For something like 25 years I have had a postcard (now tattered and brown-edged) taped near wherever I write:

One reason I became a writer is that I love the sensation of finding connections. It can stun me, make me laugh, or help me feel that I understand the universe just a little bit better.

I’ve spent the last few months researching my next book. I’m nowhere near done (and will continue!). I could conceivably, and profitably, devote whole additional years to further research.

But I’ve also reached a point in my labors that I now recognize from previous large writing projects. My brain feels like it’s overflowing. And everywhere I look, whatever I’m looking at seems to connect to what I’m writing about. Everything is hitched to everything else.

That means it’s time to start writing.

The exhilarating and painful work of trying to preserve that apprehension of interconnectedness on the page always involved some amount of disappointment, at least for me; where the apprehension is oceanic, the written end-product is finite.

But a completed book has one advantage over a vague sensation: it can be shared. So here goes!

On Fresh Air yesterday, conductor Lorin Maazel described his Zen-like approach at the podium, aimed at achieving “no tension … other than the intensity of one’s musical imperative”:

The first thing to do is learn how to breathe — very deep breaths, slow. Then you stand in one position if you’re going to conduct, or sing, or whatever, for about a minute, and you deliberately relax every muscle in your body. You become aware of the fact that quite a few muscles are tense, so you relax them, all the way down to the calves of your legs. Then you take one more very slow breath.

And then you say to yourself, what I do here is of no importance whatsoever. I am here as a servant. And if I’m nervous, it means that I think what I’m doing is important. That is an egocentricity which no interpreter can allow himself the luxury of. You’re there to serve the music, and you have to be in the best postiion, psychological and physiological, to do so. Which means no tension, no nerves. Yes, exhilaration. Yes, enthusiasm. Yes, focused energy. But no nervousness. Because that’s counterproductive.

Overheard at the end of Michele Norris’s interview with Jeffrey Eugenides on last night’s All Things Considered:

MN: Happy Valentine’s Day to you.

JE: Thanks for having me.

MN: I was going to ask you if you’re doing anything special for Valentine’s Day, but your someone special might be listening.

JE: I’ll tell you, one of the first things my wife and I decided when we got together was that we would never celebrate Valentine’s Day.

MN: What?

JE: One of the first things that made me fall in love with her was our mutual antipathy to Valentine’s Day.

MN: Wait a minute — an author who puts together a collection of love stories has total antipathy for Valentine’s Day?

JE: Oh yeah. Don’t you think it’s the cheapening and commodification of something rare that we’d all like to celebrate in private and on our own time?

MN: I personally like flowers and chocolate.

JE: Well, your special person, I hope, is listening.

I have always come down on Eugenides’ side of this argument. Fortunately, my “special person” does too.

We’re leaving tomorrow on a brief mid-winter getaway, so I may be absent from these precincts for a handful of days. Before I go, two passages worth savoring from Andrew Leonard’s recent interview with William Gibson in Rolling Stone:

How does it break down for you? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

I find myself less pessimistic than I sometimes imagine I should be. When I started to write science fiction, the intelligent and informed position on humanity’s future was that it wasn’t going to have one at all. We’ve forgotten that a whole lot of smart people used to wake up every day thinking that that day could well be the day the world ended. So when I started writing what people saw as this grisly dystopian, punky science fiction, I actually felt that I was being wildly optimistic: “Hey, look — you do have a future. It’s kind of harsh, but here it is.” I wasn’t going the post-apocalyptic route, which, as a regular civilian walking around the world, was pretty much what I expected to happen myself.

Also:

The very first time I picked up a Sony Walkman, I knew it was a killer thing, that the world was changing right then and there. A year later, no one could imagine what it was like when you couldn’t move around surrounded by a cloud of stereophonic music of your own choosing. That was huge! That was as big as the Internet!

Every year around this time John Brockman poses some Big Question to his Edge discussion group, a salon of scientists and intellectuals. The results are typically all over the map but you can almost always find something of value and/or use. This year’s question was “What have you changed your mind about?” Here are some nuggets I excavated from the sprawling pile:

BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin writes about how online communities need tending, describing BoingBoing’s experience with managing its comment space (the site hired Making Light’s Teresa Nielsen Hayden to moderate). Her conclusion is that online discussions are best moderated by human hosts rather than voting systems or algorithms:

Plucking one early weed from a bed of germinating seeds changes everything. Small actions by focused participants change the tone of the whole. It is possible to maintain big healthy gardens online. The solution isn’t cheap, or easy, or hands-free. Few things of value are.

