Did I pen this blog post?

Posted on April 18, 2013 by StephanieGolden

Of course not. I typed it on my computer keyboard. But have you noticed how commonly pen is used to mean write? In this age of the keypad and touch screen, pen is such an anachronism that it jars me every time I see it.Original pen: a quill

The Wall Street Journal noted last December that Cyndi Lauper had “penned an essay for Rolling Stone” describing how going off the fiscal cliff would harm LBGT youth. The New York Observer reported that former Lehman Brothers vice chairman Thomas Russo “has penned a book about this country’s pressing financial calamities.” A blurb for The Now Revolution, a book telling businesses how to use social media successfully, exclaims that the authors “have penned a book that truly isn’t a social media book.”  And the writer of a website touting the benefits of posting articles to content mills in order to create inbound links to one’s own site actually titled his site “Penned Articles.”

I’m guessing that none of these people wrote by hand.

This breezy usage of penned irritates me, maybe partly because I’ve been “penning” less and less myself. Initially, the physical connection between brain and pen in hand was integral to writing. Then I began typing first drafts directly on a typewriter and editing them by hand. I’ve now reached the point where the last few books I wrote stayed entirely inside the computer—no printouts. The brain-hand connection still exists, but through the fingers on the keyboard.

It’s interesting how language changes, creating this disconnect between a word’s current usage and its original meaning. Pen dates from the 14th century and comes from the Latin word for feather, the original writing instrument being a quill. The notion of a pen as an object held in the hand that uses some kind of fluid stuck, even as writing implements became metal pen points, then fountain pens, then ballpoints. It stuck so tight that we continued to “pen” books with typewriters, and now with computers.Metal-nib drawing pen

I once had an Israeli client who relished his excellent command of English and loved pointing out to me how Americans’ usage of certain words was incorrect, because, he insisted, their etymological meaning was quite different. Mindful of my English-major course in the history of language, I pointed out in return that languages evolve over time, so the meaning of words naturally changes. Thus presently used to mean at once, but now means in a while. Fast originally meant immovable; now it most often means rapid.

My client was quite unmoved by this argument, perhaps because modern Hebrew is a new language. Hebrew had been used only in a religious context for centuries, so when the settlers in Palestine revived it as a living language in the early 20th century, they had to invent many words for contemporary ideas, objects, and actions, often derived from word roots. So Hebrew hasn’t had time to evolve the way English has; the new words are still close to their etymological origins.

Normally I enjoy seeing how a word changes. But I want penned to go away.

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Floored by a foot

Posted on January 12, 2013 by StephanieGolden

A six-by-three-foot foot. It sat like a huge bench right by the elevators at the Asia Society, part of an exhibit titled “Pilgrimage and Buddhist Art.”

This gigantic stone carving of the Buddha’s right foot, inscribed with 108 auspicious symbols, packed a wallop, more than anything I saw in the exhibit rooms. It felt personal and close, as though the Buddha had just been there, striding through the lobby on his way to the galleries. You could sense the sculptor’s pure longing to feel his presence. I had never seen a Buddha footprint before, and went home to figure out why it moved me so.

Buddha footprint

By Unknown. [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

I did some research and discovered that Buddha footprints (buddhapada, in Sanskrit) are quite common. Both artist-created footprints and “real” prints—foot-shaped impressions on rock, believed to have been made by the Buddha himself—were and still are objects of devotion throughout Buddhist Asia. (The image at the left is of second-century Buddha footprints from northern India at Yale University Art Gallery; the one I saw at the exhibit is here.)

In fact footprints (handprints too) have been created and venerated across cultures and history all over the world—from the Chauvet caves in France 30,000 years ago to a temple in Syria dating from 10,000 BCE to the prints of movie stars outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. One famous “natural” footprint, at the top of Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka, is claimed by Buddhists; by Hindus (as the footprint of Shiva); by Muslims (as the print of Adam); and by Christians (as the print of St. Thomas the Apostle).

There are also footprint paintings. Many Tibetan thangkas (paintings on cloth) include the actual handprints and/or footprints of the lamas they depict. But it was the three-dimensional carvings, conveying as they do a sense of the Buddha’s corporeality, that touched me most.

So I started thinking about feet. I read about their symbolic, metaphysical, and psychological associations, the ambiguous nature of the footprint as indicator of both presence and absence, mortality and divinity.

