Douglas Barone
Douglas Barone
A Post-postmodernist with Objectivist leanings, fighting to catch up with his art after serving time as a capitalist oppressor of the people.
Doug Barone retired from corporate life after 20 years in the finance industry and is fooling everyone into thinking he is a writer. Having been a corporate strategist, finance executive, and IT executive he has found almost nothing of use to him from those years except the zany people and crazy stories that no one in their right mind could ever dream up. He uses these real life experiences in his work and this separates him from other writers who never really worked a day in their lives either.
His work, his prose fiction, is focused on power, its entanglement with emotional fulfillment, the impact of institutional concentrations of authority, and our struggles in the space created between. It deals with the ontological-deontological tension of existence in a post-postmodern world, where ideas have re-emerged as vastly powerful things even in the simple acts of everyday life. Sometimes his work allows just a bit of the mystical to cross over into reality, breaking the barriers of perception, heightening a sense of the possible.
Since this is all antithetical to the held narrative of our time, he fully expects to be pilloried by the academic left as well as the religious right, and looks forward to every lashing.
If Mark Twain Had a Laptop
Are we better off with all the writer’s and researcher’s tools on our PCs?
I look down at my MacBook’s desktop, and staring back at me is a monster. A jumble of incomprehensible and expanding piles of electronic icons spill and shuffle around as if the sorter cubbies on top of a roll top desk had just collapsed. I think, if Mark Twain had a laptop this is what it would have looked like.
The nice thing about the physicality of books, printed pdfs, and paper journals is their hard edged presence and volume. Having them piled up around you reminds you of things; like how much you’ve done, and how much you need to do. That volume of paper communicates what you have to do, and more importantly, it gives you a gauge of what you can do.
So where does that leave Sente, Zotero, Pages, EndNote, OneNote, DEVONThink, Together and Journler...