Endless Knots

Benjamin Eitan Israel, 7'11, 1:02 PM EDT July 28, 2007

Samara Shapiro and Matt Israel's first son, born an hour ago!

Benjamin Eitan Israel

Photo by Priscilla Harmel

Grandparents on the mother's side: Priscilla Harmel and Alan Shapiro
Grandparents on the father's side:  Stephen and Beth Israel

Aunts on the mother's side: Michal and Ava
Uncle and aunt on the father's side: Jesse and Karen

Waiting

The phone rang at 6:30 this morning. "Samara's in labor and we're on our way to the hospital," my son-in-law Jay said. Samara is our "third daughter," the best friend since birth of Miranda, Jay's wife who happens to be our first daughter. Samara's mother and I were pregnant together thirty years ago, gave birth within thirteen weeks of each other, and the two girls have lived intertwined lives ever since. This photo shows Samara hugging Jeff, father of Miranda, husband of mine, just seconds after "Sammy-hara," as Jeff has always called her, told us she was pregnant last December. Samara's in labor now, "pushing," a text message read about two hours ago, and I am going slightly crazy.

Virtual Team Questionnaire from Croatia

Over the years, we've received scores of requests from graduate students around the world seeking help with their research on virtual teams, networks, and collaboration. In the past two years, there has been a sharp upturn in those requests. Yesterday, we received this note from Ernest Cutuk:

I am a master's student at the Graduate School of Economics & Business University of Zagreb, Croatia conducting research on virtual teams. The thesis' title is “Managing virtual teams in the project environment".

Should you have five minutes time, I would like to ask you to answer on questions listed in the questionnaire that you will find in the attachment and send it back to me via e-mail address: [email protected]   

If you would like to receive the final result of the questionnaire, please be so kind to send me your e-mail...

If you'd like to participate in Ernest's research (we are), please read on to the jump page here to fill out his questionnaire. And...I encourage other students to send their surveys as well. If they're legit, we'll post them and we hope that you all will publish your findings back here too. Good luck, Ernest!

GOD IS DEAD - #10 in Boston!

Ron Currie, Jr's God is Dead is #10 on the Boston, Mass, bestseller list, proving, once again, the books and writers profiled on Endless Knots are...bestsellers! What this also means, Mr. Currie, is that you're next up for the famous Endless Knots interviews. And, today, the British newspaper, The Guardian, publishes a long and thoughtful review of the book, comparing Ron to Raymond Carver, whom he regularly cites as one of his greatest influences, and, of course, Kurt Vonnegut (who also went by Jr for much of his early career). Having had the very good fortune of hosting the first book party for Ron's book, I am especially thrilled to see these great new developments. Now, readers, go buy the book and post back what you think. I'm waiting.

Sting and I

Tomorrow night, the Green Monster at Boston's sacred Fenway Park welcomes The Police, perhaps the only rock band in history to sing Arthur Koestler's thinking ("Synchronicity," their 1983 album). Koestler is how I learned about The Police, actually. In 1978, Jeff Stamps was just finishing Holonomy, his dissertation, when Koestler, the great systems theorist, invited him to his cottage in the English countryside. Jeff had drawn heavily on Koestler's work on holons, work that still undergirds much of our work. From then on, I noticed anything connected with Koestler...thus Sting.

Fast forward to 1995. Apple Computer (not Records) was taking its first steps toward creating a "global" software development organization. Doesn't sound like much today but it was one of the early experiments (during a non-Steve Jobs period) to create a seamless software organization across many countries and cultures. Steve Teicher, an Apple VP at the time, hired us to help.

Our book, The Age of the Network, had just come out. Books take a long time to write, which means countless hours listening to your own voice in your head. Thus, every writer has a method to prevent madness. For this book, Jeff and I used the same one: "Fields of Gold," Sting's luscious linger on nature and love. Over and over. Literally thousands of times. So many times that when we wrote the Acknowledgments, he got one: "Sting provided Fields of Gold, the background music."

Meanwhile, the Apple group had convened in Tokyo, where The Park Hyatt had just opened, thus deals available. So did we find ourselves in a hotel with Al Gore, then US vice president, Bill Gates, a dozen six-foot-tall, one-hundred-pound models, and ...

Steve Teicher, Pam Martin (project manager for the global group), Jeff and I were at breakfast in the hotel's main dining room (not the place where you have to make reservations). Just the plain old dining room. When all of a sudden, Pam grabbed my arm and screeched in a high whisper, "JESSICA! THAT'S STING OVER THERE!"

Indeed. Sting, two tables over, with three friends, the night after he'd performed in Tokyo.

And I had our book.

So I got up, thinking about how the sleeves of my sweater were too long, and how intrusive it was for me to be doing this, and how completely absurd I felt, when I found myself standing next to Sting, apologizing for intruding, explaining the background music, whereupon he took the book. "So I'm responsible for this," he said, and read the subtitle: "'Organizing Principles for the 21st Century.' I need this book. I was very disorganized in the 20th Century."

And thus began my career as Sting's tour manager, a brief but rewarding period.

(Did anyone believe that?) No, I turned it into fiction, or maybe, more accurately, faction, a story called "Sting and I."

