A publishing house is a fragile organism

In his arms he has a pile of galleys; he sets them down gently, as if the slightest jolt could upset the order of the printed letters. “A publishing house is a fragile organism, dear sir,” he says, “If at any point something goes askew, then the disorder spread, chaos opens beneath our feet. Forgive me, won’t you? When I think about it I have an attack of vertigo.” And he covers his eyes, as if pursued by the sight of billions of pages, lines, words, whirling in a dust storm.’

- Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, 1981 [1979], pp. 97-98

photo credit: anyjazz65

In the context of the dissertation, I’ve been thinking a fair bit about textual cyborgs, the speculative field of reader-book interaction, and how this could relate to Tim’s excellent post on cyborg infrastructure. Here, the above quote from Calvino definitely resonates, but I’m still not sure what it all means …

Angels dancing in the static

“Listening to deathly voices in the dark, from Quixote’s moment on the hillside onwards, technologics has suggested, to those who want to listen to its broadcasts, a new, dynamic way of understanding literature – that is, of understanding what it is to write, who (or what) writes, and how to read it. Where the liberal-humanist sensibility has always held the literary work to be a form of self-expression, a meticulous sculpting of the thoughts and feelings of an isolated individual who has mastered his or her poetic craft, a technologically savvy sensibility might see it completely differently: as a set of transmissions, filtered through subjects whom technology and the live word have ruptured, broken open, made receptive. I know which side I’m on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static.”

- Tom McCarthy, ‘Technology and the Novel, From Blake to Ballard’, The Guardian

Goldsmiths: ‘Jacob Vaark’s Ghost’

Jacob Vaark being the (absent?) protagonist of Toni Morrison’s 2007 novel, A Mercy.

For your enlightment and deliction: a decidedly odd essay on something I decided to ‘the haunted domestic’ in American fiction post-2000. Mostly concentrating on the Morrison , but also drawing on the excellent Lunar Park (soon to be a film) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. Probably the best course that I’ve taken during my time at Goldsmiths – helped, no doubt, by a tiny class size and excellent teaching from Dr Rick Crownshaw. Bears almost literally no relevance to the rest of my Masters degree, but does mesh rather nicely with my undergrad dissertation.

Also recommended is this NPR interview with Toni Morrison, which sheds a great deal of light on some of the novel’s subtleties:

Goldsmiths: ‘Advertising, Screens and the Airport Chapel’

The first (assessed) essay for my Masters degree, deploying the work of French anthropologist Marc Augé in relation to a key site of modernity – the airport terminal. The first half is a work of ethnographic ‘thick description,’ which is then subjected to a critical analysis:

photo credit: irina slutsky

Goldsmiths: ‘Virtuality and the Mouse’

So, here’s the first (diagnostic) essay from my Goldsmiths MA. Submitted unfinished, it stands as an attempt to bend my head round literary critic Katherine Hayles‘ work on virtuality, focusing in on (1) a piece of video footage taken up by the mainstream scientific press, and (2) the Virtual Boy – Nintendo’s ill-fated attempt at consumer VR.

Gobbledegook or genius? There are some minor spelling and referencing issues, sure, and – in her comments – my course tutor suggested that the writings of biologist/cyborg feminist Donna Haraway might have filled the gaps in my argument. Since submitting, I’ve devoured a book-length interview with the woman, and got my hands of a copy of When Species Meet (2008) as part of the Christmas loot, which is high on my dead-tree reading list for 2010.

In the meantime, any comments or questions?

34 nested browser tabs open on their frontal lobes

“What new species of books, then, have proved themselves fit to survive in the attentional ecosystem of the aughts? What kind of novel, if any, can appeal to readers who read with 34 nested browser tabs open simultaneously on their frontal lobes? And, for that matter, what kind of novel gets written by novelists who spend increasing chunks of their own time reading words off screens?”

- Sam Anderson, ‘When Lit Blew into Bits’, New York Magazine

The Limitless Threat

I’ve restructured one of my undergraduate dissertations as a hypertext, mixed in some video footage and CC-licensed images, and thrown it up as its own site.

‘Containing the Uncontainable: Guantánamo Bay and the Limitless Threat‘ – it’s about terrorism, geography, theology, aesthetics and the apocalypse.  It might be a bit dense, and I admit to have been a bit overkeen on the subheading front, but there’s definitely some good stuff in there.

Writing and F3, 1 Year On

It’s been just over a year since the meme finally filtered down to my neck of the tubes with Patterns in Traffic, my first piece of flash fiction. Donning my hypothetical writerly hat in recognition of this milestone, I’ve been trying to root the memetic microfiction in something of a broader context, both in terms of my personal writing experiences and the insights I’ve taken from participating in Friday Flash Fiction.

I can’t really remember my motivation, but I gave NaNoWriMo a shot back in November 2004, producing something I can now recognise as an overwritten dérive of a pseudo-fantastical Venice. The Doge’s Gate – endearingly awkward, with infodumping a’plenty, terrible dialogue, a foul-mouthed Italian waitress, and an ill-judged authorial cameo (37k).

