Ben Lerner's Mean Free Path

This book has come up a few times for me in the last few weeks.  I bought it during my cross country journey while hating every single book I brought with me.  I had to carry so much stuff and I didn't have any room for anything.  I left a pillow (on purpose), a towel, soap, and shampoo (on accident) in Brooklyn.  I feel like I traded those things for this book.  

I saw Evan Lavender-Smith mention Mean Free Path in his Experimental Literature interview at HTMLGiant (which he killed, one of my favorites so far in the series).  He talked about poetry being one of the only avenues of experimental literature.

I also talked about Mean Free Path, and Lerner's work in general, with a few Portland poets I met through If Not For Kidnap.  It was pretty good conversation, as all the components were there:  good food, good people, good beer and cocktails (enough to last long into the evening).  The gist of our discussion of Mean Free Path was about the idea of repetition vs revisiting or recontexting language.  I felt that in Mean Free Path the bits of language were not so much being repeated, but recontextualized.

Another thing we talked about was the line breaks.  We all felt they were perfect.  When I read it, I felt like I was reading the reason why line should be broken.  So many good line breaks.  Sometimes I felt like these went hand in hand.  The way the repeated bits of language set me up for an expected outcome, that the language would be a full bit, but it was truncated or broken across the line differently.  Or I was shocked to remember the language, like an echo that took twenty minutes to come back and only after it scared the shit out of me did I remember that I was the one who said it in the first place.

Some of us (not me) felt that the line breaks were too perfect.  They were "crafted".  That Lerner had polished his book to a perfect sheen and that now it was soft, like shiny cheese in the supermarket.  This was actually a refreshing thing to me.  Feeling like I was reading something that took time.  It wasn't accident that brought it to me.  But I see what they mean.  It's a book that is fine tuned, mathematical almost.  Very clean, like a Google server farm.  Too clean.  You can't eat a sandwich in this book.  Too many crumbs.  Someone would shoot you or fire you for doing so, which is what the book is about.  Life is almost being controlled for us.  When Lerner falters, let's a little awareness into the pieces, you see that there is effort in the process, that he knows that this is a poem, that he's using language, that this isn't math and he isn't solving for x, and that he's going to be wrong most of the time.

    In an unconscous effort to unify my voice
    I swallow gum.  An old man weeps in the airport
    Over a missed connection.  The color of money is
    Night-vision green.  Ari removes the bobby pins
    I remove the punctuation.  Our freezer is empty
    Save for vodka and film.  Leave the beautiful
    Questions unaswered.  There are six pages left
    Of our youth and I would rather swallow my tongue
    That waste them on description.

For a good breakdown on the form.

House of Leaves

So over the past several weeks, as we've been moving and starting jobs and looking for jobs and so on, I've had another long-term project: Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. (Enjoy that blue "House," because I'm only doing it once.) I've been trying this whole time to think of anything to say about it and I'm not sure I've gotten very far at all. I finished the book last week, sitting on our new, old, green couch next to Tracy. Now I'm doing something I don't usually, which is to try to figure out what I should think and say by reading online what others have said. It's not that I'm worried I'll say something stupid -- although it is a little bit of that. It's more that the book seems to have digested itself so thoroughly that even as I feel overwhelmed by the idea of interpreting it usefully, I feel equally that it's already past all interpretation, and not just because of the fora dedicated to such work. What follows, then, is not an attempt at any sort of definitive opinion, but something very much in the mode of "here is a blog post about an interesting subject."

If you haven't heard if House of Leaves by the way, it might be best to start with the Wikipedia page. Basically the book is a comically academic critical exploration of a documentary that doesn't exist, The Navidson Record. This documentary concerns a family (including a photographer, now documentarian) that moves into a new home only to discover that it is larger inside than outside. Indeed, the home grows a hallway, then a labyrinth, perfectly black, constantly changing in layout and scale. This academic critical exploration narrates much of the film in what is basically the style of a novel. This academic exploration is officially authored by a blind and dead man, and was found by a young man who calles himself Johnny Truant, who has become obsessed with the blind man's book to the detriment of his health and sanity. At some point after Truant finishes with the book, it's then further revised and amended by unnamed editors at a publishing house. Where actual author Mark Z. Danielewski fits into all this is an exercise left for the reader. It has a number of significant formal complications that mirror (sometimes) the events in the text and often require an unusually active level of reader participation. It is fairly long and often physically taxing to read (unless full pages of tightly packed Courier are your idea of a good time).

