When the 2012 Pulitzer Prizes were announced this week, no award was presented for fiction. Bewildered fans of fiction such as myself could find no sufficient explanation. Juror Maureen Corrigan wrote in the Washington Post that she and her two co-jurors "have heard only the same explanation that everyone else has heard: The board could not reach a majority vote on any of the novels.” An explanation so lame, so absolutely devoid of effort, that it smells to me like a cover-up.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the eighteen board members were too busy with Columbian prostitutes to pick a winner. What happens to the $10,000 prize? More prostitutes?

The conspiracy theorist in me suspects a hidden motive of ill will toward publishers of fiction. Novels have perhaps sold too well this past year, and it’d be extravagant, even congratulatory, for one book to get the extra sales boost that inevitably results from the Pulitzer stamp. We can still award poetry because poetry needs the help, but those uppity fiction bitches can suck it. 

As suspicious as such negligent behavior is, this has happened before. The last year no prize was awarded in fiction was 1977. No prize was awarded in 1974 or 1971 either. Do these years have any special significance? Was fiction just too good for one book to stand out? Maybe these years were more somber than others (Vietnam and the death of Elvis come to mind); maybe they were so distraught that prizes and celebrations seemed inappropriate. Sorry, Denis Johnson, but we don’t have the energy to anoint Train Dreams because we’re too sad about the Republican primaries.

What if Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! was the top choice but the board thought that exclamation point was just too enthusiastic in the face of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic? Maybe David Foster Wallace, whose unfinished novel The Pale King was also a finalist, is haunting all of the board members. Or simply confusing them by adding footnotes to each eligible novel by means of his awesome ghost powers.

One last thing to consider. The Pulitzer Prize in fiction is “For distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” Maybe the board doesn’t believe in America. Maybe it’s American life, rather than fiction, that can’t get a majority vote.

Image: Wikipedia

7-Eleven, that bastion of finely textured burgers and sweetastic Slurpees, will soon dot the isle of Manhattan like popcorn bits on movie theater seats: in the next five years, 114 of the suckers will be opening. No doubt some will applaud this proliferation, but I weep for the ubiquitous crusty bodega. Like peepshows and subway art before them, bodegas stand in serious danger of becoming safe for visiting relatives. In that dystopian future, you’ll have to shower before rolling into the corner deli on weekday mornings, hungover, your body panging for an egg-and-cheese and sock-juice coffee.

So, fellow wallowers, let us now praise dingy bodegas. As is proper to nostalgia, we’ll do so with a string of anecdotes only tangentially related to bodegas and their signage trumpeting (nonexistent) stores of “organic” and “natural” foods, as well as cold beer and ATMs.

1. A few years back, I was moving into a new place in the nosebleed section of Manhattan, north of half the Bronx. While new roomie and I were schlepping boxes into the lobby, the sweetest orange tabby I’ve ever seen got himself caught in the vestibule. He mewed so incessantly I caved and let him in. As soon as I’d opened the door, he was climbing me like a tree. “Hey fucker, get off me!” I yelped, thinking fleas and other crawling nasties. I discovered that he belonged to the bodega next door, so I tried to take him back. “Here’s your cat.” “Not my cat.” “Hey man, c’mon, just take your cat. People know he’s yours.” “Not my cat.” So we took him to a cat lady, and I took my business to another bodega. Not only did it have a cat to keep rodents away; the owner wasn’t a prick.
2. All those times we needed a loosie, you shady bodegas were there for us in a way that tobacco shops rarely are. Even if it was a Newport.
3. One in the morning in Harlem, and we’re out of liquor and the wine’s running dry. My friend suggests to fresh-in-the-city me that we get some grande Coronas at the corner bodega. I concur. We get there and I make like to open the door, smashing drunkenly, with full walking force, into it: it’s locked. “They closed?” My friend laughs. “No Jake, you gotta order through the window!” “Oh…I doubt that glass is bulletproof.”
4. A guy at this Midtown deli was so goddamn good that he knew what his many weekday regulars wanted and would have it ready for them in the time it took them to approach the counter. Within a week, he'd memorized my $1.75 “special”: butter on a toasted roll plus coffee like a hot milkshake.
5. Or that hypothetical time you needed condoms, like stat, and it was after ten and the pharmacy was closed. 7-Eleven probably carries mainstream brands like Trojan and Durex, but the bodega at the end of your street? It’s going to broaden your horizons. When else is necessity going to be so compelling that you purchase (and use) Rough Riders?

