daniel prazer

I’ve seen a three people on the train in the last two weeks reading Kindles. Which is fine, if you’re just into consuming words instead of truly diving into them, turning pages with a pencil in your hand, marking passages that move you. You know, trying to make yourself a better reader or writer.

Well, now you can put your e-reader inside a case that makes your e-reader look like a book.

Based on my experience, the Pad and Quill cases are the toughest of all the gadget cases which imitate Moleskine notebooks. And now there are finally Kindle 3 and Nook versions.

Really? Really?

Ignoring the fact that Snooki has a book deal for a novel, I saw this awful news on the Poets & Writer’s daily news roundup:

A new study from Scholastic has found that 25 percent of the more than one thousand six-to-seventeen-year-olds surveyed count texting with friends as reading, 28 percent count catching up on Facebook as reading, and 39 percent said that information they found online “is always correct.”

Effing seriously? Reading your texts counts as reading nowadays? I guess this just makes me feel awfully old, because I have problems coming out of bookstores empty-handed, while the undergraduates of late seem to be wrapped in a bubble of technology at all times. I can’t tell you how many elevator rides I’ve taken at Columbia College Chicago with undergrads who are texting and listening to blaring music through their over-ear headphones. I just wish young people would pay more attention to the world around them, especially people who are at an art school. Consuming media does not prepare you to create media. The world around you does.

Okay, there was this silver lining:

In brighter news, 66 percent of the group said they will always want to read print books despite the increasing prevalence of e-books.

Now I fully understand the hypocrisy of being heartened by this factoid one post away from finally getting the e-reader for periodicals. But there’s a huge difference between periodicals and books. Magazines—and I’m a huge fan of magazine journalism—still have the advertising revenue coming in when they release digital versions, and that’s a good thing; their job is to make money for the publisher. As do books, but books, especially fiction, require an artist to create them.

Of course, they aren’t all necessarily good artists. Some books, like Snooki’s magnum opus, just piggyback on a fad. Somehow, I don’t expect A Death in the Family or The Sound and the Fury from her.

You feel crazy when you write, fraught with doubt and remorse at not being able to do it well. More on that later.

So I felt pretty good when I found this Scientific American Podcast/article through Poet & Writers Daily News feed. It’s fascinating stuff.

Here is what scientists found:  The number of ideas expressed in those autobiographies had a inverse association with the severity of dementia later in life. For instance in the sentence, “I was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on May 24, 1913 and was baptized in a church,” has seven ideas according to the researchers. Phrases like “I was born” and “I was baptized in church” all count toward what they call a measurement of “idea density.”

So I suppose that bodes well for fiction writers, particularly, who write entire works from the ether of their imagination. I’d like to think these researchers would place the “idea density” of solid novels (and even well-written narrative creative nonfiction) damn high.

As for the insanity of writing, the amazing Richard Bausch once told me—and I’m paraphrasing—that the self-doubt you feel is your talent; bad writers don’t have that voice telling you “it’s not quite right yet.”

Gizmodo had a post this afternoon about an art installation in Bologna called Scanner by a Slovakian artist. And it’s made of thousands of books.

Oh, this is awesome.

I just rewatched the film adaptation last night, which is absolutely one of the most successful translations from page to screen out there, and was reminded of the first time I read E. Annie Proulx’s novel. I was a sophomore at Miami University taking a contemporary literature class, though The Shipping News wasn’t on the reading list. (Jesus’s Son was, and that’s still one of my all-time favorites.) No, my professor mentioned Annie Proulx’s novel to us as something amazing, and I picked it up in one of uptown’s bookstores on the way home that afternoon.

It absolutely blew me away.

Leading each chapter with an entry from the Ashley Book of Knots. The way it starts with clipped phrases. Taking everything from Quoyle. The way the prose becomes more fluid and nuanced as Quoyle learns who he is and recovers his life. The stunningly human twists, and Newfoundland becoming a character of its own. The mysticism of the sensitive Newfies.

It started a young journalism student out slowly, with those clipped phrases. I remember thinking, “I can do this. I’ve read Hemingway,” but the more I read, the more I got sucked in, I said to myself, “I want to do this.”

It was the book that made me want to be a fiction writer and a journalist.

By Daniel Prazer

A year ago last weekend, I walked across the stage and got my master’s degree in writing from Columbia College. Cranking away at a book-length manuscript tends to burn you out, a condition I referred to as the post-post-graduate writing hangover.

Less than a month later, my father took his own life. For the next few months, I sank deeper into the couch cushions.

Momentum—or the lack of it—took over my writing life. When I finally emerged from my suicide-survivor’s exile, the only words I put down on the page were cover letters to go with a redesigned resume. Nothing creative.

