Scale

I've been thoroughly enjoying the documentary film How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? about architect Norman Foster. 

There's a great passage in the beginning about the Hearst Tower (2007). As Foster himself outlined the challenge: "it's a very, very small tower amongst the most extraordinary collection of mega-towers. And how do you make this tower have a presence when it's physically so small?"

Sculptor Anish Kapoor has a fascinating insight into this question:

Scale – in a way – is not the same thing as size. Scale is a quantity of somewhat abstract proportions. It bears a relationship at one level to the body. But it bears a bigger relationship to the imagination. The way, if you like, the pyramids in Egypt do. They remain – whatever you do: you walk up them, you walk round them – they remain the scale they are. Which is somehow bigger than what they really are.​

I love that insight: that the successful artist is not having a conversation only with the objective circumstances of the world; but rather, more meaningfully, with the imaginations of their audience.​

​The Hearst Tower, New York City

Critic Paul Goldberger has called Foster "the Mozart of modernism"; and in the film's view of him – particularly in his restlessness with conventional decisions – he reminds of Steve Jobs: the inversion of the relationship between the decisions made for functional reasons and those for aesthetic; or, rather, the understanding that the functional is incomplete without the aesthetic.

The film does an good job of outlining Foster's particular sensibility: his striving for space; his sense of drama; his interest in sustainability; his global perspective; the relationship between the scale of his buildings, the world around them, and our own presence. "I believe that the infrastructure of spaces, connections, the public domain – the kind of urban glue that binds the buildings together – is more important than any one building." Well worth seeing.​

How to get an interview

A complete departure and absolutely nothing to do with Portishead, I promise; or even, particularly, books or music. I was going to call this post "how to get a job" but in truth it's more like "how to apply for a job," or, at best, "how to get an interview." Last year I posted several job positions in Random House of Canada's digital team; for one of them I received – over a 10-day period – over 80 applications. Only two of those, as far as I could tell, were automated responses; the rest all showed some signs of someone having read the job description, assembled a resume and cover letter, and made a decision to send them. In other words, they went to the trouble. But not all of them went to very much trouble, and not all of them put thought into reducing my trouble.

Since I just posted another position and found that I was steeling myself for the same experience, I thought I'd post my ideas on what a well-assembled job application should look like.

(Note to future applicants: you should be able to figure out who I am with a couple of minutes of Googling, which is the very, very least bit of preparation you should do before a job interview. And now that I've posted this, I will expect you to have read this before applying.)

So here are my pushy and opinionated tips for your application package. YMMV, obviously.

1. Remember that you're trying to get an interview

Your cover letter and resume are not there to get you the job. You have to do that on your own. You have to do it in conversation (more on that later). Your cover letter and resume are to get you into an interview – and perhaps somewhat to define the terms of that interview. When you're preparing your materials, and trying to reduce their length, ask yourself this question: will this piece of information get me an interview for this particular job? Yes, you might need to include that period of minimum wage work in a completely different industry to explain a resume gap (we all have them, nowadays), but you don't need four bullet points underneath to explain exactly what you did. Company, title, dates. Move on. For jobs or education or anything else with specific applicability to the job for which you are applying, no more than 3-4 bullet points to summarize the responsibilities of your role and highlight some specific achievements.

2. Keep it brief

Everybody gets so many applications for a job that sifting through them very quickly turns – despite anyone's best intentions – into "give me a reason to reject this application." We'll look for anything: spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, or just being bored (this is especially true in content industries; if you're applying for a writing/marketing job, you absolutely don't want to seem boring). The longer your letter/resume goes on, the higher the chance you'll make a mistake. Here's how you want it to go down: "this looks professional; he/she has pertinent experience; I've reached the end." There's no alternative action left to the hiring manager other than to set up an interview. Your cover letter – properly laid out like a letter with addresses and everything else in the right place – should not exceed a single page. Your resume should ideally not exceed one page; I personally dream of receiving one-page resumes but will settle for two. No more.

Here's how you successfully prepare a brief resume: somewhere (and LinkedIn can be that place) you store a full-length resume. Every job; and for every job a list of your main responsibilities and some key achievements.*

This is your 'master resume'. When you are applying for a specific job, you take this master resume and selectively remove non-applicable pieces. Now, you can't cheat: if only one aspect of your last job was applicable, but it was only 5% of your responsibilities, you can't remove everything else and give the impression that it was 100% of your responsibilities. And you may have to reword things slightly. But the point is that you are not re-writing your resume every time you apply to a job. You are editing it down to size.

That size is 1-2 pages.

* (Why highlight some key achievements? Because it demonstrates that, for you, work is not just showing up at 9am every day and executing some tasks. Rather, you understand that work is for the purpose of achieving things. This is a clue to prospective managers: you are the kind of person who can perceive objectives and align your tasks against those objectives. You are not a task drone. Capable managers dread managing task drones because they are time vampires and cannot participate in change without unleashing contagious anxiety germs into the team.)

