Paper Houses: Vanity, Doubt, and the Perils of Self-Publishing

ritual lights, originally uploaded by Diana Kimball.

Early in autumn, in the year 2000, members of the American Printing History Association gathered at the Rochester Institute of Technology to consider the precipice between centuries. The conference: “On the Digital Brink.” Among the figures invited to address the assembly, Robert Bringhurst stood apart. As a typographer and poet, Bringhurst was intimately acquainted with the forms words take, and the ache that accompanies shepherding one’s own work toward print. Asked to issue an epitaph for the twentieth-century book, Bringhurst approached its apparent demise with caution; sensible, for at the turn of the twenty-first century, the book in its familiar form retained a certain indeterminate allure.

The allure remains. In the twenty-first century, the case for or against books is often made with readers in mind. “Books,” as we unthinkingly understand them—made of paper, released by publishing houses, available in bookstores—afford a host of pleasures and create a number of annoyances, as well. It is deeply satisfying to feel the weight of a hardcover book, but a nuisance to read one lying down. Touching paper beneath fingertips is a simple luxury; increasingly, though, at a time when information can be transmitted weightlessly and instantly from screen to glowing screen, the immense cost of creating and transporting paper volumes en masse seems indefensible. These are the justifications and criticisms that tend to surface whenever the merits of new technologies for readers are discussed; the ambivalence that swirls around the Kindle comes to mind.

On a Friday evening in October, Bringhurst issued a forecast. “The book,” he first said, “is poised to move, in the coming century, from its familiar paper house to a kind of handheld movie screen.” But, he continued, “I assure you that I see no reason to be worried by any of this. For while it does look to me like a part of our future, I expect that part to be short-lived. Wherever human beings live their own lives instead of somebody else’s, stories form in their hearts and in their heads.” Finally: “stories and people nourish each other. Where that occurs are the seeds of the book, some of which are certain to sprout.” Expressing sympathy for the impulse to publish while remaining vague about what form that impulse would come to inhabit in the future, Bringhurst drew his epitaph to a close. Stories, he suggested, were going nowhere. But nowhere did he promise that the houses they inhabit would not change.

Tradition

In 2005, a scandal broke. At issue was the definition of “tradition”; the controversy involved a print-on-demand publishing outfit called PublishAmerica, a mass of frustrated authors, and the troubled state of the novel in a digital age. PublishAmerica, The Washington Post reported, had lured authors to sign over rights to their manuscripts with the assurance that their work would be produced by a “traditional” publishing house. PublishAmerica identified itself as “traditional” to distinguish itself from vanity presses, which—historically—charged authors for the privilege of seeing their work in print, rather than paying authors for the privilege of publishing it. 

PublishAmerica did not charge, but it barely paid, either; worst of all, authors who believed they were legitimizing their work quickly discovered that they had instead condemned their manuscripts to collective disdain. When one PublishAmerica author stopped by a local bookstore to schedule a book-signing, “an assistant manager checked her computer, ‘looked at [the author] and said, “That’s POD,”’” a compact and often derisive acronym for print-on-demand. The author was told that the bookstore did not do signings for POD authors. She was devastated.

Technology complicates tradition. The publishing industry as it existed in the twentieth century was a masterpiece of systematized inefficiency. Publishing houses routinely printed thousands of copies of a book so that enough people would see it that a few might choose to buy or read it. The enterprise was, of necessity, surrounded by an ecosystem of quality control and promotion devoted to recouping the massive cost of that inefficiency. This ecosystem included the apparatus of the book review, the role of the editor, and the specialty of creating cover art. Bookstores, given limited shelf real estate, carefully chose which books to stock; publishers, given the tremendous cost of publishing a volume in quantities that would enable certain economies of scale, took great care to bet only on books they thought bookstores might stock. The advent of online merchants such as Amazon.com altered the equation slightly, offering a new outlet for books unconstrained by the limitations of physical display space. The ease of desktop publishing, and the undeniable efficiency of print-on-demand technology at managing supply and demand, hold the potential to alter the equation further.

Yet norms of approbation and evaluation are stuck clinging to a bygone matrix of scarcity, in which only books mass produced on paper at the expense of a third party have a shot at fair consideration. For many, though, the paper book as a recognizable end-product of this process remains the tangible goal they strive toward. Persuaded by outfits such as PublishAmerica that their dreams are within reach—wanting to believe that norms can change, that the long tail exists, and that meritocratic success is possible—some sign away the rights to their work, convinced that they will be happy just to feel the heft of their words on paper. “People who just want a book to hold in their hands, who don’t care about having a career as an author, do okay with PublishAmerica,” commented A.C. Crispin, the chair of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Committee on Writing Scams. But “for many, ‘after a while, they realize that what they really wanted was to be read.’’  

