During my brief stint in the Bay Area nearly fifteen years ago, I managed to go to 924 Gilman Street—the Left Coast’s answer to 315 Bowery—a few times with my friend Brian Peterson. I know one time we went to see our favorite math-rock masters, A Minor Forest, and another time was to see them do pre-…And Justice for All Metallica covers for the Metal Madness Show.
jan 31 sat: Metal Madness Show: East Bay bands doing metal
covers:
Creeping Death, Rocket Queens, American Metal,
Iron Vegan, Motley Jews, Blizzards Of Schnozz,
Anal Tap at 924 Gilman a/a $5 8pm *** @
($1 off with proper metal attire)
Iron Vegan was comprised of members of Neurosis, Noothgrush, and Lost Goat, and was the closest I’ve come to seeing any of those bands play. Their set was all Iron Maiden covers, of course, which was the closest I’ve come to seeing them live as well.
Iron Vegan: Taste the Metal.I missed Rocket Queens (doing Guns N’ Roses songs) because this cute, blonde girl who wanted to piss off her boyfriend invited me outside to take a walk…
I made it back in time to catch A Minor Forest plus two (as Creeping Death, but not this one) and Brian shaking his head at me. A Minor Forest used to play some of the most intricate, tightly woven compositions ever conceived by a three-piece. As far as them doing other people’s music, Rush covers were what crowds wanted to hear when we’d see them play as A Minor Forest proper. Their doing old Metallica material, with the aid of the two additional members (a second guitarist and a singer), was impressive, but not quite as impressive as they normally were. They’d taken hints from Metal before though, using the line “A Minor Forest supports the destruction of humanity” in the inside cover of their first record, Flemish Altruism: Constituent Parts 1993-1996 (Thrill Jockey, 1996), which their guitarist Eric Hoversten told me they’d lifted from the masthead of a Black Metal magazine belonging to Steve Albini’s girlfriend at the time.
According to the Matador Records website, Creeping Death may have had a larger impact than I would’ve imagined:
With revolving members from A Minor Forest, The Threnody Ensemble and Weakling, Creeping Death could have been responsible for the short-lived metal cover band phenomenon, which swept San Francisco in the late ’90s. Headlining shows with such bands as Iron Vegan, Rocket Queen, and Sleigher, the members of Creeping Death found that being in a cover band paid better and drew bigger and more responsive crowds than any of their respective “real” projects.
I guess when your “real” projects play songs with gamelan structures and time signatures no one can follow, a good ol’ “Ride the Lightning” cover is just the break everyone needs. It’s not just esoterica versus Metallica though, as Chuck Klosterman illustrated while comparing a cover band to a “real” metal band, writing, “One can only wonder how the real guys in Dokken feel about being as popular as five fake guys in [Guns N’ Roses cover band Paradise City]” (p. 67). Something about the inauthenticity of a cover band makes the event more fun, lighter, more intimate. I would argue that this is the only reason Weezer ever had a career (well, that and creative, Spike Jonze-helmed videos). Something to do with the levity of enjoying a cover band.
There’s also the silent sting of nostalgia. No one goes to see a band from their youth do new material. Whether it’s a reunion tour or the latest of many, past-their-prime recordings, it’s all about the legacy, the hits from the day. It’s about reliving a piece of the past.
Memories don’t live like people do
They always remember you
— Mos Def, “Travelin’ Man”
924 Gilman Street Membership Card from 1998.
Somehow my 924 Gilman Street membership card has survived in my wallet intact since 1998. I wouldn’t still have it, but every time I’ve switched wallets, I’ve seen no reason to take it out. It’s a totem, a token from a time long past that was about another time long past, a copy of a copy of a copy. It doesn’t make me particularly nostalgic—I only went to Gilman a few times—but it does make me smile. As the best memories should.
Speaking of, the girl I made out with that night is almost in her thirties now. Memories don’t live like people do.
References:
Def, Mos. (1998). Travelin’ Man [Recorded by Mos Def & DJ Honda]. On h II [LP]. New York: Relativity Records.
Klosterman, Chuck. (2003). Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. New York: Scribner.
You know the story. On September 7, 1996, Tupac Shakur was shot as he waited at a traffic light in the passenger seat of Suge Knight’s car on the Las Vegas strip. He died on September 13. Six months later, on March 9, 1997, Christopher Wallace a.k.a. Biggie Smalls was gunned down in Los Angeles.[i] The two had been embroiled in a media-abetted, bi-coastal battle for Hip-hop supremacy, dividing the majority of the Hip-hop nation into two camps, East versus West.[ii]
On April 15, 2012, Tupac’s ghost performed to a packed crowd at the Coachella Music Festival in Indio, California. The appearance of this apparition stunned and delighted those in attendance. The continued presence of both Shakur and Wallace represents an opportunity to examine how the genre represents a hauntology based on its use of pieces of the past in musical samples, lyrical references, and puffed-up personas, and how this haunting plays out in the larger contemporary culture.
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Hip-hop is haunted by a number of dead performers (e.g., Adam Yauch, Jam Master Jay, Guru, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Big L, Big Pun, Eazy-E, Proof, Pimp C, et al.). Their ghosts continue to release records, do duets with living acts, and appear on its magazine covers. Over a decade later, Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur are the two most prominent of these ghosts. They are deities subsequent emcees must pay homage to by mentioning them, performing posthumous duets with them (of course, having done a record with one or both before their deaths is the most respected position), or aspiring to become them. At the end of the music video for his song “99 Problems,” Jay-Z is gunned down on the streets of New York City. The song is from his Black Album (2003), which was supposed to be his last release. Preparing to retire from the hustle of recording and performing, Jay-Z simulated his own death, imitating the high profile and unsolved slayings of two of his contemporaries, Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls.
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Hov got flow though he’s no Big and Pac, but he’s close.
How I’m supposed to win? They got me fighting ghosts.
— Jay-Z, “Most Kings” (Unreleased), Decoded, p. 98.
