"MABEL CHILTERN is a perfect example of the English type of prettiness, the apple-blossom type. She has all the fragrance and freedom of a flower. There is ripple after ripple of sunlight in her hair, and the little mouth, with its parted lips, is expectant, like the mouth of a child. She has the fascinating tyranny of youth, and the astonishing courage of innocence. To sane people she is not reminiscent of any work of art. But she is really like a Tanagra statuette, and would be rather annoyed if she were told so." --Oscar Wilde. An Ideal Husband.
I recently made a breakthrough with my new iPhone. See, you can't walk down the street reading a book. It's socially unacceptable. Ridiculous. Crazy. But it's fine to walk down the street staring at your iPhone. A few ebook downloads later, and I've got a library on the go. A library filled with things like Oscar Wilde plays.
Later Days.
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Friday, December 7, 2012
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Kindle-ing
I just finished reading Tina Fey's book, Bossypants. Now, I could do the whole book review thing, and and discuss the topic of female comedy, which probably involve Ellen DeGeneres' book, and I'd probably find a way to work in Terry Jones' discussion in Douglas Adam's Starship Titanic, and the whole thing would be tied to some deeply meaningful event from my past, but... eh. If you like books by comedians, this is a very good book by a comedian. And if you like funny women, there's a lot of those things too.
That aside, there are two further things I'd to discuss. First, I not only read the book, I read it on Kindle. That's right, Kindle! Between that and my new Twitter account, I'm finally ready to join 2008. Not bad for a multimedia scholar. (It is, in fact, very bad for a multimedia scholar.) And I have to say... I don't like it. I appreciate the search feature very much, as well as the highlighting and the notes. And the adjustable font size does a very nice job of breaking up sections of text so that you don't get the same fatigue you get when staring at text on the average computer screen. As someone who spends a lot of time staring at a screen, it is a great feature.
But what really irks me is that the casualty of text-scaling is that the page number has become obsolete. Time was, I could use the page number as a measure of my dedication. "Oh, I'm 5 pages into Harry Potter, so I'm not really interested." "Look, I got 600 pages into War and Peace, and I can tell you, not much happens." "You've read the first 100 pages of Ulysses? How darling. Of course, it doesn't really start getting difficult until page 157." (I'm sure there are uses for page numbers that don't involve being literary-pretentious, but they don't come to my mind as quickly, for some reason.) Sure, Kindle has a percentage button, which is nice for the book at hand, and a location value, but neither translate to easily comparable features--I want to know when I've slogged through a 600 page tome. It's an accomplishment, damn it.
A search through the internet, however, tells me that I'm not the only one who feels this way, and that the good people at Amazon have created an updated version of Kindle that does page number as well. One problem: I don't have Kindle. What I actually have, sadly, is Kindle for PC, a freeware product that lets people try out a Kindle-like app before actually buying a Kindle. So basically, my complaints regarding the quality of this service is somewhat akin to someone complaining that the Nike shoes he found in a dumpster don't let him run much faster than he did before. (Yes, they're faster, but not *much* faster.)
Really, I should get one. Or a laptop. Or a new computer. Or something. But there's some part of me that feels I should stick with any possession I own until one of us falls off this mortal coil. And as I stare at my scratch-laden monitor and it stares at my pasty white skin, it's really a toss-up as to which one of us it'll be.
Oh right--the second thing about Tina Fey's book--I guess we'll do that tomorrow. Stay tuned!
Later Days.
That aside, there are two further things I'd to discuss. First, I not only read the book, I read it on Kindle. That's right, Kindle! Between that and my new Twitter account, I'm finally ready to join 2008. Not bad for a multimedia scholar. (It is, in fact, very bad for a multimedia scholar.) And I have to say... I don't like it. I appreciate the search feature very much, as well as the highlighting and the notes. And the adjustable font size does a very nice job of breaking up sections of text so that you don't get the same fatigue you get when staring at text on the average computer screen. As someone who spends a lot of time staring at a screen, it is a great feature.
But what really irks me is that the casualty of text-scaling is that the page number has become obsolete. Time was, I could use the page number as a measure of my dedication. "Oh, I'm 5 pages into Harry Potter, so I'm not really interested." "Look, I got 600 pages into War and Peace, and I can tell you, not much happens." "You've read the first 100 pages of Ulysses? How darling. Of course, it doesn't really start getting difficult until page 157." (I'm sure there are uses for page numbers that don't involve being literary-pretentious, but they don't come to my mind as quickly, for some reason.) Sure, Kindle has a percentage button, which is nice for the book at hand, and a location value, but neither translate to easily comparable features--I want to know when I've slogged through a 600 page tome. It's an accomplishment, damn it.
A search through the internet, however, tells me that I'm not the only one who feels this way, and that the good people at Amazon have created an updated version of Kindle that does page number as well. One problem: I don't have Kindle. What I actually have, sadly, is Kindle for PC, a freeware product that lets people try out a Kindle-like app before actually buying a Kindle. So basically, my complaints regarding the quality of this service is somewhat akin to someone complaining that the Nike shoes he found in a dumpster don't let him run much faster than he did before. (Yes, they're faster, but not *much* faster.)
Really, I should get one. Or a laptop. Or a new computer. Or something. But there's some part of me that feels I should stick with any possession I own until one of us falls off this mortal coil. And as I stare at my scratch-laden monitor and it stares at my pasty white skin, it's really a toss-up as to which one of us it'll be.
Oh right--the second thing about Tina Fey's book--I guess we'll do that tomorrow. Stay tuned!
Later Days.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Late Night Edition
I thought I'd try to get a proper start to this week by going to bed early on a Sunday. Now it's 2:00 am, and I'm in one of those familiar states where I'm all but exhausted, but can't for the life of me sleep. Thank goodness for the life of a graduate student, where I can get away with working strange hours--well, until my Wednesday and Friday classes, at any rate.
A new plan, then: I'll pursue various courses, capriciously, as the mood takes me, until I taken, or rather, overtaken, further, by slumber. (All right, that was cumbersome. But I'm trying.) What will I do? Well, I shall alternate between:
1) Playing Dragon Age: Origins. I'm doing a quick run-through of the game in preparation for a playthrough of the sequel. I've placed the difficult on the lowest setting; this is a session built on exploring the gameworld, rather than challenging myself with the gameplay.
2) Reading bits and snips from A Song for Arbonne, by Guy Gavriel Kay. And that's why a sort of poetic vein is creeping into my writing here; my writing style has always been subject to osmosis, and once must admit that if I had to choose someone to imitate, I could certainly do a lot worse.
3) Reading old, archived posts of Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It was introduced to me as one of the best journalist discussions of gaming on the Net, and it's certainly kept me informed and entertained in good order. I've been reading it backwards from its start, so I am currently immersed in discussions of PC games from 2007. The cake is a lie!