You bodegas are somewhat more salty than sweet, it’s true. But those of us who savor life’s tangier bits will mourn you the way others mourn New York’s pickle vendors.

Image: flickr user zippagraphics

Scoping out Tati Luboviski-Acosta's frenetic, awesomely collaged journal on HTMLGiant last week, I started thinking about all the things I've written that I really don't want the internet to see. Sure, it's usually a fun surprise to trip through old journals. If you're disciplined about it, you could even keep a record of all the books you've read, like Pamela Paul's  Book of Books. But keep them long enough and the memory jostle becomes a bit more jarring: who was I when I wore this stuff?

I experienced this sort of selfhood-whiplash a while back, when I finally got around to arranging my books. Part of this involved getting my motley collection of sketchbooks, handbound diaries, travelogues, collage binders, classroom notebooks, and the like into chronological order. Then I started fingering through my earlier journals—tailing a shadowy figure I'll call Younger Me.

Younger Me never ceases to impress me with his lack of all discernment and much judgment. Oh, and his poetry. He wrote about girls and sex, of course, and wild parties and domestic disputes. Sounds entertaining, maybe some of it even lurid. But Younger Me left out too many of the details that anyone other than him would want to read. Presumably he had those tasty little bits firmly in mind while he wrote, confident that they were permanently etched in voluptuous red cursive on his brain. Problem is, I don’t know where he etched them. In the mind we share, those finer, fleshier details are lost. So much for posterity.

I journal now because it helps me understand the tacit construction of my sense of identity. No one cares what my favorite movie was when I was 16, not even me, but I am interested in who Y.M. thought he was when he wrote about it. Revisiting his entries prods my eyes with how much I've changed.  

Over time, I've developed a system to highlight this. I leave wide margins with enough space to allow Current Me to annotate Younger Me’s concerns. The thought was that I’d reevaluate and expand upon significant events, building a layered record of this process of self-fashioning. These pages, with their multiple hands and inks, reveal how perception of the self, like every other perception, arises out of processes involving subject and object, observer and observed: each time you think about yourself, you're remaking yourself.

And so I return, irregularly, to the chickenscratch of my late teens or the not-quite-graceful italic of my mid twenties (thank you, Arrighi), jot down some notes in my current fashion, whatever that is, and reshelve the volume, my self to be rediscovered there in a year or three, a month or two.

Blogging is a similar monster. It's just already out there for all the webby world to remember. And judging by fascinating/terrifying resources like this one, it's not going anywhere soon.

Image from flickr user Richard Winchell

Bowker, an organization that generates (and sells) all sorts of information—logistical, sales, customer preference—about the publishing industry, just released the results of a study on ebook buying habits in 10 countries, “major world markets” all. The study presents a daunting array of data: correlating likelihood to buy with age, gender, and income; predicting increases in ebook sales in certain markets; differentiating pace of growth across regional markets; et ceteraz. There's a lot to say about the study’s intrinsically fascinating details, but what I really like is the flurry of responses popping up throughout the publishing blogworld—and usually revealing way more about the responders than the data.

Lots of the responses smack of confirmation bias. Printing Impressions, a business publication for American printers—who, obvs, want to find hope for pulp-n-fiber books—highlights a post pronouncing that the breathless predictions of ebooks eradicating printed books and brick-and-mortar stores are “way off the mark.” (Although, R.I.P. Borders.) Meanwhile, Digital Book World looks into the morass of data and sees that “the world has caught up to the U.S. when it comes to e-book buying.” On the internet, everyone wins! But where do I get my ice cream?

