A new piece of fiction, inspired (if that's the right word) by my muse Jenn Topper @revolucion0, who provided me a topic to share bile on and I just kind off riffed from there. Compositional soundtrack provided by Public Image Ltd.
* * *
A perfect day for a round over the golf course. Roiling grey clouds, a stiff breeze off the sea, that metallic tang of precipitation suspended in the air. Certain to clear out the cobwebs all right. Time for the full eighteen holes, or just the front nine? He would just have to see how things unwound. He donned his leather gloves and hoisted his golf bag over his shoulder like a soldier on the parade ground. Only the weight of it caused an imperceptible sag.
The Royal and Ancient course lived up to the venerable tradition implied in its name thank god. A proper links course using the natural features of a rugged coastal scarp, rather than pastoral landscape architecture commissioned to make Japanese businessmen feel at home. Unfortunately this did entail the Club rules were also hidebound by tradition. But today is Friday, within the first week of April, so he gets to break with stultifying tradition. It means he can play the course clockwise.
He exits the Clubhouse having signed in and having his credentials checked. Bona fide member, who would have thought given his family roots? Like all club members, he'd had to check his mobile phone in at the reception desk. One of the few real boons of the fustian rulebook. Golf was not to be relegated to a subsidiary of doing business. No deals cemented beneath horizontal sheets of briny rain, stood leaning on your club like a shooting stick, clad in ridiculous plus fours tucked into tartan socks thank you very much. People were gathered here just to play the game and no other purpose.
He marched past the first tee. Towards some shrub and high gorse just off to the left of it. The strap of his bag was beginning to carve a welt into the skin and he absently shifted it further away from his clavicle. He stepped daintily over the out of bounds rope and unshouldered arms with only a slight a purse of his lips indicating a release of taut breath. An insect disturbed from its pollen gathering, fretted around his shadowing mass. Its bombilation carried more conviction than the apologetic unzippering of his bag. Seven surgical scrub hatted clubs popped into view, like junior doctors crowding round to observe the operating table. Bumping and boring into one another as he delved in amongst them with a gloved hand. Reaching into the innards, to extract a thin metal tube. Feeding it upwards between the jealously jostling clubs, drawing free like a langorous rocket leaving its silo.
Next he almost had to thrust himself deep into the bag's interior as if he too were prospecting for pollen. But he emerged unscathed, bearing the stock which had nestled itself flat on the bag's floor. He brought the two metal planes together and snapped them into place within each other's receiving grooves. The other graphite clubs bowed their heads in mute acknowledgement. Mere cudgels, when this had an infinitely greater driving range.
He moistened his finger to determine the directionality of the wind. Pronouncing himself satisfied, he proceeded to remove the elongated loupe from his single breasted pocket. He brought it up to his eye and nonchalantly twizzled the shallow focus fluting. With a sudden surge, he craned his neck so that the scope was partitioning the sky. Crosshairs biopsying a little clump of grey-brown cirrus. The black outer frame around the lens curtaining off the rest of creation. Suddenly something prised open the circular screen and insinuated itself briefly across his vision. Just as the projectile threatened to pass from his line of sight, he locked on to it. A golf ball, with tightly turning revolutions. Another notch on the focus serrations and he could see its dimples, like the surface of the moon. Like the near symmetrical spacings of holes in the cardboard targets at the range. The ones he took home with him and hung up on threads of cotton. Just so as to filter and dice the light, creating lacerating chiaroscuro ribbons throughout his room. He retrained his eye to ground level just as the sphere plopped silently earthwards. The backspin carried the ball back past the hole as he secured the scope on to the rifle, his tongue just protruding from the corner of his mouth.
He relaxed into his stance and scoped the first green. The red pennant of the flag was billowing out away from the sea. Pointing him at the congregation before its blood red demand for sacrifice. Seemed to be a threesome. Who was going to make the cut and who wasn't? Simplicity enough, no less stacked than the voting for new Club members. Nominated and seconded. Didn't have to be eagle-eyed to drop this one with two shots to spare. Yellow should not be a colour ever to adorn the male of the species below his waist. Above the waist is honourable, the souwester of the trawlerman, the high visibility jacket of the coal miner or railway track engineer. So this one is for all those invisible men in their high visibility jackets. The mark tilts his head back, laughing at his playing partner's remotely unheard wit. As the mark settles over his putter, he synchronises with his own teeing off. His opening salvo for the day. The birds in the trees flap over the rifle's report. It's just Nature's way. Damn, whiffed completely. Shanked it badly to the right, both tee shot and putting green. He delicately adjusts the sights and reconvenes his grip. The mark is bending down to retrieve or maybe mark his ball. Coin or other marker he idly mused. The mark's companion is about to putt, when the (presumed) thud of the stiff collapsing to the ground brings a flaring turn of the head and an accusatory putter raised at chest level. Before it is slowly lowered. Still, two shot penalty for that breach of etiquette surely? He'd leave that for the scorecard Secretary to resolve as he picked up his bag and proceeded over towards the Second tee. Or more accurately, the high grass beyond it.
He took a swig from his pewter hip flask as he strode across the wild grass, making a mental note to avoid shooting in the chest area, lest the target have a miraculous stroke of luck and be saved by a hip flask of their own absorbing the bullet and leaking malt instead of blood. Twenty bullets for a par round on the front nine should suffice. In order to win the notional Claret Jug. The Third hole had a nasty dog leg that meant he could not possibly have a clear bead to anyone on the green. So dropping a shot into a bullseye knot on the gnarled trunk of a specific tree, (which if you stared at long enough you could mistake it for a human face from a distance) entitled him to a Mulligan. Advancing from the tee to behind a high mound of earth around the fairway to continue. It was only fair to proceed in this manner. He had his rules too you know. But the Second was no "gimmie" either.
He settled himself into position just in time to catch sight of a behemoth of a man in checkered knickerbockers slowly lower himself to the grass in incremental stages. As the man finally levered himself flush, he himself felt the earth tilting just a smidgeon on its axis beneath where he stood. The thud of dead or soon to be dead weight, seems to have reverberated all the way back to him here in the Rough. The man's chin on the grass seemed to suggest he was communing with the worms as to the lie of the hole. Which would be true enough in a few seconds or so. He shook his head clear and winked one eye shut again in order to realign the cosmos. Yet in that interim, the beast had turned with all the elegance of a dreadnought, so as currently to be presenting his red checked posterior to the crosshairs like a monkey on heat. Now the eclipser of planets removed his baseball cap and still holding it in his hand, brought the ensemble round to scratch his voluminous rear. Oh to plug the cap straight into that mound of flesh. But no, rules are rules, besides there was no telling if that amount of blubber wouldn't sap the bullet of all velocity before it could burrow into a sweet spot of carnage within the body. Whatever the beached whale was sizing up seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time. Bristling with impatience to play through, he squeezed off a round into the man's playing partner who was stood there holding the pin. He toppled to the ground with just a hint of fade to the left of the pin. Another golfer scratched. The behemoth's cap was suspended in midair, the peak just kissing the twill of his trousers.
The twin parts of the tricky dog leg had proved easy enough to negotiate. Pressed there against the earthen mound, he was trying to weigh up the lie. The victim had half fallen into a bunker, head wedged into the sand and out of sight, like a pot-holer too big for the aperture. But visibly he was still alive, since his leg was twitching and thrashing the green beyond the bunker. A last outpost of protest before the oncoming tsunami of blackness? Get in the hole, get in the damn hole! Of course the other three from his convivial fourball had scarpered for the trees. Even pranging a buggy in their genteely electrified haste. But their lack of indication of a gimmie through any ministrations made to their stricken friend, left him none the wiser as to whether to wait for him to drop into the hole. Or whether a further inside the leather putt, putt, putt was required to get this albatross off his neck. This is when you really need a caddie to help you out.
