Archives for March 2008
Will Kindle Save “Hypertext” Fiction?
You too might be an artist, but your medium just hasn’t been invented yet. Luis Bunuel’s daughter once remarked that he would have been frustrated in his life if film hadn’t come along: he couldn’t draw, didn’t write prose, but with a camera in hand, he knew what to do.
Hypertext, non-linear, interactive fiction for your computer, seemed like the perfect medium for Shelley Jackson. Then in her early-30s, with a BA in Studio Art from Stanford and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown, Jackson’s “Patchwork Girl,” a CD-ROM released in 1995, was the first hypertext work to really find an audience. Its exquisite visual images and clever fairy tale-like storytelling, seemed to offer the promise of a new way of reading.. In MFA-speak, the “long reign of print has induced a kind of somnolence in literary and critical studies, a certain inattentiveness to the diverse forms in which ‘texts’ appear.”
Yet, ten years later most people don’t even know what Hypertext fiction is. As computer graphics advanced and modems were replaced with Ethernet hookups, users looked for connectivity, not the locked in world of CD-ROM entertainment. Plus, that interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure” spirit already exists in literature like Julio Cortazar’s “Hopscotch” and Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” — and you can take those with you on a plane.
Even without wide Internet deployment and high-speeds, hypertext would have floundered. Instead of an alternative to “inattentiveness,” it offered too many options, with little clear reward — in which case a user might just just give up and check email instead. A 1997 essay in Salon explained:
In hypertext fiction, too often, there’s no incentive to keep reading. We begin reading any new story in a state of confusion, sorting out the cast of characters, where they are and what they’re doing. In traditional fiction, a good author will dazzle us by creating a complex, carefully calibrated sequence of revelations to orient us and then sometimes disorient us again. In hypertext, the initial fog never lifts.
Like their companions in the computer-gaming world who have created story-games like “Myst” and “The Seventh Guest,” hypertext authors hide the hearts of their stories behind barriers and challenge us to pass through. But the best games at least deliver a satisfying resolution, and fun along the way for those who enjoy solving puzzles. Most hypertexts are so devoted to ambiguity that they fail to communicate much of anything at all. The hypertext author does this in the name of empowering readers: They’re free at last to construct texts of their own, to experience the joy of play. But we don’t perceive this activity as freedom; too often, it feels like work.
Recently, I saw Jane McGonigal speak, and much of her lecture emphasized the importance of real-wolrd integrated games. She compared the close world of MMORPG to using words only in books, not in signs, not in speech.
Wi-fi is slower than cable wires, and mobile broadband is slower than wi-fi, but we are willing to take these setbacks to detach ourselves from our workstations. The failure of hypertext fiction might have less to do with its nonlinear narrative, and everything to do a computer user’s disinterest in feeling constrained in place.
If hypertext fiction can move past it’s “po-mo” delusions, changing the device and environment might lead to a reemergence. I can see Kindle one day being used almost exclusively for hypertext fiction. Already, its designed for some interactive control, like hypertext links to dictionary and Wikipedia. You can take it with you and read under a tree. Thinking of how the iPod of five years ago compares to the one today, a sleeker looking, cheaper Kindle — one that embraces more social components like RSS feeds and better sharing capacity — could even lead to MMORP-hypertext (well, no, probably not.)
By the way, Shelley Jackson released a great novel two years ago, “Half Life”. Her newest project is “Skin,” a story written, word by word, as tattoos on a different individual’s body — interactive and off-the-grid.
Related links:
- Brian Eno’s zen-like Microsoft Windows 95 start-up theme. (Audio)
- “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945
- “The future of the short story in a digital age,” by J.M. Tyree, The Smart Set
Soft-core Czech fairy tale film “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders” is playing at MFA Boston next week with a live soundtrack by several “New Weird” musicians. Is this going to be Rocky Horror for art school girls before long?
Oliver Stone’s Prescient SFnal Scientology Critique
“Why should this reality be public domain? What’s so great about it?” asks a Clara Bow-bobbed Kim Cattrall in the 1993 miniseries “Wild Palms.” “Tony wants a new and improved reality: controlled by Mimecon and sold straight at 7-11… A world where we don’t have to be afraid to leave our dreams open at night.”
“Wild Palms” isn’t dark enough to be “Twin Peaks” and it isn’t campy enough to be “V,” but the show holds up as a odd document of early 90s speculative fiction (the film is set in 2007.) Producer Oliver Stone might not be known for his futuristic vision, but he certainly is paranoid, and that’s what every dystopic fiction needs. Said EW at the time:
“It was dreamlike and hallucinatory. I put my friends in it. I put famous people in it. I didn’t care about the story. It was a tone poem.” [Writer Bruce Wagner] hangs a right onto La Brea. “Then Oliver saw it.” Oliver Stone knew Wagner from purchasing the film rights to Force Majeure (a movie Stone still hasn’t made), and the Palms cartoon struck a special conspiratorial chord with the JFK director. ”It was so syncretic,” Stone says. (Syncretic? ”Look it up,” he says.) ”It was such a fractured view of the world. Everything and anything could happen. Maybe your wife isn’t your wife, maybe your kids aren’t your kids. It really appealed to me.”