And then there are the thought-tickling observations. At MobyLives, Kelly Burdick was struck by the fact that both the French and the Japanese seem less than enthusiastic about purchasing ebooks. French insistence on the sensuous pleasures of reading a bound book? Or, as Burdick suggests, simply a result of the Amazon ebook store being relatively new in France? Time will tell; there’s nothing in the current study to say. Other people found other things significant. And more people will likely write more, shortly: watch them do it, in real time!

That’s the thing about studies like this one. Bowker generated so much data, and then correlated it in so many ways, that without some sober (boh-ring!) statistical thinking, extrapolations begin to look meaningless. They suggest that data can be bent to support virtually any argument. Which means these broad interpretations may reveal less about what’s going to happen with ebook sales and more about what the people jockeying the data want to believe.

For my part, I find it interesting that India leads the globe in percentage of people who have purchased ebooks: I want to see that correlated with pricing in Indian ebook outlets, access to old-fashioned print books, and availability of ereaders, as well as some remarks about the culture of the book in the subcontinent.

I could avail myself of Google and the lieberry. Or I could take my cue from the blogosphere: extrapolate first, ask questions later.

Image via flickr user Josh Bancroft

Right now, I am typing in Dvorak, a keyboard layout that places all the vowels in the home row and purports to be more ergonomically friendly. I have been typing this way for a week, but my computer keyboard still feels foreign to me. I cannot believe my fingers are still not dancing across the keys.

I decided to start typing in Dvorak because I wanted to see if anything would change. So what did change?

First was my brain: I could feel the ache immediately. Norman Doidge describes competitive plasticity as a gerrymandering of cerebral territory, which perfectly explains why training my fingers to tap different keys for the same letters would run so palpably contrary to my brain’s heavily automated routines. In his book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, James Gleick discusses how breaking words down into letters "forces the reader to detach information from meaning; to treat words strictly as character strings; to focus abstractly on the configuration of the word." I didn't have to be told twice. I struggled through the first half-hour of typing, and then stopped. My head felt like it might divide in two.

But an hour later, I came back and found myself distinctly remembering where the different letters went. Astonishing. My brain—I could feel my brain mastering this.

Then it was my writing: I had to simplify every part of it. If I was patient and tough, I might break ten words a minute. Gone were all the fillers—eh, nah, well—I’d typed during my Qwerty days. Gone were my slow-spooling, oft-Proustian digressions. Like Beckett switching from English to French, my sentences became plain.­ The words I chose changed, too. As a recent study has found that QWERTY typists prefer words typed with their right hand. I do prefer words that are easier to type; as David Mitchell mastered vocabularies to work around his stammering, so I found myself similarly picking words to suit my fingers and my mind.

“Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts,” declared Nietzsche in 1882, having learned to use a typewriter. I have moved in the opposite direction from Henry James, whose novels swelled in length and obliqueness once he started dictating to his secretary. He was able to postpone the work of editing; I, in my turn, must begin editing before I get a single word down.

I feel like I am writing more clearly now, more carefully and precisely. Typing in Dvorak has made my words strange to me, and so I look at each one closely like a small gemstone before setting it into my text. I won’t pretend that I’m a happier person for having learned to type at a rate far slower than my thoughts, but I know my words have become more exact and honest. My brain has actually been rewired.

Image credit: flickr.com/photos/julianrod

A recent Telegraph post about the relationship between poets and their editors starts off with the nervous subhead, “If one poet edits another, whose work is it?” Tensions arise over the prospect of editors having too heavy an influence, the implications of an incestuous landscape. How can we rest assured that our most treasured poetry is "pure"?

Lucky for me, I am completely unperturbed by this notion of purity. I, in fact, adore quite a few exceptionally heavy-handed editors. I’m also still coming off the glory high I got reading Jonah Lehrer’s article in last week’sNew Yorker about brainstorming, in which Lehrer debunks the myth that brainstorming has to be free of criticism in order to be productive. Criticism and debate have been shown to actually improve creativity. Ha! Criticism wins! Editors are helpful!

So, seeing as how some people could use a little push toward criticism-acceptance, I’ve decided to draw up my top five reasons (with a little help from Lehrer, whom I quote liberally below) we shouldn't fear the red pen.