3. Show that you read the job posting

This is basic. Don't say "this role" or "this position" in place of the job title. Don't say "Dear Sir/Madam" in place of the name of the hiring manager if it is something you can ascertain from the job posting or some simple detective work (i.e., Google). Don't say "your company" in place of the company in question. All of that shows that you have a generic letter/resume ready to send at the slightest opportunity. That's rude. It will only guarantee that you will not get an interview. Moreover:

4. Show that you thought about the job posting

Seriously. What is it that excites you about this role? Say it. This is what your cover letter is for. Is the job in an industry that is undergoing exciting change? If so: what is it, and why is it exciting? Is the job at an industry-leading company, or an underground boutique startup, or working with a particularly impressive team? Say so and explain why that appeals to you. By doing so, you demonstrate that you are thoughtful about the opportunity and your career, that you have the committment to do some research, and you allow your prospective employer to imagine how you might contribute to the team or the company. If your cover letter is all about you, and not at all about the position or the company or the industry, it's harder for a prospective manager to see how you might fit into the role.

5. Cut out all the top shit

We've all seen the resumes that open with 'Objective', 'Highlights', or 'Profile'. Please don't do that. Really. It's my #1 pet hate. I never, ever read it. Why? Because that isn't what I'm looking for in your resume. That's in your cover letter, where it exists in two or three sentences and doesn't convey the same bland set of meaningless qualities that everyone else touts. Maybe you are an "independent self-starter" or an "effective multitasker," but I'm afraid that these claims are going to be completely ignored because of their use by people who are emphatically not any of those things, usually don't realize it, but nonetheless claimed so at the top of their resume. If you genuinely do possess these qualities, I'm going to be able to infer them from the quickly summarized specific achievements in specific roles on your resume. If you led a set of specific process improvement initiatives with specific results in your last job, I'm going to know that you are an independent self-starter capable of working within and across teams with a results-orientated approach. Show, don't tell.

When I open a resume, I'm fairly quickly looking to get a sense of what you have done, not who you are. Your attitude, intelligence, and approach should all have come across (briefly!) in the cover letter. When I get to the resume, I really, really don't want to come across a trailer. Especially a boring one.

6. [Advanced tip] You know what? Instead, open with something like this:

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If you insist upon a summary at the top of your resume, then summarize in a visually coherent manner your experience. Solve the resume problem that, as its reader, I face: trying to figure out what the hell all this stuff is, when you did it, for how long, and how has led us to the current situation.

Now, as you can see, I have a spectacularly complicated professional history because I changed my mind a number of times and it took me until very very recently to find a single job that united my interests in software and writing. For quite a while I was doing several things at once. But if I can assemble this incoherent professional history into a clean infographic (I did it in garden-variety spreadsheet software, by the way) then you probably can too. (If anyone is really interested, I'll post a how-to guide another time.)

7. Resist the temptation to design your resume

Clean and well-organized, please. Clean segregation of distinct jobs or periods in your career. Specific dates (months helps). Most people put working experience ahead of education so that the current/last job is at the top, but if you've only recently finished school, that's fine; by all means put education at the top. (If you use #6 you'll pretty much solve the problem.)

Above, all remember this: resumes have one design problem to solve. That design problem is:

• How should this information be best laid out in order to clearly and quickly communicate it?

It is not:

• What can I do to ensure that my resume stands out from everyone else's resume?

Why not? Remember #2: I'm likely looking for the first possible excuse to put your resume down and move onto the next one. A really really good excuse would be that in order to understand your resume I needed to reorient my entire understanding of visual hierarchy or design conventions. Your task here is to make me think less, not more. You want your resume to look like a job application, not a Futurist manifesto.

So:

• Try not to use glaring colour schemes, background images, etc.
• Your resume should be no more than three colours.
• Two of those colours should be (1) black and (2) white.
• Clue: the pages should be white.
• A third colour may be used discreetly for accents (e.g. headings, dividing lines, etc).

The best-designed resume I have ever seen was put together by a young and talented intern who was applying for a full-time position. It looked something like this:

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See how clear that is?

• How should this information be best laid out in order to clearly and quickly communicate it?

Here's a rule of thumb:

If you are a design professional and you are applying for a design job, by all means spend a great deal of time thinking about the design of your resume. If you are not, avoid anything that might risk abominable personal branding exercises, clip art, and idiosyncratic attempts to reinvent our collective perception of time.

