I’ve noticed over the last couple of months that several of my favorite websites were becoming, well, wide. It’s become increasingly common, in fact, for me to find myself scrolling sideways as well as up-and-down when out there browsing, and frankly, it was getting to be a bit annoying.

But with my entry (yes, at last!) into the ranks of those who are getting to play with the Google Wave preview, it hit me: the fundamental orientation of the web is changing. And Wave may well cement that change.

Here’s the thing. Early web pages were composed vertically, in portrait layout, partially because of the limitations of screen width and partially because of the rear-view mirrorism that caused us to think about these new digital forms as “pages.” That concept has proven surprisingly sticky: web “pages” scroll vertically to this day, and very few sites have played with the horizontal axis.

Enter Google Wave, however (and possibly, as its necessary precursor, Google Chrome, though being a Mac user I can’t really speak to that at all).

Its three-column orientation demands horizontality — if the columns are too narrow, you lose a lot of the toolbar options, and everything just feels out of proportion.

So this makes me wonder, if Wave gets the kind of buy-in that the hype suggests, whether we’re seeing the fundamental orientation of the web switching from portrait to landscape — not that we won’t still be scrolling vertically rather than horizontally, but that the basic screen unit will be wider than it is tall.

This has deep implications for contemporary web design, I think, and not least for me; the other Planned Obsolescence works quite well in a wide window: you can stretch the main text and comments columns to be as wide as you would like. But it doesn’t work well here at all, as I’ve been using a fixed-width theme, and that ugly gray background block at right just gets bigger and bigger.

I’ll be curious to see whether this shift becomes — no pun intended — broader. Is the basic assumption of web layout becoming landscape? How do we organize a wider window?

I went to bed last night about 11.30, and got up this morning around 7.30. And inbetween, didn’t receive a single piece of email. For some reason, I’m having a hard time accepting this — nothing from my listservs, nothing from my students, nothing from random spammers. Nothing. Why is it that eight hours of radio silence, over a Saturday night and into Sunday morning, has me convinced that something is wrong?

I’m finding it extremely difficult this year to make the shift out of the fall semester and into everything I need to focus on over the winter break. Probably I should cut myself some slack about this, given that I filed my last grade for the semester at 5.30 this morning. But I’ve had some time over the last few days to begin thinking about the what-next stuff, and I haven’t exactly gotten myself focused, or even aimed in the right direction.

Part of the issue is the daunting nature of what I’ve got to accomplish over the break: I really need to make some serious headway on the actual production of actual text for the book; I need to get a lot done for MediaCommons*; I need to get one entirely new class prepared and one previously taught class heavily revised; I need to finish preparing for a Mellon workshop I’m hosting in a couple of weeks.

But it’s also the plethora of small details from this semester that are still hanging over my head: a peer review, a committee report, a search. (Okay, that last one’s not at all small.) And, in fact, these two factors — the daunting nature of the big tasks, and the proliferating nature of the small ones — combine to make the possibility of focus even more distant, as the small tasks provide a too-welcome distraction from the big ones, feeling more urgent, even though not important.

Here’s hoping for the — what does it require? will? — to keep centered on the important this break, and to find ways to recalibrate that sense of urgency.

—–

*[7.16 am, updated to add:] Whoops! Forgot the footnote, which intended to say that MediaCommons is emerging from its persistent vegetative state. The old site (i.e., that which was current back in July) is back online, and the development of the new site is once again proceeding apace. Watch this space for more developments!

the view from here
Originally uploaded by KF

R. and I are off on another of our famous working vacations, a phenomenon which makes my family (and many other folks as well) think we’re positively nuts. “You’re going to Hawaii in order to sit in front of your laptop and work?” they ask.

Well, yes.

The joy of these trips has a good bit to do with the ways a change of scenery, an escape from the usual pathways and the quotidian business of house- and cat- and job-care frees up the brain to focus on a project in a new way. And the beauty of Hawaii in particular for such a venture has to do — well, partly with the beauty of the scenery, but partly with the change of time as well as of place.

