Caring for Your Online Introvert
I was just rereading Jonathan Rauch’s 2003 essay for the Atlantic, Caring for Your Introvert. Incidentally, this article was one of the first to spread through the nascent blogosphere (remember Blogdex? It was on the top of that list for weeks…IIRC.) One part stuck out as a charmingly dusty:
Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially “on,” we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn’t antisocial. It isn’t a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: “I’m okay, you’re okay—in small doses.”
Now of course, an introvert is just as likely to play with his phone, using it as a social shield (Don’t talk to me while I’m sitting here alone at the bar, waiting for my friend.)
But have we changed? Social media drains me like a large party might. I just deactivated Facebook. And I don’t @ much on Twitter. Too often it feels like the “fog of [an extrovert's] 98-percent-content-free talk,” as Rauch put it.
I’m an introvert and an online introvert. A hard INTP, (which I think would be the most likely Myers-Briggs type for someone introverted in both spheres.) This doesn’t mean i don’t see the value of social media. I just use it my own way.
I know a lot of introverts who are online extroverts, which is perfectly reasonable. Maybe they see social media as a shortcut for getting necessary small talk — how’s the new job? where are you moving? – out of the way. And then there are extroverts who are online introverts. They really don’t have time for Twitter or Facebook — too busy partying with friends or talking on the phone or other social activities, to sit at a desk and type.
About the time I deactivated my Facebook account, I came across this essay by Carmen Joy King about why she did the same:
Ironically, the decision to destroy my carefully built-up virtual image came as a result of wanting to enhance my profile. All that particular week I’d been hungry for new quotes on my page, something to reflect the week I’d been having: something introspective. I perused a quotes website and found this one attributed to Aristotle:
“We are what we repeatedly do.”
I became despondent. What, then, was I? If my time was spent changing my profile picture on Facebook, thinking of a clever status update for Facebook, checking my profile again to see if anyone had commented on my page, Is this what I am? A person who re-visits her own thoughts and images for hours each day? And so what do I amount to? An egotist? A voyeur?
We are what we repeatedly do. I tried really hard to be one of those people who responds to every email, every @, every comment on this blog. I just can’t do it. Any expectation of me to act differently feels like the pressure I feel for acting standoffish with people I just meet.
The other day, I overheard a woman tell her friend about her young niece:
“She’s really outgoing…”
“That’s so much better.”
“Right. So much cuter.”
I thought of my own failure to live up to the prevailing definition of cuteness as a child. The grownups who couldn’t understand why this seven year old wanted to curl under a tree with her notebook rather than play dodgeball, let alone never ordered the whole family and all of their friends into the living room to watch her tap dance and sing. If I ever have a daughter, and if she should disappoint the world for never having a snappy comeback or wanting to play peek-a-boo with strangers in the park; not only will I think that’s adorable, I will encourage and reward such decidedly uncute behavior.
Of course, part of this has to do with shifting expectations of femininity. Society is largely uneasy with women who enjoy ideas, and even more so, those who enjoy time alone. We can size up a good hostess in an instant, but a wallflower requires effort that many are unwilling to initiate.
I don’t want anyone to think I’m mean or that I don’t care. Usually, if I don’t respond to something it’s because I don’t think I have anything worthwhile to say.
Social media is like a party. It facilitates meeting new people, and fosters casual acquaintances rather than deep friendships. Most of us communicate with best friends over email and instant messages instead.
I am probably revealing my bias in this post. Most of my favorite people are introverts and introverts are certainly my…sexual preference. A lot of people who are awkward in those moments you’re waiting in queue for a movie or deciding where to eat dinner, have come through for me in times when I’ve needed someone. And a lot of people who seem to radiate from within, just wouldn’t make it to the point of the conversation where I’d reveal whatever it was that might be troubling me.
My line between friendship and acquaintanceship is this: if I’m ever in a hospital will this person take time out of his day to come to see me? I can’t say I count on but a dozen or so followers on Twitter. And how often they @ me isn’t a measure of it.
Previously: Movies to See Alone
The Editor and the Curator (Or the Context Analyst and the Media Synesthete)
“The promise of the Internet-as-Alexandria is more than the rolling plenitude of information. It’s the ability of individuals to choreograph that information in idiosyncratic ways, the hope that individuals might feel invited by the gravitational pull of a broad and open commons to ‘rip, mix, and burn’ — to curate.”
—Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “A World in Three Aisles: Browsing the Post-Digital Library” Harpers (May 2007)
Oh, curation. What was once the dusty practice of elites at cultural heritage institutions is now something Robert Scoble is apparently an expert in. Who says there are no jobs for art school students? Poynter is hiring!
Poynter is seeking a Writer/Curator for its Sense-Making Project, an ongoing examination of the universe of information and its impact on democracy. We are looking at how facts and information are created, used and transformed. Our goal is to influence the new structures that are emerging, equip citizens with the skills they need to navigate civic life and assist in the development of a new infrastructure to support those doing journalism.
The writer/curator would play a critical role in allowing the public to interact with the project, its findings and its research.
This person must be:
* Immersed in multiple forms of media
* Conversant in traditional journalism values
* Able to articulate applications of those values in new settings
* A published author of short- and medium-length writing, in blog style and other styles
* Capable of determining the best sources of information on a wide range of topics
* Skilled in identifying those with influence, and able to evaluate and describe that influence
Meanwhile, YouTube is also in need of a Culture and Trends Curator, requesting a “savvy, dedicated writer who enjoys discovering news events and trends as they develop on YouTube – and can relay what those trends say about how the Internet is changing society.”
I curated this mess of printouts from AAAARG at my feet. I curate my breakfast on Twitter. I curate my way to work and curate my transfer to another line on the T. I even curate my drawer of undergarments. Yes, really…it takes some serious curating:
When did curate stop meaning, as the OED says, “to look after and preserve” and start describing the retweeting of bit.ly links and SEO optimization? The “curation economy” isn’t at Basel, it is happening in office meetings around the country just getting clued in about Twitter and the importance of setting up Facebook fan pages. Socialmediatoday.com instructs readers on “Curating, not moderating, the flow of content and participation” and provides a “Manifesto For The Content Curator.”
If life weren’t hard enough for art students looking for work, a Monster.com search for those in need of curating skills is likely to request proven track records in monetizing web traffic and managing follower partnerships, not to mention assisting with internal knowledge management systems. Software company Intuit calls their copywriters “Answer Curators” and undisclosed company in San Francisco needs a part-time experienced curator to “interact with other social media and blogger communities.”
I have yet to find a new media appropriation of the word “curator” that couldn’t just as well describe that oh so obsolete occupation: “editor,” (as I previously explained in the Tomorrow Museum podcast.) Understandably, the screen presents challenges very different from the page. It is reasonable to use a different term to describe the new skills needed. But if anything it is the “curator” job requirements that seem antiquated.
