You gotta love poets ...

... with a sense of humour and an undaunted grasp of just how hard it is to get Northerns to settle down to take in some artsy stuff. :-)

Congrats to Robert Budde and company on this any many fronts.

posted by Lynda at 14:55   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments

It starts with...

And ends up with ...

All of which I can live with and keep smiling. :-)

Dru Pagliassotti writes well, too.

posted by Lynda at 07:36   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 2 comments

I love books. I have also spent much of my adult life, to date, contributing to the cultural revolution of the digital era, from my FreeNet work to introducing web-based courses at my university. I watch movies and play video games.

Since I have always done all these things, simultaneously, I never understood the Big Scare about books becoming obsolete. It felt like someone insisting fried eggs would vanish from menus the world over because ice cream was getting too popular. It baffled me.

As I approach my fifties, I finally think I get it. A little bit. But I still think the fear is wrong-headed. How books get produced and sold is changing. Yes, indeed. There are more small presses (as well as big scams) and mass market sales have narrowed down to concentrate, fiercely, on best sellers, to the detriment of diversity. But this may be a good thing for the art form, even if it reduces the income of established writers working for big publishing companies.

The entertainment market is dominated by movies, with games contesting with them for the royal sceptre of maximum profitability. But popular forms of entertainment were always more -- well, popular -- than those that demand more of their audience. So what? Not everything is about being the number-one-most-profitable media. For one thing, books are still the source of most of the best stories that make it into other media in the end. For another, they have things to offer that counterpoint the digital era. Things like permanence vs. transience and complexity vs. the 30-second window for delivering a message. Few people have the luxury of settling down with a good book, maybe, but it is still in that fertile, experiential space, that profound things germinate.

Books will be loved in new ways in the digital era. They can't be aloof and foreboding, as they have sometimes been portrayed. They need to get down off the shelf and out into the world, flowing through book clubs and read aloud at gatherings; reviewed and argued about by more than just professional critics; illustrated and pod-cast; collected and traded; elevated to prominence through bottom-up processes in reading communities and blessed with awards by the literary elite who have a complementary and equally valid role to play; circulated in a variety of forms and imprints; scribbled on in the margins by their readers, but for all the world to see; reacted to in public and treated like friends (or enemies).

In a world in which it is harder and harder to find the right setting for a good, long think about anything, books are one of the few surviving forms of magic able to encompass deep reflection, casting spells that penetrate deeper than the amazing rush of visual spectacle and vicarious thrill of a blockbuster movie. They are different. And appeal to different people. But to proclaim them extinct is as silly as declaring classical music defunct because hip-hop racks up better sales.

I see no quarrel between movies and books. Nor books and games. Except in the ludicrous claims of games, in particular, to be able to out-do literature in the symphony of shaped, emotional experience that a writer builds into a narrative to make it literature. My reaction to such claims is dumbfounded bewilderment, followed by compassion for anyone whose grasp of literature is so shallow that they perceive no more than If/Then branches or a set of programming schema in a work of art, deaf to the orchestration behind the scenes. Rather as if they viewed the point, in Hamlet, as being how to win the duel at the end, or extract information from a ghost.

I would not be sorry to see games replace books that do no more than capture action movies in print. I'd probably play such a game, once. I enjoy playing games. I enjoy role playing, as well, but that is only the training ground for literature (whether realized in movies or in books.) The power of literature is in the orchestration of its layered parts.

Handing every reader a baton won't get you a symphony, although you may inspire one, eventually, by giving a new musician the experience of being in control. In the end, we still need scores created by great artists (as well as great improvisers, as in jazz). Creating games that empower non-musicians to mess around with the raw materials and adding some thematic or emotional elements to those raw materials, is an exciting goal. But not the end of narrative as a self-consciously manipulated art form.

If literature ever does lose its place in the world to admittedly captivating problem-solving exercises without any emotional, moral or artistic validity, in which -- for example -- the death of a character has no meaning beyond being a bit of bad luck, then it will be time for me to start pushing up grass somewhere because the world will no longer make sense. There will be nothing worthwhile to hang onto and believe in anymore.

With any luck, I'll be buried with some good books.

Links of Interest

• 
  A Clash between Game and Narrative by Jesper Juul, IT University of Copenhagen
  


• 
  Is it a Book? A site with essays and discussion centred around the nonlinearity of discourse in pre-print, print and post-print eras.

posted by Lynda at 09:21   permalink comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments