The Twittering Author

I talk a lot of smack in person. I can launch serious about politics or social issues but my preferred verbal mode is to shit around and spar and goof and on just about anything that is not serious but more like verbal gymnastics. Highly enjoyable but not much insight especially in 140 character bursts. But I do post. I'm a writer and that's the way I express myself through sentences and paragraphs with a beginning middle and end. It's just the way I'm comfortable in twitter land.

Not so with other authors. They talk directly into the twitter feed. They are comfortable shooting out 140 character missives to other people and responding. I really don't think I have anything valuable to say in 140 character shots except to talk smack and who wants to hear that? But others do. Others can say what they want in a quick blip and then they are done. I guess it comes down to what kind of writer you are and how comfortable you are pulling back the curtain.

In Anne Trubeck's piece in the Sunday Times she cites authors as being in two groups, the ones that cannot let the veil down and the others who want the feedback twitter provides Also there are sales. Sales Sales Sales. Publishers don't know if twitter gets people to read books or not. The logic would go something like, well he seems like a witty tweety fellow, I wonder what his book is like. Ah, but you have to stop twittering to go get that book and for many of us twitters we are already on to the next tweet.

Social media does break down the isolation of the author and some don't care for it. The big guns tend not to twitter or if they do it is some sort of mass PR twitters. I don't know. You have to find your comfort level and do what you do. Me. I like letting people know my thoughts and maybe they get a kick out of it and maybe not. Then I go talk smack. Or write another novel.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic (surviving as a writer)

The Writer and Facebook

The novelist Curtis Sittenfeld says she finally joined Facebook because she felt she was under a rock. She is a successful author to the point she did not have to dance with Facebook until now. The rest of us had to dance early and keep dancing. It is not that as a novelist you dislike Facebook or that you don't want to go on there, it is just necessary to keep yourself out there and Facebook along with Twitter and other social media is part of the novelists job now.

I write essays. That is how I interact as my readers know. Some people complain I do not go on Facebook and get personal. The truth is I find that strange and I'm not comfortable with the form and I do believe I can provide a greater service by doing what I do best and that is writing on literature, politics, and culture. And here is the real reason I do it: I enjoy writing on these subjects. If Facebook is  only a chore then you will not stay with it.

The novelist is a little different. The ogre on the back demands you sell books. So one does feel a bit like a huckster, but that is why the writer must make his or her separate peace with all social media. You can only do what you are comfortable doing. No amount of hubris will make up for feeling  awkward or embarrassed by posting personal things about yourself.  This poses a dilemma for writers who are shy retreating creatures usually.

The novelist in particular should have the thick ankles to endure the rigors of social networking. There are times you feel a bit used up and you fantasize about those million selling authors who sit up on the mountain in their splendid isolation. But they are the few nowadays. Even Hemingway had to make sure he kept his name in the media with safaris, wars, and good old catastrophes. We really just have to get on a computer and think and post.  Not so bad when you think about it.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Our Tacky Age of Social Media

Social media is tacky. It is our personal billboard, the billboard of yesteryear with the lawyer telling us that bankruptcy is the way or the triple XXX truck stop with GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS. We would see these billboards from our car and wonder what type of people would respond to such garish enticements. Bankruptcy, triple XXX. Really? But now we know, we would respond to those billboards and we prove it every day on the Internet. It is the age of tacky.

Anothy Wiener is just another casualty of our twittering reality. We now advertise ourselves to others in ways we would have never dreamed of or condoned. Jump into facebook and behind the pictures of Aruba or the vacation in Switzerland is a self advertisement for the Fantasy Life. We now advertise ourselves to others and present our lives or our version of our lives to others and this brings the glow of braggadocio to our cheeks as we hide behind our screens.

We now sell ourselves. Anthony sold himself as the hip congressman to a twenty six year old and went down salacious avenue to see what he could drub up. Why not? Social media gives us the vehicle so we can all act like prostitutes and then turn off the computer and go about our everyday life. But social media has a dark side and the Andrew Brightbarts of the world are the perfect vampires. They look into the underbelly of our tweets and posts and our comments and they find the worst of us. Now our letters and furtive phone calls of yesterday are sitting in cyberspace, waiting to destroy our lives.