4) Watching the various spiders crawl around the basement. This is, frankly, a full time occupation; without straining myself, I can immediately identify six different spiders in operation here. I used to wonder what that many spiders could find to eat down here, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer is "each other."
5) Transcribing some notes and choice passages from Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time vol. 2: Disorientation. While this chapter, focusing on anthropology and technics (as many of them do) didn't really pick up for me until the discussion of style near the end, I'm starting to get an inkling as to how this can be profitably applied to my own research. And it's good that it's finally becoming clear; you don't want to read five hundred pages or so of hardcore French theory and come out at the end without any other sentiment than "well, that was fun."
I think I'd best be about my work, then.
Later Days.
A new plan, then: I'll pursue various courses, capriciously, as the mood takes me, until I taken, or rather, overtaken, further, by slumber. (All right, that was cumbersome. But I'm trying.) What will I do? Well, I shall alternate between:
1) Playing Dragon Age: Origins. I'm doing a quick run-through of the game in preparation for a playthrough of the sequel. I've placed the difficult on the lowest setting; this is a session built on exploring the gameworld, rather than challenging myself with the gameplay.
2) Reading bits and snips from A Song for Arbonne, by Guy Gavriel Kay. And that's why a sort of poetic vein is creeping into my writing here; my writing style has always been subject to osmosis, and once must admit that if I had to choose someone to imitate, I could certainly do a lot worse.
3) Reading old, archived posts of Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It was introduced to me as one of the best journalist discussions of gaming on the Net, and it's certainly kept me informed and entertained in good order. I've been reading it backwards from its start, so I am currently immersed in discussions of PC games from 2007. The cake is a lie!
4) Watching the various spiders crawl around the basement. This is, frankly, a full time occupation; without straining myself, I can immediately identify six different spiders in operation here. I used to wonder what that many spiders could find to eat down here, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer is "each other."
5) Transcribing some notes and choice passages from Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time vol. 2: Disorientation. While this chapter, focusing on anthropology and technics (as many of them do) didn't really pick up for me until the discussion of style near the end, I'm starting to get an inkling as to how this can be profitably applied to my own research. And it's good that it's finally becoming clear; you don't want to read five hundred pages or so of hardcore French theory and come out at the end without any other sentiment than "well, that was fun."
I think I'd best be about my work, then.
Later Days.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Welcome toThe Daily---: A Story of Delayed Gratification
Well, that was weird.
I was embarking on my usual daily anaerobic exercises--200 push-ups, 200 sit-ups, and some light weightlifting (yes, I'm trying to brag in an overly affected modest manner, just ignore politely and move on)--and, also as usual, my background noise per choice was an episode of the Daily Show, as streamed through the Comedy Network's website. (Look at that! A legal use of the Internet to watch television. How quaint.) But due to a crossed wire of some sort, the show kept stopping every fifteen seconds or so in order to load. So I'd get a few seconds of some joke, then a weird pause. I endured this process for approximately 20 minutes of work-out time, during which I received about 9 minutes of actual show. (BTW, the original title of this post was "Welcome to the Daily Sh---," which was more faithful to the actual pause in my viewing, but provided a sort of mixed message in terms of signaling today's content.) This stilted method of viewing drew a number of things to mind:
1) It was the first time I finished the my exercises before the interview segment, making it my fastest workout ever. (I know this isn't actually the case, but please, be quiet; I really need a win right now.)
2) I'm reminded of how big a role immediacy plays in the modern media culture. I want what I want, and I want it now. Internet lags, television commercials, video game loading time, waiting for book releases, listening to an entire song (I've got a friend with a record player) --they're all anathema to culture of NOW, dammit. I had to actively resist an urge to turn off the stream, because a large part of me would rather listen to nothing than be forced to wait.
3) The pauses really drew attention to the structure of the show. The Daily Show is very formulaic in this regard; there's the opening run-through of the news, a consultation with one of the reporters/comedy people, and a commercial. Followed by a a more in-depth look at some more news items (or a feature on-location piece by one of the reporters), another commercial, and then a closing interview. The formulaic approach comes in part from the news format the show is satirizing, and in part from the late night talk show format that it actually is. But another big reason for the formula is that, once people are used to it, they ignore it, and that's what the show wants you to do--to focus on the content rather than their format.
The constant breaks drew attention to the format. Not at the broad level I've been describing, but at the micro-level of the individual joke. There's the framing, from Jon Stewart, the set-up (some kind of news clip, usually), the punchline, and the laughter. With the show slowed down to a crawl, I found myself looking for each element more and more. And because the cut-off happened at various places, I got to see how each element blended into and anticipated the next, particularly the set-up and laughter. You could often predict exactly what Stewart was going to do for the punchline, just from the news clip used. And despite what you might think, the joke doesn't end with the punchline, but with the laughter, the reaction to the punchline. I think both of these elements draw attention to how much of comedy and humor is in its communal component; to follow Kenneth Burke a bit, you identify with the group by anticipating Jon's joke and reacting with them. Of course, that's the main function of a studio audience to begin with.
(There's been a lot of noise in the press this year comparing Jon Stewart to Glenn Beck. It would be interesting to see if his show, while not a comedy, follows the same pattern of formula and community creation/enforcement. If only I could figure out a way of doing it without actually watching the show...)
4) It reminded me a lot of my own research habits. Particularly, it mirrored the painstaking efforts I once went through to map out the conversation tree of a scene in the video game Mass Effect (in case aficionados are wondering, it was the scene with Wrex on Virmire. Flowchart of the conversation is available upon request). There would be a few seconds of speech, then I'd push pause, and frantically rush over to my computer to type out what had just been said. It was significantly worse than transcribing an actual video, because there's no rewind button; if I missed something, I had to reload the entire scene and try again.
More generally, it reminded me of my close-reading method, which is basically to read a passage, stop reading, spend a few seconds jotting notes and reflecting, then return to the text. Watching the Daily Show in this broken manner reminded me of the pros and cons of this approach--you get a very good reading on the micro-level, but at the cost of missing the bigger picture. I might have to rethink my approach a little in the future.
To recap: muscle building, entertainment, and scholarly reflection, all in one 20 minute work-out. Truly, I am the modern Renaissance man. Ladies, get in line.
Later Days.
I was embarking on my usual daily anaerobic exercises--200 push-ups, 200 sit-ups, and some light weightlifting (yes, I'm trying to brag in an overly affected modest manner, just ignore politely and move on)--and, also as usual, my background noise per choice was an episode of the Daily Show, as streamed through the Comedy Network's website. (Look at that! A legal use of the Internet to watch television. How quaint.) But due to a crossed wire of some sort, the show kept stopping every fifteen seconds or so in order to load. So I'd get a few seconds of some joke, then a weird pause. I endured this process for approximately 20 minutes of work-out time, during which I received about 9 minutes of actual show. (BTW, the original title of this post was "Welcome to the Daily Sh---," which was more faithful to the actual pause in my viewing, but provided a sort of mixed message in terms of signaling today's content.) This stilted method of viewing drew a number of things to mind:
1) It was the first time I finished the my exercises before the interview segment, making it my fastest workout ever. (I know this isn't actually the case, but please, be quiet; I really need a win right now.)
