|
|
(Note: since publishing the original version of this essay, I received two extremely nasty, insulting comments from people I don’t know. Rather than publish the comments – because the vitriol in them is not something I care to have cluttering up my blog – I’m revisiting the essay to attempt to clarify my original point, conceding that the imagery I chose to use in the original post was too easy for critics to lambast instead of considering the real point of the piece. What follows is a revised version of the essay; the original has been taken down.)
When I was younger, I reacted passionately and negatively against what I perceived to be Harold Bloom’s staggering heights of pretension and arrogance, setting himself up as the canon-keeper, looking down his nose and sniffing disdainfully at all those things I loved that wouldn’t even begin to measure up to his impossibly elitist ideals. He was the über-snob, the Platonic ideal of everything that I hated in the worst of my undergraduate professors, the mascot of the asinine out-of-touch Old Guard that represented everything I despised in traditional English Literature. I was a lousy teenager when it came to rebellion, a miserable failure as a punk of any sort – I wasn’t terribly interested in the Ramones, the Rolling Stones or the Sex Pistols, I was more interested in Counting Crows, U2 or R.E.M. – but when it came to literature, by God was I pissed off by these stony-faced buffoons. Reigning atop this bilious pile of condescension and loathing was, of course, Harold Bloom.
Now, I see videos like this one, and… Well. It’s hard to keep a hardened heart against someone who so eloquently communicates his love for language and poetry, for the art of text. There’s something sweet in his smile here, in the way his hands tremble when reciting verses. Thirtysomething me watches Bloom and wonder if in fact I was wrong, if I somehow missed the point.
Then again… I just did a quick search, and discovered that I’m not alone in my disgust for Bloom’s narrow-mindedness. Neil Gaiman considers Bloom a twerp for his take on audiobooks, as well as Bloom’s condescension towards Stephen King. That latter link contains a perfect example of Bloom’s pretentiousness:
The decision to give the National Book Foundation’s annual award for “distinguished contribution” to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I’ve described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer, on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.
The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller. By awarding it to King, they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat. If this is going to be the criterion in the future, then perhaps next year the committee should give its award for distinguished contribution to Danielle Steel, and surely the Nobel Prize for literature should go to J.K. Rowling.
What’s happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale bookstore and bought and read a copy of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character “stretched his legs.” I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling’s mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.
But when I wrote that in a newspaper, I was denounced. I was told that children would now only read J.K. Rowling, and I was asked whether that wasn’t, after all, better than reading nothing at all? If Rowling was what it took to make them pick up a book, wasn’t that a good thing?
It is not. “Harry Potter” will not lead our children on to Kipling’s “Just So Stories” or his “Jungle Book.” It will not lead them to Thurber’s “Thirteen Clocks” or Kenneth Grahame’s “Wind in the Willows” or Lewis Carroll’s “Alice.”
Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, “If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King.” And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read “Harry Potter” you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.
Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I’m 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I’ve seen the study of literature debased. There’s very little authentic study of the humanities remaining.
Bloom wrote this essay, “For the World of Letters, It’s a Horror”, for the Los Angeles Times in 2003. Back then, I was furious when I read it, and denounced Bloom as an elitist asshole that had somehow mistakenly been given the keys to determining “what’s worth reading”. Now, with more years of distance between me and being a student, the experience of having attended multiple academic conferences on comics and video games and film and other popular media, having been a grad student at MIT looking at the evolution of media and storytelling and having given quite a few academic lectures myself… Now I see Bloom as something else, as the defender of a particular religion that may require defending or else it will simply disappear. I see him as loving that which he is defending, but that which he is defending is not a thriving, living thing but something to be studied and analyzed and understood – then replaced in the museum where it is stored, safely away from the day-to-day vibrancy of the contemporary arts scene. I suppose writing this will come back and bite me in the ass someday when I wish to teach at a more traditional institution, but there is so much vibrancy, so much life to be found in the areas Bloom wouldn’t dare to explore, much less enjoy, that I can’t quite bring myself to care any more.
Bloom has plenty to say, but all of it should be taken with a grain of salt. It’s like listening to a doddering great-grandparent telling stories from their cracked old chair, reeking of pipe smoke and linament and decay. The stories can be excellent, providing a window into a bygone era – but they can also be touched with the racism and sexism that ran rampant back in their youth. These stories can still provide insight, as long as one can separate the wheat of the insight from the chaff of the resentment at being left behind.
Further, what strikes me as particularly onerous about Bloom’s condescension now (with these few extra years’ worth of perspective) is how dull it is. The field of writing has always been bifurcated into high and low art, and just like every other art form, low art exponentially outsells high art, and the high artists bemoan the unfairness of it all. I’d argue there is more reading being done now than in decades, what with the advent of the Internet and the explosion of content through websites, e-books, and so on. It’s true that America is suffering from a toxic, potentially fatal overdose of anti-intellectualism, but it’s also true that characters like Bloom have only their own snobbishness to blame. When intellectuals place themselves so gleefully and disdainfully out of touch with what gives the majority of the people joy, they set themselves up for a fall. That’s one of the reasons I long to teach, and when I teach whenever I can – to get students to not abandon that which they love (which is what the worst of my own English Literature professors did to me) but to love it more thoughtfully, to embrace a kind of playful thinking that will turn them not into ossified, out-of-touch intellectuals, but vibrant, full-of-life intellectuals that will continue to shape the future and foster further joy as long as they live. For even art evolves, as it must if it is to stay alive and relevant, and there are degrees of art, all (well, most) of which can and should be celebrated.