8. Send a single attachment

Oh, and that reminds me: I rather like the single-document pdf attachment. So you're including one file with your email (your email, by the way, should be a single sentence, something like "please find attached materials to support my application for the role of Web Analytics Specialist at Steamworks Analytics"). This attachment is a pdf; the first page is your cover letter (properly laid out) and the second (and maybe third) pages are your resume. This single document is wonderful because I can print it easily and quickly for myself or anyone else; pdf has the additional advantage of preserving your resume's coherent (see #7) layout and means it will display consistently on my laptop, phone, or wherever else I'm trying to open it.

9. Read the instructions

It the job posting asks you to include links that showcase your work, include links that showcase your work. Your best work. Ideally recently. If you don't have recent pertinent work: should you really be applying for this job? If it's a job that involves writing copy, you should probably be able to demonstrate that you can write copy, even if your current gig isn't writing copy.

10. Use a professional email address

When I say we end up looking for any reason to reject an application – see #2, above – this includes an email address like ilikemesomehoneyandfireworks@gmail.com or gina@iamasexyginbunny.com. Please.

Recording and uncertainty

There's a fantastic piece in the current New Yorker by Jeremy Denk, a classical pianist, on the practical and conceptual complexities of the recording process. The ways in which recording, at the same time as preserving -- ossifying -- a performance, also unsettles and erodes the artist's certainty and purpose:

The most maddening paradox of recording is that what you hear in the playback does not resemble what you're sure you played. You hear two tracks at once: what you desire and what you have produced. Notes dangle before you without their motivations, minus the physical struggle of playing them; my muscles twitch strangely while I listen. The microphone alters my interpretation, inevitably. In subsequent takes, I'm effectively talking back and forth to myself via an electronic ear, trying to find truth by trial and error. There are many places where I am not achieving what I want, others where I realize I don't know precisely what I want.

The full piece is behind an online subscription wall, unfortunately, but he also appears on the magazine's podcast.

Not Books, but Doors: Why eReading is a More Immersive Experience

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

I've been reading electronically -- phone, desktop (I know), Kobo, Kobo Touch -- for perhaps two years now, and I've come to the following conclusion as my reading habits have changed. Electronic reading does a better job of engaging the reader's imagination than print books do.

It's also, of course, a more physically pleasurable experience:

• Lighter
• Easier to operate (I'm talking about turning pages, and believe me no one is a better one-handed print page-turner than I am)
• Less likely to wake you up when you drop it on your face when falling asleep reading
• Not going to bedazzle you with glare when reading in bright sunlight (seriously, reading a good e-ink display beside a pool is a world-class experience)

But all of those are ultimately secondary. What eReading is really, really good at is letting you be a creative reader. Reading is the act of imaginatively interpreting -- reconstructing -- the work of an another person's imagination. That's subject to two sets of constraints: the range and ability of the author to express their imagination; and the range and ability of the reader to interpret it, which is to say, to creatively reimagine it on their own terms. Technology is not a neutral factor in that relationship. And electronic readers do a better job of relaxing the second set of those constraints.

Here's what I've noticed about my reading experience over the last couple dozen months.

1. I'm reading more.

Having a vast array of content to choose from means less reading time lost because I'm not quite in the mood for the book that I happened to bring with me. And that's exactly the point: I can read according to my mood -- not have to remember to bring a book strong enough to change my mood. Every time.

So, I'm better read -- but also have the ability to start reading something on a spur-of-the-moment suggestion. If I'm at a party and someone says, look, you have to read The Poisonwood Bible, I can start reading it on the bus on the way home instead of the Pretty Little Liars #9 that I was reading on the way there. This possibility, alone, makes me feel better read, because it's always within reach. The horizons of my imagination feel broader. (It doesn't hurt that the prices are usually lower.)

2. I'm far less tolerant of poorly written non-fiction.

Perhaps that's not quite fair: I'm far less tolerant of non-fiction that is written without a distinctive voice, or at the very least some concession to narrative structure. For all the improvements of scrolling and progress indicators, it remains much easier to skim a print book than an eBook. Which means I have to page through the eBook... and if it's boring I'd just as soon move onto something else. But on an eReader, the abandoned books aren't staring me in the face in some strange transfiguration of guilt and anxiety. In short: I'm in control of the reading experience -- unless the author is really, really good; unless they are actively contributing towards the mutual creative act.

Hanna from Pretty Little Liars

Theodore Dreiser

Perhaps we do lose something in that. "Great books don't promise to hold your attention," I remember an English professor once telling a class utterly bored by one of the masters of American literature (probably Dreiser), "but they do promise to reward it." I suspect that, in a future when electronic reading is the dominant manner of reading, authors who can't write well will not be able to release ideas slowly. (And if we don't read Dreiser, we'll all miss out on some of the more amusing fender-benders of American prose.)

On the other hand:

3. I can concentrate better

Somehow the flexibility of the form -- yes, the font size, the typeface selection -- means that I can get better terms in the reading relationship. I can take my glasses off but still read without having to hold the device a couple of inches from my face. It's less about the conditions that I must arrange in order to read, and more about how I can manipulate the content to suit me.