He could at least prevent that leg from twitching. But that would mean a bogey. He took a quick check of the four cardinal compass points and saw no trace of any handicappers. So he strode out from beyond the mound and on to the fairway. The gun down by his side, he moved as jauntily as if he'd just hit a peach of a shot straight down the middle. Stepping on to the apron, he started to address the awkward lie. He neared the man sprawled over the bunker, stopping only to replace a divot where the man's putter had incised some of the turf in its sudden fall. He surveyed that the overhanging ridge of the bunker was sufficiently high to swallow him up to any viewer from a southerly direction. He had to figure that there would be no fresh players teeing off from holes one and two, so those directions ought to be safe as well. The carry of the gunshot might be a problem, but if he timed it with the squalling wind, he should be able to cover it up. And any explosion of sand thrown up by the force of the bullet could be a genuine sand trap phenomenon. He swivelled the man's legs round so they folded into the bunker. "Winter rules old chap" he said. As he removed the man's limbs from the green, he saw the blood glaze on the manicured carpet. Double bogey he thought to himself, but his hands still didn't waggle as he loosed off a round into the back of the man's head. He raked the bunker with a few more rounds, then headed off to the Fourth with its water hazard. Three down, six to play.
Tuesday, 27 October 2009
Saturday, 24 October 2009
Interview With Deborah Riley-Magnus
I first encountered Deborah Riley-Magnus through the online writing community Authonomy. She had two full novels uploaded and I had the pleasure of reading both, two very different types of work indeed. "Cold In California" was a Vampire-busting genre book, while "Blind In The Light" was an inquiry into spirituality, guided through the Catholic tradition but going so much further.
We undertook that most rare beast within an online writing community, a long, hard and frank discussion on the craft of our respective books; if I remember, on a post I started up called "Nothing To See Here" and merrily watched people dropping in and very quickly out when they realised that they had neither read the whole book, nor wanted to get all forensic. From that point on, we struck up a fruitful writers' friendship and solidarity, despite having very different approaches to the form and existing on radically separated time zones.
Deborah is a write-a-holic. Each of her two novels are part of trilogies, she has an ingenious recipe book on the go, she does commercial writing within the marketing sphere, she's a publicist with her own company Magnus Consulting, she has two blogs and set up "Whispers Of The Muse" which showcases the work of new writers in its literary wing, while it also has a special fanfiction shrine devoted mainly to Russell Crowe and some erotica too. (I know that was an inordinately long sentence, but this woman has many strings to her bow to cram in).
Debs supports new writing selflessly. Her tastes are wide and in addition to "Muse", she is currently engaged in bringing together writers as mentors under the "Cranky Critics" banner. I give you Deborah Riley-Magnus, WRITER, networker, facilitator, muse (in her own right) and all round good-egg.
"When we kicked around together on Authonomy, I read both your novels posted there. They were very different. How would you describe them?"
"They seem to come from very different places within you. Representing different parts of yourself. Would that be fair?"
"Okay, that's very interesting. Why do you feel you needed two very different ways of attacking your theme? What could one give to it that the other couldn't and vice versa?"
"How would you feel if one of the two 'made it', leaving the other one seemingly less validated?"
"Although pushing at the conventions, one is definitely 'genre'. If that gets published professionally, then you risk getting pigeonholed as a genre writer. Equally, if your literary work was taken up, I bet your publishers would dissuade you from putting out the genre work, at least under the same writing name. How would you feel about either of these scenarios?"
"In our online chats, you astounded me by saying you know virtually the whole book before you've even written word one. How does this come about in your head and how does it stay fresh for you as you write it?"
"You're red hot on marketing. But I have to ask, do you think about genre before you've written a word? Or do you write the last period point and then turn round and think how to label it for marketing purposes?"
"What do you see as the respective merits of both genre literature and literary fiction? "
"How do you relate this to the workings of the publishing industry?"
"How do you pack in so much into just 24 hour days? Never a day goes by when there isn't a new blog post, short fiction, new chapters from you and that's in addition to your day job promoting others?"
"What do you see as the future of literature? Do all the new media forms for books hold any interest for you as a writer?"
We undertook that most rare beast within an online writing community, a long, hard and frank discussion on the craft of our respective books; if I remember, on a post I started up called "Nothing To See Here" and merrily watched people dropping in and very quickly out when they realised that they had neither read the whole book, nor wanted to get all forensic. From that point on, we struck up a fruitful writers' friendship and solidarity, despite having very different approaches to the form and existing on radically separated time zones.
Deborah is a write-a-holic. Each of her two novels are part of trilogies, she has an ingenious recipe book on the go, she does commercial writing within the marketing sphere, she's a publicist with her own company Magnus Consulting, she has two blogs and set up "Whispers Of The Muse" which showcases the work of new writers in its literary wing, while it also has a special fanfiction shrine devoted mainly to Russell Crowe and some erotica too. (I know that was an inordinately long sentence, but this woman has many strings to her bow to cram in).
Debs supports new writing selflessly. Her tastes are wide and in addition to "Muse", she is currently engaged in bringing together writers as mentors under the "Cranky Critics" banner. I give you Deborah Riley-Magnus, WRITER, networker, facilitator, muse (in her own right) and all round good-egg.
"When we kicked around together on Authonomy, I read both your novels posted there. They were very different. How would you describe them?"
Blind in the Light is a literary novel about a Catholic priest who serves as one of the Vatican’s premier investigators of spiritual phenomena. He’s a man faced with the crisis of questioning the limitations of his faith within Catholicism and making the choice to leave the church to explore what he’s learned … that God works miracles through every part of life and on every level.
Cold in California is a genre novel that began as an urban fantasy and has since evolved into a supernatural romance. It’s the first fun adventure in a five book series and features a twice-dead vampire who wakes in a kind of purgatory with several other very dead supernaturals living in a West Hollywood warehouse. Their goal is to take advantage of their one last chance to earn heaven or hell (against their natures, of course).
"They seem to come from very different places within you. Representing different parts of yourself. Would that be fair?"
Sure, I suppose that would be a fair first glance opinion, but in truth, almost all of my writing seems to follow the same theme of redemption and salvation. They both come from a place of questioning.
Raised Catholic, I’m a sometime visitor at Sunday mass, but I spent ten years studying under a Native American Medicine Man and the similarities and distinct differences in how various religions and spiritualities look at life and afterlife always has me curious. What if a devout priest faced miracles he can’t explain? Would he categorize them away as unimportant, inexplicable events? Or would he delve deeper? What if a vampire died his second and supposedly final death and discovered he was chosen for one last shot at heaven? Wouldn’t he feel like an atheist standing at the pearly gates? Wouldn’t his first thought be, “Oh shit”?
Both novels are very, very different genres, but both concepts come from a singular place deep inside that defines me as a person.
"Okay, that's very interesting. Why do you feel you needed two very different ways of attacking your theme? What could one give to it that the other couldn't and vice versa?"
