Archive for July, 2009
Feminism shows up in the funniest places
Posted by Nav in Pop Culture, Rambles on July 31, 2009
Here, from Blogulator, an animated pitch for a sitcom called “A Fat Wife” that features a plump woman with a ‘surprisingly’ hot, successful husband. Get it? It’s like, the inverse. Clever, witty stuff.
The Electronic Book: More Through Less
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading on July 31, 2009
Because life is so utterly elusive all the way down to the end, you have two basic choices if you want to say anything about it. You can say a lot, too much even, and be satisfied that at least you’ve dumped as much clutter on the matter as you could. Or you can withhold, take little tiny pecks at the thing, and be satisfied that the gaping silences are doing the job. -Morgan Meis
Raymond Carver always made the latter choice. Or so we thought. As I’ve mentioned before, it turns out what we believed to be Carver’s style was actually the combination of Carver’s initial ideas and the ruthless editing of Gordon Lish, who not only cut Carver’s stories by up to 50%, but also often asserted his own style on them in the process.
Now, from this piece in the Times Literary Supplement, we know that certain stories from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love are being rereleased by the author’s spouse in a form closer to Carver’s initial drafts [via]. As someone with a deep attachment to both Carver’s work and his style, my reaction to this careens back and forth between “I must read them now” and “I must pretend these don’t even exist”.
But a discussion of the elusiveness of ‘the real text’ is coming at the right time. Despite all the competing visions of what the electronic book should be, one common hope for the ebook is that it will be adaptable, editable, ‘annotatable’ – a constantly shifting vision, unfinished and forever incomplete. At the same time, this utopian ideal always sounds less appealing when applied to fiction. To pick the extreme example, what if Shakespeare went back and had Hamlet neatly and heroically dispense with Claudius? It wouldn’t simply be different; it would be an entirely different play.
But what is the ground underneath our fear of changing texts? We have this historically groomed affinity for fixed stories, partly, I’d guess, because stories are how me make sense of our lives. Change those stories enough and you’re asking people to make sense of themselves again. Regardless of what you think about the issue, it means the fear is understandable: the ways we understand our lives are at threat of being under constant revision.
But, rather than only talking about significant change to texts – where a character or plot event is radically altered – what Carver’s example shows is that editing can open up space; when things are taken away, we also create the new. Whether you like Carver’s stories after or before the edits, his ‘post-edited’ stories work because of the yawning gaps of possibility and imagination that lies pregnant between the words. What if the adaptable novel or story weren’t about a re-writing of key moments or characters, or about a continual wiki-style augmentation and addition, but a paring down of explication so as to open up imaginative possibilities?
The metaphor always is: a text is never finished, it is always being rewritten every time it is read. What if, like so many things in our connected age, technology made the metaphor manifest? And it did so by paring down texts to open them up to more and more ways of reading. To wit, the less you say, the more your reader can imagine.
Will ongoing editing of fiction work in a manner where certain structural and ‘factual’ elements of a story are generally left intact, but others are tweaked, not to change the story per se, but to open up other possibilities of interpretation? After all, there are many books in which readers ask “well, I wonder if the narrator was actually insane” or “maybe that character was a figment of that other character’s imagination”. What if authors picked up on those re-readings of their work and, rather than re-imagining and re-writing the stories, made changes in order to re-frame the appeal of certain interpretive frameworks?
What if the emphasis of the electronic book was always to produce more readings by showing less?
Apparently, Jon Hamm Agrees With Me
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Pop Culture on July 29, 2009
Hey, remember my whole schtick about how I love Mad Men so much because it’s like witnessing the birth of ‘late-capitalist’ culture? Listen to what Jon Hamm has to say on the topic at a recent press event:
A reporter followed up with an observation about “Mad Men” reflecting the classy ’60s. Hamm had plenty to say about that.
“Buddy, I don’t know if they had class back then. I can send you a couple of links of stuff where guys are berating their wives for making their coffee badly. What I think happened in the ’60s is I think irony happened. And the idea of selling non-earnestly became cool. And obviously that’s not a mistake that that’s when the baby boomers started getting 18. We’re seeing a lot of it now, we’re seeing these cool hipsters, man …
“You can’t tell 18-year-olds anything. … That’s what happens. The irony happens. And it’s cool to be in a not-cool place. Get it man? And so that’s what the big shift was that our guys are trying to figure out.”
