A few years ago, I realized that I was wearing the wrong size pants. All of my pants were too short. Though I’d been buying the same size pants for years and coping accordingly, the realization was sudden. As soon as I was able, which took a few more months, I ditched them and bought all new, appropriately sized pants.
For a long time I used a stereo pre-amplifier I’d gotten at a thrift store to play music from my computer on larger, better-sounding speakers. The increased sound quality was amazing, but the volume knob on the amp had a short in it and often required readjusting. One speaker would go out, and I’d have to go jiggle the knob to get it back.
These two cases are examples of what Herbert Simon called “satisficing.” That is, dealing with decisions that are not optimal but just good enough. Simon claimed that since we can’t know all of the possibilities or consequences of our choices, satisficing is the best that we can do. In other words, we all satisfice in some way on a daily basis. The problem is when a situation starts to wear on you in barely noticeable ways, slowly eroding your psyche, something seemingly small can quietly build into a real issue. I thought my pants were okay, not realizing for a long time that their ill-fitting length made me uncomfortable and wore on my confidence. Though my faulty volume knob was chronic annoyance, I never thought it was that big a deal.
And — in the biggest of pictures — it wasn’t, but the habit of making do, dealing with the okay instead of the optimal, can be dangerous. In his latest appearance on Conan O’Brien’s show, Louis CK addresses a version of satisficing that can erode our psyches in the worst way. By avoiding sadness, we erode our humanness. “Sadness is poetic,” Louie says “You’re lucky to live sad moments.” [runtime: 4:51]
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Being a person, present in the moment, is not always sad, but with our technologically enabled avoidance of sadness, we satisfice our lives away. “You never feel completely sad or completely happy,” Louie says. “You just feel kind of satisfied with your product, and then you die.”
With 30 Rock coming to an abbreviated end in its seventh season, I’ve been watching and re-watching past seasons. A friend of mine once complained to me about movies and shows about making movies and shows, and I understand his frustration, but the media-making premise is solid. It has a lengthy history going all the way back to Shakespeare’s plays but also includes many classic television shows, from serious, news-room dramas like Lou Grant to silly comedies like Newsradio and WKRP in Cincinnati. The media made on these shows is only the anchor for the interaction of the characters, and as long as the characters are good, the rest is gravy. I mean, Party Down is about catering in the same way that That 70s Show is about the 1970s. Compare the latter to the short-lived That 80s Show, and you’ll immediately see what I mean. A good TV-show premise gets out of the way and lets the characters drive the narrative. Cheers isn’t bout the bar; the bar is only the setting, but there’s something special about the making of a show being the setting for another show.
Aaron Sorkin’s only series not continued after its first season was Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which ran on NBC for a twenty-two episode, single season in 2006 and 2007, the same season that 30 Rock debuted on the same network. In spite of Studio 60‘s win in the ratings, 30 Rock stayed on while Studio 60 wasn’t renewed. Watching the show, you can tell that it was very expensive to make. I’m only halfway through the season, but so far, I wish that they’d kept making it.
Studio 60 gave me a new respect for Matthew Perry. As writer Matt Albie, he only rarely pulls Chandleresque reactions to the situations he faces as the new head writer on the show. Little Sorkinian gems like the following exchange between Albie and Harriett Hayes (one of the stars of the show within the show and Albie’s on-and-off love interest; played by Sarah Paulson) give this show its shine:
Harriet: I got a laugh at the table read when I asked for the butter in the dinner sketch. I didn’t get it at the dress. What did I do wrong?
Matt: That’s one laugh out of thirty you’re going to get tonight.
Harriet: What did I do wrong?
Matt: You asked for the laugh.
Harriet: What did I do at the table read?
Matt: You asked for the butter.
Albie’s partner Danny Tripp (producer/director; played by the inimitable Bradley Whitford) is just so damn likable. Their struggles with standards and practices and network politics, as well as constant budget concerns, are tempered by the new head of NBS, Jordan McDeere (who is loosely based on Jamie Tarses, who was head of ABC while Sorkin’s Sports Night was on; played by Amanda Peet), who brought them back on after previous head writer Wes Mendell (their old boss; played by Judd Hirsch) melts down on air. The power dynamic is refreshing, as it is more complex than just Creatives versus Suits. The guys who run the show have someone in power on their side, and even though the hierarchy still includes the usual power struggles with higher-ups (most often with McDeere’s boss, Jack Rudolph; played by Steven Weber), it’s handled with more nuance than usual.
Power dynamics aside, equal time is given to the interactions between the writers, actors, producers, and assistants. The boardroom might determine a lot of the show’s conflicts, but live on stage is where it lives and dies (and I adore the Nicolas Cage bits). Behind these scenes is where the pressure builds.
Created by Mark Frost and David Lynch, as well as many more members of the team who brought us Twin Peaks, On the Air tells the story of the 1950s variety show, “The Lester Guy Show.” In true Lynch/Frost fashion, the pressure that builds while trying to put together a live show always blows everything sideways at air time. On the Air was only actually on the air (on ABC) for three episodes, though they filmed seven. Lester Guy (Ian Buchanan, who also played Dick Tremayne in Twin Peaks) is the washed-up yet spoiled thespian, who is immediately imposed upon by the dimwitted Betty Hudson (Marla Rubinoff), who becomes the star of his show (a situation noticeably similar to 30 Rock‘s addition of Tracy Jordan to the cast of “The Girlie Show”). Special mention must be made of Buddy Budwaller (played by Miguel Ferrer, who played Agent Albert Rosenfield in Twin Peaks) as he is the foil to the show’s fun and few play that role better than Miguel Ferrer (see also his appearance as FBI Agent Bill Steele in season 2, episode 10 of Lie to Me). Overall On the Air as tedious as it is hilarious, and you almost have to be a David Lynch fan to like it, but like most of the other shows assembled here, it pays homage to the golden age of television as only Lynch and Frost could.
All of the above shows deal with a live television broadcast, whereas Greg the Bunny‘s show within the show, “Sweetknuckle Junction,” is prerecorded. This lowers the on-screen stakes a bit, but the Greg the Bunny is about the same things as the others: the behind the scenes drama and politics of making a TV show. Page One of all of these shows includes a major change in the cast. In Studio 60 it includes a change in the writing staff as Wes Mendell (played by Judd Hirsch) loses his shit on screen about censorship and such, setting the stage for the show’s on going strife with Standards and Practices. On the Air starts with the addition of Betty to the cast (see above), while 30 Rock of course starts with the addition of Tracy Jordon (Tracy Morgan) to the cast of “The Girlie Show.” And Greg the Bunny unwittingly ends up as the new star of “Sweetknuckle Junction.” Planting big changes on Page One is screenwriting 101, and these shows illustrate exactly why: They get us in on the narrative just as the characters are dealing with those changes; we’re invested in their story right from the start.
Sean S. Baker, Spencer Chinoy, and Dan Milano’s Greg the Bunny has had several incarnations as a public-access show (Junktape), short film spoofs on IFC, and a more recent spin-off on MTV (Warren the Ape), but the show they did for Fox is the real gem. Pairing their great puppet characters with humans played by Seth Green, Sarah Silverman, Eugene Levy, Dina Walters, and Bob Gunton, eleven episodes made it to air in 2002 (two more unaired shows are included on the DVD). If On the Air is 30 Rock on LSD, then Greg the Bunny is just plain high. Puppets in Greg the Bunny, though second-class citizens, are citizens nonetheless (a trope the writers use to great comedic advantage). The show is fun and funny and plays on its obvious classic forebears like Sesame Street and The Muppet Show.
Similarly, Studio 60‘s references to classic TV shows, including Lou Grant from Mary Tyler Moore (“I hate spunk!”) and actually including Ed Asner in a minor role on the show (as executive Wilson White), not to mention Judd Hirsch, and 30 Rock‘s parade of guest appearances (e.g., Carrie Fisher, Jennifer Aniston, Brian Williams, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Fallon, Aaron Sorkin, Fred Armisen, Michael Keaton, Andy Richter, Al Gore, et al.), including Tim Conway as almost himself, make these shows each slices of comprehensive television. That is, their allusions are not only to other similar shows but also to their genres and the television medium itself.
With that said, I get the gripe of my friend about shows about shows. His beef is really about the self-indulgence of Hollywood and their losing touch with anything outside of the studio. There are plenty of other things to talk about with all of these shows, but I find it interesting when a medium has become declassified enough to be this reflexive. To varying degrees, all of these shows let us get backstage and right in the middle of things. We already deal in meta-media with shows like Talk Soup or The Daily Show and follow actor salaries and box-office earnings as much as we do plots and characters, but when we speak fluently in a medium such as television, it opens itself up to us in a new way. Once we’ve assimilated it into our media lexicon, we can explore its inner-workings in a way that was alien to us in its newness.
Somehow the registration for my main domain name lapsed. I don’t know how it slipped by me, but it did. Since my website gets a decent amount of traffic, it showed up on various radars, and someone snagged it. The guy who now owns my name told me via email, “I am planning to put in on Sedo for $2000 USD. These type of domains usually sell fast, because they have high PageRank.” The only reason this particular domain name has a high PageRank is because I have spent the last 15 years developing content for it, promoting it, and keeping it visible. Also, it’s not just some cute web domain, it’s my name. Because of the money-making land-grab of domain poachers, I didn’t even have access to my own email address.
I bought my first domain name in 1997. The ‘zine I was doing at the time was called “Front Wheel Drive,” so I made the leap online and bought frontwheeldrive.com. As it says on the About page here,
A few false starts later, it evolved into an archive of interviews and reviews that explored the peaks of theory and technology and the depths of the cultural underground. Following our interests and curiosity wherever they led, my small but dedicated staff (Tom Georgoulias, Brandon Pierce, Mark Wieman, et al.) and I kept the site up-to-date with in-depth reviews of books, films, music, and art from all the edges of culture — and interviews with the minds that created them. Scott McCloud described the site as “nicely designed and packed with ideas (a rarity on both counts),” and Mark Dery called it “brutally cool.” Though frontwheeldrive.com ceased operations in late 2007, the best of its content is archived in my book Follow for Now, and all of the above continues on this very site.
“This very site” was roychristopher.com, my main web presence from 2007 to, well, a month or so ago.
I spent those weeks trying to decide if it’s worth it to pay the guy off and maintain the name I have spent so much time and effort to build. To dispute this with iCANN would cost more than the guy wants for the domain, and I also don’t have a case. I inadvertently let the name lapse, and he bought it. I thought maybe since it’s my name–my legal name–and a brand of sorts that I’d have a legal precedent, but according to my lawyer friends, I don’t. So, I opted to see if I could raise the money to get it back.
I decided that getting my name back would avoid a lot of confusion now and in the future, but would also require help (as a grad student, I don’t have two grand just to get back where I was a few weeks ago). Eventually, the precious PageRank of my domain would lose its value. No one wins in this situation. Not even the poacher and his domain-trolling scripts.
So, I started an Indiegogo campaign, and I convinced the poacher that I’m no one and the only no one interested in this piece of surreal estate (save maybe the award-winning production designer of the same name). I also got his price down to $1000. Thanks to my gracious friends, I’ve raised enough so far to regain control. I don’t yet own the domain, but I am able to post here again. I know this may seem like a frivolous or minor problem in the grand scheme, but I work very hard on what you see here. If you like anything I do here, please consider helping me out of this jam. I have rewards available, and I will keep working on the site as ever.
In the March 19, 1990 issue of Newsweek, they unsurprisingly attack Hip-hop with everything from unfettered racism to ignorant fear-mongering. I say “unsurprisingly” because in March of 1990, rap music was still the bane of popular culture. Yo! MTV Raps had barely started its decade-long run, N.W.A. had yet to release records from their separate ways, Public Enemy was just on the verge of dropping Fear of a Black Planet, and Tipper Gore’s PMRC was advising parents not to let their kids listen to rap. In Newsweek‘s cover story, “Rap Rage,” with the cover copy, “Yo! Street rhyme has gone big time, but are those sounds out of bounds?” Jerry Adler attempts to describe music made by groups “most Americans may never have heard of,”
…music so postindustrial it’s almost not even played, but pieced together out of prerecorded sound bites. It is the culture of American males frozen in various stages of adolescence: their streetwise music, their ugly macho boasting and joking about anyone who hangs out on a different block—cops, other races, women, and homosexuals (p. 56).
Bill Adler (1999; absolutely no relation) writes of the cover story,
It was so off-base that 49 music writers, led by Entertainment Weekly‘s Greg Sandow (and representing publications including Time, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice) wrote a letter to the editors of Newsweek insisting that [Jerry] Adler had “invented a nightmarish and racist fantasy about ignorant Black men who scream obscene threats. This is more than artistic misjudgement. Adler has slandered a major strain of contemporary Black culture” (p. 145).