Perhaps this is why it’s hard to rectify the joyful, literature-loving Bloom in the video up top with the condescending, scornful Bloom in the pull quote. If Bloom had spent his life fostering love for literature instead of spewing such pretentious bile, he would have had a much broader impact and have done much, much more good in the world. This, I believe, is why I adore Umberto Eco so much – he captures so much love and joy and playfulness in his essays, especially compared to Bloom. When I am an old man, I hope to be the joyful old soul that shows kids what happiness there is to be found in imagination, innovation and art, not the hateful, cantankerous monster shaking his cane at progress. To be an Eco, not a Bloom. Or, at the very least, to be the Bloom expounding his loves, not the Bloom decrying the loves of others.
Found this on my Comix-Scholars mailing list. I can’t make it to Puerto Rico next year, but maybe one of you can?
CFP: ASA Panel 2012 – Transmedia Empires: The Impact of Transmedia Storytelling on the Paradigm of Empire and Resistance
The ASA Annual Meeting
San Juan, Puerto Rico
November 15-18, 2012
Abstracts Due: 2011-11-20
At the turn of the 21st century, corporate consolidation, technological advances, and new attitudes towards and among audiences caused an explosion in a phenomenom known as transmedia. In transmedia, popular “franchises†(such as Harry Potter, The Matrix, comic book superhero “universes,†etc.) expand across and between various media in a process of fleshing out a property so as to increase both sales and communicative possibilities. With the advent of this “convergence culture,†as Henry Jenkins calls it, media forms are now linked more closely than ever before as the boundaries between them become as porous and fluid as the international circulation of ideas. This has given rise not only to transmedia narrative, but also, according to Jenkins, to, “transmedia branding, transmedia performance, transmedia ritual, transmedia play, transmedia activism, and transmedia spectacle.â€
Scholars, agents, marketers, corporate executives, and a host of other interested parties and stakeholders have all begun to explore this topic. However, in this flurry of ink, relatively few authors have considered the transnational ramifications of the transmedia moment. How does the new interconnectedness of media influence our thinking about the relationships between nations and peoples? Does transmedia offer new opportunities for the subaltern to be heard, or does it merely reassert or strengthen existing power imbalances?
Transmedia is a fluid concept, and we invite contributors to make full use of this fluidity in their work, exploring any and every aspect of the phenomenon. Papers might explore such issues as:
- The way transmedia franchises mirror the structures of colonization and domination
- The use of transmedia by marginalized groups to tell their stories
- The use of transmedia stories by corporations and conglomerates to attract new international audiences
- The ways in which transmedia franchises have influenced, shaped, and/or bypassed both domestic politics and international relations
- The creation of new possibilities for identity formation via transmedia
- The use of transmedia iconography for subversive purposes
Please send 250 word abstracts by November 15 to Andrew J. Friedenthal and Andrew Hamsher, Dept. of American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, andrewfriedenthal@gmail.com and ahamsher17@gmail.com.
September 27, 2011
6:36 pm
I’m writing this on Liwet, my silver sliver of a laptop (a 2011 MacBook Air that I bought for the precise purpose of grabbing writing time in strange places) while seated behind the wheel of my car, waiting for the ferry to shove off from Edmonds and cross the sound over to Kingston. I’ve got Imogen Heap’s Eclipse on the stereo, and I’ve just discovered I’m three scant days older than Heap. That might have something to do with how much I enjoy her unique style of work. Perhaps something was up with the moon that week.
This morning I put Laura the Wifeâ„¢ on a plane to Ohio, where she is throwing a baby shower for her sister. If everything goes according to plan, I’ll be an uncle for the first time right around Thanksgiving, which is both odd and kind of cool for the kid. Although it’s rough to have your birthday dominated by a holiday (turkey and birthday cake every year?), it’s also rather a perk for everyone to be on vacation for your birthday. I’m hoping the kid shows up at least after November 22nd. This family needs more Sagittarians. (Sagittarii? Sagittariuses?)
Anyway, this temporary reversion to bachelorhood is weird. I’d been making a list of things to do for weeks once I had the place to myself (play Deus Ex and Gears of War 3 until the wee hours of the morning! Eat an entire box of Count Chocula!) but now that I’m actually on my own, I feel more unmoored than anything else. So far the most adventurous thing I’ve done is spend the better part of an hour wandering around a Half-Price Books – and I didn’t even buy anything. I am apparently growing dull in my old age.
Still, there are some things I might try to crank up while I have this focus time. Prep for the Fall 2011 Lecture Circuit! Do some more writing! Catch up on work! Record an album of esoteric, Heap-esque music! Finish off some long, long, long-overdue projects! Achieve Inbox Zero!
First up, though: the video games. Or maybe one of the horror movies The Wife refuses to watch with me. Then the video games. Hey, it’s research.
How long until The Wife comes home again…?
September 8, 2011
7:45 pm
Autumn 2011 is going to see me on a lot of planes. On October 4th, I’ll be a guest lecturer in Henry Jenkins’ transmedia storytelling class at USC (see Henry’s full syllabus here – I am honored to be among some amazing presenters, and I would kill to take that class), and then I’ll be presenting for the second time at GDC Online (which used to be GDC Austin) in the Game Writing track October 10-13. Then, at the end of the month, I’ll be part of a panel discussion at the first-ever Storyworld Conference in San Francisco, which is shaping up to be amazing. November’s much more tentative, but it looks like I might be giving another talk in Vancouver, and perhaps flying up to Boston to hang out at the Futures of Entertainment 5 conference if time allows. Come say hello if you’ll be around!
