nerve.com do not rest. First they brought us Babble, a site for the post-dating set (young parents, that is), and now, a more homespun project dedicated to the fine art of picking people up in what blogger types like to call “the meat world.”

Pickupedia, the Pickup Line Encyclopedia, is a user-driven miscellany of all the one-line seduction attempts that the hive mind can muster.

They’re gross and bizarre and largely un-funny and…well, you know pickup lines. Has any SMITH reader ever had a pickup line work for them? I mean successfully delivered one? Or been wooed by someone else’s? Tell!

A few weeks ago, a friend told me that she found the stack of books on the whitewashed mantlepiece-type thing that I use as a bedside table aesthetically pleasing. I was glad she said that, because I thought that my book stack had been lookin’ especially good recently, too—mostly thanks to the addition of Zak Smith’s “Pictures Showing What Happens on Every Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow,” which has a chunky red spine that is super hott.

What I didn’t know, until the same friend forwarded me a link to the Reading Stack Group on Flickr is that I’m not the only person who admires my own book stack. Which is kind of a relief. As cool as blogs are, there’s something about a pile of spines of different lengths and sizes that sets my heart aflutter.

As a postscript, isn’t it interesting that as media become digitized, our media consumption habits leave less and less of a physical trace? From LP covers on the wall to CDs to a pixellated, ever-changeable list of names on the ol’ iPod. From books and magazines to…well, nothing’s replaced books and magazines for me yet. It’s strange to wonder if anything ever will.

This morning, as I open my web browser to Arts & Letters Daily, I see a link to a New York Times article reporting that Kurt Vonnegut has died. Vonnegut passed away in Manhattan last night. He was 84.

I haven’t picked up a Vonnegut book in years, but he and his work were a full-blown obsession to me once. There’s only one way to describe what happened when I discovered Slaughterhouse-Five in high school. I freaked out. There was something so exciting about the blend of fact and fiction. The directness of the address. ‘You are a reader and I am a writer,’ Vonnegut’s prose said, ‘and I am telling you a story. Let’s not pretend otherwise.’ And he threw in drawings and weird chapter breaks and put the obviously-memoir chunks up against the obviously-science-fiction ones because that strange brew is what he needed to get the point across. Looking back, I see now that Vonnegut was my first brush with metafiction. His writing answered to some need in my high-school brain. If I studied it hard enough, I thought, I would find an inkling of how to develop my own true and necessary voice.

The Times obituary quotes Valerie Sayres pointing out what she calls Vonnegut’s “continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction.” I have that interest (fixation?) too, and for what it’s worth, Vonnegut’s writing took it from latency into full flower.

(more…)

Microfiction has a new brand name: Ficlets. “A ficlet,” according to the new and beautifully designed Ficlets website, “is a short story that enables you to collaborate with the world.”
Ficlets is part of the AOL’s AIM network (since when has AIM had its own network? Does nobody tell me anything?), and you can sign in with your AIM screen name to pen a short-short story to which other users can then add sequels or prequels, in addition to regular ol’ comments. The lentgh of a ficlet is capped at 1,024 characters, which looks to be just under a couple hundred words.

Ficlets.com is curated by John Scalzi, who writes of the site at his own blog, Whatever:

This site will fly depending on the quality of the contributors, which is why I hope that you folks who come here, who I know are damn creative, will come over to Ficlets to play, and will add your own ficlets as well as post quality sequels and prequels to the ficlets that are already there. I also hope you’ll tell folks about it; the more folks we have contributing to and playing in the site, the better it will be.

So get on over there and lend a talented hand, already.

The image on the right shows the distribution of affluent families in New York City. (Just in case you had any doubts about which is the tonier side of the Park.) It was prepared by CUNY sociology professor Dr. Andrew Beveridge, using Social Explorer, the statistical mapping website that he’s helped to develop.

Unlike some of the really fun academic online toys out there, Social Explorer is open to the public and free to use. The interface of the maps feature can be a little slow, but the range of information that Social Explorer puts at the fingertips is impressive, integrating census data from 2000 back through 1940.

You want to see the geographic location of individuals of Iraqui ancestry according to the 2000 census? No problemo. The percentage of people employed in the arts/entertainment/recreation trades? Oh, hello, New York City. Hello Memphis. Hello Disneyworld. Hello almost all of Nevada.

Sociologists probably have important uses for all this, but I call it fun.

(Image from the Gotham Gazette.)

Everyone loves a list, so it was savvy of the newish L.A.-based magazine GOOD to run a list of the 51 best magazines of all time. Best-of lists like this are even more fun in the internet age, when comment-enabled stories make it possible to argue, bicker and posture (which is the real joy of ranked lists, of course) not just with your friends but with obsessive strangers from all over.

Read the list, but don’t miss the comments. Esquire, The New Yorker, Life, Playboy, and The New York Times Magazine take the top five spots. Vogue, weirdly, ranks underneath Lucky magazine (ouch!), at #s 45 and 44, respectively. My beloved Sassy rates a very respectable 25.

When you’re done, take a gander at GOOD itself, a print mag and website purporting to be “media for people who give a damn.”

Hat tip: Helen Jupiter.

Jessica Hagy, known for her less-than-a-year old blog Indexed, reports that she has just landed a book deal with a major house. She deserves it. There’s something ingenious about her relational charts and graphs, each rendered on a white index card in black ink in Hagy’s distinctive, tidy-but-homespun handwriting. They have an appeal that hits immediately and then slowly blossoms to a deeper, head-scratching kind of appreciation: the best ones are both ha-ha funny and truly insightful. Delivering something pithy that also accommodates web readers’ tapped-to-the-max attention spans isn’t easy—but the advertising copywriter from Columbus, OH has perfected a highly addictive formula. Bravo!

Image: Indexed