To the Newsweek‘s left in the photo above is the October 18, 2012 issue of the Chicago Sun-Times in which they do much the same thing over 22 years later, furthering Chicago’s Chief Keef’s place as an ephemeral media lightning rod. All the bias, misinformation, and well-worn themes from the past two decades of mainstream Hip-hop coverage are here, from jail time boosting record sales to record companies exploiting violence. I call Keef’s treatment ephemeral because comparing him to Tupac and T.I.—as Thomas Conner does—is ludicrous and illustrates how little these writers know about their subject matter or care about reporting it accurately. It also shows how desperate their employers have gotten, especially when major news outlets sport inset “tl;dr” boxes in their articles, as if that makes them hip instead of hopeless.
Keef has popularized a rap style called “drill music” that originated in Chicago’s south side. Its use of truncated half-bars made up of single statements chanted one at a time rather than rap’s signature flowing poetry over beats makes it a distinctive vocal expression, possibly only prefigured by other one-offs like early-1990s dis-rapper Tim Dog or NOLA’s hoarse-voiced Mystikal. It’s a style that other rappers sound cramped attempting to emulate, as proven by Kanye West’s remix of Keef’s one hit “I Don’t Like,” featuring the ample vocal skills of Pusha-T, Jadakiss, Big Sean, and West himself—all veterans compared to the 17-year-old Keef. “Mr. West has rarely sounded so out of place,” writes Jon Caramanica, “and the original trumps the remix in every regard. ‘I Don’t Like’ is all hard angles and concrete walls, resistant to whatever nuance Mr. West wanted to add.” The drill sound’s closest contemporary analogue lies in the gang-fueled, club anthems of Atlanta’s Waka Flocka Flame, which feature a little more in the way of flow but are no less clipped and shouted. He’s already outlasted his critics’ expectations though and has made the transition from street tough to entertainer with a sort of gangster’s grace. That shift still remains for Keef, and for argument’s sake, here’s the original house-arrest version of his break-out hit “I Don’t Like” [runtime: 5:09]:
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I do like the song as well as his mixtapes, but I can’t say that I hear evidence of a talent like Tupac, T.I., or, more germanely, Tyler, The Creator. Mark Brown opens his Chicago Sun-Times article about record labels exploiting violence such as the gun waving seen above, by writing, “There probably ought to be a rule against a guy like me writing about somebody like teen rapper Chief Keef, the gulf between our worlds so vast that there’s no way I can relate to his life experiences let alone his music” (p. 5). You might be onto something there, Mark. He adds later, “I decided long ago there’s no value in old white guys wagging their fingers about the dangers of rap music lyrics that glorify guns, drugs, violence, and other criminal activity. I don’t like them. So what?” (p. 5) So, why did you just spend nearly 800 words doing just that?
Chief Keef’s raps are like Tweets: one-line, stand-alone missives; all comment, no story. Another Sun-Times article that emerged as I was writing this revisits how social media fuels public feuds. Much has been written about the role Twitter played in Keef’s rise to infamy, mainly due to gang rivalries that bubbled up into the music and possibly resulted in the death of his south-side rap rival Lil Jojo. “THE defining document of hip-hop’s current evolutionary state isn’t a song, or a music video or a concert,” writes Jon Caramanica in The New York Times, “Years from now cultural archaeologists will do much better to look back over the Twitter account of the 17-year-old Chicago rapper Chief Keef, who’s been exploding, or imploding, depending on how you look at it, one short burst of text at a time.” The immediacy of such a channel—someone once called it “the death of the unspoken thought”—lends it to hotheaded responses and eventual regret. “I think it’s pretty likely that instantaneity means there is no chance to ‘count to 10’ in hopes that things might cool off a bit,” says my colleague at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Steve Jones, who’s quoted in the Sun-Times article. “I don’t pin that on Twitter, though, as that is the case with other synchronous media — Facebook, [texting], etc. . . . There’s probably some perceived advantage to the public-ness of Twitter, that it seems like more of a mass medium than other options at this point. It also has the perceived advantage of having messages amplified via retweeting. If Facebook is a wall, Twitter might be a bullhorn.” The bullhorn is the perfect symbol for the nodal point I’m trying to reveal here.
In writing about these articles, I feel kind of like the people who wrote them, like I’ve gone looking for something to be outraged about. And that’s a large part of the problem: If you go looking for something to be bummed about, you will find it. Unless you want to be up on the latest trends in rap music, Chief Keef is really none of your damn business. Journalism is like the postal service: They’re both dying businesses that continually do their jobs more and more poorly. So much so that they’re redefining what it means for media to “go viral” and what it means for someone to “go postal.”
It should also be noted that Newsweek announced last week that they are folding their print edition at the end of the year. I hope it means the end of their shitty rag in all its forms. Fuck them.
References:
Adler, Bill. (1999). Bill Adler’s Top 5 Mainstream Media Rap Coverage Travesties. In Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Chairman Mao, Gabriel Alvarez, & Brent Rollins (Eds.), Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists. New York: Ego Trip Publications.
Adler, Jerry. (1990, March 19). The Rap Attitude. Newsweek, CXV, 12, p. 56-59.
Brown, Mark. (2012, October 18). Record Companies Feed Off Violence. Chicago Sun-Times, p. 5.
Caramanica, Jon. (2012, October 4). Chicago Hip-Hop’s Burst of Change. The New York Times.
Conner, Thomas. (2012, October 18). Jail Time Might Not Hurt Sales. Chicago Sun-Times, p. 4.
Conner, Thomas. (2012, October 20). Rappers’ beefs sizzle on social media. Chicago Sun-Times, p. 3.
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Many thanks to Stacey Spencer who boosted me the one copy of Newsweek I’ve ever owned and to Zizi Papacharissi and Tim Baker for additional links and input.
Partially fueled by Jane McGonigal’s bestselling Reality is Broken (Penguin, 2011), “gamification”—that is turning mostly menial tasks into games through a system of points and rewards—became the buzzword of 2011 and diluted and/or stigmatized videogame studies on many fronts. Gaming ungamed situations is not all bad though. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies (1975) were tactics for gaming a stalled creative process. In an interview with Steven Johnson, Brian Eno explained, “The trick for me isn’t about showing people how to be creative as though they’ve never been like that before, but rather trying to find ways of recontacting the natural playfulness and curiosity that most people were born with.” When it becomes exploitative, it becomes a problem.
Roy Christopher:While reading How to Do Things with Videogames, it occurred to me that videogames really are the medium of the now. They encompass so much of everything else our media does and is. Was this part of your point and I just need a late pass?
Ian Bogost: Maybe it would be more accurate to say that videogames are the least recognized medium of the now. In the book—in the first chapter even—I argue against the conceit that games have not achieved their potential. That’s true of course, but what medium has achieved its potential? But in that context I was speaking against researchers, critics, and designers who talk about everything videogames are not, but could be: akin to film, or novels, or textbooks, or what have you. The book tries to show that videogames are already a great many things, from art to pornography to work to exercise.
But all that said, videogames are hardly a dominant medium. What is instead? Some might say “the Internet,” but that’s wrong too, although the reasons it is wrong are surprising. As Marshall McLuhan taught us, media contain other media. But weirdly, even though we access the Internet on computers, the former actually has relatively little to do with the latter. The Internet contains writing, images, moving images, sound—all “traditional” media in common parlance. McLuhan’s idea of the Global Village was meant to rekindle the senses overlooked thanks to the age of print, and in that sense TV and the Internet have succeeded in realizing that vision. But the result turns out to be just the same as TV and radio and print, except any of us can create the equivalent of a publisher or a broadcaster.
Videogames, by contrast, have different properties than these other media. They model the way something works rather than describing or showing it; they offer an experience of making choices within that model rather than an audiovisual replay of it, and they contextualize that model within the context of a simulated world. Now, to be sure, that sort of approach is very “now” in the sense that we SHOULD be interested in the complex, paradoxical interrelations of the moving parts in a system. But at the end of the day, it’s just easier to watch cat videos on YouTube and spout one-liners onto Twitter. In some sense, videogames both are and aren’t other media. They do what other media do—and some things they do not—but they do them differently.
RC:The idea of attaching rewards to menial tasks is understandable, but the current buzz around gamification seems to miss much of the point by filtering out what’s actually good about games. You’ve been quite vocal about the ills of this trend. What are we to do?
IB:If videogames both have and haven’t arrived as a mature medium, then the proponents of gamification want to pretend that the work is done and now we can settle in to the task of counting the profits. The basics of this phenomenon are simple enough: marketers and consultants need to surf from trend to trend, videogames are appealing and seductive but complex and misunderstood, so the simple directive to apply incentives to all our experiences both satisfies the economic rationalists and ticks off the “game strategy” box for organizations.
The irony, not lost on many, is that as virtual incentives like points and reward programs have risen, so tangible incentives have gone into decline. We used to provide material incentives in the form of things like compensation, benefits, perks, and so forth. Now we use JPEGs and 32-bit Integers.
In fact, just as I was writing this response, a friend told me about a novella someone wrote that appears to be an introduction to gamification. It’s called “I’ll Eat This Cricket for a Cricket Badge,” written by a marketing consultant with the improbably-parodic-sounding name Darren Steele. The description reads, “This is the story of Lara, a senior director at Albatron Global. Today she learns she has 24 hours to prepare for a once-in-a-decade meeting with ‘The Brotherhood,’ the triumvirate of terror that founded the company.” Imagine if these gamification shills spent even a fraction of the energy and creativity they devote to swindling on the earnest implementation of worthwhile ideas. In fact, I can’t even tell if the novella is serious or not, the world has become that ambiguous.
As with most things, knowing what to do about it is harder than mere critique. And in that respect, it’s always dangerous to fight against marketers and consultants. Though often stupid, they are also very smart. Or better yet, they often use their savvy to appear stupid or simplistic, so that we’ll let them into our homes and our minds.
In that respect, one possible strategy of opposition is to infiltrate the consultancies and corporations themselves. To create our own highly leveraged solutions-oriented roll-out for it-doesn’t-matter-what service. It’s too laborious and time-consiming to convince people to make games in earnest, so to combat gamification we need to seed a distraction, a new trend that will dissipate this one. Media theory as consultancy counter-terrorism.
RC:A set of tactics like Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s “Oblique Strategies” seems a better tack for bringing gaming ideas into other areas of creative problem solving.
IB: Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies were originally meant to spur ideas for artists, but now we see similar idea cards being used in design and business too (the famous design firm IDEO released something similar a few years back). And given our Facebook-status and Twitterified media ecosystem, there seems to be a strong interest in aphoristic world views. And for that matter, Jesse Schell developed a series of cards around his theory of game design, which he calls “lenses” in a textbook called The Art of Game Design. So there are some precedents for bits-and-pieces idea generation around games.
But there’s a chicken-egg problem at work here too. In order to be susceptible to the surprising solutions of idea generation, you still have to be conversant enough in those ideas to give them life. For example, many of the phrases on the original Oblique Strategies cards are meant for musicians (the deck’s original creative context), and if you are not a musician, it’s hard to imagine understanding how to “mute and continue” or “left channel, right channel, centre channel” unless you were already well-versed in musical concepts. Admittedly, these are pretty basic ideas, basic enough that even a layperson can grasp them, but that’s only because the experience of recorded music is so universal. The basics are shared as a literacy. But that literacy had to come from somewhere, and until the literacy is developed for games, design tools for their increased application will remain mired in ignorance. To use games, we must know games, but to know them we must have used them.
This is why progress will be stochastic. In How to Do Things With Videogames I argue that games will have arrived through incremental examples altering, increasing, changing our ideas of what games can do. I didn’t use this language there, but it’s a kind of accretion, in which the medium grows bit by bit over time, eventually developing a larger and larger gravity. This process is both recursive and compounded, in the sense that individual successes feed back on our overall comfort and knowledge, becoming candidates for the kind of idea generation that Oblique Strategies exemplifies.
RC:Cow Clickeris like your hit song that won’t stop playing. People’s missing the point seemed to prove its point further. Even with its persistence, did you accomplish what you set out to do?
IB: Cow Clicker is so much bigger than me now, it’s not even possible to know if it did what I set out for it to do, or if that’s even a desirable outcome. There’s an Internet adage called Poe’s Law, that says that it’s often difficult or even impossible to tell the difference between extremism and its parody. It was originally coined in relation to discussions of evolution within Christian forums, but it’s been generalized since: a parody of something extreme can be mistaken for the real thing. And if a real thing sounds sufficiently extreme, it can be mistaken for parody.
The best example of this phenomenon these days is The Onion. There’s a whole website, literallyunbelievable.org, that collects reactions from readers who mistake Onion articles for the real deal, such as the fuming reactions from folks who took seriously headlines like “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex.” And then on the flip side, it’s become common to hear people say of undeniably real headlines, “Is this an Onion article?” The lines between reality and absurdity have blended.