I got up this morning at 4.30 am, feeling pretty well-rested and ready to go. Sat down at the computer, and very quickly produced a six-page overview of the contours of the chapter I’m beginning to write, all the while watching the light gradually come up outside. It’s now 8.30 am, and I feel as though I’ve had a successful work day already, and can either continue plowing along or can move onto something else as I like.

Day 1, accomplished already. I’m feeling pretty good about where things go from here…

I honestly didn’t mean to disappear for quite this long. I needed a little time, of course, to grieve, to process everything that was going on around me, to take care of things. But the longer I took, the harder it became to figure out what to say next, how to move on. So here’s this, partially just breaking things loose, partially creating some space. Creating the possibility of an actual return.

It was like someone flipped a lightswitch.

I’ve been listening to a number of podcasts from France Culture for the last couple of weeks, trying to tune my ear to a more rapid-fire, more quotidien mode of spoken French than I’ve been able to pick up from any of the French instruction audio I’ve listened to. Some of it’s been interesting, some of it’s been perplexing, some of it’s been an outright mystery, but all of it’s been work.

And then yesterday, I was listening to “le journal de 7h” (a five-to-thirteen minute podcast of the morning’s news headlines), and about three minutes in, I suddenly realized I’d heard it all. Heard, as in understood without actively listening, without paying attention, without trying to — or needing to — parse the sentences. Just heard.

As soon as I realized what had happened, I got a bit self-conscious about it, and the transparency of the language disappeared — but relaxing again, I was able to get it back, or at least glimpses of it. I spent much of the rest of the afternoon downloading and listening to other broadcasts, to see if the feeling was replicable, or if it was just a fluke, produced by the fact that I understood the basic facts of all of the stories presented. (No small feat: the conventions of French journalism are a good bit different from those in the U.S., not least around the amount of background info provided; in a story about the Bastille Day ceremonies, for instance, that mentions the détente between Sarkozy and the army stemming from the Carcassonne affair, you can’t necessarily expect to be told what exactly happened in Carcassonne. It’s assumed you’ve been keeping up, so jumping in mid-stream can be hard.)

It turns out that the feeling was replicable. And even live: I turned on the radio and caught an absolutely amazing Barthesian analysis of the bagless vacuum cleaner, followed by a remarkable interview with Alain Robbe-Grillet.

It was the damnedest thing: one day, I could comprehend fine, but only with effort; the next day, the effort was gone. Like flipping a switch, and now the lights are on.

That sensation will probably come and go — my struggles with this language are far from over — but I wanted to record this moment for myself, so that I can remember that the possibility of fluency is really out there.

Yesterday afternoon, I spent a couple of hours in a small café a few blocks from here, first doing some reading and then having coffee with a former student. The café’s quite cool — imagine a merger of French bar and college-town co-op coffee house — and felt somehow very much like home to me as soon as I walked in. It took a second to register how much so: the voices coming out of the café’s speakers were American. Not just American: familiar.

The café, it turns out, was streaming KCRW over the internet.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, it’s quite cool that they can do so, and the music that played during the time I was there was great. On the other hand, there’s something in it that feels a little too much like the sudden explosion of Starbucks here.

Once upon a time, one went somewhere far away to see and hear and taste things one couldn’t see and hear and taste anywhere else. Now one can see and hear and taste many of the same things wherever one goes. Has the point of travel come down to simply being far away?

I eagerly anticipate at some as yet undetermined point in the future having a complex thought of which I do not later discover Jay David Bolter has already said a portion, both more intelligently and a decade earlier.

(I feel compelled, however, to note two attendant ironies:

1. The chapter on which I’m currently working makes as part of its argument the claim that one of the ideas about authorship that we’re going to need to loosen our grip on a teeny bit as we move into the digital future is that of originality.

2. One would think I’d already spent enough pages disagreeing with the notion of the anxiety of influence to suddenly find myself feeling it.)

I’ve got a million favorite lines, and so I just grabbed for the first one that came to mind. That there won’t be any more has already made the world seem a sadder place.

RIP, George Carlin.

But no actual cats. I saw this animation the other day, and something in it resonated so deeply that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s viral, I think, in an infectious way. The only thing that’s left is for me to pass it on.