The following spring (April 2005) – despite not studying English or, indeed, anything remotely Englishesque – I managed to blag a place on an undersubscribed 6th form writing course, run by the Arvon Foundation at Totleigh Barton, in the depths of Devon. Viewed through the rose-tinted goggles of nostalgia, this was one of the best weeks of my life. With spring sunshine, good food, and a surfeit of cows, I managed to produce a couple of pretty good poems, a staggeringly vast quantity of really bad poetry, and the first part of a nifty short story in which the MC escaped an abusive mother-daughter relationship … in favour of adventure-with-a-capital-A.

Moving the clock forward to the start of my second year of university (November 2006), I tentatively dipped my toe back into the literary lake of NaNoWriMo. With the additional support of a diverse, vigorous, and broadly likeable bunch of Brightonians (including Kay, Shebit, Alabaster, and Shaun), I made it to the 50k milestone with Illyria - the fantastical offspring of Shakespeare and a thinly-veiled critique of American imperialism. This tale covered theatrical insurrectionism, messenger pigeons, cultural relativism, covertly trebuchet assembly, sheep, swamps, and yet more awkward dialogue.

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F3: ‘There Is No Lion’

Another short drip-drip-drip of story, following on from The Landsberger Vats.  And, yes, there’s still a fair bit more to come.

THERE IS NO LION

In the depths of the structure, darkness reigns. The air hangs heavy with perfumed solvents and anti-bacterial agents; a wall against the tide of microbial invaders. Stumbling through the door, I drop to my knees, gulping down a lungful of fumes. Extending a hand for support, my palm clings to a floor of moist linoleum. A corridor of halogen pulls my gaze right, towards the lobby proper; the harsh orange standing stark against the gloom. To the left, a bank of terminals and, yes, more biometrics.

Struggling against the polished plastic to stand, I carefully jog over to the terminals. Running an index finger down the main panel, the screens flicker into life – projecting an arc of colourful graphs and schematics onto the dull black wall. Struggling to push aside the noisy and useless with my outstretched hand, I search for the suite. But I’m sweaty and trembling, and the terminal ignores my gestures as sign language through a fish tank.

Realising the futility of my flailing, I give up. My irises are on the system, and – shit – my alibi is watertight, but my body is in revolt. My mouth is a featureless desert, and I’m swallowing dust. Then, echoing down the corridor’s plastic veneers, the thud of approaching footsteps. I’m not getting any feedback from my lower extremities; casualties of hypertension. Now is hardly the time for pre-fight nerves, but something in the mammalian recesses of my consciousness remains convinced that – providing I avoid any sudden movement – the lion won’t see me.

There is no lion. The footsteps are those of a broad-shouldered man in epaulettes and doc martens; a man whose eyes harden as they alight on my frozen form. Now he’s yelling; his red face the conduit for a torrent of angry German. I don’t have time for this. Searching for a solution, my mind flits back to the broken heart of a thwarted victory; back to the ugly plastic mats and vapid smiles of London. Uncorked, a flood of years-old anger pulses through my muscles, springing me from my paralysis. Through a dark fog, I watch distantly, as my right leg traces a gentle arc through the air. Meeting upper chest, my toes buckle within a battered converse sneaker. As the warm sting of pain spreads up through my foot, I wince, tumbling past the guard and down the corridor.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Superstructing

Last month, the California-based Institute for the Future annouced Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. Here’s the (in game) press release;

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SEPTEMBER 22, 2019

Humans have 23 years to go

Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens.

PALO ALTO, CA — Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the “survival horizon” for Homo sapiens – the human race – from “indefinite” to 23 years.

“The survival horizon identifies the point in time after which a threatened population is expected to experience a catastrophic collapse,” GEAS president Audrey Chen said. “It is the point from which a species is unlikely to recover. By identifying a survival horizon of 2042, GEAS has given human civilization a definite deadline for making substantive changes to planet and practices.”

According to Chen, the latest GEAS simulation harnessed over 70 petabytes of environmental, economic, and demographic data, and was cross-validated by ten different probabilistic models. The GEAS models revealed a potentially terminal combination of five so-called “super-threats”, which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks. “Each super-threat on its own poses a serious challenge to the world’s adaptive capacity,” said GEAS research director Hernandez Garcia. “Acting together, the five super-threats may irreversibly overwhelm our species’ ability to survive.”Garcia said, “Previous GEAS simulations with significantly less data and cross-validation correctly forecasted the most surprising species collapses of the past decade: Sciurus carolinenis and Sciurus vulgaris, for example, and Anatidae chen. So we have very good reason to believe that these simulation results, while shocking, do accurately represent the rapidly growing threats to the viability of the human species.”

GEAS notified the United Nations prior to making a public announcement. The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General Vaira Vike-Freiberga released the following statement: “We are grateful for GEAS’ work, and we treat their latest forecast with seriousness and profound gravity.”

GEAS urges concerned citizens, families, corporations, institutions, and governments to talk to each other and begin making plans to deal with the super-threats.

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Superstruct! Play the game, invent the future.

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