So, to begin with, I hope I won't lose my spot at the cool kids table (that's right, I'm cool now, pass it on) if I say I find the book frustrating, and not always in a good way. You can justify most of the book's more questionable aesthetic decisions by way of a meta-argument, usually something like "well we're supposed to get lost in the book the same way the characters get lost in the house." I want to buy this, and I do think it's more or less the book's goal, but I don't really believe it when I'm honest with myself, primarily because the material we're getting lost in (usually: academic fluff 'n' bullshit) is so much less interesting than the house our protagonists are exploring (an impossible labyrinth as old as the Earth itself wherein strange, mysterious, menacing forces alter time and space according to their own designs or, worse yet, no designs at all).

There's a pattern to the novel: just when things are getting really good in the narrative of The Navidson Record, which basically operates as a horror/love story, they get interrupted by our blind academic for page upon interminable page of interpretation. How are Will and Tom Navidson like the brothers Jacob and Esau, and what do these similarities suggest about the Record itself? Questions like these are interrogated at some length, with frequent reference to outside sources that mostly don't exist. Sometimes this is cute, sometimes it's funny, and occasionally it gets sort of intense, but mostly I felt a real disconnect between the book's ambitions and my own experience. Johnny Truant is reading the same pages I am, ostensibly, and it drives him insane; he hallucinates murders, hallucinates his own death, comes to conclude (correctly) that he may not exist, lets his life collapse around him. But why? I never once felt threatened and only experienced thrills or fears of any kind intermittently, and strictly while I was reading the sections that focus on The Navidson Record. If I'm supposed to feel something like what the characters are feeling, that simply isn't happening, and it won't: not as I wade through what often feels like extraneous self-referential play.

The Navidson Record is an excellent story unto itself and clearly the main draw of House of Leaves, but it would be too much to suggest that it would be as good (or better) without the intervening materials. At the same time, one does wonder. Truant's narrative (which takes place in footnotes and appendices) is more engaging than the faux-academic stuff, but it's also rather a massive shaggy dog story, thick with foreboding and narrative potential on which it rarely delivers. The metafictional qualities of the novel do lend it a certain weight and intensity, even if they sometimes seem misdirected. I wouldn't say, in other words, that I only want the fun part of the book: but it does seem suggestive that I think of it as "the fun part."

The sheer amount of active participation required by House of Leaves and the ways in which it constantly interprets itself suggest that we are meant to plunge into the labyrinth by further interpreting it ourselves, perhaps forever. It is strongly suggested by numerous events in the plot and the form that there is ultimately no center to the novel, no one truth, no secret, and yet it sure has a lot of codes for a text that so adamantly resists being cracked. I don't mean to be dismissive when I say the result is basically a prank: we are constantly enticed to search even as we are promised we will find nothing (or, more likely still, ourselves; whatever we find in the world is ultimately, the text suggests, an encounter with selfhood). I'm not against pranks: fiction is lies. But I do find it difficult to enter into a relationship I'm told in advance will be basically fruitless, or, more optimistically, only offer me what I had to begin with. And the tools of interpretation the book offers itself are, perhaps because I've spent the last three years in academia, rather unappealing. Basically, I have trouble crawling into a book already 50% of the way up its own ass. 

I remain skeptical of fiction obsessed with flaunting its own means of operation: thoughtful readers know that fiction is lies, and one can play on that fact with a lot more subtlety than Danielewski uses here, usually with better results. As I've said, I wouldn't excise the non-Navidson Record materials completely if it were my book, but I would reduce them tremendously and attempt to fold them into a satisfying narrative. A book doesn't have to invite or demand reader participation to receive it, doesn't have to be ostentatious about what it wants us to do with it: we were always already participating, interpreting, deciding.

This is not to say House of Leaves is not worth reading. I've written here before that great novels should fail, and I stand by that claim, and House of Leaves is indeed a great novel, not least because it is a great failure. Readers and writers with an interest in formal experimentation are strongly advised to read the book: Danielewski's greatest contribution is probably his awareness of the page as an object and a resource. I literally laughed with delight on several occasions as Danielewski used the transparency of the page, manipulated common formal elements in uncommon ways, and, at one point, used both sides of each page to show two sides of the same words, as if they were suspended on glass or some other medium. House of Leaves questions everything about the form of printed fiction, which is a valuable service to those of us who enjoy printed fiction.