1. Science says that “exposure to unfamiliar perspectives can foster creativity.” Sure, everyone has something to say. If it's useful, steal it. If it's not useful, it can help define what it is you're not looking for.

2. Science also says that “dissent stimulates new ideas because it encourages us to engage more fully with the work of others and to reassess our viewpoints.” Dissent! Know thine enemy! How better can you position yourself to be the champion? Would you even know about being a "champion" if it weren't for the presence of critics?

3. For the most part, no one is paying any attention. If they are paying attention, they will forget everything you’ve done in less than thirty seconds. There is only so much time you have to engage and really have an effect on someone else, so you might as well try to make it count. Good criticism can help push you toward that effect.

4. For the most part, we are not paying attention. Do you know how many unconscious actions I’ve committed, for years, without knowing? I couldn’t be the first to end a telephone conversation until I was 24 years old—and I had no idea. Or with my writing: how many times in a paragraph do I have to mention a hand touching something before someone shoots me? We all need someone else to tell us what it is we are doing.

5. No one wants to hear you whine. What are you, a baby? Whether it’s the undergraduate with the rambling justification or the man-child distraught because not everybody likes him, whiners are usually too busy suckling on the self-absorption tit to get any work done. Don’t be one of them.

Good criticism can save you from the enormous embarrassment your actions alone will undoubtedly lead you to. So what's the difference between shitty criticism and good criticism? Honest, deep concern for the creative object at hand. As long as the critics you listen to are truly engaged with what it is you’re trying to accomplish—and not just smarmy ass-clowns with ulterior motives—they deserve a good listen. Even the act of turning away can lead to something better.

Image: curmudgeonloner.wordpress.com

News of online storage service FileSonic's disablement didn't exactly get this downloading devotee's heart racing. FileSonic…had I ever heard of them? But Megaupload's shutdown left me shattered, considering its ultra-convenience and the realization that Swizz Beatz is CEO! (or is he?) Me, I'll remember Swizz for his bangin' production skills, plus his marrying the most beautiful woman in music.

Though there are myriad music-downloading options—not to mention social media-friendly sharables like Spotify and SoundCloud—that wasn't the case when I was a trainspotting undergrad, circa 2003. Picture it: an impressionable young man caught up in the crackling allure of breakbeats and basslines, dutifully reading BPM-bible URB magazine while marooned in Central Texas.

The massive Tower Records adjacent to campus helped a bit (carrying CDs of both Photek's splintered-rhythm masterpiece Modus Operandi and Autechre's cerebral robo-jam LP5), but it wasn't enough. Most of the artists I read about released their tracks on dubplates: DJ-friendly 12" or 7" vinyl records. Tower Records didn't carry vinyl, nor were these artists releasing “proper” CDs. So I made do with mp3 downloads. I wasn't content with streaming new tracks from the epic Drum & Bass Arena; I wanted to “possess” them, to listen to them whenever and wherever. I had a 2G iPod, but before that—I kid you not—I walked around campus with a Walkman, big-ass headphones and a bag full of burned CD-Rs.

I probably downloaded a million Gigs of music through the P2P networkSoulseek. This marvelous application was created by a former Napster programmer and had an enormous underground electronic music userbase. Soulseek featured "wishlists" (shareable stored searches of tracks you want) and chat-rooms with other users. I spent my days in lectures and nights downloading tracks and chatting with new "friends" on both coasts.

So when I "share" a track on Spotify with my friends or post it on Facebook/Twitter, I barely give it a second thought. It's funny that UK distributor STHoldings pulled its 200+ labels from Spotify in mid-November of last year, as many of those labels were my outlets for dope d'n'b back in the day. I can't add Blame's transcendent “Amazon Girl” to a Spotify playlist—yet his Asylum EP is available on iTunes, incredibly. The RIAA recently commented that the closure of P2P sites like Limewire actually lead to digital album sales, as many former users seek legal outlets.

It's not as freeing as last decade's nascent download/share culture, but for us trainspotters, there's always a way.

Image: Black Christian News (slightly photo-chopped by the author)