The practice of literally sampling previously recorded pieces of music, vocals, and sounds has remained integral to the process by which Hip-hop music is created. Hip-hop’s practice of sampling and manipulating sounds and voices lends itself to haunting. Schwartz writes that sampling “ultimately erases the line between the quick and the dead,”[iii] and Peters adds that mediated communication via recording “is ultimately indistinguishable from communication with the dead.”[iv] The DJ in Hip-hop combines and reanimates bits and pieces of old recorded history to create new compositions. Indeed the pioneers of the genre had little more than records, record players, and speakers.[v] “That’s how rap got started,” says Public Enemy emcee Chuck D, “Brothers made something out of nothing.”[vi]
Derrida calls our obsession with recording “archive fever,” writing, “The archivization produces as much as it records the event.”[vii] Nowhere is our feverish archiving of things for the future more powerful than in digital recordings. As Rimbaud puts it, “Capturing these moments, storing them, and redirecting them back into the public stream enables one to construct an archeology of loss, pathos, and missed connections, assembling a momentary forgotten past in our digital future. It is a form of found futurism.”[viii] Sterne adds that the advent of sound recording maintains the promise of future archeology, writing, “sound recording is understood as an extension of the art of oratory—a set of practices that depended heavily on the persona and style of the speaker and relations between the speaker and audience.”[ix] Sterne’s analogy to oratory rings true with the emcee in Hip-hop.
Hip-hop music is an artistic and aesthetic form similar to that of literature, and sampling is a similar practice to that of reference, allusion, and quotation in literature.[x] Regarding European novels, Meyer stated that the “charm” of quotation lies “in a unique tension between assimilation and dissimilation: it links itself closely to its new environment, but at the same time detaches itself from it, thus permitting another world to radiate into the self-contained world” of the piece.[xi] The use of quoting, or sampling, therefore creates “a new entity greater than any of its constituent parts.”[xii]
Further conflating sound recording and literature, Peters writes, “The phonograph, as the name suggests, is a means of writing.”[xiii] McLuhan stated that, “the brief and compressed history of the phonograph includes all phases of the written, the printed, and the mechanized word,”[xiv] and Peters points out that the phonograph “is a medium that preserves ghosts that would otherwise be evanescent.”[xv] Biggie and Tupac haunt us in the same way that the ghosts of literature do. Quoting Philip Auslander in their discussion of haunting in music, Shaffer and Gunn argue, “‘listeners do not perceive recorded music as disembodied’. Rather, he argues that listeners and performers fashion a ‘fictional body’ or personae when listening to music, an imaginary corporeality that is ultimately associated with a ‘real person.’”[xvi]
As many other so-called “gangsta rappers” have claimed, Tupac Shakur hoped to exact change by exaggerating ghetto narratives, stories of poverty and neglect.[xvii] The son of a Black Panther, Shakur grew up painfully aware of the disadvantages of his minority status.[xviii] Once the Panthers dissolved, Shakur’s mother, Afeni, raised him alone, often without a job and sometimes without a home due to her off and on affair with crack cocaine.[xix] In many ways in his short life, Tupac Shakur faced every ill with which the American black man struggles.
Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. Biggie Smalls; The Notorious B. I. G.) lived a similar, truncated life story. Raised by a single mom, Wallace came up hustling in Brooklyn and rapping on the side.[xx] The hours of standing on street corners, selling crack afforded Wallace plenty of time to rehearse his street-borne rhymes. At the time of their deaths, they were also entangled in the largest battle in Hip-hop history. Shakur was shot five times outside of a studio in which Biggie was recording.[xxi] The coincidence was too much to be ignored and helped launch the much-discussed East Coast/West Coast Hip-hop battle, which was primarily waged between Tupac and his label Death Row Records and Biggie Smalls and his label Bad Boy. The feud, largely conducted via lyrical shots, eventually ended in both of their deaths.
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While Biggie was posthumously honored with a film biography in 2008 entitled Notorious, Tupac remerged in 2012 at Coachella as a “hologram.” The ghostly image, which was accompanied on stage by Tupac’s peers Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, was actually a nineteenth century special effect known as a Pepper’s Ghost, a trick that’s been used to create apparitions in haunted houses. John Henry Pepper, after whom the effect is named, along with Henry Dircks developed the technique to make ghosts appear on stage.[xxii] And that’s just what visual effects company Digital Domain did at Coachella, much to the awe of the music fans present and those who have seen it via the internet.
Viewing Hip-hop as a hauntology illustrates how deep our culture’s ghosts run. From the musical samples, lyrical references, recorded memories, and now rapping revenants, the haunting seems endless. Thanks to recording technology, we live in an era when, as Andreas Huyssen put it, “the past has become part of the present in ways simply unimaginable in earlier centuries,”[xxiii] and more than any other genre of recorded music, Hip-hop is willfully haunted by its own ghosts.
Notes:
[i] Joy Bennett Kinnon, “Does Rap Have a Future?” Ebony, June 1997, 76.
[ii] Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005).
[iii] Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 311.
[iv] John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 176.
[v] Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn, Yes, Yes, Y’all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-hop’s First Decade (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002).
[vi] Quoted in Russell A. Porter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 73.
[vii] Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 16-17.
[viii] Robin Rimbaud, “The Ghost Outside the Machine,” in Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, ed. Paul D. Miller (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 131-134.
[ix] Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: The Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 308.
[x] For further discussion of the correlations between literature and rap music, see Richard Shusterman, “Challenging Conventions in the Fine Art of Rap,” in That’s the Joint: The Hip-hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 459-479, and Richard Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
[xi] Herman Meyer, The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 6.
[xii] E. E. Kellette, Literary Quotation and Allusion (Cambridge: Heffer, 1933), 13-14.
[xvi] Tracy Stephenson Shaffer and Joshua Gunn, “‘A Change is Gonna Come’: On the Haunting of Music and Whiteness in Performance Studies,” Theatre Annual 59 (2006): 44.
[xvii] Tricia Rose, The Hip-hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip-hop and Why It Matters (New York: Basic Civitas, 2008).
[xviii] Eric Michael Dyson, Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur (New York: Basic Civitas, 2001).
[xxiii] Huyssen, Andreas. (2003). Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Ed Note: This is an edited excerpt of a chapter from my book-in-progress, Hip-Hop Theory. It was originally a much longer and much different piece co-written with Joe Faina for Josh Gunn’s “The Idiom of Haunting” seminar at UT-Austin (which is being offered for the last time this fall). Many thanks to Josh Gunn for his knowledge and guidance on this topic.
