When we were in college, we knew a couple of women who had a perfect bar game for getting rid of unwanted attention. One of them would start to tell a story, and the other one would would pick it up and tell it for a while, and then the first would jump back in and change it a little. It always started "So there we were in," and it was always completely false. The point was to talk really fast, and create a narrative and a sense of community that excluded the smelly bozos they didn't want to talk to. We're sure that this isn't the type of collaborative storytelling Christine has in mind, she's going for something a little harder--how to invite community in, but maintain a clear narrative that's specific to an organization. She's not the only one thinking about this. Ed has a post on Malcolm Gladwell's recent New Yorker story about dog training, and how it relates to organizational leadership.

When the New Yorker finally awoke from a '50s induced slumber, put its monocle to its eye and noticed it was the '90s they hired Tina Brown to completely remake the magazine and boost circulation. That wasn't a completely failed experiment, but we thought the unwillingness of the magazine to actually embrace change was epitomized by the fact that the first piece of fiction in this brand-new era was written by John Updike. A man who, we're sorry, is pompous and boring and utterly dreary. Run, Rabbit! The hell away from his books! Ed Rants has a couple good posts on the literary "establishment's" war on any kind of fiction that dares address someone other than middle-aged, upper-class, adulterous white-guys. If there was a way to flick on a lighter and raise it above our heads in appreciation on the web, we'd be doing it now.

Part of what annoys us about high-brow fiction is exactly that--it's high-brow. You're supposed to appreciate it intellectually, to nod and "Hrmmm" over its lucid insights and crafty metaphors. Frankly we like our writing a little more like this plane landing, even if it does mean we'd have to change our shorts.

And sometimes fiction seems inadequate for the situations we create for ourselves. Kokochi has a very touching recap of her pregnancy, which is 180 degrees away from the cringworthy work of our (and Ira Glass', and your) past.

Pic from Civic Center's post on the SF Opera Outdoors!