Approbation

Particularly for novelists and memoirists, who pour their imagined worlds and private memories into volumes that they then nervously expose to appraisal, just seeing their work “in print” falls short of the fantasy they held close: that people might enter those worlds by choice, and pay for the privilege, thereby validating the creative mind that constructed them.
For writers, technology-enabled shades of gray in the publishing industry have proven dangerous, seductive, destabilizing, because: for them, paper artifacts have long been the mark of success. 

The dream of becoming a “published author” is haunting. Becoming one, for most of the twentieth century, was a worthy goal because it was incredibly difficult to achieve. To achieve it meant conquering all of the obstacles put in place by the publishing industry to keep unmarketable or uninspired texts from reaching bookstore shelves. In a sense, it meant winning—over other manuscripts and other authors, but also over one’s own self-doubt. It did not, of course, always or even often translate to riches. But to become a published author at least meant that someone else believed in a work enough to bet on its success. 

As paper-based business models confront the digital age, the function of the physical book shifts and mutates. Meanwhile, the familiar bundling of validation, distribution, and promotion afforded by advance-paying mass-production publishers becomes even more of an elusive and alluring goal through its comprehensive authentication of the authorial voice. Self-publishing, by violating these standards through the vehicle of a potentially identical physical product, illuminates their presence and challenges their endurance.  

Expectations

Self-publishing outfits transgress publishing industry norms on a number of fronts, complicating the assumptions of quantity as an assurance of quality, production values as a competitive necessity, and business models in which publishers assume the financial risk of printing a book. The disjunction between what self-publishing authors think they are accessing and what they are in fact accessing shows that the physical book carries with it certain powerful expectations that can be easily disappointed.  

The significance of paper books is further complicated by the explosion in online publishing over the past ten years. In an age when anyone can, and most people do, instantly publish their thoughts in one form or another on a near-daily basis, the paper book has come to represent not only an antithesis to unpublished manuscripts lying in desk drawers, but an antidote to the flimsy ephemerality of thoughts beamed up into the digital ether, as well. Paper, in any form, is in fact an increasingly inefficient medium for the transmission of information, especially up-to-the-minute information. Books, then, must provide something better than up-to-the-minute information, or at last something different: cohesively imagined worlds, strong narrative, well-considered characters, immaculate copy-editing, readability, portability, and mastery of the long form.

Most of all, books offer the promise of durability; there remains something unsatisfying about purely weightless words. “Weren’t writers supposed to be bypassing publishing houses and dead-tree technology by now?” asked Paula Span in the Washington Post. “Shouldn’t the industry have evolved to something other than the book as Gutenberg knew it? Somehow, though,” she answered, “writers’ most potent fantasies still involve pages between covers, not e-books and blogs.” 

When asked why this might be so, Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors’ Guild, suggested that “the immortality of the book, the permanence of the book draws people in.” Though the paper of books may be fragile, the objects themselves have a habit of sticking around—resurfacing at opportune times, persisting as reminders of the words within. For aspiring authors, the tenacity of that finished product is appealing and comforting: unlike screens, which start each day anew, paper cannot so easily forget the words it holds.

Ironically, appropriately, the same technology that enables words to be published weightlessly allows them to be published physically at will.  Armed with print-on-demand technology, self-publishing outfits can flourish. All offer to transform digital files into bound volumes; they differ mainly on the degree to which they prey on aspiring authors’ dreams. Blurb, for instance, makes few promises; PublishAmerica implies many, without guaranteeing any. Yet each, operating on the premise of print-on-demand, manages the eternal problem of matching supply to demand by literally supplying only the books that are demanded, printing each volume only once it is ordered online. In so doing, the services violate another twentieth-century publishing norm: mass production as quality insurance.

Mass Production

Books constitute one of the few arenas of art where mass production enhances value rather than diluting it. The words within are uniquely affirmed by the magnitude of their reproduction. Recorded music provides perhaps the closest analogy; and yet songs, like paintings and unlike novels, can be fully enjoyed just by being in their presence. (Standing in front of a portrait at the museum; swaying to a rock song at a concert or in a dorm room.)

Henry Baum, editor of Selfpublishingreview.com, has written that “it takes all of two minutes to listen to a song, as opposed to investing real time in reading a book.” Furthermore, “writers can’t sell out a rock club the way an unsigned band can.” Because the worlds inside books are so interior, and require attention rather than simple ambient presence to access, the best guarantee a potential reader has of quality is the confidence with which a publisher invested in that interior world. For according to the business model of publishers such as Random House or Simon & Schuster, a book could never be published without being read by a number of discerning individuals. The risk would simply be too great. And so a book’s presence in bookstores assures potential readers (and purchasers) that they are about to invest in a collection of worthwhile words.

