Does technology matter?

I'm a vintage technology kind of guy--I spend a lot of my time fiddling around with mechanical cameras and old analogue synthesizers (or, for that matter, pianos, guitars, and drums). I like things that are tactile--tools that feel a certain way when I use them, and which give me certain results that, at least in part, are determined by the technology used to create them.

I used to think I felt the same way about reading and writing--but my recent appreciation for the iPad, and general acceptance of the ebook, are suggesting to me that the same doesn't apply for my experience of literature. Why should this be?

The fact is, I had no trouble switching from writing on a note pad to writing on a typewriter to writing on a dedicated word processor to writing on a computer. Rhian and I are probably the last generation who will make this transition--our experience has spanned the entire history of writing technology, in just a handful of decades. And I think I'm a unique position to say that technology does not matter to writing the way it does to other forms of art.

Stories, I think, are not created with the hands, the way music and art are. They're created in the mind, and translated into print by whatever means are at hand. The tactile is important in photography, and even more (far more) in music--but in literature, it's little more than window dressing. We might be deeply invested in that window dressing (indeed, I still love pencils and note cards, and as I said in my iPad review, I will continue to adore the physical book), but in the long run it doesn't matter. Literature is an effort to connect two minds, the reader's and writer's, through language, the original tool, and the one that means the most to our shared humanity.

(And if this post sounds like something I've said before, honestly, it's just an excuse to share that seriously stupendous little YouTube clip. I believe the movie is the 1970 Merchant-Ivory picture Bombay Talkie, and the man and woman are Shashi Kapoor and Helen Jairag Richardson.)

Steve Hely's How I Became A Famous Novelist

This is the funniest book I (RE, not JRL, thankyouverymuch) have read in years. Really! It's so funny it made me wonder why funny novels are so rare. Why can't novels be as funny as, say, Jon Stewart, or even David Sedaris?

How I Became A Famous Novelist is that funny. It's about a guy who decides to write a bestseller by imitating all the cliches in the books on the NYTimes list -- books like A Whiff of Gingham and Pecorino (life in a villa in Sicily), Nick Boyle's ShockBlade: Lynchpin (a thriller), and especially Kindness to Birds, a feel-good road-trip novel by his soon-to be-nemesis. It works! And then he finds himself turning into what he hated. Of course there is much opportunity for Hely to skewer the institutions and people that writers both love and hate, like publishers, and other writers. The story itself is just an over-the-top romp, but Hely manages to carry the antic energy almost to the end. Chapter after chapter, it keeps being funny.

Here are some of the rules that Pete Tarslaw, Hely's hero, distills from the bestseller list:
Rule 1: Abandon truth
Rule 4: Must include a murder
Rule 5: Must include a club, secrets/mysterious missions, characters whose lives change suddenly, suprising love affairs, women who've give up on love but who turn out to be beautiful
Rule 6: Evoke confusing sadness at the end
Rule 16: Include plant names

Oh, it's just so much fun. One wonders why this book -- which makes fun of almost every other book and writer in existence -- didn't get more attention. Then again, maybe it's obvious.

Baby's first rebellion

I wasn't an especially rebellious child--in fact, I was something of a goody-goody. I didn't misbehave in school, and adult approval meant a lot to me. (Needless to say, this would cause problems later in life--but that's another story.)

But any decent artist has got to rebel, somehow, and my rebellion happened, like most of my life, on the page. I must have been eight or nine, and I wrote a short story in which I used the following series of symbols to express a character's incredulity:

?!!?

My teacher red-penned it. Not, she said, a valid punctuation mark.

Oh yeah?!!? I had just read it in a Peanuts cartoon. So it must be legit. Nope, it's not, said my teacher. I backed down, erased the two exclamation points and one of the question marks.

But in my mind, I knew I was right. "?!!?" expressed something I needed to express--intense, confused astonishment. Who was this teacher to tell me otherwise? I would remember this years later when a well-meaning copyeditor added about two thousand commas to my third novel, and I nearly tore holes in the paper STETting them back out again. If I say there's no comma, there ain't no goddam comma, Teach!

One of the first things I remember Rhian telling me about herself was that a teacher once told her there was no such word as "gamboling." Needless to say, I know a kindred soul when I meet one.

Reading on the iPad

What can I say, I bought an iPad. I'd planned on waiting for the early-adopter jitters to work themselves out, but then my college bookstore got them in stock, and, well...