So, it’s clear that Cow Clicker is far weirder than my original intentions. Rather than reflect more on whether or not I succeeded, I’ve started asking other questions. What happened? is certainly one of them, and I’m not sure I’ll ever wrap my head around it. Perhaps more interesting: What can I learn from it? or even What’s next for Cow Clicker. The latter question just terrifies me, because I’ve tried so hard to distance myself from the madness that running the game entailed. But it’s also short-sighted. After all, Cow Clicker was popular. It still is. People like clicking on cows! What can I do with that observation, what can I make that takes that lesson in a direction unburdened by the concerns of obsession and enframing? Is it even possible? In any case, I’m not giving anything away when I say that I don’t think I’m done with Cow Clicker yet. Or better, I don’t think Cow Clicker is done with me.
RC:Video games inform most of your work, including your new title, Alien Phenomenology. Tell us about your foray into object-oriented ontology and its link with video games.
IB: Object-oriented ontology seems like an obvious match for media studies. Any scholar or creator of media interested in the “thingness” of their objects of study has something to gain from OOO. In addition to (or even instead of) studies of political economy and reception, we can add studies of the material history and construction of computational devices. In other words, “materialism” need not retail only its Marxist sense, but also its realist one: not just political economy, but also just stuff.
I suspected there would be productive connections with object-oriented philosophy, and I remember waiting for Graham Harman’s Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court) to be published in 2002 so I could read it and apply it in my dissertation. I’d been following the emergence and growth of speculative realism with interest, but from afar.
Then two things happened. First, I started thinking about the idea of a “pragmatic” speculative realism, one that would embrace some of the first principles devised by the movements’ true philosophers, but that would put them to use in the service of specific objects, but looking beyond human experience. That thought was in my head since 2005 or so.
The second thing was the Atari. Several years ago, I learned how to program the 1977 Atari Video Computer System (VCS), the console that made home videogame play popular. Nick Montfort and I were working on a book on the platform (Racing the Beam; MIT Press, 2009), about the relationship between the hardware design of the Atari VCS and the creative practices that its designers and programmers invented in those early days of the videogame. The Atari featured a truly unique custom graphics and sound chip called the Television Interface Adapter (TIA). It made bizarre demands on game makers: instead of preparing a screen’s worth of television picture all at once, the programmer had to make changes to the data the TIA sent to the television in tandem with the scanline-by-scanline movement of the television’s electron beam. Programming the Atari feels more like plowing a field than like drawing a picture.
As I became more and more familiar with this strange system, I couldn’t help but feel enchanted by its parts as much as its output. Sure, the Atari was made by people in order to entertain other people, and in that sense it’s just a machine. But a machine and its components are also something more, something alive, almost. I found myself asking, what is it like to be an Atari, or a Television Interface Adapater, or a cathode ray tube television? The combination of that media-specific call to action and my broader interest in object-oriented ontology more generally catalyzed the project that became Alien Phenomenology, a book about using speculation to understand the experience of things, of what it’s like to be a thing.
RC:What’s coming up next for you?
IB: There’s a concept in sales, the sales funnel. It’s a structured approach to selling products and services that helps salespeople move opportunities from initial contact through closing by structuring that process in a number of elements. Those might include securing leads, validating leads, identifying needs, qualifying prospects, developing proposals, negotiating, closing the sale, of course, and then managing and retaining the client.
In sales, it’s always best to keep the contacts and leads elements at the top of the funnel very full, because those opportunities will winnow away through attrition, disinterest, loss, and other factors. You tend to have far fewer proposals and negotiations than you do contacts.
I often think about my upcoming creative work through a similar kind of structure. The “creative funnel,” we might call it. We can even use some of the same language: leads, opportunities, commitments, publishing, and support, or something like that. In any case, I tend to throw a whole lot of stuff at the wall (lead and opportunities), because I know that far fewer of those ideas will actually be realized.
In the leads and opportunities column, I’m currently working with my co-editor Nick Montfort to support a number of new books in the Platform Studies series, the series we began with Racing the Beam. Those include both popular and esoteric game consoles and microcomputers. As for my own writing, I’m trying to identify which of a number of books I’ll pursue next… I’ve got one planned on game criticism (a series of critical pieces on specific games), one on games and sports, one on Apple, a book on McLuhan and metaphysics (with Levi Byrant), the crazy kernel of a follow-up to Alien Phenomenology, and a book on play that I would call my attempt at a Malcolm Gladwell-style trade book. Who knows which if any of those will ever come to fruition.
As for commitments, Levi and I are finishing a collection called New Realisms and Materialisms, which we hope will paint a very broad portrait of the different ways of thinking that take those names, applied to a variety of domains, from philosophy to art, architecture to ecology. I’m also desperate to make some new games… I’ve got a small iOS puzzle game in the works, and a larger, weirder piece that should open at the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art in the fall of 2012 and see a general release shortly thereafter.
And I’m closing, if you will, on a big game infrastructure project, the Game-O-Matic authoring system. It was funded by the Knight Foundation two years ago as a tool to help journalists quickly and easily make games about current events without specialized game design or programming knowledge, and it’s just about to release into beta. The system is sort of magical: it takes a concept map (a diagram of nouns with verbs connecting them) and turns them into a playable game. Folks can sign up to use it for free.
I’m currently struggling to take seriously my own idea of “carpentry,” the practice of making things that do theory (described in Alien Phenomenology). I’m trying to expand my theoretical output beyond books, but I still love reading and writing, so I hope I’ll end up with an interesting menagerie of new little creatures over the next few years.
References:
Bogost, Ian. (2011). How to Do Things with Videogames. Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press.
Bogost, Ian. (2012). Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Pres.
Eno, Brian & Mills, Russell, with Rick Poyner. (1986). More Dark Than Shark. London: faber & faber.
Eno, Brian & Schmidt, Peter. (1975). Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas. London: Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt.
Harman, Graham. (2002). Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Open Court.
Johnson, Steven. (2011). The Innovator’s Cookbook: Essentials for Inventing What’s Next. New York: Riverhead.
McGonigal, Jane. (2011). Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin.
Montfort, Nick & Bogost, Ian. (2009). Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
It’s time once again for the annual Summer Reading List. This is my tenth year of compiling reading recommendations from fellow scholars, musicians, artists, and other bookish friends. This year that includes regulars like Howard Rheingold, Douglas Rushkoff, Dave Allen, Paul Saffo, Zizi Papacharissi, Steven Shaviro, Ashley Crawford, McKenzie Wark, Alex Burns, Peter Lunenfeld, Brian Tunney, and myself, as well as newcomers Nick Harkaway, Lance Strate, Mark Amerika, Tricia Wang, Dominic Pettman, Jussi Parikka, Eduardo Navas, David Preston, and Barry Brummett. There’s a wide-ranging, far-reaching pile of books below to be sure. My own list has doubled since I read through all of these.
Lily reads to Howard the donkey. (Photo by Cynthia Bayer)
I’m stoked on publishers I love and who have been very supportive being in the list multiple times. Among them are Red Lemonade, HiLo Books, Zer0 Books, The MIT Press, and The University of Minnesota Press. Many thanks to everyone who provides us reading material and everyone who contributed to the list — this time and for the past ten years. I’m just a guy who loves to read and the support is mad appreciated.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that as the shift to e-books gains further adoption, there are insights from both sides of the new digital divide in the following list. As always, the book links on this page will lead you to Powell’s Books, the best bookstore on the planet. Read on for various thoughts on many current and classic reads.
George Dyson Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (Pantheon, 2012): It is a little slow and overly detailed at the beginning but becomes extremely rich when it gets to Johnny von Neumann, a man who is as little known as he was important, and the end is a truly grand and perhaps frightening broad vision of the state and future of digital life.
I’ll be kicking off with Evening in the Palace of Reason (Harper Perennial, 2006), James Gaines’ extraordinary history of J S Bach’s encounters with Frederick the Great and what they mean. It’s the clash between two radically different perceptions of the world. The book is an amazing lens through which to understand a fragment of history and various threads which run through to the present day. Plus it’s crackingly dramatic.
Then there’s Ned Beauman’s Boxer Beetle: A Novel (Bloomsbury, 2011), which everyone raved about a while ago but I never got to. I’ve just been sent his new book, The Teleportation Accident, which is superb. Boxer Beetle sounds like something Borges might have written if he’d been a drunken Irish libertine. It is apparently a crazed romp featuring riots, sex, murder, Darwinism, and invented languages. Now you know as much as I do.
William Gibson‘s Distrust That Particular Flavor (Putnam Adult, 2011) has been burning a hole in my pocket for a month. I’ve dipped into it, and I already know it’s fascinating, but I haven’t really had time to sit down with it and get to know it. The early sections tell me that we have different ways of working and thinking about writing, but that somehow the differences are complementary rather than oppositional, and I just feel he broadens my mind.
I have an advanced reading copy of Tom Pollock’s The City’s Son (Flux, 2012). Tom has turned out something which may end up as the next His Dark Materials. It’s not always easy reading work by people you like, but having read the first couple of chapters I’m feeling pretty confident that he won’t let me down.
I have Murakami’s 1Q84 (Knopf, 2011) by my bed, and I’m dying to get to that, too, along with Carne Ross’s Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century (Blue Rider Press, 2012) — but I may blink and fall back on P. G. Wodehouse’s irresistible golfing stories in The Clicking of Cuthbert (CreateSpace, 2011) — at least for a while. The title story, in particular, says more about writers and how we live than any other single text I know. And it’s great fun. Everyone talks about Jeeves, but for my money it’s Emsworth, golf, and Ickenham. Call me cussed…
I don’t have a lot of reading time over the summer. Actually, less than I normally do. But I plan to read Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland, whatever draft of Cintra Wilson’s upcoming masterwork she’ll let me look at, Howard Rheingold’s new book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (MIT Press, 2012), and a radium-age sci- fi novel by Edward Shanks called The People of the Ruins that HiLo Books will be releasing this year, and that I hope to blurb. I’m also finally learning Python from a big O’Reilly book by Mark Lutz appropriately titled Learning Python that Mark Pesce bought me for my 50th birthday. Never too late to learn a new programming language!
I am reading Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) by John Protevi and The Affect Theory Reader (Duke University Press, 2010), by Melissa Gregg and Greg Seigory Seigworth (Eds.) among other books on affect. I am looking for new ways to explain how digital formations connect to the political — so hoping these will give me some new ideas.
I have spent the last few months teaching in Paris, so my summer reading list has a Gallic flavor this year. Francoise Mallet-Joris’ The Illusionist (Cleis Press, 2006) does not get the attention that her near-namesake Francoise Sagan gets for her sexually precocious bon-bons of the same era, but it seems to be more evocative, gender-blurring, and intriguing. Irina Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise (Vintage, 2007) renders the Nazi occupation of France with an absolutely singular and unsentimental voice (and the letters from her husband, included in the appendix, desperately soliciting the authorities for information of her whereabouts and condition are among the most wrenching things I’ve ever read). Also, I’m told Elizabeth Bowen’s A House in Paris (Anchor, 2002) is an over-looked classic of English modernist literature, and stands as one of the most subtle melodramas ever written; so that’s definitely on the list. Then, as a palate-cleansing chaser, I will read part three of Henri de Montherlant’s amusingly astringent (and let’s face it, misogynist) series of books collected as The Girls (Picador, 1987).
Finally, I hope to find the time to read John Crowley’s eccentrically fantastical tale Little, Big (William Morrow, 2006), since I’m intrigued by Harold Bloom’s blurb: “A neglected masterpiece. The closest achievement we have to the Alice stories of Lewis Carroll.” Seems like perfect upstate New York hammock reading . . . if I am lucky enough to find such a thing.
Every now and then I will read something because I need to read it. The book, journal or article will usually have some relation to my research which will then feed into my own writing and art projects. The vast majority of these sources come from writers who I have no personal connection to but who I am very grateful for having uncovered some data points that I can sample from and remix into my own creations.
But then there are other works that are made by artists, writers, theorists, and others whom I personally know, have met in the best of circumstances, or have simply met online while conducting my daily social media rituals.
It’s these latter works that I generally save for summer reading. This summer I have truly lucked out as there are quite a few titles that I eagerly anticipate digging into while simultaneously finishing my Museum of Glitch Aesthetics project. As you will soon see, even the titles of the books are enough to warrant a closer inspection of the writing therein:
I have just finished two books. Novels that have enthralled me like no others in quite some time. Both debuts from two gifted writers – one Irish one French. City of Bohaneby Kevin Barry (Greywolf Press, 2012) and HHhH from Laurent Binet (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012) are so startlingly original it seems unfair to compare them to other literary endeavors, yet in literature as in digital actually, the new new thing is rarely completely new.
Page 5, City of Bohane:
‘Did he have it coming, Jen?’
