Occupying a place on my overflowing bookshelf is Jonathan Franzen's collection of essays How to be Alone. The "underlying investigation in all these essays," Franzen writes to us, is "the problem of preserving individuality and complexity in a noisy and distracting mass culture: the question of how to be alone." It's a contemplative reader, not tackling loneliness but chasing the communication forms that bind us together or set us apart. For instance, should the novelist write to connect with an audience or to make art? The question gets lofty as Franzen tosses around the names of tomes I'd never dare to attempt reading. But you can take the question down a few levels — to your work, to your love, to your interactions, whether they arrive at you unthinking or hopeful.

So, that's all why I like young writer Tanya Davis' poem and now video, "How to be Alone." Same title, different text. She goes after loneliness, but her points lie in the same world as Franzen's. The full text is here.

Via Couch's Lost Change blog:

Among Amazon's massive $5 mp3 album sale this month, there's Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsys live set. My only purchase from the sale is Lily Allen's Alright, Still, but the Hendrix album gets this reader review.

57 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
[5 stars] Machine Gun – Tay Ninh Province Vietnam 1969, June 15, 2000
By old hombre (Colorado) – See all my reviews
This review is from: Band Of Gypsys (Audio CD)

Imagine hearing this album for the first time on the ear-plug "mono" headphones of a battery operated Panasonic mini reel-to-reel tape recorder. Now imagine that that annoying background noise spoiling the mood is from exploding Viet Cong 122mm rockets while you're hunkered down, cold, hungry, and wet from that incessant goddamn monsoon rain. But you're smiling at every riff 'cause you know Jimi knows what you're thinking. Maybe you're surrounded by living hell, but somehow…THIS MAKES YOU SANE! It's been 30 years since I first "experienced" Band of Gypsies. Nothing else will ever come close to having the same meaning to this old 'Nam vet.

Discovered while walking back from breakfast. An instant classic plate.

As was this one, which Melissa photographed in Georgetown and then Meghan saw in a separate photo from Georgetown on DCist. I'm kind of worried someone abandoned the car or, worse, is dead in the trunk.

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Who cares if Google makes us dumber. What if digital kills the lit crush?

Remember when you could tell a lot about a guy by what cassette tapes–Journey or the Smiths?–littered the floor of his used station wagon? No more, because now the music of our lives is stored on MP3 players and iPhones. Our important papers live on hard drives or in the computing cloud, and DVDs are becoming obsolete, as we stream movies on demand. One by one, the meaningful artifacts that we used to scatter about our apartments and cars, disclosing our habits to any visitor, are vanishing from sight.

Nowhere is this problem more apparent, and more serious, than in the imperilment of the Public Book–the book that people identify us by because they can glimpse it on our bookshelves, or on a coffee table, or in our hands. As the Kindle and Nook march on, people's reading choices will increasingly be hidden from view. We'll go into people's houses or squeeze next to them on the subway, and we'll no longer be able to know them, or judge them, or love them, or reject them, based on the books they carry.

The writer, Mark Oppenheimer, admits some people won't care. "This essay is for the rest of you," he writes on Slate, "the ones who freely admit to having been seduced by a serendipitous volume of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John glimpsed on a potential girlfriend's living-room shelf or by a spine-broken copy of Robert Lowell sitting atop that boy's nightstand. Maybe that was your first time in the apartment, you had been reluctant to go, and now you wanted to linger a while …"

That ellipsis is both his and all of ours — "the ones who freely admit to having been seduced by a serendipitous volume." One could write the same essay for music. I think the arguments explain my Amazon habit, the one where I keep asking the corporation to send me physical, UPS packages. Or at least the arguments explain half of this. The first half, we do for ourselves, depending on our characters. We put pieces of expression around us to identity, reinforce or challenge who we are.

But the second half, we do for you, the ones with whom we hope to begin an exchange. Here are our narrative wares, we say. Barter.

There are digital substitutes. One of my favorite research bits from the past years has been how we trade links and content socially, where a news story about a power outage means "I care" and video of Merton the improv piano player means "I love you, take off your clothes." (Or something like that.) Friendships and relationships thrive on content.

The problem is links are infinite. They're the proverbial hill of beans.

What you need, to stretch the proverb, is Paris just before war. Tables can only hold so many books. A person can only pick up one at a time. When Oppenheimer writes about what we "carry," the issue at heart is scarcity. The challenge of the modern romantic is not the new digital infinite but how to use that world to create scarce and unique lives.

During a break in the Los Angeles trip, I walked around USC's campus.

While I met Tommy Trojan, Dave met what I figure is Tommy's horse.

In true 12-year-old style, I took lots of pictures.