In any event, as most of you have probably heard by now, this thing is just about perfect right out of the box. (One advantage of its being "just a big iPod Touch" is that its operating system, and general hardware scheme, are mature and user-tested.) It's not especially comfortable for writing (for that I'll stick with my laptop), but it is an ideal casual-computing device. It excels at video and photos (the photo-viewing app is spectacular, and my family has already enjoyed browsing pictures we haven't looked at in years), and is pretty good for internet as well. Its main use for me so far has been quick readings of student manuscripts, and responses to them via email, and this experience (after getting my email accounts squared away) has been smooth.

But what about books?

If you were thinking about buying a Kindle, you might want to reconsider. The iPad Kindle app exceeds it in pretty much every way except for reading in bright sunlight, and the iBooks app is even better looking (though the iBookstore, so far, contains little I want to read and is a pain in the ass to navigate). In the evening, with the screen brightness adjusted down to about 25%, I experienced no eyestrain, no more than when reading a paper book. The only thing I've actually bought (in the Kindle store) is a Lawrence Block story that is apparently unavailable anywhere in print, and the pages look great. The iPad is rather heavy and you might find that it slips around in your lap too easily; if so, get the rather ugly but very utilitarian grippy-feeling case that Apple sells--it will serve you well until a more elegant solution becomes available. Personally, I suspect I'm always going to prefer a real book. But I think that, for a lot of people, this is going to become their primary way of reading.

The one thing I am excited about, however, is something not many reviewers seem to have mentioned--magazines. For several months, I've been a subscriber to JPG, a photography publication whose print edition died of poverty, and which has reimagined itself as a pdf-only concern. I had downloaded all 20 issues, figuring that, some lonely day, I would get around to reading them on my laptop. But the iPad suddenly seemed a better bet. I picked up the $1 Goodreader app (it displays pdfs on the iPhone OS) and loaded in my JPGs via iTunes.

Holy moses! JPG looks incredible--and so, I suspect, will most art magazines. This platform, I think, is going to revolutionize the periodical business--it should single-handedly make electronic magazines, full-color magazines, commercially and aesthetically viable. This is great news, as a lot of fine special-interest magazines have bitten the dust in recent years, thanks to declining advertising revenues and increasing postal and printing costs. I realize that generating good editorial content is not cheap, but suddenly there seems to be some wiggle room in the previously claustrophobic and crap-heavy periodicals market. My book-buying dollars are likely to keep flowing towards my local bookstore, but magazines? I will be watching closely for new offerings in the niche markets that interest me. I suspect a lot of would-be editors are entertaining a lot of very interesting ideas this week.

(What would have been) the stupidest thing in the world

Scrabble to allow proper nouns. I know this is all over the internet right now, but it's worth a quickie post: does Mattel really think that youngsters will be attracted to Scrabble because they will be allowed to to form SNOOPDOGG using all their tiles, plus letters already played in SLIPKNOT and LADYGAGA? You know, instead of jerking off on Chat Roulette or engaging in the ancient pleasures of glue sniffing or video game console modding. And where are people going to be playing this new Scrabble, at their Windows 8 party?

Mattel has clearly fallen on hard times. This is like suddenly realizing your beloved grandma isn't getting any action and forcing her to attend her wheelchair pilates class in a G-string and pasties.

Meanwhile, time marches on: stay tuned for my iPad as an e-reader review. As if you haven't already re-read The DaVinci Code on it, just for kicks.

EDIT: Damn! I mean, thank goodness!

Here's what's actually happening. Mattel, which owns the rights to Scrabble outside of North America, is introducing a game this summer called Scrabble Trickster. The game will include cards that allow players to spell words backward, use proper nouns, and steal letters from opponents, among other nontraditional moves. The game will not be available in North America, where rival toy company Hasbro owns Scrabble.

Well, I had a good rage on for half a day or so, anyway. Now that healthcare has passed, such passion is hard to come by, alas.

All hail guerilla lit

So a few months ago a couple of guys named Nick and Zach asked me to write a 125-word short story that would, they said, be printed on 3'x3' stickers and pasted randomly around New York. I would be paid in copies. That would be pasted randomly around New York. Needless to say, I got right on it.

The 'zine, if you could even call it that, is named, horribly, Perineum, and the packet of short-short stickers I received arrived with an even more horrible line drawing of...uh...something. Something...postnatal. I think. It's hard to tell--it's kind of like a limited-edition goatse (NSFW) as drawn by Jim Woodring. In any event, disgusting or not, this is a very cool project, rendered all the more cool for having no apparent internet presence, no contact info, and no way of even telling who wrote the stories.