‘Don’t they always, Cusacks?’
Logan shaped his lips thinly in agreement.
‘The Cusacks have always been crooked, girl.’
Jenni was seventeen that year but wise beyond it. Careful she was, and a saucy little ticket in her lowriders and wedge heels, her streaked hair pineappled in a high bun. She took the butt of a stogie from the tit pocket of her white vinyl zip-up, and lit it.
‘Get enough on me plate now ‘cross the footbridge, Mr H.’
‘I know that.’
‘Cusacks gonna sulk up a welt o’ vengeance by ‘n’ by and if yer asking me, like? A rake o’ them tossers bullin’ down off the Rises is the las’ thing Smoketown need.’
‘Cusacks are always great for the old talk, Jenni.’
‘More ‘n talks what I gots a fear on, H. Is said they gots three flatblocks marked Cusacks ‘bove on the Rises this las’ while an’ that’s three flatblocks fulla headjobs with a grá on ‘em for rowin’, y’check me?’
‘All too well Jenni.’
That conversation takes place 50 years in the future in a city in the Southwest of Ireland. Things have not improved economically. Being Irish, Barry clearly has an ear for the cadence and lilt of Ireland’s working class phrasing and further deconstructs it as if everything now, here in the future is only spoken, where words are no longer pressed to paper. The palpable violence that ghost-shades the entire book reminds me of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962).
Page 1, A Clockwork Orange:
‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither.
And as I consider the language and grammar deconstructions of both those chapters, the upending of rules as if rules in literature ever mattered, I’m reminded of Russell Hoban’s classic post-apocalypse novel, Riddley Walker(Indiana University Press, 1998), a telling of history by the survivors that couldn’t be written – it was an oral history.
Hoban went beyond Burgess and Barry by taking the grammar deconstruction to its obvious place in a post-apocalyptic world, a place where there were no longer written words. Language then became free of grammatical constraint, where punctuation in oral history was not mandatory- it was personal. The speaker or narrator decided whether to pause or exclaim for effect, or not..
Page 1, Riddley Walker:
On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyert he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and ther we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, ‘Your tern now my tern later.’ The other spears gon in then and he wer dead and the steam coming up off him in the rain and we all yelt, ‘Offert!’
In all three of these books the central characters are “telling” not writing. The only narrative they’re left with is oral history.
In future the digital version of this will be known as Twitter.
In HHhH (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), Laurent Betin goes back into history to the period in Nazi Germany just prior to World War 2. It is, ostensibly, a historical novel, one that follows the rise through the ranks of the SS and SA, of the cruel Nazi, Rienhard Heydrich, who became too well known as the sinister figure “the Butcher of Prague.”
Yet is it? Heydrich did exist and he did commit atrocities across Europe during the war, but Betin is not satisfied with the genre. He wrestles openly in the book with his fear of memory polluting his attempts, as Brett Easton Ellis puts it, at “neutral, journalistic honesty.” Or as Wells Tower says “HHhH is an astonishing book – absorbing, moving, for the agony and acuity with which its author engages the problem of making literary art from unbearable historical fact.”
Here’s an example. Betin is describing how fighters had slipped out of Czechoslovakia and into France where they joined with the French army to battle the Germans:
…a few months later it will be practically a whole division and it will fight alongside the French army during the war. I could write quite a lot about the Czechs in the French army: the 11,000 soldiers, made up of 3,000 volunteers and 8,000 expatriate Czech conscripts, along with the brave pilots, trained at Chartres, who will shoot down or help to shoot down more than 130 enemy planes during the Battle of France.. But I’ve said that I don’t want to write a historical handbook. This story is personal. That’s why my visions sometimes get mixed up with known facts. It’s just how it is.
Actually, no: that’s not how it is. That would be too simple. Rereading one of the books that make up the foundation of my research – a collection of witness accounts assembled by a Czech historian, Miraslav Ivanov, under the title The Attack on Heydrich – I become aware to my horror, of the mistakes I’ve made concerning Gabcik.
Remember this a novel about a true story. We know from history much of the story. Yet does the book by Miraslav Ivanov mentioned above even exist? Does/did Ivanov?
As David Lodge points out “Binet has given a new dimension to the nonfiction novel by weaving his writerly anxieties about the genre into the narrative, but his story is no less compelling for that…”
It is truly a work of art. And I believe that now I’ve read it, it deserves its place on my bookshelf as a future classic, where someone else can pick it up and consider its heft, both literally and figuratively.
Something that an e-reader cannot provide.
Recently I bought two books by Hans Keilson, of which Comedy in a Minor Key: A Novel (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011) is the first that I have read. Keilson was born in Berlin in 1909 and during World War II he joined the Dutch resistance. It too is a short novel and is the story of a young Dutch couple who during the war take in and hide a Jew they know as Nico, then when he dies of pneumonia they must dispose of his body. It was written in 1947, so just after the war ended, and one gets the sense when reading it, that no it is semi-autobiographical.
As I note above that book was written in 1947 and recently I’ve been picking up books from the past rather than the present: Essays In Disguise (Knopf, 1990) by Wifrid Sheed (Read – amazing!), In the Next Galaxy (Cooper Canyon Press, 2004) by Ruth Stone (Poetry) (Reading now), and X20: A Novel of (not) Smoking (Harper Perennial, 1999) by Richard Beard (Up next).
On the aesthetic side of things, I’m continuing with a long process of research into LA’s cultural history, so I’m reading Beth Gates Warren’s Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011) and Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader (East of Borneo Books, 2012), edited and with an essay by Susan Morgan, a companion volume to a wonderful show Morgan organized at the Schindler House about the seminal architectural writer and feminist. Not about LA at all, but no less intriguing is Kodwo Eshun’s new volume for Afterall’s series of books on individual artworks. Eshun’s Dan Graham: Rock My Religion (MIT Press, 2012) should be a great mash-up.
To segue to fiction, I’ll be reading Thomas Malone’s Watergate: A Novel (Pantheon, 2012), because the ‘70s still fascinate, J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come (Liverlight, 2012), because even late Ballard is better than no Ballard, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (Orbit, 2012), because people who imagine interesting futures are more necessary than ever. Last year, I claimed I’d start and finish David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (Back Bay Books, 2006) over the summer. This year, I’ll just claim to finish it. But you never know…
This summer I am reading material that I started earlier in the year. I tend to read various books at the same time.
In terms of fiction, I am finishing Kicking, a novel by Leslie Dick (City Lights, 2001). I ran into a copy of this book quite a few years ago at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but never got around to it. Leslie Dick is a former teacher of mine from Cal Arts who often lectured on psychoanalysis. She clearly makes use of her knowledge of Freud in this novel for key moments. The novel takes place in the seventies between New York and London. It is a third person narrative of the coming of age of Connie, a middle class kid who finds herself in a love triangle that moves between the two cities. It is interesting to wonder how some of the content in the novel may be inspired by Dick’s personal experiences in the respective cities. It’s a good read, though at times it feels a bit too “bourgeois” in the struggle the hip kids are having with the burden to live with no clear direction, and indulging occasionally in drugs.
I am also finishing The Difference Engine (Bantam Spectra, 1991), a joint collaboration of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. I love used book shops, and one of my favorites is in San Diego’s 5th street and University, where they have a large collection of sci-fi. In one of my last stays in San Diego, I bought the book and did not get to read it until recently. I’m almost done with it. It’s really great to see how the styles of the two sci-fi writers blend into one. It’s a story of an alternate reality, a what-if scenario, in which the United States did not shape out to be as it is now: Texas is independent, The Confederate States have an association, and the territory on the North-West is unclaimed. In this scenario England became a major global power in part because Charles Babbage got to actually develop his difference engine, thus starting the informational revolution much earlier. It’s a bit tedious at times, but very good to read. Well researched too.
I am also reading Capote: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 1988) by Gerald Clarke. The film Capote is actually based on this biography. I decided to read it after I saw the film years ago. But first I read other works by Truman Capote, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Signet, 1959) and In Cold Blood (Random House, 1966). Reading Capote’s biography is fascinating. It’s actually written like a novel. Gerald Clarke is a very good researcher. Admittedly, this book finds itself at the crux of my research because in part I read literature and related creative material to develop my own art projects. I guess this book is my transition to work-related reading.
I have a long term project on Theodor Adorno called Minima Moralia Redux. For this reason I have been reading three of his major works in the last few months: Negative Dialectics (Continuum, 1981), Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer; Stanford Univeristy Press, 2007), and Aesthetic Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
I often cite Adorno in my own research, but have to admit that one must spend extreme in-depth time with his writing to realize that he arguably was the ultimate optimist about the quality of life. The books are not easy reads if one is impatient, but that is the point of his writing: One must slow down to understand things in life. Reading these books leads me to hope that one day academics who try to sound hip will not be so dismissive during conferences about Adorno’s misunderstood position on the possibilities of culture.
This year I started a new job as creative director at Timber Press. Among other things, this opportunity has lit the fire under a long-smoldering interest in electronic publishing: what it is, how it works, what the future holds. I’ve been spending a lot of time comparing e-book “design” and e-reader function, reading about new ways to present words and pictures, and trying to avoid saying “content” too often.
So far the thing I like the most is reading magazines and newspapers, particularly the New Yorker and the New York Times, on a tablet like the Kindle Fire or iPad. I’ve subscribed to the New Yorker for as long as I can remember, and my grandmother, who got me hooked on it, was a subscriber since the 1930s. And now, after a stretch of mostly collecting New Yorkers by my bedside rather than reading them, I have access to all of the magazines on a little device that I can mostly carry wherever I want to go. So I’m catching up, for the first time in a long time. And I love the way the magazine reads on these medium-sized screens. The apps for the Fire and the iPad are both good; the iPad is better, but both offer very good typography and, occasionally, wonderful extras, like excerpts from books or bonus photos.
I like how magazines are using tablet versions to expand the reach of their graphic design. For example, WIRED has some beautiful and striking animated photo illustrations in their recent issues, and they’ve taken full advantage of the tablet environment for things like gear reviews, where flipping through a series of reviews of headphones, for example, is an interesting and interactive experience. They’re moving past skeuomorphism, breaking free of the page, and making publishing work in the tablet space.
Then there are magazines like Katachi, which is as much a demonstration of the possibilities of digital-publishing as it is a magazine. While the copy and editing is somewhat vapid or amateurish, the design and construction is fun to play with, and makes me imagine incredibly cool digital versions of some of the craft, design, and how-to books that we produce at work.
It’ll be a long while before e-books get to be that cool, though. In the few months that I’ve had this position, I’ve watched as my fabulous ideas about e-publishing are deflated by simple facts: e-books need to be marketed with other e-books, not as apps or special publications (or they won’t sell); there’s virtually no money in selling them (yet), so we can’t put any money into their development, really; creating some kind of beautifully functioning app is way, way, way out of our budget; and yes, it really is like www.1994.com, where the reader gets to “choose the font” — and a sack of other things that, from this graying book designer’s perspective, are just wrong about e-books.
As I mentioned, I like the tablets because of their access to periodicals, which seems like one of the highest purposes of a little minicomputer. I like all the other stuff, like email and Google docs (which I’m using to write this), that I can also get on my phone, but that feel much more comfortable on a tablet.
But books? I borrow an e-book from the library, load it on one tablet or another, read a few pages, forget the tablet in the drawer at work, and end up reading the rest of the book on my phone. Until e-readers (and e-books) offer a design or user experience that justifies carrying around the little minicomputer, I have a hard time seeing an advantage over reading on my phone, since most of my reading is done in transit. The disadvantages of reading on one’s phone are compensated, for me, by how much access I have to the device. I can pull it out on a crowded bus without so much as elbowing my neighbor. I can read in the bathroom, at the coffee shop, while walking down the street (but not crossing! i swear!), even while waiting for coffee or, um, whatever else one waits for.
Books I’ve read recently and enjoyed:
Emily St. John Mandel The Lola Quartet: A Novel (Unbridled Books, 2012): Read mostly on the beach, in actual book form!
Maile Meloy, everything she’s written — I got on a Meloy kick earlier this year. Her Young Adult novel The Apothecary (Putnam Juvenile, 2011) was especially enjoyable, as was her book of short stories, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It (Riverhead, 2010).
Some books I’m looking forward to reading this summer, in whatever form ends up being the most convenient or pleasant:
This is a list of what I am reading, what I want to read and what I hope to read — these three do not always meet, but one of the best things about summer (and other non-teaching time) is that one can plan. Planning is part of the fun.
