"[This book] embodies the Buddhist wisdom about change, life, and the world more than anything written after the events of that day." |
« Previous · Home · Next » September 13, 2007PAPERBACK POSTINGSCoverage of the paperback continues, I'm gratified to say. Kevin L. Carter, writing for U.S. 1, out of Princeton, New Jersey, offers a kind assessment of Watching the World Change in his piece, "Analyzing the Photos of 9/11." VanityFair.com, the ever-reliable Web site, provides a slideshow of significant images from the pages of the book, including this arresting image by photographer Rob Howard who happened to lean out his window with a medium-format camera at the very instant the second plane made its fatal approach toward with the south tower. PHOTO BY ROB HOWARD And then, in its efforts to disseminate online versions of every morsel of media, unfiltered, YouTube has posted an entire 40-plus-minute talk I gave at Google's New York headquarters -- warts and all, quite literally. Tell a friend or two. GOOGLE-GRAB OF YOURS TRULY I have a new theory, germinated just now. I call it Repurposing Calculus. In the mathematics of Repurposing Calculus, the above clip is a Derivative 4: four steps removed from the original media creation. It is a screen grab for a Website, taken from a Google video, recorded at a lunchtime talk, about a book. (Since the book is about media, it could arguably be recomputed as a Derivative 5. And if you email me a comment about the video, and I post it on this Website, together we could extend the chain to a Derivative 6 or 7.) All of which is a way of warning: We are perpetually at a remove from the spark of creativity, writing not books but blog posts, reacting not to films but to reviews, hearing not symphonies but random iPod shuffles. Our synapses are hot-wired to synopses. |