This isn’t exactly news; the gardening metaphor as applied to online conversation has a long history stretching back to the early days of the Well (and probably Usenet as well) and extending more recently into communities like Flickr and Wikipedia. But each new generation of online services needs to learn this lesson through experience; BoingBoing has managed it well.

Linda Stone writes insightfully, as always, about attention — and how we habitually hold our breath as we answer email (I tried observing myself and, yes, it’s true!):

I believe that attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit and that we can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals.

But lately I have observed that the way in which many of us interact with our personal technologies makes it impossible to use this extraordinary tool of attention to our advantage.

In observing others — in their offices, their homes, at cafes — the vast majority of people hold their breath especially when they first begin responding to email. On cell phones, especially when talking and walking, people tend to hyper-ventilate or over-breathe.

The rest is here.

Nick Carr — echoing ideas in his new book, The Big Switch, which I’m reading now — jumps off from a line by Chinese leader Hu Jintao to argue that the Net is becoming more centralized:

It’s not Hu Jintao who is deluded in believing that the net might serve as a powerful tool for central control. It is those who assume otherwise. I used to count myself among them. But I’ve changed my mind.

Kai Krause, who created software tools for designers that were hugely popular a decade or so ago, writes about the frustrating ephemerality of creativity in the software field.

Noting that “hardly any of my software even still runs at all,” he writes:

I used to think “Software Design” is an art form.

I now believe that I was half-right:
it is indeed an art, but it has a rather short half-life:
Software is merely a performance art!

A momentary flash of brilliance, doomed to be overtaken by the next wave, or maybe even by its own sequel. Eaten alive by its successors. And time…

Finally, Alison Gopnik, the psychologist and coauthor of The Scientist in the Crib, writes about the purpose of imaginative play:

Learning about the real world has obvious evolutionary advantages and kids do it better than anyone else. But why spend so much time thinking about wildly, flagrantly unreal worlds? The mystery about pretend play is connected to a mystery about adult humans - especially vivid for an English professor’s daughter like me. Why do we love obviously false plays and novels and movies?

…In fact, I think now that the two abilities — finding the truth about the world and creating new worlds — are two sides of the same coins. Theories, in science or childhood, don’t just tell us what’s true — they tell us what’s possible, and they tell us how to get to those possibilities from where we are now. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. So do we whether we are doing science or writing novels. I don’t think anymore that Science and Fiction are just both Good Things that complement each other. I think they are, quite literally, the same thing.

A fine insight — one that generations of readers of science fiction and fantasy know in their bones already.

The 10ZenMonkeys blog has the transcript of an extraordinary speech by Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland delivered at a recent conference for the Craigslist Foundation. (Found via BoingBoing.)

This passage about admitting your mistakes is worth taking to heart, particularly for those newsroom veterans who scratch their heads over posts like my last one:

Number Three, Don’t Lie. This is for real. There is something about the relationship between the not-for-profit sector, the government, the foundations, and the donors that creates a massive incentive to lie — flagrantly, and often.

And it’s not just a one-sided thing. The relationship between not-for-profits and foundations is like the relationship between teenagers and parents. You don’t really want to tell them everything that’s going on, and they don’t really want to know. So there’s this dance of deceit, shall we say.

“What’d you do this weekend?”
“Oh… Studied! With my friends.”

And the parents say “Good! So glad to hear that!” Because they don’t want to know. And so what do you say?

“How did the year go?”
“We had success after success! All goals were met, and a good time was had by all.”

And what was there left to say? “Good! Good!” They don’t want to know about the youth in your program that cussed you out and set the building on fire. They don’t want to know that you hired somebody once again who was a complete idiot. They don’t want to know, and you don’t want to tell them, and therefore we all stay very ignorant. Then the actual innovation curve has flattened out, because nobody’s telling the truth about what we’re going through any more. We’re all self-deceiving and trying to make it look good.

At the Ella Baker Center, we adopted a reporting form that freaked out our board and advisors. It was very simple: highlights, low lights, and lessons learned. We created a discipline in the organization that we would report out the bad stuff. First of all, everybody knows the bad stuff anyway, because the person you fired is talking right now, so it’s not like it’s not out there. But did you learn anything?

Program officers at foundations, donors, and philanthropists are just inundated with lying, false crap. And they know they’re being lied to. If you took all your annual reports and just read them end to end, you’d have to conclude that we’re now living in a socialist paradise. Everything’s going well, people are being served, and all the children are happy. And then you look at any newspaper, and it’s very clear that we might be fudging a bit.

So my experience has been that donors and program officers love to actually get the truth. They don’t punish you for it if you learned something. I think if all of us started to confess a little bit more, we would learn a little bit faster.