A social media curator is a essentially a selector. The practice is nothing more than human hand editing in the model of Mahalo. By this account, if you can pick out clothes for yourself in the morning, you can “curate.” Meanwhile, what Poynter and Youtube are looking for might better be described as “context analyst,” or what used to be known as a semiotician.
So why are these companies hiring curators in name only, rather than requesting real curatorial duties? If all you want is someone to list what is good and what is not good, you might as well call the job “office Nick Hornby.” Not to mention, identifying trends, context, and environment is something a writer should always be doing.
Contrast “curate” with a very good word for online media: content. Content can be video, image, comic, text, or game. It doesn’t signal anything or favor one form over another. It can be whatever comes next, the media we have yet to imagine.
What I think these media companies are trying to get at, but having trouble articulating is that the web is interdisciplinary. To understand it, you need a broad comprehension of the relationships between different tools and means to communicate. Nothing in these “curator” job descriptions calls for this talent. Interestingly, these digital curator jobs listed don’t even emphasize acquisition or sequencing.
As blogger New Curator writes, “When I asked what the most important function of curators was, we saw how complex and varied the job was and not a single person said ’selecting.’” Pointing to Nina K. Simon’s new book, “The Participatory Museum” he explains the role is deeper than that, requiring someone to be a “facilitator, designer and collaborator.”
So what should they be hiring? Well, start by thinking about the etymological roots of “curate” — “to take care of.” Information surplus creates different challenges in preservation and archival record keeping. There are “digital ethnographers,” slightly fewer “cyborg anthropologists,” but media is most in need of digital historians like Jason Scott providing historical context. Someone who can determine the “and this” from the “don’t forget” in fickle Internet memes.
Also implied by the word curator is an intuitive sense of pattern recognition and glyphs. More visual than a mere editor, the Internet requires a sense of the relationships between words, images, space, and shapes. The reason we call web content “content” is because every kind of it — be it text or game or photograph — communicates differently on the net. Online, art is no longer just an image, it becomes a collage that you made.
I used to know someone who worked as a sound designer and I was constantly fascinated when he would do something like rub his hand across his collar and say “that’s a character moving in a space suit.” The media application of this is writing text and knowing exactly how to visually represent it. This is more than just photo editing, it is multi-platform mediamaking.
Quick example: say you were blogging a review of the videogame Heavy Rain. The standard way to illustrate the post is with a sequence of screengrabs:
The curatorial approach, which we are swiftly moving toward, might be illustrated like this:
Heavy Rain screengrab and Lesley Vance painting. It doesn’t have to be that painting, just any visual representation that emphasizes the aspects of the former.
Like remix culture, having a collage mind is essential in making something standout on the web. What Youtube and others should be hiring is a “media synesthete,” someone who communicates in text, as well as forms, sounds, and shapes. The iPad, if anything, could kickstart mainstream demand for this skill. “Digital curation” may soon require a vocabulary of images and multimodality. For really great examples of this kind of media synthesia, take a look at MSTRMND, Pictory, Triple Canopy, specifically John Powers’ essay and also his blog Star Wars Modern. Also, Things Magazine is what you should be reading for insight on “curation.”
On a more personal note, I created The Tomorrow Museum almost exactly two years ago (here’s my first post.) The name was a pun on the then emerging buzzword: “curation.” I wanted to play with the idea of the blog/internet as physical space and display art as if on the walls of a gallery. The essays were the subtle underpinning like a coffee table book rather than a WG Sebald story. If there are fewer images on my site than before it’s because I have run out of art I like less time than previously, but early examples here like this post (and this and this and this and this) are in practice how I feel a blog post should communicate. Never would I have guessed that two years later the interplay of text and image would still stand out as unique. Six months down the line — the Internet landscape post-iPad — I expect this won’t be the case.
Previously:
- Accidental Storytelling
- Handmade Looking Writing
- Saying Yes and Hearing No
- The Daily Death
- Rules for an American Fantasy Road Trip
Crowdfunding or What?
So much of the future of media debate concludes with little evidence and much conjecture on how the latest idea or gadget will or will not “save” publishing. Therein lies the problem. The Internet presents us with limitless possibilities. How could anyone believe in a silver bullet?
If a savior is what publishing needs, the best thing anyone could hope for is that more people will draft their wills like Ruth Lilly (she left Poetry magazine 100 million.) Really, the goal should be business models as unique as our creative strengths, but sometimes that feels just as unrealistic.
The trouble I see with crowdfunding for creative projects is not that it doesn’t work, but that it couldn’t possibly work for everyone. First of all, the very act of crowdfunding requires a level of self-assuredness that does not often come naturally for artists and writers. Mikita Brottman, literature professor at Maryland Institute College of Art, talks about the problem her students have selling themselves to the public “I have art students who grasp pretty complex ideas but can’t put them into words. If someone is a great video-game designer or great artist or a great musician, when if comes to speaking about it, if they aren’t articulate, they’re seen as freaks.” This often comes at the expense of grants and other opportunities they are more than qualified to receive, but fail to articulate the need. That point reminds me of something I read about Dr. Suess. He was invited all the time to speak at schools but mostly declined. As a very shy, somewhat awkward person, he worried children would be let down as he does not appear as carefree and spirited as the narrator of his books.
The least remarkable novels I read seem written as though the author knows his mother will see it one day. Imagine an author who feels accountable to hundreds and hundreds of people — context collapse as the death of creativity.
My friend Ed Champion was once explaining the difference between writers who write to write, rather than write to have written. I worry crowdfunding works best for the latter — those who see writing as the means for prestige rather than a greater calling. When I look at my bookshelf, I don’t see a single author who was ever described as “salesman-like” or even “good with people.” In a country where 81% of the population “feel they have a book in them,” there’s already a problem of loud voices crowding out raw talent, with or without crowdfunding.
As Joseph Epstein once put it, “I wonder if the reason so many people think they can write a book is that so many third-rate books are published nowadays that, at least viewed from the middle distance, it makes writing a book look fairly easy. After all, how many times has one thought, after finishing a bad novel, ‘I can do at least as well as that’? And the sad truth is that it may well be that one can. But why add to the schlock pile?”
Last week there was an informal discussion about crowdfunding on Twitter, preserved here by Tim Maly. More from Maly, Michelle Pauli at The Guardian, PD Smith, and Paul Raven at Futurismic. Will Wiles expanded on some of his points in the debate, with a thoughtful post, “I Have Always Relied on the Strangeness of Crowds”. I like his footnote, “Here’s an idea for redistributing the risk in publishing – crowdpledging. How about a publisher says ‘get 1000 people to say they’ll buy a copy of your proposed book, and we’ll give you a contract?’ Could that be made to work?” I also like the idea of publishers, indie or otherwise, using Kickstarter and other crowdfunding methods to find new voices. A writer who is his own cheerleader, probably isn’t maxing out his talent. But so long as demand for outstanding work remains high, there’s still potential for alternatives.