Reading the book is often very happy work. The sheer amount of effort required to understand the text will turn some off, but generally serves (along with its bestseller status) as a strong argument for trusting one's readers. There are complex calculations necessary, quite frequently, to understanding House of Leaves at even a basic level, and these calculations can be intensely pleasurable.

I'm curious what you'll think of this post. Have you read House of Leaves? Am I totally missing the point? What do you think?

Why publish? pt. 2

Elisa Gabbert was kind enough to write a post responding critically to my previous post on the subjects of Fugue Magazine's footnote scandal. This happened on Wednesday while we were still moving into the new apartment, which in Internet time means it might as well have happened ten just before they nailed Jesus to the cross, but I want to encourage more people to disagree with me publicly (I thrive on discord!) so I felt I should respond.

I should start by saying that I think Gabbert is a cool, bright writer and I think her argument makes sense. Mainly I want to use it as an opportunity to refine + clarify some of what I said in the previous post, as well as to discuss some of the differences in how prose and poetry writers approach publishing and editing, which I think are at the root of our disagreements here.

It's going to get a little convoluted now, as, for clarity's sake, I'm going to quote Gabbert quoting me and then replying to the quote:

"As an editor, I expect a lot of deference when it comes to deciding how to package and present my authors' work. For instance, if I think a certain font is best for a story, and I make the story that font, I will think it is pretty stupid for the author to say, 'Dude, I am pissed about that font. Put it back in Times New Roman.' If I want a certain piece to have different margins than the others, I want to be able to do that."

This is an unusually strawmanny argument from Meginnis. There's a distinct difference between changing the font or layout of a piece and inserting new content into it (or removing content without asking, or changing the order of the content). I also think you get more leniency here with prose than poetry. I recently had an experience with an editor who wanted to right-justify half the poems in an issue. The font is usually not an element of the poem, but the margins are, and you can't just change them to mix it up visually. It would be the equivalent of an editor changing all the paragraph breaks in a story, not for semantic reasons but to better fit the layout of the page. Adding footnotes strikes me as one of the most disruptive ways you could alter a piece of prose while keeping the original text intact, up there with inserting subheads.

These are good, useful points! There's generally understood to be a pretty big difference between choosing the font and choosing the words that go into a piece. But part of what I was trying to get at -- and I realize now I didn't make this sufficiently clear -- is that I think that difference is rather less significant than most people believe. 

Tracy and I are currently working on editing and typesetting the first print issue of Uncanny Valley and there are actually two very different processes for different kinds of content: some of the material, usually the more formally straightforward prose, is being edited strictly on the levels of sentence structure, paragraph structure, and content. For the writers being put through this process, we're using track changes on word documents and working collaboratively with the writers to negotiate how much we can and will alter their language. (Our contributors have so far been entirely professional about this, by the way, for which I am eternally grateful; there's nothing worse than a contentious editing process.) After that, I typeset the pieces, and will soon send them galleys for their approval. These people can ask for anything at this stage but I would probably regard most requests with some degree of hostility: the design really should be, I think, largely up to me. What they would need to do to convince me to make a significant change to the design is to demonstrate that it was necessary to the effectiveness of the piece.

Then for some people we aren't bothering with track changes or really even applying text-level edits for anything but obvious grammatical errors or typos -- these tend to be poems or more formally engaged prose that derive much of their meaning/pleasure/power from their presentation on the page. When I've finished the preliminary typesetting for these pieces, I'm going to send the galleys to the authors and ask them what they think of certain font choices, layouts, and etc. I'll be more open to changes in these cases as any formally engaged work must be, in its editing, negotiated in those same terms -- the terms under which it was written.

I even have one piece (by Robert Alan Wendeborn) where I wanted to change the visuals to such an extent that I sent him a document that demonstrated what I meant to do to the piece and offered him the opportunity to revise on the content level given what I was planning.

Part of what I meant to argue, and again this didn't come across clearly because it was rather tangential to the situation, is that writers often place blind trust in editors and designers when it comes to the formal aspects of their work while erring on the side of excessive protectiveness where content is concerned. This leads to writing that is less interesting on the levels of form and content. What I wanted to suggest is that we should probably be more liberal when it comes to our content and more discerning/engaged when it comes to the forms in which our work is presented. 