The problem with self-published books, for authors and for potential readers, is that the physical book no longer signifies that anyone has read it. In fact, the physical fact of a self-published book is far more likely to signify that astonishingly few people have read it. 

This is not a tautology of the form. Rather, it is a pattern that affects the reputation of the entire enterprise. The very exclusivity of traditional publishing houses means that their approval retains substantial meaning; moreover, it commands at least some respect. Since the rubric for success as an author is part of popular culture, “published authors” do not have to advocate for themselves in social situations to the extent that “freelance writers” often do. Social status is so often simply a function of whether or not strangers are impressed.

Promotion

For authors, though, the true mark of success is whether or not strangers read their work. One of the major disappointments cited by authors who have self-published is the failure of their work to filter out beyond their personal social networks. In the self-publishing universe, according to Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio, “the overwhelming majority of sales are to the friends and family of the authors.” 

A 2002 article in The New York Times noted that “unless authors make extraordinary promotional efforts on their own, most print-on-demand titles typically sell just a few hundred copies.” Most book-buyers do not walk into bookstores, or embark upon browsing through Amazon.com, thinking about metrics of approbation and the business models of various publishing houses. They are looking for something to read.

Without paper copies of a book inundating physical stores and crowding their shelves, countless opportunities for real-world serendipity are lost. It is almost impossible to accidentally collide with a print-on-demand book, because the book would first have to be demanded. For all its astounding resource inefficiency, the publishing industry’s system of mass production is quite expert at populating shelves in enticing ways. Without admission to that physical matrix, self-published books lose out on the production of consumer desire—a production process that is mimicked, not subverted, on sites such as Amazon.com.

The supreme downfall of self-publishing, though, might be its reliance on the self. Untested authors, when they are desperate for approval, long to be discovered—to be spontaneously recognized by a respected stranger as having talent, promise, value. They ache to be believed in. Friends and family, while supportive, lack the capacity for the kind of recognition that these authors desire, for they are already invested in the person behind the words. To be recognized for words alone is a pure, unimpeachable form of affirmation.

Marketing oneself can be painful and humiliating; marketing one’s words, exposed for all to see, can be even more difficult. Without external affirmation, all confidence feels like vanity. For most self-published books, The New York Times mentioned, “marketing…is up to the author, which is one reason why most do not sell.” Furthermore, “too often, writers who use print-on-demand services do not put enough energy or money into their efforts, expecting that somehow their work will become known.” People who gravitate toward print-on-demand, a self-published author added, “are very frequently planning to fail.” 

A crisis of self-confidence can undercut a book’s success completely. Longing to be discovered, authors balk at producing serendipity for themselves. “With the availability of print-on-demand services,” the Times concluded, “the issue is no longer whether one can get a book in print but only whether anyone will notice.”

* * *

On the digital brink, would-be authors face the dissolution of publication as a unified goal, and thus a disruption of the meaning of paper books as unified products of that system. As familiar business models for selling fictional words fall apart, the book’s role as signifier alternately deteriorates and stiffens. Yet, in spite of everything, “people keep on hankering to write and publish books,” Bringhurst reflected. “It seems to be the way we are. People keep on wanting to make love in spite of overpopulation and wanting to write books in spite of overpublication.” The way we are, and what we long to become: one who leaves to the world something worth believing in.

* * *

Adapted from my final essay of college, Paper Houses: Modern Vanity, Self-Publication, and Authorial Crises of Confidence.  Previously: Nightmares Exorcised in Dreamland, Bring Your Own Buttons, Algorithms and Avatars, Instructions for Everyday Life, Kodachrome, Fallout Shelters, and Practical Magic">Practical Magic.  Thanks due to Lisa Gitelman for a remarkable class, and to Joanne McNeil for a very thorough conversation.

The Tim & Diana Show, or: Endings

I woke up. Bought a bottle of rootbeer for Tim, and despondently ate some cinnamon-sugar pita chips. Then, walked across lawns to get to where he was. Because one year ago today, Tim Hwang and I recorded the first episode of The Tim & Diana Show, so today we recorded the last one. It’s about endings, and I’ll be sad to see it go.

On May 23, we are throwing a release party at Berkman Squared. What we are releasing: a DVD set of the entire series, seriously. I would love to see you there.

Thank you to all of our very patient guest stars over the past 28 episodes—Carrie, moot, Chris Kelty, JD Connor, Deb, Kristen, Matt, Annemarie, Sarah, and Allie. Thank you also to Amar, who laughed silently while filming the final first episode, and Jared and the team at blip.tv, who have hosted the show the entire time and then we met them at SXSW and said hello. And, finally, thank you to Tim, for being the best pretend talk show co-host of all time. Mostly, though, for being an incredible friend.