Rules for Second Life

If you know what Second Life is, then this post's title makes sense -- and that would be 8 million of you (a mere fraction of my readers, of course). And if you've never heard of it, take a look: In short, it's an online environment where you can buy virtual land, visit virtual places, make virtual friends, and, in the past couple of years, conduct meetings, go to concerts, even listen to candidates hawk their wares.

Turns out that a bunch of biggies, including IBM, have been scooping up virtual real estate and building their own online environments. We did a quick survey of what's out there for a client last year and were surprised to find how many companies are playing with this technology.

Ever the experimenter, I joined and spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get my bearings and figure out how to "fit in." Having never played a video game beyond Frogger (oh, for those innocent days), I was a clumsy Second Lifer. Mainly, I felt like a rube. The "clothing" that comes with signing on left me feeling a lot like my grandmother must have when she stepped off the boat from Rotterdam onto Ellis Island. The previous immigrants had hip, imaginative appearances. I was from the Old Country.

But, alas, it's a generous world and a "woman" (she could have been a hermaphrodite, no way to tell, but her avatar was a woman) from Denmark (or Mars, again...) sent me a text message, offering me some hand-me-downs. Quickly, I looked a bit more like a native.

OK, back to The Rules. IBM has issued some guidelines for its 5000 virtual employees. Well, I guess they're actual employees participating virtually. From Rachel Konrad's article and with thanks to Eric Bedell's superb This Web Day for the pointer (hi, Eric!):

Endless Knots Interviews Eric Van Lustbader

Today begins a new irregular feature, Endless Knots Interviews... Here interesting people will respond to (hopefully) interesting questions. Keen readers may have already seen the episodic answers from our first interviewee, best-selling author Eric Van Lustbader, now a valued and frequent poster to this blog. I met Eric in late June, thanks to my high school friend and fine artist, Neelon Crawford. Click here for Eric's site. Here then, Endless Knots (EK) Interview #1, gathered up from Eric's (EVL) responses below, with great thanks to him for playing along.

EVL: I'll answer all reasonable and intelligent questions.  Just remember: I get to make those determinations!

EK: Aiming for the reasonable, Eric, as the intelligent may be beyond my ken, but here goes. In Agatha Christie's obit (don't remember where), she was quoted as saying she really wanted to be a concert pianist, not a mystery writer. You?

EVL: I always wanted to be in a rock'n'roll band. I spent 10 years in rock doing many other things (writing, producing, A&R, publicity, merchandising). I was even on stage with a couple of bands I went on the road with (Elton John, Mountain -- but that's another story)-- but that's as far as I got.

Anyway, strange to say, it's too public a life for me. My getting up in front of people constantly wpould surely lead to a mental breakdown!

"The Rise of the Social Operating System"

Nova Spivack, the wide-ranging thinker about matters Internet-ish, has an excellent post that categorizes the elements of the emerging "social operating system" on the web. Take a look:

In recent months we have witnessed a number of social networking sites begin to open up their platforms to outside developers. While this trend has been exhibited most prominently by Facebook, it is being embraced by all the leading social networking services, such as Plaxo, LinkedIn, Myspace and others. Along separate dimensions we also see a similar trend towards "platformization" in IM platforms such as Skype as well as B2B tools such as Salesforce.com.

If we zoom out and look at all this activity from a distance it appears that there is a race taking place to become "the social operating" system of the Web. A social operating system might be defined as a system that provides for systematic management and facilitation of human social relationships and interactions...

Who's your favorite writer?

When writers are interviewed, invariably they receive this question: Who is your favorite writer? Or, the variant, which was put to Ron Currie, Jr., just last week at a book party for God is Dead, his new book: Which writers influenced you the most? (Raymond Carver, Currie said first, and, by the by, he got an unusual rave in the Atlanta Constitution-Journal a few days ago.)

The answer changes for me as time passes. There was my Doris Lessing period, a time when I couldn't read enough of May Sarton, the winter when I read all of Edna O'Brien, the year when I got this question from a Boston Globe reporter who was asking "business people" what books they were reading: then, Mr. Chekhov.

After years of switching affections, for the past two my answer has remained steady: Roland Merullo. I've posted about Roland's work before.  I didn't know his writing until I attended Solstice Summer Writers, a workshop then in its first year, and which I signed up for at the very last minute (several posts below, including this one). I was working on a novel and needed a little strength training.

As things worked out, I was assigned to Roland's section and found his singular commandment about writing corresponding to my own: There are no rules in writing (decent grammar and proper spelling being the exceptions, Mom -- she was an English teacher). After the workshop ended, I read his In Revere, In Those Days and will likely never forget my mad enthusiasm as I thumbed away a message to him while on a train in Sweden, where I was working at the time. There's a tenderness in this book around the life challenge that has been my companion since a very young age, losing people I love unexpectedly, that sends a message to my tear ducts just thinking about it.

Letters from Oxford

The comments below sparked by the post, "Email is for old people," reminded me of a short piece about writing letters that I wrote a few years ago. While cleaning up our children's playroom, I found a trunkful of long, beautifully written letters, one for nearly every other day of the 1967-68 school year. During one of the most tumultuous times in US history, the letter-writers, including this very scribe, kept track of events. I got thinking about the loss of this lovely and very personal means of communication and wrote "Letters from Oxford."

Letters from Oxford

The girls had been gone for some years when my husband and I finally decided to tackle the erstwhile playroom. He said it couldn't be done.