Redding up

In Pittsburghese, that's what I've spent much of the holiday weekend doing. I don't know why, but that's what we used to call cleaning up and putting things in order.

Another way to put it: I've been editing my life.

Living in a small apartment imposes a certain discipline: Every now and then, you have to sit down and do an inventory of your life -- deciding what to keep and what to toss -- in order to keep one's accumulated possessions from taking over.

This is painful. The hardest for me is parting with books. Every time I do, I realize that a chapter of my life is over: No, I probably will not read that novel again, or become an art historian, or. . . or. . .

The longer I have been a reporter, the more I have realized why I'm not an editor: The ability to zero in on the one key item; the strength of mind to know what to throw away -- those are not skills that come naturally to me.

And yet, in our information-saturated age, it seems to me that is a skill worth cultivating.

The sheer volume of what is published can be overwhelming and depressing. This weekend, I made many, many trips from my apartment to Second Story Books, a nice used bookstore in my neighborhood. I was stunned at how much they rejected: Good condition (no writing inside) hardback literary biographies and some fiction.

If even works like this, which made it through the ultra-selective publishing mill to find a place between hard covers, are considered to be in glut, then what are we to think about the stream of consciousness that is the Internet? Is any of it worth saving? Does it matter if it isn't?

Or is the idea of the internet not permanence but flow? A service like Twitter seems to me to give a whole new meaning to the term "stream of consciousness"... it is a stream of the collective consciousness, with the charm being not the profundity (because most of it is quite banal) but the reach. At any given moment I am in touch with funny, charming, boring, touching but human, every human observations from all over the globe. Does it matter if none of it is worth keeping beyond the moment in which it is created. As Doestoevsky once wrote: "It's life that matters, nothing but life, that endless, perpetual process of discovering. Not the discovery itself, at all."

These are some of the things I'm thinking about as I close several volumes of my life and ready the ones Second Story rejected for donating to the library. Here's hoping these little shards of myself find a happy home.

The world is flat

I spent today in the Museum of Natural History, taking a wonderful Smithsonian class on digital cameras. Like most gizmos of the computerized age, these devices are amazing little universes in which it is easy to get lost. Fortunately, teacher Eliot Cohen, was a terrific and inspiring guide.

What I was thinking about as I walked home on a crystalline May evening, however, was my fellow students. We were homogenous in some obvious respects: all white, all middle-ished aged, all probably on the affluent side (the fact that we have the leisure and the money to pursue digital photography is a dead giveaway).

But we were pretty disparate in terms of our experience and interests. On the semi-professional end of things, there was me, a journalist trying to extend my half-life in an increasingly multi-media field, and a fellow who has a small photography business that he's taking digital. There were some pretty serious hobbyists: people who have gone on photo safaris and who have expensive digital SLRs and know all about the editing software. And then there were a couple of folks who hadn't yet gotten up the nerve to take their new digital cameras out of the box.

The interesting part was how much I learned from EVERYONE. I have a very primitive digital camera and am thinking about upgrading, and I got as much good advice from the shutterbugs as I did from the more expert photographers. In some ways, the amateurs' advice was better because it was more practical.

It was a great example of the kind of shared expertise Internet mavens like to celebrate. And it did give me a sense of how much creativity and good advice is available out there. The rapid changes in techology have had a great democratizing effect: Forget the high priests of culture; there's much wisdom to be gained in the pews. The turmoil and tumult of our technological revolution can be painfully dislocating. But it also lets all of us start over again and view the world with beginners' eyes. That can be liberating.

This is dedicated to the one I love

Maybe I mean journalism. Or maybe I mean the journalist who has been my companion and inspiration for most of my career.

"The War As I See It" was the name of a column he wrote for a newspaper he started when he was a kid. I have adopted it for my motto because:

• The chutzpah that it took for a preteen living in Charlotte, NC to share with the world his views on the great battles taking place in Japan and Germany is the quintessence of journalism. The need to share stories and the conviction that those stories need to be told is what motivates most of us news guys and gals.
• This blog is, in a sense, an imitation of my friend's insanely optimistic preteen effort: The Internet makes it possible for each of us to write a neighborhood newspaper -- but now, we're publishing to the world.

To me, this is potentially the greatest contribution the Internet can make in an age when corporate mega-mergers are reducing the number of media outlets: Taking fresh voices from the neighborhood and broadcasting them to the world.