Nothing, and I honestly don’t think I need two different ways of attacking any theme. It’s just that this theme is part and parcel of who I am as a person. It’s simply something that intrigues me. I may stumble across a hundred ways to do it. As long as those ways are unique and interesting, I may explore them. Another answer to this might come from the marketing evil twin inside me. See, the person who reads Blind in the Light is not the same person who reads Cold in California. It’s all a matter of voice and audience. The New York Philharmonic, or Rock ‘n Roll at the L.A. House of Blues.
"How would you feel if one of the two 'made it', leaving the other one seemingly less validated?"
Ohhhh, now you’ve tapped into my biggest fear! Blind in the Light is a three book series and two of those books are completed. Cold in California is a five book series backed up with a cookbook (don’t ask, LOL, part of my author’s platform.). Yes, it is terrifying to imagine I’ll only find publication and build a reputation for one over the other. Truth? I believe in both genres … both book series.
"Although pushing at the conventions, one is definitely 'genre'. If that gets published professionally, then you risk getting pigeonholed as a genre writer. Equally, if your literary work was taken up, I bet your publishers would dissuade you from putting out the genre work, at least under the same writing name. How would you feel about either of these scenarios?"
I have thought about these possibilities long and hard. One of my favorite authors is Barbara Kingsolver. She began her writing career with a genre I like to call “light chick lit with guts”. Animal Dreams, The Bean Trees, etc. But Kingsolver is not only a prolific writer but and author with a cause. She has also published short story collections, essay collections then she charged like a bull into heavy literary work with her best selling The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer. Nothing pigeonholed her, and I like to believe I have the same tenacity to drive forward and have my voice heard.
All I need to do is get that voice perfectly polished. Kingsolver is a literary genius!
"In our online chats, you astounded me by saying you know virtually the whole book before you've even written word one. How does this come about in your head and how does it stay fresh for you as you write it?"
Well, it stays fresh because it excites me so much I can’t sit still and I usually write nonstop for months until it’s ready for readers, betas, editing and revamping. But I will say one thing, it’s not like I wake every few weeks with a whole new novel bursting to get out of my head. It germinates until it reaches a climax and I know … absolutely KNOW without a shadow of a doubt how the story progresses from the first to the final word. By that point the characters have been talking to me for months, arguing with me in dreams and basically working out the conflicts and events of the book.
"You're red hot on marketing. But I have to ask, do you think about genre before you've written a word? Or do you write the last period point and then turn round and think how to label it for marketing purposes?"
Unfortunately or fortunately, I am marketing from the bone to brain. Working with clients who struggle to shove a concept down a prospective customer’s throat against their will has made me a wary writer. Yes, I’m clearly aware of genre and the market, but mostly I’m aware of how hard or easy it may be to sell the manuscript based on the trends. Blind in the Light is a tough sell. Vampires and a cookbook featuring recipes for the (emotional) vampires in a cook’s life are very, very hot sells.
Even when I write a book I know will be tough, there’s a tiny marketing wizard living in my brain that pings with ideas to make it more marketable after it’s written. It doesn’t change the story or redirect the genre; it simply whispers “hey, this might be wonderful in winery gift shops that sell books”. For example, my second level brain is currently working out the details of a literary novel I intend to write after Cold in California rewrite. Already I have jotted down fifteen unique venues for its sale as well as a platform for the target subject. It all sort of happens while the book is being written.
"What do you see as the respective merits of both genre literature and literary fiction? "
The merits are easy to define. There are millions of people who read on this planet and just as many preferences. I may not be the author of choice for a Dan Brown fan, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a fan out there of my own I need to reach. Remember, you’re talking to the consummate optimist here.
I respect authors like you, who explore new ways of communicating with a reader, using experimental thoughts and language to tell a story. It’s an art. I respect authors who want to talk to young adults. I respect authors who write non-fiction only and I respect authors who have found a successful genre niche and fiercely staked their territory. I honestly believe there is merit to every kind of writing, from high literary to the lowly fortune cookie.
"How do you relate this to the workings of the publishing industry?"
The workings of the publishing industry? What workings? I think at this point we can all observe that the way things have been done for centuries just isn’t working anymore. I absolutely love the fact that the industry is in flux and shuffle. It demands better attention to all elements of the industry, including the author, and it forces everyone from Harper-Collins to start-up e-publishers to do their job better and better.
The direction and author chooses now is an open landscape, the terrain is constantly reforming but getting more stable by the minute. I’m not advocating a “sit tight and wait” attitude, but I am saying that no writer should close themselves off to the various publishing models available these days.
"How do you pack in so much into just 24 hour days? Never a day goes by when there isn't a new blog post, short fiction, new chapters from you and that's in addition to your day job promoting others?"
I have no idea. All I can say is that I love the work, I love the writing and I’m a pretty social being – for someone who almost never leaves the house. I never have a problem finding energy for it (although the dust is building on the furniture and most times I don’t wash dinner dishes until the next day). I get a charge out of helping my friends and clients be successful … that breeds networks … that breeds marketing and publicity ideas … and that breeds writing ideas. It’s a glorious, vicious cycle. I’m pretty blessed.
"What do you see as the future of literature? Do all the new media forms for books hold any interest for you as a writer?"
The future of literature? More intelligent, more meaningful, more entertaining, more reflective of the universe we live in and supported by the need for people to stop, read and get out of their own lives. Genres will begin to split and mutate into new genres. Authors who could never before find publication will become household names – IF they do their marketing chores like good girls and boys.
As I writer I’m interested in everything from e-publishing to traditional publishing. I consider indie publishers and have taken a serious look at POD. Lord knows I’d love to be agented but the more authors I represent as a publicist, the more I’m seeing that after the efforts to perfect and polish a manuscript … getting it out there is only successful with letting everyone know it’s out there. Okay, I’ll stop now, I won’t get onto my marketing bandwagon, LOL.
Thursday, 22 October 2009
Whatever Happened to ... Saddam's Body-Doubles?
The following is a fictionalised treatment of the question. If you happen to know 6 underemployed Saddam lookalikes, then point them my way and we'll see if we can get this thing made...
INT: DAY.
Scratchy quality film, that periodically jumps. Each of 6 Saddam
Hussein bodydoubles take a turn in the sketch for which they are
auditioning for the role. They are only distinguished by a number
sticker on their prison issue jacket. Hence the jumpy film to cut from
one Sadaam actor directly to another in the same scene.
Saddam Hussein hanging on to a pay phone in prison visiting
area. He wheels around as he gets a response. On the visitor’s
side of the glass panels, his aide takes a seat. Saddam slams the
phone down and it bounces off its cradle and dangles from its
wire. Saddam takes a seat on the other side of the glass. Picks up
the wall mounted screen phone
INT: DAY.
Scratchy quality film, that periodically jumps. Each of 6 Saddam
Hussein bodydoubles take a turn in the sketch for which they are
auditioning for the role. They are only distinguished by a number
sticker on their prison issue jacket. Hence the jumpy film to cut from
one Sadaam actor directly to another in the same scene.
Saddam Hussein hanging on to a pay phone in prison visiting
area. He wheels around as he gets a response. On the visitor’s
side of the glass panels, his aide takes a seat. Saddam slams the
phone down and it bounces off its cradle and dangles from its
wire. Saddam takes a seat on the other side of the glass. Picks up
the wall mounted screen phone
Friday, 16 October 2009
Vooks Apocalypse
Continuing the theme of the new technology and its integration with traditional print, here is a piece of video literature and discussion.