Until this summer, when a former professor and friend, Sam Weller, threw down this gauntlet on his Facebook wall: “I am going to write 500 words a day, every day, until the end of August. This will give me a 53,000-word draft of a novel by the end of summer. Anyone care to join me in this challenge? It’s just two pages a day.”

Read the rest at New City’s Summer Guide.

I’m working on copy editing and laying out the Story Week Reader 2010 (the past five editions are available online at the Publishing Lab’s Web site) this week, something I’ve been doing for two years now with my wife, Ann, who designs the cover. This year’s, I think, is particularly strong. It’s got the tiny keyboard and the large keyboard, the process from writing small—the magazine’s maximum word count is 750—to writing long.

Those aren’t my hands. Nor my wife’s. The faculty advisor told me my hands looked too old and wizened. “We need something younger,” he said. “Maybe tattoos. Definitely female.”

And I take that as a complement. I’ve got scars on my hands from years of cats and hot oils popping from skillets and general clumsiness. I’ve got a wedding ring. Could I use some lotion? Probably, but man’s men don’t moisturize. That my hands wouldn’t work for this design is a sign of growing up, not old. Do my knees ache after I go to the gym? Sure. Can I pull all-nighters and still be alert the next day? Certainly not as well as I could when I was an undergrad, or hell, even a grad student.

It was a gentle validation that I’m an adult. And I like that. It means I’ve got perspective. It means I’ve survived things that made me stronger (especially this past summer). It means I can make wise choices, and if my choices turn out to be not-so-wise, that I’m adaptable enough to duck and weave and come out on the other side with my own momentum.

And I like that.

It’s been ages since I’ve posted on here, and there really isn’t an excuse. This winter, I’ve been doing a bit of driving back and forth from Chicago to Ohio, once for Thanksgiving, and twice for my first season out trying my hand at deer hunting.

My mom will never understand this newfound fascination of mine, and my wife’s sick of hearing about it. But for me and thousands of other people, hunting isn’t about killing defenseless animals. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Division pegs the whitetail population in the state at just over 650,000, far beyond the natural carrying capacity of the state’s ecosystems. Which explains why there were three huge whitetails in my mom’s suburban front yard last week.

I didn’t managed to harvest a deer my first year out—yet. But I’ve had an amazing time out at my friend’s 93-acre farm in Bellefountaine, Ohio. I’ve seen plenty of deer; after all, it’s a long-neglected apple orchard ringed by cornfields. And even though my first trip was cut short thanks to the flu, being outside and off Chicago’s pavement for a few days is indescribably refreshing.

It’s more than a few days of solitude and a chance for my mind to quiet down, though. It’s ethical. If I’m going to eat meat, I better be able to man up and harvest it myself. Besides, I’d rather have an animal on my plate that’s lived its entire life in the wild than one that spent its life on a factory farm. And it’s worth noting that no group—none—contributes more financially to conservation than hunters and fisherman (there’s an 11 percent federal excise tax on all firearms and ammunition that goes directly to the Department of the Interior). The press release that’s linked to above points out that deer season brings almost $900 million to Ohio’s economy. And I can get behind that, especially if I can clear the city air out of my lungs while I’m doing it.

Morning in the ground blind. Click to enlarge.

Branhaven was a Jackson Township, Ohio, staple while I was growing up. A HUGE pool (500,000 gallons, if memory serves, which is larger than Olympic-sized), six lifeguard towers, more than a dozen tennis courts and a backboard, sand volleyball court, and acres of grass for kids to play on.

I grew up two blocks away, and Branhaven was the farthest I was allowed to walk or ride my bike—no doubt because my grandpa worked there. Always unable to sit still, he kept that pool crystal clear and handled general maintenance after he retired from Ohio Bell. As a kid, I remember him driving his powder blue Plymouth Duster over to our house every day we weren’t at the pool, just to have lunch with his daughter and grandkids. Those lunches and Grandpa taking me down to show how the filtration system worked are some of my most cherished childhood memories.

A few years ago, the owner of Branhaven passed away, and the new owners decided to do something new—make it into a water park. “Jackson Township doesn’t have a community pool. I think there’s a need here for this type of aquatics facility,” the new owner told the Massillon Independent. So before the bottom dropped out of the economy, that’s what they were doing.

Today, it looks like this. Click the image to see more of this on my Flickr page.

The Christian Science Monitor’s Marjorie Kehe has put together a list of the top 10 pirated eBooks (e-books? Ebooks?) of 2009.

It seems like most people are downloading what they’re too embarrassed to buy.

Don’t look at this list if you want to believe that the Internet is feeding a hunger for a deeper kind of learning. The 10 books most downloaded on BitTorrent (a free file-sharing application) this year do not include titles by Victor Hugo or Emily Brontë (or even Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling).

Instead, with the exception of Leonardo da Vinci and Stephenie Meyer, they mostly focus on either self-help or sex (or in the case of a couple of titles, both).

See the list at the Christian Science Monitor.