2) I'm reminded of how big a role immediacy plays in the modern media culture. I want what I want, and I want it now. Internet lags, television commercials, video game loading time, waiting for book releases, listening to an entire song (I've got a friend with a record player) --they're all anathema to culture of NOW, dammit. I had to actively resist an urge to turn off the stream, because a large part of me would rather listen to nothing than be forced to wait.
3) The pauses really drew attention to the structure of the show. The Daily Show is very formulaic in this regard; there's the opening run-through of the news, a consultation with one of the reporters/comedy people, and a commercial. Followed by a a more in-depth look at some more news items (or a feature on-location piece by one of the reporters), another commercial, and then a closing interview. The formulaic approach comes in part from the news format the show is satirizing, and in part from the late night talk show format that it actually is. But another big reason for the formula is that, once people are used to it, they ignore it, and that's what the show wants you to do--to focus on the content rather than their format.
The constant breaks drew attention to the format. Not at the broad level I've been describing, but at the micro-level of the individual joke. There's the framing, from Jon Stewart, the set-up (some kind of news clip, usually), the punchline, and the laughter. With the show slowed down to a crawl, I found myself looking for each element more and more. And because the cut-off happened at various places, I got to see how each element blended into and anticipated the next, particularly the set-up and laughter. You could often predict exactly what Stewart was going to do for the punchline, just from the news clip used. And despite what you might think, the joke doesn't end with the punchline, but with the laughter, the reaction to the punchline. I think both of these elements draw attention to how much of comedy and humor is in its communal component; to follow Kenneth Burke a bit, you identify with the group by anticipating Jon's joke and reacting with them. Of course, that's the main function of a studio audience to begin with.
(There's been a lot of noise in the press this year comparing Jon Stewart to Glenn Beck. It would be interesting to see if his show, while not a comedy, follows the same pattern of formula and community creation/enforcement. If only I could figure out a way of doing it without actually watching the show...)
4) It reminded me a lot of my own research habits. Particularly, it mirrored the painstaking efforts I once went through to map out the conversation tree of a scene in the video game Mass Effect (in case aficionados are wondering, it was the scene with Wrex on Virmire. Flowchart of the conversation is available upon request). There would be a few seconds of speech, then I'd push pause, and frantically rush over to my computer to type out what had just been said. It was significantly worse than transcribing an actual video, because there's no rewind button; if I missed something, I had to reload the entire scene and try again.
More generally, it reminded me of my close-reading method, which is basically to read a passage, stop reading, spend a few seconds jotting notes and reflecting, then return to the text. Watching the Daily Show in this broken manner reminded me of the pros and cons of this approach--you get a very good reading on the micro-level, but at the cost of missing the bigger picture. I might have to rethink my approach a little in the future.
To recap: muscle building, entertainment, and scholarly reflection, all in one 20 minute work-out. Truly, I am the modern Renaissance man. Ladies, get in line.
Later Days.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
The Mundane Middle Stretch
All right: we're in post 2 of a three post series. Yesterday covered some of the differences between the Disneyfied Little Mermaid and its original; today, we'll take the final point, the marginalization of women, and run it into the ground. Be warned: this post is definitely the "Empire Strikes Back" of the bunch, as it comes to a fairly negative conclusion. Negative in the way it reflects me, I mean. My only defense is that I hope to be somewhat redeemed with tomorrow's blog equivalent of Return of the Jedi. (I can promise no Ewoks, so that's already an improvement.)
Anyway, while The Little Mermaid rekindled my decision to do a feminism-issue series of posts, the seed was originally planted when I attended a lecture Elaine Showalter gave at my university a few weeks ago. The lecture essentially presented a case for her upcoming book, a history of female writers of North America. This history, especially in the United States' early years, really hadn't been told. She gave a particularly striking contrast. When Walt Whitman first tried to publish his seminal "Leaves of Grass," he absolutely couldn't get anyone to buy it. The single book store that accepted a few copies couldn't move one of them, and no one else was biting. So he actually sent a few fake, raving reviews to literary magazines and suddenly the work no one would read became one of the pillars of American poetry. At the same time, a woman published a book of poems to huge acclaim, but was forced to write under a pen name so her husband wouldn't find out. When he did, he gave her an ultimatum: either she give up public writing forever, or he would divorce her and take the children. So she literally had to choose between her family and her writing. She acquiesces, and becomes virtually forgotten. Showalter's point is that men were allowed to go to extreme measures for self-promotion; women who did the same were vilified.
That I can't even remember the name of the woman she used lends further credence to her argument.
Anyway, the talk got me thinking about influential women creators in my own field. In video games--well, the pickings are rather slim. That isn't to say there's no one. It was a husband and wife team that were behind Sierra, who made some of the best computer games of the 20th century. Another woman was behind Sierra's popular Hero's Quest series. And I know it was actually a female who coded the arcade classic Centipede. But while I'd recognize the names if I saw them, I can't actually name any of them off the top of my head. In contrast, the big historical male names in video game history--Shigeru Moyamoto, Warren Spector, American McGee, John Romero--immediately roll off my tongue. In this case, at least, it can be partly contextualized. Video games are--excuse the gross overgenralization--heavily masculinized. There are exceptions, and I believe there will continue to be more exceptions, that the field will change with the greater expansion of the form, and with the increasingly popularity of, um, pop games and sim games, but for now... well, how many women would WANT to be associated with a character like Duke Nukem?
Maybe some prominent female role-models can be found in the actual games.
...or maybe that's not a productive area of discussion. (Sorry, Samus.)
One area of video games that does have a prominent female presence is its scholarship. There's a lot of women who bring some of the more useful anthropological approaches into game studies: see Suzzane de Castell, Mia Consalvo, and Lisa Nakamura (all right, she's more digital media at large, but there's crossover.). Brenda Laurel and Janet Murray are often cited as the founders of the narratology-side of the video game debate. There's also Karen Collins on game sound design, Katie Salen on game design, and Sheila C. Murphy on the game artifacts, such as cell phones and the Intellivision. So yes, pretty good representation there.
But just as I satisfied my white liberal conscience with the above list, I came upon a new question: what female creators have had a personal influence on me? This one was... harder. I recently did this Facebook thing, where you name 15 authors who influenced you, as quick as you can. And once I was pretty advanced in the list, I realized I didn't have any women on there. I threw Virginia Woolf on near the end, but I couldn't say definitely that she wasn't a token addition. To be honest, my list of high literature doesn't include a lot of female writers. A large part of this is my educational background. My undergrad university split the humanities in such a way that many of the modern female writers were under the purview of the Women and Genders Studies department. Split between a double English and Math major, I didn't have many electives to spend on outside classes, so I just never experienced the modern female writers. And before the 20th century, you start running into the lack of support female writers have faced for centuries. Gaskell and Austen are fine, but really not my bag. I think Elizabeth Heywood is amazing, but I came across her after my scholarly interests turned elsewhere, so her impact too was less on me than it might of been. And so on.