As an editor, I've only encountered significant negotiation on form from poets, who tend as a group to be generally hostile to revision of any kind. I would like to see some poets relax a little in this regard, but I would also like to see many prose writers become a little more like these poets.

Which brings us to more from Gabbert:

"I wouldn't publish with someone if I didn't want them to change my writing, to make it better. If it were already perfect in its little Word document, I would leave it there. I publish a piece because it is not perfect, because it needs to be improved, because I think the process of publication will improve it ... Ultimately whether Fugue was right or wrong isn't that important to me. The principle here is this: If you don't want your work changed, why do you publish with other people? If you need total control, why not self-publish?"

This is an interesting and very literal interpretation of the concept of an "editor." (In the literary world, many editors' work is 90%+ curatorial.) I sort of admire this approach to publishing, but I also think it's kind of naive. (Or, I admire it because it's naive.) Most people publish not because they want their work to be better, but because they want it to be validated by a third party and then exposed to a larger audience. This is also why most people don't self-publish: both validation and potential audience tend to be greatly reduced. Of course there are exceptions, but it's more work to find an audience when you don't have an established publicity department, and without the built-in reputation of an established press, you're fighting the biases of the many people who believe gatekeepers exist for a reason.

This is all very true! And I'm glad Gabbert finds my naivete at least a little charming, because I'm going to stick to my guns on this one. Ultimately, I'm driven by careerist concerns and my desire to be read, so if a good press or magazine wants to publish me without contributing the editorial interventions that would improve my work, I'm probably going to go for it (as I have done plenty of times in the past). But I would really prefer to be edited, because I've seen what it can do for my work (both the text being edited and the texts I will write and revise in light of the experience) and I want to have that as much as possible.

And while I understand that most people aren't interested in publication primarily as a mode of improvement, I want to make it as clear as possible to anyone considering working with us that if you don't want our help with your work, if you don't want to see it changed by publication, you probably shouldn't submit to us. There are a few pieces that we'll print or post online in more or less the form that we received them, but more often than not, we plan to interfere. 

I would generally advocate for more communication on these matters. Fugue should probably have provided its authors with galleys -- we can disagree about how much the footnotes mattered (I still think an astute reader would likely guess they weren't in the original pieces) but I suspect we can also agree that writers and editors alike would benefit from more effective, explicit communication about the parameters of their relationship: the form it will take, the burdens of each role, the goals of their union. 

It's Sunday & I Still Love My Country: ChillTFO

Action Books

So I had a discussion last night that led me to google Action Books (it was over who read from Action Books at the Posses Nothing reading).  IDK what's going on, but reaching Action Books through google is hard (pun!) and hilarious.

When I clicked the links I was taken to a blank page at first, not the site.  Once I typed the address in by hand, the google search link took me to the right page (when I cleared my cache it did it again, took me to the blank page).  I don't really mind typing it in by hand because I love the line:  "why i get low/ blood pressure with levitra levitra duration action".

Library Review: Des Moines Central

I have made it to Minneapolis, and on the way I stopped in Des Moines. What does Des Moines have? It has some interesting pizza shops and some good coffee shops and a smelly river. It also has a great central library, which came together just before I left the city in 2006. While I was in town a couple weeks ago I made sure to stop by. Sarah accompanied me on this review, as did DM resident Kevin Henderson, who seemed unsure about this whole endeavor:

LOVELINESS

The new Central Library was built to replace a cramped and stained and ancient building that made me feel moldy whenever I walked in. The new building is angular, and the bright copper of a new penny, and built of glass that started to fail within the building's first year. It shines as you approach downtown from the west, and as you walk to the main entrance the walls sort of come up on you, so that you might wonder if they're closing in to squash the very life from your body.

Inside, books are stacked in wide shelves, generously spaced. Leather or faux-leather chairs are arranged around the perimeter so you can sit and read or soak in wifi or just stare blankly through the windows at the street outside. This is the first place I encountered librarians wearily going around, asking sleeping people to keep their eyes open.

The strangest visual elements in the library exist in the restroom. (I wanted to take photos but felt extra creepy operating my phone's camera while someone occupied one of the stalls.) The fixtures are modern, metal, but there are no mirrors. There are also no doors, so that as you round the corner from the sink you might crash into some kid slurping at the hallway water fountain.