Facebook is Worse than AOL
Devin Troy Strother, Please Don’t Shoot Up the Dancehall. From The Armory Show 2010 preview.
“Facebook’s coming at it from a corporate position. It’s basically like AOL in 1997 — everything is there and there’s no need to go anywhere else. I don’t know if they’re even considering what users want anymore. It’s all about how to maximize revenue and all that crap. It’s wanting to be everything to everybody possible so they won’t have to go anywhere else.”
– Matt Haughey. (via.)
Facebook is worse than AOL. It’s like a neverending digital teambuilding exercise. But instead of trailing a rope course or catching blindfolded people leaning backward, participants post pictures of doppelgangers and list “25 things” about themselves.
I really dislike the term “walled garden,” as it brings Frances Hodgson Burnett to mind and people imagine something privately enjoyed rather than simply restricted access. Don’t confuse this with invite-only message boards or mailing lists that make the Internet wonderful. To end the confusion, lets call the good places secret gardens.
Back in the day, AOL had a lot of secret gardens. According to my friend Erin, there was a Spin magazine message board frequented by established rock critics that was at an off the index location. A lot of corporations and publications created “channels” which would include chat rooms and message boards. These were about as successful as the businesses with Second Life presences. But some users would take over the dead space and make it their own. Several online friends and I once claimed the message boards for a Canadian radio station long after it was launched and quickly abandoned. Likely the citizens of Second Life do that with virtual ghost town storefronts.
It’s a little surprising Facebook isn’t used more like a message board or a mailing list –most people seem to use Ning or Google Groups for that purpose. The problem is something that tries to do everything can’t do anything well. Anyone who remembers Usenet or even the AOL message boards knows that as soon as posts dropped to one or two a week, the whole thing died not long after. Constant updates keep a social network alive.
I don’t have a problem with secret gardens on the Internet. Actually, just about everyone I know is on some kind of private invite-only mailing list or message board. But a walled garden leads to a number of complications. In 2007, Jason Kottke called Facebook the New AOL, referring their platform:
What happens when Flickr and LinkedIn and Google and Microsoft and MySpace and YouTube and MetaFilter and Vimeo and Last.fm launch their platforms that you need to develop apps for in some proprietary language that’s different for each platform? That gets expensive, time-consuming, and irritating. It’s difficult enough to develop for OS X, Windows, and Linux simultaneously…imagine if you had 30 different platforms to develop for.
As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It’s called the internet and it’s more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007. Eventually, someone will come along and turn Facebook inside-out, so that instead of custom applications running on a platform in a walled garden, applications run on the internet, out in the open, and people can tie their social network into it if they want, with privacy controls, access levels, and alter-egos galore.
This sort of reminded me of Alex Payne’s The Case Against Everything Buckets. Someone smarter than me about these subjects could probably make a comment about how this is happening with mobile apps right now. Android developers, for example, fear that too many differentiated models will make their job harder. I’d love to see data on how many users don’t install Facebook apps at all. Or never use them. Or only use them. For a lot of people Farmville is Facebook.
My real frustration with Facebook has to do with context collapse. This was exactly why I was slow to sign up for the service. I can’t remember exactly when I did, maybe 2006, but I used the email I have just for online shopping and mailing lists and never imported my gmail contacts. I knew then I wanted it to be as small a part of my life as possible. Why? Because my friends weren’t on it, but a bunch of professional acquaintances were. And also because of the poke feature. danah boyd’s Facebook vs MySpace class distinctions was very apparent, as I was living in Chicago, and had few friends affiliated with universities, but old work colleagues from DC were all there. Even today, many of the musicians and artists I knew there still favor Myspace, but is there a 4.0 average student alive who doesn’t Facebook?
And when I heard about the “poke” feature that did it for me. It indicated the creators just weren’t serious about making something that could be more than a place for goofing around in a perplexingly formal way. “Poke” is the dumbest and worst feature ever invented for a social network. Even worse than that “suggest a match” thing on Friendster back in the dark ages (I still turn bright red and wince thinking of the time a less than socially savvy pal suggested a match for me with the person I had a crush on at the time.) I don’t really like when people lay out “best practices” for social networking like, “oh, she doesn’t @ reply enough people on Twitter.” And “netiquette” very often neglects the fact that introvert/extrovert classifications also exist in the digital world. But no, there’s never a good time for a poke. (Why stop with the poke? Why not call me and hang up before answering? Why not send me a blank email with no subject? Why not blank @ me?)
Rule of thumb on who to listen to in social media: ignore every non-artworld person talking about “curation” and instead subscribe to the feeds of those blogging about “filter failure.” (More on this in an upcoming post.) Facebook epitomizes filter failure for me. Yes, there are ways to segment information and keep groups, but there aren’t very good ways to keep worlds from overlapping. Facebook isn’t a more neutral LinkedIn and Myspace. It is the collapse of LinkedIn, Myspace, and a bunch of other networks, while many people want these worlds compartmentalized. I mostly avoid Facebook the same way that I’ll get drinks on a Monday night with colleagues, but not on a Friday or Saturday night. This generation blurs the line between work and play, but there is still a line or else you’re not getting the best out of either.
Now, this is my experience with Facebook. I don’t doubt there’s value to it for lots of people. I like it as a visual rolodex, and if I were a heavy user, I can see the advantage of adding just about everyone you meet at a conference or class as a “friend.” But mainly my use of Facebook is transitionary. I import my contacts to newer, hopefully better social networks as they come along like Foursquare or Quora.
That being said… add me.
Previously: The Overexamined Life: Finding Bits of Ourselves in Digital Ghost Towns
How to Frame the Internet II: Entertainment and Culture Post iPad
Mainstream since the 50s, but rarely used since the early 80s craze, 3D is now expected of every major movie these days.
Why? You can’t download 3d glasses, let alone an IMAX theater. It’s the staging of an event, a singular experience. Something that cannot be so easily replicated at home.
Likewise, in 2008, I wrote a post How to Frame the Internet, calling for the staging of events online:
The problem I see in terms of editing online content seems to be the absence of “frames.” Time frames as well as frames as a metaphor: ways of segmenting information so it doesn’t overlap with other content or ideas, complementary or not. Creating scarcity when there is abundance and understanding how to work with the desire that grows in anticipation of something.
I can’t remember the comedian — I want to say someone Saturday Night Live affiliated — but he was making a point about repetition in sketch comedy. You tell a joke once and it’s funny (well, sometimes, in the case of SNL.) Tell it again, it’s not funny. Tell it a third time it’s funny again. The next several times it’s really not funny, but if you keep repeating it after ten times and keep going, each of those times the joke is funny (this is, of course, a total perversion of the law of diminishing marginal returns.)