Well, fine. If I'm being honest, I've been influenced at least as much by my pop fiction reads as by my high literature forays. Admittedly, this area skews heavily towards fantasy for me, but I can't be faulted for good taste. And if you turn towards this area, favorite female writers crop up pretty quickly. Fay Weldon's combinations of postmodernism and chick lit are awesome. Diane Duane's Wizardry series always formed a must-read for me, and her Star Trek stuff is good too. Robin Hobbs plays with the fantasy genre itself in ways that need to be read by any fan of the form. Anne McCaffrey's Pern series have been a staple for decades. Marion Zimmer Bradley, likewise, is a cornerstone for her work on Arthurian legend. When you're talking urban fantasy, Charlaine Harris' Vampire books deserve some grudging respect, though for my money, Patricia Briggs' Mercedes Thompson series is infinitely better written. Hell, I did my MA thesis on Tamora Peirce's young adult series. This is just a representative sampling, but yes, my list of influential female fantasy writers is fairly well stocked.
But... can I say that any one of these writers has been personally influential on me? The problem there is that for every writer above, there's one writer, one male writer who fills the same sort of niche for me, but one better. I'll take Italo Calvino over Fay Weldon (which, sadly, probably elevates Weldon in many people's eyes, even to lose by comparison), Peter David over Diane Duane, Stephen Donaldson over Robin Hobbs, David Eddings over McCaffrey, Guy Gavriel Kay over Bradley, Jim Butcher over Briggs and Harris, and Lloyd Alexander over Peirce. I know these comparisons don't map exactly, but my basic point is that, for my personal oeuvre, the top of the list is an overwhelmingly male presence.
So what's the explanation for this imbalance? Is it a reflection of the chauvinism in the various narrative industries that I'm invested in (Good lord, I didn't even get to the machismo-fest that is the comic book industry)? Or a reflection of what I've been exposed to, and narrowly limited myself to? Am I a mysognist? A chauvinistic literary snob? Do I have any female influences in my background at all?
Full story tomorrow, but for the short answers: Wait for it, yes, partly, no, a bit of one, and yes; yes of course.
Anyway, while The Little Mermaid rekindled my decision to do a feminism-issue series of posts, the seed was originally planted when I attended a lecture Elaine Showalter gave at my university a few weeks ago. The lecture essentially presented a case for her upcoming book, a history of female writers of North America. This history, especially in the United States' early years, really hadn't been told. She gave a particularly striking contrast. When Walt Whitman first tried to publish his seminal "Leaves of Grass," he absolutely couldn't get anyone to buy it. The single book store that accepted a few copies couldn't move one of them, and no one else was biting. So he actually sent a few fake, raving reviews to literary magazines and suddenly the work no one would read became one of the pillars of American poetry. At the same time, a woman published a book of poems to huge acclaim, but was forced to write under a pen name so her husband wouldn't find out. When he did, he gave her an ultimatum: either she give up public writing forever, or he would divorce her and take the children. So she literally had to choose between her family and her writing. She acquiesces, and becomes virtually forgotten. Showalter's point is that men were allowed to go to extreme measures for self-promotion; women who did the same were vilified.
That I can't even remember the name of the woman she used lends further credence to her argument.
Anyway, the talk got me thinking about influential women creators in my own field. In video games--well, the pickings are rather slim. That isn't to say there's no one. It was a husband and wife team that were behind Sierra, who made some of the best computer games of the 20th century. Another woman was behind Sierra's popular Hero's Quest series. And I know it was actually a female who coded the arcade classic Centipede. But while I'd recognize the names if I saw them, I can't actually name any of them off the top of my head. In contrast, the big historical male names in video game history--Shigeru Moyamoto, Warren Spector, American McGee, John Romero--immediately roll off my tongue. In this case, at least, it can be partly contextualized. Video games are--excuse the gross overgenralization--heavily masculinized. There are exceptions, and I believe there will continue to be more exceptions, that the field will change with the greater expansion of the form, and with the increasingly popularity of, um, pop games and sim games, but for now... well, how many women would WANT to be associated with a character like Duke Nukem?
Maybe some prominent female role-models can be found in the actual games.
...or maybe that's not a productive area of discussion. (Sorry, Samus.)
One area of video games that does have a prominent female presence is its scholarship. There's a lot of women who bring some of the more useful anthropological approaches into game studies: see Suzzane de Castell, Mia Consalvo, and Lisa Nakamura (all right, she's more digital media at large, but there's crossover.). Brenda Laurel and Janet Murray are often cited as the founders of the narratology-side of the video game debate. There's also Karen Collins on game sound design, Katie Salen on game design, and Sheila C. Murphy on the game artifacts, such as cell phones and the Intellivision. So yes, pretty good representation there.
But just as I satisfied my white liberal conscience with the above list, I came upon a new question: what female creators have had a personal influence on me? This one was... harder. I recently did this Facebook thing, where you name 15 authors who influenced you, as quick as you can. And once I was pretty advanced in the list, I realized I didn't have any women on there. I threw Virginia Woolf on near the end, but I couldn't say definitely that she wasn't a token addition. To be honest, my list of high literature doesn't include a lot of female writers. A large part of this is my educational background. My undergrad university split the humanities in such a way that many of the modern female writers were under the purview of the Women and Genders Studies department. Split between a double English and Math major, I didn't have many electives to spend on outside classes, so I just never experienced the modern female writers. And before the 20th century, you start running into the lack of support female writers have faced for centuries. Gaskell and Austen are fine, but really not my bag. I think Elizabeth Heywood is amazing, but I came across her after my scholarly interests turned elsewhere, so her impact too was less on me than it might of been. And so on.
Well, fine. If I'm being honest, I've been influenced at least as much by my pop fiction reads as by my high literature forays. Admittedly, this area skews heavily towards fantasy for me, but I can't be faulted for good taste. And if you turn towards this area, favorite female writers crop up pretty quickly. Fay Weldon's combinations of postmodernism and chick lit are awesome. Diane Duane's Wizardry series always formed a must-read for me, and her Star Trek stuff is good too. Robin Hobbs plays with the fantasy genre itself in ways that need to be read by any fan of the form. Anne McCaffrey's Pern series have been a staple for decades. Marion Zimmer Bradley, likewise, is a cornerstone for her work on Arthurian legend. When you're talking urban fantasy, Charlaine Harris' Vampire books deserve some grudging respect, though for my money, Patricia Briggs' Mercedes Thompson series is infinitely better written. Hell, I did my MA thesis on Tamora Peirce's young adult series. This is just a representative sampling, but yes, my list of influential female fantasy writers is fairly well stocked.