Scrolling through the “Buddha’s Footprint Inspiration Gallery” on a tattoo website, I found:

[The footprint] reminds us that the spiritual life has its feet on the ground, and that while we aspire to “transcendence,” we should never lose awareness of the material plane of existence. At the same time, a disembodied foot speaks of Buddha’s absence, the absence of the human personality, and by extension, his non-attachment to this life.

I love symbols, so I found all this fascinating. More:

  • A central Buddhist teaching is the noble eightfold path, the “way” to enlightenment. What else but a footprint to represent it?
  • A footprint’s ambiguity makes it a type of liminal, or transitional, space. You can imagine yourself filling the Buddha’s shoes (as it were), being imbued with his spirit. Suddenly this thing we’ve been assured we have—our intrinsic Buddha-nature—connects with its universal manifestation.

But none of this really answered my question.

Finally I found a report by Faxian, a fifth-century Chinese pilgrim traveling through India. He came across a buddhapada that changed size depending on who observed it. It was either long or short, noted Faxian, “according to the thoughtfulness of a man’s heart.”

“It exists,” Faxian added, “and the same thing is true about it, at the present day. Here also are still to be seen the rock on which he dried his clothes, and the place where he converted the wicked dragon.”

So perhaps the footprint I saw—which I’m happy to note was pretty long—helped open my heart. It tamed whatever dragon might be making me feel more wicked than I needed to be.

Note: for someone else’s very personal reaction to Buddha footprints, see this blog post.

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Where’s the OUTRAGE?

Posted on May 7, 2012 by StephanieGolden

A city dweller—a true child of concrete—once spent the weekend with a friend in the suburbs. The friend’s cat snared a bird and as cats will do, deposited the corpse as a gift on the doorstep. The city visitor was indignant. “Aren’t you mad at Rudy for killing the pretty bird?” she demanded.

“Why should I be angry at a creature for acting according to its nature?” the friend responded.

Even at the time, I perceived a real wisdom in this answer (that city creature wasn’t me, by the way). But only recently do I see why.

Sorry, I was going to post photos of a couple of these billboards—they sure have great entertainment value—but decided I didn’t want to give those vodka makers any more publicity for than they already have. I hope that’s an example of wise discrimination. Photo by Gary Deibler.

Not long ago a friend showed me a photo of a now infamous Wodka Vodka billboard near the Brooklyn Bridge. On a red background, next to an image of a vodka bottle together with a lamb wearing something resembling a sombrero (don’t ask me!), a headline read “ESCORT QUALITY—HOOKER PRICING.” It was one of a series of so-called shock ads; others included “CHRISTMAS QUALITY—HANUKKAH PRICING” (two dogs, one wearing a yarmulke) and “BLACK RUSSIAN,” showing a muscular black man in a wifebeater and a fur hat in front of an image of the Kremlin. The Jewish/ Christian one had been taken down following a storm of outrage.

My friend had shot the photo with his cell phone while driving on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. He showed it to me in anticipation of feminist outrage. But I didn’t produce any, and I think he was rather disappointed. I thought the billboard was pretty disgusting, but I couldn’t work up any ire over it.

Fact is, I don’t get angry as much as I used to. That’s where the cat story comes in. Creatures (including people) are the way they are, they act according to their nature. And they may or may not be at a place where their nature can become kinder, gentler, wiser, whatever. If what they do is harmful, you try to prevent them from doing it, but more and more, indignation and outrage seem to me like a waste of time and energy—even a form of self-indulgence.

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I’m moderating! Book collaboration basics at 2012 ASJA conference

Posted on January 8, 2012 by StephanieGolden

As a professional freelancer, book collaboration is probably my greatest expertise. So I’m totally tickled to be moderating a panel where I can spill all my secrets at the American Society of Journalists and Authors annual writers conference next April in New York City.

I’ve been on my share of panels, but this is my first chance to moderate and shape the content of a session. I lined up two panelists who have even more experience than me: agent Madeleine Morel and author Nancy Peske. The three of us will walk everyone through the subtleties of contracts and payments, division of labor and ground rules for a good working relationship. We’ll also cover ways to handle conflicts and the myriad of other issues that pop up when two people produce a manuscript together. Participants will learn how to avoid pitfalls, have a great working relationship, and produce a terrific book.

