Dan Chaon wants to be an assassin.

Nick Antosca’s favorite sentence is from Salter.

Julianna Baggott calls writing “the daily practice of empathy.”

Bethanne Patrick explains how literature reminds us of our common humanity.

Michelle Haimoff says “the point of writing is to make the controversial beautiful.”

We also have an essay contrasting the adolescence of a first-world teenage boy with that of an embattled youth in Rwanda: “I Was 16.”

I recently posted about the 10 Best Books I Didn’t Read in 2011 and weighed in on the Amazon vs. Indie throwdown.

And I updated the submissions guidelines for writers.

Now I just need to redesign the whole site, finish the WordPress development, and everything will be dandy.

The task of rebuilding Identity Theory from the ground up is daunting because there are so many old stories — ten years’ worth — that are difficult to transfer to a more high-powered content management system, not to mention that the site contains a handful of multi-author blogs, substantial “orphaned” content, and dozens of photo galleries. (I also worry about losing the search placement we’ve built up through eleven years of backlinks, though I have some faith in 301s.)

This large-scale content transfer and redevelopment is such a complicated undertaking for a relatively minor literary journal — thousands of dollars of development work for a payoff that is at best questionable — that I’ve put it off for years, settling for minor patches to a sinking ship on the theory that people ultimately only care about the content (which is true, I hope).

I don’t believe, however, that you can produce a quality magazine-style website unless you can manage the content at least as well as a random blogger can manage a Blogspot blog. Since Identity Theory launched 11 years ago — before you could build a powerful online magazine in WordPress, Drupal and the like — it has paradoxically lagged behind the more recently launched journals in interactivity and ease of use.

With that in mind, here are some online magazines/literary blogs that have actualized many of the ideas I have wanted to put into place on Identity Theory over the years — and with very nice designs to go with them.

The Awl – Their motto: “Be Less Stupid.” I couldn’t “Be More Impressed.”

HTMLGIANT – I like the informality, visual feel and constant literary dialogue.

The Nervous Breakdown - Haven’t spent much time on this site yet, but when I found it I was like, “Hey that’s exactly what I envisioned years ago doing with Identity Theory if I ever had the time.”

Similarly, The Rumpus - Always has good stuff. Every day. Stephen Elliott has done a great job putting together a literary website that takes advantage of all the latest web technology.

Feel free to point me to other magazine websites using the latest publishing technology that will make me jealous. It motivates me to see what the new kids are doing, and I am excited about building Identity Theory into a fully functional site that could be even half as useful/informative/awesome as the sites listed above.

Imagine if after only a few days of meditating, he had said, “That was cool, now I’m gonna go drive around for a while, try every drug imaginable, meditate some more, write a bunch of rambling novels, get famous and drown myself in alcohol.”

According "Wake Up," Jack Kerouac loved dogs and "dogs loved him."

Then he would have turned out something like Jack Kerouac.

It turns out Kerouac wrote a little tome about his ancient alter ego called Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha, which I picked up at a used bookstore in Tennessee while on a not-totally-Kerouacian road trip this summer.

In the foreword to this long-lost religious fiction, Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman (a brilliant/awesome fellow actually) points out that Kerouac’s interest in Buddhism focused on the Tibetan/Indian sects of the religion that emphasize compassion. He wasn’t crazy about the Samurai-rigid, discipline-minded Far East Zen schools, which he referred to as “mean” when discussing it with a fictionalized Gary Snyder in The Dharma Bums.

I found this interesting as a reflection of Kerouac’s life as a whole. His writing is full of compassion. But from his Benzedrine-fueled “typing” binges to his zigzag-around-the-country lifestyle to his alcoholic demise, it’s even more full of compulsion. Which is of course what makes it greatly appropriate and essential American literature. We Americans are always confusing “freedom” with unadulterated compulsion.

Of the two values, which are of course not mutually exclusive, this is a country—a world—that generally neglects compassion and breeds compulsion. Even if you’re a reserved sort of person, you are constantly encouraged to be compulsive, prodded to buy things you can’t afford, advised to eat food that your body doesn’t need, told to do things you don’t want to do, surrounded by compulsive behavior. Compulsive activity is so ubiquitous, as Buddha (and probably the Beats) understood, that it’s hard to recognize when you’re being compulsive and when you’re being free and acting on your own conviction.

