• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

William Landay

Official website of the author

  • Books
    • All That Is Mine
    • Defending Jacob
    • The Strangler
    • Mission Flats
  • News
    • Updates
    • Blog
  • Events
    • Appearances
    • Podcasts
    • Print
  • More
    • About
    • Contact

Archives for 2010

Tweeting to no one

December 8, 2010

Sysomos, a maker of social media analysis tools, looked at 1.2 billion tweets over a two-month period to analyze what happens after we publish our tweets to Twitter. A few highlights:

  • 71% of all tweets produce no reaction (no replies or retweets)
  • only 6% of all tweets produce a retweet (the other 23% solicit replies)
  • 96.9% of replies and 92.4% of retweets happen within the first hour
  • of all the tweets that produce a reply, 85% get only a single reply before the “conversation” ends

Mashable

Filed Under: Internet Tagged With: social media, Twitter

Darwinian Theories of Beauty

December 6, 2010

In this TED video, Denis Dutton explains how our shared sense of what is beautiful may have its origin in human evolution. The theory connects to another idea I ran across recently: that we humans acquired our species-wide instinct for storytelling as a biological adaptation. Telling one another stories conferred on our ancient ancestors an advantage, i.e. storytelling animals were more likely to survive than non-storytelling ones. Brian Boyd seems to be the leading exponent of this theory with his book, On the Origin of Stories. (Boyd summarizes the theory here. An interesting review of the book by Michael Bérubé is here.) If all this is true — if we are hardwired to find certain art forms beautiful and to enjoy certain kinds of stories — then maybe we should not worry so much about the death of the novel after all.

Filed Under: Art Tagged With: Brian Boyd, Denis Dutton, evolution, storytelling, TED talks, video

Garrison Keillor: Advice to writers

November 30, 2010

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: Garrison Keillor

11.22.63

November 29, 2010

JFK in Ft. Worth, Nov. 22, 1963

November 22nd, 1963: President Kennedy reaches out to the crowd gathered at the Hotel Texas Parking Lot Rally in Fort Worth, Texas. (Cecil Stoughton, White House / John F. Kennedy Library) (via)

Filed Under: Odds & Ends Tagged With: history, JFK, journalism

Quote of the Day

November 28, 2010

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

William James

Filed Under: Odds & Ends Tagged With: quotes, William James

Boston, February 1944

November 24, 2010

Boston cops 1944

Photo by Walter Sanders for Life Magazine.

Filed Under: Odds & Ends Tagged With: Boston, police

Shoes

November 18, 2010

This video made the rounds on the web a while ago, when Converse announced the latest reinterpretation of its sneakers by designer Ryusaku Hiruma, but I only discovered it the other day.

Fashion clod that I am, I had never heard of Hiruma or his Converse shoes. For the uninitiated: Ryusaku “Sak” Hiruma is a Japanese designer who has been studying traditional shoemaking techniques in Florence for almost a decade. Over the last few years, Sak has applied old-world craft to produce chic, luxurious handmade versions of Converse’s classic Jack Purcell, Chuck Taylor, and One Star models. The latest Sak/Converse shoe, a design based on an old basketball shoe called the Star Tech, features fine leather and hand-stitching throughout. Only 64 pairs will be made, in natural shades of tan, off-white and black leather. Retailing for $600, they will be available only in New York, Boston, and Costa Mesa. (Costa Mesa?) If you’re into shoe porn, details are here and here.

I loved this video. I found it oddly touching and romantic, not just for Sak’s dedication to craft and tradition but for personal reasons. My own family was in the shoe business for several generations. Growing up, I assumed I would be too. There were no writers or artists of any kind in my family or anywhere else in my world. Even now I think I might have been very happy making shoes.

Maybe that is why I have a nagging sense that, as a writer, I don’t really “make” anything. A book is an ethereal creation, a non-object. It exists as a chain of words, separate and apart from the paper-and-ink thing we call by that name. Book publishing is only now transitioning to digital, permanently alienating the idea of a “book” from a physical object, but writing made the leap decades ago. In my own daily working life, paper plays no part. Over the two years or so it takes me to produce a novel, I never print out a hard-copy manuscript. And when I am done, I simply email a digital file to my editor. There is no object to hold, really, until I receive bound copies from the publisher, long after the writing is done. Even then, the physical books do not feel like my creation. Only the words do.

Contrast that with the intensely physical world of traditional shoemaking in this video. The materials are so lush and sensuous. Even the tools have a gorgeous patina. That the shoemaker’s artistry is lavished on such a low, practical object — when you step in shit, it is not your hat that is ruined — only makes the concrete physicality of the whole thing that much more real and authentic. Only 64 pairs of these shoes will be made, and Hiruma will touch every one with his own hands. And, poignantly, every one one of those shoes will wear out.

Novels, of course, are theoretically immortal precisely because they are insubstantial. My books can be reprinted and rescreened into infinity, and each copy is no less my creation than any other. Maybe that is what makes the shoemaker’s art so poignant to a writer: he cannot give you his creation without surrendering it himself.

Filed Under: Books, On Writing, Writing Tagged With: Converse, shoemaking, video, writing life

Kanye West: Power

November 17, 2010

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: Kanye West, music videos, rap

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Page 1
  • Page 2
  • Page 3
  • Page 4
  • Page 5
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 22
  • Go to Next Page »

Footer

  • Amazon
  • Facebook
  • Goodreads
  • Instagram
  • Threads