Art filmmakers are aware of the boredom they inflict when they hold a certain shot just a moment too long. Horror films especially are cruel games of anticipation. It is agonizing to watch the girl go down the steps to the basement tiptoe after tiptoe sooooo slowwwly.
The great change we are waiting for, the one that will make newsworthy information part of one’s daily media diet is online content that will acknowledge and work around a user’s lack of patience. This means creating an event out of what is being presented… Make viewers mark in their calendars for it. Make them miss it if they miss it.
Twitter often takes this role. For the past few years, I make a point of watching the State of the Union as it airs, rather than later on in the evening, at a time more convenient to my schedule. Only then can I keep up with the tweets and status updates from friends and bloggers I follow.
In terms of segmenting information, I’m very enthusiastic about the iPad. One aspect in particular is intriguing, and it is the very aspect that annoys Gizmodo so much: No Multitasking.
This is a backbreaker. If this is supposed to be a replacement for netbooks, how can it possibly not have multitasking? Are you saying I can’t listen to Pandora while writing a document? I can’t have my Twitter app open at the same time as my browser? I can’t have AIM open at the same time as my email? Are you kidding me? This alone guarantees that I will not buy this product.
- Gizmodo, 8 Things That Suck About the iPad
Here is the slow web in effect. The opportunity to focus on the one task at hand. Combined with the intimacy of the device, we’re going to see an entirely new way of interacting with information.
It is a more reflective way, one that might even correct some of the signal-to-noise issues we’ve for so long taken as a given of the digital age. Also in 2008, I wrote about how I feel the iPhone (and now the iPad) could gradually kill off some of the more inane youtube comments. From the post Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments:
If more and more people start reading online media on mobile phones and Kindle, the incentive to leave a comment will go down dramatically. Do you really want to save this post for later and comment in a couple hours? Or do you want to struggle with writing something on the inadequate keyboard?
We might also see growth in devices that divorce writing from reading… A computer is designed to do both things at once so you no longer even think of reading while writing as multitasking. Often times the experience of writing an email is consuming and processing at once: as the message you are writing and the message you are responding to are in the same frame. I’m not old enough to remember the conventions of handwritten letters, but I doubt my grandmother sat at her desk composing a letter to her friend with her friend’s prior letter folded above it, going line by line, making sure she’s responded to every question in sequence.
The keyboard is closer to you than the screen. Many of us scroll the screen with the same keys we compose letters. It’s wonderful in that it has made us a more literary culture, but it also means a lot of great stuff gets lost in the abundance of online text.
If Kindle becomes more popular, and more laptops start including tablets, I think users will grow accustomed to reading without having to add their .02 once they get to the end. Which means those who do, might have something really interesting to say.
I actually prefer my iPhones inability to multitask. It’s putting a constraint on me… and my worst multi-tabbing, unfocused habits. If I can’t so easily navigate to another app or another page, I won’t.
The iPad is effectively dividing two experiences: reading and writing. This means actively listening to another person’s words, and having the time to think of what to say before typing. This is better communication. This is the future.
Previously:
Accidental Storytelling
The world is split into two different kinds of people. When I moved into my flat, we were having all our kitchen goods delivered. My then girlfriend got off the phone and said to me, “we need to stay in because the fridge men are coming.” The world is divided into those who hear that and think, “I need to be in because I’m having a kitchen delivery” and those who hear the word “fridge men” and immediately conceive of a kind of cyborg creature with a big open door in his chest and stopping arms and legs and kind of freezing demeanor—a fridge-man hybrid.
Miguel Palma, Dream House (detail), 2003, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, (Art Fag City Flickr set)
As I mentioned the other week, I’m testing out the Dragon NaturallySpeaking iPhone app. This is my first experience using speech recognition software, but I’ve always had warm feelings about the brand since it is what Robert Conquest uses and well, who doesn’t love dragons? My hope was it would alleviate two major problems in my life right now: I have to drive many miles every day and I have very little time to write.
James Franco on General Hospital and I think on that of New York as a band being of what people think New York is her more every day lead when they were young that there is no New York has true iPod Andy Warhol imagination in his bed There is no need to work as true as the noon your hands me or call imagination on his background before you and being so general but all in the mid-the TV show General Hospital is written by someone who doesn’t know what a gallery show is really alive or what’s going in hard and really live it’s written by someone who was never there
In that particular paragraph, my actual comment was that New York is, at its best, a projection of Andy Warhol’s fantasies of New York from his bedroom in Pittsburgh. It’s a city with a rich history at odds with the fantasies of those who finally arrive after dreaming of living there. LA is the same way, like that wonderfully titled documentary “LA Plays Itself.” From that point, I said General Hospital’s “Franco” character is scripted like the writers have never met an artist, never gone to a gallery. It’s this fantasy element like the city itself. They might as well have dressed him in a beret and given him a French accent. If Dragon NaturallySpeaking worked better, I can’t says that any of these thoughts would make the cut to draft 2. It was just something I was considering at the time. I was talking out my ideas, which is very strange for me as I’m definitely someone who thinks before she talks — having the classic introverted tendency of holding back in conversation until developing a strong opinion, rather than shaping and creating opinions in the act of a conversation. Speech recognition seems to work for Fred Wilson and it probably works for certain type of talking — “to do” list transcription or very direct correspondence. Just speak clearly, with uncomplicated words and sentences. I’m amused Dragon recognized “Franco” of all the words — Conquest’s influence? Conquest, by the way, explained to WSJ, “my handwriting’s pretty bad and my typing is worse.” In the same interview he points out Henry James always dictated his novels. Miguel Palma, Dream House (detail), 2003, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, (Art Fag City Flickr set) As for the way I like to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking, it operates as a from-pollen-comes-honey word machine. “There is no need to work as true as the noon.” Now, I have a higher tolerance for purple prose than most, but that sounds lovely to me. Maybe I’ll turn that into a song lyric, a medium less stringent upon the precision of words and their meanings. I have no idea what I was saying when that line appeared on the screen. But I’ll take that and make something from it. I didn’t think it, but I created it. Either way it is mine. “your hands me / or call imagination / on his background / before you and being so general” … Well, I’ve written far worse song lyrics than that in the past. Now, I’m not recommending speech recognition for the moments that you badly need to capture an idea before it escapes. But if you just playing around some thoughts, ideas aren’t so committed to, this is a fun way to seek inspiration. We are so often presented with these kinds of quick fiction experiments. I can’t argue with my savings account interest rate but the credit union website makes me want to pull my hair out. For