Watch the 8 minute video, read the transcript below and compare and contrast the efficacy of either media to communicate the same message and if you like, vote on it by leaving a comment.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello gentle readers and welcome to the future of literature. By this I don't inevitably refer to myself, but to this as visual presentation of the written. For gentle reader, we are being constantly told that the 21st Century mind wishes to assimilate its data inputs by means other than the book, ones which incur less time investment. Podcasts, videos and vooks. Ones that leave the hands free to make the devil's work (mis-said on video as "word"). And I would argue, Satan's serpent has indeed come to reclaim the apple of temptation with ruinous, maggoty usury.
One argument the technophiles use to promote the new publishing media, is that is saves on wood pulp. Preserving Nature, how ironic while we consistently wipe out species in the name of progress. 16 a day is the estimate, 35 if you include flora.
If I may be so bold as to employ literary tropes in a visual presentation, here follows a brace of allegories for the prospect we face staving off.
The Guerilla players - that's gu-guerilla, not go-gorilla - the guerilla players present for you some mis en scene. Is the film better than the book? (You can decide by reading the full script on the blog).
Bye bye "thou whoreson Zed, that unnecessary letter" said Shakespeare. And no one's going to miss your passing 'D'eee-light. Gone to the dogs. Throw me a fricking bone here. Okay, but only into the abyss. The animals went out two by two hurrah, hurrah. Say hi to the dodo down there. Where's Wally? (impromptu "Wally the Whale" added in video - filler by the mind when mentally scanning for prompt). Washed up on a dried up estuary probably and suffocated. Don't wail and blubber so my son, this is the will of your parents. The candle wax will come in useful for the power cuts. Perish the Elephant packing her trunk. If we just eviscerate Elly here, aw don't cry little boy. There we go, you can escort the letter 'E' off to the elephants' graveyard. It will have to stand for extinct form now on. Buzz buzz buzz off letter B, we all know your namesake creatures are fast disappearing off this earth. Plant payback for all the stolen honeyed nectar, though it won't do them the slightest bit of good either. The cat has finally used up the last of his nine lives. Off to the great kitty litter in the sky. And trepanning cousin Terry. No more tales of the "Tiger who came to Tea" for you little boy. From now on it will have to be the "Tourniquet Applied to the Tableleg" Mmm, veritably trips off the tongue. Still, some letters will be all right. Though kids will have to adjust to carrion crawlers like cockroach and blowfly. Sweet dreams.
Now a little older and I'd like you to imagine a queue of teenagers all lining up outside a club. Right around the building and circling back on itself. The letter "Q" you see, like I said. The wrinkle through it? The velvet sash behind which the bouncers stand, who can gain entry, who is refused. A metaphor for life itself. Anyway, to while away the wait, said kids are busy on their mobiles (fluffed, restated as "mobile phones"). "I'm in a queue in'it?" Or punching away at their texts, since we are all touch-typists now. All of us committing our thoughts in writing, that has to be a good thing right? Now conceive a shadowy figure - someone in a balaclava maybe, not too inconspicuous with the club wear of choice for these kids - he's moving up and down the line. Inclining his head in towards those phones held out at arms' length.
E’s ? Anyone want some E’s ? Eee-asy ! ‘E’s’ are good ! The best in fact. You E’d up ? Oh, you’re sorted ... Fair enough. How about you ? No ? ... C’mon. I got all your ‘E’ needs covered. I can iterate your pleasures for you. Determine the way you experience things. Contain your inhibitions. Distill wellbeing. Render you lover-lee. Or any other E-motion you care to name. No ? Okay then. What about you? You don't spell it like that! Bloody number racketeers moving in on our turf. Not a patch on us for legibility ... That's it, get shot of the '8', now you need a - yeah that's right mate, you do spell 'deal' with two 'E's' and I got just the ticket for you on that. Uh-oh, here comes that upstart U-pusher (accidentally reversed in the telling). One of the few who've had a renaissance in market share. It's all 'me me me with that U". A distinctly untrustworthy character if ever I met one. Time to up sticks and E is for exit.
So how will our future generations acquire the speech of naming, if all the early words limned with simple, happy, associative charge, the animals, the pretty coloured flowers, the orange sun and the blue sky, are blotted out from our primary copy-books? Our loquacity will be flat and lifeless, shorn of our fabled ability to fabricate literature and dreams. We'll need the virtual interfaces then to preserve our collective memory of these fabled beasts. The new dinosaurs in the virtual Natural history museum.
What will be the point of children learning to become fluent readers, if all future 'books' will read to them in the form of vooks, podcasts and videos? Early on in our flying solo reading career, entering the imaginative world of a book is how we expand our own range of thought and to forge new connections. In short, our thought processes take wing and spread through reading. School expands our (became "their" in performance) conceptual abilities even further, still dominated by the text book or set texts. In our present desire and present is a word that in Shakespeare's time meant 'immediate', a vestigial meaning that still lurks within it depending on the context in which it is used in prose, but one that is very unlikely to come across in a video - in our present desire for instant data, for scanning information, we risk changing our whole evolutionary future by sidelining the deep thought facilitated through books. When you read, your visual cortex has to connect up with your linguistic brain to decipher what is being said by the book. As soon as you put other inundations on the visual brain, such as with vooks and video, as soon as you introduce an audio aspect with podcasts and vocalised reading, the linguistic centres of the brain is no longer the sole focus and some of the layering of the words will inevitably get missed. How much of this have you been able to process first time through? It certainly took me considerably longer to compose than for you to hear it read out aloud. For all the complex demands of sight and sound stimuli, you can still be transported among a blacked out cinema or theatre audience. Not so sat at home sat in front of a monitor or on a train staring into your phone to read an e-book. To quote cognitive psychologist J.Bruner, the creative imagination offered up by the writer allows the reader to "go beyond the information given". To take the time to think. I don't credit that such time is afforded by the new technologies which are all about time saving and convenience. The inputs are regulated for you at a rate determined by pixel rates and data translation speeds. Reading online may give you the meat off the bone, but a book gives you access to the deep lying marrow. I'd say ask the dog which of the two he prefers, except we just consigned all canines (mutated to "him") to extinction.
Alles fuer der kinder not alles fuer der kindle.
Missed prop for the visual gag to end, covered with verbal "thank you")
* VOTE NOW * Place your virtual X/Y/Z in the comment box
X The print version had far more clarity (despite author's best attempts to cut up narrative flow by referencing divergences from the video)
Y The vid's the way to go man. I could still read my e-mails and check out a couple of blogs while I absorbed the message. Safe
Z None of the above/ This guy's as nutty as the Monster Raving Loony Party.
Watch the 8 minute video, read the transcript below and compare and contrast the efficacy of either media to communicate the same message and if you like, vote on it by leaving a comment.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello gentle readers and welcome to the future of literature. By this I don't inevitably refer to myself, but to this as visual presentation of the written. For gentle reader, we are being constantly told that the 21st Century mind wishes to assimilate its data inputs by means other than the book, ones which incur less time investment. Podcasts, videos and vooks. Ones that leave the hands free to make the devil's work (mis-said on video as "word"). And I would argue, Satan's serpent has indeed come to reclaim the apple of temptation with ruinous, maggoty usury.
One argument the technophiles use to promote the new publishing media, is that is saves on wood pulp. Preserving Nature, how ironic while we consistently wipe out species in the name of progress. 16 a day is the estimate, 35 if you include flora.
If I may be so bold as to employ literary tropes in a visual presentation, here follows a brace of allegories for the prospect we face staving off.