Though the concept album has a history dating back to the 1940s, prog rock acts like Pink Floyd, Yes, and Rush are probably the first bands to come to mind. Just doing an album-length story connotes prog leanings, recall The Mars Volta‘s De-Loused in the Comatorium (GSL, 2003) and Francis the Mute (GSL, 2005). Metal picked up the concept mantle in a big way. Devilish icons like King Diamond wouldn’t have records if it weren’t for album-long narratives. The same can be said for Coheed and Cambria with their multi-album and comic-book epic The Armory Wars, Voivod with their career-spanning, post-apocalyptic visions, and Mastodon‘s Melville-driven Leviathan (Relapse, 2004). Drummer Brann Dailor explains the literary influence on that record in a 2004 interview, saying that the summer before, he was reading Moby Dick…
We were in London in fact, and I kinda just spouted off why we should choose Moby Dick as a guideline of what to write about and what to go for. I was looking up all these passages and reading them to the guys and saying: look, they call Moby Dick the sea-salt mastodon, you know, it’s all in here. There are so many different images we can borrow from whaling and just the whole thing as a complete package.
As bizarre as it might seem for a metal band to be influenced by classic literature, it makes sense when you look at the histrionics of metal in the first place. It’s all a kind of theatre. The stories are endemic to the genre. “[W]e just chose Moby Dick ’cause we’re all really interested in any kind of folklore,” Dailor continues, “We’re totally into Sasquatch and The Yeti and The Loch Ness Monster and all that stuff, you know? We’re into that kind of subject matter.” Folklore is metal’s secret lifeblood. Slayer, Ghost, Bathory, and many others mine the story of Elizabeth Bathory for themes, Maine’s Falls of Rauros lifted their name from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and Light Bearer‘s four-part saga, Æsahættr Tetralogy, is influenced by Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trology (Everyman’s Library, 2011) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (Samuel Simmons, 1667), among other texts.
The now-defunct Fall of Efrafa took their name from Richard Adams’ Watership Down (Rex Collings, 1972). Their Warren of Snares trilogy (Halo of Flies, 2010) is an elaborate artistic, musical, and literary artifact based on the mythology in Adams’ novel. Watership Down is an allegory in which the endeavors of a group of rabbits — Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, and Silver, “mirror the timeless struggles between tyranny and freedom, reason and blind emotion, and the individual and the corporate state” (Magill, 1991). Fall of Efrafa extended this allegory to rail against all forms of oppression. Vocalist and artist Alex CF described it like this:
From the point of view of the metaphorical tale behind the band; the story is about desperation, as the ‘Efrafa’ encroach more and more upon the earth, what is left for those who share this space with us? The story is a war of will, not only to stand your ground, but also not to give in to the crutch of misguided belief. From the point of view of us as a band it has a lot to do with our lives outside this; what we cherish and think about, what we read…
The Warren of Snares box-set comes with the trilogy on six LPs, a book, posters, and a silk-screened tote bag, among other paraphernalia. With delicately dark art work by Alex CF (who now serves vocal and art duties in Light Bearer and Momentum), the box is an artifact worthy of time-honored capsuling.
In another extended package, Swedish post-metal band Cult of Luna’s Eviga Riket tells the story behind their 2008 record Eternal Kingdom (Earache). During rehearsals for that record, which were conducted in an abandoned mental institution, the band happened upon the journals of former inhabitant Holgar Nilsson. The songs on Eternal Kingdom are based on Nilsson’s journals, which chronicle his torment by an owl demon (the Näcken), his drowning his pregnant wife at its command (leading to his institutionalization), and his demise in the ongoing battle between the herbivores and carnivores, the humans and other “malformed fauna.” Drawn from Nilsson’s journals (titled “Tales from the Eternal Kingdom”), Eviga Riket tells his story in full, in both English and Swedish, hauntingly illustrated by Joris Vanpoucke. The hardbound book also includes an audio version on DVD read by Anna Guthrie accompanyed by Vanpoucke’s visuals and new music by the band.
Cult of Luna also released a live DVD of a 2008 performance of these songs in Scala, London (Fire Was Born; Earache, 2009). With the self-funded and released Eviga Riket finishing the story at last, they’re planning to move on to new material.
In our day of downloading disposable sounds and music perceived as free window-dressing, it is heartening to see bands take the longview — without automatically looking backward.
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Fluff Fest: Here’s Fall of Efrafa performing “No Longer Human” from Owsla (2006), part one of The Warren of Snares trilogy during their last tour in 2009 [runtime: 7:29]:
I’ve spent the last several days reflecting on Adam Yauch and the Beastie Boys, their music, their projects, and their place as a cultural force. Growing up when I did, the Beasties were unavoidable. Every car, every boombox, every top-ten radio countdown had License to Ill (Def Jam, 1986) on blast. I hated it, but as much as I was repelled by the frat-boy antics of that record, it was impossible to ignore the significance. You knew you were witnessing something historic, that somehow things were different after that. And they were.
I didn’t get into the Beastie Boys music until they made the jump to the Left Coast and released Paul’s Boutique (Capitol, 1989) And, like most people, I didn’t recognize that record’s greatness until it’d been out a while. By the time they started running projects like Grand Royal Magazine, Grand Royal Records, and X-Large clothing, I had become a fan. Their undisputed comeback was with Check Your Head (Capitol, 1992). That record set the tone for the 1990s in a way that no other album did, and it shed new light on Paul’s Boutique, introducing a whole new crop of fans to the Beastie phenomenon. In the wake of the live instruments played on Check Your Head, a practice the Beasties had abandoned after Poly Wog Stew (Rat Cage, 1982), the sample-saturated Paul’s Boutique garnered new meaning. After the various sampling copyright lawsuits at the end of the 1980s, it was no longer a record one could make. Today it would be a free mixtape, and still have to dodge litigation from multiple parties. The Beastie Boys had moved on and on.
Their early success became a burden rather than a boon to their being taken seriously. Where Paul’s Boutique flirted with maturity, Check Your Head showed they meant business. It was still playful, still fun, and still silly, but it also proved that they weren’t a parody act, that they could downright rock things other than the mic, and that they were here to stay. Eventually these two records will get their due as two of the most important documents of the sound of their time, deserving their placement in the alphabet and their placement among music legends: right between The Beach Boys (Pet Sounds) and The Beatles (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band).
Grand Royal was a magazine that I wish had lasted longer than it did. Its pages were driven by the interests of Adam Horivitz, Mike Diamonds, and Adam Yauch. That meant that just about anything could end up in there. From a fold-out dedication to Billy Joel (a.k.a. “The Fourth Beastie”) to an interview with a not-yet-famous, basement-recording Kid Rock, and from Biz Markie flexidisc to a calendar featuring demolition scenes, all put together with the inimitable Beasties flair. Their record label of the same name boasted a varied roster including acts like Atari Teenage Riot, At the Drive-In, Luscious Jackson, Jimmy Eat World, and Techno Animal, among many, many others. Their extended family includes The Dust Brothers, Mario Caldato Jr., Money Mark, Spike Jonze, Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, Sean Lennon, Ben Lee, Kathleen Hanna, Kim Gordon, Kim Deal, Eric Haze, Q-Tip, Rick Rubin, and John Doe, just to name a few. The reach of this network of creative souls is utterly impossible to gauge.