When I move to Golden Gate Boston, I'll miss him dearly.

The World of Writing

thesis, originally uploaded by Diana Kimball.

A month ago today, I turned in my senior thesis. On Atlanta's 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition; it was a work of love and distress. Through fall, I could feel the endeavor looming and beckoning, all the while knowing it should already have begun. Through January, I worried about the fact that I hadn't started writing yet. In February and March, I wrote everything. Since then, I've tried to swallow, and get distance.

The truth about a long writing project is that it's very different from a short writing project. A short writing project can be accomplished in a single night. And anything that can be accomplished in a single night falls into familiar patterns of delay and rush, completion and relief. Even if you have to stay up all night, the work somehow gets stuffed into circadian rhythms. You worry, write, and worriedly write, and then, in a quick succession of hours, it's over.

Writing has always been hard for me. Over years, I've found all these tricky ways to accomplish most of the work of academic writing without writing anything at all, to accommodate my relentless desire not to start the thing itself. Including: messy, elaborate schemes of serrated strips of paper full of quotes not mine piled on desks and scotch-taped together, color-coded, trains of thought captured in space (not words). Every paper in college, without fail, I've written this way. A huge gulp, a night of fear and compromises and elation and ideas, and a paper by morning.

My thesis could not go like this. But it really, really took me five months to work through to something else.

Patterns

Sinking in: to write about 1895, I read. For hours, days, hours. I did the same thing I always do, so I found newspapers and strange fragments. I transcribed them relentlessly. This is the café I went to every week, all fall and winter, to spend the best pale hours mindlessly copying. I imagined that once I mindlessly copied all of the newspaper articles at hand (there were always more articles), I would reduce each to a quote, then reduce the quotes to a smaller pile of quotes, and then there it would be, my thesis—waiting for fabric words. I am not surprised that I expected this, because it's the way I've always written. Compression and rearrangement, until in my organization of other people's words something substantial emerges. My own words last.

This did not scale. I had a feeling it might not, but kept going anyway, until I eventually found a different sort of compromise. But something important came from all those nervous months. I developed a relationship of mutual dependence with all of the characters, places, moments I was reading about. They needed me to save them from the past; I needed them to save me from starting. Led on by the desire to delay accountability for my own words, I lived through theirs for much longer than was necessary. But that endless research—the intricately, uselessly detailed picture that emerged—wasn't a waste. Glimpsing it was every private joy.

Patterns aren't for nothing. It takes a long time to know anything well enough to have something new to say. Even if those months of persistent research were caught up with avoidance, I know that if I'd started writing earlier, I would have been working from a very different picture. A much emptier one: so I'm grateful that it was full.

Surprises

At the same time, my hard drive was failing. (And then failed, during finals!) And anyway, there was no way I could compress the evidence, rearrange the fragments, and somehow manage to use the resulting words as a map.

What was hard for me was trusting my imagination. I wanted to save thinking and decisions for the end, and wanted to feel like whatever I discovered was a compact representation of the story in all its dimensions. But that story would never have been mine. In winter, in the basement at night, I tried to write an outline. And realized: I needed to change my thesis completely.

The project as I'd come to know it felt heavy. The idea of focusing on a part instead of the whole felt lighter. Instead of writing successive, winding chapters about the South, the nation, and the world, it occurred to me that I could write about the world alone. I knew the least about the world and the exposition, so: I'd have to research more.

But I found all of this evidence on the periphery of my vision, where I didn't expect it to be. I wrote a new outline from scratch, and watched the fragments in my mind rearrange themselves, levitating through thick air like something in a cartoon. It was all in my head, it was already all in my head.

The point of those months of research, I think, wasn't to write the whole story. It was to know enough of the whole story that I could walk through history confidently, curiously, and decide what might come next.

Systems

Holding together an unwieldy project, in all its charming and frustrating fits and starts, I became deeply attached to my systems.

Convincing yourself to do something you want to do but are afraid to do can require an inordinate amount of ritual. Anyone who's ever tried to do anything knows this. Reluctant, hopeful runners depend on the right shorts, right weather, right music. Novelists with coffee and a familiar glance out the window. Times of day, shoes on indoors, familiar rewards.

Some of the systems were hard-won and practical, and others should have been optional—but, of course, weren't.

Practical: the World of Writing. The World of Writing used to go like this. I'd have to start a paper, due the next day. I couldn't possibly start it. So I'd set a timer, start for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then immediately fall into an hour or two of sleep. Waking up, I'd be living in a world where all that existed was finishing what I'd started.