Buddha committed to the discipline necessary to conquer compulsion and develop real freedom. Kerouac intellectually understood it, but he couldn’t develop it for a variety of reasons—from pure genetics to having-Allen-Ginsberg-as-a-friend to the fact that his fame was built in part on glorifying compulsion. (As Goethe said, “Knowing is not enough.”) Even the most prominent American Tibetan Buddhist of Kerouac’s time, Trungpa Rinpoche, a friend of the Beats, was a helpless womanizing drunk, so it’s not like Kerouac had the healthiest mentor.

The above screenshot is from Hal Hartley's appropriately named film "Surviving Desire."

Which brings me to my next point. Can compassion be taught? I find a lot of times when I feel a sense of empathy for someone, the programming isn’t there to know exactly what to do. This is something I personally need to develop. I think it’s difficult because “the right thing to do” for someone who is suffering is rarely obvious. Perhaps when you have a well-developed compassion faculty, you just know. I definitely know people who are good at being compassionate. I admire them. I’m just not one of them.

The only time I can think of when a specific compassionate response is encouraged is when a major catastrophe is involved. When something like Hurricane Katrina or the Haiti earthquake happens, it’s usually followed by months’ worth of pleas for donations by Red Cross, MSF and the like. And that’s great, to give money, goods, blood, or time. All of that goes a long way to relieve suffering. It’s obvious, simple, everyone can do it.

But what about when an everyday individual is going through a hard time? Usually they’re encouraged to buy their way out of it, whether through overpriced (they have to pay for those ads somehow!) prescription drugs or some other quick fix that makes someone else an equally quick buck. We’re taught that America is a place of “personal responsibility.” Compassion in the public sector—like, say, trying to keep the cost of emergency health care down—is “socialist,” while striving for compassion in the competitive private sector opens you up to exploitation.

So, at least my view, the “personal responsibility” to be compassionate is truly personal, because very few people will help you nurture that value. Polite? Heck yes, you have to be polite to get ahead. You kill more flies with honey. Etc. Being “nice” is just a part of the daily routine. (Lots of suicide bombers are generally well-mannered, too, I’m sure.) But what about taking the time to enact positive change in other people’s lives? I think it’s quite rare to be encouraged to do that. I think it’s your personal responsibility to develop that capacity for yourself.

Back to our tragic hero: what drew me to Kerouac’s writing early on, as a teenager reading various pieces of the Duluoz Legend, was the the open-minded, open-roaded adventure. There was a quality that seemed pure in its clumsy, refreshingly unpackaged (of course it was packaged) spontaneity. In hindsight, though, I have gained a new appreciation for his compassionate depictions of the random characters he encountered on the road.

Unfortunately, as Kerouac’s life shows, compassion and adventure doesn’t always lead to happiness or enlightenment. You have to have the discipline to ward off those “demons”—to use an outdated but appropriate word—who try to convince you that compulsion and consumption are in any way comparable to actual freedom.

People call this NaBloPoMo. And while NaNoWriMo is an annual November event only, NaBloPoMo is really pretty much any month you feel like trying it.

The first three days of the month have gone smoothly. Today was a little tricky because it’s my b-day, but I still made a sliver of time to put together this post.

(I am not doing all my posts on one blog–I will be spreading the love to the various blogs to which I contribute on Identity Theory as well.)

The conclusion? “With content ranging from John Cusack’s views of torture to a wickedly satirical short story about a marketing consultant, IT defies demographic niches, and proves that you can do serious reading on a screen.”

Check it out over at: Burlington Resident Explores Identity Theory in His High-Profile E-Journal

This week’s issue features:

* an interview with author Tom Grimes, who, in addition to literary matters, puts forth the idea that America has “for years” been a fascist country, and claims that Kanye’s famous “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” outburst really only applies to poor black people.

* a piece of fiction written in a sort of chat-room + email format.

* a review of the Calamari Press reissue of Gary Lutz’s (very awesome) Stories in the Worst Way

* an essay on “empathy marketing”

Publishing multiple articles at once helps me appreciate the range of quality content being put forth by our contributors and editorial teams.

Speaking of which, we are looking for a new fiction reader.