But... can I say that any one of these writers has been personally influential on me? The problem there is that for every writer above, there's one writer, one male writer who fills the same sort of niche for me, but one better. I'll take Italo Calvino over Fay Weldon (which, sadly, probably elevates Weldon in many people's eyes, even to lose by comparison), Peter David over Diane Duane, Stephen Donaldson over Robin Hobbs, David Eddings over McCaffrey, Guy Gavriel Kay over Bradley, Jim Butcher over Briggs and Harris, and Lloyd Alexander over Peirce. I know these comparisons don't map exactly, but my basic point is that, for my personal oeuvre, the top of the list is an overwhelmingly male presence.
So what's the explanation for this imbalance? Is it a reflection of the chauvinism in the various narrative industries that I'm invested in (Good lord, I didn't even get to the machismo-fest that is the comic book industry)? Or a reflection of what I've been exposed to, and narrowly limited myself to? Am I a mysognist? A chauvinistic literary snob? Do I have any female influences in my background at all?
Full story tomorrow, but for the short answers: Wait for it, yes, partly, no, a bit of one, and yes; yes of course.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Media Night
I was originally going to post this in a series of Facebook statuses, but since I haven't done a post here in a while, I thought it might make an interesting experiment in live-blogging. (Yes, I know that's not what live-blogging means. And yes, I know that I said I wouldn't blog about comp stuff. Look, it was either this or a post on the Aero Chunky bar, okay? And I've got to save something for sweeps week.)
Ahem.
Person of Consequence welcomes everyone to another round of "I'm finishing this book before I go to bed, dammit." This evening's challenger is "The New Media Reader," by editors Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort.
7:43 pm. Currently, I'm on page 635 of 800, with an essay by Bill Nichols. It seems like he's trying to update Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." And by "seems," I mean, "that's explicitly what he says he's doing," and the title is also a fair give-away: "The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems." Benjamin essentially said that artwork was originally imbued with an aura of authenticity, but that aura vanishes in the age of mechanical reproduction, especially with technology like the cinema and the camera. Nichols is expanding this idea to the computer, with an emphasis on Baudrillard's concept of simulation and psychoanalytic ideas like the masculine gaze and object fetishization.
8:13 Half an hour, and I've finished the essay and made it 8 pages. This bodes poorly.
Nichols actually covers a lot of the ground that, a few years later, Hayles will be covering in "How We Became Posthuman." They both place emphasis on the cyborg, on abstract/material, on blurring computer and life. Hayles gives a less homogeneous, more sustained view of cybernetics, though. Next: supper, (banana red pepper mushroom pizza) then Lynn Hershman's "The Fantasy Beyond Control."
8:41. Tasty, but slight. (The essay, not the food.) Hershman, a digital instillation artist briefly describes some of her works and what she wants to do next. Basically, she uses interactive systems to require the viewer to make choices that reveal his or her engagement with media. p 649, reached. Next up: Pelle Ehn and Morten Kyng on "Cardboard Computers."
9:18. Ehn and Kyng consider the use of the mock-up, and what happens when you make the transition from a cardboard mock-up to a computer model. Coming at it from entirely practical considerations, they reach a conclusion similar to Nichols: the computer blurs the line between model (or mock-up, or simulation) and actual product. The application of Wittgenstein language games seems to work well in this context, and there's a nice "unifying power of computers" sort of rhetoric. I like the idea of the mock-up: it's basically a physical, material object whose only resemblance to the abstract product may be the way we choose to perceive it.
Next: A trip to the other side of Star Wars' past with "The Lesson of Lucasfilm's Habitat" by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer. p 663, and counting.
10:06. Where the hell did that 45 minutes go??? Okay: Habitat. It's essentially an early example of a MMOG, played with all the computational power a Commodore 64 can offer. Which is basically equivalent to your average modern microwave. Two of the designers here comment on their experiences with it, and how they were constantly surprised by what the users came up with. This is the first essay in the book that really moves from the one user, one computer model to the more modern conception of cyberspace. And what's really interesting is that the designers explicitly say that for cyberspace games, the implementation platform is unimportant. Of course, they have an economic reason for stating that; they really want to convince people that cyberspace can be reached on Commodore 64s rather than virtual reality goggles or something. But still, it's the sort of declaration that makes a McLuhanite howl in fury. As things become more abstract (ie., the move from the personal computer in front of you into cyberspace), I think it becomes easier and more convenient to forget the technology involved. And that's page 679. Next up, an excerpt from Jay Bolter's "Writing Space."
10:38. Ok, that's better time. Bolter basically follows the same pattern here that he did in his book with Grusin, "Remediation": he states his theory, then demonstrates it through a series of mediating (pun intended examples). In this case, the theory is that "our writing space has been a hybrid of verbal and pictorial elements" since at least the ancient Greeks, and he goes on to prove it. He starts with the basic element, letters, then moves on to consider the basic form of the electronic page; pictures in text from the illuminated medieval manuscript to the computer form; diagrammatic space, that is, a codified, labeled picture; and the closely related numbering space. It's a book I'm clearly going to have to read for my larger dissertation. And that's page 691. Next up, Stuart Moulthrop, and "You Say You Want a Revolution?". I like that the editors parse the title for the headings: "You Want a Revolution." Yeah, that means the same thing.
11:24 pm. No... how did? Gah. Another 45 minute interval. Okay, quickly: Moulthrop's big question is what a digital revolution would mean, and if we're capable of it. He considers the revolutionary ability of hypertext under the McLuhan Laws of Media: What does it enhance, what does it render obsolete, what does it retrieve that was obsolete, and what does it produce or become when taken to its limits? Hypertext, he declares, renders TV obsolete. Well, in terms of the Internet it certainly does; I watch nearly all my shows online these days, and my TV is a conduit for my Xbox. And, more controversially, hypertext performs a recursion on literacy, which means it brings it back, but different. That's a description that gives him a suspicious amount of wiggling room. And I think he gets a little caught up in his revolution; though a little more skeptical than some of his predecessors, it basically falls into the other direction: if it's not utopia, it's dystopia. Anyway, p 705. Next up: Robert Coover's "The End of Books." No recursion, then?
11:53 pm. That was quick. Probably because it was four pages long. Coover presents glowing praise of hypertext as the next great medium, and stomps on the corpse of books for a bit. I think this text is most useful as an artifact; it was, as the editors put it, one of the mainstream declarations of the power of hypertext (originally appearing in printed form in The New York Times Book Review). And in terms of Bolter and Grusin's remediation, it would be interesting to study how Coover attempts to remediate the book in favor of hypertext. I guess I can buy the idea that the book is, very slowly, going to go extinct (though probably not in my lifetime); linear storytelling, on the other hand, isn't going anywhere until people stop living linear lives. And that's p 711. Next up, Scott McCloud's "Time Frames." Comic books. Real fun!