months, I was fine accessing my account through Mint.com. Then one day there was an error, I needed to re-answer the security questions about my first car and major in college. Well, I did and still generated error messages. I had to go to the credit union’s website, which presented me with an entirely different list of questions! On both sites there were a bewildering number of questions I had the option to answer. Here’s the catch, anything about me — my favorite food, my alma mater — was not available to answer on the Mint.com prompt. The only questions that were available to answer on both Mint and my credit union’s site were about my spouse’s favorite food, or my child’s preschool. Well, I have neither a child nor a husband, but for the purpose of accessing my accounts online, I’m happy enough to invent them. Remember Sarah Palin’s email hacking? All it took to get into her gov.sarah@yahoo.com account was answering “Where did you go to high school?” Even being quite private about these kind of details, were I married, just how hard would it be for anyone to figure out my “spouse’s occupation?” or where we met? LMGTFY. But who would ever guess that I do have a husband, his name is Nikolajs, we met in an airport in Abu Dhabi, and he works a pilot? The children are Omni and Jurate, we married in Riga, Latvia, and have a summer home on Saturn. For security purposes isn’t it better to invent a story? Otherwise, your password might as well be “123456″
Anyway, this is as good a place as any to announce an exciting event next week, I’m thrilled to take part in: Boston Bookfuturists: Introducing experiments in storytelling and The first ever Bookfuturists Meetup is this month at Microsoft New England Research & Development Center Boston Bookfuturists 1 Interested in presenting at future events? Please contact us: info@bookfuturists.com Please visit our website Host: Joanne McNeil, The Tomorrow Museum Presenting: Joshua Glenn, a Boston-based journalist and scholar, is coeditor of Hilobrow.com and co-curator of Significant Objects, an online experiment that pairs writers with secondhand junk, then sells the junk on eBay (using the story as an item description), in an effort to answer this question: “What makes things meaningful?” Peggy Nelson is a new media artist whose work encompasses film, augmented reality, performance art, and reenactments. In Search of Adele H is a Twitter movie, a re-imaging of the life and fictionalizations of Victor Hugo’s daughter Adèle. But as with a book, the moving images are intentionally missing. The Twitter movie happens in your head, much as the main character’s life happened in hers. Stona Fitch writes powerful novels that have earned an international following. His novel SENSELESS is now a UK feature film and a cult classic that critics often refer to as the most disturbing novel ever written. St. Martin’s is publishing his next novel, Give + Take, in April. He has been selected as one of the Boston Public Library’s 2010 “Literary Lights.” In 2008, Stona and other writers/thinkers founded the Concord Free Press, the world’s first generosity-based publisher, which publishes original novels and gives them away in exchange for voluntary donations to worthy causes or people in need. Matthew Battles has written about technology, language, and culture for such publications as the American Scholar, the Atlantic, and the Boston Globe. He’s cofounder of the blog Hilobrow.com and author of the book Library, an Unquiet History. Previously: Handmade Looking Writing Falero. Departure of the Witches, 1878 (via.) One of the best things about living in this era is that there are countless options available to capture ideas, digital or otherwise. You may have a moleskine in your pocket, but you still jot an idea down on your iphone, depending on what the idea is, the rhythm of it, and what you plan to do with it. The decision to type or handwrite usually boils down to how fast do I need something captured and searchable? If I know I’m immediately going to use an idea, I usually write it as an email to myself. I delete the email as soon as the text is integrated in the intended project, whether it is an article or blog post or short story I’m writing. When I come up with a somewhat poetic turn of phrase, I usually write it out on a paper notebook I always have with me. For years, I carried kraft brown Moleskine Cahiers, but now I’m obsessed with and never without Muji’s recycled paper note sets. (I also have the Chronotebook with me always, but mostly use it for mind mapping, rather than scheduling.) I title these notebooks something obscure (“Are you a sling shot or a snake charmer?) and date them with silver sharpie. It has to be silver sharpie or I really will not use the notebook. There’s probably a deeper rationalization for why I need silver titles on recycled brown paper covers — like how most of my work is about where the organic meets the inorganic, nature and technology at odds — but in any case that’s one area I’m uncompromisingly neurotic. Attending a lecture, I would much prefer to take notes on my iPhone, but because that action is so often misconstrued, I usually write things down on whatever pamphlet was handed out before the event. I could never type a journal. I always write them in ink, partly because my handwriting is so terrible, it may as well be in cyrillic. Handwritten, the secrets in my journal are safe from others, sometimes indecipherable even to myself just a few years later. When I do type out my ideas, it’s because I need it fast. If I’ve got a story beginning to end in my head I will cancel anything to get straight to my laptop because otherwise key elements will escape from my brain between the time I’m going about my day and the time my fingers are typing it out. Lately, I’m experimented with voice recognition like the DragonNaturallySpeaking iPhone app, and I’ll explain that in an upcoming post. I get a lot of use out of Simplenote on the go, but because typing on an iPhone presents hiccups, I dont ever bother with articles or conjunctions. Usually these notes result in lists of scattered nouns and verbs, to remind me of the original idea. Reading about Cormac McCarthy’s Olivetti and knowing JG Ballard only used a typewriter, made me think about getting one. Just to mix things up and see what kind of writing might result from the introduction of a new tool to deliver it. When I have a rough idea I need time to stretch out, I create a file and type a loosely structured outline. I use TextEdit, Google Reader, MarsEdit, or something else, depending on how much time I have to type it, whether it is going on the blog or to an editor, and a bunch of other deciding factors. And Ommwriter is a dream come true for the book of essays I’m writing. I’ve got this blog, a tumblr, a twitter, a posterous account. The choice I make over what goes where is based on similar kids of decision — whether it’s social, private, a first draft, etc. I also have a long file in Google Wave, I’m using as a project timeline. When it comes to preserving facts, quotes, reference material, it’s just as much a matter of how this information is being used. For a while, when I was working on a novel, I would cut out relevant articles and put them in labeled green folders in a wire sided cabinet on casters (again, really particular about colors for some reason.) I’m afraid the last time I filed something was about a year ago, as I read fewer and fewer print publications, and don’t print out articles as often as I did in the past. That’s not to say, I wouldn’t start doing it again if a new project called on it. I use del.icio.us is spurts, either tagging several things a day or ignoring it for three months at a time, instead saving links in text files with full quotes. Search is really the key reason I feel digital storage is the best place to save other people’s ideas I want to build on. However well I label paper folders, I still can’t plug in “beijing” and “shoe design” or whatever and come up with several results in a snap. It’s also partly why I subscribe to as many blogs as I do. I can search for “Tiger Woods” and the results come from my little globe of blogs and publications I like, rather than, well, what happens when you search for “Tiger Woods” in Google. I hadn’t realized my number of subscriptions (now 752) was at all unusual until the Bygone Bureau’s Best New Blogs post went up. And Nav at Scrawled in Wax