Ryan Chapman’s on Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey: “I remember Sam Tenenhaus saying Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 was great because it captured our fragmented, internet-addled expression of reality. I would say Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey does the same. This slim work doesn’t need images, or hyperlinks, or video animations to make it ‘better,’ it’s already at the peak of its art as a novel. It can be tersely described as a Borgesian fan fiction approach to Homer. (This plays well on Twitter.) But I would also argue its episodic structure, sidelong approach to canonical myths – an iterative text built upon the urtext – and its conception by a computer scientist make Zachary Mason’s novel a consummate evocation of the novel in 2010. It contains the modern world, though slyly, furtively.” Wow. More about Mason in the New York Times today.
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 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. 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 “”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.
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 Twitter Copywriters and the l33terati
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.
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:
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