Like much of early-90s science fiction, the focus is on televised holograms. A corporate body, with some zen-relgious pretensions and Hollywood ties — not unlike L. Ron Hubbard’s sect — is experimenting with bringing TV to life. These “New Realists” — insisting they are just Buddhists in practice, freeing the mind from the body — work with a narcotic drink “Mimezine.” Inspired by Philip K. Dick’s idea of corporately-distributed hallucinogens in “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” and William Gibson’s virtual worlds (Gibson even makes a sheepish cameo as himself in the first episode,) the most surprising thing about Wild Palms is it is actually pretty good.
It was originally a Bruce Wagner-penned comic in Details magazine that eventually spawned a book, “The Wild Palms Reader,” containing timelines, secret letters, and bios of all the characters, as well as contributions from scientists, sci-fi writers (Gibson, Thomas Disch, Bruce Sterling,) musicians (Genesis P. Orridge, Malcolm McLaren, Lemmy from Moterhead) and others like Mary Gaitskill, Jane Pratt, and ex-CIA Operative E. Howard Hunt. To hype the program, ABC offered 900-773-WILD (75 cents per minute,) offering tips and storyline cues. It was ultimately a flop, and still is, unfairly. Maybe it’s just to early for cult-classic status? Or maybe the miniseries format is just too awkward in length, which is why only PBS still airs them (”V,” for that matter, isn’t as cult-y in popularity as it seems it should be.)
Kathryn Bigelow (”Strange Days”) directed some of the episodes, and Ryuichi Sakamoto composed the creepy minimalist soundtrack. James Belushi plays Harry Wuckoff, a patent attorney, offered a job with the “Wild Palms Newtork” — Channel 3 — run by Senator Anton Kreutzer. Sen. Kreutzer used to be a sci-fi writer, his motto is “everything must go.” In addition to virtual programming, the “Fathers” have been kidnapping children since the 1960s. Wagner doesn’t even try to conceal the resemblance of “Synthiotics” to “Dianetics,” but Scientology was more benign in those days (Tom Cruise had only just begun his studies.) One doesn’t have to be Theresa Duncan to doubt this script could ever be filmed now.
In addition to the virtual worlds and Scientology send-up, the joy in watching “Wild Palms” is its naive perception of what the world of today would look like. Oliver Stone appears as himself, talking about “recently released” documents that prove his film JFK was correct and alluding to the “late” Jack Valenti (who did in fact die last year.) There are no cell phones and nothing like the Internet or email, and people smoke freely indoors, but the looks and feel of people’s homes is what seems most “off.” The utilitarian office tables and chairs, beige walls, and Times New Roman fonts show just how far we’ve come with design, in that future-speculating set designers couldn’t even imagine a world where college students decorate with IKEA and Trader Joe’s enables gourmet-enough hors d’oeuvre for the most casual get-togethers.
Ironically, the wardrobe stylings are what give the series a modern look—mostly because early 90s looks have yet see a revival on the runways. Those boxy silhouettes and monochrome jewel-tones are exaggerated with a Jetsons-spin. In an early scene, Cattrall wears a beautiful burgundy satin dress with an unusual Grecian-inspired satin draping, but just about everything she wears could easily be in Proenza Schouler’s next collection. That being said, I can’t really see a future in menswear for the Edwardian collars and neckties Belushi wears.
Related links:
- Wild Palms and the “Wild Palms Reader”
- “Neuromancer” by William Gibson
- Erik Davis’ review in the Village Voice
- David Cronenberg’s Videodrome
- Coilhouse, “Inside Scientology’s ‘Psychiatry Kills’ Exhibit”
- The New Yorker, “Chateau Scientology”
Ronald Reagan addressed the UN in 1987 praying that aliens invade so we could militarize the planet. He also asked high school students to volunteer for Ender’s Game.
Who Needs Sleep?
