Literary Agent Janet Reid returns from the Book Expo America with the feeling that something huge is changing in the way literature is experienced and delivered.
There's an artistic revolution coming.
[…]
I have no idea what it will look like. It will be more than a book because it will be more than text. It will be more than a movie because it will be more than pictures and text.
It will be more than a compilation of things that presently exist. It will be something entirely new.
It will be interactive. It will be visual. It will be electronic. It won't be tactile. Other than that, I have no idea what it will be.
Science fiction writer, ARG writer, and storytelling pioneer Sean Stewart discusses the art of storytelling , asserting that not enough emphasis is placed on the “hardware of storytelling,” or the platform upon which the story is told. Stewart reviews several fascinating examples of stories that straddle the line between games and literature, and he concludes that narrative is shifting toward a dance between author and audience for a shared control over the story.
Michael Strangelove has compiled a very impressive bibliography of important work about YouTube. The works cover subjects from library sciences to identity. (Thanks Jill Walker! )
On several occasions, as I frustratedly jabbed my backspace button sharply, I’ve thought to myself, “If only I were some troubled soul, trapped and unable to express myself in life! Then, by God, I’d be able to express real emotion!”
A separate question is the effect on Forster as a writer. Would he have written better novels if the antihomosexual laws had been reformed in the 1890s rather than in the 1960s? He seems to have thought so. On the other hand, fans of Maurice are thin on the ground.
The article recapitulates the fascinating account of the effect Forster’s homosexuality had on his work proposed by Wendy Moffat, who believes that it played a much larger role than academe tends to acknowledge. More importantly, the article raises interesting questions about inspiration as a result of oppression.
Comics designed on the printed page have traditionally used panels to denote space as time. Because of this key metaphor, comics have found themselves somewhat constrained in the wake of the digital revolution. On the one hand, the page boundary is no longer clear; we can have pages as big as we want. On the other hand, the screen is not print; if we want to depict motion, why not simply let things move?
Some comics have tried to take advantage of the medium by adding sound or video to panels, and it could be argued that many short flash videos have their roots in comics, but for the most part, the medium has struggled to retain the panel while taking advantage of time as it is afforded by digital media.
A simple web comic by Yves Bigerel explores this problem, and circumvents it by presenting panels sequentially through a Flash slideshow. This allows for greater authorial control over when information is presented while also allowing for certain framing tricks akin to cinematic sight gags.
Neal Stephenson (and a few others) are releasing The Mongoliad, a serialized literary project for mobile devices. The project will also include a series of extra-narrative content for iPhone, iPad and Android clients.
Not much is known about the project to date, but it’s billing itself as “something of an experiment in post-book publishing and storytelling.” Stay tuned!
When most people think of live-action role-playing, they think of these guys:
Apparently, however, they’re not all like this. Greg Costikyan reports on Europa, a LARP that explored issues of Otherness in wartime refugee situations. A camp in Vestby, Norway became a refugee center for victims of a fictional Scandinavian conflict. Fleeing from atrocities committed by rival Scandinavian ethnics, the players were processed into a bureaucracy-ridden refugee camp staffed by oppressive “Orsinians” who spoke an incomprehensible language amongst themselves. Players remained in character for four days.
Of the session, Costikyan writes:
Reading through something like the Europa documents makes me despair of "games for change" types who want to explore issues like this and meaningfully impact peoples' attitudes with, say, Flash applications. Games can do this; games can be powerful. But not with a platformer, for God's sake. This is how it's done.
His statement is telling, and seems to reflect the argument that a certain level of player-avatar connection must be felt in order for the game to be meaningful and have a real emotional impact.
At the recent ELO conference, Terry Harpold presented a paper on the eBook as a a fetishized version of the codex, citing the ways in which we have become aware of the book’s properties as a technology and have fetishized selective traits. Yet we still can’t grasp the intangibles that we believe eBooks lack. TPage-turning animations and the loving rendition of page edges at the border of the iPad serve both to represent and to remind us of the original object.
In light of Harpold’s argument, I was struck by Christopher Fahey’s interesting anecdote on reading Lolita in print.
And what delight as, finishing the third to last, right-side-facing page, I turned to the final spread, one-and-one-half pages of text, and unexpectedly found some of the most heartbreaking words of the whole novel, right at the top of the penultimate page, the finish line within sight: an experience that was both textual and physical in its manifestation. Was it the author, the typesetter, both, or neither, who constructed — designed — this neat, sublime, perfectly-timed emotional jolt?
Even before he expressly draws his conclusion, I couldn’t help but think that some of the phenomena of reading Lolita that he describes—your eyes scanning the page for certain keywords, longing for them—would be changed on the reader I use, since the page breaks change with the adjustable font size.