We’ll cover the actual process of collaboration/ghosting. The next day, veteran ghostwriter Ellen Neubourne will moderate a separate workshop on retooling your resume to break in to ghosting.

I was an editor at a book publisher before I started writing for a living, and that taught me a lot about how to work in a professional yet also rather intimate way with someone else. Aside from the personal/professional interaction and plain old writing skills, you need to know how to draft a collaboration/ghosting contract that will be fair to both parties and protect the writer at the same time. And since books are now so (relatively) easy to publish independently, whether on paper or as ebooks, that contract can be complicated. We’ll talk about that too. In the meantime, you might want to check out the articles on book collaboration on my website.

Find all the details about the 3-day conference here. Panels cover everything from books to blogs to tweets, from marketing to the newest technology.

Twitter: #ASJA2012

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Occupy Wall Street: a spiritual movement?

Posted on November 13, 2011 by StephanieGolden

The other day I visited Occupy Wall Street in Zucotti “Park,” essentially a paved strip one block long between tall buildings. What struck me first was how dense it is. Little

Tents at OWS, photo by Atomische • Tom Giebel

bubble tents are close-packed, with narrow aisles here and there so you can thread your way through. Almost all the square footage is taken up by these tents and by various organizational/ administrative booths: the “Think Tank” where seminars and lectures are held, the Library (writers, note: lots of real books), Information, Community Affairs, and Legal. A large hand-lettered sign listed a full schedule of activities for the day: seminars, speakers, actions.

Click for larger image

Sanitation department, photo by David Shankbone

Not everyone was young. Middle aged and elderly people staffed booths, held signs, played guitars and banjos, wandered around in costume talking to visitors.

The low wall surrounding the park marks a marginal area where occupiers engage the outside world. Sign holders, musicians, people offering flyers present themselves to a lineup of onlookers wielding video and still cameras—many press people and lots of tourists. The site is only a couple of blocks from the WTC memorial, so the tourists make this another stop.

At the west end, on Church Street, I encountered a group of about 10 nattily outfitted senior citizens from Westchester, who had driven down to Fort Lee in New Jersey, then cycled into Manhattan. “We do this every year,” one man told me, so this year they picked OWS as their destination. He reminisced about the 60s, when construction workers beat up anyone with long hair. His group smiled quite kindly on the occupiers.

The level of organization and community structure in the park is remarkable. Signs hang from the wall:

  • To reach an OWS Community Affairs Representative, call __________.
  • Good neighbor policy: Zero tolerance for drugs or abuse of personal or public property (and about a half-dozen more items I didn’t write down).
click for larger size

The altar, photo by David Shankbone

I browsed my way through the tents, behind a young man with dustpan and broom who was sweeping the foot-wide aisle between two rows. The occupiers represent a great variety of groups, ranging from far-lefties to the people who set up the altar that sits at the west end near the wall, on which at least one man sat apparently meditating. The photo shows one side of the altar.

I noticed several statues of the Buddha, images of Hindu gods and Kwan Yin, incense, plants, beads, pebbles, little medallions, an orange pepper, a photo of Gandhi (“he would have been here,” said its sign), feathers, pumpkins, the Virgin of Guadeloupe, Tibetan scarves. Nearby a trumpet accompanied a group of drummers. I dug out of my handbag a foreign coin that my colleague Mary, who sold me the purse, had slipped into a compartment for feng shui (never leave a purse or wallet empty, she advised me) and left it in the lap of a Buddha as a token from both of us.

Everything goes on against a background of continuous music: drumming but also guitars, in groups and solo. It heightens the heady, high-spirited atmosphere. Inside the park it feels like school is suspended for the day; there’s a rent in the fabric of everyday life allowing something extraordinary to flow in, something joyous and completely unprecedented. My question, like that of so many others, is: will this produce anything meaningful?

Wandering back along the other side of the park, I encountered a man holding a sign that read “I am not a protester—I am a change agent” being interviewed on video for a website. I asked what his sign meant. “This movement is different,” he said, “because what we need is a shift in consciousness. We can’t change the system using the same methods as past movements of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. We need to align our energy and attention with what we want to happen, not waste it on anger.” His name is Steven Morrison, and he teaches sessions in the park in what he calls the Spiritual Workout. “Everything is energy,” he says, and by increasing the number of people who make this shift in consciousness, we can actually shift reality—something he believes is already being demonstrated by the growth of the OWS movement.