After Ill Communication (Capitol, 1994), the Beasties’ music and I parted ways again. We grew apart just as we’d grown together years before. I always kept an eye on what they were up to, but it was never mine again.
All of this stilted reminiscing over the Beastie Boys legacy is just to say that they are important, much more important than the bands that get the attention as such. The loss of Adam Yauch is a huge loss for all of us.
————
Here’s a recently unearthed, unaired clip of the Boys on Dave Chappelle’s show [runtime: 2:40] showing the raw sound they brought to the masses:
I was pulling into my friend Thomas Durdin’s driveway. By the volume of the AC-DC sample that forms the backbone of Boogie Down Productions’ “Dope Beat” (the first song on the second side of their 1986 debut album, Criminal Minded), I knew his mom wasn’t home. Along with the block-rocking decibel level, I was also struck by how the odd and primitive pairing of Australian hard rock and New York street slang sounded. It was gritty. It was brash. It rocked.
De La Soul’s 1995 record Stakes is High opens with various voices answering the question, “Where were you when you first heard Criminal Minded?” — knowing that moment was the door opening to a new world.
There was the one definitive moment
Well, did it mean it to you?
There was that one definitive moment
When it was something new.
— Pretty Girls Make Graves, “Speakers Push the Air”
Wayne Coyne once described this phenomenon to me as the “punk rock” moment, remembering the first time he heard something other than Foreigner and realized that Foreigner really wasn’t all that good. Listening to fans of The Replacements describe the way certain records changed them forever in Color Me Obsessed (What Were We thinking Films, 2011) is often painful. That moment is so difficult to describe without sounding stupid. So much so that many of them preface their testimonies with phrases like, “this is going to sound cheesy, but…” And it does. Mark Schwahn (creator of One Tree Hill) described the moment well in sober tones, saying that you know your life is different when you hear that sound than it was the moment before you did.
In that same movie, everyone also has a stoic opinion about which Replacements record was “the last good one.” In an old issue of Seattle’s The Stranger, Josh Felt wrote. “Authenticity is subjective. Case in point: The person who thinks Nirvana was the height of authentic rock and therefore disdains any post-grunge band for being phony is obviously someone who had an important moment along the lines of that day in their bedroom listening to Nevermind when they were jarred into consciousness about the homogenous teen culture surrounding them.” Once the moment happens, it often poisons the experiences that follow, some of which were potential epiphanies. The new is tired because it’s not like the old stuff. “Authenticity comes from the moment you’re living in,” continues Felt, “not from the product you’re buying.”
Psychologists call this “imprinting.” Certain experiences during certain times of your life just stay with you. Whatever you listened to in the decade somewhere between ages twelve and twenty-one is likely the most important music you’ll ever hear. Explaining what it means to you is one thing; making someone else understand, someone who didn’t have the same experience, is damn near impossible. Our experience with music is what my friend Josh Gunn calls “radically subjective.” We try and try to translate the experience with language and it always falls short.
I feel like I’ve had that moment many, many times in my life. Hearing Criminal Minded for the first time was one of them, and one that still informs my listening today. There’s no escaping the imprinting of the punk-rock moment.
When was yours?
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Here’s the video for Pretty Girls Make Graves’ “Speakers Push the Air” [runtime: 2:57], which I think captures the feeling pretty well: “Yeah, nothing else matters when I turn it up loud!”:
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Special thanks to Josh Gunn, Wayne Coyne, and Barry Brummett for the many discussions that informed this piece, and to Thomas Durdin for playing me the good stuff back in high school.
No one can really tell you how to write. It’s a matter of finding what works for you. Since posting my last piece on writing, I talked to several people about their processes and remembered some things that should’ve been included last time around. I consider most of these higher-order aspects of the task, but they might not seem so to you. It all depends on where you are as a writer, and I’m not exactly an expert. Either way, this should be taken as an addendum to the other piece.
Writing Space: I am enamored of scenes of bands working in the studio. My musician friends tell me that being in the studio is no fun, so I know I’m romanticizing it. Maybe it’s just leftover boyhood dreams of being a rock star, but seeing the way that artists occupy the temporary space of the recording studio while making records inspires me.
I try to emulate the studio experience that I imagine with my writing space. The walls around my desk host white boards and butcher-paper mindmaps, as well as posters and images that inspire me to write depending on the topic. Books chronically clutter every flat affordance within arm’s reach, which can be a burden as well as a boon. If applicable, I also listen to relevant music. For instance, while working on a chapter heavy with material about Laurie Anderson, I put up my Home of the Brave movie poster and listened to a playlist consisting of songs from all of her records. Immersing oneself in the subject matter is one way to dip your writing deeper into it.
An Essential Tension: There is a tension between wanting to write and needing to write. I find that both are necessary, but neither is sufficient. Writing in a vacuum can be lonely, disheartening work, and writing strictly for deadlines can be just as soul-squishing. Writing for my website (I loathe the term “blogging”) has provided me a perfect tension between the two. I want to write because it is what I do, but having an audience makes me feel that I need to write as well. Maintaining this site maintains that tension and keeps me writing.
Get Critical: In a response to my previous piece, Howard Rheingold (who has a beautiful office/studio space himself) wrote:
Find good critics you trust. Much writing needs to be sheltered — don’t show it to anybody until you think it can live on its own, even if it will need minor or major surgery after reconsideration. Then get some smart readers — people whose intelligence and knowledge you admire, you are supportive of your work, but are unafraid of telling you candidly what didn’t work for them in your writing. You need to develop a way of judging criticism. Some of it needs to just bounce off. Some of it needs to be considered. Some of it directs you to make important changes. You need to develop a sense for criticism — and get accustomed to it.
This runs counter to my “Release Your Darlings” suggestion from last time, but it’s good advice. Find mentors who will give you solid feedback — encouraging as well as constructive. It’s essential for all areas of writing development. Now, which of your darlings you release and which ones you save for the private pressure of critical eyes is up to your own judgement. It’s a meta-skill that you’ll hone as you go.