Bernhard Siegert Passage des Digitalen (Brinkman U. Bose, 2003): Siegert is perhaps the most interesting of the current German media theorists, and one of the key people behind the concept of “cultural technique.” Passage des Digitalen is a massive work of cultural history, media theory and insight into a sort of a media archaeology of digital culture. This is approached through its “sign practices”; the visual, textual, spatial and design arrangements which articulate the longer history of media as cultural technique. Siegert has fascination with such non-obvious “media” objects, or design, as water/the ocean (relates also to information theory). He is one of the “culprits” in the past 20-30 years of media theory expanding to the fields of historians, linguists and other humanities – much before talk of “digital humanities” tried to grab the field. Ok, I am cheating a bit as I just finished reading this one, but I had to include it as it deserves an immediate reread!
A lot of the stuff on my to be read list are funnily enough about diagrams, lines and design – but part of media and cultural theory. A good example is the just published Gary Genosko book Remodelling Communication (University of Toronto Press, 2012) that I am reading now. Besides being an expert on Guattari, Genosko is also a communication and media philosopher and in this book his background as a meticulous and focused writer on communications theory comes clearest. He is able to find refreshing ideas from classical theories of communication such as Shannon and Weaver, as well as develop his Guattarian-influenced ideas of transmission as transformation. As such, there is a curious link to Siegert’s approach; Genosko’s focus on models of communication could be seen to emphasize this visual, diagrammatic side to how we think the most abstract events of communication in the age of technical media. Of course, Genosko is not so much a German media theorist than someone who is keen to elaborate the mixed semiotics (Guattari) of network communications environments. Hence, no wonder that he brings back old things, like Jakobson’s phatic aspect of communications, but in a fresh way.
Besides German media theory, Guattarian influenced diagrammatics, I will definitely try to read Tim Ingold’s Lines (Routledge, 2007) – finally. In addition, I never have enough time to focus on fiction, but the one that I am going to pick up any day now is Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House (Pyr, 2011). What pushed me to it was a tip from Nick Dyer-Witheford. Now, I cannot resist anymore. I’ve been more and more interested in Turkey and Istanbul since my first visit there last November. An articulation of European politics through the nanolevel as significant agent; cannot go wrong with that!
For my dose of network theory, I will grab Geert Lovink’s new book Networks Without a Cause (Polity, 2012) and in a universe where I would have endless time (one has to try to write as well, not just read!), I would read Katherine Hayles’ new book How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (University of Chicago Press, 2012). Although, why write so much when people have written already such books that definitely need to be read?
Besides planning possibles, I want to flag what is left out (because they will be published only after summer!): I wish I could add Ken Wark, Rosi Braidotti and Alex Galloway’s to the list, but that is post-summer reading list and another story….
This will be my first summer where I am not doing fieldwork in China, Mexico or some where in the US. So I’ll be soaking up sun in Brooklyn and feeding my heart lots of brain food in the form of a wonderful summer reading list. I haven’t read any books over one year because I’ve been in fieldwork, so there are many books that I want to read. But I managed to narrow down my list into two themes: 1.) ethnographic monographs written by ethnographers and 2.) creative non-fiction written by journalists & writers.
I’ve chosen several ethnographic monographs about how people learn capitalism. Coming from a sociology department, I’ve been heavily trained in Marxist theory. Marxism helps me understand how labor is a commodity and how people become alienated from their own work. But Marxism doesn’t help me understand why consumers want commodities, how financial markets work, and why capitalism continuously mutates. I’ve found three monographs that addresses the questions that Marxist theory doesn’t address.
Douglas E. Foley’s Learning Capitalist Culture: Deep in the Heart of Tejas (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), is a 36-year ethnographic study on how a Mexican-American community negotiates racial tensions with the dominant white population. Foley gives a biting account of how the very attempt for Mexcian youth to learn traditional American values can often reproduce class inequalities and exacerbate racial tensions. I’m really excited to read Foley’s response to Paul Willis’s argument about class reproduction in his seminal book, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Columbia University Press, 1981). I chose Foley’s book because his work is super relevant and will help me process what I’m watching in China – the arrival of rural migrants in cities and their consumption of games, clothes ,and entertainment in malls and online, often times mimicking elites but other times inventing new rituals. Foley’s book also brings up questions around the dominance of cultural markers that Pierre Bourideu brought up in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1987).
Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Duke University Press, 2009), is an insider’s ethnographic account of the banking world on Wall Street. Her research reveals that macro market volatility is an ingrained part of corporate culture. Ho’s research provides so much insight into how banker’s ideas about their own self-worth reproduce our current financial system. In their world, volatility and liquidity are part and parcel to an “efficient” market and they believe in this so much that they hold themselves to the same standard. The everyday experience of job insecurity is normalized and valorized under the belief that only the best workers survive. I am quite obsessed with learning about financial history because I don’t think I can understand our world and China without a strong grasp of the ascent of financial capitalism. I am fascinated by why so many middle-class in China invest in the stock market and how they define “transparency.” And for investors outside of China, the question at the end of day is, how do I make money in a market with such little transparency. It’s so interesting to hear them ask this question when I think the US banking system is incredibly un-transparent. I want to understand how bankers define transparency in a profit-making context.
Emil A. Royrvik’s The Allure of Capitalism: An Ethnography of Management and the Global Economy in Crisis, is a view on our financial world from an organizational perspective. Royrvik’s several years of experience inside a transnational corporation reveals how managers create techniques to deal with financial crises, investments, and knowledge workers. I am excited to read Royrvik’s work because he took the time to document and understand modern corporate culture without shying away from political economy. I’m seeing this book as the academic version of The Office. I’ve been spending a lot of time with CEOs and managers in China so this book is super relevant to my fieldwork.
I am already anticipating that these three ethnographies of capitalism are going to be quite complex and bring up a lot of questions, so I’m going to have to do some background research on finance. I’m going to start with some financial history from David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (Melville House, 2011), and Niall Ferguson The Ascent of Money: A Financial history of the World (Penguin, 2009). I’ve already been reading a condensed version of Carroll Quiqley’s Tragedy and Hope (GSG and Associates, 1975), and all I can say is that it’s absolutely mind-blowing. I’m not sure if I will have time for Jackson Lear’s Something for Nothing: Luck in America (Penguin, 2004), but I’ve been told that this book is a must read for understanding America’s culture of risk. Several people have recommended John Cassidy’s How Markets Fail: The Logic of Market Calamities (Picador, 2010) as a good primer on the economy. Lastly, I’ve already found several blogs that are provide great insight into the world of banking. Joris Luyendijk’s Banking Blog at The Guardian is a anthropological dive into the world of finance. Michael Lewis’s An Investment Banker’s Take on Life is the banking world from a banker. I like Felix Salmon’s finance blog at Reuters because he writes in an accessible way and provides a snapshot of what news most investors are reading everyday.
While ethnographers are known for capturing great stories, we aren’t necessarily known for storytelling. Why is that? Just as much as ethnography is an art in itself. so is storytelling. And like any other form of art, one can be trained into an art form and/or have some innate skills.
Ethnographers aren’t taught the methods of storytelling, such as tone, narrative arc, voice, and character development. We are taught the methods of ethnography. Depending on your academic discipline, ethnographers learn to report observations with as little interference from theory as possible or to marry observations to theories. I love ethnographies of both kinds, but sometimes they can be a bit dry.
Thought, it’s a bit unfair to except for ethnographers to become “writers.” Ethnographers have to dedicate so much time to explaining how they got their data and then contextualize it all within research questions, sampling biases, outliers, data interference, methodological decisions, theoretical arguments, and reflections. After addressing all these factors, the creative voice can be dampened. I’ve realized over the last few years that I’m not so sure I want to always write like an academic ethnographer. I don’t find writing ethnography for an academic audience to be very liberating or creative. And that’s ok. I see the value in it and I still want to write up my ethnographic fieldwork, but journal articles don’t accomplish what I believe is one of ethnography’s public projects — to engage a wide audience in universes that they may not have had a chance to witness — writers and journalists do a really good job at doing this. So my second list is comprised of non-fictional books from writers and journalists. (And there must be ethnographers who are great storytellers. Do you know of any? If so, please suggest!)
Elisabeth Pisani wrote about her first hand experience with HIV/AIDS works in The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS (W. W. Norton & Company, 2009). I want to understand how she addressed a serious topic by weaving in her own voice and her main characters, who were all involved in her fieldwork.
I’m re-reading Philip P. Pan’s Out of Mao’s Shadows: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (Simon & Schuster, 2009) because it’s so well-written, insightful, and relevant. He tells us about China told through the lens of several primary characters, which highly compliments of a character driven ethnographic work (the kind that I’ve been doing).
Philip P. Pan also suggested that I read Ted Conover’s Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders With America’s Illegal Migrants (Vintage, 1987). I’m super excited to read this because I research Mexican migration, so it’ll be fascinating to read a journalist’s recounting of migration after all these years of reading academic analysis of migration.
I’m re-reading Anand Giridharadas’s India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2012) and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (Penguin, 2003). Giridharadas’s and Chatwin’s book were the only books that I read cover to cover when I was in fieldwork last year. I want to re-read them again to analyze their storytelling techniques. Giridharadas splits his chapters up by themes, like Ambition and Love, and then in each chapter his characters appear, disappear, and re-appear. Chatwin writes in 3-5 pages sections and his sparse style brings his subject of interest to life – a geographic region that is known more for being cold than a goldmine of myths.
I have to sneak in one more book that doesn’t fit on my list at all! My colleague, Jenna Burrell, who I blog with on Ethnography Matters, has just published Invisible Users: Acting With TechnologyYouth in the Internet cafe of Ghana (MIT Press, 2012). There unfortunately is a shortage of ethnographic monographs, much less any that address technology use and Africa, so this is a very important contribution to the literature. I can’t wait to dive into this book over the summer.
And since I’m already sneaking a book in, let me also tell you about three other books. Whenever I read, I always have Manuel de Landa‘s One Thousand Years of Non-Linear History (Zone Books, 2000) within reach. de Landa’s book is my theory bible and every time I feel lost or need inspiration, I return to his book.
I often dream of what I read, so I have to douse myself with plenty of gossip magazines and something more spiritual to prepare myself for non-terrorizing dreams. I’m going to add Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary (faber & faber, 1996) to my stack of gossip magazines that I need to catch up on.
And lastly, I love reading in other languages. I particularly love the way Spanish captures feelings — everything just feels softer, deeper, and meltier. I always return to Eduardo Galeano’s El Libro de Los Abrazos (English: Book of Embraces; W. W. Norton & Company, 1992) for inspiration, love, and peace. Galeano abandoned the long and linear historical essays for 3 to 20 lines of poetry to tell the stories of colonialism and everyday life in South America. His style of writing reminds us that writing can be in any shape.
Daniel Suarez Kill Decision (Dutton, 2012): It releases July 19th (I just read the galleys). It is an edge-of-one’s-chair, high-tech thriller that orbits around autonomous weaponized drones. Scarily, real, and plausible. Suarez is the author of New York Times bestsellers Daemon (Signet, 2009) and Freedom™ (Signet, 2011).
Samuel R. Delany Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (Magnus Books, 2012): Delany’s latest novel — his longest ever (over 800 pages) — skirts the boundaries between pornography, science fiction, and mainstream literary fiction. The book contains lots of explicit gay sex, but it also includes poignant meditations on memory and mortality. Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders tracks the life of its protagonist, Eric Jeffers, from the age of 16 (in the present) right through until he is in his 1990s (in the late 21st century — this is what makes the book science fiction). Nothing dramatic happens in Eric’s life, even as he lives through a period of immense social and technological change. But that is precisely the point: Delany is interested in the textures of lived experience, even at its most humble. He offers us a history of human bodies, and their pleasures and pains. He also offers us a vision of community, as a widening circle of friendships and affiliations, cemented with acts of generosity and kindness. The novel’s sexual extravagance will shock some readers, while rocking the world of others. But in any case, the book offers us a humane vision of personal fulfillment and social justice, in spite of the terrors that surround us today.
Ian Bogost Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (University of Minnesota Press, 2011): Ian Bogost is best known as a designer, historian, and theoretician of computer games. But in this book, he discusses a wide range of “weird objects,” in order to answer the question of “what it’s like to be a thing.” Bogost encourages us to step beyond our anthropocentrism, and instead seek to comprehend other points of view: not only the points of view of animals, or other living things, but of inanimate objects as well. We do not live in a unified world, or in one that is organized around our own needs and interests; rather, we live amidst a cacaphonous multiplicity of things and processes — or what Bogost calls “unit operations” — each of which has its own features and its own set of possibilities. Bogost approaches this multifarious world as a philosopher, seeking to decipher the inner logic that makes things tick; but also as an engineer, not afraid to get his hands dirty as he explores, and dismantles, the strange contours and inner workings of nonhuman entities.
