writing

On the internet

Go read Andrew Fitzgerald’s new collectively-directed short story. It is weird and wild—and Snark­mar­ket is threaded through it.

Ran­dom sam­ple (the beau­ti­ful thing is that you can select almost any two grafs of Andrew’s story for this purpose):

In the pop­u­lar children’s online role-playing game “Fur City”, a dig­i­tal avatar named Mr. Tum­bles, con­trolled by a 17-year-old Japan­ese girl in Osaka is pac­ing the cob­ble­stone streets. He remem­bers it’s Tues­day and how much he loved last Tues­day. It was cup­cake day at the Sugar Plum Bak­ery, and although Mr. Tum­bles, the local cal­ico kit­ten, was no fan of straw­berry short­cake wrapped in rib­bons and bows, he couldn’t deny that the rabbit-run bak­ery was paws and whiskers above any other estab­lish­ment in Fur City. Today at the Sugar Plum Bak­ery it’s not cup­cake day. The rab­bits told him it was pan­cake day. But he knows it’s Tues­day. Something’s fishy in Fur City.

Something’s fishy on the whole Internet.

This is more than a big in-joke, though; the way it all wraps up is sin­cere and more than a lit­tle wonderful.

 

The jazz standard and the stone tablet

This is mostly a pointer to Frank Chimero’s new post that con­nects jazz and design think­ing to web plat­forms and APIs in a neat way. Frank is, unsur­pris­ingly, actu­ally walk­ing the walk when it comes to designed con­tent; his approach is sim­ple and very effec­tive. Look at a pre­vi­ous post to pick up on the pattern.

The illus­tra­tions remind me of some of the best sec­tions of Watchmen—the graphic novel, not the movie—where whole scenes play out “silently” behind the main action. It’s visual counterpoint—the illus­tra­tions not sim­ply, er, illus­trat­ing the text, but actu­ally riff­ing on it. Maybe even sat­i­riz­ing it a tiny bit. It’s just great.

Any­way! I say “mostly” because I also want to tag on a ques­tion. Frank builds his argu­ment on the great virtues of jazz. I think this graf sums it up best:

You know what I love about jazz and impro­vi­sa­tion? It’s all process. One-hundred per­cent. The essence of it is the process, every time is dif­fer­ent, and to truly par­take in it, you have to visit a place to see it in progress. Every jazz club or improv com­edy the­ater is a tem­ple to the process of pro­duc­tion. It’s a fac­tory, and the art is the assem­bly, not the prod­uct. Jazz is more verb than noun. And in a world rid­dled with a feel­ing of iner­tia, I want to find a verb and hold on to it for dear life.

Here’s the ques­tion. Let’s change our time-scale from years or decades to hun­dreds of years or more. Does process-based work endure? Does pure process endure?

This might be a bor­ing or moot to a lot of peo­ple. It’s not to me. For what­ever rea­son, I find myself pre­oc­cu­pied with dura­bil­ity. It’s the Long Now; it’s the bat-glyph.

Will peo­ple still be riff­ing on jazz stan­dards in a hun­dred years?

This is totally not a rhetor­i­cal ques­tion! I can imag­ine a whole line of think­ing that goes: Oh yeah, actu­ally, this is the secret weapon. Encode your work as pure process, and it will get made and remade over and over. It’s imma­te­r­ial and there­fore inde­struc­tible. This is the trick that every reli­gion has fig­ured out.

But I can also imag­ine the other line: Actu­ally, process is frag­ile. It doesn’t sur­vive the fal­low peri­ods. It depends too much on an unbro­ken series of practitioners—of cham­pi­ons. To reli­ably make it between gen­er­a­tions, you need a canon­i­cal text or a fin­ished can­vas. You need to print on paper or etch in stone. Process is fine, but the fin­ished prod­uct is the thing. Mate­ri­al­ity is the ulti­mate ark. Hello, Renaissance?

But, this is pretty abstract, so let’s focus on the sim­pler question:

Jazz is young—really young. But the jazz icons and jazz stan­dards that Frank invokes actu­ally feel quite old to me. It feels like they’re on the wane, and have been for quite a while. Tell me if I’m wrong. And tell me: Do you think jazz—jazz as process, jazz as platform—is around for the long haul?

 

Writing for the mind’s movie screen

Do you know about Script­Shadow? It’s one of my favorite blogs lately: a smart, snarky, insid­ery screen­play review. It focuses (as best I can dis­cern) on screen­plays that have been bought by a stu­dio but not pro­duced yet. There are some excep­tions, but that seems to be the core of it—and as such, it’s actu­ally an odd pre­view of the next 2–5 years of releases.