LONELINESS

This library does not feel very lonely. Everything seems built as if to minimize separation: the shelves are short, and the chairs are widely spaced, and you can see people nearby in every direction. Even if you're alone you can see people outside, through the windowed walls. I visited often while I was unemployed and always left feeling thrilled about life, even when I stopped to consider that I was spending the third or fourth morning in a week lounging around a library.

PARKING

If you visit this library you can park for free, and you can park underground. You can park beneath the earth. That's probably not very exciting unless you ever tried to park at the old central library. Here you go down and get a ticket and validate it upstairs and when you leave, hopefully the machine that blocks the exit will read it correctly. The first time I tried this the machine flashed a digital red 20.00 at me.

To hell with that machine.

WEIRDNESS

This library is a little weird. There are usually cops in the foyer, often standing cross-armed next to bicycles that appear to be too small for them. The librarians, too, look a little stranger than Orlando librarians. (Sorry, Des Moines librarians.) The science fiction section nearly bleeds into the children's section, so that it's difficult to browse SF titles without alarming or at least catching the attention of nearby parents, especially if you pick up a title with a near-naked alien person or an otherwise wild cover. Who made the decision to juxtapose racy SF with go-getting child detectives?

I Read A Book About Something And Now I Don't Want To Write About It Anymore

As I mentioned in my last post, I just finished reading a book about Pitcairn Island, in hopes it would help me with a poem project. I initially started writing poems about Pitcairn in 2009 in Carmen Gimenez Smith's poetry and nonfiction form and technique class, but then thesis work set in and I kind of forgot about the project. I was cleaning out my harddrive one day a few months ago and looked at the few poems I had again, liked them, had my curiosity rekindled.

Pitcairn is an island about halfway between New Zealand and Chile, aka 3000 miles from anywhere. You can only get there by longboat; it's too rocky for planes to land there, and the harbor is so shallow that ships have to dock a few miles out. Pitcairn was settled in the 1780s by the mutineers of the Bounty and a few Tahitians, mainly women ("wives" of the mutineers) but a few men as well. In the mid-2000s, the island gained international attention when it experienced a sex scandal; six Pitcairn men (a third of the male population) went on trial for the regular sexual abuses of minors. Islanders basically insisted that early sexual activity was a normal practice on Pitcairn, due to isolation and Polynesian influence. The British government disagreed and the trial went on, several men were convicted and served time in the island jail, which the convicted men built themselves. 

In my first flush of interest in Pitcairn, I did a ton of research about it...mainly Googling intensely and reading as many articles and pieces of information as I could (there's a lot...Vanity Fair, National Geographic, NPR, the island's own strange website). Once I decided to continue the project, I got really interested again and turned out a few poems. And then I read the book about it, which was good, and told me way more about the day-to-day life of the island and what the people do and how they do it and why they do it.

But now I can't write any more poems about Pitcairn. I keep opening the file, but then I'm just like blah ew this is weird. Why? Maybe doing the research, reading the whole book, entering into a full narrative of the island, killed my interest. I can't create my own narrative now. I don't know. I can't get any images out or think of any new way to look at it, the sex, the rocks, the ocean, the sky, the whole idea of Pitcairn I was working with in my head before.

I thought that doing research usually strengthened a creative project, especially something like this, which is grounded in both a historical and a modern reality. But maybe not. Generally, I don't do a lot of research for my poetry, haven't undertaken many projects that call for it, really. Fiction writers, I  imagine, do more research than poets and are probably held to higher standard of capturing reality/fact than poets (right? I don't know. Tell me I'm wrong. That's actually probably a tangent, nevermind).

But basically, I'm mad now. I thought that knowing more about Pitcairn would spark me to write more, maybe get this series of poems into a chapbook or something, but the complete opposite happened. I guess I'll give it more time and see if I become interested again, out of the headspace of someone else's Pitcairn and away from what all of the reading and reading and facts told me.