The Guerilla players - that's gu-guerilla, not go-gorilla - the guerilla players present for you some mis en scene. Is the film better than the book? (You can decide by reading the full script on the blog).
Bye bye "thou whoreson Zed, that unnecessary letter" said Shakespeare. And no one's going to miss your passing 'D'eee-light. Gone to the dogs. Throw me a fricking bone here. Okay, but only into the abyss. The animals went out two by two hurrah, hurrah. Say hi to the dodo down there. Where's Wally? (impromptu "Wally the Whale" added in video - filler by the mind when mentally scanning for prompt). Washed up on a dried up estuary probably and suffocated. Don't wail and blubber so my son, this is the will of your parents. The candle wax will come in useful for the power cuts. Perish the Elephant packing her trunk. If we just eviscerate Elly here, aw don't cry little boy. There we go, you can escort the letter 'E' off to the elephants' graveyard. It will have to stand for extinct form now on. Buzz buzz buzz off letter B, we all know your namesake creatures are fast disappearing off this earth. Plant payback for all the stolen honeyed nectar, though it won't do them the slightest bit of good either. The cat has finally used up the last of his nine lives. Off to the great kitty litter in the sky. And trepanning cousin Terry. No more tales of the "Tiger who came to Tea" for you little boy. From now on it will have to be the "Tourniquet Applied to the Tableleg" Mmm, veritably trips off the tongue. Still, some letters will be all right. Though kids will have to adjust to carrion crawlers like cockroach and blowfly. Sweet dreams.
Now a little older and I'd like you to imagine a queue of teenagers all lining up outside a club. Right around the building and circling back on itself. The letter "Q" you see, like I said. The wrinkle through it? The velvet sash behind which the bouncers stand, who can gain entry, who is refused. A metaphor for life itself. Anyway, to while away the wait, said kids are busy on their mobiles (fluffed, restated as "mobile phones"). "I'm in a queue in'it?" Or punching away at their texts, since we are all touch-typists now. All of us committing our thoughts in writing, that has to be a good thing right? Now conceive a shadowy figure - someone in a balaclava maybe, not too inconspicuous with the club wear of choice for these kids - he's moving up and down the line. Inclining his head in towards those phones held out at arms' length.
E’s ? Anyone want some E’s ? Eee-asy ! ‘E’s’ are good ! The best in fact. You E’d up ? Oh, you’re sorted ... Fair enough. How about you ? No ? ... C’mon. I got all your ‘E’ needs covered. I can iterate your pleasures for you. Determine the way you experience things. Contain your inhibitions. Distill wellbeing. Render you lover-lee. Or any other E-motion you care to name. No ? Okay then. What about you? You don't spell it like that! Bloody number racketeers moving in on our turf. Not a patch on us for legibility ... That's it, get shot of the '8', now you need a - yeah that's right mate, you do spell 'deal' with two 'E's' and I got just the ticket for you on that. Uh-oh, here comes that upstart U-pusher (accidentally reversed in the telling). One of the few who've had a renaissance in market share. It's all 'me me me with that U". A distinctly untrustworthy character if ever I met one. Time to up sticks and E is for exit.
So how will our future generations acquire the speech of naming, if all the early words limned with simple, happy, associative charge, the animals, the pretty coloured flowers, the orange sun and the blue sky, are blotted out from our primary copy-books? Our loquacity will be flat and lifeless, shorn of our fabled ability to fabricate literature and dreams. We'll need the virtual interfaces then to preserve our collective memory of these fabled beasts. The new dinosaurs in the virtual Natural history museum.
What will be the point of children learning to become fluent readers, if all future 'books' will read to them in the form of vooks, podcasts and videos? Early on in our flying solo reading career, entering the imaginative world of a book is how we expand our own range of thought and to forge new connections. In short, our thought processes take wing and spread through reading. School expands our (became "their" in performance) conceptual abilities even further, still dominated by the text book or set texts. In our present desire and present is a word that in Shakespeare's time meant 'immediate', a vestigial meaning that still lurks within it depending on the context in which it is used in prose, but one that is very unlikely to come across in a video - in our present desire for instant data, for scanning information, we risk changing our whole evolutionary future by sidelining the deep thought facilitated through books. When you read, your visual cortex has to connect up with your linguistic brain to decipher what is being said by the book. As soon as you put other inundations on the visual brain, such as with vooks and video, as soon as you introduce an audio aspect with podcasts and vocalised reading, the linguistic centres of the brain is no longer the sole focus and some of the layering of the words will inevitably get missed. How much of this have you been able to process first time through? It certainly took me considerably longer to compose than for you to hear it read out aloud. For all the complex demands of sight and sound stimuli, you can still be transported among a blacked out cinema or theatre audience. Not so sat at home sat in front of a monitor or on a train staring into your phone to read an e-book. To quote cognitive psychologist J.Bruner, the creative imagination offered up by the writer allows the reader to "go beyond the information given". To take the time to think. I don't credit that such time is afforded by the new technologies which are all about time saving and convenience. The inputs are regulated for you at a rate determined by pixel rates and data translation speeds. Reading online may give you the meat off the bone, but a book gives you access to the deep lying marrow. I'd say ask the dog which of the two he prefers, except we just consigned all canines (mutated to "him") to extinction.
Alles fuer der kinder not alles fuer der kindle.
Missed prop for the visual gag to end, covered with verbal "thank you")
* VOTE NOW * Place your virtual X/Y/Z in the comment box
X The print version had far more clarity (despite author's best attempts to cut up narrative flow by referencing divergences from the video)
Y The vid's the way to go man. I could still read my e-mails and check out a couple of blogs while I absorbed the message. Safe
Z None of the above/ This guy's as nutty as the Monster Raving Loony Party.
Thursday, 15 October 2009
Maths & Engish (no, not Dizzee Rascal's album)
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 And there you have it. Ten digits, ten numerical symbols. A perfect hermetically sealed system from which all mathematics stems from. All the way up to infinity, a mind blowing concept but related back to these basic numbers - in this case, symbollically all you have to do is turn a number 8 on its side and hey presto, the symbol for infinity! Everything mathematical refers back to these ordinal first terms. They reach out to encapsulate the physical universe and the physical universe is defined wholly in these first terms. The four basic functions, + - X / and equals, even these derive from the interrelationship of the numbers straddling them, One digit functioned upon to yield another. And when there are logical breakdowns within the system, the NP problem or The Hodge Conjecture and the rest, well then mathematicians ironically revert to the alphabetical abstraction of letters (Roman or Greek) in order to try and grapple with their breaches. So the numbers are still unsullied, untainted. It's the algebraic letters and the limitations of language and metaphor wot get the blame. Quantum behaviour? We just haven't cracked the multi-dimensionality to come up with a predictive probability for it yet is all.
But enough of maths, I get enough arithmetic all day at work. The only sheets I want to spread are those of a folio of a book. Maybe soon I won't even be able to do that the way technology and the market may be heading.
We possess 26 letters in our alphabet, a finite number to correspond to a finite set of phonic sounds to express every one of our words. Of course there are more than 26 phonic sounds, so here at source we already have a great deal of slippage, unlike the flawless 10 numerals within maths. Never mind, onwards and upwards eh? We can aggregate our alphabetic characters into a huge amount of combinations, first within single words, then further sliced and diced and tossed into salad day sentences, building into novels and wonderful journeys within the logic of the human mind. It's ironic that the earliest traces of writing, all seem to be recording stocks figures and the debits and credits arising from them, ie accounting systems. Numbers demanding to be expressed in symbols again. Little more rivetting than reading somebody's laundry list.