I thought this tactic might work on my thesis. But, then again, I didn't have classes on Wednesdays this semester. Very aware that I needed to actually start writing, I tried to work all night one Tuesday. But after the requisite pre-sleep writing segment, I realized I could sleep all night! And just pretend that nine in the morning was midnight. Internal conspiracy: so that's exactly what I did.

The next Tuesdays, ritualized: slight writing, rewarded by immediate sleep (more than usual), and a morning without browsers and only full of writing. By afternoon, ten or twelve pages. So that's how I wrote my thesis, in a month and a half of Wednesdays.

Impractical: pumpkin sunflower seed chocolate chip muffins from down the street, stepping off curbs in sneakers.

Very practical: Papers. I don't know what I would have done without Papers, the PDF library for OS X. Since almost all of the newspaper articles I needed came to me as PDFs (courtesy my school's subscription to ProQuest Historical Newspapers), I decided early on in my research to consolidate digitally. Papers has this wonderful full-screen reading mode, with a translucent black Notes overlay, and so I could sit and transcribe articles for hours. There are other ways I could have accomplished the same thing. But this way was fun, and beautiful. I've never enjoyed reading history on screens, but Papers let me love it.

Once everything was transcribed, Papers acted as a database of everything I'd already found interesting enough to download. Whatever threads my imagination picked up—"I remember the red jackets of programme boys," or "let's follow all the journalists"—I could search through all of my transcriptions and the results would show me my notes alongside the original article. The program was intuitive from the very beginning, but over months of working with it, I think it became fully interoperable with my imagination. It was an amazing tool.

Impractical: using my dorm room bed as a desk. Not only did this go against the advice of every sleep expert ever—do not use your bed for anything* but sleeping!—it also should have been conducive to accidental sleep. I couldn't care, and became very attached to writing surrounded by pillows. However, at some point I might want to transition back into the World of Desks. Okay. But not yet.

Impractical/practical: Spaces. Since all of my information started digital, I couldn't do what I always do—print out, cut up, tape together pieces, hang the results, gaze at the expanse and type away. Even in my mind, though, I treat information as though it hangs in viscous space. In order to represent that on my laptop, I turned to Spaces.

Spaces, in OS X, let you maintain up to sixteen different "desktops," and zoom in and out from them, pinning documents to positions on a meta-grid. I liked this: every cell of the grid (every desktop) could have an emergent theme. I could move fragments of information from space to space according to intuition, and then look at what had naturally accumulated and grouped together. This was a good idea.

The fragments were the problem. In order to turn information into modular units that could be dragged across dimensions, I dumped text into a series of over 200 unsaved text files. (See: Untitled 200, an exercise in precariousness.) I could pull these tiny windows from one space to the next. But, I didn't want to face saving them. This was a bad idea. I couldn't ever turn off my laptop, because I had no good way of capturing the spatial organization I'd put so much time into. It was a wildly irresponsible way to deal with my own work, but, miraculously, it sort of turned out all right. I may or may not have learned my lesson.

Practical: A degree of trust. Last summer, I wrote about the importance of trusted systems that let you trust yourself. All of these systems, practical and impractical, were part of that. As long as I was writing, I tried to trust that I would keep writing. Once I'd spent a few Wednesday mornings that way, I fell into a sort of love.

Spaces

Long writing projects are very different from short writing projects. Because you can't help but live with them: the space between starting and finishing holds so many idle moments. For a time, the work is never over, and that knowledge is hard to live with too.

In the middle of the night, in the middle of a paper and the old world of writing, I would sometimes take showers. Under running water, there was no way I could write anything down, so worry would lift, and I could just think. When I'd step out, I'd always know what to write next.

For some reason, when I was trying not to start my thesis for all those long months, I imagined that once I'd started, I'd have no choice but to keep going. All-nighters, save showers, are like that. What I somehow didn't realize: in reality, writing for six weeks straight would be absurd. Extraordinary, desperate effort is unsustainable. Long projects have to fit into the way your life really is.

But once I finally started, I always had somewhere to start. So every moment not spent writing felt like standing under running water. And, one morning, it was over.

The Intimacy of Imposition

brittany, originally uploaded by Diana Kimball.

A year ago, I stopped taking pictures. For 2008: a photograph every day, a promise. I meant to take pictures of people I loved. And strangers, asking them, politely, to step outside. In three months, I photographed almost no one. I photographed laundry, inanimate things, myself, avoiding. I was going about things the wrong way.

I got stuck at asking politely. I couldn't bring myself to ask at all. My then-silver pocket camera, unwieldy, felt like a mistake: too common, and it didn't give me the license to impose. I suppose I imagined that a larger, sturdier camera might.