Yishan Wong Only Understands "Social"

Yishan Wong doesn't like Google+. So far, I love Google+ (apart from the ugly snarl of punctuation it causes whenever I put it at the end of a sentence). Why doesn't he love it? For precisely the reasons I do. He begins his argument by noting that while there is a popular conception among media talking heads and writers that Facebook is pushing users toward less and less privacy, this isn't really the case:

I dispelled this myth in [my anonymous answer at] Social Networks: Since Facebook has been so aggressive in pushing users to be more public, is there now a market opportunity for a player that resembles what Facebook once was and intensely focuses on preserving intimacy and privacy?, explaining that Facebook would find it far easier to keep things private for users, but that it has observed user behavior that indicated an increasing desire for more public information sharing. The user "demands" for more privacy come from a vocal minority who oppose both Facebook's actions as much as they do the general consensus of the casual internet user who does not think much about the public/private dichotomy, but rather thinks in terms of histrionics, narcissism, exhibitionism, and voyeurism.

I actually think Wong is right about this. Facebook users want to overshare. The history of the Internet is, in many ways, the history of our need to display ourselves as flagrantly as possible, increasingly enabled by sophisticated technologies. GeoCities pages were Facebook without a guaranteed way of harassing your friends and family (your updates didn't show up on anybody's feed; you had to e-mail them if you wanted them to know about it, which was aggressive and usually rude). 

Wong also argues that Facebook actually has all of the same functionality as Google+ circles, but doesn't make it obvious because people don't like using it -- they find it too difficult. He's right about this as well, but neglects the possibility that circles are more intuitive and user-friendly, which they definitely are. Filtering who sees what in Facebook is possible, but a gigantic pain in the ass, so I rarely bother.

So far Wong and I see the same facts, but we evaluate them differently, which is a good place to be in a disagreement. But then he begins to genuinely misunderstand things:

On Google+, people whom you have not friended can comment on your public posts. 

At first blush, this seems reasonable because it copies from the Twitter model of public tweets and how anyone can @-reply to someone's public tweet. In fact, it's not.

On Twitter, an @-reply remains in your own tweetstream, and a user has to click into a particular display (e.g. see all @-mentions). On Google+, the display of the reply mirrors the UI of Facebook rather than Twitter, essentially injecting a stranger's reply into a conversation thread nominally between you and your friends. On Facebook, even when you make a post at the "Everyone" (public) privacy level, it is still essentially intended as a broadcast to your friends, or at least people with whom you are acquainted. People who have friended you but whom you have not friended back are prevented from commenting on your posts. This is obviously reasonable; you haven't stated that you wanted to be connected to them in any way, so why should they be allowed to participate in your conversations? Yet Google+ violates this by not only allowing but, through the design of the UI, encouraging and sanctioning this behavior as though there were nothing odd about it.

This is just weird. He's misunderstanding an intentional feature as a problem. In Google+, public sharing is only the default on your first post -- once you tell it which circles you want to see your updates, it remembers that and assumes you would like to share with those circles (and only those circles) next time you post as well. Public sharing is a choice, in other words, and it's a choice you'll only make under the specific circumstance that you want to allow people you haven't added to your circles to see and comment on what you're sharing.

And indeed, there's nothing strange about this. Imagine if you were talking to some friends at a party. You would naturally form a sort of circle so that you could see each other's faces and hear each other's voices, as well as symbolically excluding other party guests who were, nonetheless, not a part of your literal circle. You would speak at a lower volume level so that other people were less likely to hear you, and you would (hopefully) take turns, listening as well as speaking. If you were to then decide to address the entire party, including people you wouldn't count as friends, you would presumably dissolve or step outside your circle and speak a bit louder -- and then wait to see if someone wanted to say something back. That's a normal social interaction. It's well understood that you don't speak to people unless you're willing to listen to what they want to say back, except in special situations like a public speech or performance (where Q&As or informal discussions after the fact are still quite common).

What we see here is the root of the problem: Wong understands "social" quite well, but he doesn't understand actual social interactions. He offers an example of two people joining public + threads he started in order to criticize his arguments, and asserts that this is socially unacceptable. But why, exactly, would that be? Why does Wong need people to hear him without talking back? My best guess: Wong is a rude, self-absorbed person. In one example, he's actually addressing the strangers who are following him, and then he gets angry when they respond! That's mystifying behavior.

Wong makes himself clear when he writes, "People actually want to share more information in public, mostly because they like to talk about themselves." In other words, Wong believes that people want to talk about themselves all day long without ever having to listen to anything anyone else wants to say. And you know what? Wong is right. But that's not how normal social interactions are supposed to work. In practice, talking with other people is usually a way of talking about ourselves. But we're expected to at least pretend to listen, with the hope that occasionally real human interactions will occur. 

