Positioning
Via Lindsay last week, a good listen is writer Ryan Knighton's 2009 talk at Cusp, the Chicago conference I most wish I could afford to attend.
Blind since 28, Knighton discusses how he uses his walking stick, and his main point is about lo-fi success. There are segments about optics, writing, trust, and technology. There's mention of JAWS, for instance, which is screen-reading software. If you've never read about it, you should. At work, one of the things I'm proudest of with the community publishing tool we built last year is its working end-to-end with JAWS.
But the key theme for me in Knighton's talk is positioning.
Where and how do you place yourself in the world? Once in a place, how does it change you? For a storyteller, how does your positioning affect your craft? Consider Knighton's good account of the "Stephen Hawking" voice JAWS uses and how it developed his writing style.
Or take Knighton's 2006 Modern Love column. "I would give anything to tell you what my wife looks like, but I can't," he writes. "I haven't seen her face in five years, and even my memory of her is rapidly fading. Her expressions, body language, the shapely gait of her walk, all of those things are dissolving in my mind as I move further away from the visual world, and the memory of what it means to see."
He then explains how he assembles his world with his wife — and the complications of assembly. "The notes are singular, a subtle mingling of her own scent with that of her perfume. Then, the full effect reaches me — and this is the important part — the moment she passes. Those are the erotics of smell and space. Different notes twirl in the air after her. They make me want to turn my head. I want to look."
Or read his great 2007 conversation with Jim Knipfel. In brief: "Two blind memoirists walk into a Brooklyn bar and happen to find one another. One of them turned on a tape recorder for The Believer."
RK: Somebody told me there's a washroom here in New York that's just a wall.
JK: With the water running down?
RK: With the water running down. That's the one.
JK: Yeah, it's at some fancy ass hotel.
RK: That would drive me insane. I'd deliberately piss on the other wall.
In other words, if you live in a world, you have to deal. But there's no reason your dealing can't try at more. That's design but also life.
November 22nd, 2010 at 8:45 AM
[...] speakers at this year's Cusp Conference. The conference in Chicago, as I've noted before in this blog, is the most awesome conference I can't afford to [...]