Any­way, I men­tion it now because it’s sci-fi week, and you can read the review of the script for the Ender’s Game adap­ta­tion that will prob­a­bly still never be pro­duced. You can also down­load the script in its entirety!

Read­ing screen­plays, like read­ing plays, is actu­ally pretty fun in its own right. They’re always tight and terse: very con­sum­able. And I find the descrip­tive lan­guage of screen­plays sort of charm­ing. That is, not the dia­logue, but the parts that go

EXT. NEW JERSEY COUNTRYSIDE - MORNING

The train hurls straight at us.

NEW ANGLE — Skim­ming along­side as the train twists and turns, suck­ing up track — feet, yards, miles of it.

Beneath it, the curv­ing rails, which the rush­ing train barely seems to touch. They vibrate with an eerie, dul­cimer HUM.

It’s never par­tic­u­larly good prose—but it’s not sup­posed to be, right? It’s sup­posed to be descrip­tive and con­ver­sa­tional. These are words that will never be seen or heard by the pub­lic! Their audi­ence is all agents and pro­duc­ers and, ulti­mately, a direc­tor and pro­duc­tion staff. They’re the dark mat­ter of storytelling.

That sec­tion above is from the first page of Source Code, one of the most pop­u­lar scripts on Script­Shadow, and one that I enjoyed reading.

I often find myself read­ing scripts before bed. Maybe that tells you some­thing about their sen­si­bil­ity and heft. Actu­ally, I think it has a lot to do with their look: a scat­ter­ing of lines, lots and lots of white space. They’re light and airy. The words flow fast. The film strip plays. Ahh.

 

‘Joy, interest, empathy’

The attrac­tion here, as before, is less the sub­ject and more Sam Anderson’s artic­u­la­tion of it. I mean, okay, the sub­ject is a site where you con­nect via web­cam to ran­dom strangers, which is not unin­ter­est­ing. But I feel like there are 99 ver­sions of this arti­cle that are bor­ing or pre­dictable or “ZOMG inter­net,” and one that is patient and sub­tle and great, and this is that ver­sion. (Via Joanne.)

 

A very significant object

I’ve got a Sig­nif­i­cant Objects story-let up today! Check it out here; get some more con­text here. There’s a very strong indi­ca­tion that it has some­thing to do with the mys­te­ri­ous dis­ap­pear­ance of Annabel Scheme… can you spot the clue?

As with all Sig­nif­i­cant Object sto­ries, you can actu­ally bid on the object, now laden with the pleas­ant weight of nar­ra­tive. All pro­ceeds go to 826 National.

 

The view from a different discipline

In an utter and absolute twist, Nico Muhly waxes rhap­sodic about a totally sci-fi notion:

Often­times, I wish I had some­body who would just rush into my stu­dio and say, here’s the deal with this piece: this part is awe­some, and these two bars have to go. Or “those two bars are irrel­e­vant.” I’ve writ­ten at length about this prob­lem before; in the other Arts, both applied and oth­er­wise, there are out­side forces to tem­per the artist. Visual artists are restricted by the size of their can­vas or the space their art will inhabit. Writ­ers have edi­tors! Can you imag­ine, com­posers, if you had an editor? 

And what I love is the way he defines an edi­tor in the very next line…

Some­body you love & hate & trust & mis­trust who has access to your music at any juncture?

…which sounds rather Jekyll-and-Hyde-ish, doesn’t it? Almost like some other ver­sion of your­self that you swoon and trans­form into: “Huh, what? Where am I? What is this? Who wrote this? I… wait… my god, this is crap!” Some other ver­sion of your­self with one dif­fer­ence, one impos­si­ble advan­tage: fresh eyes.

 

A short tale of a cold-hearted hero

Hilo­brow is run­ning a microfic­tion con­test with a com­pelling theme: trou­bled and/or trou­bling super­men or –women. Don’t think Super­man; think Ozy­man­dias from Watch­men. Or, like, Steve Jobs. Here’s the full setup, which is a fun bit of sci­ence fic­tion his­tory in its own right.

I fully expect a mem­ber of the snark­ma­trix to win this contest.

 

Andrew vs. the Collective

I think it says a lot about my friend Andrew’s Kick­starter project that you can describe it so many ways. For instance, yes­ter­day I was one of the first peo­ple to tweet about it:

  • @robinsloan Wooo @magicandrew’s @kickstarter project is live! He’s writ­ing a new story *every week* based on our contributions.