Friends and strangers reflexively resist having their picture taken. But since I stopped trying, I've realized that most people are willing to sit for portraits. The chance to be known, or shown something of yourself you didn't already know, beckons delicately. I smile warily for pocket cameras, plead silently with sturdy ones. What do you expect to see through you? The contraption in between becomes a contract. I will see you if you let yourself be seen.

Portraits and interviews: people seldom mind. Before it was spring, I spent time reading about Katy Grannan and her project of photographing true strangers, found through newspapers. "I was uncomfortable approaching people I didn't know," she told a reporter. "Out of that trepidation I started to place ads." Out of trepidation, they responded. Furtively, innocently they invited her into their homes. What motivated them, Grannan thought, might have to do with a "longing for new experience and for transformation." To be transformed into someone you do not recognize, by someone whose station or countenance commands respect. What an honor. What personal calamity.

I read about Grannan because I was reading about photographers, because this semester (the last) I'm taking photography. It was a conscious decision, since I've been disappointed for a long time about the way last year's effort ended. There were obstacles I wanted to run into, to feel their size. The first was a camera, and so I'm borrowing a Yashicamat, shooting on medium-format film. (And all the pictures are squares.) The camera introduces more obstacles: real, mechanical, freeing constraints. I can't take a photograph without looking down.

The other obstacle, though, was the problem of imposition. How do you ask someone to sit still while you adjust knobs, taking photographs that might blur, walking up close to them, light meter in hand? Then again: how does anyone ask someone else to take the time, arrange the equipment, to capture them looking beautiful, or some essential self? The imposition goes both ways. And, though lately it's photographs, I have a feeling it's this way for profiles, too. I, a journalist, want to know you and discover something unknown. You, famous or ordinary, won't admit that you want the same.

Imposing on someone else's time, space, or secrets is a terrifying task. Asking for trespass is terrifying, too; most people never do. The intimacy of imposition, filtered through the license of a camera or a promised story: still, what it's like to need one another.

In the photograph above, Brittany: who let me come to her room and photograph her in fading light.

What You Wonder

It was Brooklyn in January, and Luke and I were talking about fragmented journals and immersive environments, all the ways that memories can be information. Quickly, we decided, it would be great—some way to keep track of fleeting things. (Hours slept, indecisions.) Ideas drifted. A web app, maybe.

Later that night, I found a solution so simple it seemed not real. All I wanted was a set of questions and a place to collect answers, to picture them across time. And that: was something I could do.

The answer had to do with forms. The short answer: create a Google Form, find a way to get to it, remember to fill it in every now and then. The long answer includes pictures.


1. Create a new Google Form.

A quick trip to docs.google.com should get you to your main documents page, as long as you're already logged into Google somehow. From there, selecting the New button should give you the option to create a new form.











2. You are confronted with a blank form.

These forms are typically used for surveying groups of people, once. I've been using them to survey only myself on multiple occasions across time. Because of this, some aspects of the form-building process will be slightly weird.

a) "Untitled form": here, a name for your tracking form. I've used "Nightly Questions", but anything will do. (Whatever name you choose will also be the name of the resulting spreadsheet on your Google Docs homepage.)

b) "Info that will help people fill this out": since you are the only one filling out this form, you will probably not need help. However! If you foresee your future self needing encouragement, this may be a good place to write about what you're tracking and why.

c) "Name": This is the only required question for all Google Forms. It is a set field simply because in the tracking-multiple-people's-responses scenario, it is so obviously important and useful a question. Since the presence of this field on the form only indicates that it will be present on your finished form, there's nothing you need to do with it right now. You might think about mentioning the day of the week, or the music you're listening to. Or using it for something different and notable, every time.

3. A time to consider what you wonder.

Approaching your empty form, you'll notice that it's very empty. So, what do you wonder? When I started, I was wondering about the places I was going, friends I was seeing, things I was feeling, sleep I was getting, the way love worked. And a few other things. I decided to make almost all of my questions simple text; I didn't want to constrain the answers too much, because I quickly realized that the urge to mention reasons was strong, persistent. Thinking about sleep, I would always write more than a number. I would put a nap in parentheses, or a few words on why I could never get to sleep in the first place. It always went like that.

(Incidentally, I just discovered that my friends built a sleep tracker, in twenty-four hours without sleep.)


4. After the first question, the next one comes more quickly.

Let's say the first question—Friends seen today?—is already there, looking plausible and welcoming. Adding a second one presents another decision, but you've already started making them. (How you're going to use this, what you want to learn from it.) Rating things on a scale seems like it might be nice. (How was today's breakfast?) I always end up going with an absurdly tiny text-entry box, foregoing even the "Paragraph text" option. But someday, I might change my ways.