Adam Kotsko Why We Love Sociopaths (Zer0 Books, 2012): This short book offers us “a guide to late capitalist television.” Adam Kotsko considers why and how so many of the most compelling characters in television of the past decade (from Cartman to Dan Draper to Jack Bauer to Dexter) are sociopaths: figures who seem both to lack an understanding of social norms (they are devoid of human sympathy and any sense of guilt) and yet to be able to manipulate those norms masterfully for their own benefit. These figures seem to encapsulate everything that is horrible about social life in America today; and yet they are also figures of our own sympathetic identification, as if they offered the hope of overcoming the very ills of which they are the symptoms. Kotsko is a superb cultural critic, who deftly analyzes contemporary popular culture, with a keen eye toward his own (and our own) implication within the emotional currents that he describes.
Carl Freedman The Age of Nixon: A Study in Cultural Power (Zer0 Books, 2012): A definitive analysis of the strangely twisted life, personality, and political policies of our 37th President, Richard Milhous Nixon; together with some cogent discussion of why Nixon’s career is still (unfortunately) relevant to us today, 38 years after he toppled from power, and 18 years after his death.
Kieron Gillen Journey into Mystery (Marvel, trade paperbacks & ongoing comics series): The strangest and most interesting series in either the Marvel or the DC universes at the moment has to be Kieron Gillen’s take on the adventures and entanglements of Kid Loki.
Matt Fraction Casanova 3: Avarita (Marvel, 2012): Matt Fraction’s ongoing creator-owned comics series Casanova is a heady metafictional and pulp-fictional brew. I’ve recommended previous volumes in earlier summer reading lists, in one of which I wrote: “Imagine a 1960s spy-movie hero (James Bond, Matt Helm, Derek Flint) as reimagined by some crazed combination of Jorge Luis Borges, Groucho Marx, and Quentin Tarantino.” The same holds for the all-new volume 3, with individual issues on sale now, and available as a graphic novel in late July.
Sergio De La Pava A Naked Singularity: A Novel (University of Chicago Press, 2012): Comparisons to Wallace’s Infinite Jest (Back Bay Books, 2006) are inevitable. At 689 pages it is a sprawling maelstrom of ideas that bullets along with a narrative that has more in common with a Neal Stephenson epic such as Cryptonomicon(Goldmann, 2003). Like Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (Scribner, 1998), De La Pava’s tale has a sport motif. But Wallace’s tennis fixation, and DeLillo’s powerful baseball setting, pale beside De La Pava’s orgasmic boxing tableaux.
On the surface A Naked Singularity could be described as a legal thriller, but one injected with musings about the nature of Television (always capitalized), recent discoveries in physics and pure courtroom slapstick that recalls Pynchon at his best (and a truly laugh out loud moment of scatological grotesqurie). There are musings on the Human Genome Project and a moment of correspondence between our protagonist, the long suffering Casi, and a death row inmate that is as moving as Wallace at his best. There’s enough paranoia for one to be reminded of a Philip K. Dick story and enough surrealism to keep a David Lynch fan content. It is both preposterous and profound, a philosophical thriller if you will set in a very gritty and very cold New York City haunted by a Golem-like creature that is depicted as a black void which could only be defeated by a naked singularity.
Ben Marcus’ stunning fourth book, The Flame Alphabet (Knopf, 2012). This is a tome that stuns at every turn, not the least because, for Marcus fans, it takes a twist into almost mainstream narrative. To be sure the obsessions remain intact; language, flesh, rubber, hair, wire, but unlike the disturbingly fractured nature of his previous works, Marcus holds the reins on an equally disturbing linear narrative.
It is intriguing how strongly family (especially children) feature in the recent wave of sub-apocalyptic North American fiction. Steve Erickson’s Our Ecstatic Days (Simon & Schuster, 2005), Jack O’Connell’s The Resurrectionist (Algonquin Books, 2008), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (Vintage, 2007), and Blake Butler’s There is No Year (Harper Perennial, 2011) all feature the shattered remnants of family and, in each, notions of communication are central. The real apocalypse is the one of loss. Not the loss of luxury items and creature comforts but the loss of true communication. Of Language itself.
If there is a resonating tonality to The Flame Alphabet it is the dangerously dulcet tones of the Surrealist master, J.G. Ballard who, like Marcus, masterfully draws one into a truly psychologically hallucinogenic world.
There are dark hints at the Holocaust, tickles of pop culture (the children render their parents into something very much like zombies after “eating” their brains with language). And there are border-line scholarly forays into the history of Hermeneutics. Marcus hasn’t lost his experimentalist edge so much as mutated it, morphed it into something slightly more digestible. But I emphasize slightly; one should adorn a mouth guard and sound-deadening gear before opening this book. And you should read this book in silence, alone. Very alone.
Brian Evenson Immobility (Tor Books, 2012): It’s not hard to imagine Evenson’s latest as a sequel to McCarthy’s The Road set several decades further into the future. The landscape is certainly as blasted, the noxious dust is almost as pervasive. Evenson isn’t as subtle as McCarthy; it is fairly apparent that this was nuclear Armageddon – the flashing light and the bizarre mutations. This is not Evenson’s first foray into the wasteland – in his 2002 Dark Property (Thunder’s Mouth) a woman carries a dying baby across a desert waste, in a devastatingly bleak book that pre-dates The Road by five years.
Evenson shares with Ben Marcus a fascination for both language and the hazards of structured belief systems. Both question the delusions of structured religiosity and they both question notions of self-perception. Immobility and The Flame Alphabet prove that a dark canvas can still illuminate.
Colson Whitehead Zone One: A Novel (Doubleday, 2011): Whitehead is by no means a genre writer. He is what is known as an award-winning “literary” writer with five previous books under his belt, thus a foray into the Zombie zone came as a surprise for many.
But Zone One is far more than just another zombie thriller. The book carries a burden of nostalgia for an older New York City, a far more multi-textured habitat, a place where “the city itself was as bewitched by the past as the little creatures who skittered on its back. The city refused to let them go.” This is not just a post-9/11 response (as Don DeLillo’s Falling Man clearly is), however the residents do suffer from PASD: “Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder.” It is just as much a knee-jerk reaction to a city embroiled in bureaucracy and a Kafkian labyrinth of miniscule rules, a city that once prided itself on bridled anarchy and smoke-filled bars with dim lights and solid camaraderie. (Ironically, given the life expectancy in Zone One, one of characters chain smokes pilfered cigarettes while being harangued about the habits’ dangers by another.) In what is no doubt a nod to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, what are left of the major corporations ‘sponsor’ the war effort. Looting regulations protect only the corporate brands that actively sponsor the fledgling government’s tactics.
It is, poignantly, the very minions of bureaucracy that suffer the worst fate, those who fill out pointless forms and photocopy meaningless documents ad nauseum. In Whitehead’s world there are different zombies – he never uses the term ‘zombie’ specifically, they are ‘the dead,’ ‘stragglers’ or ‘skels’ – short for skeletons. What Whitehead makes abundantly and chillingly clear is that the zombies are already here, toiling mindlessly in an office near you.
A fair percentage of the rest of the year shall be consumed by wallowing in Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), which, thus far, appears to be as mind-bendingly fabulous as I had hoped it would be.
I’m looking forward to reading Howard Rheingold’s latest book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (MIT Press, 2012). Howard’s books combine accessibility with media ecological insight, and in this book, Howard brings a practical, media literacy oriented approach to the great concern of finding balance among the services and disservices of new media.
I’ve been hearing really good things about Terrence Deacon’s recent work, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (W. W. Norton, 2011), as it relates contemporary thinking in systems theory (e.g., complexity, autopoiesis) to the question of consciousness, so I just recently added it to my list.
As a media ecology scholar, Elena Lamberti’s new contribution to McLuhan Studies, Marshall McLuhan’s Mosaic: Probing the Literary Origins of Media Studies (University of Toronto Press, 2012), is a must read, and her discussion of McLuhan’s relationship to Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis speaks very much to the question of methodology in our field. Christine M. Tracy’s The Newsphere (Peter Lang, 2012), which follows up on some of Neil Postman’s insights about news in the television age, is also on my list.
Speaking of Postman, I will be giving Amusing Ourselves to Death (Penguin, 1985) a close rereading for a new book project I’m working on, and along with it I’ll be rereading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1932) and Brave New World Revisited (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1952), and his later novel, Ape and Essence (Dee, 1948), another dystopian vision set in the aftermath of global warfare and destruction.
One book I’ve been meaning to get around to reading is The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath by Joe Lieberman and David Klinghoffer (Howard, 2011). I’m not sure if our 24/7/365.25 culture is quite ready to reverse its accelerated pace or retrieve the concept of the day of rest, but the Technology Shabbat movement is a response to our overheated media environment, and I’m interested in the topic as a media ecological practice, as well as a spiritual one.
Speaking of spirituality, the new book by Rabbi Barry L. Schwartz, Judaism’s Great Debates: Timeless Controversies from Abraham to Herzl (Jewish Publication Society, 2012) is an absolute must for anyone interested in moral theology or a dialogical approach to religious experience, and it is near the top of my stack of books.
Also in my summer plans are The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Anchor, 1997), The Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1981), as well as an odd little item I picked up in Brier Rose Books in Teaneck, NJ (one of the few remaining used bookstores in the area), Poem Outlines by Sidney Lanier (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), and another volume I purchased there, Thomas Stanley’s translation of the ancient Greek lyric poet, Anacreon (Merrill & Baker, 1899). And I am anxious to read the next trade paperback collection of Robert Kirkman’sThe Walking Dead, Vol. 16: A Larger World (Image Comics, 2012).
Aaron C. Brown Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street (John Wiley & Sons, 2012). Brown is risk manager at AQR Capital Management and a high-profile rocket scientist. Red-Blooded Risk introduced me to risk ignition: using “an optimal amount of risk” for “exponentially growing success” (p. 35). I had encountered this idea in the early trading careers of Bruce Kovner and Paul Tudor Jones II in the currency markets, and in the film Limitless: Brown provides a conceptual framework to understand their success. Brown has different views on the Dutch Tulipmania bubble; the Kelly Criterion; Harry Markowitz’s Modern Portfolio Theory, and Value at Risk. For how to use these insights, also read Dylan Evans’ Risk Intelligence: How to Live With Uncertainty (The Free Press, 2012). Brown’s previous book The Poker Face of Wall Street (John Wiley & Sons, 2006) persuasively argues that Wall Street’s roots lie in gambling and speculation.
Michael T. Klare The Race For What’s Left: The Global Scramble For the World’s Last Resources (Metropolitan Books, 2012). Klare is director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies at Amherst’s Hampshire College. Race focuses on the collision of resources scarcity, investment, international security, and geopolitical crises and flashpoints. Klare brings clear analysis to the Arctic, deep-offshore oil and gas drilling, mining, rare earths, hydrocarbons, and food production. As with Klare’s earlier books, Race is a primer to understand the volatility in global commodities markets, and the recent speculative bubble in rare earths.
John Lewis Gaddis George F. Kennan: An American Life (The Penguin Press, 2011). Kennan (1904-2005) was a United States diplomat, grand strategist and public intellectual credited with formulating the Cold War strategy of containment against the Soviet Union. The Yale historian Gaddis spent almost 30 years researching and 5 years writing this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography. The sections on Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ (1946), ‘X’ article (1947), and stint at the US State Department (1947-50) are insightful about how advisers can influence policymakers, how deep knowledge and experience can shape leaders, and the challenges of navigating organizational politics. Kennan emerges as a complex, ambivalent figure who became a realist critic of US foreign policy and an award-winning diplomatic historian. Gaddis’s in-depth research takes the reader deep into Kennan’s mind. For a contrasting view, check out Marc Trachtenberg’s The Cold War and After: History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012).
John Gerring Social Science Methodology: A Unified Framework(second edition, Cambridge University Press, 2012). Gerring is a professor of political science at Boston University. A major insight of undertaking a political science PhD is how methodology is central to social sciences research. Gerring provides an integrative approach to conceptualizing research problems; descriptive arguments and measurements; causation; and pluralistic, inclusive ways to use different methodological traditions. Familiarity with research design and methods will give you the frameworks and tools to critically evaluate and synthesize information.
Jim Hopkinson Salary Tutor: Learn The Negotiation Secrets No One Ever Taught You (Business Plus, 2011). I saw Hopkinson’s presentation on salary negotiations at SXSW Interactive in March 2012. “Rock your negotiation!” he scrawled at the book signing afterwards. This step-by-step guide focuses on how to do ‘due diligence’ on a new role; how to thwart the ‘evil HR lady’; and handling interviews, job offers, and raises. This accessible primer is an introduction to tournament theory: how rank-order differences can shape individual contract and salary negotiations. Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Milles’ Your Career Game: How Game Theory Can Help You Achieve Your Professional Goals (Stanford University Press, 2010) is a good follow-up read as is Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (Allen Lane, 2011). Hopkinson’s work can also be modeled using real options theory: Jonathan Mun’s Real Options Analysis: Tools and Techniques for Valuing Strategic Investments and Decisions (second edition, John Wiley & Sons, 2006) is a good methodological guide.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful (Riverhead, 2012): A year ago, for this very same list, I was knee deep in Paul Theroux travelogues beneath the depths of the Hudson River en route from Jersey City to Manhattan and back. With real books in my backpack, somewhere between half-eaten Clif Bars and that unopened can of Red Bull that lingers as a reminder that I aspire to be energetic but remain energy-less at the end of a typical day.