I mean, it’s a little clumsy and unclear, but… has Jon Hamm been reading contemporary cultural critic Frederic Jameson?
Owen Pallet at Hillside: ache as the storm washes over you…
I can’t embed this video, so you’ll have to head over to NOW to watch a video of Owen Pallet, a.k.a. Polaris Prize winning act Final Fantasy, play a new song at the Hillside festival while a summer storm sweeps in. As the crew tries to get him to stop and come off stage, the storm grows, the lightning flashes intensify and the song just gets better and better. Incredible.
An 8-Bit Film
Posted by Nav in Video Games on July 28, 2009
Via Offworld, what I suppose is retro-machinima: a short 5 minute film called The Adventures of Ledo and Ix done in the style of earyl-nineties video games. It’s being screened on McSweeny’s DVD Magazine site. (Yeah, who knew?). It’s funny and – well, poignant would be pushing it too far – but it’s certainly interesting.
In only slightly related news, I miss the way 8-bit pixels look on VGA monitors the way some people miss the crackle of a record.
“I’m not sure I want to read books on a tablet. But a magazine…”
Posted by Nav in eBooks, Electronic Reading on July 28, 2009
So, everyone is chatting about Nicholas Baker’s 6300-word takedown of the Kindle in the New Yorker. While the piece makes some valid and clever critiques (on the screen: “This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon?”), you can’t help but feel that, after having written a glowing, unexpected paean to Wikipedia, Baker is just becoming good at upending expectations. As everyone worries about Wikipedia or praises the Kindle, Baker swoops in and says “not so fast!”.
The timing was interesting, though. The Apple Tablet rumour mill is churning at that breathless, slightly insane pace than only Apple can conjure. With murmurs of an electronic bookstore to accompany its launch, people were ready to say the Kindle was just an intermediary step, a blip until the the true masters of digital media revolutions stepped into the fray. Already, before the existence of the device has even been confirmed, it’s a Kindle-killer.
I don’t know whether I want to read books on a tablet with an LCD screen – and I genuinely mean that I don’t know. I assumed I would never read 6300-word New Yorker articles on my phone but, to my surprise, it works for me, and it works well. But an entire book on a backlit screen? One that, quite literally, does hundreds of things, from being a remote control to a game board to a movie screen? I’m always open to technological change, but I have enough trouble concentrating as it is. This seems suspect to me.
But entirely by chance, yesterday I remembered to check Wag’s Revue, on online literary magazine that has a lovely aesthetic, one that melds a bit of paper and web culture. After browsing the table of contents, I was really keen to read Lili Wright’s essay “The Country I Came From“. But as I sat down to, I realised I didn’t want to read this on my desktop monitor; it didn’t feel right. This was the sort of thing I wanted to read while lying back on a couch or sitting on a patio. I’m not even sure if the site would work on an iPhone, but if it did, the type would certainly be too small to read. Here, it seemed, was a new form in need of a new delivery mechanism.
Of course, in light of the Apple rumours, it was impossible not to think: what would this online magazine be like as an experience on a 9 or 11″ tablet? Well, you’d get:
- a fixed screen-size so that magazine articles were not only easy to read, but page layouts could be standardized. Wag’s could maintain its design but be far more user-friendly.
- unlike current e-ink technology, you would get full colour, and crisp, vivid graphics. The design of a magazine would be emphasised again, but in a new way, one that would also include usability as a key part of its ethos.
- easy page turning: like an iPhone, you’d just swipe your finger.
- and perhaps just as importantly, an online magazine store – possibly even paid magazine aggregators which would collect articles from various sources and put them together into your own personal magazine. RSS Readers are, after all, very ugly.
To me anyway, that sounds great. If the magazine has always been that intermediary between newsprint and the book, between what was once the ‘immediacy’ of the daily and the deliberate slowness of a novel, then perhaps it is most ideal to make the transition to the mobile web.