So in case you see the piece above stuck to the floor at Duane Reade, or wrapped around a suspension cable on the Manhattan Bridge, or affixed to the mayor's forehead, or pasted over Norman Mailer's face on the inside back flap of an ex-libris copy of Barbary Shore at the Strand, you can thank me, and the other eight writers who participated in this project. And Nick and Zach, of course.

At a time when you can download books while sitting in the bathtub, it's nice that somebody is providing the kind of literature you need to go tramping around the city to find. Here's to the inaccessible, confusing, obscure, and slightly revolting!

The (un)importance of originality

Rhian made a joke this afternoon--a song parody, actually. And then wondered aloud if anybody had already made this particular parody.

Five seconds on Google told us what we already knew--that if you just made a clever pun, you are approximately the five hundered thousandth living American to think of it. If present-day technology has told us anything, it's that there really is nothing new under the sun. If you've come up with something good, you can bet it's been thought of before. If you can think of something disgusting, guaranteed, somebody has done it, and is probably doing it right now. It can lead one to think that we are not all that different from, say, our chickens, who, while they are sort of distinctive from one another, are basically just chickens--they do the same kind of thing all day long, they seek out their own kind, and the world around them is terrifying and incomprehensible.

That said, there's a good way to interpret this news. And that is that, if we are inherently, inalienably unoriginal, then, ipso facto, it doesn't matter if we're original or not. What does this mean for the writer? If you get inspired to write, say, a poem about rain, or a short story about infidelity, or an essay about your grandma, don't be deterred by the fact that ten million others before you have done the same thing.

Because the only originality that matters is the kind you have no control over--the imprint of your particular personality. We're not like the chickens after all--it may be a cliché to be human, but it isn't a cliché to be a particular human. Indeed, the mark of a great artist is the willingness to embrace the ways in which they are different--to identify and cultivate their own strangeness.

In other words, it's the singer, not the song. Which come to think of it isn't the most original thing in the world to say.

Why I hate April Fool's Day

As I usually do on April Fool's Day, I'm going to spend the day far away from other people--probably taking long walks and reading novels. It really is the holiday I despise the most. People are sometimes surprised when I tell them this--I am hardly humorless; if my mouth is open, a wisecrack or stupid song is usually coming out of it. But there's a big difference between a joke and a prank.

I've already fallen for one this year. There's a photographer named Jeff Ascough, quite famous in the business--he is considered one of the top wedding photographers around, makes very good money, and is a product tester for Canon. He started twittering the other day about a new camera he was testing--a highly advanced digital rangefinder.

To fill you in--rangefinders were a type of camera popular in the forties, fifties, and sixties; by and large, they were replaced by SLRs (the current dominant camera type) in the 1970's. But certain photo nerds (myself among them) love these elegant old machines, and desperately hope for an affordable digital version on which to mount our collection of still-useful but obsolete old lenses. The only one currently manufactured is from Leica, the upscale German camera company, and it costs around $7000. So most enthusiasts have to either keep shooting film, pony up for a used (but still expensive) discontinued digital model, or just sit around and hope a Leica competitor will bring out a new one.

Well, Ascough strung the internet along for a couple days, rendering the online camera nerd community delirious with excitement, and then revealed that it was a joke. Or rather, should I say, a prank. In response to the flood of angry email he received late yesterday, Ascough wrote:

I am fully aware that a lot of people have absolutely no sense of humour, and that some have chastised me for actually having a sense of humour, but alas that is really their problem and not mine.

Actually, no--it is his problem. To the hopeful camera nerd, Ascough's prank isn't funny--it's the internet equivalent of the captain of the football team knocking the books out of your arms in the hallway. It's a bit of smug bullying, like most April Fool's pranks--and as usual the victim is accused of having no sense of humor for not enjoying getting his glasses smashed underfoot.

If you think that my own childhood experiences have rendered me slightly sensitive to this dynamic, you're right. But here's the larger justification for my feelings--the April Fool's prank is a mockery of credulity. And credulity is a virtue, not a fault--especially for a writer. The writer has to go around with his heart and mind wide open. He has to believe that the world is filled with amazing possibilities. Conversely, the artist--indeed, the person--who approaches the world with suspicion and mistrust, who is careful never to be fooled, is sacrificing a little bit of his soul every day.

Anyway, denizens of the internet, enjoy your fake news stories and iPad parodies. I'll be lurking off the grid until the coast is clear. And if you call me to tell me I've won a MacArthur, or the Pulitzer, or that Obama was photographed reading Castle on Air Force One, I will never speak to you again.