Years can be dynamic.
The Red Bull is gone (exchanged at a corner store in Jersey City for a bottle of seltzer), and suddenly I’m driving a car down Century Boulevard next to Los Angeles International Airport, listening to NPR because you can’t read and drive legally, even in Los Angeles. Last week just happened to be their own version of a Summer Reading List, and I listened contently, glad that for once, it didn’t involve politics.
A bookstore, I can’t remember whom, mentioned A Sense of Direction in passing. I heard the words “pilgrimage” and “writer” and that was enough for me to take a mental note of the book and download it later on the weird contraption that advertises diapers and lets me read books without going to a book store or library.
I am only a chapter or so into the pilgrimage. The dedicated pilgrimage has just started for that matter. But I’m taken by Lewis-Kraus’ sense of existential malaise and his attempts to come to terms with the fact that he should be writing, and living, but can’t get past the lives he’s started thus far.
He begins in San Francisco, blissfully living on the cheap with his engineer younger brother, after a relationship has crumbled. This works, for a time, but both decide to move on. (Gideon to Berlin, Micah to Shanghai.) While in Berlin, the author falls in with a crowd that does what Berlin asks of them: live for cheap, enjoy the now, smoke cigarettes and attend art openings.
Lewis-Kraus does all this and more, but never rises above the situation to cast judgment on his friends for simply being in Berlin. He sleeps with women in relationships, doesn’t read the books he’s committed to reading and debates the position of Jews in modern Germany. He casts doubt on himself, wonders what and where he “should” be going, and escapes, for a weekend, to Estonia.
There, he commits to a pilgrimage with a friend across the northern tip of Spain. And that is as far as I’ve gotten so far. But I’ve been hooked the past few hours on it. Lewis-Kraus’ writing is self-deprecating without reaching for a laugh button. He is honestly lost, searching for something to give purpose to his life, and openly inviting the reader on a journey that questions the past, embraces the idiosyncrasies of the present and wonders how to make sense of the future.
Nick Harkaway Angelmaker: A Novel (Knopf, 2012) and The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World (John Murray, 2012): Finally decided to order these after seeing them mentioned by people I respect a lot (e.g., Steven Shaviro, Charles Yu, William Gibson, et al.). The former is a surrealist noir novel like no other. The latter is an exploration of our device-riddled times (à la Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital), and may very well outmode my new book. Angelmaker is heady and heavy, but Harkaway’s prose is giddy in its grasp (see his recommendations above). This, Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Vintage, 2011), and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (Night Shade, 2010) are my selection of current-ish novels.
Matthew Battles The Sovereignties of Invention (Red Lemonade, 2012): These short stories baffle and bewilder even as they entice and engross. Matthew Battles is able to achieve in just a few pages what most writers can’t do in a whole book. Where some build machines, Battles sharpens blades. This tiny tome and its tiny tales betray his position as a Harvard librarian: His subject matter(s) and mastery thereof are seemingly limitless.
George Dyson Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (Pantheon, 2012): I ordered this on Howard Rheingold’s recommendation (see above). It’s as dense as he says it is, but it also rewards the patient read. It’s obvious early on that Dyson set out for this to be the definitive history of the birth of the digital.
I’m also trying to get a decent grip on the decided looseness of the varieties of speculative realism by reading Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects (Open Humanities Press, 2011). I also added several of Graham Harman‘s books to my Kindle, which I typically find more useful for novels, and Paul J. Ennis’s Post-Continental Voices: Selected Interviews (Zer0 Books, 2010) provides an excellent introduction to this field of fields.
As ever, I’m also reading and re-reading several older books. Among them are,
Bettina Knapp Machine, Metaphor, and the Writer: A Jungian View (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989): I’ve been dragging this book around for years since finding it at A Capella Books in Atlanta. I picked it up not only because it has “metaphor” in the title but also because the first chapter is about Alfred Jarry. I’ve read most of it once and a lot of it several times. Knapp’s approach is unique and generative, I revisit it regularly, and am planning to do so again in the coming weeks.
Anthony Wilden System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange (Tavistock, 1972): Josh Gunn recommended System and Structure to me during my comprehensive exams defense, and I wish I’d come across it sooner. Wilden’s bird’s-eye approach makes this a meta-book that ties all sorts of areas together, from systems theory and semiotics to psychoanalysis and structuralism. To say that Wilden’s work has been slept-on is a gross understatement.
Victor Turner Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Cornell University Press, 1974): Again with the metaphors… I’ve found my recent research drifting across the line into anthropology, and Victor Turner has become one of my favorites. His extensive ethnographic studies of ritual and rites of passage are illuminating and provide homologies galore. This and his The Ritual Process (Aldine de Gruyter, 1969), as well as Arnold van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage (University of Chicago Press, 1960) are my current sources. The same can be said for Mary Douglas, whose work I’ve also been devouring, especially Purity and Danger (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966) and Risk and Culture with Aaron Wildavsky (University of California Press, 1982). It’s good to cross the lines sometimes.
What are you reading this summer? Let us know 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]:
vDHET3aCI2U
“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.
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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.
SXSW can always be considered an extreme example of the platitude “when it rains, it pours,” but this year, it was a bit too literal. SXSW Interactive weekend was a rainy, sloppy affair like I haven’t seen in my few years in Austin. Someone — nay many ones — downtown likely made a killing on rain boots and umbrellas because they were everywhere, and I know nobody packed those for the trip. Once Interactive was over and the guard changed for Music, the rain had subsided and the sun shone again. The outdoor shows that would have been a drenched disaster went on without weather-induced incident.
I started off my own, soggy SXSW Interactive with a quiet breakfast with Howard Rheingold. He was here to talk about his new book, Net Smart (MIT Press, 2012), and it was his first time at SXSW since he was the keynote speaker for Interactive ten years ago. His book Smart Mobs (Basic Books, 2002) was just out then. Lots has changed around the conference since, but the ideas in that book were prescient (as proven by its echoes in Amber Case’s SXSWi keynote this year). Net Smart will definitely send out the same temporal ripples. Other than books, Howard and I talked about everything from the weather and breakfast to life and careers. It was so nice to sit down with one of my mentors for a face-to-face interaction after over ten years of virtual ones.
Next on the list of rain-limited events was a trip to Red 7 to see my friends Jake Flores, Ryan Cownie, Seth Cockfield, Brook Van Poppelen, Lucas Molandes, Nick Mullen, Blake Midgette, Kath Barbadoro, and others put on some free funny. Now, a show like this is a fairly typical night for me here in Austin, but this line-up is like three really good versions of those nights all put together. We had to go through a wormhole to find the back door to Red 7, and once inside we found our friends in the dark, damp, abandoned-warehouse feel of Red 7’s backside (there was some other event hogging up the inside space). Assorted badges followed us in, but most quickly left. The venue was perfect for the material in play though: dirty, dark, wet, hilarious. For those outside the community, the Austin stand-up comedy scene is one of its best kept secrets. It boasts not only open mics nearly every night of the week, but damn funny line-ups on a regular. Jake’s show was no exception. Against all the SXSW rules, we left early to catch Ume at Stubb’s.
Ume played on the big, outdoor stage at Stubb’s, which left us happily skanking in the mud. Eric Larson was out of town, but Mark Turk filled in nicely on bass, even after only two rehearsals. He and Rachel held down the rhythm and rumble while Lauren brought the flash. Fresh off of a Left Coast tour with Cursive, Lauren kept up her supernova energy (this was also only the second of no less than eleven shows Ume played during SXSW). The last couple of times I’ve seen them, they’ve ended with a new song that sounds like Lauren is singing for Kyuss. The track is thick, heavy and huge. According the Eric, the working title is “Black Stone.” I’m anxious to play it very loud on my headphones. We saw them again on Tuesday at Bat Bar with Eric happily reinstalled. Even with sound issues, they never disappoint.
Ume's Lauren Larson rocking Stubb's. (photo by Lily Brewer)
Monday found me getting my Music badge, which I’d tried to get the previous Friday, but was denied. Credentialed up, I met Alex Burns for lunch. Alex and I have worked in tandem on at least two versions of 21C Magazine as well as several years together on the Disinformation website. Alex is another great mind with whom I’ve been in touch and exchanged ideas for over a decade and finally met IRL at SXSW. People say it every year, but it cannot be overstated: The sidebar conversations that an event like SXSW affords are very often its true value.
Dave Allen, Hank Shocklee, and I hamming it up in the green room. (photo by David Ewald)
While meeting in the green room preparing for our panel “What Happened to the Big Idea in Music Technology?,” Hank Shocklee stopped by to say hello. As one of the sonic architects behind the sound of Public Enemy, Hank has had a profound influence on the way music sounds in the twenty-first century, as well as my appreciation thereof. It felt more than appropriate to run into him before we took the stage. Dave Allen (North), David Ewald (Uncorked Studios), Jesse von Doom (CASH Music), and I had done a version of this talk in San Francisco last September at SF MusicTech Summit. At SXSW Music, we were joined by Anthony Batt (BUZZnet, Katalyst, etc.) and novelist and music critic Rick Moody (author of The Ice Storm, On Celestial Music, and many others). This gathering of minds represented every aspect of the issues we were addressing: From artists to fans and from technologists to journalists, we used everyone’s expertise and experience to express our opinions about the direction music is headed as an industry, a cultural practice, and as a commercial enterprise. Ours is a discussion that will continue as long as people love making and hearing music and other people try to capitalize on that love.
Speaking of music technology, the Vinylrecorder T-560 was on display at the trade show. This device allows one to cut a vinyl record from recordings on a computer. It’s like burning a CD, except it offers the “warmth” of vinyl playback. As many times as events at festivals like this prompt me to question what year they think it is (e.g., Bruce Springsteen? Counting Crows? Billy Corgan? We’re only doomed to repeat history if our elders keep force-feeding it to us.), I have to admit that the idea of pressing my own records looked like the kind of useless fun I often enjoy most. Home recording fun notwithstanding, the back-to-the-future approach of the Vinylrecorder is a great metaphor for many of the attitudes represented in music technology: “How do we use what we have now to get back to the way things were?” they seem to be asking.
This is part of the reason we gathered to talk about these issues. There’s no going back. Technology has lowered the barriers to entry, but you still have to be good at what you do. The internet has made fame much easier and fortune nearly impossible. You have to learn the technology. It’s easier now than ever to get heard, yet harder to stand out. Events like SXSW emphasize just how noisy and cluttered the current music milieu is. How do you cut through it all? If you want engagement, be engaging. Show us something. Doug Stanhope has a joke about how you never see ads for drugs. “If you have a good product,” he says, “people will find it. You don’t need to advertise.” No one owes you a living just because you make music (or Doug as a comedian, or me as a writer, etc.), but if you do something people want, they will find you. Rain or shine.
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Many, many thanks to Dave Allen, David Ewald, Anthony Batt, Jesse von Doom, and Rick Moody for the great discussions both on and off the stage; to Hank Shocklee for the chat; to Rebecca Gates for coming by; to Howard Rheingold and Alex Burns for sharing meals and beers; to Andy Flynn for hooking it all up; to Ume for rocking everything as usual; to Tarryn Lambert and friends for the lively debate; to Brooke Pankey for braving the city streets on a bicycle with us; to Luke and Abby Brewer for walking nine miles even though we couldn’t get their young selves into a show; and special, special thanks to Lily for enduring the whole week with me.
After a decade of teaching at the university level, David Preston decided to stop ignoring the ills we all know haunt those halls and dropped back to high school. He’s now trying to reform a place that desperately needs it. I got the chance to participate in a discussion with his literature and composition classes, thanks to David, Ted Newcomb, and Howard Rheingold, all of whom are hacking education in various ways. I can tell you with no reservations that David is making the difference. I want to keep this introduction as brief as possible and just let him tell you about it. Some men just want to watch the world learn.
Roy Christopher:What drove you from the hallowed hells of academia to teaching high school?