12:16. That was fun. And probably the quickest I'll make it through 20 some pages all night. Even the editors here admit that McCloud's techniques for comics don't extend perfectly into new media; maybe they just liked it because it's a cool text--that's my reason. (Okay, and that the juxtaposition of image and text for narrative purpose is relevant to larger issues.) Anyway, this is chapter four of Understanding Comics, which means it's about how time is conveyed in comics, through spacing, motion lines, words, etc. He also looks at how timelessness is conveyed, and how motion is apparent. About the only thing he doesn't cover is nonmotion, AKA stillness. The only reason that popped into my head is that I'm in this comic book reading group, and last time around, one of the members asked how we could tell that the characters in one of the book were photo-based. Well, I answered, because they're clearly posing. But how do we know that? asked the other guy. And I didn't know. And don't know. So: stillness. Mystery for another day. For now: p. 740. Philip E. Agre's "Surveillance and Capture." Longest essay left in the book. But first, a break to watch tonight's Big Bang Theory. What? It's called priorities.
1:26. ...And we're back. Agre's big idea is that we need to replace the surveillance metaphor of Big Brother and Foucaldian panopticons with the capture model, which collects only specific information about people. That is, surveillance is visual, surreptitious, invasive, centralized and state-oriented; capture model applies linguistic metaphors to human behaviors and emphasizes de-centralization. I'm not sure I buy Agre's notion of capture, as it's a little too cozy with computer science artificial intelligence study and computerized notions of information, but Agre is right in pointing out that we need to be aware of how accepting the surveillance model colors our worldview. Onto p. 763. Espen J. Aarseth's "Nonlinearity and Literary Theory." I hope he's going to talk about Dark Castle again.
2:19 am. If you want to dig through my archives, you can probably find my original review of Aarseth's "Cybertext." (It's too late at night for hyperlinks.) All of that basically still stands, and this essay is essentially an abridged version of the terminology he sets up there (which, frankly, makes it a little more readable). As the editors point out, he extends the discussion to more than just hypertext or computer-based texts; he wants to form a terminology for all sorts of nonlinear texts, from a Choose Your Own Adventure to the I Ching. After multiple readings, though, I still don't know the difference between scriptons and textons, except that they're derived from exactly the part of linguistics that gave me conniptions in Andersen's "A Theory of Computer Semiotics." So if anyone could inform me of said difference, I'd be grateful. Moving on: p 783. "Nomadic Power and Cultural Resistance" by the Critical Art Ensemble.
2:53 am. Idea: in the global village, those in power have become nomads, either roaming the world and taking what they want, or retreating to electronic bunkers. In such a world, traditional forms of protest are no longer valid, so the protests must go online. "By whatever means electronic authority is disturbed, the key is to totally disrupt command and control." "A small but coordinated group of hackers could introduce electronic viruses. worms, and bombs into the data banks, programs, and networks of authority, possibly bringing the destructive forces of inertia into the nomadic realm." It only sounds mildly less "Anarchist Cookbook" in context. p 792. "The World-Wide Web" by Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, Ari Luotonen, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, and Arthur Secret. Call me a pessimist, but five writers bodes poorly for an engaging article. Too many cooks, etc. 8 pages left...
3:09 am. Essentially, the essay is an introduction to the web, aimed at an audience of reasonably adept computer users. It's very much an early document, explaining the difference between the web and its competitors, like gopher. I suppose it was included because the editors wanted to end with a sense of history--rather than the sense of immediate, brand new existence often associated with New Media, they deliberately closed with a work that would invoke a sense of the past and history. It's a bold choice. I would have ended with something, you know, interesting, but the ending's the important part.
This was useful. I'll do it again the next time I decide to cram an 800 page anthology into my brain.
More coming later. NO! NO MORE LATER! DONE! DONE!
Later Days.
Ahem.
Person of Consequence welcomes everyone to another round of "I'm finishing this book before I go to bed, dammit." This evening's challenger is "The New Media Reader," by editors Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort.
7:43 pm. Currently, I'm on page 635 of 800, with an essay by Bill Nichols. It seems like he's trying to update Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." And by "seems," I mean, "that's explicitly what he says he's doing," and the title is also a fair give-away: "The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems." Benjamin essentially said that artwork was originally imbued with an aura of authenticity, but that aura vanishes in the age of mechanical reproduction, especially with technology like the cinema and the camera. Nichols is expanding this idea to the computer, with an emphasis on Baudrillard's concept of simulation and psychoanalytic ideas like the masculine gaze and object fetishization.
8:13 Half an hour, and I've finished the essay and made it 8 pages. This bodes poorly.
Nichols actually covers a lot of the ground that, a few years later, Hayles will be covering in "How We Became Posthuman." They both place emphasis on the cyborg, on abstract/material, on blurring computer and life. Hayles gives a less homogeneous, more sustained view of cybernetics, though. Next: supper, (banana red pepper mushroom pizza) then Lynn Hershman's "The Fantasy Beyond Control."
8:41. Tasty, but slight. (The essay, not the food.) Hershman, a digital instillation artist briefly describes some of her works and what she wants to do next. Basically, she uses interactive systems to require the viewer to make choices that reveal his or her engagement with media. p 649, reached. Next up: Pelle Ehn and Morten Kyng on "Cardboard Computers."
9:18. Ehn and Kyng consider the use of the mock-up, and what happens when you make the transition from a cardboard mock-up to a computer model. Coming at it from entirely practical considerations, they reach a conclusion similar to Nichols: the computer blurs the line between model (or mock-up, or simulation) and actual product. The application of Wittgenstein language games seems to work well in this context, and there's a nice "unifying power of computers" sort of rhetoric. I like the idea of the mock-up: it's basically a physical, material object whose only resemblance to the abstract product may be the way we choose to perceive it.
Next: A trip to the other side of Star Wars' past with "The Lesson of Lucasfilm's Habitat" by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer. p 663, and counting.
10:06. Where the hell did that 45 minutes go??? Okay: Habitat. It's essentially an early example of a MMOG, played with all the computational power a Commodore 64 can offer. Which is basically equivalent to your average modern microwave. Two of the designers here comment on their experiences with it, and how they were constantly surprised by what the users came up with. This is the first essay in the book that really moves from the one user, one computer model to the more modern conception of cyberspace. And what's really interesting is that the designers explicitly say that for cyberspace games, the implementation platform is unimportant. Of course, they have an economic reason for stating that; they really want to convince people that cyberspace can be reached on Commodore 64s rather than virtual reality goggles or something. But still, it's the sort of declaration that makes a McLuhanite howl in fury. As things become more abstract (ie., the move from the personal computer in front of you into cyberspace), I think it becomes easier and more convenient to forget the technology involved. And that's page 679. Next up, an excerpt from Jay Bolter's "Writing Space."