Letters are the building blocks for reading and writing our language. Children learn to recognise letters and attach the requisite sounds to them. Then they learn to associate the character symbol with each letter and from that reconstruct the sound of the word from its written representation. As they become more and more fluent readers, the eye and brain bat scarcely an eyelid as they steam through blocks of print. The words ingested as familiar and therefore automatically scanned, even though the text is fresh and unseen to them. Once a reader is fluent, they take little cognizance of the letters on a page, being several processing steps ahead of that bottom reading rung.
So how does the basal building block of letters compare with the fundament of numbers in maths? The letters themselves bear little correlation other than sound, to the words they help form. A letter 'B' is no more indicative of a 'bear' or a 'bestowal' or some 'bitumen'. It happens to usher all three onto the tip of the tongue but that's about it. Other than phonetic ordering, the letters do not bear the ordination of numbers. They do not build into scales of importance. If letters bear no significance other than arranging sounds, then we have to move on to the unit of the word for deriving everything about language. In a curious way, like numbers, words are sort of hermetically sealed. They are individually defined in terms of other words which are defined themselves by other words defined... An endless loop. This reflects the origins of language, of roots of words, of importations from other languages whether by force or through trade. There is no equivalent of 10 digits, or 1000 basal words, from which all meaning stems through second and third stage acting upon them (prefixes and suffixes). Esperanto took a shot at naailing down a basic language at 900 root words, but has had to expand to accommodate all the new words of technology.
Clearly language isn't hermetically sealed. No perfectly circular system. New words are coming into usage all the time, old ones dying off. So, given that letters do not seem to be able to carry the same weight as numbers do in maths, do we still need the visual prompts they provide? Txt spk is fast pensioning off certain superannuated characters, vowels mainly (mind you, if you ever hear der yute speak, it's like vowels were never invented anyway as their lips barely crack open to eruct their glottal stops). Maybe we should just condemn printed matter off to the recycling bins forever and content ourselves with audio and vook delivery systems for our great works of literature. Printed books will become the new samizdat, the subversive, underground literature produced on home-made presses. Oh no wait, that's self-publishing isn't it?
Me, I haven't finished messing with the alphabet yet. I don't just want to break down words and probe their plasticity, I want to split their atomic letter structure. I play with typefaces and linearity, so self-publishing is pretty much beyond meeting my needs, with its template typesetting.
And Dizzee Rascal? he'll soundtrack it for me
Since I posted this, I have come across a wonderful blog posting about the symbology of letters and numbers by @egllinski which reminded me that the Hebrew alphabet also ascribes numerical value to its letters, thus buttressing worded 'proofs' with more mystical codes of proof by numerology... And the Sanskrit word 'Om' or 'Aum' that contains all sound within its three letters and is the creative force behind existence. Fascinating stuff.
But enough of maths, I get enough arithmetic all day at work. The only sheets I want to spread are those of a folio of a book. Maybe soon I won't even be able to do that the way technology and the market may be heading.
We possess 26 letters in our alphabet, a finite number to correspond to a finite set of phonic sounds to express every one of our words. Of course there are more than 26 phonic sounds, so here at source we already have a great deal of slippage, unlike the flawless 10 numerals within maths. Never mind, onwards and upwards eh? We can aggregate our alphabetic characters into a huge amount of combinations, first within single words, then further sliced and diced and tossed into salad day sentences, building into novels and wonderful journeys within the logic of the human mind. It's ironic that the earliest traces of writing, all seem to be recording stocks figures and the debits and credits arising from them, ie accounting systems. Numbers demanding to be expressed in symbols again. Little more rivetting than reading somebody's laundry list.
Letters are the building blocks for reading and writing our language. Children learn to recognise letters and attach the requisite sounds to them. Then they learn to associate the character symbol with each letter and from that reconstruct the sound of the word from its written representation. As they become more and more fluent readers, the eye and brain bat scarcely an eyelid as they steam through blocks of print. The words ingested as familiar and therefore automatically scanned, even though the text is fresh and unseen to them. Once a reader is fluent, they take little cognizance of the letters on a page, being several processing steps ahead of that bottom reading rung.
So how does the basal building block of letters compare with the fundament of numbers in maths? The letters themselves bear little correlation other than sound, to the words they help form. A letter 'B' is no more indicative of a 'bear' or a 'bestowal' or some 'bitumen'. It happens to usher all three onto the tip of the tongue but that's about it. Other than phonetic ordering, the letters do not bear the ordination of numbers. They do not build into scales of importance. If letters bear no significance other than arranging sounds, then we have to move on to the unit of the word for deriving everything about language. In a curious way, like numbers, words are sort of hermetically sealed. They are individually defined in terms of other words which are defined themselves by other words defined... An endless loop. This reflects the origins of language, of roots of words, of importations from other languages whether by force or through trade. There is no equivalent of 10 digits, or 1000 basal words, from which all meaning stems through second and third stage acting upon them (prefixes and suffixes). Esperanto took a shot at naailing down a basic language at 900 root words, but has had to expand to accommodate all the new words of technology.
Clearly language isn't hermetically sealed. No perfectly circular system. New words are coming into usage all the time, old ones dying off. So, given that letters do not seem to be able to carry the same weight as numbers do in maths, do we still need the visual prompts they provide? Txt spk is fast pensioning off certain superannuated characters, vowels mainly (mind you, if you ever hear der yute speak, it's like vowels were never invented anyway as their lips barely crack open to eruct their glottal stops). Maybe we should just condemn printed matter off to the recycling bins forever and content ourselves with audio and vook delivery systems for our great works of literature. Printed books will become the new samizdat, the subversive, underground literature produced on home-made presses. Oh no wait, that's self-publishing isn't it?
Me, I haven't finished messing with the alphabet yet. I don't just want to break down words and probe their plasticity, I want to split their atomic letter structure. I play with typefaces and linearity, so self-publishing is pretty much beyond meeting my needs, with its template typesetting.
And Dizzee Rascal? he'll soundtrack it for me
Since I posted this, I have come across a wonderful blog posting about the symbology of letters and numbers by @egllinski which reminded me that the Hebrew alphabet also ascribes numerical value to its letters, thus buttressing worded 'proofs' with more mystical codes of proof by numerology... And the Sanskrit word 'Om' or 'Aum' that contains all sound within its three letters and is the creative force behind existence. Fascinating stuff.
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Death Notices...
nothing. When you're dead you're dead. That's why I don't quite buy the writing for posterity argument. Yes you may still be minting royalties for your heirs, but other than that what benefit redounds to you decomposing away there in your clod and loam? (decomposing, is there a more apt word to describe the status of an ex-writer?) Mind you, the same could be said of why bother to have offspring at all, now that our species is no longer tied to seasonal reproduction? Might brighten up your life while you're compos mentis, but when your compost lettuce, just what are the benefits?
Okay, so writing can't preserve more than your name and the words you bequeath. Even then you've got to be a damn good writer; John Le Carre and Ian Fleming (to name two from outside my genre) are more likely to be read and remembered down the line, than say Hammond Innes and Alistair McLean. In the same way that eventually every living relative who knew you in the flesh, themselves go the way of all things mortal, so that there is no one left to place fresh flowers on your grave; there will be no readers left to place bouquets on Innes and McLean's memory and their books remain permanently out of print.