In other news, the new car (which we named Samwise, since it’s small, reliable, and the best traveling companion anyone could hope for) is absolutely amazing, and we’ve put over 2000 miles on him in the month-and-change that we’ve had him around. The day job has me hopping, working on things that I can’t tell anyone about but are going to turn some serious heads in the next couple of years. All this and I’m still trying to steal time to write and do other creative work during my long commute and in any spare moments I can carve out. In short, life is good – intensely busy, but very, very good.
Yesterday Laura and I finally pulled the trigger on something we’ve been thinking about for a very, very long time: our first-ever new car.
 I’ve been fantasizing about this literally for years. I’ve never owned a new car – I’ve always been blessed with a long string of free or close-to-free cars, hand-me-downs from a father for whom the term “car enthusiast” falls way short. At one point, I think Dad owned 40 cars in various stages of disrepair and disassembly, scattered across our barn, my grandparents’ barn, the barn at the company where Dad worked, my grandmother’s detached garage… At one time or another, “Fred’s Fleet” has included everything from a forklift to a 1940s American La France fire engine. I myself learned to drive on a WWII Willy’s Jeep, in which one had to turn the key and then push a button on the dashboard to start the engine. Dad’s passion has always been for finding interesting old cars in junkyards (or, more recently, on eBay), dragging them home from far-flung parts of the country, fixing them up, selling them for a modest profit and then restarting the cycle. I’ve benefited greatly from all of this (thanks, Dad!) by getting to drive, at various points of the last 16 years:
- WWII Willy’s Jeep
- Chevy Citation
- Ford Escort hatchback
- Ford Thunderbird
- Ford Taurus (1 of 2)
- Ford Taurus (2 of 2)
- 198x Mercedes Benz
Of these, the last was far and away my favorite, but when Laura and I linked up back in Boston her Ford Escort (itself a hand-me-down from her own family) became our primary vehicle. Alas, the mechanic’s skill is not a hereditary gene, and since I haven’t lived within short driving distance of my parents’ place in Ohio for fifteen years and it’s highly unlikely I’ll have the spare time anytime soon to learn how to do anything past the most basic auto repairs (e.g., replacing a burnt-out taillight), it’s well worth the extra cash to buy a set of wheels with a really, really nice warrantee. Add to that the knowledge that whatever I buy I’m planning to drive for at least a decade (our current car is coming up on 15, and the poor thing’s wheels are about to fall off), I knew I wanted to buy something I’d still love to be driving in 2021. Something classy, something fun, something with personality (my personal backlash against driving two Tauruses in a row, not-that-I’m-not-grateful-Dad), something big enough to be useful as a family car but small enough to have a huge MPG.
Enter the MINI Countryman.
I’ve loved the MINI for years. I’ve had a little red Burago 1:18 model MINI Cooper on my desk for a decade or so, my favorite author has owned (and blogged about owning) one since 2007, and another of my industry beacons bought damn near the one I had my eye on just a few weeks ago. Alas, when I first tried to sit in a Cooper I was crestfallen, because as a six-foot, two-hundred-and-*coughcough*-pound man, I don’t fit in a Cooper very well. When I first heard they were introducing an SUV, I was ecstatic. I stalked the development of that car mercilessly on MINI sites like motoringfile.com, started bugging our friendly neighborhood MINI dealer (in our case, the one in Tacoma – and yes, I know there’s also one in Seattle, but we made friends with the guys in Tacoma first) back in October or November of 2010, demanding to know when they’d have one on the lot. I carefully and politically and graciously outlined all the reasons why I wanted this car to my dear, sweet, loving and ever-patient wife, and she eventually consented to test-driving one, and didn’t hate it. I then spent months crunching the numbers and playing with the Configurator at miniusa.com and got all the paperwork in order…
…And yesterday we went down to Tacoma and finally placed the order.
Now comes the waiting, and as any Tom Petty fan will tell you, that’s the hardest part. Sucker will take about two months to build, so it’ll be here right around the end of July. It’s going to be a long two months, not least because our current car is giving us fits and because I’ve got wanderlust something fierce. We’ve explored a good chunk of Seattle in the last year, and now I want to go take some weekend trips without worrying about whether the car will die an ignoble death on the way home. I want to go see more of Canada, more of the Washington coast, more of the small towns and countryside and so on and so forth. To say that I can’t wait is an understatement. (Man, I thought it was hard to wait for a laptop to get built and delivered!)
So, yes. New car. MINI Countryman Cooper S All4, in Oxford green with a black roof, complete with MINI Connected on-board computer system (of course). Expect a very excited update when the thing arrives!
…And that’s why the secret of the universe is a combination of quantum entanglement, interpersonal relationships and the square root of 1,764.
What’s that? The signal cut out? Oh, how embarrassing. Sorry about that – let me try and catch you up.
Over a year ago, I posted that 2010 would be different. Boy, I couldn’t have been more right about that – just not in the ways that I’d predicted. It’s been a long time coming, but I’m finally bringing this blog (and perhaps the rest of this site) back from the Great Beyond. I’ve got a lot to talk about, but even more that I can’t talk about, which is why this site’s been so abandoned. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.1
From MIT to Microsoft
The first change is that I’m no longer at my dear, beloved MIT. In the fall of 2009, the Convergence Culture Consortium was hosting its fourth Futures of Entertainment conference in Cambridge. I was there as an alumni researcher, moderating a panel discussion on the (now sadly defunct) Purefold project from Ag8. Afterwards, two very nice gentlemen came up to me and asked, “You’re Geoffrey Long, aren’t you?” Before I knew it, we were engaged in a vibrant conversation about the future of entertainment, technology, and how the two were destined to collide.