Bill Evans on creativity and simplicity

Interesting bit of video here--an interview with jazz piano legend Bill Evans that addresses the notions of simplicity and straightforwardness I have been thinking about lately. I've been obsessed with spare prose, and with the perils of overwriting. But of course some writers are very good at working in a dense, complicated mode--are they overwriting?

No, they're not--they are working efficiently within a framework where they know they can achieve clarity. Evans illustrates this on the piano--he demonstrates the "overwritten" version of a complex passage. A pretty neat illustration!

How to say no

I'm back at the computer after a solid week and a half of work judging a fiction contest. It's great to be able to give people the good news that they have won something (though in this case it won't be me doing that). But as always when I do this kind of thing I think a lot about the people who will come away empty-handed. We have all been those people, of course--we are those people every day. Any serious writer learns quickly to accept rejection, and stops taking it personally. But it certainly helps to be rejected respectfully, and you'd be surprised how few times this has happened to me.

I'm not talking about litmag rejections, which are, by their very nature, rather impersonal--I'm talking about rejections by people you know and have worked with--people with whom you have developed a professional relationship. It's a mistake to assume these people will publish you just because they like you and you like them, and the best relationships contain a strong element of critical give-and-take. But I think it's reasonable to expect to be turned down bravely, directly, and straightforwardly.

Of the book editors I've worked with, only one cut me loose like a pro--he called and apologized for not being able to accept the book (that book was Mailman, and it was the marketing department who said no--presciently, it turned out!), and I still respect him for it. One editor at a national magazine whom I have worked with has occasion to reject me now and then, and always does so gracefully, in a way that makes me like her all the more. Another favorite magazine editor, now at a book publisher, always used to bypass my agent, emailing me directly with his reasons for not saying yes.

But when I'm in a foul mood, I still gnash my teeth over the shitty dumpings of my literary life. Most of them consist of long relationships terminated through a proxy, with nary an email of explanation and no further contact after. There was one contact who spent an entire day talking me into not dumping her, only to send an email dumping me first thing the next morning. And there are editors who ran me through several rounds of on-spec revising before deciding the work was not for them. One editor called me a creep and a hanger-on for wanting an answer on the book I'd sent him, exclusively, nine months before.

I understand where these people were coming from--nobody likes saying no, especially to a friend. But I don't think most people realize that it actually feels good to be rejected like a pro--not as good as getting accepted, of course, but pretty good nonetheless. "I take you seriously," these rejections are saying. "Which is why I want better things from you." A good rejection flatters the writer's sense of himself--it is a validation of his ambition.

Of course it isn't easy being a literary gatekeeper, especially in this publishing climate. And most editors have to do a lot of rejecting, often of things they really like and wish they could publish. But a word of advice: treat the talent with care. We are easily wounded.

Around teh webs

A couple of links today, one sent by a W6 reader, the other by a student. The first (Thanks, Benjy), language policing in Chicago. The CEO of the Tribune Co. has issued a proclamation:

The man at the top of the troubled media empire took time out of his real job this week to issue a list of words and phrases — 119 of them, to be exact — that must never, ever be uttered by anchors or reporters on WGN-AM (720), the news/talk radio station located five floors below his office in Tribune Tower.

The aim seems to be to discourage "newsspeak." I have two comments on this. One, I personally would like my news anchors to sound like they're reading the news, not as though they are sipping coffee in my living room. The increasing friendlification of the news really bothers me--if I hear an NPR reporter use the word "folks" one more time, I'm gonna...well, to be honest, I'm going to just shake my head ruefully and get on with my day.

My second comment on this story is...since when is "bare naked" newsspeak? In any event, I'm not sure why people are getting bent out of shape over what is mostly a generalized anti-cliche memo. Perhaps, because it involves language, we think of it as a free speech issue. But it seems to me more like a verbal corporate dress code.

Link #2, your daily litty funny, comes from my student Adi: If All Stories Were Written Like Science Fiction Stories. A sample:

He logged onto the central network using his personal computer, and waited while the system verified his identity. With a few keystrokes he entered an electronic ticketing system, and entered the codes for his point of departure and his destination. In moments the computer displayed a list of possible flights, and he picked the earliest one. Dollars were automatically deducted from his personal account to pay for the transaction.

Billy Collins interview podcast

I haven't been updating this blog lately with information about the interviews I've been doing for Writers at Cornell. But I wanted to mention it today for two reasons--first, I just posted a new interview with former Poet Laureate Billy Collins, wherein we discuss the trouble with rules of thumb, not liking to compare poetry to jazz, and the secret government plot against poetry. It's a good one, so please give it a listen.

