too many Daves

1) Running. Lots of running. Our new dog — dog number two — is younger, faster, bigger than dog number one. So I’m getting a lot of good exercise. It’s wonderful. Maybe there are ways to blog while you run. I’m not interested in discovering them.

2) I’m 37. I had never read Tolstoy. I tried War and Peace once. I gave up. Blame my slow reading speed. Then, a week or so ago, I found Anna Karenina in iTunes among the audiobooks I’ve bought, downloaded, and ignored. I gave it a try. It’s so different than I expected. The words “compassionate” and “empathetic” keep coming to mind. No character seems to be placed in the book as a joke, a villain, a prop. Tolstoy eventually gets around to rendering everyone in three dimensions. I love the story so much that I even listen to the audiobook while I’m running with the dog. Credit Tolstoy foremost. Credit narrator Davina Porter, too. For now, at least, I would rather listen to Anna Karenina than jog to Jay-Z or write blog posts.

3) If a brilliantly narrated audiobook has an opposite, it is probably the built-in voice on my Mac. The Mac’s speech software is useful, but it lacks a certain soulfulness. So it should really be a kind of torture to be doing what I’m doing: listening to the computer read through the manuscript for my novel. I’m doing this on the theory that it will reveal my most clunky sentences. When I read my own words, my inflection can rescue prose that doesn’t deserve to live. The computer can’t do that. Even if it could, it wouldn’t. It simply doesn’t care about my novel. I do. I’m finding that even a computer voice can’t change the way I feel about what I’ve written. To my biased ears, there’s a freshness to the novel that even a computer voice can’t wilt. Does that sound like bragging? I hope not. I know my novel is not for everyone — probably not even for most people. Still, as the cliche goes, I’ve written the sort of book that I’d want to read. Somewhere in the world there are people who want to read the same sort of book I want to read. Maybe this novel won’t find those people. Maybe it will.

4) Speaking of Macs, my thoughts keep drifting to the new iPad. I woke up Wednesday expecting Apple to introduce a product that would make me regret the Kindle my parents gave me for Christmas. But it didn’t happen. I may blog about the iPad’s flaws and untapped potential later — either here, on HuffPost, or both. But for now, it can be summed up in a couple of Twitter posts. Here, in 140 characters or fewer, is my dig at the iPad’s seeming unwieldiness. Here, in 140 characters or fewer, is the essence of why I think the iPad cannot possibly be the iPod of publishing unless and until there are fundamental changes in the way publishers sell the written word.

5) Susan Orlean is teaching a class at NYU right now. She posted her syllabus here. My attempt to follow along with the class readings is helping to sabotage my blogging. So far, the readings have been: McPhee’s “Travels in Georgia,” an excerpt of Didion’s “Salvador,” Jane Kramer’s “Cowboy,” Joseph Mitchell’s “The Rivermen,” and Orlean’s own unforgettable “The American Man, Age Ten.” This last one is famous as these things go. Especially the first paragraph, which you can read at the bottom of this link to the Esquire site. (Warning: You’ll want to avoid that link if you recoil at the words “load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt.”)

Meanwhile, I’m not keeping up with Orlean’s class. I’ve forsaken reading the Kramer, the Mitchell, and most of the dauntingly-parenthesized Didion excerpt in favor of reading more of Orlean’s work. Because I saw light like this during an especially rainy Hawaiian vacation, I savored this bit from a piece called “The Maui Surfer Girls”: “It was a half-cloudy day with weird light that made the green Hawaiian hills look black and the ocean look like zinc.” In the same piece, I also liked the economy and inarguable truth of Orlean’s observation that “Hana is far away and feels even farther.”

The cumulative effect of reading Orlean and McPhee and a tiny, tiny bit of Didion is to make me seriously miss the best parts of my life as a newspaper reporter. It’s been about seven years since I quit. And this, in Orlean’s words from her introduction to The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, is the essence of what I miss:

The subjects I was drawn to were often completely ordinary, but I was confident that I could find something extraordinary in their ordinariness. I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it. The challenge was to write these stories in a way that got other people as interested in them as I was.

I posted part of that passage on Facebook last night along with a status update that went like this: “Reading Susan Orlean’s collection of profiles is making me frantic to get back to writing the sort of stuff my extremely indulgent TNT editors used to print under my byline. So you all have my permission to launch your own magazines and hire me.”

It’s a joke, of course. Nobody needs my permission to launch a magazine. Nobody needs my permission to offer to hire me. Not my friends on Facebook. Not anyone who might happen to read this. But just know that you have my blessing to do both.

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OK. By blogging about why I’m not blogging, I seem to be blogging. I’m pretty sure that’s why I did this. More to come. First, though, more Anna Karenina. Only about seven hours left.