And I think the magazine has been overlooked in the past few years. While we know they’re disappearing, they certainly haven’t made as large a splash as the decline of the newspaper. But as the newspaper and its physicality starts to seem anachronistic, the cultural analysis central to the magazine doesn’t feel quite as obsolete. Don’t we all still turn to big, long New Yorker articles to reframe the debates we are constantly having in micro on our blogs? In the unending rush of both opinion and information, the magazine still has a cultural function to perform.
So bring on the tablet, and forget ebooks for the time being. Let’s think about the e-magazine.
Kurt Cobain is spinning in his grave. Well, good.
There was a time that this video, in which Cherri V samples “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in an R&B-inflected pop song, would have made me scream “sacrilege!”. No longer. Not only is it hard to hold Cobain in a sort of reverence any more, to take umbrage with this would just ‘feel wrong’ – you know? It somehow seems that to say “oh my God, I can’t believe they did this to my youth” wouldn’t just be about nostalgia – it would be historically out of place. Can’t explain why I feel that way though. Anyhoo, sorta’ fun catchy song. [As if you had to ask, via]
By the way, if you haven’t seen Cobain documentary About a Son, I highly recommend it. As a friend who jut watched it this weekend said: “1) It’s really well done; 2) I’d either forgotten or never realized just how much he hated people”.
The Philosophy of the Screen
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Culture of Technology on July 26, 2009
Some random thoughts about knowledge and its forms on a Sunday morning. If you’re bored of this stuff, skip to point 6 – I think that’s new-ish.
- The book is an attempt to understand the world by producing linear narratives. This is predicated upon two things: first, the possibility of a singular perspective from which to write; and secondly the coercive effect of narrative itself that asserts the possibility of a singular or unitary reception. To make a story of something is to say “look, this is how it is”. The linear nature of narrative, the fact that you have to follow along, ‘bring yourself to it’ is part of the way that it convinces you of its argument; it makes you part of it, it ‘produces you as its reader’.
- This isn’t going anywhere. The need to weave together numerous strands of a complex situation in order to render it comprehensible and manageable will still be vital, largely for the reasons that narrative has been so historically important: it doesn’t just weave bits of information together, it weaves people(s) together. Whether or not it is produced in the form of ‘the book’ or ‘the ebook’ (or the s-book or the iff-book) will remain to be seen. What is certain that the political need for the narratival mode of thinking will remain. That said, with the arrival of the screen, a new challenger has appeared.
- Yet, at the same time, the movement from the page to the screen is about more than about technological advancement or convenience. After all, the screen is: adaptable, ever-changing, never-static and, rather than being underpinned by the narrative of the book, is predicated upon the database or the network.
- So, the non-linear, constantly changing nature of the screen and its system of thought makes certain assumptions about knowledge. First, the wiki-like nature of screen knowledge is based on the idea that no singular, unitary analytical perspective exists. It is impossible to provide a comprehensive, complete vision of a given topic, so the aim is instead to provide an entry point that, quite literally, scatters off in an infinity of directions due to hyperlinks. The condensing of forms of information is not because we are happy with shorter, less robust anaylses now, but because our interpretive perspective has been explicitly fractured and made multiple.
- Similarly, the adaptability of the form also means that no singular mode of reception is possible. You cannot control how people receive your ideas because you cannot – and could never – control how they will read them or what they will do with them. All you can do is provide someone with one fragmented fraction of a kaleidoscope.
- These two modes of thought will exist in a constant tension, and will do so for more than just reasons of convenience. Instead, it will be about politics. Mikhail Bakhtin once argued that language use is governed by two forces, the centripetal and centrifugal. The centripetal force is the social pressure that pushes language toward one interpretation and mode: the standard, ‘normal’, accepted version. Centrifugal force scatters language, creating difference and dialects, fracturing language. Something similar will, I think, develop in the competition between narrative and network knowledge. Narrative will be employed to string together knowledge into compelling visions: “this is the future of our nation for reasons x, y and z”. Network knowledge will be used to fracture and reframe: “these are the underpinnings of the idea of ‘a nation’ and this is why they must change”. This will not be about philosophy; this will be about power.
- There is not an exclusive connection between networks and screens and narrative and paper. It is simply that there is a relationship of knowledge established between modes of expression and particular ways of thinking. The network-y book or narratival web site are both equal possibilities.