As it turns out, those two gentlemen were from Microsoft, and in the spring of 2010 I was offered a position in a small think tank working for J Allard, the creative mastermind behind the Xbox 360. My wife Laura and I packed up our things, bid a tearful farewell to all our loved ones at MIT, and set off for the West Coast. Before long we had found a really lovely turn-of-the-last-century farmhouse on Bainbridge Island, just a short ferry ride away from my office in downtown Seattle, and I was learning the strange, arcane language and practices of a Fortune 100 company with 90K employees. For obvious reasons I can’t talk about precisely what I’ve been up to at Microsoft, but I can honestly say that my time here has been the most intensely educational period of my life. The old joke is that an MIT education is like drinking from a firehose, but after graduation I discovered that working at MIT was even worse – and working at Microsoft is frequently like being strapped to a rocket, handed a canoe paddle, and told to steer as you’re fired off into the atmosphere. Since my arrival in April of 2010, I’ve met more amazing people, had more brilliant conversations, and found myself in more unimaginably fantastic situations than ever before, and things are still getting crazier. (Most days, in a good way.) I’m now part of an experimental new team in Microsoft Game Studios, where I’ve been tasked with putting all these theories into practice to build the next generation of entertainment franchises. To say I’m having a blast would be putting it mildly.
The downside to this past year is that the same thing that got me this job – my public work in the transmedia space – was largely put on hold. Although I’ve been doing amazing things, I can’t talk about any of them, or at least not yet. That’s starting to change, which is why I’m bringing this blog (and largely the rest of this website) back from the beyond, so it can serve as an occasional research notebook and journal, the role it had played in my life from – jeez – its original beginnings sometime in (I think) 2001. I should find that out; it would be fun to celebrate a 10-year anniversary for this blog, even given its long absences like this past one.
Who Blogs Anymore?
I’ll admit that another appeal of returning to the blog world is that it’s no longer hip to be a blogger. All the cool kids now seem like they’re just using Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and so on. While I have accounts on most of those services (although not a Tumblr blog yet, come to think of it) there’s something pleasantly old-school about having my own simple journal at my own top-level domain. Further, the people who are still blogging are folks that are really passionate about it, and are doing great things. I miss hanging out with those folks, engaging in that dialogue. I’m sorry I was gone from the party so long, guys – I may not be a regular anymore, but I’ll at least try to show up at the reunions.
For that matter, I’d also like to get back to doing more playful things with this site. Although I’ve been doing a ton of writing this past year, there are a lot of tools in my mental toolbox that have grown sadly rusty. With a little luck this site can be a place where I can knock some of that rust off, and get back to doing some of the stuff I really love. It’s weird that I now have to be so mindful of my affiliation with Microsoft, and so I should be clear:
This site is my personal site, and the opinions and creations and so on and so forth that appear at this site are mine and mine alone, not my employer’s.
The lame pictures of our cats are mine, the lousy poetry is mine, the jaw-droppingly awful music is mine. I’m sure I’ll have to draft up some kind of disclaimer text to run somewhere here too – and I should probably draw up some text for my new workmates and professional contacts who find this site saying something along the lines of, “Yes, I do this stuff too. I really am this lame.” Or something like that. After all, the only way to get less lame is to be constantly improving your work, and one of the best motivations for improving quickly is to do that work in public.
Finally, on a behind-the-scenes note, all of this will give me a chance to kick the tires of WordPress. I started out using Blogger, then switched to Movable Type and happily used that for years and years, but now that Movable Type has turned into something largely unrecognizable I’ve finally made the switch over to WordPress. I should have done this a long time ago, I’ll admit – it’s weird to think that this piece of software that powers so much of the Web now was created by a guy I was hanging out with at SXSW less than a decade ago. Good on ya, Matt – all the accolades you’ve racked up since then are well deserved.
So, yes. Geoffreylong.com is (kindasorta) back. And yes, I lied about it turning white. I was going to turn white, and then I decided that was just too eye-searingly bright. (As they say on the t-shirts, “Come to the dark side. We have cookies.”)
Now, who’s willing to bet me twenty bucks it’ll be 2012 before I post another update…?
Postscript. Yes, I know some things are broken around here. Apologies. I’ll fix them sometime in 2014.
This is one of my favorite times, the liminal space between one year and the next. For most people, this time for intense thinking and planmaking runs from Christmas through New Year’s, but at MIT this period is extended through the beginning of February. (Yet another reason I love it so much here at MIT.)
According to MIT tradition, January is what’s known as the Independent Activities Period, or IAP – originally founded (according to legend) in the 1960s as a way for students to take off and protest the Vietnam War all at once, instead of disappearing for random weeks out of the year. IAP has since evolved into a sort of micro-semester crammed in between the autumn semester and the spring semester, a month set aside for students (and faculty and staff) to enroll in courses they might not otherwise have a chance to take, to go off and tackle an externship somewhere, or to simply recuperate from MIT’s normal grueling demands. (Another local legend likens an MIT education to drinking from a fire hose, which is truer than might be comfortable. This is, not coincidentally, why my friend Eitan named his new startup Firehose Games.)
I love this time not just for its interstitial nature, but because of the time it affords for reflection and planning. Years ago I launched a personal initiative called the Personal Improvement Project, or PIP (no relation to Fallout 3’s pip-boy 3000, although I’m half-expecting a real one of those to show up at CES this week). This is the time of year when I mourn all the stuff I didn’t get done in the previous year, and plan furiously for ways to achieve more of those goals in the year ahead. 2009 was a wonderful year, a crazy year, productive in ways I hadn’t planned for, but, alas, rather unproductive in the ways that I had. Read the classics? Not so much. Get out of debt? Yeah, no. Get back in shape? Hells naw. To a certain extent, that’s the nature of the universe – life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans, man plans and God laughs, yadda yadda yadda.