Google+ replicates the social norm that you don't talk to people who you don't want to hear from by making communication mutual: excluding me from your updates is so easy that if you don't do it, I feel not only able to comment but invited to do so. This reduces the stress of using the service tremendously. There are two reasons I hate Facebook:

1) People are using it to "network" with me. As I've become better known in the publishing community as a writer but especially as an editor (not that I'm any hot shit), many writers I know less than nothing about have chosen to add me as friends. Why? I hesitate to speculate, but let's just say it often happens on the same day they submit a story or poem to one of the publications I edit. As a result, I often don't know if someone who's friending me on Facebook actually wants to have social interactions, or only wants to use me as an avenue for self-promotion.

2) Relatedly, my Facebook feed is about 90% spam. I don't mind when my actual friends who actually like interacting with me promote their stories, presses, publications, accomplishments, and etc. because I like those people and I want them to succeed. But I've completely lost patience with the sort of "friend" who regularly sends me invites to events I obviously can't attend (because they're in New York, and I'm in Iowa). I have no interest in being blasted with self-promotional links who only "friended" me in the first place because they wanted to blast me with said links.

For these reasons, I have about half or maybe even the majority of my Facebook friends set to "ignore" at this point. This is the only way I can filter out the spam without offending people by refusing their friend requests. 

Google+ solves these problems. If you want to follow a famous or accomplished person, or someone who isn't "important" but whom you admire, you can choose to add them to your following circle and see their public posts. They, meanwhile, get to spam anyone who adds them to that circle guilt-free; but at a cost: if you talk to the public, the public gets to talk back. This encourages smarter, more careful, more engaged-self promotion and sharing. And those of us who mutually add each other to our circles will have more intimate, more engaged interactions for the same reason. The quality of conversation on Google+ is already clearly higher than that of Facebook for this reason.

Wong argues that most people are like him -- they want to talk more than they listen, want to share without opening themselves to comment and response. I think he's probably right. I hope those people stay off of Google+, or learn to change their behaviors. If people like Wong don't use Google+, that'll be a feature, not a bug. I'm switching over as much as possible precisely to get away from him and his ilk.

I am moved

Tracy and I moved yesterday, with my mother's help, to a new apartment in Iowa City. She has a good job here. With any luck, I'll have one soon. Today we bought a couch and two bar stools for less than we expected the couch alone to cost. The couch is nice and very green. We very nearly had one of those scenarios from the first Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency wherein a couch is somehow placed in a position from which no possible series of maneuvers can remove it, but thankfully the laws of physics intervened. I had a similar situation when I put my thumb in our new elephant toothbrush holder and then for a second I didn't think I could get it back out. The new elephant toothbrush holder is identical to a previous elephant toothbrush holder we had, which I guess made it feel like an old friend, which I guess is why I put my thumb inside it. (I do that to all my old friends.)

This is an auspicious time for Tracy and I: two years ago, on July 11 2009, we were married. So far it's been the best decision of my life. It's a good time to start over again, to free ourselves from the constraints of school (my primary complaint, at this late stage: I had too little time for my own reading) and to start over in what seems like a very nice town. I don't 100% love our new apartment (our old one had more space; I was spoiled) but I do love our new kitchen, and its little bar-style counter, where I am presently typing this post. Tracy is asleep on the green couch. We are on the third floor and there is no elevator. My calves are very sore.

Tracy's new job won't make us rich, but it is enough money that we don't have to worry, that if I want to buy a book or a third pair of pants I can probably afford to do it. This is very new for me. It will be the first time ever, really. I'm more relaxed at the moment than I have been for years, with fleeting exceptions. Tomorrow I will probably not accidentally run out of money. That's a nice feeling. Of course, when I find steady work, I will feel even better.

The writers in this magazine have been working with me on their stories. They have been uniformly lovely. I hope you will submit for our next issue, because I'm sure it will be amazing also.

I don't have a lot else to say for the moment. Certainly nothing very smart. Only a sense of relief, to finally be here, after what feels like an eternity. We'll write more -- and about less us-centric subjects. I have been reading House of Leaves. I have no idea what I could say about it. Maybe I will find something to say, though. Maybe I will talk about the '90s X-Men cartoon, instead.

Summer Reading

Are you doing it? I thought I'd be doing a LOT more reading once I finished my MFA, but I've found myself kind of piddling along. It is, as you might imagine, HOT AS HELL here in southern New Mexico, so I spent most of my time lying in a dark room to maximize comfort and minimize sweat. I should be reading more, but instead I look at the Internet more.