See? Not nearly as funny.

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I can't listen to music on my commute these days. If I wore earbuds on the Metro or walking from the train to work, I'd miss my stop or step in front of a bus, respectively. Meghan is better about stuff like this. She rides her bike to her job, and she listens to podcasts along the way. I root for the buses to avoid her! She finds good stuff on the podcasts.

Example: David Carr does a review on the Times Book Review podcast and brings up Gaslight Anthem lead Brian Fallon's June NPR interview.

The mp3 is here, and Carr starts talking at the 18:30 mark in true Carr style: "The prissy NPR person said, 'You write about this guy he's got tattoos on his knuckles, he's a hard luck guy. He never gets what he wants.' She says, 'Who is this guy?' And he answered, 'Who isn't this guy?' That's part of what I think people all secretly feel, that maybe they've got some little monster creeping around in 'em."

Love it. And even if Carr thinks our interviewer was prissy, thank you for listening. Anyway. Meghan sending me that moment got me curious about the rest of the Fallon interview. Turns out you can hear it here and read it here. Fallon talks with All Things Considered's Melissa Block.

BLOCK: I wanted to ask you about the song "Boxer" and the character here, the character who has tattooed knuckles, and he's taking it on the chin. Who is this guy?

Mr. FALLON: Oh, who isn't that guy? I think that it's just about a lot of people that I've seen who've kind of, you know, found some sort of thing that has kind of crippled them or knocked them down and that they've had to be picked up from and find you have to find something that kind of carries you through your days. And a lot of the time, people find that that's just hearing something on the music and remembering what you started when you were, you know, kind of finding your place in the world.

Then Block plays a clip of the song. This live version will do here.

Then the interview continues.

BLOCK: Do you think there's some redemption in this song?

Mr. FALLON: It has redemption in every song.

BLOCK: Really?

Mr. FALLON: Yeah.

BLOCK: What happens if there's not?

Mr. FALLON: I don't know. We'll see. You know, that's the endless search, I think, for musicians and for searchers in general, those people who are looking for something.

Says another 1:30 in the morning, not knowing where to put my arms or legs or mind to fall asleep. Do people really just crawl into bed and close their eyes? How do they lie there for more than a few hours? I get envious when I run out of energy, but more so I'm just confused.

In our shared affection for McGruff the Crime Dog, who recently wears pants* and receives no justice from WMATA, friend Melissa and I have been wanting to visit the National Museum of Crime and Punishment.

As I now work in its neighborhood, we visited and were not let down.

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It's easy to bemoan the slow pace of digitalization in the news world, especially among traditional staff operations (as opposed to separate digital shops). Among papers, the Washington Post takes its share of hits on this charge, including from me. But I want to pause briefly to highlight a quiet recent example of bottom-up change at the Post.

Sports departments, as anyone with significant time in digital news can tell you, have extraordinarily mixed reputations when it comes to tech change. At some times, a sports department can lead effortlessly, even occasionally unaware of how much ground they're breaking. At other times, they fight tooth and nail and are happy ignore what the rest of an org is doing. You can probably attribute the bipolarity to the needs of deep embedding, event regularity and a love of subject that beats almost every other section. Either change fits the publishing situation, or it doesn't. When it doesn't fit but is still necessary, that's trouble.

So, consider as much context for this Post example, a sports one. Tarik El-Bashir covers the Caps, and he writes the Capitals Insider blog. He also tweets and makes TV appearances. His audience likes him much.

Long story short, he's now leaving the beat. El-Bashir has a heartfelt note to readers in the blog, and their subsequent comments thanking him and wishing him luck are numerous and just as heartfelt. El-Bashir asks them to greet his replacement, Katie Carrera, and points to her Twitter account. Carrera then thanks him on said Twitter account.

There's nothing complicated about the previous paragraph or the acts mentioned. There's nothing heroic or sweeping. It's exactly that ease and comfort — with technology, with the audience — that makes the handover so notable. Amid goodbye and hello, we have progress.

Ralph pushed back his tangled hair and wiped the sweat out of his best eye. He spoke aloud.

"Think."

What was the sensible thing to do?

There was no Piggy to talk sense. There was no solemn assembly for debate nor dignity of the conch.

"Think."

Most, he was beginning to dread the curtain that might waver in his brain, blacking out the sense of danger, making a simpleton of him.

–William Golding in Lord of the Flies. For more dramatic reading of this post, or if you are a vegetarian, please play this song as you read on.

Thank you.

Laura, Amy and I went to the Bourbon Steak pig roast Sunday. In line for food, we met the man who had roasted the pig. He wore its ears.

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