But mere moments later, I was bested:

  • @dsldsl Want a per­sonal slave writer? Want to see a rap­ping cat? Want a great novel? If so, check out @magicandrew’s project.
  • @superkiy Great new project — Andrew vs. The Col­lec­tive — @magicandrew thinks he can take all of us. let’s make him dance

Then, after sleep­ing on it:

  • @SaheliDatta Went to bed think­ing of chal­lenges for @magicandrew & had fan­tas­tic, crazy dreams. Get him with your imaginings.

So there you have it. I chose the NEMESIS backer level, for obvi­ous rea­sons. Come aboard, Snark­ma­trix. “Let’s make him dance.”

 

Up from the gutter-forms

I like this summation—grabbed real-time from a chat with Neil Gaiman over at the New Yorker:

Authors like Michael Chabon have been cru­sad­ing for awhile to break down the bar­ri­ers between so-called ‘lit­er­ary fic­tion’ and ‘genre fic­tion’. Do you have any idea why lit­er­a­ture remains so com­part­men­tal­ized? Is there any end in sight?

Neil Gaiman: Hon­estly, I think the bar­ri­ers are imag­i­nary, the walls have already been breached and the key to lit­er­a­ture in the early 21st cen­tury is one of con­flu­ence. There’s not much high and low cul­ture any more: there’s just min­gling streams of art and what mat­ters is whether it’s good art or bad art. But then, I come from comics, and miss the days when it was a gut­ter art-form in which nobody was expected to make art; and think that SF was much more vibrant and rel­e­vant before they taught it in uni­ver­si­ties. Either way, Michael Chabon is a very wise man.

Mostly I like this part: “the key to lit­er­a­ture in the early 21st cen­tury is one of confluence.”

 

Gaiman, Morrison, and the strange substratum

Hey cool—a long New Yorker pro­file on Neil Gaiman by Dana Goodyear. I like this line:

“Sand­man,” Gaiman says, is sex­u­ally trans­mit­ted. “Guys who wanted their girl­friends to read comics would give them ‘Sand­man.’ They’d break up, and the girl would take the ‘Sandman’s and infect the next guy.”

(Hmm—a gen­eral the­ory of cult media transmission?)

But read­ing about Neil Gaiman reminds me of another comic book writer with a strik­ing accent who you ought to know about. He’s not as famous as Gaiman, but I think he’s exerted just as much influ­ence on cul­ture in the last few decades. He’s Grant Mor­ri­son.

His All-Star Super­man series is one the gems of comics of the past few years: built on famil­iar foun­da­tions, but thor­oughly, thor­oughly weird. It leaves the self-conscious grit of super­hero reboots behind, but it’s not with­out sharp edges. In fact, it’s hard to put a fin­ger on Morrison’s tone in the series; the whole thing is rainbow-colored but super-sophisticated.

Like a Bol­ly­wood movie directed by Wes Anderson.

And it’s par­tic­u­larly remark­able if you also read The Invis­i­bles, the long series that came ear­lier, and is still really Morrison’s sig­na­ture work. The Invis­i­bles is a boil­ing nine-dimensional stew of sym­bols and sub-cultures, and I mean, it’s just really, really weird. But it’s this guy, the guy respon­si­ble for this deep utter weird­ness, that DC has now put in charge of the Jus­tice League, Bat­man, and Super­man, all in turn. The weird­est writer of them all is the king of the castle.

So, just to be super-clear—this is your geek-cred talk­ing point—Grant Mor­ri­son is the most pop­u­lar, most impor­tant comic book writer work­ing today.

But this is the impor­tant part: I think if you look on any writer’s shelf in TV or Hol­ly­wood, you’ll find Mor­ri­son. That’s def­i­nitely true of writ­ers of shows like Bat­tlestar Galac­tica and LOST. Yes—in fact, LOST is basi­cally a TV series writ­ten by Grant Mor­ri­son. It’s his techno-occultism, his rain­bow sophis­ti­ca­tion. Comic-book adven­ture meets quan­tum foam meets Rider-Waite. I really believe the writ­ing staff at LOST would cop to it.

If “the weird” has gone—is going—mainstream, Grant Mor­ri­son (along with Neil Gaiman) gets a big chunk of the credit. He’s been toil­ing for decades, dig­ging this under­ground lake that con­nects all these points, all these people.

Nerds of many worlds, all read­ing the same comics—all reach­ing down into the secret sub­stra­tum of the strange.

 
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