responded with a post, How Many Feeds is Not Enough? Robin at Snarkmarket commented: [William Gibson] said it’s like dipping a finger into the zeitgeist. It this river roaring past, and you’re just taking its temperature. The reason to go for scale—to subscribe to 700 feeds, not just 70—is to increase the chance of weird combinations, of unexpected collisions that reveal something new & interesting. To pile it all into your brain and wait for interesting things to happen, not necessarily on the conscious level! Warren Ellis talks about this too: about throwing it all in the brain-pot and letting mysterious things happen And it’s not just the odd combinations that result; it’s essential for trend spotting. When all of a sudden everyone is talking about Rodarte, not just the fashion bloggers, but the design bloggers, even the boy bloggers, well, then you know it’s happened: it’s tipped. Farhad Manjoo once wrote: RSS started to bring me down. You know that sinking feeling you get when you open your e-mail and discover hundreds of messages you need to respond to—that realization that e-mail has become another merciless chore in your day? That’s how I began to feel about my reader. RSS readers encourage you to oversubscribe to news. Every time you encounter an interesting new blog post, you’ve got an incentive to sign up to all the posts from that blog—after all, you don’t want to miss anything. Eventually you find yourself subscribed to hundreds of blogs, many of which, you later notice, are completely useless. It’s like having an inbox stuffed with e-mail from overactive listservs you no longer care to read. But…it’s not email. It’s not directed at you. You don’t have to read it all or respond to any of it. Folders are key to keep from feeling overwhelmed. I have four must read folders “friends,” “daily,” “boston new&events,” and “ballardian” (pretty much every blog on Ballardian’s list of links.) I have about a dozen other folders marked by subject, but everything else is subject to “Mark All Read” depending on the time I have to scan through it. Since I don’t have much time to read blogs during the day, I usually glance at Google Reader and star whatever looks interesting for reading later. At the end of the day, I go through whatever I starred, unstar a bunch of things that at second glance doesn’t seem interesting, and read what is left. The best thing about Google Reader is it is so multi-use. The sharing and liking fuction isn’t really as well used as it could be, but the potential is there. If I had really thought about the question, I might have listed Zach Seward’s shared items as the best new blog this year, since he seems to read just about everything and leaves insightful notes. This is really just what works for me. Having the information stored and searchable matters more to me more than seeing the full design of a blog or coming across it in a serendipitous way. Although, I really get what Michael Surtees has pointed out about wanting to read blogs at the original sites. Even if I already subscribe, I definitely go the URLS of my favorite sites a few times a week, whether to click on the archives, check out the comments or just view them in a more aesthetically pleasing format. And I understand I’m in the minority here, but I really don’t like Twitter as a link aggregator. I wish more people used it for the epigrammatic rather than an arrow to elsewhere. Yeah, I miss what you had for breakfast, ok? Your “must read article on architecture” bit.ly link may be my “already saw it on Metafilter three weeks ago, and six other blogs.” For the most part, bloggers title posts relevant to the post, but there’s not much space on Twitter to explain what the link is about. I might use it more if there were sites where you could search your friends’ feeds. Again, I’d much rather search just my friends for “Tiger Woods” than all of twitter. The funny thing about this, is just a few weeks ago I dumped a couple hundred RSS feeds and stopped following a number of Twitter accounts to clean house. I feel like I could comfortably follow twice as many blogs without feeling fatigue as the number I follow has more to do with what I enjoy reading rather than a limit to what I can control. Google Reader just makes my life a lot easier and if there were only one Previousy: Survival Creativity
Dragon NaturallySpeaking best delivers as a game giving clues to help you remember something you once said. It takes your words and scrambles them. No idea how the desktop version fares, but the app is very selective in what is chooses to recognize. Or my accent is indecipherable. But it’s free, so I can’t complain about that. Just take a look at what happened when I tried to get thoughts down for a review of James Franco’s “performance art” on General Hospital:
Another storytelling experiment for fiction writing block: reCAPTCHA. “Looming hours” …”helium years”…”hobnails out.” If you are the sort of person like China Mieville describes, you can make something out of that. Not that these accidents are exclusive to the screen either. Someone I met the other night had mistaken my name for “Japan.” In a flash I fantasized about how my life could have turned out… “Japan” studied visual anthropology at Goldsmiths, wears clear frame glasses, and drinks Talisker on ice. I could get away with another level of pretentiousness with a name like that. 
publishing — exploring the intersection of books and technology.
near the MIT campus in Kendall Square. Come listen to presentations on
experiments in storytelling and publishing. The event is free. Please
RSVP:
7-9pm
January 29
Microsoft New England Research & Development Center
One Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA How to Capture an Idea
thing I’d ask of it, it would be an auto import to Instapaper.
Twitter Copywriters and the l33terati
Today on the internet, I’m trying to figure out the origin of the “If you lived here, you’d be home now” sign. The kind that 80s development utilitarian high rises in the fartherst corners of the city limits sometimes display outside.
Seems like it’s a Boston thing. I first came across the phrase reading Susanna Kaysen’s memoirs of MacLean when I was eleven or twelve. And I clearly associate it with the apartment complex by the often gridlocked Storrow Drive on-ramp to 93 South. A friend of my mother once lived there. It’s the Kevin Bacon of real estate in New England and iconic enough for Mass General Hospital to use as a landmark on their directions page. This article suggests it started as a 60s citywide campaign to reverse the flight to the suburbs.
It’s like “A diamond is forever,” classic and to the point. It’s so clever it could be twittered. Something you memorize without thinking.
Since I started the blog in April of last year, I’ve had a halfworked post titled “l33terati” waiting as a draft. It’s not that I can’t quite figure out what to do with it, as I’ve certainly posted plenty of “blog essays” without any real point or unifying theme. It’s that the idea behind it is entirely false but something I really want it to happen. It’s my own fiction. I want for there to be a generation of authors whose love of writing was born from years of geekery, starting in chat rooms and message boards.
So in my post-long alternate history of book culture in the aughties — “l33terati” — there’s a generation (1978-1986, mainly) writers with a rough, punchy way of writing that is not without aesthetic merit. The fiction doesn’t take place on the Internet necessarily, but the narrative is clearly influenced by it. It is a literary movement that is a total rejection of the purple teased out prose of MFA-speak that needlessly prattles on about memories of grandmother’s house and the smell of sugar cookies and carpet cleaner or whatever.
So there is no geek literary movement. There are geeks that write, some even embrace their geekiness, but no work is about to oust “Eat, Pray, Love” or “The Corrections” as the dominant publishing ideal. Maybe the reason “l33terati” never happened is all the geek writers value tl, dr above everything else.
If there is a “l33terati,” they aren’t writing novels or even short stories. They are writing flash-super-super-flash fiction or flash-super-super-flash creative nonfiction. That quick evocative half-poetry, half-advertising that is “A diamond is forever” or “if you lived here, you’d be home now,” well you can find it on Twitter every day.