I started with "Friends seen today?" because, as it turned out, that question made me the happiest. I learned that I end up seeing a number of people I care about a great deal, almost every day. (Or talking with or writing to ones that are far away.) Taking a moment at the end of the day to remember all those other moments brought me reliable joy.

5. Having decided on questions, you do what comes next.

Once you've written prompts for everything you wonder (sometimes leaving the question mark off feels less urgent, more contemplative), the form is done, for now. I started with five questions, and then found there were more things I wanted to know about every day, and then the form started to get unwieldy. A small number seems like a good place to start.

To answer the questions, you'll need a way back to the form—someplace where it will be clean every time. Normally, if you were sending the form to other people, you'd just click "share"; that would be the end of it. But it's just going to be you, answering the same questions over and over.

There's a slim black bar at the bottom of the Create Form page, offering you the chance to "view the published form here." Clicking that link will take you to the way the form finally looks.

6. The way the form finally looks.

Every time you refresh the link you just followed, you'll get a clean form. I put a bookmark to the link in my browser bar, and labeled it "q."


For a time, I really did follow it nightly.








7. Where everything goes.

Into a spreadsheet, automatically; tidily stored among all your other documents. Looking at life in a grid is disorienting, but might show you new things. It showed me some.

* * *

Everything here has been in the past tense. I filled out forms for a while, and then abruptly stopped. The thing that stopped me was, also, almost too simple. I'd put a question into the form that was too specific, and I started avoided it altogether.

I still believe in memories as information, though, and in the strength self-knowledge can bring. Even if only revealed in the act of avoidance, or realized tucking fleeting things away.

Exposition

"It is manifest that the varieties of being concerned or dedicated, and of loving, are important to us quite apart from any antecedent capacities for affecting us which what we care about may have. This is not particularly because caring about something makes us susceptible to certain additional gratifications and disappointments. It is primarily because it serves to connect us actively to our lives in ways which are creative of ourselves and which expose us to distinctive possibilities for necessity and for freedom."
-Harry Frankfurt, "The Importance of What We Care About"


dr. bombay's underwater tea party, originally uploaded by Diana Kimball.

Monday and Dr. Bombay's Underwater Tea Party, Candler Park. A chalkboard announcing red velvet and chocolate peanut butter cupcakes. A sunworn banner across the ceiling, delicately.

Three customers in the shop, and one of them maybe my age. He opens the door for two small girls carrying pink, blue ice cream cones. We look up, and quickly look away.

I've remembered the room through fond distance. Everything was hot and closed; so that's how the summer ends in Atlanta. I was there to think about the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition, before school started again. One hundred pages about something that happened one hundred and fourteen years ago: a senior thesis, looming or beckoning, and promising; on the horizon for March.

Writing this is incredibly hard. But I know it's only difficult because I care so much. If I didn't care, it wouldn't be.

I'll try to remember that, reaching back through the haze to September and heat.

Nightmares Exorcised in Dreamland

In 1905, a novel attraction opened at Coney Island’s Dreamland. “In ‘Hell Gate,’” the New York Tribune confided, “the visitors will be carried in an ingenious boat ride to ‘subterranean depths.’” Thrust out on an iron pier, Dreamland jutted into the Atlantic. But no matter that water coursed below; the specter of drowning was forced above. The start of “Hell Gate” was “made in open boats, which circle round the inclosure, and when the centre of ‘Hell Gate’ is reached the boats disappear, presumably swallowed up by the vortex of onrushing water.” The vortex swallowed again and again, drawing tourists and curious New Yorkers to witness its insatiable gape. The falsified sea, compacted, wreaked havoc in safety. The underworld haunted Dreamland.

When Luna Park opened for the season in May 1910, a new spectacle mesmerized. “‘Havana,’” the New York Times reported, “is another illusion based on the tragic fate of the old battleship Maine.” The illusion opened “with the Maine at anchor, the bluejackets skipping about her decks, and everybody having a good time.” But good times were fleeting: before long, “night comes, and suddenly there is an explosion. The Maine goes down, and the sailors are seen trying to escape.” In the attraction, the “murky waters” of Havana Harbor were reproduced lovingly. Every performance ended tragically: the ship sank into the mud.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the coastline of Coney Island harbored a number of amusement parks. Luna Park, Steeplechase Park, and Dreamland all contained mechanical wonders, thrilling rides, and human monstrosities. Though the parks arrayed themselves along a corridor descriptively named “Surf Ave.,” each destination was determined to cordon itself off from insidious advance of the ocean. Thus protected from pounding waves, profiteers crowded the parks with bottled shipwrecks.