Remember to Return: I spoke to a few writing friends who responded to my “write everything down” credo, saying that they never go back through their notes or journals. It’s not only helpful, but imperative for me to go back through my collected notes on a regular basis. I find myself digging through the latest one almost every time I write something for this site, looking for a half-remembered reference or quotation. I don’t want to go blaming the internet, but we seem to have a web-fueled obsession with the latest, the most current, the now. Sometimes the piece you need is tucked away in the archives. Remember to return to your notes; otherwise, why are you taking them?
These are just a few more things that have come up in the past few weeks. Again, no one can tell you exactly how to make it happen. You may know more than I do. What tips do you have for getting writing done? Feel free to leave some in the comments below.
Publishing has its problems. Academic publishing has its as well, and in turn public intellectualism has problems. With the rise of ebooks, self-publishing, blogging (oh, how I loathe that term), and the like, all of this seems to be coming to a head. I have chosen a path that attempts to eschew these issues. This is not to say that I am above academic publishing, but to say that I am not interested in being read by such a small audience. I am also not necessarily interested in scientific rigor as such. Interesting ideas to me come from many sources, and those are rarely academic journals (I’m more of a Feyerabendian than a Popperian). No offense to those who pursue that path, but it’s not mine. Today, Cory Doctorow posted a piece to bOING bOING about the problem, and The Guardianchimed in as well. Steven Shaviro has been very vocal about the issue, having run into it specifically with Oxford University Press, writing,
I was asked to sign a contract for an essay I have written, which is scheduled to appear in an edited collection. Let’s leave aside the fact that I wrote the essay — it was solicited for this collection — in summer 2010, and yet it will not appear in print until 2013. I think that the glacial pace of academic publishing is a real problem. But that is not what is bothering me at the moment…
What’s bothering him is that the piece would have been “work-for-hire.” That the contract stipulated terms as follows:
WORK-FOR-HIRE. The Contributor acknowledges that the Publisher has commissioned the Contribution as a work-for-hire, that the Publisher will be deemed the author of the Contributior as employer-for-hire, and that the copyright in the Contribution will belong to the Publisher during the initial and any renewal or extended period(s) of copyright. To the extent, for any reason, that the Contribution or any portion thereof does not qualify or otherwise fails to be a work-for-hire, theContributor hereby assigns to the Publisher whatever right, title and interest the Contributor would otherwise have in the Contribution throughout the world.
Shaviro continues,
I found this entirely unbelievable, and unacceptable. Since when has original academic writing been classified as “work-for-hire”? It is possible, I suppose, that things like writing encyclopedia essays might be so categorized; but I have never, in my 30 years in academia, encountered a case in which primary scholarship or criticism was so classified. Is this something widespread, but which I simply haven’t heard about? I’d welcome information on this score from people who know more about the academic publishing situation than I do. But it seems to me, at first glance, that the Press is upping the ante in terms of trying to monopolize “intellectual property,” by setting up an arrangement that both cuts off the public from access and denies any rights to the henceforth-proletarianized “knowledge worker” or producer. I am unwilling to countenance such an abridgment of my ability to make the words that I have written more freely available.
I don’t think I have permission to actually reproduce the words of the editor from OUP, so I will paraphrase. What he basically said was that traditional publication agreements are insufficient because they only give presses “limited sets of rights.” In other words, he was openly confessing that OUP seeks complete and unlimited control over the material that they publish. The justification he gave for this was that old neoliberal standby, “flexibility” — OUP is seeking to do all sorts of digital distribution, and if rights are limited then they may not be able to control new forms of distribution that arise due to technological changes. Of course, the mendaciousness of this claim can be seen by the fact that, as was confirmed to me by one of the people involved in putting together the volume, the “work-for-hire” provision was in place long before the Press even got the idea of supplementing physical publication of the volume with a (no doubt password-protected and expensive-to-access) website.
I have exactly one piece “published” in an academic journal. It was a book review. It was due on November 15, 2008, and appeared in the September, 2010 issue of the journal — two years later. As much as I am thankful for the opportunity (my master’s thesis advisor Brian H. Spitzberg had passed the chance on to me), and I know that’s a normal publication period, it was a freaking book review. Why would I ever pursue that avenue again? My friend Alex Burns has a great post on how academia kills writing, which is a great fear of mine: I want to write books, and I want to write books that people actually want to read.
Alex Reid has an excellent post about why academics keep writing books that no one wants to read, which is because academics largely write books in the pursuit of tenure, not in the pursuit of an audience. Ian Bogost calls this “vampire publishing.” Their shared concern draws an important distinction between writing to be read and writing to have written (a distinction my professor at UT, Katie Arens, has drawn as well). In academia, there’s a strong push toward the latter. Bogost writes,
The reason there is no irony in my simultaneous support of Alex’s position and my continued participation in scholarly publishing is quite simple: people actually want to read my books. They buy them, both in print and electronic format. And I’ve tried very hard as an author to learn how to write better and better books, books that speak to a broader audience without compromising my scholarly connections, books that really ought to exist as books. Imagine that!
The problem doesn’t stop there though. As a scholar who pursues nonacademic or para-academic routes to publication, I am appalled at how insanely bad some of the channels outside of academia have gotten. Case in point: TED. TED, the “Technology, Entertainment, Design” conference originally envisioned by Richard Saul Wurman, has been watered down to the point of self-parody. If they hadn’t once done great things, this wouldn’t matter, but a once visionary site of Big-Idea exchange has become the Starbucksification of public intellectualism, what Benjamin Bratton calls, “the Thomas Friedman of Megachurch Infotainment.” If the following doesn’t make you lose your shit, then you should probably stop reading this post-haste [runtime: 3:47]:
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“John Boswell, of the ‘Symphony of Science’, came to TED2012 and made this remix of the speakers onstage.” It’s a TED-sponsored promotional video! It’s not a parody, it’s a self-parody! (Have you ever seen the Bank of America “One Bank” video?) TED, once the bastion of non-academic public intellectualism, is now this. SMFH.
The problem — the real problem — is that there should be a gate-keeping function to scholarship, but that the ones in place are currently failing us. TED’s former elitism wasn’t necessarily the answer, but their new openness is total, indisputable crap. Couple that with the aforementioned problems of academic publishing, and you’ve got yourself a crisis — a big one.
My main gripe with all of this is that Big Name people basically copyright ideas via TED (Bogost calls it, “American Idol for non-fiction trade books”). I’m all for openness, and I pretty well only synthesize the ideas of others (and I do my damnedest to cite and give credit where its due; I am self-conscious about it to a fault), but I’ve seen this happen so many times: One person spends years developing idea X and then one of The Chosen mentions X in a TED Talk™, and then it’s their idea. That is a problem.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution. If I did, this would be a very different piece. I have chosen to do what I do and hope for the best. I know many others who’ve resolved to do the same. None of this is to shit on those who do academic publishing or hope to do so, but we need to realize that the system is broken and that the alternatives are not much better. Here’s hoping we all find ways to get our ideas out there.