This generation considers the way words look and sound together, without necessarily a care for their actual meaning. I think of the time I spent deliberating on a handle for my AIM account when I was a teenager. I was really proud of how clever it was (and I won’t tell you what it is, least anyone uncover the sprawl of terribly embarrassing high school lonesome usenet posts Google has idexed…forever.) It was like that for most teenagers in the 90s, a mix of emo and self-promotion in the “losthelecopter,” “vixengoverness,” “cakelike” and others. Back there there were no photos or real names, so the handle was the way you stood out in an internet community. There were straightedgers who had their handles between x — “xdollfacex” or such. And if you took a conventional handle, one with your age, hobby, or hometown, well that was another form of signaling.
I’m not quite sure how to write this, but I think technology makes
young people proficient in copywriting, more so than literature. The ultimate pop culture reference of the year: Don Draper, as he proclaims the new Kodak invention isn’t a wheel… but a “Carousel.” It seemed like a Twitter epiphany:
“”Technology is a glittering lure. But there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in house at a fur company. This old-pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy … Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is ‘new.’ It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of Calamine Lotion. We also talked about a deeper bond with the product — nostalgia. It’s delicate but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship; it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called ‘the wheel’; it’s called ‘the carousel.’ It lets us travel the way a child travels, around and around, and back home again to a place where we know we are loved.”
I studied economics in college and my favorite professor said we should never turn in a report longer than two pages. Anything more than that would be digressing from the assignment. While, I’m well aware my writing could be smoother and flow more pleasantly, I count myself as lucky to never be bogged down with “qualifying the signify” academic-ese, I’d inevitably need to un-learn. Actually, when I come across academic papers seeped in such language, I think it looks so… middlebrow. Like a kid playing dress up.
Which reminds me of the lecture I attended at Frieze last month, “Scenes from a Marriage: Have Art and Theory Drifted Apart?” It’s worth listening to the podcast, especially to hear the scuffle between the panelists and an artist who sees nothing wrong with using words like paint or clay. While I sometimes appreciate an artist’s vague language, when an academic speaks without clarity, I see it as their own shortcoming. It’s bluffing, it’s failure to communicate. You might as well say nothing at all.
The Daily Death: When A Celebrity Dies Every 15 Minutes
In the future, a famous person will die every fifteen minutes. Already it’s happening. The ascent of the microcelebrities, the 24 hour news cycle, citizen journalism, and our darkest fantasies all collide on Twitter now. The website’s question “What are you doing?” sometimes feels more like “Who died today?”
Every day on Twitter, news of another death. Les Paul, John Hughes, Farrah Fawcett, those big names, but also the editor at this publication, the founder of this startup, the people who we might not all know, but someone you know knew them and they are using the space to remember them.
Sure, Maria Shriver’s euology made me sit up straighter and think I want to be like that. But, I mean, was I supposed to be shocked that Eunice Kennedy passed on? I guess it’s small talk of a darker sort. You could talk about the weather or whose heart stopped.
Sometimes I feel like I don’t want to sign on Twitter, precisely for that reason. What if David Cronenberg died? Or Bill Callahan? Sophia Coppola, Rachel Maddow, Tilda Swinton, anyone I like.
Although you don’t even have to be a fan to feel affected by the death of a celebrity. Something about Dash Snow really hit me hard and I had a few dark days thinking about it. Perhaps because it felt so retro — the overdose — those kind of tragedies used to happen all the time in the 90s. I have as many friends now with babies as I had friends who were junkies when I was a teenager. It’s a relief, but sometimes I miss the high stakes of things.
Michael Jackson and Bubbles by Jeff KoonsThen there’s Michael Jackson. The Twitter crashing, diverting attention from Iran, OMGWTF?!?! death. Now as the smoke has cleared, when I see his image in TV clips it feels like he’s still alive. He’s so far removed for our everyday existence, living a life as though written by a pathological liar (Lou Ferrigno as his personal trainer, midnight buying blitzes on eBay, the nose that disappeared from the mortuary, and Gunther von Hagens friendship, among the countless strange things)
I wrote a short story a few years ago — a science fiction mystery — about a computer programmer hired by a gossip glossy to design software to help them find actresses wearing the same dress for their “who wore it best” feature. Instead he becomes obsessed with the like clockwork weekly deaths of nubile teenage singer/actresses.
I’m going to spoil the ending because I wrote it three, almost four years ago and it’s lingering unread by anyone but me as a text file on my desktop. Plus, with things like TinEye now, the matching software MacGuffin feels a little dated.
So, he uses the software to find that no fewer than 25 of the girls died in the same unusual shape — their arms and legs contorted oddly. The causes of death varied — car accident, overdose, plane crash, flu, cancer; but the shape of their bodies were the same.
A number of adventures lead the protagonist to a manufacturing center where he finds a secret assembly line building pneumatic female androids. Tomorrow’s stars.
Since every time the newest Miley dies, her song is number one for the rest of the week, music corporations eventually decided to build popstars rather than breed them. Planned obsolescence of celebrity. The title of the story is “The Daily Death,” after a morning TV program they watch that is simply rattling off every dead celebrity that day like an irreverant speeded up version of Stephanopolous’ “In Memoriam.” (The story was to be a modern update to The Stepford Wives. If enough of you ask, I might clean it up and post it here as a pdf.)
I wrote this in 2007:
SKEPTICISM IS the natural response to all web content. If you read about Owen Wilson’s suicide attempt online, your first reaction was likely that of disbelief. Rumored “suicides” of everyone from Winona Ryder to Jaleel White were debunked in the same minute they were spread, and yet, there seems to be no end to these kinds of morbid lies.
On the Internet, mourning has surreal or even sanctimonious undertones, especially for those who only knew the deceased as a web presence. It could be because emails and blogs are the worst places to communicate sincerity. You can easily alt-tab from a deceased person’s website to view “LOLcats,” or you might get an instant message “ZOMG, I got sooo drunk last nite.” The time-shifts that are the natural web-crawling experience prevent us from ever really dwelling on a tragic experience.
(from The Web is the Worst Place to Grieve)
I still think the web has the capacity to bring out the best and the worst in us. We’re going to look back at the spectacle of Jade Goody’s wedding earlier this year and think how innocent it was, how damn near respectful people were to her and her family. It’s all downhill from here. Death is just something you think about until the next 140 character tweet appears.
“The Autopsy of Michael Jackson” and “The Presentation” by Dana Schutz. Found via Hrag Vartanian and MRod.
Panning for Gold as Reading and the Creativity of Outsiders
Sculpture by Kohei Nawa
Four years ago, in the back of the top deck of a commuter rail train traveling from the Ukrainian Village to Deerfield in suburban Chicago, a nice enough looking middle aged man started raving about his plan for the “Imperial City of Chicago.”
At first he just started yammering — about city sewage systems, train schedules, etc — like a cranky grandfather, to no one in particular. It was strange certainly, and mothers were gripping the hands of their children tighter as he did this, some people took the steps to the lower level of the car, but in the initial minutes, nothing was yet out of the ordinary.