Now I’ve heard all this before. In fact I’ve seen people who profess these same ideas stuck way up in the air, spinning a fantasy so enchanting that they quite lose their grasp on reality. Until reality proves intractable, and they hit the ground with a crash. So I couldn’t help feeling dubious.

Many commentators have asked, “What are their demands?”  Like others, Steven answers that these protesters aren’t making demands, because the system that exists isn’t capable of responding. Look at Congress. It can’t do anything.

This is true. We really do need a paradigm shift. So my question is: how do you keep your feet on the ground and stay connected to reality while doing what you can to make that shift happen? How do you know whether you’re lost in a dream world, spinning brightly colored wheels in the air?

I’m hardly the wise person on this, but my experience in organizing and political protest, plus my Buddhist training, suggest that at least one major component of any paradigm shift will be letting go of anger. Many people on the left learned activism as an expression of anger. Think of the vocabulary: Fight! Struggle! Outrage! And as a Buddhist would say, they’re still clinging to that anger.

When I worked with homeless women, I learned why anger feels so  good. Physiologically, it gets the adrenalin flowing; you feel empowered, invincible, righteous, alive.  You actually get addicted to the high. And like any form of attachment it prevents you from seeing clearly with what Buddhists call ‘wise discrimination.” You don’t notice that you aren’t really invincible—you’re not even all that righteous.

This week, some commentators suggested that OWS has indeed created a change: it’s shifted the public dialogue. The Obama administration wouldn’t have backed off the Keystone XL oil pipeline otherwise. A change in consciousness isn’t easy, and it doesn’t happen overnight, but despite my doubts I’m still hoping this time something really has shifted. Well, we’ll see.

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Social media & inspiration: Google+ or minus?

Posted on August 16, 2011 by StephanieGolden

In a race to beat the other Stephanie Goldens out there, I got myself an invite to Google+, and secured possession of—my name.  A real coup, right? I haven’t learned yet how to use Google+, but once I do, it’ll be a big boost to my career… right?

Not according to computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who says social media just reduce everyone to little more than the database fields they fill in to create their profile. In his manifesto You Are Not a Gadget, he attacks two notions popular among his community of techies:

  • the “wisdom of the crowd,” which Lanier calls the “hive mind”;
  • the seductiveness of the idea that “bits can be alive on their own”—that is, machines can attain consciousness.
http://images.cdn.fotopedia.com/flickerslair-o9s-NhBoTlA-hd.jpg

The "hive mind": Heidi Welch, "Bees on Honeycomb"

Together, he says, these ideas degrade the concept of personhood, which loses its individuality and (more important, to my mind) the mystery of its being and its spiritual quality. In his book Of a Fire on the Moon, about the NASA space program, Norman Mailer developed a rather mystical notion that machines contained a soul. For him this was a metaphor for what he saw as the heroic man/machine enterprise that climaxed in the moon landing, the contemporary idea that machines can be conscious is just flat—the opposite of heroic, the antithesis of human.

Devaluing individuality wipes out true creativity, which requires the singular vision that arises only from ineffable, individual personhood. That, says Lanier, is why online culture so often just rehashes cultural material from the pre-internet era (really original stuff being in short supply.)

Wikipedia is Lanier’s main example of the way “crowd-sourcing” eliminates the individual voice. It’s always at the top of search results, so people click the Wikipedia link, missing more original, ambitious material.

The flattening of individuals into a “hive” also undermines the concept of authorship. To me—an author—this is the true horror. There’s a notion that all books should become “one book” once they’re digitized and put online. Then anyone can take any fragment out of context and “mash” it with any other fragment. Lanier makes the very good point that online mashups destroy the original context in which a work is made, which then destroys their meaning.

In terms of my Venn diagram, the inspiration circle simply falls out of the picture. A whole piece of my personhood is gone. Once I figure out how to use Google+, will I just be buzzing around the global hive, as my mind melds into a single worker-bee brain?

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The 99¢ store: what’s a book worth these days?