This year, though? This year things are going to be different.
What Happened?
First, why did things go so wobbly in 2009?
For starters, in 2009 I got married. In 2010, I’m not getting married. This should help. Don’t get me wrong – I loved getting married, but I love being married much more. For starters, being married is much cheaper than getting married. Further (and, perhaps, better), it’s much less stressful. These are two hallmarks of a good marriage – if being married is cheaper and less stressful than getting married, you’re doing something right. (Note that this most likely ceases to apply once kids become involved.)
Second, in 2010 I was racing like mad to prepare for applying for Ph.D. programs at the end of the year. Again, not so much. I finally wound up postponing applying to Ph.D programs for another year, which was an intensely difficult decision to make (at this rate, I won’t be Dr. Long until I’m in my 40s), but it was the right thing to do. Being a grad student is a wonderful state of existence, but it’s not a very lucrative one, and stepping right into that after just investing a bunch of money in my wedding was going to be a nightmare. So, the whole doctorate project is going to have to be pushed back until the fall of 2011 or even 2012.
Third, I took on a lot in 2009. Not just the wedding (although that was big enough), but also a whole mess of travel (Singapore, Germany, Los Angeles, Brazil, Pittsburgh, Austria, Florida, San Francisco…!), joined the Executive Board of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, took on a whole mess of projects at work (including writing my first video game) and am now in the middle of launching Playful Thinking, a new series of short game studies books published by the MIT Press which I’m co-editing with William Uricchio and Jesper Juul. Woof.
So, yes – all of this meant that life in 2009 was hectic as hell, and didn’t leave a lot of time for reading, exercise, and not spending money on plane tickets. Fortunate or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it – but not at all a bad thing!
It’s a new year now, though, and I’m reconsidering a number of the decisions I made in 2009. (Not the marriage. I’m keeping that one.) Primarily, this year I’m planning to buckle down and do a lot less traveling for conferences. I may do some more traveling for my consulting work (which is directly tied to the whole paying-off-debt thing) but for the most part I think this is the year I really need to write. On a larger scale, though, if you’ll permit me to swipe and modify a line from Hollywood, it’s starting to feel like 2010: The Year We Make Contact Up.
Need A Little Time To Make Up
The primary meanings of the phrase “make up” deal with either imagination or reparation, which is why this is such a timely phrase right now – and in some kind of weird micro-macro fractal reflection, this applies not just to me, but for all of us, particularly us Americans. For me it’s going to be a year of writing (imagination) and paying down debts (reparation), but the whole world is going to have to use 2010 as a year of great imagination and reparation while we reimagine what the next wave of existence is going to be like, and as we pay off the disastrous debts we’ve incurred during the previous wave.
Right now, it feels like pretty much the whole damn planet is wondering the same things. What is the post-recessionary global economy going to be like? Is it reliant upon new energy sources and green-collar jobs? Is it a post-oil existence? Will America decline while other countries ascend? Will our new planetary society be more of a global village, will it be more hyperlocalized – or is it, in some weird anti-Venn diagram, simultaneously increasingly both? (Based on what I’ve been seeing during my travels, that gets my vote.)
Those of us in the media industries are worrying about slightly different things. How will the combination of recessionary economics and new technology change the media universe? (I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Borders’ nosedive and the well-intentioned, if ill-executed, Barnes and Noble nook.) Further, in the 21st century, does ‘digital’ still have any great meaning? What happens when we push past that – what is ‘post-digital’, and what will post-digital media, entertainment and storytelling be like? One of the things that excites me about transmedia and comparative media studies is that they may be inherently post-digital; we no longer get so hung up on the explicit divide between the analog and the digital, but examine the unique advantages and affordances of each, which enables us to capitalize upon these features as they increasingly blend together – which sure seems to be the way we’re going.
Profitability Sustainability Is King
One thing I wonder a lot about right now is whether the twenty-teens (damn, that sounds odd) will see a shift away from rampant profiteering and ridiculous, irresponsible spending and towards not just repaying our debts, but towards aiming for simpler, more sustainable levels of existence. One thing I’ve been wondering about for a long time is, simply, How much is enough? How does the cost of living in one part of the world compare to another? (I’m somewhat astonished to see that Boston isn’t included in Mint.com’s map of the world’s most expensive cities.) How much is a house really worth? How much is a thought really worth, or an experience, or one’s reputation? How do we handle value in an experience economy, or a reputation economy? (For some insight into the latter, check out the Whuffie Bank, where you can find me at my usual handle.)
What is a model for sustaining a good, solid lifestyle with a decent amount of enjoyment, a relatively high standard of living, a sufficient amount of thought and reflection, a decent reputation, and so on?
It may be me thinking about these things because I’m in my early thirties now and am obsessing over things like families and houses and careers and so on, but it’s clear that the 21st century models of success are not the same as the 20th century models. Do you have to have Gaimanesque levels of success as an artist to have a nice house and writing studio in the American midwest? Do you need to go all Hollywood and make ridiculous piles of cash to “make it”? Plus, what’s an unsustainable business model for guys like me now? My model has always been to hit the trifecta of consulting-writing-academic, but given today’s hyperaccelerated demands, is that still sustainable?
