¶ Matins: In a column in Saturday’s Times, Gail Collins ended a characteristically wry roundup of geriatric Senatorial candidates (“The Revenge of Lacey Davenport“) with the following bit of common sense:

My theory is that the age issue is not all that huge a deal when it comes to legislators. If you’re old and in good shape, the big problem is that it’s hard to think about things in new ways. You tend to get better and better at a narrower and narrower set of skills.

Yes, but does this mean me?

¶ Tierce: The publisher to watch: Philip M Parker, compiler of more than 200,000 titles. They’re all available through Amazon, not that you’d want to read any of them quite yet. There’s a method to his madness, though…

¶ Sext: I’m contemplating a trip to Sleeve City.

Oremus…
§ Matins. There’s the vanity aspect, of course: am I falling apart as I get older? Of course. It’s all right to fall apart — physically. But what about my mind? Yes, I know that my mind is physical, too, but surely…

Aside from that baggage, I wonder how the difficulty of thinking about things “in new ways” plays out here, at The Daily Blague, and at Portico. Do blogging and the Internet constitute “new things”? I was already fairly advanced in age before either became part of my everyday life. This old dog has learned a few new tricks.

Or have I? Sometimes it seems that I’ve applied my “narrower and narrower set of skills” in a strenuous effort, lasting several years, to fashion the kind of sites that I’d have figured out in a week or two when I was twenty-five.

§ Tierce. The interesting thing here is Mr Parker’s conjunction of two discrete technologies; it may even be safe to call it a “synergy.” On the one hand, computer algorithms comb the Internet for content. You could do it yourself if you were a good researcher; Mr Parker admonished a purchaser who claimed that he could have done it with the cheeky retort that he oughtn’t to have bought the book! There’s a tremendous skills differential in Internet research, however, what with all the professionals still out there (often at the top of their tree) who were trained in a pre-‘Net world. This differential will eventually close, but by then Mr Parker may have taken everything that he needs from it to smooth out the other side of his business, which is the printing on demand of his books. With 200,000 titles and growing, Mr Parker is not your ordinary CafePress franchiser.

It is the idea of automating difficult or boring work that led Mr. Parker to become involved. Comparing himself to a distant disciple of Henry Ford, he said he was “deconstructing the process of getting books into people’s hands; every single step we could think of, we automated.”

He added: “My goal isn’t to have the computer write sentences, but to do the repetitive tasks that are too costly to do otherwise.”

After all, the problem in publishing today is almost everything but the production of content.

§ Sext. The other day, I had the most! amazing! idea! Ever! Instead of scratching my head trying to figure out clever things to say about Web sites that I’d come across — isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with a blog? — instead of wasting my time on that, I would ask myself, “What are you thinking about right now?” and then Google it. What a concept!

What I am thinking about right now is the stacks of Jazz and Standards CDs in the blue room. There is no room for them in this apartment. Rather, there is no room for their jewel boxes. They’ve got to be stored otherwise, in wallets, binders, or sleeves. If I go with sleeves, then I have to have something to put the sleeves in. Don’t even think of bureau drawers!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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