—–
Apologies to Doug Rushkoff for my bastardization of his book title for the name of this piece, and many thanks to Steven Shaviro, Alex Burns, Ian Bogost, and Alex Reid for sharing their thoughts.
I have a real hatred of false headlines, titles of articles that lie about their contents. The latest one to catch my ire was James Altucher’s “Self-Publishing Your Own Book is the New Business Card.” Mainly because, well, it isn’t. As much as we may try with apps and QR-codes, as well as traditional things like stickers and postcards, there still isn’t a token of identity that works like a business card. I don’t wholly disagree with Altucher’s article, just the parts where he claims his headline. The article is actually about why you should self-publish as opposed to seeking a publisher, and, as a publisher of my own first book, I can safely say that it isn’t my new business card, but that I do support the practice.
I listen to the vapid resignation coming from capital-P publishing and to the stories of corporate awfulness my friends endure, and I think if we landed half the punches we’re pulling now out of misplaced deference and outdated political instincts, we would bury them. — Erin Kissane via Twitter, October 10, 2011
I published my first book, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes (Well-Red Bear), five years ago, and I learned the process as I went through it. The tools for doing so have gotten much better, faster, and easier to use. I did Follow for Now largely “the hard way” at the time because I wanted control over every aspect of the book. I didn’t want it to look self-published. Due to advancements in the available technology, those concerns have lessened quite a lot, and I probably wouldn’t do things the same way now. Here are some of the things I’ve learned in the process, in the hopes that you can avoid some of the same issues now.
Design: As I said, I didn’t want my book to look self-published, so I hired a designer. I am also fortunate to have designer friends, some of whom have book design in their repertoires. I tapped Patrick David Barber and his partner Holly McGuire to do mine. I was originally going to hire Patrick to do the cover, but they took on the whole project, and I am very, very thankful that they did. It’s difficult to put a price on great design, and I didn’t pay them near what the job was worth, but I can confidently say — thanks to Patrick and Holly — that Follow for Nowlooks at home with any book on the shelves at the various bookstores, libraries, and homes that carry it.
Editing:Follow for Now consists of the best interviews from my old website frontwheeldrive.com. I spent a year and a half choosing, categorizing, and arranging the interviews into a form suitable for publication as a book. Once I got it pretty close to what I thought the final version would look like, I’d read those interviews so many times that I didn’t feel comfortable doing the final copyediting. I was simply too close to the content. I hired another old friend, Adem Tepedelen, to help me get the words all together. This was a step I didn’t anticipate when I started this journey, but again, I’m glad I did it. Adem found so many inconsistencies, misspellings, awkward sentences, and other holes that I’d never seen — even in all the years some of this stuff had been online. Get a skilled third party to help you get your copy tight.
Indexing: I cannot express how frustrating it is as a researcher to pick up a book, flip to the back to look up something that you know is in it, and find that there’s no index to help you locate it. Since Follow for Now contains so many people, ideas, books, records, and so on inside, I thought it was imperative that one be able to find the information in as many ways as possible. I was advised not to do the indexing myself (and I felt the same way I felt about the copyediting), so I hired Steve Connell (from the awesome Verse Chorus Press) to do mine. It was well worth it. There are rare cases when an index might be superfluous, but most nonfiction books should have one. Don’t skimp on the index. Your readers will thank you.
Distribution: I ordered a thousand copies of Follow for Now. They arrived on my doorstep in Seattle on a wooden palette. A thousand books is over forty boxes of twenty-four books each. It’s about half a standard palette. As a physical presence, it’s no joke. I’ve moved three times since then. Maintaining one’s own inventory at this point is absolutely ludicrous. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless you happen to have your own warehouse and aren’t planning on moving anytime soon. The print-on-demand services have gotten much better, and if I were doing a book myself right now, I’d certainly be looking hard in their direction.
I moved just a few months for a new job after that palette of books arrived, so I missed out on shopping the book to a lot of independent distributors. If you go this route, look into distribution before your inventory comes knocking.
Digital: Given the current battles over digital distribution, I am loathe to mention Amazon, but there’s no denying their power. If you have an ISBN (and you shouldn’t have a book out without one), then you can get your book listed on their site. I make no money from Amazon sales of my print book, but having it on their site has raised its profile. If you choose to use one of their services for digital and print-on-demand publishing, you get their distribution platform automatically. This is powerful stuff, but be sure check out all of the terms of service in full: You can certainly use their strength without signing over your soul. I hired Josh Tallent at eBook Architects to convert my book’s raw files to Kindle-readable ones. Google Books and other digital distributors have their own sets of legalese to sift through. Don’t sell yourself short.
Local: Check with all of your extant local independent bookstores. Most have consignment deals and many will buy books from you outright. See what they have as far as local events as well. A reading or talk from your book can sell a few copies and raise your profile in your own area, which, if done well, can lead to more exposure online as people post and Tweet about you and your new book.
Web: I am fortunate enough to have a background in web design, so can build my own websites. If I didn’t, I know several people who could help in that area. Again, in the five years since Follow for Now, the technology has advanced enough that free sites can do the trick. Having a website to highlight elements from the book and press about it is invaluable, but at least a landing page with all the pertinent details about your book is imperative.
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There are many other things you can do to get your book out and raise awareness about it, but these are the basics. “Self-publishing” is a misnomer if there ever was one. It still takes a team of people to do it successfully. You should be prepared to do most of the work yourself, but chances are you have friends who can help where you fall short. I have told many classes that if you have a book written, you can have it out tomorrow. Just make sure you’re ready for the challenge: Be prepared for years of work. Having a completed volume in hand is only about half the job; it’s the end of one phase and the beginning of another. I’m still learning as I go.