Then he raised his voice even louder. He said it was time to “gentrify Cottage Grove! New industries! Get rid of the white trash there now and bring back the locals like George Wendt. Bozo’s a local. He needs a new show. Make him a newscaster. Co-anchor Victoria Principal. Make every girl in Chicago look like Victoria Principal. No one’s better looking than the next, all women will be beautiful. All the girls in Chicago will look like Victoria Principal and Morgan Fairchild. And teach them all to speak proper English like in London. A distinct accent for every neighborhood!
[Cockney voice] ‘ello i’m from the Southside of Chicago! This is BBC Chicago!’
“One of these days Southside Chicago will look like Switzerland. Take out the weeds, the garbage, the graffiti. Replace with tall buildings, with ribbon windows like in Italy. Buildings with ribbon windows or buildings that look like Buckingham Palace. Beautiful concrete, beautiful limestone. There will be two Whole Foods in Southside Chicago. one at [names street intersects] Another down on Ashland past the B Dalton. A little bit further down there.”
[He starts singing this in a Frere Jacques-like melody:] “No graffiti, no abandoned buildings in the Imperial City of Chicago!”
“Yes, yes my friends! [points to a woman sleeping] See her? Her with her eyes closed. She’s dreaming of a better Chicago! Lady, thank you for dreaming. Thank you for believing in the dream. We’ll have mauve and pink letters on these trains. German trains. There are 14 German offices in Chicago. Let there be twice as many. Let there be Mercedes Benz buses. Chrome buses. Mauve and pink letters that say ‘Deus servious imperios chicago…deus servious unum imperios chicago.’ We Shall Serve the Empire of Chicago. Mauve and pink the correct color scheme. A crest on the front of the train. We’ll take a steam ship–one of the 27 that arrive at the Chicago Port every day–and take all the bureaucrats into the ocean. Things will get better. We’ll change the weather and make it better, like San Diego’s weather. I will be in charge [He points to a young black man sitting in the
back] That’s Reginald Ferdinand Maxfield the Fifteenth. He’s my second in command in the Imperial City of Chicago.”
I cut and pasted this from an old email to someone I used to know. I transcribed all that I could, as quickly as I could in the front and back covers of Philip K Dick’s “Counter-Clock World.” Later I gave the book to him as a gift. I sometimes wonder if he sold the book to a used bookstore and maybe the next person to own that book is shaking his head and thinking, what sort of crazy person wrote this shit?
But back to the crazy man — his racism is contemptible and his story wasn’t exactly Gormennghast, nevertheless, his ranting revealed a highly involved fantasy world, the kind of imagination that too few contemporary novelists even exhibit.
There was a fascinating panel at Readcon a few weeks back about “outsider writers.” The central question: why is Henry Darger’s art found in mainstream museums and the subject of a documentary, but his 7 million word novel has never been published in any form?
At one point Elizabeth Hand, the moderator, compared Darger with JRR Tolkien as someone singularly obsessed with the world he created. Apparently Tolkein was a terrible speller and his grammar and syntax were always a mess (embarressed to admit, I’ve never read him, and can’t verify this.) You have to wonder….what if Tolkien’s work was recieved by the most type-a editors imaginable — the sort who mistake such errors with limited intellectual capacity? (Slight digression here: I found this wonderful hundred year old article in defense of poor spelling, I keep meaning to share it.) How, as critics do we determine what is Middle-earth and what is the world of the Vivian Girls?
I hate the term “outsider art,” as some touch of mental illness is a necessity for creative genius, and stigmatizing those who fall to far on the spectrum is done so, at the perpetuation of the literary careers of well-groomed perfect i-dotters and t-crossers, whose banal fiction is the real reason (not the Internet, not the Kindle, not the recession) publishing is in such desperation.
Writing a novel is hard work. I’m trying to remember now a quote from Haruki Murakami about writing novels, something about how the the dream must be vivid and continuous, and you have to actually see the hallway and the door in your mind if you write about such things or else you aren’t going to take anyone else there. (A quote I pinned to my wall when I worked on my — regrettably — long abandoned novel.)
Fiction writing requires two primary skills that are often at odds with each other — focus and fantasy. The Clear Channel-ization of fiction means we fail to see much of either. If you are never in the “hallway,” as Murakami may or may not have ever put it, the author of the book you are reading was probably checking his Facebook while writing that passage. And the lack of fantasy, the failure of imagination, goes without saying. Few people can manage to tell a story better than boy grows up in upper-middle class suburbs, goes to college, meets girl, gets married, has child, the end.
Without having looked it, I’d be willing to bet Henry Darger’s seven million word novel has focus and fantasy in spades. So what is missing from it? Cohesion. In addition to focus and fantasy, cohesion is needed or a novel tests a reader’s patience. It’s that whole cliche about how you need to know the rules first in order to know how to break them. Technique matters. But then there’s that other cliche: do you long for “technically masterful” sex?
Now to use that wretched term just one last time, “outsider artists” and “outsider musicians” — like Darger, Freddy Johnson, Roky Erickson — don’t require the same amount of attention as an “outsider writer” would. While I’m certainly not weighing the medium as better for this reason, reading a novel requires far more persistence and patience from the audience than listening to a song or looking at an illustration,
But maybe to enjoy that book by Darger I’ve never read and probably never will, and all those other crazy person-pened works of fiction like it, one has to do an entirely different kind of reading. Instead of line by line, maybe we should skim this kind of work to find gems. Panning for gold as reading. As web surfers we are already used to this kind of semi-engaged reading. It’s what I do from time to time with my unabridged copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy (a great sprawling document of the author’s madness.)
I’ve picked up a number of little self-published zine-like novels from gutter punks, homeless persons, other displaced, society-rejected persons and usually found at least a line or something that had stayed with me. In those kind of texts, you find a lot of repetition; grandiosity or obscenity or cliche or “Imperial City”-like tegious fantasy. The bulk of the text will not connect. It may as well be in another language. Glossolalia as writing. But sometimes you skim and you find just one line that gets right to the heart of the human condition.
That brief eloquence is the pain that only an amateur can exhibit. Your average best-selling novelist knows his mom is reading. He’s afraid to say a lot of things. And when it comes to emotions he never gets… to that hallway I probably imagined Murakami once talked about. (By the way over the course of writing this post I’ve combed through dozens of Murakami interviews and still can’t find that quote. Found this though: “Many readers assume that I enjoy writing such sexual scenes, but that’s not true at all. When I’m writing such a scene, I’m so embarrassed and ashamed that I don’t know what to do with myself. But each time, I say to myself: Haruki, this is your duty! You must not stop!”)
Previously: Crazy Artists, Crazy Authors, and Blog Comments as a Slush Pile Unfiltered.
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