4. I don't feel like I'm carrying a book around

Because I'm not. I'm not carrying hundreds of books either. At a certain point, having more books than I could list made my device something less like a book, or a compendium, than a portal: a door. That was one of the thrilling discoveries of the first Kobo reader: it came pre-loaded with a hundred free books, which made it clear that this technology was not simply a more efficient distribution mechanism, but a gateway to limitless content. Wi-fi devices have absolutely helped with that too -- but they have kept the connection to the wider Internet obscure enough that I'm not prone to jump on Twitter or the web. Reading remains immersive, yet feels connected.

5. The books I have read feel closer to one another

And that sense of connection, crucially, extends to the books I have already read. Somehow the ability to have the complete works (well, not quite yet) of Faulkner, Didion, Murakami, and John McPhee in my bag, at all times, gives me a more holistic sense of my reading life than having them marooned, out of reach, on a bookshelf, where their valences are confined to the sequence in which I happen to have them shelved. The connections between these books are multiple and they continually expand as I -- by the sheer act of reading -- add to their company. Virtual shelves aren't the same as real shelves, and the books I have on my Kobo live in the same kind of unregulated relationships to one another than they do in my imagination.

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John McPhee: The Non-Portable Version

By amalgamating possibility, your aggregate reading experience, the range of your reading and your interests, electronic readers offer a sort of physical external representation of your imagination. They are a sort of auxiliary imagination. My Kobo Touch, after only a few weeks, houses hundreds of books and hundreds of annotations and highlights; it has measured and marked my progress through novels and essays (and, yes, I earned the insomniac badges along the way). It hasn't just been a device: it's been a companion.

Reading merges the content of the page with everything else you have ever read, through the filter of your imagination. It is a cumulative, messy process: it disintegrates the boundaries between ideas, times, places, people, events. It is a process of unseaming the constraints of reality; of unspooling it into the collective and personal reaches of the imagination. And the eReading device is by definition a much better metaphor for that process than physical books. Ideas collide, aggregate, pile into one another. They are sunk within you. They do not remain distinct.

Perhaps this is how the listeners to epic poetry once felt, as the stories that are now The Iliad and The Odyssey were released into the collective ether. Perhaps physical books were a transitional media.

So that's where I'm at. Admittedly other things have conspired to bring me there. I'm not at a point in my life where I still strongly feel the need to display my books around me as an expression of my refinement and taste, and in any event it's rare that a book changes me in the way of a Slouching Towards Bethlehem or Light in August: my imagination is more robust than it was when I was 21, and I've already discovered many of the books most likely to change me. What's more, the limitations of urban living have somewhat necessarily curtailed my ability to endlessly collect books.

But still: I've fallen out of love with shelves of trade paperbacks, and back in love with something that feels closer to the experience of reading itself.

Reading a physical book still retains its pleasures: there is absolutely something thrilling about a gorgeous hardcover, something that feels like a communion close to the author's intent. But that's exactly the point: physical books make you read on the author's terms; reading electronically takes place more on the reader's terms. I think that's a good thing. It makes reading more personal, more democratic, more controversial.

But it's a huge change -- and it could be a generation before authors catch up to it.

December appearances online and elsewhere

Delighted to have been asked to write a short guest post on 2009 in review for the BookNet Canada blog.

I also got a contribute some short recommendations for the wonderful folks at the Advent Book Blog.

Finally, the Oxford American's 2009 music issue is still on the stands, and it is a fine piece of reading, coming this year with no less than two CDs. It is, as usual, a fine list of contributors, among whose august company I was thrilled to pen a short piece on Memphis Slim's "No Mail Blues".

Twitter and Conference Rage

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

An interesting post by Michael Fienen about David Galper's keynote presentation at a recent HighEdWeb conference -- and the Twitter backchannel that resulted (it starts at 12pm).

Twitter allows two things to happen very well: mobs feed on themselves, and the slippery slope gets very steep and extremely slick. There’s also the snowballing analogy... Bottom line, there was a lack of respect for the topic, a clear void in researching the audience, and just bad presentational ability. A perfect storm, if you will. And once the tweeting started, it simply became more fun to be in the stream than put up with the presentation. In a way, it was less about being snarky towards the speaker, and more about amusing each other by sharing and exaggerating the pain.

We touched on this a few months ago: the idea that Twitter is, as yet, a social space largely unregulated by norms of behaviour. There are further thoughts elsewhere about this particular example and some possible lessons: are we moving from a model of passive consumption in conferences to one of active participation? Does the 'unconference' model so successfully employed by, for example, BookCamp Vancouver last week, provide more value to attendees? Has the burden changed from audiences (to pay attention to the presenters) to presenters (to better know their audiences)?