I started writing poems and comics, and making fake newspapers at the age of six. Having grown up with an artist mom and always drawing, painting, or making something, I thought I’d end up an artist. I started making photocopied zines in my teens and taught myself how to turn events and interviews into pages with staples, but my driving interest (aside from the BMX, skateboarding, and music content that inspired those zines in the first place) was originally in the layouts. Balancing words and images on the page excited me. I thought I might end up being an artist of some sort after all. In fact, I was an Art major for my first three years of undergraduate study. As I’ve written elsewhere,
If I were forced to pick a single answer to the question “What do you do?” I would probably say I’m a writer, though I never did well on writing assignments in school. In spite of my placement in advanced classes, I scored poorly throughout high school on writing-related projects. Hell, I made C’s in both English Composition 101 and 102, but In my second-to-last semester of undergrad, one of my instructors complimented my writing. We had done several in-class essays in her Abnormal Psychology class, and one day she pulled me aside and told me what a good writer I was. This came as a surprise, given my previous track record and the fact that I’d been an Art major for my first three years of college. Regardless, it stuck with me. I took a class on writing for social science research the next semester, and though I barely made a B, I felt more at home researching and writing than I ever had trying to do traditional art.
Typical me. (photo by Lily Brewer)
Since then, I’ve moved on to just about every type of writing, and the process intrigues me to no end. I find that writing in different formats and styles (e.g., academic, journalistic, poetry, online, etc.) breaks up any creeping monotony and keeps me writing. As such, I try to be a writer at all times. As Johannes Milner (1814) put it, “Poetry is not something to be activated and deactivated. It is a part of a process, a byproduct of simply being poetic” (p. 43). So, at its best, writing is not an activity unto itself, but a byproduct of being a writer. Here are a few tips for becoming and being the writer you want to be (which we will explore in-depth below):
Find Make Time to Write: Unscheduled time is lost time. You have to give yourself breaks and let yourself enjoy them, but making time to write is essential. This is first and foremost.
Always Be Writing/Write Everything Down: This does not always seem possible for the busy among us, but allowing for the opportunity is imperative. Collecting your most fleeting thoughts — on the bus, in the car, while trying to fall asleep, during any downtime whatsoever — is an important practice. Don’t assume you’ll remember them. You won’t. Write them down.
Don’t Let the Blank Page Stop You: Being intimidated by the emptiness of a white page and a blinking cursor can be debilitating. Just type what you’re thinking. If you’ve jotted down notes, type them up. You can — and will — edit later. This will get you past the blankness. It has been said that writing is re-writing, so take advantage of the impermanence of your initial words.
Release Your Darlings: I’ve posted about this one before, but it bears repeating. Don’t sit on your ideas. Get them out there. You’ll get invaluable feedback from blog posts, Tweets, and exchanging emails that you won’t get from a Word file withering away in the foldered hierarchy of your hard drive.
Collaborate: The fruits we bare are inevitably due to the roots we share. Collaboration makes each one of us bigger. Read widely and exchange ideas with many. Even if it’s just having someone to bounce your ideas around with, the importance of sharing them cannot be overstated.
Stay Positive: This stuff isn’t easy, but inspiration is all around you. I find it in books, discussions, stand-up comedy, Hip-hop, my fiancée, animals, staying up late, reading magazines, listening to music, etc. Don’t look for reasons to be discouraged. The world is full of inspiring things if you look for them.
From the page I feel a lot of pressure
I treat it like it’s too precious
Like there’s an audience saying, ‘Impress us!’
But it’s just my impression
— Roy Christopher, June 19, 2007
In his book On Writing(Pocket, 2001), Stephen King urges aspiring writers to turn off their televisions, writing, “Once weaned from the ephemeral craving for TV, most people will find that they enjoy the time they spend reading. I’d like to suggest that turning off that endlessly quacking box is apt to improve the quality of your life and the quality of your writing” (p. 148). Director Michel Gondry adds, “I stopped my son from playing videogames, and he began to develop all kinds of creative skills. It’s human to seek out the quickest reward, but if you get the reward immediately, you don’t go anywhere else. You learn that the delayed reward is more rewarding” (quoted in Thill,2006, p. 56). These two quotations get at the issue of distraction. Having time away from writing is also important, as is having a head-clearing activity. I have colleagues who can’t write at home due to things like dishes, television, roommates, spouses, etc. I know others who have their own “writing space”: a nice, secluded spot with a comfortable chair, and good tea. Still others are binge writers: They need large chunks of time to write anything of substance. I am sympathetic to all of these conditions, but I have found it important to cultivate the ability to write at any time, in any circumstance — even if it’s just collecting thoughts about something. I keep a pen and paper in my pocket at all times, pen and pad by my bed, notebook(s) in my backpack and all over the house. I do find that I need large chunks of uninterrupted time to surmount larger writing tasks, but the ubiquity of computers, portable or otherwise, makes writing anywhere a much more viable option.
It’s not always about making a fist, sometimes it’s about opening your hand. — Tom Waits
In Post-Continental Voices: Selected Interviews (Zer0 Books, 2010), Paul J. Ennis interviews seven scholars all working in and around new Continental Philosophy (e.g., Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Ian Bogost, et al.). There’s a lot of solid writing advice in each of these. In his interview, Stuart Elden states:
The key thing is that there is no correct way to write, but ways that work for individuals. The problem is that people seem to try to write in ways that are not right for them, that are just not working. Personally I try to write everyday, even if it’s just typing up notes or work on references. I try not to get hung up over particular words or formulations; because I go over things so many times that I never think anything I write is the final version. For me that’s helpful in not getting blocked. I write a lot of “stage directions” into the text — “this link doesn’t work”; “need better examples”; “develop” etc. — and I move on. (p. 43)
He goes on to talk about reading a lot and how it inspires him to write, as well as writing cumulatively as opposed to on deadline, adding, “I do know people who claim to work that way, and they can ‘turn on’ the writing at that late point. It just doesn’t work for me — writing is more of a slow accumulation. I’ve written some shorter pieces quite quickly, but most pieces are built up very slowly, accretion over a long period of time. The other thing to note is that I work on several things — not quite at once — but in parallel” (p. 43). Billy Wimsatt once said that the first rule of writing is reading a lot, and I concur with that. Also, reading widely is helpful. Venture outside of your area of interest. Treat your mind like an ecology and diversify its literary flora and fauna. I also agree with Elden’s working on several pieces in parallel. When work on one project stalls, switching to another can jostle new ideas loose. The process is less about balance and more about tension.
In his interview with Ennis, Levi Bryant adds, “Too many of us labor over projects in isolation, never revealing them to anyone else until finally, at long last, they are masterpieces ready for publication. I think this is a tremendous mistake both in terms of prospects for professional success and intellectually. Attending conferences, talking to other academics, participating on discussion lists, and blogging all create countless opportunities and assist in your intellectual development. Nor should this engagement be restricted to established academics” (p. 79).