“Instead of talking to our computers, we’re typing on our phones”
Posted by Nav in Uncategorized on July 25, 2009
Proving once again why those handsome fellas at Snarkmarket are my new man-crushes, Tim has a great post up that thinks through recent changes to literacy that, rather than falling into the usual dichotomies – “kids can’t read no more!” vs. “down with printed words! long live video!” – instead thinks about the changing dynamic between the oral and the literate:
This is where most of the futurists got it wrong – the impact of radio, television, and the telephone weren’t going to be solely or even primarily on more and more speech, but, for technical or cultural or who-knows-exactly-what reasons, on writing! We didn’t give up writing – we put it in our pockets, took it outside, blended it with sound, pictures, and video, and sent it over radio waves so we could “talk” to our friends in real-time. And we used those same radio waves to download books and newspapers and everything else to our screens so we would have something to talk about.
But rather than asserting a fundamental primacy of writing, unchanging and universal, writing is now changed. It’s more than just our awareness of language’s constant slippages, the fact that when I say “Wow, this Lil Wayne album is sick”, I could mean one of at least two things. Instead:
This is the thing about literacy today, that needs above all not to be misunderstood. Both the people who say that reading/writing have declined and that reading/writing are stronger than ever are right, and wrong. It’s not a return to the word, unchanged. It’s a literacy transformed by the existence of the electronic media that it initially has nothing in common with. It’s also transformed by all the textual forms – mail, the newspaper, the book, the bulletin board, etc. It’s not purely one thing or another.
This seems key: that the experience of reading is not simply different on the screen and the page – it isn’t that paper is simply the linear antecedent of the web. Instead, writing remains forever changed by the web as it simultaneously alters the text that appears on screens as screens alter the text that exists on paper. And that isn’t good or bad necessarily. It just kinda’ is. As argued by Walter Ong – who Tim quotes at length in his post – once you make the transition from the oral to the literate, there isn’t any going back. This, I think, is sorta’ the same thing.
Anyway, I highly recommend you read the full post. It is, as always, smart and a pleasure.
Waxy’s Metaphor for the Web
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Theorizing the Web on July 25, 2009
By now, you’ve probably heard of the Associated Press’ highly controversial attempts to lock down its content. In classic style – and, it must be said, with classic style – Andy Baio has crafted a charming response. Rather than a clever blog-post outlining everything that’s wrong with AP’s desire to control the spread of information, Waxy has gone the other route and chosen to produce what I see as a metaphor for the situation: he’s made a Tumblr that aggregates the AP’s own RSS feeds.
What I love about this is how it works as a symbol. First, even though I have no programming skills, I know that it only took Andy 5 minutes to pull this together, which suggests the ease with which this kind of thing happens. While it’s true this particular site uses the AP’s feeds, it isn’t hard to imagine someone pulling a certain set of information from a more scattered, dispersed set of sources using custom feeds or crawlers. So on the one hand, the Tumblr works as a metaphor for the aggregative power of web technologies to sift and collect information and put it together in one place. To attempt to prevent this is to turn the web into a slow, electronic version of a printing machine, linear, structured and hierarchical.
On the other hand, having the site on Tumblr is also rather neat, as it works as symbol for what I’ll call the disseminative power of the web. Tumblr, perhaps more than most platforms, thrives on the idea and primacy of ‘the network’. In fact, when I try an envision Tumblr as a network, I often end up with visions of 3-D matrices in my head. It’s a bit like a machine – it’s the constant interaction of all the parts that makes it work, and Tumblr is much the same, as posts ricochet and replicate almost endlessly through the act of ‘reblogging’. To invoke Baudrillard, the network precedes the individual instance. To put something on Tumblr is to, symbolically at least, have it infinitely replicated, and infinitely reproducible. This is true for all the web, but I find Tumblr is a concentrated version of this idea, so… I likes.
Thus, Waxy’s delightful ‘middle-finger-in-the-form-of-a-Tumblr’ works as a lovely metaphor for the dual and always-present aggregative-disseminative power of the web. You can gather information from disparate sources and then scatter it in a profoundly non-linear, non-hierarchical fashion, at both ends of the equation. There is no starting point and no end point – only the circulation of bits of information. So, while Baio hardly needs any more kudos, good on him for both the literal and symbolic effects of his artistic, imaginative use of programming and its implementation on the ‘tubes.