It’s possible that the proper response (the “mind like water” response for you GTD-heads out there) to our current scenario is “less is more”, or, to put it another way, “less is more sustainable.” On my way into campus this morning, there was an episode of The Diane Rehm Show on WGBH where (I think) Allen Sinai, the chief global economist and president of Decision Economics, bluntly stated that we Americans have to get used to a lower standard of living. I think he may be right – as Trevor Butterworth and his ‘slow word’ manifesto, the ‘slow food’ movement, and scores of others seem to be indicating, we are on the brink of a society throwing up its hands and surrendering to the impossibility of the ever-increasing demands for more, more, more. The recession may be an overcorrection to the fiscal irresponsibilities of the last decade, but it may also be a chance for many of us to catch our breath and rethink what “enough” means to all of us. You don’t need a McMansion to be successful, but you do need enough to live comfortably and, hopefully, put your kids through college. So what does that cost now? How do you get it? And how do you get it without going insane?
Making Up Is Hard To Do
Anyway, that’s what I think 2010 (and maybe 2011 and even 2012) will be all about – more so than ever before, at both the micro and macro levels. How do we make up new answers to these questions, and how do we make up enough for our previous errors and indulgences to return to a more stable and sustainable footing? It’s not going to be easy, but that’s, again, the nature of the universe.
But life is good. And even if things get crazy, life gets better. Here’s to a wonderful 2010 for each and every one of us. Onward and upward!
 It’s been something I’ve waffled over doing ever since I first joined up with GAMBIT. Should I? Shouldn’t I? It’s a lot of money, the ROI is somewhat questionable, but… But… Finally, yesterday the stars aligned, the proper slot machine tumblers of fate finally clunked into place, I was in the right place and the right time, and I found myself slapping my credit card down to buy a shiny new Sony PlayStation Portable, AKA the PSP.
What were the factors? I’m so glad you asked.
Research. I’ve been considering the PSP as a great platform for transmedia extensions for a while now, but the release of Assassin’s Creed II: Bloodlines as a PSP-only narrative bridge between the Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed II console games clinched the deal. Throw in the PSP-exclusive Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core and the upcoming Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep and this reason hit #1 with a bullet.
Timing. Call it a near-miss of synchronicity: not only do I turn 32 on Sunday, but yesterday was the PlayStation’s 15th birthday. This is making me feel both old and nostalgic; the fact that I can buy Final Fantasy VII at all for the PSP is awesome, but I vividly remember being a freshman in college and having my socks knocked off by my friend Kurt’s shiny new copy of Final Fantasy VII. What can I say? I wanted to give myself a birthday present, and so I gave Sony a birthday present of my money.
Curiosity. Discovering the existence of a cradle for the PSP made me imagine using the PSP as an always-on Internet appliance. I’ve been looking at things like the tiny little Mimo USB-driven minidisplays and the new Chumby One as small Internet-enabled devices, functioning as simple kiosks for things like Flickr and Twitter.
So now I have my very own PSP-3000, courtesy of the PSP 3000 Limited Edition Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines Entertainment Pack. It’s a strange color, described by Sony as ‘pearl white’. This is something of a misnomer; I was expecting something kind of irridescent, like, well, a pearl. It isn’t. Instead, the thing glitters. It’s not that bad, especially when it’s in a relatively low-light situation, but when the sun hits it just right, the sucker glitters like goddamned Edward. (Yes, I went there.) Again, it’s not that bad, but I’m admittedly considering buying some kind of leather sheath for the device to man it up a little.
I haven’t gotten to play the game very much yet, but so far my expectations for this device as a pocket computer have been coming down on the wobbly side. It’s not entirely Sony’s fault; I’ve been a heavy iPhone user since its initial release, so many of my expectations for what a portable device can and should be have been notably skewed – but when I started playing with the PSP, I realized that I had completely taken for granted that I’d be able to obtain some kind of dedicated Twitter app for this thing. Not only is that only apparently not the case (at least without hacking the device and installing some alternate form of OS, perhaps) but the experience of typing on this beast has been so utterly execrable that the very thought of attempting to write on this thing for even 140 characters at a time makes my ass twitch. Even attempting to pull up the Twitter site on a PSP is a groanworthy undertaking – not only is the browser astonishingly slow, but the wi-fi connection must be reestablished every time you launch it. This makes sense at some level – switching the wi-fi on and off as needed is a logical way to extend battery life – but asking me which of my established networks it wants me to to connect to every time is ridiculous, especially when the two choices are the network here on campus and the network at home. One simple bit of automated checking would have removed this annoyance: if one network is available and the other isn’t, don’t ask.
Another aspect of this thing which is distinctly odd is the sensation of having a spinning piece of physical media in the back of the device, and almost no on-deck storage. Again, this is almost certainly the result of being an early adopter of the iPhone and a very, very late adopter of the PSP, but I was somewhat amazed that I couldn’t install my copy of Bloodlines to some kind of internal drive and then retire the Universal Media Disc (UMD). True, I can’t do that with my Nintendo DS, either, but for some reason I thought of the PSP as a more forward-thinking device. Ha.
In fact, for a brief little while after first popping the UMD into the device I seriously considered taking the thing back and getting a PSP Go instead – and this is despite the litany, or even cacophony, of utterly disastrous reviews that have been lambasting the Go. As Ars Technica’s Ben Kuchera so devastatingly advised Sony, “when your older, cheaper hardware is better and more able than your new offering, you need to fire some designers”. Ouch.
So why was I even considering swapping the PSP-3000 for a PSP Go? First, I’m a design junkie, and the Go’s slider-style industrial design is very sexy. Second, I’m also a digital downloads enthusiast – I can’t remember the last time I bought a CD, and my physical Netflix discs have been sitting on the shelf gathering dust ever since Netflix Streaming arrived – and the PSP’s digital-download only model is, in the abstract, incredibly attractive to me. Plus, the PSP Go is smaller, and as I noted in an earlier post, recent health issues have made me start to seriously reconsider how much junk I’m willing to carry around on a daily basis. If I’m going to add another device to my satchel, it’d better weigh as little as possible.