Waiting until the “right” time to write and toiling away at it alone might be our two biggest mistakes. One of my main correspondents with regard to writing is my friend Alex Burns. In a recent email exchange, he introduced me to the idea of “hot space.” That is, a quick snapshot of an idea that often resonates with an audience more so than something fully formed. The concept’s namesake being Queen’s 1982 album Hot Space, which was apparently recorded in very quick bursts of studio time. Again, sharing cannot be overstated. Don’t deprive the world of your ideas. Get them out there and see if they float or sink. This practice will also help you build a platform.
When she wrote about things, her sense of them changed, and with it, her sense of herself. — William Gibson, Spook Country.
A friend of mine recently lamented on Facebook, “I miss being able to write creatively. I feel like academia has ruined me. What can I do to jump start my imagination and start writing again? 🙁 It makes me really sad.” This has been a fear of mine as well, and I find that constantly working on different kinds of projects helps keep my writing limber.
More to her question, there are many, many books on breaking out of these ruts and finding new grooves. In spite of its New-Agey style, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Unleashing the Writer Within (Shambhala, 2005) is one I return to regularly. Goldberg outlines a total plan for writing as a practice, which can be overwhelming if taken wholesale, but the book is rife with reminders of how to write through the fits and starts of any project. Daniel Pink‘s A Whole New Mind (Riverhead, 2006) has some great exercises for getting the creative process started as well. Ultimately, as Stuart Elden stated above, each of us has to find what works for our writing needs, but trying out the methods of successful writers is one tactic to finding your own way.
The best way of getting into something is to think of it as mischief.
― Steve Aylett, The Crime Studio
Being a writer is not an easy path to take, but it’s navigable. Don’t be afraid to test an idea, ask for help, or bounce ideas off someone. The more difficult it is, the more likely you will find it rewarding when you finish a project. Some people write all the time, and others are able to plow through when something is due. Experiment and find what works for you. Ultimately, if you want it, you have to find a way to make it happen.
References:
Aylett, Steve. (2001). The Crime Studio. New York: Thunder’s Mouth.
Ennis, Paul J. (2010). Post-Continental Voices: Selected Interviews. London: Zer0 Books.
Gibson, William. (2007). Spook Country: A Novel. New York: Putnam, p. 171.
Goldberg, Natalie. (2005). Writing Down the Bones: Unleashing the Writer Within. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: Shambhala.
King, Steven. (2001). On Writing. New York: Pocket Books.
Milner, Johannes. (1814). This Quotation is From a Dream I Had: Pull Inspiration from Everything. My Head: Dream Time.
Pink, Daniel H. (2006). A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. New York: Riverhead.
Thill, Scott. (2006, March). Keeping it Reel: Michel Gondry’s Block Party. WIRED, 14.03, p. 56.
If bricolage is the major creative form of the twenty-fist century, then the archive is its standing reserves. Socrates famously worried about the stability of our memories as we moved from an oral to a written culture, and his concerns have been echoed in the move to digital archives. The pedigree of this technological Socratic shift is deep. When Thomas Edison first recorded the human voice onto a tin foil roll on December 6, 1877, he externalized and disembodied a piece of humanity. Jonathan Sterne writes that “media are forever setting free little parts of the human body, mind, and soul” (p. 289). By the time Edison patented the phonograph in 1878, the public was familiar and comfortable with the idea of preserved foods. As a cultural practice, “canned music” in John Philip Sousa’s phrase, was ripe for mass consumption. Envisioning a world without such “canned” media is difficult to do now. We preserve everything. The problem is not so much the authenticity of our entertainment and information, but how to parse the sheer expanse of it. Andreas Huyssen (2003) mused, “Could it be that the surfeit of memory in this media-saturated culture creates such an overload that the memory system itself is in constant danger of imploding, thus triggering fear of forgetting?” (p. 17).
Condense fact from the vapor of nuance.
— Juanita Marquez in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash
Alongside library science and other information archiving skills, forensics is a contemporary growth field. If we are to use our media as a sort of technological “Funes the Memorious,” what do we do when technological change outpaces its retrieval compatibility? You likely have (or have had) mass storage containers (e.g., cassettes, VHS tapes, floppy discs, etc.) that lack a device capable of reading them, ghosts of information past trapped in a black box forever. We’re all archivists whether we notice or admit it, but the gates to our archives have expiration dates. A recent trip to UT’s Harry Ransom Center revealed stacks of media unreadable by any technology on-site. William Gibson‘s electronic work Agrippa: Book of the Dead plays on this very trope of archival decay. The piece, set for a one-time reading, consists of a 300-line poem on a 3.5″ disc encased in a box made to look like a hard drive, is set to scroll once through and erase itself forever, a textual spectre set free from the archive after its single haunting episode. The pages of the included book version were treated with photosensitive chemicals which fade with exposure to light.
According to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (The MIT Press, 2008; now available in paperback), There was one public performance of Agrippa. On December 9, 1992, at the Americas Society in uptown New York City, Penn Jillette read the poem aloud, which was projected on a big screen, exacerbating its scroll into oblivion. The event is fraught with rumor and lie, as the full text of the intentionally ephemeral Agrippa was posted online the next morning. The conditions of its hacking are detailed in full in Kirschenbaum’s book, and a collection of documents surrounding the work is available online. Another interesting artifact sprung from this event: Re:Agrippa, a choppy remix of videotaped footage from the single Agrippa public event, test patterns, and haunting voiceovers kludged together by the NYU students who “hacked” Agrippa‘s text for online consumption [runtime: 5:44]:
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Our archive fever needs feeding. With its flickering signifiers and configurable nature, we consider the things on the screen temporary. But, as Kirschenbaum notes, in lieu of hard drives and other external devices (the main concern of his book), the visual display of the computer was originally considered a storage device. Now, crashed drives and outmoded media hide their secrets from everyone except those closest to the machine. Forensic scientists, not unlike those seen on that other screen, are more important than ever to our unstable memories. They can condense fact from the vapor of hidden nuance and open the gates to the archival entrails of dead media.
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It should be noted that my conception of the archive and the haunting thereof owes a large debt to the teachings of Josh Gunn. Oh, there’s some unacknowledged Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Dick Hebdige, Bruce Sterling, and Kate Hayles in there as well.
References:
Borges, Jorge Luis. (1964). Funes the Memorious. In Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Directions.
Huyssen, Andreas. (2003). Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. (2008). Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Stephenson, Neal. (1993). Snow Crash. New York: Spectra.
Sterne, J. (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Further conflating sound recording and literature, Peters writes, “The phonograph, as the name suggests, is a means of writing.”
