Slashdot Mirror
Excerpt:Running to the Mountain
- I think the site is great and Rob and Jeff deserve some help with the rent money. Books fought from this site send some money back to them.
- We write a lot on this site about empowerment, about individuals taking some responsibility for their technology. Writers need to do the same. I argued for months that I could bring my book to readers directly and bypass the hype machinery than handcuff writers and keep them dependent on reviewers and producers and marketers. So I always saw a link between an OSS site and an experiment like this.
And it worked. It probably doesn't take that many books to go from 9,000 to 200 (last week my ranking was l.2 million) but I think this is an experiment that has really worked. It shows sites like this reach people, even sell things. It gives some money back to a site that has given everybody else, including me, a hell of a lot. It suggests another empowering possibility for the Net. Writers can get off their butts and communicate directly with readers.
So thanks to those of you who have been e-mailing me those nice words. Thanks to the people who are buying the book and giving a dollar or two back to the site. And thanks even to the flamers for adding their usual free-wheeling spice.
I plan to top 100 by the end of the today. The USA Today review helped, obviously, but this is the place that made it happen.
you can e-mail me at jonkatz@slashdot.org Running to the Mountain
Written by Jon Katz
So, tentatively, with equal parts determination and terror, I set out on what Thomas Merton liked to call a journey of the soul.
Merton, a Trappist monk whose work I began when I was in the 9th grade and in sore need of solace, as did millions of others all over the world, was my guide on this trip. I'd read almost everything he'd written. He was a Catholic, I was raised a Jew; he had absolute faith, I never did. Still, for reasons I may never completely understand, he spoke to me, personally and powerfully. As a boy, I'd written him a letter that he never answered; if he had, I might have wound up in the monastery with him. Merton died thirty years ago. I never met him, but if a stranger's voice can enter one's soul, his permeated mine.
"It is absolutely impossible," he wrote all those years ago, "for a man to live without some kind of faith."
It is equally impossible to change your life without some.
A prolific author, journal keeper, letter writer and poet, Merton lived in the abbey of Gethsemani in the Kentucky woods. He was approaching 50 when he retreated to a hermitage; perhaps it's not coincidental that as I approached 50, I ran to a mountain, too.
Merton was obsessed with a central issue for our time -- figuring out how to live, trying to forge a life of balance, purpose and meaning. I've grown to share his obsession, his belief that life demands a lot of tinkering, and requires people to give birth to themselves not just once, but over and over.
Central to much of Merton's writing was the idea of these journeys, powerful images of seeking and traveling. The journey of the soul -- his term -- is to me one of his most important notions. It has enormous moral force and potent appeal to us wretched pilgrims as we struggle to find direction, to figure out what to believe, to incorporate some measure of spirituality and peace into our frantic lives.
On my own journey, in the years since I stared into those monitors, my life changed more radically than I had imagined.
I underwent years of psychoanalysis, became a writer, and swore never to work for a large institution again. Shedding ambitions, friends and colleagues of 15 years, I left the world of offices, annual evaluations, meetings, suits and expense accounts behind for good.
The world I entered -- the life of a suburban parent and solitary author -- could not have been more different. I crossed a vast cultural and social divide in months, from barking orders in a high-tech control room to holding up in the attic of my house trying to write and sell a novel, keeping one eye on the clock so I never missed a carpool.
Had I a realistic idea of what a writer's life would really be like, I would have thought a lot longer and harder.
But the point was, I began one year a big-deal producer and ended it at home, fielding calls about playdates from the other Moms, learning the ways of supermarkets, and sitting in front of an early primitive Apple computer at the dawn of the Digital Age clacking out the story of a network taken over by a heartless conglomerate.
So began the wildest ride of my life.
But as I turned 50 in the summer of l997, even before I stood on that mountain, I already suspected that I needed to take another trip, even if I didn't really know why.
A decade, seven books and countless articles later, I was driving up the New York State Thruway, my heart pounding like some eager traveler about the hit the road again.
Change, I remembered all too well, is risky and frightening. Much as you flail around seeking help, when it's all said and done, there is only one genuine source of inspiration, courage and determination -- that's you.
In fact, running to the mountain, another spiritual adventure, proved even more frightening than the first. A decade of shocks, disappointments, successes and defeats had accumulated since the last trip. If I had a heightened sense that one could successfully change one's life, being a writer had taught me time and again that rejection and failure were even greater possibilities. The first time, I'd leaped more or less blindly into the void. This time, I had a sense of what awaited me.
Only recently has it occurred to me that recounting this ongoing trek might be interesting or useful to others. But because so many people have embarked on journeys of their own -- of all sorts, from embarking on parenthood or divorce to changing a career and facing the end of life -- it may be worth telling.
E-mail jonkatz@slashdot.org with questiosns or comments.
If you want to purchase this book, head over to Amazon and help Rob and I pay rent.