10:38. Ok, that's better time. Bolter basically follows the same pattern here that he did in his book with Grusin, "Remediation": he states his theory, then demonstrates it through a series of mediating (pun intended examples). In this case, the theory is that "our writing space has been a hybrid of verbal and pictorial elements" since at least the ancient Greeks, and he goes on to prove it. He starts with the basic element, letters, then moves on to consider the basic form of the electronic page; pictures in text from the illuminated medieval manuscript to the computer form; diagrammatic space, that is, a codified, labeled picture; and the closely related numbering space. It's a book I'm clearly going to have to read for my larger dissertation. And that's page 691. Next up, Stuart Moulthrop, and "You Say You Want a Revolution?". I like that the editors parse the title for the headings: "You Want a Revolution." Yeah, that means the same thing.
11:24 pm. No... how did? Gah. Another 45 minute interval. Okay, quickly: Moulthrop's big question is what a digital revolution would mean, and if we're capable of it. He considers the revolutionary ability of hypertext under the McLuhan Laws of Media: What does it enhance, what does it render obsolete, what does it retrieve that was obsolete, and what does it produce or become when taken to its limits? Hypertext, he declares, renders TV obsolete. Well, in terms of the Internet it certainly does; I watch nearly all my shows online these days, and my TV is a conduit for my Xbox. And, more controversially, hypertext performs a recursion on literacy, which means it brings it back, but different. That's a description that gives him a suspicious amount of wiggling room. And I think he gets a little caught up in his revolution; though a little more skeptical than some of his predecessors, it basically falls into the other direction: if it's not utopia, it's dystopia. Anyway, p 705. Next up: Robert Coover's "The End of Books." No recursion, then?
11:53 pm. That was quick. Probably because it was four pages long. Coover presents glowing praise of hypertext as the next great medium, and stomps on the corpse of books for a bit. I think this text is most useful as an artifact; it was, as the editors put it, one of the mainstream declarations of the power of hypertext (originally appearing in printed form in The New York Times Book Review). And in terms of Bolter and Grusin's remediation, it would be interesting to study how Coover attempts to remediate the book in favor of hypertext. I guess I can buy the idea that the book is, very slowly, going to go extinct (though probably not in my lifetime); linear storytelling, on the other hand, isn't going anywhere until people stop living linear lives. And that's p 711. Next up, Scott McCloud's "Time Frames." Comic books. Real fun!
12:16. That was fun. And probably the quickest I'll make it through 20 some pages all night. Even the editors here admit that McCloud's techniques for comics don't extend perfectly into new media; maybe they just liked it because it's a cool text--that's my reason. (Okay, and that the juxtaposition of image and text for narrative purpose is relevant to larger issues.) Anyway, this is chapter four of Understanding Comics, which means it's about how time is conveyed in comics, through spacing, motion lines, words, etc. He also looks at how timelessness is conveyed, and how motion is apparent. About the only thing he doesn't cover is nonmotion, AKA stillness. The only reason that popped into my head is that I'm in this comic book reading group, and last time around, one of the members asked how we could tell that the characters in one of the book were photo-based. Well, I answered, because they're clearly posing. But how do we know that? asked the other guy. And I didn't know. And don't know. So: stillness. Mystery for another day. For now: p. 740. Philip E. Agre's "Surveillance and Capture." Longest essay left in the book. But first, a break to watch tonight's Big Bang Theory. What? It's called priorities.
1:26. ...And we're back. Agre's big idea is that we need to replace the surveillance metaphor of Big Brother and Foucaldian panopticons with the capture model, which collects only specific information about people. That is, surveillance is visual, surreptitious, invasive, centralized and state-oriented; capture model applies linguistic metaphors to human behaviors and emphasizes de-centralization. I'm not sure I buy Agre's notion of capture, as it's a little too cozy with computer science artificial intelligence study and computerized notions of information, but Agre is right in pointing out that we need to be aware of how accepting the surveillance model colors our worldview. Onto p. 763. Espen J. Aarseth's "Nonlinearity and Literary Theory." I hope he's going to talk about Dark Castle again.
2:19 am. If you want to dig through my archives, you can probably find my original review of Aarseth's "Cybertext." (It's too late at night for hyperlinks.) All of that basically still stands, and this essay is essentially an abridged version of the terminology he sets up there (which, frankly, makes it a little more readable). As the editors point out, he extends the discussion to more than just hypertext or computer-based texts; he wants to form a terminology for all sorts of nonlinear texts, from a Choose Your Own Adventure to the I Ching. After multiple readings, though, I still don't know the difference between scriptons and textons, except that they're derived from exactly the part of linguistics that gave me conniptions in Andersen's "A Theory of Computer Semiotics." So if anyone could inform me of said difference, I'd be grateful. Moving on: p 783. "Nomadic Power and Cultural Resistance" by the Critical Art Ensemble.
2:53 am. Idea: in the global village, those in power have become nomads, either roaming the world and taking what they want, or retreating to electronic bunkers. In such a world, traditional forms of protest are no longer valid, so the protests must go online. "By whatever means electronic authority is disturbed, the key is to totally disrupt command and control." "A small but coordinated group of hackers could introduce electronic viruses. worms, and bombs into the data banks, programs, and networks of authority, possibly bringing the destructive forces of inertia into the nomadic realm." It only sounds mildly less "Anarchist Cookbook" in context. p 792. "The World-Wide Web" by Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, Ari Luotonen, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, and Arthur Secret. Call me a pessimist, but five writers bodes poorly for an engaging article. Too many cooks, etc. 8 pages left...
3:09 am. Essentially, the essay is an introduction to the web, aimed at an audience of reasonably adept computer users. It's very much an early document, explaining the difference between the web and its competitors, like gopher. I suppose it was included because the editors wanted to end with a sense of history--rather than the sense of immediate, brand new existence often associated with New Media, they deliberately closed with a work that would invoke a sense of the past and history. It's a bold choice. I would have ended with something, you know, interesting, but the ending's the important part.
This was useful. I'll do it again the next time I decide to cram an 800 page anthology into my brain.
More coming later. NO! NO MORE LATER! DONE! DONE!
Later Days.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Music Musing: A (Brief?) Return to Proper Blogging Form
On my last post, I quoted at length a method of reading. Essentially, you read until whatever you're reading strikes some sort of a chord with you, and then you go off on a tangent, pursuing whatever line of thought the reading material at hand prompted. I don't actually read like that. When your reading is directed toward a 14 000 page comp exam, you don't time to stop and think about the roses. Although to be fair, I didn't read like that before the comp either. My reading habits tend to pretty linear: you go sentence by sentence, page by page, and the story accumulates around you. My exception is dialogue; I like to think I have an ear for story dialogue. I certainly have a preference for it, since if a work of fiction is getting too descripty for my tastes, I often jump ahead to the next big speech. It does mean that I miss the fine details sometimes (I remember having to go back with Neal Stephenson's Anathem the first time around to find where, exactly, the climax happened, because I pretty much missed it), but it works for me. Honestly, I think I never would have finished Lord of the Rings otherwise.