Posted on April 21, 2011 by StephanieGolden

When I put my out-of-print book Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice on Kindle, I had to decide how much to charge. Amazon limited me to charging $9.99 if I wanted the higher royalty, 70%. So I thought, I’ll underprice it a bit to make it more attractive, and listed it for $8.99.

Turns out that was way overpriced. Fierce pricing debates rage among indie authors on blogs and the Kindle online forums. Many charge 99¢—the lowest Amazon allows. One theory is that people will take a chance on anything for 99¢, so you start there to build buzz and then raise your price—all the way to $2.99. Another is simple: the less you charge, the more you sell.

But I think this debate isn’t just about how to sell more copies. It’s about what a piece of writing is worth. One writer posted an e-publisher’s price list (scroll down to find it) for different length works—ranging from a “Short Story” of 12,000 to 18,000 words ($2.50) to a “Plus Novel” over 100,000 words ($6.50).

I was distressed to see prices for books and stories quoted by volume, as though they were pounds of potatoes or bars of soap.  I pointed out that a lot goes into writing that can’t be quantified that way. Research. Revision. Thinking. As magazine writers like to say, it’s harder to write short than long because of the additional effort (and skill!) needed to compress information into a tighter space. One person responded that she just wouldn’t fork over more than $1 for something that took less than an hour to read.

These indie authors are almost uniformly writers of genre fiction: horror, romance, sci fi, etc. My book is nonfiction, dealing with a serious question in many women’s lives, and based on a lot of research. Does that make a difference? Should I expect my readership to pay more than an audience looking for entertainment, a quick escapist read? Would they think that’s fair?

And a broader question: is my book—anyone’s book—really the equivalent of those doodads they sell at the 99¢ store—a worthless impulse purchase, but so cheap it doesn’t matter?

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Tech warrior II: online sample

Posted on April 21, 2011 by StephanieGolden

Amazon is amazing. They don’t miss a beat.

I just discovered that I can post a link to an online free sample of Slaying the Mermaid that people can read in their browser—no special software needed. You can read the entire first chapter; just scroll past the title and copyright pages.  Makes me feel like a techie.

All you other writers, take note. Much opportunity for publicizing your ebook via the KindleBoards forums (where I learned about this online sample link). I just finished figuring out the html code for including both book cover and a tag line in my forum signature. That took all my brainpower this evening: actual posting, including figuring out the protocol for authors, will be next.

I have very mixed feelings about Amazon, but they sure do know how to sell books.

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Tech warrior: putting a book on Kindle

Posted on April 21, 2011 by StephanieGolden

Slaying the Mermaid cover imageSlaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice is now an ebook offered through Amazon. A triumph, for I did it all myself. Years in print publishing had worn deep grooves in my brain, so it took some effort to wrap my mind around the basic ebook concepts:

  • No pages.
  • No fancy fonts for display type.
  • No artful white space before and after chapter titles and subheads (but enough space and sufficient variation in font size so the reader knows that a new section is beginning).
  • No index!
  • On the bright side, endnote reference numbers are links. Click and jump straight to the note. Click again and jump right back to where you were in the text.
  • On the agonizing side, guess who had to format each of 300 notes, one by one? Continue reading →
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Writer as flypaper

Posted on April 21, 2011 by StephanieGolden

Have you noticed that when you’re deeply involved in something, you turn into a magnet for anything related to it?

I once interviewed Kay Gardner, a musician and composer of healing music (sadly, she died in 2002), who told me that during a time when she was intensively exploring the physical effects of sound—teaching experimental workshops and reading extensively—all sorts of information found her. “People sent me books and articles. Books would fall off shelves. A book would be handed to me through a crowd—just a disembodied hand like one of the aces in the tarot deck.”

In that state of focus, you become like flypaper—things sail in out of the universe and stick to you. That’s what it feels like, anyway. To take just one example: writing my book on homeless women, I struggled to untangle some complex ideas about what these women meant to people inside society. I was tackling a chapter about mental illness—which I was choosing to call madness, a term that gave this condition a lot more meaning.

One bright Saturday afternoon, walking down my block toward a nearby park, I came across a stoop sale, which included a bunch of books. (In my Brooklyn brownstone neighborhood, we don’t have front yards, but everyone has a stoop, so that’s where we set the items out.) I was tempted, but figured I’d check it out on my way back. Continue reading →

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