So what have *you* done? Other then read articles (clearly labled as to what they contain and who wrote them I might add) that you don't like and therefore don't pertain to you then whine and complain like a child that you don't like them and wah, sniff, he shouldn't be here and make the bad man stop, mommy... :P btw, that earlier question, the one about what have you done, etc. was retorical, I really wasn't giving you an invitation to toot your own horn about whatever it is you have done for OSS or anything else for that matter...
Look, For you and all the other idiots that complain about Katz, I said it before and I'll say it again, noone came to your 'puter and forced you to read a Katz posting or a post by Hemos about Katz or anything else on slashdot for that matter. If you don't like it, don't read it. Thats what Titles are for, they tell you whats in a posting *before* you read it. I for one, like Katz's articles, and plan on buying his book. For my own amusment or just to piss you off, I haven't decided yet...
-deech
Run. I like water. Push My rutabaga.
Although Katz's writing style tends to grate on my nerves occasionally as another example of cliche' writing style, he does sometimes have interesting stuff to say. Otherwise, those posting reply upon reply about Katz's ineptitude should admit that they only read his stuff to savor The Joy of Flaming. He's not the best writer I've seen; he's also by /no/ means the worst. Slashdot may not be the most appropriate forum, precisely /because of/ the nerd-oriented and tech-saavy community to whom he's writing. But hey, he does this on a volunteer basis, and we should give him some credit for that; not to mention that we obviously keep reading his stuff, as the comments attest to.
/I'm/ not doing it either.
/all/ "News for Nerds," and I love Linux to death as much as the next Slashdotter. But there's more to being "an insider" (although I was skeptical when i read that as well) than writing code. Katz /may/ be able to increase the visibility of the Linux (and additional OSS) OS, and he's helping in that way; and those of us who love the functionality of Linux and /use/ it can be just as suppportive via word-of-mouth explanation and the willingness to help newbies get started as those who code up a storm and submit patches. He may be a different sort of insider, but we don't reject Rob and Jeff as outsiders, do we? The entire concept of Slashdot is on community participation, just like OSS, and such members/leaders are just insiders on a different level.
Considering that the articles written for this site are free, we could probably cut him/CmdrTaco et. al. at break for posting a book excerpthere-- why not grant him the press. I agree, however, that in general he's writing on a different level than a fair number of Slashdotters (or that they/we can appreciate.)
I find it fairly annoying to see, time and again, people rejecting Katz or other non-coders off-hand because they haven't physically contributed to
Linux, in the form of documentation, code or the like. There are probably more than enough Anonymous Cowards out there to tell me that that's what it's all about, and that I'm only bitter because
Not so.
Slashdot is not just about Linux-- it's about
--Anneke
"Real women use Linux"
--Anneke
"Real Women Use Linux"
/. is not a "Linux only, OSS only" news site. Read the title: "News for nerds...stuff that maters".
I've said this before; it's important to pull your head out of the sand once-in-a-while, and take a look at the big picture. I really like Katz's writing, not because it's technical, but because it's insightful. If I wanted to read something technical, I'd grab an O'reilly book.
An offtopic slashdot article is an oxymoron.
Where did this close mindedness come from? What are we, a private country club? How do you define "one of us"?
I say that Katz most definitely is one of us based on his interest in free software and its implications on society. That he is spending the time to try to learn to use Linux first hand is an even bigger indication that he's one of us.
I find Katz's articles some of the most interesting at slashdot because I've also considered the role of free software in remaking our society. It definitely can be argued that a large portion of geek community is concerned with things like freedom and privacy, two topics which he's written about in the past.
I like that he's a "real person" and not just a one-dimensional geek. As another slashdot community member, I don't want you to speak as a "proud member of the community". I'm embarrased by your exclusive ideas about who "belongs".
Where did this close mindedness come from? What are we, a private country club? How do you define "one of us"?
I say that Katz most definitely is one of us based on his interest in free software and its implications on society. That he is spending the time to try to learn to use Linux first hand is an even bigger indication that he's one of us.
I find Katz's articles some of the most interesting at slashdot because I've also considered the role of free software in remaking our society. It definitely can be argued that a large portion of geek community is concerned with things like freedom and privacy, two topics which he's written about in the past.
I like that he's a real person and not just a one-dimensional geek. As another slashdot community member, I don't want you to speak as a "proud member of the community". I'm embarrased by your exclusive ideas about who belongs.
I'm happy to report that since this excerpt was posting, the sales ranking on Amazon.com of my book went from 9,000 to about 200. That's a phenomenal jump in two hours, and a testament to the punch of /. and the people who hang out here.
I'm very happy the excerpt was printed here -- I really fought for that to happen -- and that a percentage of all these sales are going back to Jeff and Rob and the site.
When we talk about empowerment and OSS, this is writer's version of that in action...skipping the machinery of hype to take a book directly to the people who might want to buy it. Very kewl. Many thanks to those of you e-mailing me and buying it. And thanks to to the flamers (I always think of those German fighters in WWII) who give all work a bit of spice. But this is really quite amazing.
jonkatz@slashdot.org