Still, the naysayers on the Go have me convinced. The fact that Sony’s digital download versions are more expensive than the physical versions is a deal-killer, amplified by the fact that I can’t buy heavily-discounted used UMDs and rip them into playable digital versions the way I might buy some used CDs and rip them into perfectly servicable MP3s. Sony also backed off on a planned trade-in program swapping physical media for digital versions, so UMDs and the PSP Go will apparently never get along – and since Crisis Core isn’t available on for digital downloading yet, then 25% of the games driving me to buy a PSP at all just went away. (That number jumps up to a full one third given that Birth by Sleep isn’t out yet.) I’m clearly a Square-Enix fan, as 75% of my PSP game wishlist are Squeenix games, but God knows I’m not the only one. Sony’s managed to get Squeenix to put FFVII on their digital download service and (I think) the Final Fantasy-themed brawler Dissidia (itself a chimera of somewhat dubious genetics), but until Squeenix commits that all its future games will be available for downloading, then owning a PSP Go makes no sense for me.
As it is, this strange little device represents a fascinating new toy to tinker with over the holidays. I’m looking forward to taking it on our honeymoon so I can whack some Templars while en route to Florida, and I’m holding out hope that when I really start tinkering with it I can hack it to do some of the other things I thought it might be able to do out of the box – but I can’t shake the feeling that in this post-iPhone environment, Sony is really missing out by not making those very functions stock. I’d pay a couple extra bucks per function if Sony enabled app downloads on their PlayStation Network, letting me set up my PSP as a kind of Chumby lite. I’d also jump at the chance to buy the PS2’s Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II on it the same way that I can get Final Fantasy VII, but apparently they’re not available yet – or if they will ever be made available at all.
This drives home one of the negative affordances inherent in games as opposed to books, music or (now) even movies: books, music and movies all convert fairly well to portable versions which can be stored on one’s laptop or phone, but console video games are almost completely locked down into one’s living room. The PSP offers a function called ‘remote play’ which was, I believe, designed to address that somewhat, and the screen-to-screen interaction between Assassin’s Creed II on the PS3 and Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines on the PSP is what drove me to switch to the PlayStation versions of the franchise from the Xbox 360 version I have of Assassin’s Creed – but there is still such a very long, long way to go before I can be playing Uncharted 2 on my living room couch, pause the game, run out and jump on a bus to work, then pop open my PSP and continue the game from where I left off. Even taking greatly reduced graphics and other concessions to the form as givens, I feel like this is where we’re heading. The fact that we’re not there yet is slightly annoying – especially as games are attempting to become bigger and bigger components of the media diet of increasingly over-busy adults.
At the end of the day, I’m still fairly happy I bought my PSP, and I’m still looking forward to playing with it. That said, I’m looking forward even more to playing with what comes next, in the hopes that it will do what I hoped this device would do – and, with a little luck, the PSP2 or whatever it’s called will arrive before it has an entirely new set of unrealistic expectations set for it by the rest of the market.
November 30, 2009
9:04 pm
For the past week-and-some-change my old brother-in-arms Nick Bastin has been hanging out at our place, taking an extended vacation here in Boston. In between marathon sessions of Rock Band, Lego Rock Band and Beatles Rock Band (see a trend emerging here?) Nick and I have been debating the issue of netbooks. For the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend, a number of vendors have been slashing their prices on netbooks, bringing them down into impulse-buy range. The one that I was eyeballing, Dell’s Mini 9, is the same beastie that another old brother-in-arms, David Seitzinger, had some luck hacking into a usable 9″ Mac netbook, and although he had a few cautionary words on the experience, I was all set to pull the trigger and order one of those beasties to use as a small word processor when the damn thing sold out. Rats.
Still, it’s just as well – since Apple is apparently doing their best to crush the of-questionable-legality practice of installing Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware, I should probably wait until Apple does release a similar piece of hardware. I could also just use Linux or Windows, but really what I want is something smaller and lighter then my MacBook Pro (or a 12″ MacBook, for that matter) and yet more feature-rich than my iPhone that I can carry around with me and take some of the strain off of my back. For the last few weeks I’ve been limping around due to a pinched nerve of some kind in my leg, and one of the underlying causes for sciatic nerve pain is something wrong with one’s back. This is making me reconsider the wisdom of my shoulder bag – and what it is that I really need.
A Portable Toolkit
For the longest time, I lugged around an absolutely ridiculous amount of hardware. The general idea was that my bag contained a mobile media studio – camera, videocamera, audio recorder, some video game equipment, art supplies, laptop, etc. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve traded portability for power: my digital SLR camera largely sits unused, replaced by a tiny digital Elph; I usually use my laptop more than either desktop machine (and, in fact, my desktop machine at home hasn’t been functional in months); and my portable game devices are getting more use than the ones hooked up in my living room. Unfortunately, I think my back is paying for it.
That’s why I’ve started eyeballing the netbooks. For the next little while, the major thing I need a machine for will be word processing. I’m not using Photoshop anywhere near as much as I used to, and I’m not even using Microsoft Word so much as I am using BBEdit or Scrivener. What I’m considering is using a netbook as a simple portable typewriter, and I’d like to have something super lightweight and super tiny that I could still use my preferred workflow setup on – hence the desire for a Mac netbook, to run BBEdit and Scrivener.
What I really, really want to do is store my documents in the cloud and then access those files from anywhere with a small, yet fully-featured, device. If I could hook a keyboard up to my iPhone and run a Scrivener or BBEdit client on that, I would – but we’re not there yet.
The Best Is Yet To Come?