So the tangential method not how I read books. It is, however, how I listen to music. I'll hear a tune, or a few lines, and my mind will instantly drift off to other things I associate with it: where I listened to that song previously, people I associate with a set of lyrics, other songs that remind me of it, etc. And by the time the drifting is finished, so is the song, and I'm always mildly surprised when I "come to" and something new is playing. The same holds for live performances--not that I've been to many, but of the, uh, one, I've been to, it unfolded in much the same manner. (And to go off on a tangent here, the tangential is also how I listen in general; I learned a long, long time ago that if I'm not taking detailed notes during a lecture, I'm not going to actually learn a damn thing.)
But with most music, I think it makes sense that it's never what I'm focusing on. I listen to it when I'm heading out to the store, or biking to the university, or out for a run. In other words, it's what I do when I'm in transit. And just like the journey is rarely the point of the transition movement, what I'm doing on the transition is rarely the main focus either. So I tend to drift. (I also tend to burst into song, when the mood strikes me, and I manage to convince myself that no one can hear me. Which is rarely the case, especially when I'm on my bike. You know how some people driving forget that other people can see them? Well, when I'm biking, I forget that other people can hear me. Can hear me singing loudly. Oops.)
Normally, this isn't a problem. If you miss a song, you can just go back and hear it again. It started to become a bigger deal when I started with my "books on tape" series. (The proper term, I think, is "audio book"; there's no actual tape, and there hasn't been for quite some time. But "books on tape" sounds better to me.) I thought that the half-hour or so a day I spent in transit could be better spent listening to something edifying. The edification started with Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. It was actually a few days before I realized that not only was I developing a very scattered notion of the plot, I was getting some weird de ja vu as well. After some manual examinations of my playlist, I realized that I had not only put the book on my Ipod three times, which meant that I was getting each chapter three times, I had also set it on shuffle, so I was getting them in a random order. And it took me a few days to notice this. The tangential listening method had been so ingrained that I could have been listening to Metallica lyrics. As long as a prim, middle-aged British woman was reading them out, I'd never had known the difference. From this wonderful experience, I devised a few rules for later book on tape listening:
1. Pick books read by British people. Northanger Abbey experience to the contrary, people with accents that differ minimally from the norm are easier to pay attention to than people with no discernible accent or thick accents.
2. Pick books that are anthologies. Generally, the longer the work, the harder it is to stay focused. A book of short stories is perfect, especially if the length of the story corresponds roughly to the length of your travels. This rule led me to G. K. Chesterton's Club of Queer Trades (which is in the public domain, and can thus be found easily online).
3. Pick books read by their authors, or famous people. The latter makes the book easier to pay attention to, and the former actually might add a dimension. I've heard the argument that listening to a book rather than reading it adds another level of interference between you and the author's "intentions." But if the author is actually reading the book to you, then he or she knows exactly where to place each emphasis and pause, which may actually add to the "authenticity" of the work. (Sorry for the quotation marks, but after a lit theory comp, I can't let either term pass by blithely anymore.)
These three rules led me to Neil Gaiman's M is for Magic, a book of short stories all read by Neil Gaiman. He has a great voice and storyteller ability, which helps a lot. In fact, I imagine there is a direct correlation between the level of the author's resemblance to a story teller as opposed to writer and the level of quality of an audio version of their work. But I'll muse on that some other time.
Later Days.
So the tangential method not how I read books. It is, however, how I listen to music. I'll hear a tune, or a few lines, and my mind will instantly drift off to other things I associate with it: where I listened to that song previously, people I associate with a set of lyrics, other songs that remind me of it, etc. And by the time the drifting is finished, so is the song, and I'm always mildly surprised when I "come to" and something new is playing. The same holds for live performances--not that I've been to many, but of the, uh, one, I've been to, it unfolded in much the same manner. (And to go off on a tangent here, the tangential is also how I listen in general; I learned a long, long time ago that if I'm not taking detailed notes during a lecture, I'm not going to actually learn a damn thing.)
But with most music, I think it makes sense that it's never what I'm focusing on. I listen to it when I'm heading out to the store, or biking to the university, or out for a run. In other words, it's what I do when I'm in transit. And just like the journey is rarely the point of the transition movement, what I'm doing on the transition is rarely the main focus either. So I tend to drift. (I also tend to burst into song, when the mood strikes me, and I manage to convince myself that no one can hear me. Which is rarely the case, especially when I'm on my bike. You know how some people driving forget that other people can see them? Well, when I'm biking, I forget that other people can hear me. Can hear me singing loudly. Oops.)
Normally, this isn't a problem. If you miss a song, you can just go back and hear it again. It started to become a bigger deal when I started with my "books on tape" series. (The proper term, I think, is "audio book"; there's no actual tape, and there hasn't been for quite some time. But "books on tape" sounds better to me.) I thought that the half-hour or so a day I spent in transit could be better spent listening to something edifying. The edification started with Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. It was actually a few days before I realized that not only was I developing a very scattered notion of the plot, I was getting some weird de ja vu as well. After some manual examinations of my playlist, I realized that I had not only put the book on my Ipod three times, which meant that I was getting each chapter three times, I had also set it on shuffle, so I was getting them in a random order. And it took me a few days to notice this. The tangential listening method had been so ingrained that I could have been listening to Metallica lyrics. As long as a prim, middle-aged British woman was reading them out, I'd never had known the difference. From this wonderful experience, I devised a few rules for later book on tape listening:
1. Pick books read by British people. Northanger Abbey experience to the contrary, people with accents that differ minimally from the norm are easier to pay attention to than people with no discernible accent or thick accents.
2. Pick books that are anthologies. Generally, the longer the work, the harder it is to stay focused. A book of short stories is perfect, especially if the length of the story corresponds roughly to the length of your travels. This rule led me to G. K. Chesterton's Club of Queer Trades (which is in the public domain, and can thus be found easily online).
3. Pick books read by their authors, or famous people. The latter makes the book easier to pay attention to, and the former actually might add a dimension. I've heard the argument that listening to a book rather than reading it adds another level of interference between you and the author's "intentions." But if the author is actually reading the book to you, then he or she knows exactly where to place each emphasis and pause, which may actually add to the "authenticity" of the work. (Sorry for the quotation marks, but after a lit theory comp, I can't let either term pass by blithely anymore.)
These three rules led me to Neil Gaiman's M is for Magic, a book of short stories all read by Neil Gaiman. He has a great voice and storyteller ability, which helps a lot. In fact, I imagine there is a direct correlation between the level of the author's resemblance to a story teller as opposed to writer and the level of quality of an audio version of their work. But I'll muse on that some other time.
Later Days.
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