But what are Le Carre and Fleming yielding to the generations that come after them? Well great stories and central protagonists certainly. But I think Literary Fiction writers might crave for more of a legacy than that. I think they yearn to contribute to the great debate. To furnish some ideas for the great pool of human knowledge. To create a meme in the current parlance. If it can't render them any benefit from beyond the grave, at least it might serve humanity into the future. We still live by the notions of virtue portrayed in Greek Tragedies. Shakespeare left us plenty to ponder on the condition and make up of man. Nick Hornby gave us the insight about running an independent music store. Mind you, it's all a bit wooly this conceptual inheritance thing. Maybe if you help instigate a paradigm shift in the thought of all mankind, as you can argue that the Impressionist painters achieved, rather than just a trend shift as say the Beats or the Bloomsbury Circle, then it moves us all forwards. To put it in perspective, such creative impulse throwing tiny conceptual pebbles, is hard to hold up to comparison with the creativity of a bridge builder whose artistry solves a practical problem.
So here's the thing. As altruistic as it was of Sophocles and the Bard to leave us these testimonies for us to reflect on hundreds/thousand years down the line, (funny sort of altruism that has a sadistic element to it through contemplation of the ineffably ambiguous, but still), I'm not convinced it was just to help us all along a millennium hence. They didn't have the media to project their fame much beyond their local geography, so don't think they were about celebrity status either. Okay they got decent working wages out of the writing gig so that's not to be sniffed at. But I reckon they were driven to consider the human condition out of an awareness/fear of their own mortality. In fact I believe all artists, consciously or unconcsciously have the same drive.
This becomes more so as the myth of Heaven/God/The afterlife recedes from ever greater numbers of the populace. There is no useful posterity to be had. So rather than look ahead to the hereafter, now artists look to their immediate lives. We may all celebrate birthdays, but the artist calibrates back from his imagined death day, in order to make sense of his purpose here on earth. He knows he's going to pass over, so what is the best way to make use of the time in the here and now? Well justifying it, explaining it, deconstructing it, might all be fair uses of his time. And that means not only telling his own story, but locating it within the cosmic tragedy/comedy of its inevitable full stop. We already know how this story is ultimately going to end. Therefore that is not really where the interest in it lies. Steve Tesich, who died tragically young, wrote the funniest novel I have ever read called "Karoo" Tesich's protagonist Saul Karoo, a fixer up of failing movie scripts, explains away his need to write: "from the constant need to narrate my existence". For as much as we cease to exist after death, now the nagging inquiry is that we may not purposefully exist all that much in life.
Writers may just be aware of this hollowness and in addition to probing it in their own being, also tug urgently at everybody else's sleeves to alert them to this fact. Even celebrants of Eros who write escapist fantasy books, are still driven by a need to have their voice heard (despite choosing to neglect examining the motives behind that impulse). Thanatos lies behind all contemporary literature. It is merely up to the individual author whether he doffs his hat at the spectral cortege as it passes over his future grave.
Okay, so writing can't preserve more than your name and the words you bequeath. Even then you've got to be a damn good writer; John Le Carre and Ian Fleming (to name two from outside my genre) are more likely to be read and remembered down the line, than say Hammond Innes and Alistair McLean. In the same way that eventually every living relative who knew you in the flesh, themselves go the way of all things mortal, so that there is no one left to place fresh flowers on your grave; there will be no readers left to place bouquets on Innes and McLean's memory and their books remain permanently out of print.
But what are Le Carre and Fleming yielding to the generations that come after them? Well great stories and central protagonists certainly. But I think Literary Fiction writers might crave for more of a legacy than that. I think they yearn to contribute to the great debate. To furnish some ideas for the great pool of human knowledge. To create a meme in the current parlance. If it can't render them any benefit from beyond the grave, at least it might serve humanity into the future. We still live by the notions of virtue portrayed in Greek Tragedies. Shakespeare left us plenty to ponder on the condition and make up of man. Nick Hornby gave us the insight about running an independent music store. Mind you, it's all a bit wooly this conceptual inheritance thing. Maybe if you help instigate a paradigm shift in the thought of all mankind, as you can argue that the Impressionist painters achieved, rather than just a trend shift as say the Beats or the Bloomsbury Circle, then it moves us all forwards. To put it in perspective, such creative impulse throwing tiny conceptual pebbles, is hard to hold up to comparison with the creativity of a bridge builder whose artistry solves a practical problem.
So here's the thing. As altruistic as it was of Sophocles and the Bard to leave us these testimonies for us to reflect on hundreds/thousand years down the line, (funny sort of altruism that has a sadistic element to it through contemplation of the ineffably ambiguous, but still), I'm not convinced it was just to help us all along a millennium hence. They didn't have the media to project their fame much beyond their local geography, so don't think they were about celebrity status either. Okay they got decent working wages out of the writing gig so that's not to be sniffed at. But I reckon they were driven to consider the human condition out of an awareness/fear of their own mortality. In fact I believe all artists, consciously or unconcsciously have the same drive.
This becomes more so as the myth of Heaven/God/The afterlife recedes from ever greater numbers of the populace. There is no useful posterity to be had. So rather than look ahead to the hereafter, now artists look to their immediate lives. We may all celebrate birthdays, but the artist calibrates back from his imagined death day, in order to make sense of his purpose here on earth. He knows he's going to pass over, so what is the best way to make use of the time in the here and now? Well justifying it, explaining it, deconstructing it, might all be fair uses of his time. And that means not only telling his own story, but locating it within the cosmic tragedy/comedy of its inevitable full stop. We already know how this story is ultimately going to end. Therefore that is not really where the interest in it lies. Steve Tesich, who died tragically young, wrote the funniest novel I have ever read called "Karoo" Tesich's protagonist Saul Karoo, a fixer up of failing movie scripts, explains away his need to write: "from the constant need to narrate my existence". For as much as we cease to exist after death, now the nagging inquiry is that we may not purposefully exist all that much in life.
Writers may just be aware of this hollowness and in addition to probing it in their own being, also tug urgently at everybody else's sleeves to alert them to this fact. Even celebrants of Eros who write escapist fantasy books, are still driven by a need to have their voice heard (despite choosing to neglect examining the motives behind that impulse). Thanatos lies behind all contemporary literature. It is merely up to the individual author whether he doffs his hat at the spectral cortege as it passes over his future grave.
Monday, 12 October 2009
Read 'em their Writes - or how the new literature media only saves time by depriving us of the richness of our senses
I've got a techie mate who swears by podcasts. Assimilating his techie product journals while in his car makes perfect time management sense, seeing as he has an autistic child and twin daughters making inordinate demands on his attention back home. But he tells me he also exclusively consumes his beloved SciFi literature in this manner as well. It may well suit to pick out and memorise the key techie items in order to research them further online once out of his car, but the potential narrative fracturing of his SciFi by events outside his windscreen worries me. (Any meta time travel storyline not withstanding).
(His potential thoughts in bold) "The polyp-like craft exuded colours that shredded the known spectrum as it regally lowered itself towards the ground-" Oh blast, there's a sign saying 'parking bay suspended'.
"Okay guys, jet-packs on, we've a civilisation to save from extinction at the hands of-'Would you believe it, that speed camera just flashed me?'
"For all her seaweed-like recrudescences, he could still see the inner beauty radiating out. He was drawn to her like a Geiger counter to polonium 210-" Did that guy just give me the finger? Cut you up? I'll bloody show you cutting somebody up pal! (okay my mate probably wouldn't say this in real life as he is mild mannered and, well a techie).