The other reason I bring up the podcast is to tell you that it is now available on iTunes. Just click this link to bring it up, or type "Writers At Cornell" into the iTunes search bar. All new interviews, and about half the archives (so far anyway) are available for download there. Don't know why I didn't do this sooner.

Collins is reading tonight at Cornell, and we're expecting a big crowd--I don't think America's got a better known poet. (We do talk in the interview a little bit about the mixed blessing of there being such a thing.)

From a dream

Yesterday we were on our way back from a weekend out of town, and I got an idea for a short story. This was a six-hour drive, at the end of which there would be no time for writing, not until this afternoon, when my class was over and I'd made it home. I genuinely feared the urge to write would leave me by then--if I'd been alone in the car, I would have pulled over and written for half an hour at a rest stop (probably fueled by one of those Dunkin' Donuts egg sandwiches on a waffle, I'm afraid).

The reason I was so nervous is that the story comes entirely from a dream, or rather a series of dreams, that I've had over the past couple of years. I'd had one the other night. In each, there's an abandoned cottage on a hilltop behind our house. It's the same cottage each time, but it always looks quite different. The story I was working up involved this series of cottages, and the idea that something can be the same and not-the-same at once. As I conceived of it, it wouldn't be a realistic story--or rather, just realistic enough to feel wrong somehow.

The weight of dreams leaves you pretty quickly. I've tried writing from them before, and rarely finish. A few times I've managed to semi-evoke that feeling in fiction, though not usually when I'm employing actual dreams as the material in question. Our dreams, unfortunately, are not inherently interesting to other people. In fiction, they need context, even if that context has to be built into the representation itself. And it's hard to know what specifically they need to carry their own sense with them.

I did manage to hold out until noon today, then write a mess of pages. I don't know if they're any good. Tomorrow I'm going to try a bunch more. Whatever the result, it feels good, a return to the dream state. I suppose it's better to write inspired garbage than nothing.

Barry Hannah

Oh, hell...I really loved Barry Hannah, who died this week at 67. He came up last week in conversation with some other writers, and I found myself semi-drunkenly holding forth about the awesomeness of Airships, and very slightly less so that of Bats Out Of Hell, two excellent and highly idiosyncratic story collections. (I've got first editions of both, suckas!)

Hannah was a writers' writer, a guy who often came up in informal chats with fellow scribblers, sometimes as a guilty or obscure pleasure. He wasn't always good, but he was always interesting, and when he was good, he was superb, in a manner unlike anyone else. He was at times very direct, at others hopelessly baroque; his work vacillated between brilliant comic energy and terrifying violence--or perhaps it was both, all the time.

At Montana, when we were there in the nineties, his brief and chaotic professorial stint was still fresh in some memories (a Bowie knife stabbed into a chalkboard? Brandishing a pistol in a rain-drenched car?!?), but he was gone long before we got there, and neither of us ever met him. (I did meet his daughter in a bar in Tuscaloosa once.) But he has loomed large in my imagination, ever since my college pal Brian O'Keefe lent me a copy of Ray in 1990 or so. It's time I caught up on the stuff I haven't read.

Sometimes you gotta write a manifesto

Well, I wasted half the day yesterday, putting together a six-page manifesto about common beginners' errors in fiction writing, when I was supposed to be writing fiction of my own. For some reason I'm getting a lot of repetitive mistakes from my students this semester (and a repetitive stress injury from scribbling them out), so I figured the only reasonable solution was a gargantuan handout. Here it is.

Rhian and I had a big argument about Lists of Things You Shouldn't Do. She thinks they send the wrong message. I think they're kind of fun, and made to be contradicted. Anyway, this isn't quite that--more like a collection of current pet peeves of mine, with suggested (and hopefully amusing) remedies. The nine, exhaustively elaborated on the handout, are:

1. Misuse of hyphens and em-dashes
2. Nested dependent clauses
3. Misadventures in dialogue tagging
4. Gerund phrases that incorrectly imply simultaneity
5. Modifiers and pronouns with ambiguous antecedents
6. Missing commas before names, in spoken address
7. Spaces between paragraphs
8. Re-describing a person or object using a new noun
9. Overwriting

Some of them are grammatical, some creative, some technical (like #7, which only Microsoft can be blamed for). Don't know if they'll be of much use to all you smartypantses, but have at it!

Photo from Oddlyspecific.com