The only way social media works is by self promotion. We all have cellphones so the communication gig is only a small part. Social media is the high school girl or boy saying the dirty words and then taking it another step by saying the dirty act. We ride high in our reflected glory that comes back in comments and posts and tweets and pictures and videos. The humdrum life has been amped up along the lines of the cheap thrill of pornography and lasts about as long. Because the dirty secret is social media mostly plays to an audience of one and the fantasy we are playing to millions fades with the screen turning to black.

Ultimately we are left withe pathetic bits and bytes of middle aged men with their shirts off or women with their computer cams that are all the more tawdry when exposed as the hubris of politicians or celebrities. Social media is the final democratization of a culture with not enough celeb to go around and so we tackily post our own bios and our own pictures and then our obits. Mostly to no one, but ourselves 

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in July

The Dark Side of Facebook

When I first got out of college I got a job selling WATS lines for the phone company in Chicago and one of the perks was I could go up to the "Switch" at all hours of the night and walk past the tech guys and put on headphones and plug into a million conversations. I would even take dates (what a loser right) up to the switch and give them a pair of headphones and we would listen to the million voices talking into the analog void. It was amazing to think that each voice intertwined with the other represented a human,but it was also scary in a way because it trivialized each voice until it no longer represented a human, just a sound wave zooming through a huge trunk line.

Fast forward to Facebook with it's strange access into the million voices of our creation and after you get past the hype and the pictures then you end up with the obnoxious guy oin the train or the coffee house who won't stop his conversation about his kids, his family , his sex life and you are part of it. Facebook pledges to give us all a new way of interacting (so says Newsweek) and maybe it will or is it just that weird social network thing taken it's logical movie fueled zenith that will eventually end up like Myspace as a feeding ground for child molesters and porn stars--another footnote to the early days of the Internet.

But Facebook's dark side is it makes something out of nothing and by contrast knocks everyone else down to nothing. Take the couple who crashed the White House all under the guise of getting their pictures on Facebook with the President. Their ten nanoseconds of fame came and went and was cataloged into the cyberstream along with everyone out crying out for attention. Zuckerberg's prototype was rating girls on a primitive site that preceded Facebook. Then Facebook became the domain of colleges and one could make a case maybe it should have stayed there. Is Facebook really that different from the primitive girl rating site and arent we all rating each other by the life we paint in cyberland?

 We have already been privy to conversations we never wanted to know where people complained about their husbands or wives only to find out they were sharing it with the world. The Social Network is a great movie in the story of the creation of Facebook and we know that it resulted in a twenty six year old becoming a billionaire. Isnt that really what Facebook is all about? A billion dollars to hear the million voices at the switch?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Writing Code--Review of The Social Network

There are all sorts of writers. Mark Zuckerberg writing code in his dorm room for Facemash to get back at a girlfriend who dumped him as he hacks his way through Harvard's computers and makes mush of their security and nearly gets thrown out of school and then he settles down to really kick it into high gear with the creation of Facebook. There are others with similar ideas but Zuckerberg is the only one who can write the code or he is the only one who does and so he becomes Facebook and the rest try and get their piece but miss the main thrust of Zuckerberg's vision which is a world where people can broadcast themselves into cyberspace in the ultimate social club.


What moves underneath this very cool movie The Social Network is the antithesis of whats happening in our world where intellectuals are seen as enemies of the state and being smart is way down on the totem pole. Not so in Zuckerberg land and we follow him through Harvard as he creates his billion dollar empire but more we see that there is a world where the people who will rule the world are hard at work becoming smarter and smarter as they busily write their code. He that writes the code in the early years of the Internet was truly king.

Nothing new here. Real originality stands out among half baked ideas and as Mark Zuckerberg pursues his vision we see a brilliant mind at work that is intent on one thing and one thing only and that is to make the world his. There is this movement underneath the movie that sneaks up on you as you watch and sort of bites you somewhere in the middle and that is this: that there are people who don't give a damn about the random ness of our popular culture because they are moving in a power chord that does not run on our highway and they are busily becoming smarter and smarter while the rest of the world is trying to follow the crude shenanigans of the Sarah Palins.

The real movers and shakers made sure they made it into the best schools and moved with the best people and if there is one thing Zuckerberg and his friends want to be is the very best in a world of the very best. This type of intensity has fallen beneath our national consciousness and papered over with the faux populism of the everyman. Watching The Social Network you realize we have all been watching television while Zuckerberg was writing code to change the world as we know it. You just wish someone had told you.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January