Now shift our enclosed vista to a train or bus. You are reading a book, a pleasant and maybe stimulating way to pass the bromide of a commute in to work. Your attention wavers periodically. Maybe an aesthetically pleasing person sits down in the seat opposite you, or they have a musk that hooks your nostrils and forces you to look up from the printed page. Maybe on spotting somebody else engaged in reading, you idly crane your neck to see the title of their book to compare and contrast. Perhaps you are fully ensconced in your book, when a snatch of conversation from the passenger next to you spookily echoes the very words your eyes were scanning on the page... All minor events that distract you from the text, but you have the ability to revisit the words and give them your full concentration.
Of course you can equally press rewind on a podcast or scroll back in an e-book. But if you've clotted your ears with headphones, you are less likely to overhear the synchronicity from next to you. You may spot the other reader on the train, but how are you going to laser your comparative 'I've got Stephen Fry voicing Jeeves on my i-Pod', or 'I've got Sartre's "Being And Nothingness" downloaded to my phone' to your erstwhile compatriot in reading? Your nose may well still get hooked, but earphones in place, or poring over your IPhone, are unlikely to secure you eye contact from the Looker in the seat opposite since that's what every other punter on the train is likely to be doing.
These technologies, designed for convenience, for immediacy, actually end up serving the same function as the free newspapers given out to commuters. They wall us off from our fellow travellers. They lock us into our own senses, involve us with our own minds, but without the possibility of someone from outside breaking through to make contact with us, however cursory. It was actually David Blunkett who predicted a version of this back in the mid-1980s, when he highlighted how all these home entertainment centres (remember those?) of video, hi-fi stacks and computer (and now games console and Internet) were likely to reduce us more and more into barricading ourselves into our Englishmen's castles and entertain ourselves, rather than interact in social milieus. A modern day Tiresias, shame he failed to demonstrate such analytical perspicacity when casting sightless eyes over our culture on ascending to power. Commuters will not be satisfied until they have a data stream blocking up every one of their sense outlets (including smells, so bye bye musks and bouquets hooking you). Then they will truly be inviolable.
These devices are sold as time-saving. What they also skimp on is the quality of processing our brains do with the function formerly known as reading. The rush to put visual content into literature, vooks and the like, means people are now being asked to use whole different interpretive languages in order to 'read' literature. Picture the scene, sat at your laptop imbibing a book online. Because you lack the weft and weight of a tome in your hand, well then the devil can make work for those unemployed fingers. I bet you're reading, or should I say skimming, while you've got your e-mail/Twitter alerts pinging and dragging you to heed their siren calls. You've probably got some i-Tunes burbling away in the background. Someone's just tipped you off to an exclusive pop video on YouTube or some hilarious stunt gone wrong that you just gotta check out. Computers faciliate us multi-tasking. The antithesis of the demands made by reading a book. Can you lose yourself in a good file share?
My next post will attempt to go even further into these issues. I want to consider the evolutionary implications of our rush for more rapid assimilation of data and input. I just need to film a video and upload it, hopefully this week. It will present visual treatment of two extended (literary) metaphors and since I will also post the script for the video, you'll have the opportunity to decide which medium, video or written word, delivers the material with greatest impact and clarity.
Till then, lean over and ask the Looker what their scent is. Lean over and tell the other reader on the carriage that you loved that book, have they read ... Lean over and show the person next to you that their selfsame words have magically coalesced within not only your mind, but that of the writer who set them down in their book in the first instance...
(His potential thoughts in bold) "The polyp-like craft exuded colours that shredded the known spectrum as it regally lowered itself towards the ground-" Oh blast, there's a sign saying 'parking bay suspended'.
"Okay guys, jet-packs on, we've a civilisation to save from extinction at the hands of-'Would you believe it, that speed camera just flashed me?'
"For all her seaweed-like recrudescences, he could still see the inner beauty radiating out. He was drawn to her like a Geiger counter to polonium 210-" Did that guy just give me the finger? Cut you up? I'll bloody show you cutting somebody up pal! (okay my mate probably wouldn't say this in real life as he is mild mannered and, well a techie).
Now shift our enclosed vista to a train or bus. You are reading a book, a pleasant and maybe stimulating way to pass the bromide of a commute in to work. Your attention wavers periodically. Maybe an aesthetically pleasing person sits down in the seat opposite you, or they have a musk that hooks your nostrils and forces you to look up from the printed page. Maybe on spotting somebody else engaged in reading, you idly crane your neck to see the title of their book to compare and contrast. Perhaps you are fully ensconced in your book, when a snatch of conversation from the passenger next to you spookily echoes the very words your eyes were scanning on the page... All minor events that distract you from the text, but you have the ability to revisit the words and give them your full concentration.
Of course you can equally press rewind on a podcast or scroll back in an e-book. But if you've clotted your ears with headphones, you are less likely to overhear the synchronicity from next to you. You may spot the other reader on the train, but how are you going to laser your comparative 'I've got Stephen Fry voicing Jeeves on my i-Pod', or 'I've got Sartre's "Being And Nothingness" downloaded to my phone' to your erstwhile compatriot in reading? Your nose may well still get hooked, but earphones in place, or poring over your IPhone, are unlikely to secure you eye contact from the Looker in the seat opposite since that's what every other punter on the train is likely to be doing.
These technologies, designed for convenience, for immediacy, actually end up serving the same function as the free newspapers given out to commuters. They wall us off from our fellow travellers. They lock us into our own senses, involve us with our own minds, but without the possibility of someone from outside breaking through to make contact with us, however cursory. It was actually David Blunkett who predicted a version of this back in the mid-1980s, when he highlighted how all these home entertainment centres (remember those?) of video, hi-fi stacks and computer (and now games console and Internet) were likely to reduce us more and more into barricading ourselves into our Englishmen's castles and entertain ourselves, rather than interact in social milieus. A modern day Tiresias, shame he failed to demonstrate such analytical perspicacity when casting sightless eyes over our culture on ascending to power. Commuters will not be satisfied until they have a data stream blocking up every one of their sense outlets (including smells, so bye bye musks and bouquets hooking you). Then they will truly be inviolable.
These devices are sold as time-saving. What they also skimp on is the quality of processing our brains do with the function formerly known as reading. The rush to put visual content into literature, vooks and the like, means people are now being asked to use whole different interpretive languages in order to 'read' literature. Picture the scene, sat at your laptop imbibing a book online. Because you lack the weft and weight of a tome in your hand, well then the devil can make work for those unemployed fingers. I bet you're reading, or should I say skimming, while you've got your e-mail/Twitter alerts pinging and dragging you to heed their siren calls. You've probably got some i-Tunes burbling away in the background. Someone's just tipped you off to an exclusive pop video on YouTube or some hilarious stunt gone wrong that you just gotta check out. Computers faciliate us multi-tasking. The antithesis of the demands made by reading a book. Can you lose yourself in a good file share?
My next post will attempt to go even further into these issues. I want to consider the evolutionary implications of our rush for more rapid assimilation of data and input. I just need to film a video and upload it, hopefully this week. It will present visual treatment of two extended (literary) metaphors and since I will also post the script for the video, you'll have the opportunity to decide which medium, video or written word, delivers the material with greatest impact and clarity.
Till then, lean over and ask the Looker what their scent is. Lean over and tell the other reader on the carriage that you loved that book, have they read ... Lean over and show the person next to you that their selfsame words have magically coalesced within not only your mind, but that of the writer who set them down in their book in the first instance...
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