Whitney Anne Trettien has written an article for the EBR to supplement her recent digital master’s thesis on generative poetry. The article both complements the thesis and provides anecdotes on its creation:
So I began sketching ideas on graph-paper pads, receipts, discarded library catalog cards - any scrap of paper I could find. Combining these with print-outs of notes I had accumulated on my hard drive, I began cutting these bits of paper into manipulable chunks of text and image.
In preparation for the Computers and Writing Conference for 2010 , Ryan Trauman put together some interesting thoughts on mentorship as it relates to scholarship.
There are plenty of aspects of working productively within our discipline that have nothing to do with scholarship. How do you know when it’s time to take a break? What do you do when you’re at the end of your rope? What are the dangers of dating someone within the discipline? Are there any shortcuts on the way to tenure? … And these sorts of questions are really just the general questions. Anyone might be interested in these conversations, and they really are most productively engaged with a mentor who is honest and trusts whoever might be listening.
Trauman also examines the role of intimacy in mentorship and concludes that perhaps it's a combination of obscurity and privacy—even when the conversations are not particularly secret—that are important to fostering a mentorship.
Eastgate returned from Hypertext 2010 in Toronto, exhausted but also encouraged by the interest in narratives in generative and locative systems.
Excellent talks included Charlie Hargood’s presentation of semiotic systems for generative narrative photo montages, Heiko Haller’s iMapping presentation, and James Goulding’s talk on transclusion and hypertext structures.
But the real standout session was an impromptu breakout session organized by Nate Matias on Monday afternoon to discuss narrative hypertexts and interesting games. Topics ranged from narrativist games like Sweet Agatha and Shadow Unit to using fictional Twitter accounts as a means to extend serial narratives that live on the Web and off. Sometimes using Twitter is just a marketing ploy, but what determines if this practice is working? The quality of the tweets? Is there credit to fictional characters offering completely mundane tweets? Is there really a difference in the fictional account used for marketing and the one used for content delivery?
We also discussed Jason Rohrer’s new Sleep is Death, an interesting two-player game that exists somewhere between the table-top RPG and improvisational narrative. One player acts as a game master to create a world and control NPCs while the other player interacts with the world. However, a 30 second time limit per turn prevents the type of planning that normally goes into a tabletop RPG, making the narrative more fluid and dynamic. The result is a game with considerable gameplay constraint that in many ways frees the narrative from the constraints of the gamemaster’s railroading. It’s also interesting that the low-tech graphics play a huge role in allowing enough ambiguity to call a small person either a baby, a child, a dwarf, a gnome, and so forth. This kind of inventive gameplay would not be possible with the dazzling graphics of current-generation systems.
The group also discussed the adaptation of print fiction to hypertext forms, focusing much attention on Sherlock Holmes adaptations and pastiches. Sherlock Holmes as a Hyperbook and a stretchtext were mentioned, as well as an adaptation of a half-finished story that was adapted as an interactive narrative . Here we see another example of constraining narrative operation allowing for freer story elements.
Though I do regret that certain panels were scheduled opposite each other, it was a good conference overall with wonderfully fascinating people. I can’t wait for next year in Eindhoven.
For much of history, writing has been considered a solitary act. I would be lying if I didn’t have the occasional fantasy about being a romantic caricature, writing in some ivy-strangled brick workshop that I would call my fortress of solitude whenever friends came to visit.
Jed Perl questions the way we’ve come to view writing in the era of blogging and tweeting. Has the reading public begun to feel entitled to all of a writer’s writing whether it was intended to be published or not?
The strange thing about Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems—which contains 163 poems discovered among Schuyler’s papers in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego—is that the editors, James Meetze and Simon Pettet, feel no obligation to explain why this book exists. Didn’t anybody wonder why these poems were not published during Schuyler’s lifetime? There are many possible explanations. Schuyler might have thought certain poems were not good enough. Or he might have thought there was some virtue in publishing less rather than more. Or it may be that an editor prevented him from publishing things he in fact wanted to publish. But none of these questions is even considered, at least not in the brief introductory texts that the editors have included with Other Flowers. The idea—extremely simple, even simplistic—appears to be that if it was written it needs to be read.
The magic of writing is the intimate one-on-one connection between writer and reader. Are we losing that intimacy and depth when the writer knows that this work will be read by millions as soon as she presses enter? Perl argues that writers must “to some degree believe they are alone with their own words.” Otherwise, if writers are always aware of their audience, can they really let their guard down and write with the raw emotion that can be beautiful and ugly, but is always inevitably true?
I’m not arguing that there are no emotional weblogs, but the majority of them are written on emotionally safe subjects or are written in a guarded manner. But if a blogger can actually write with their guard down, you probably have an exceptionally good weblog on your hands.
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