Illusory tragedies evoked delight. In a 1928 article about Coney Island's “special brand of romance,” the New York Times mused that “The strange fact about people is that they want to think they are going to get hurt, and yet know they are not.” Amusement parks at Coney Island presented safety cloaked in danger—a sure antidote to New York City's brand of danger cloaked in safety. At least, this was the remedial relationship drawn by Rem Koolhaas in Delirious New York, his 1978 exposition on the metropolis and its cures. Dreamland, in his estimation, distinguished itself by producing a “series of simulated disasters...a psychological addiction for the metropolitan public.” The public, in his eyes, sought refuge in the catharsis of peril: “Each nightmare exorcised in Dreamland,” according to Koolhaas, was “a disaster averted in Manhattan.”

Coney Island has long been defined in opposition to the commotion of the city. Accessible by subway and yet still otherworldly, its seashore basks in the salt breeze—out of the shadow of skyscrapers. Koolhaas wrote that Coney was “the logical choice for Manhattan's resort: the nearest zone of virgin nature that can counteract the enervations of urban civilization.” Its suitability, of course, proved to be its undoing: in 1883, “the Brooklyn Bridge removes the last obstacle that has kept the new masses on Manhattan: on summer Sundays Coney Island's beach becomes the most densely occupied place in the world.” Facing debasement, Coney Island’s architects chose transcendence. “To survive as a resort—a place offering contrast—Coney Island is forced to mutate; it must turn itself into the total opposite of Nature, it has no choice but to counteract the artificiality of the new metropolis with its own Super-Natural.” The Coney Island experience was re-imagined as one of periodic immunization through sensory overload. The city paled in comparison.

And yet, though Coney has always been Manhattan’s salvation, every effort to comprehend it is confounded by setting city against island. Any such juxtaposition obscures the larger struggle. For although Coney Island did mightily resist the advances of urbanization on one side, it had no choice but to tirelessly resist the encroachment of the ocean on the other. Miles of seacoast threatened to slip away at any moment; Coney was a pleasure zone whose edges were fragile and treacherous. The ocean defined it. Often, the ocean defied it.

If Manhattan offered danger cloaked in safety, and Coney’s amusement parks presented safety cloaked in simulated danger, the Atlantic confronted the island with danger for danger’s sake. No risks taken, no monstrosities built: the ocean soothed because it was heartless and fair. It menaced not by design, but by nature. Manhattan, according to Koolhaas, was “an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen”; an infinite drama produced by an “invention in urban theatricality: the anticlimax as denouement, the non-event as triumph.” Coney Island’s coast was the opposite. Alongshore pulsed the potential for disasters that did happen, constantly. Bathers drowned, tornados devastated, tents flooded; Coney Island’s coastline was a margin of true calamity. In the rhythmic undulation between terror and relief throbbed Coney Island’s secret allure: the arrest of unbidden reality, thrilling as it menaced and breached; breaking in towering waves against the shore.

On May 27, 1911, reality breached. At 2:15 a.m., flames started near Dreamland’s power house, and “their spread was so rapid, under the impetus of a brisk breeze that swept in from the ocean, that in fifteen or twenty minutes it became apparent the entire place was doomed.” As the sea breeze urged the fire inland, the surrounding water quietly watched. The New York Tribune insisted that “the waters of the ocean gave back a ruddy glare.” In waves, from the ocean inward, the flames overtook. By the time dawn broke, Dreamland was in ruins. Later, observers would claim that the first sparks started at an exhibit called “The End of the World.” Fanned by the sea, incited by artifice; the Dreamland fire was the end of an era. In the years that followed, artifacts of artifice would slowly return to the land.

In the end, what nightmares were exorcised at Dreamland? The nightmare of catastrophe was certainly allayed by the rhythmic rendering within Dreamland of fictionalized real-world disasters. If such disasters could be fake, they might never be real again. And yet, ironically, that precipice harbored the nightmare that Dreamland ultimately exorcised for good. For if the fleeting triumph of Dreamland was an affront to the ocean, its reclamation by fire was Coney Island’s revenge. The idea that an elemental force might overcome any built landscape or social milieu was petrifying. But the idea that humans might have conquered such a threat, through their assiduous construction of skyscrapers and the meticulous building of pleasure exhibits, was even more disappointing. Beachgoers fled to Coney Island not only to escape the city, but to move toward the sea: to commune with something larger and more elemental than themselves. Spectacular calamity along the coastline of Coney Island served as a comforting reminder that the world was still governed by majestic caprice. At the end of the world, anything might happen.

* * *
Excerpted from a longer paper I recently wrote, on spectacular calamity along Coney Island's coastline.

Previously:

Bring Your Own Buttons

Algorithms and Avatars

Instructions for Everyday Life

Kodachrome

Fallout Shelters

Practical Magic