My exposure to the strange music and story of Jandek, the reclusive Texan singer-songwriter, has been limited to occasional enthusiastic mentions by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. But NPR did a story about Jandek last night that concluded with this observation by critic Douglas Wolk. It bears repetition:

“There’s not an obligation to be famous,” Wolk says. “We live in a culture that has impressed on us the idea that everybody not only can be famous, but should or must be famous, and if you’re not famous, you’ve failed, and if you’re making art and the world doesn’t cheer you, then it’s a failure, and that’s just a lie. And it’s a lie that Jandek realizes is a lie, and he’s gotten around it his own way.”

• Kevin Kelly appears to be blogging, and, unsurprisingly, in just a few posts he’s providing considerable food for thought. In this post, he describes his (successful) effort at creating a sort of desktop memento mori:

  I decided to take the idea of number days seriously, and to revisit my earlier experience of counting down my remaining time on this lovely mortal plane. My hope was that a reckoning of my numbered days would help me account for how I spend each precious 24 hours, and to focus my attention and energy on those few tasks and projects I deem most important to me. Indeed, it might help me decide which ones are most important, which is the harder assignment.

• David Edelstein, my favorite film critic (I’m biased, as we’re old friends and former colleagues), has begun a blog called The Projectionist for New York magazine’s Web site:

  Cyberspace being infinite, at Slate I had license to write between 250 and 2,500 words on a movie, and no digression was too digressive. Now, there’s the horror, the horror of eliminating whole paragraphs to fit the page — in addition to changing, for example, “did not” to “didn’t” to pick up a line and removing anything in parentheses. I do not always want to use contractions, and I like parentheses. You never know where they might lead.

  And who knows where this might lead? Movies connect with us on an unconscious level, and blogging is a pipeline to the id.

• Finally, Bill Wyman, who I worked with for many years at Salon, has a fine new blog on the entertainment industry — with a heavy emphasis on music — at Hitsville.

Before Gnomedex recedes too far, I wanted to post about what was by far the standout experience of the conference for me and, I imagine, many others present.

Derek K. Miller is a longtime Canadian blogger who lives in Vancouver. I encountered his writing at Penmachine several years ago the way bloggers often discover one another — he’d linked to a post of mine, I saw the referrer, I checked his site out and liked it. I’ve followed Miller’s blog sporadically over the years but hadn’t read it in a good while, and so I missed his news earlier this year: he’d been diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Since then he has written with honesty and openness about his ordeal. He’s using his blog at once to keep his community of friends and relatives up to date and to give a wider audience a little window onto the nature of this experience, which in our culture frequently gets hidden from view.

Apparently he’d been slated to give a talk at Gnomedex, but he’s still recovering from an operation, so making the trip to Seattle wasn’t in the cards. Instead, he spoke to the conference from his bed via a video link, and talked about what it’s been like to tell the story of his cancer experience in public and in real time. Despite the usual video-conferencing hiccups (a few stuttering images and such), it was an electrifying talk.

This wasn’t about peddling a new product or handicapping startups or any of the usual conference fodder. It was a moment for everyone present to think about mortality, strength in the face of adversity, and the ways that resourceful people find to forge strong human connections with our little technological tools.

(I haven’t been able to find a posted video of the event, but if I do, or if someone posts a link in comments, I’ll add it!)

Lee Gomes interviewed Stanford engineering professor Thomas Lee in the Wall Street Journal yesterday; the subject was the history of microchips — but Lee uses that material to offer some trenchant observations on the nature of creativity.

For instance, he says, the transistor was invented in the 1940s by a group led by William Shockley — but not in cliched “eureka!” fashion. Instead, it was “something they stumbled on while they were trying to diagnose their earlier failures to invent a transistor.”

Gomes asks Lee how we got from transistors to integrated circuits:

Because of a somewhat bored and nervous new hire at Texas Instruments, a young kid named Jack Kilby, who eventually won the Nobel Prize. He had been hired in the summer of 1958 and given a project that left him unenthusiastic. He was hired just before the entire company went on a two-week vacation. Rather than just goofing off for the two weeks, he decided to come up with an alternative to his assigned project, so he wouldn’t be seen as just a complainer. So during those two weeks, he invented the integrated-circuit concept.

Failures, accidents, things stumbled upon, stuff people do on the side: that’s how the world moves forward.

Lee’s moral? “You shouldn’t feel bad about being in a state of ignorance; if you are an enlightened person, you should be in a perpetual state of ignorance. And be very suspicious of linear histories, because it means either that the author had an ax to grind, or he hasn’t done his homework, and there are lots of side stories left to be uncovered.”

Read the whole interview.