David Preston: (Hang on, let me hop up on my soapbox) Every generation thinks school can’t get any worse but somehow we manage. When I was a kid I hated school but loved learning (and still do), so when I graduated I thought I could liberate the other inmates by learning about the institution and how to fix it. After college I wrote about schools as a journalist and then I went back for a master’s and a Ph.D. in education. But in grad school I discovered the politics, how difficult it is to ask pressing questions without incurring the wrath of well-funded powers-that-be. Eventually I figured there wasn’t enough lipstick for this institutional pig and found my way into management consulting, where I worked with executives and organizations on learning and planning. Even though I was making good money and keeping my hand in by teaching courses at UCLA, the idea of school nagged at me because I could see the trend worsening. Really smart, highly-motivated students and executives told me how completely unprepared they were for life after graduation—and these were the successful people! Today’s students have it even worse. They don’t learn about their own minds, they don’t learn about how they fit in the larger scheme of things, they don’t learn how to use the tools available to them, and they don’t learn the basics of how to manage their bodies or their money. Forget the achievement gap and the union versus reform sideshow—even the best prep school curricula are designed for a world that no longer exists (if it ever did). Once upon a time the American high school diploma signified that a person had the tools to be self-sufficient; now it’s like one of those red deli counter tickets that tells you to line up at the recruiter’s office or financial aid. And the worst part is, today’s students know all this because technology allows them to see the world for themselves. They don’t have to be told that school is an irrelevant exercise in obedience.
I’ve been critical of school since watching my first grade teacher pull kids’ hair for getting math problems wrong, but after 9/11 I thought about the issue differently. I reflected on how our thinking influences the world we’re living in and the future we’re creating for ourselves. Whatever big-picture issue you care about—the environment, the economy, human rights, politics—is defined by how people think and communicate about it. And the institution ostensibly in charge of helping people learn to think and communicate is fucked. So, when a friend of mine suggested in 2004 that I take a “domestic Peace Corps” sabbatical and offered me an opportunity to teach high school courses, I turned him down immediately. But over the next couple of weeks I realized that you never hear anything about education policy from inside the classroom, and I’d get to be an embedded anthropologist. Boots on the ground. I wanted to find out what today’s students are actually like (they’re not the Digital Natives you read about!) and what actually goes on in school on the days they don’t give tours. I may have been fantasizing about Hunter S. Thompson riding with Hell’s Angels or Jane Goodall hanging with chimps when I said yes to going back inside the belly of the beast.
I taught at the country’s fourth-largest high school in LA. It had a year-round calendar with three tracks to accommodate five thousand students, most of whom didn’t carry books because they didn’t want to get jumped on the way home. But this one student, Zolzaya Damdinsuren, came into my class during a sweaty summer school afternoon and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. This is a whole other story, but the bottom line is that I spent a month in western China, Tibet, and Mongolia with Zolzaya and his family, and the experience changed me. By the time I returned I had decided not to return to my consulting practice. Instead I resolved to create learning solutions that would help people whether they were in school or not. I moved to California’s central coast and I’ve been hacking education ever since.
RC:Tell me about your current education project, the one you’ve been piloting for a while now.
DP: I’m helping students build a massively multiplayer online learning network. I started with the students in my high school classes. Initially, 100 students created 100 blogs and learned about online security, privacy, filter bubbles, search, online business models, and how to use social media to curate and broadcast information. We reached out to authors, we conducted a flash mob research project that created a mindmap out of a William Gibson interview in 24 hours, and we held video conferences with illustrious celebrities such as yourself. That was fall semester. Now we’re reaching out to recruit a study group of 20,000-50,000 people to prepare for the AP English Literature & Composition exam using both synchronous and asynchronous platforms. This is proof-of-concept: the ultimate goal is to create an online exchange that offers the resources and tools people need to acquire information, demonsrate mastery and build a portfolio of work. In five years I want to see a teacher make a million dollars, not because of some collective bargaining agreement, but because she’s that good. Maybe she’s an author, maybe she’s a mechanic. I want to create a model of community in which learning is an economic driver. I think the outcome will be a competitive market of entrepreneurs, job candidates and creatives who aren’t just eager to tell you what they can do, but eager to show you what they’ve already done.
RC:What insights have you found doing this work?
Until about two years ago I was focusing on interdisciplinary curriculum and information-referenced assessment models as ways to extend what I could offer students. But basically these were just ways of remixing the standard curriculum and providing more formative feedback to learners. Even my use of social media was essentially limited to conserving paper, helping absentees, and trying to make the same old lessons seem more engaging or entertaining.
You see that sort of thing all over the Web. Blended learning, virtual schooling, online lessons, LMS, SIS—some of the ideas and applications are really cool, but it’s all essentially Skinner’s Box 2.0. It’s what happens when anything good gets sucked into the school policy meat grinder. Apple in the world = Think different. Apple in school = Electronic textbooks. Peter Drucker said the worst thing management can do is the wrong thing more efficiently. Standardizing and streamlining is great if you’re starting with something of quality, but otherwise incremental change makes the problem worse because it reinforces the idea that change is impossible. You can’t lose twenty pounds by eating one less Twinkie a day. You have to radically, fearlessly redesign from purposeful scratch. That’s how evolutionary adaptation works: one day there’s no fin, then the water rises and—Whoa!—everybody who’s still alive and reproducing has fins. So I gave up trying to tweak the finless and started thinking more about where we are trying to swim. This took the form of a simple question: What does it take to be an educated global citizen in the 21st century?
The real opportunity of the Internet is creating a network that takes on its own momentum, grows, and exponentially increases its value. In fact, I think at this point network theory has a greater payoff in learning than learning theory does. The really cool part is that as the network grows and gains experiences, it also changes purpose and direction. School isn’t built to tolerate that, which I think is a big issue, considering the need for innovation in this country.
It’s exciting to be a part of something so dynamic. In too many places learners are forced to wait for an institution, or a government, or an economic sector to get its act together and do right by them. Learners don’t have to wait for Superman. They are Superman.
RC:Well, one of the things I wonder is where the funding comes from. That still seems to be a major problem with education reform, and I’m not just talking about funding for technology and other resources, but funding for teachers: One of the main reasons interesting and innovative people avoid teaching in high school is because there’s so much more money to be made elsewhere. How do we fund this revolution?
DP: Learning needs to become the economic driver. We need a learning environment in which learners and mentors select each other, co-create interdisciplinary curricula and demonstrate mastery in ways that translate to the broader economy and life in our culture. Such an open market would allow learning innovators to create revenue streams that feed communities and align compensation with perceived value and performance: if you suck you starve, if you rock you make bank. This is happening already. In Korea, teacher Rose Lee is known as the “Queen of English.” She makes over $7 million a year. If clients are willing to invest that much in university prep, imagine what they’ll do for top-shelf professionals who can prepare the next generation for economic success without needing the university at all. Creating a new economic sector around learning makes mentoring a much more dynamic and potentially lucrative endeavor than teaching ever was.
Until that exists, though, it’s still possible to integrate coursework and network once learners get the basics of the Internet and online privacy/security. It doesn’t take much money for an individual teacher to offer online learning opportunities. I started off guerrilla style. Everything I’m currently using with students is available for free to anyone who has access to the Internet—and every student has access to the Internet. It drives me crazy when I hear well-meaning adults suggest that we not work online with students because not everyone has a computer at home. We read books with students, and some of my students don’t have those at home either. This is Problem Solving 101. If you don’t have a computer at home you have an access problem. That would be a cruel proposition if the problem wasn’t super easy, but we are surrounded by solutions. Go to a friend’s; go to the computer center or library; spend $3 at the copy store. If an entire community is impacted to the point that an individual really can’t access the Internet, document the case that supports getting the community connected. Agitate. Citing lack of Internet access in 2012 is an admission of defeat that suggests a lack of determination and imagination.
RC:What are you up to off-campus?
DP: For the last six months I have been neck-deep in the work I’m doing with students. Writing curriculum, reading blogs, and replying to messages around the clock seven days a week. It’s insane. I’ve never worked harder as a teacher or had more fun. Now I’m documenting the process and starting to promote it. I’m writing a white paper, starting a blog, designing the system architecture for the learning exchange, consulting, and speaking about the proof of concept. Next event is the CUE conference in Palm Springs on March 15.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of liberating learning from school. Our present is competitive and our future is uncertain. My old mentor used to say that in chaos there is profit, but success in 2012 is not for the passive, weak, or risk-averse. Intellectual and financial freedom isn’t something that can be given to you. You have to take it.
Grant Morrison describes his growing up through comics books as a Manichean affair: “It was an all-or-nothing choice between the A-Bomb and the Spaceship. I had already picked sides, but the Cold War tension between Apocalypse and Utopia was becoming almost unbearable” (p. xiv). Morrison’s first non-comic book, Supergods (Spiegel & Grau, 2011), is one-half personal statement, one-half art history. It’s an autobiography told through comic books and a history of superheroes disguised as a memoir. His early history of superhero comics is quite good, but it gets really, really good when Morrison enters the story full-bore — first as a struggling but successful freelancer and later as a chaos magician of the highest order, conjuring coincidence with superhero sigils.
As if to follow Kenneth Burke’s dictum that literature represents “equipment for living,” Morrison puts a lot of weight on the shoulders of the supergods. “We live in the stories we tell,” he writes, and he’s not just saying that. Morrison wrote himself into his hypersigil comic The Invisibles and watched as the story came to life and nearly killed him.
In Supergods Morrison tells the story in high relief and stresses the transubstantiation between words and images on a page and thoughts and actions in the real world. His works are largely made up of “reality-bending metafictional freakouts dressed up in action-adventure drag,” as Douglas Wolk (2007) describes them, “metaphors that make visible the process by which language creates an image that in turn becomes narrative” (p. 258). If you’re not one for the magical bent, think of it as a strong interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with a Rortian addendum: If we assume that language creates reality, then we should use language to create the reality we want to live in. Morrison writes, “Superhero comics may yet find a purpose all along as the social realist fiction of tomorrow” (p. 116). He insists that whether we realize it or not, we are the superheroes of this world.
The mini-apocalypse of September 11th, 2001 presented an odd dilemma not only for us, but also for our masked and caped heroes and our relationships to them. On one side, the event questions the effectiveness of our superheroes if something like that can happen without their intervention. Our faith in them crumbled like so much steel and concrete. On the other, after witnessing that day, we were more ready to escape into their fantasy world than ever. The years after that event exemplified what Steve Aylettdescribed as a time “when people would do almost anything to avoid thinking clearly about what is actually going on.”
9/11 is conspicuously missing from Peter Y. Paik’s From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), as is Morrison, but blurbed by our friends Steven Shaviro and Bruce Sterling, the book provides another look at the link between the printed page and the world stage. As a contemporary companion to Barry Brummett’s Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric, which came out in 1991, Paik’s book provides another peek at the larger picture beyond the page that Morrison alludes to. I do find it odd that there’s no discussion of 9/11, a date that also roughly marks an epochal shift between things that were once considered nerdy and now are not. Morrison rails against the word “geek” as applied to comic book fans saying, “They’re no different from most people who consume things and put them in the corner or put them in a drawer… Anyone who’s into anything could be called a geek, but they don’t call them a geek.”
As much of a nerd as I’ll admit I am, I’ve never really been much for comic books. With that said, I found Supergods enthralling, much in the same way I found the screen stories of Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives. Intergalactic narrative notwithstanding, Morrison’s prose seems both carefully constructed and completely natural. As my colleague Katie Arens would say, he writes to be read. My lack of comic-book knowledge sometimes made following the historical cycles of superheroes difficult, but Morrison’s presence in these pages and personal touch kept me reading hyper-attentively. Here’s hoping he writes at least half of the other books hinted at herein.
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My own introduction to Grant Morrison came via Disinformation‘s DisinfoCon in 2000 where he explains the basics of chaos magic in an excitedly drunken Scottish accent [runtime: 45:28]:
Morrison, Grant. (2011). Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human. New York: Spiegel & Grau.
Wolk, Douglas. (2007). Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo.
Sean S. Baker, Spencer Chinoy, and Dan Milano’s Greg the Bunny has had several incarnations as a public-access show (Junktape), short film spoofs on IFC, and a more recent spin-off on MTV (Warren the Ape), but the show they did for Fox is the real gem. Pairing their great puppet characters with humans played by Seth Green, Sarah Silverman, Eugene Levy, Dina Walters, and Bob Gunton, eleven episodes made it to air in 2002 (two more unaired shows are included on the DVD). If On the Air is 30 Rock on LSD, then Greg the Bunny is just plain high. Puppets in Greg the Bunny, though second-class citizens, are citizens nonetheless (a trope the writers use to great comedic advantage). The show is fun and funny and plays on its obvious classic forebears like Sesame Street and The Muppet Show.
IB: Cow Clicker is so much bigger than me now, it’s not even possible to know if it did what I set out for it to do, or if that’s even a desirable outcome. There’s an Internet adage called Poe’s Law, that says that it’s often difficult or even impossible to tell the difference between extremism and its parody. It was originally coined in relation to discussions of evolution within Christian forums, but it’s been generalized since: a parody of something extreme can be mistaken for the real thing. And if a real thing sounds sufficiently extreme, it can be mistaken for parody.
I started off my own, soggy SXSW Interactive with a quiet breakfast with 