None of you realise it yet, but this is an advance as big as the step the first ichthyoid took out of the protozoic sea 300 million years ago. At last we’ve freed the mind, raised it out of that archaic sump called sleep, it’s nightly retreat into the medulla. With virtually one cut of the scalpel we’ve added twenty years to those men’s lives. For the first time Man will be living a full twenty four hour day, not spending a third of it as an invalid, snoring his way through an eight hour peep show of infantile erotica…
Sometimes Neill’s aggressiveness surprise him; it was almost as if he regarded sleep itself as secretly discreditable, concealed vice. What I really mean is that for better or worse, Lang, Gorrel and Avery are now stuck with themselves. They’re never going to be able to get away, not even for a couple of minutes, let along eight hours. How much of yourself can you stand? Maybe you need eight hours off a day just to get the shock of being yourself. What happens if they get fed up with themselves? – J. G. Ballard, Manhole 69
Nap or more coffee? I ask myself this question several times a day. Like everyone else, I’m in sleep debt and the interest rate is a bitch. A few months ago, University of Pennsylvania researchers published a report in Nature making a hypothesis about sleep’s real function. They studied the sleep-like state known as “lethargus” of roundworms, observing that sleep is ubiquitous in nature. It enables nervous system plasticity — better performance, better memory, physical and mental wellness. In other words, sleep defrags your hard drive. Eight hours is the 8GB RAM stick you can install every night.
But it sure becomes a bother when there is so much more to be done. My favorite short story, Manhole 69, quoted above, is about a team of scientists trying to enable a 24-hour day. Read it and you will never consider even ripping off the telephone number from coffee shop flier to volunteer for a sleep study. But if you’ve seen The Machinist, you’ve already resolved to get at least 6 hours, if not 8. Curiously, the director of that film asked Christian Bale to starve himself for the role, while in fact, sleepless people tend to grow more obese (again, due to the neural plasticity, malfunction of the “hypocretin neurons” means one’s appetite never shuts off.) Sleep depravation so rapidly affects your endocrinology, you could be in a pre-diabetic state within several days.
On 60 Minutes, Leslie Stahl talked with Matthew Walker, of the University of California-Berkeley Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab, who says after five days deprived sleep, lab rats started to die. She also toured a sleep lab where the volunteers, mainly college students, were shown graphic disturbing images. The control group, who rested, had minimal response in the amigdula (the part of the brain that controlls emotions,) but the sleep-deprived had hyperactive brain activity. Participants described the unclean and slow feeling, like “moving through molasses.” Skin feels tight around the mouth and dirty, even after several showers.
Yet, for about $9,000 comp for four weeks of procedures, these volunteers made out better than the sad sacks who appear in “Solitary” on the Fox Reality Channel, where as Nick Douglas says, “they couldn’t even get as famous as a Blind Date contestant,” and only one of several walks about with 50k.
The most amazing thing about sleep is that evolution actually put us in danger — interrupting our consciousness — in order for us to experience it. Still, “polyphasic sleepers” try to hack it. Claudio Stampi, founder (and sole-proprieter?) of the Newton, MA-based Chronobiology Research Institute says you can get by on 20-minute nap every four hours, but I wouldn’t trust any place with so minimal a web presence. Polyphasic sleep advice is right here, and the web communities seem almost like pro-ana.
In 1964, Randy Gardner, then a 17-year-old high school student, went 264 hours (about 11 days) without sleep. It was just a benign science fair idea that blew out of proportion. Prior to that, radio DJ Peter Tripp went 8 days without sleep inside a glass booth in Times Square. He also experienced extreme hallucinations and psychosis, but was taking drugs to keep at it. Several people, like Tony Wright last year, claim to have beat Gardner’s record, but they were not under constant, careful observation. David Blaine is considering an attempt. “The idea came to me during a sleepless night,” he said. Recently, Britney Spears went 100 hours without sleep. Now do you see why sleep is necessary? Kindly then, get some rest tonight. If not for yourself, than for the people around you.
Related links:
- The Machinist
- “Sleep Has His House” by Anna Kavan
- “The Best Short Stories” by J. G. Ballard
- “Beggars in Spain” by Nancy Kress
- “Why We Nap” by Claudio Stampi
- Wikipedia entry for Circadian rythm sleep disorders
- MSNBC on “Graveyard Shift Linked to Cancer”
- Gizmodo on “Darpa’s sleep-replacing nasal sprary”
- Radio Lab on “Sleep”
- Io9 on TV and circadian cycles.
- Mother Jones on the reality show Solitary, with TV clips
Torturing an animal isn’t art, it’s sick. 300,000 and counting want Guillermo Vargas Habakkuk out of the Central American Biennale.
All the cool kids are building ball pits (xkdc, last.fm.) You can too, just calculate. But watch out for the heroin needles (an urban legend made lame in Saw II.)
Milla Jovovich: ok musician, pretty good actress, brilliant fashion designer — for Target
Barbara Kruger ripping off Barbara Kruger.
If Ashley Dupre did assert copyright claims, news organizations might have a harder fair use case than in Núñez, another suggestive-photos case – Rebecca Tushnet
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