It’s entirely possible that the best thing for me simply doesn’t exist yet. I’m still absolutely enthralled by the Microsoft Courier prototype tablet that’s been making the rounds. What I love about it is that this monster is essentially a digital Moleskine, replicating the functions of a pocket notebook (note taking, scrapbooking, mindmapping and/or to-do list management) while slotting neatly in between the phone and the primary computer. Although there’s no evidence to support it yet, my suspicion is that the device can be turned sideways and one of the screens becomes an iPhone-esque virtual keyboard. Even if it doesn’t, though, I’d still love to get my hands on one and discover how ti fits into my workflow.
Another experiment I’ve been considering is what kind of a computer could fit into a camera bag. I’ve considered building such a device ever since being squeezed behind a big fat guy on the gruesomely-long plane ride back from Singapore, using either a netbook or a phone of some sort as the CPU and hooking it up to a rollable keyboard and a set of goggles for the visual interface. I’m not sure I’m ready to get all Johnny Mnemonic in public yet, but it would be a neat thing to try out.
Vintage
Another thing I’ve considered is hauling one of my dead laptops out of storage and attempting to Frankenstein something out of that – I have an old PowerBook 1400c that’s begging to be put to some use, and a Lombard that I still consider to be the prettiest chassis Apple’s made in decades – but none of these satisfy the ‘smaller and lighter’ requirement. There’s some real appeal to using something really antiquated and figuring out how to make it suit my needs, but the weight thing is a deal killer. Even a MacBook Air isn’t quite what I’ve got in mind yet.
Something’s Gotta Give
I suppose Apple will have something to announce in 2010, since they’ve got to be feeling the recessionary hurt in their computer division if not the iPod and iPhone divisions, but we’ll see. As I was saying to Nick this week, we’re in the middle of another hardware lull, which is bad timing for the industry. Although nobody’s buying a lot of hardware right now, I suspect I’m not the only one who would find the money to spend if there was something obviously worth spending it on.
Until something gives, though, this is likely to remain just a thought experiment. The problem is a pain but not enough of one yet to warrant spending a ton of money or time to fix it; in another 6-8 months, hopefully something will come a little more clearly into focus. Perhaps the Courier will finally reach the market, or perhaps Apple’s long-brewing entry into this field will be another game changer. In the meantime, I’m keeping an eye on the super sales.
November 19, 2009
8:51 am
In the Boston area tonight for Futures of Entertainment, or a C3-minded local who can’t make it to the conference? This evening from 5-7, the novelist, anthologist and cross-media storyteller Jeff VanderMeer is giving a free, open-to-the-public talk as part of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Colloquium lecture series and the unofficial kickoff to Futures of Entertainment! The talk will last about 45 minutes, after which the anthologist, essayist, NPR commentator and Booktour.com CEO Kevin Smokler will lead the Q&A session.
Here’s the rundown:
Booklife: The Private and the Public in Transmedia Storytelling and Self-Promotion
Jeff VanderMeer with Kevin Smokler
Fictional experiments in emerging media like Twitter and Facebook are influencing traditional printed novels and stories in interesting ways, but another intriguing new narrative is also emerging: the rise of “artifacts” that, although they support a writer’s career, have their own intrinsic creative value. What are the benefits and dangers of a confusion between the private creativity and the public career elements of a writer’s life caused by new media and a proliferation of “open channels”? What protective measures must a writer take to preserve his or her “self” in this environment? In addition to the guerilla tactics implicit in storytelling through social media and other unconventional platforms, in what ways is a writer’s life now itself a story irrespective of intentional fictive storytelling? Examining these issues leads naturally to a discussion on the tension and cross-pollination between the private and public lives of writers in our transmedia age, including the strategies and tactics that best serve those who want to survive and flourish in this new environment. What are we losing in the emerging new paradigm, and what do we stand to gain?
A writer for the New York Times Book Review, Huffington Post, and Washington Post, Jeff VanderMeer is also the award-winning author of the metafictional City of Saints & Madmen, the noir fantasy Finch, and Booklife: Strategies & Survival Tips for 21st-Century Writers. His website can be found at jeffvandermeer.com.
Kevin Smokler is the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic Books) which was a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of 2005. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Fast Company and on National Public Radio. He lives in San Francisco, blogs for the Huffington Post and at kevinsmokler.com, and is the CEO of BookTour.com.
Presented in conjunction with Futures of Entertainment 4.
The event is, again, free and open to the public – registration for Futures of Entertainment is not required. It begins at 5 PM, runs until 7, and is going down at room 4-231 (building 4, room 231) on the MIT campus. Parking on-campus is a little wonky, but there are multiple parking garages around; a better bet is likely to take public transportation. The Red Line in Boston comes straight to Kendall Square, which is right on the edge of the MIT campus. The lecture location is only a few minutes’ walk from there.
 Jeff is currently on tour supporting his new book Booklife, which he describes as “a unique writing guide to sustainable careers and sustainable creativity, the first to fully integrate discussion of the role of new media into topics that have always been of interest to writers”. I just finished reading my copy this afternoon and I can personally testify that it’s full of a wide range of great stuff. Jeff splits the book into two distinct sections, one on the author’s Public Booklife (marketing, PR, social interactions and other public engagements) and Private Booklife (the actions, philosophies, emotions and other internal struggles of the actual act of writing) and both halves – plus the appendices – are packed with thoughtful insights and useful advice. For example, how do writers deal with envy – and what does Francis Bacon have to say about that? To steal a line from an old tomato sauce commercial, “It’s in there!”
5 o’clock PM tonight, Thursday, November 19th, in room 4-231 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – I’ll see you there!
|