Here is what I've read since the beginning of June, with brainless vacation reads included (I was on straight-up vacation in Italy for two weeks, and finished all the reading material I brought with me, so had to resort to Nora Roberts borrowed from an old lady on the tour bus):

Find The Girl by Lightsey Darst: Recommended to me by Richard Greenfield. I liked it a lot, even if I did find the poems themselves a bit repetitive.

Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born by Tina Cassidy: if you're interested in birth or ever plan to be involved in having a baby, this is fascinating (and well-written).

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout: I liked this a lot more than I expected to, and much more than my mom (who I borrowed it from) did.

One Day by David Nicholls: a cute beach read and now I want to see the movie even though I CANNOT STAND Anne Hathaway and want to die when imagining her British accent.

Hot Rocks by Nora Roberts: I read this in about 3 hours, while stuck on a tour bus in a traffic jam in Sicily for 6 hours. The sex scenes were funny.

The Wedding Officer by Anthony Capella: pure unadulterated sugar in book form. A WWII love story with pages of lush description of Italian food. Fun to read. I would see this SO FAST if it were a movie.

The Daughter of Siena by Marina Fiorato: a soap opera set in 1700s Siena. Not very well-written or very interesting, but fine to read if you need something to read (I did).

Drinking Closer to Home by Jessica Anya Blau: I read her first novel and I preferred that to this, which had some funny parts but was basically just another dysfunctional family novel.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver: not my favorite Kingsolver, but a powerful book (I liked the first 100 or so pages quite a bit more than the rest of it).

Serpent In Paradise by Dea Birkett: I just finished this yesterday. I'm working on a series of poems about  one of the weirdest places ever, Pitcairn Island, and this is one of the only books written about Pitcairn in modern times. It's weird. I liked it, I think, but I didn't get as much fodder for poems as I had hoped.

I recently went to the library and got this biography of Pablo Neruda, Taste of Cherry by Kara Candito , and Scary No Scary by Zachary Schomburg.

Read anything lately? Tell me about it. It doesn't have to be legit, literary, or even good. I should be reading more poetry so I can get in the mood to write more poetry but honestly, in this heat, I just want to read something that makes my brain happy (poetry or not). Let me know in the comments.

YouTube Variations: Heat of the Moment

Tracy and I are planning to decorate the walls of our new place in Iowa City (where we'll be moving on Tuesday) with prog rock record covers and hilarious comic books from the Half Price Books. The first album we got for this purpose was Asia's self-titled record, which looks really freakin' awesome. Prog record covers are generally pretty insane, so that's one reason for the purchase, but I also actually like a fair amount of prog, so I went home and bought the electronic version also (you're welcome, Asia). I hadn't realized, because the album predates my birth by four years, that this is where "Heat of the Moment" comes from. I had heard the song, but only in the hilarious Southpark scene where Cartman uses it to convince Congress to legalize stem cell research. For some reason Comedy Central will only let the scene stay up on YouTube if it's been multiplied by four, so, uh, here's that:

The Southpark cover is actually really stirring and effective, with Cartman's brilliant use of harmony in the climax selling the song better than Asia ever really did. I like this high school student attempting to recreate the moment. He's not a great singer but it's a hilarious entry into the "unopposed student government election speech" genre. Kind of tragic how bad his fellow students' rhythm is, but I'm glad they have the sense of humor to go for it.

I really appreciate how literal the original video is:

"Here's a fire, to symbolize heat! Here's a clock, to symbolize the moment! Here's a woman with fire reflected in her glasses, to symbolize the heat in her eyes!" Brilliant.

So I went looking for covers on YouTube and guys, did you know there are a lot of covers of "The Heat of the Moment" on YouTube? Unfortunately most of them are awful, and not even in a funny way: the Internet has apparently collectively concluded that this song cannot be improved on or even varied in any interesting ways. Not only do the majority of covers play it totally straight, they tend to slavishly imitate the original vocal performance.

Probably the best cover is this a cappella version. Like most songs in this style, it sounds sort of wonderfully unhinged, though I do think they could have handled the melody a little more roughly and wrung out a little more interest -- purify the tone, reduce the absurd over-emoting, and it becomes a little too straightforward, I think. The build that comes at the halfway point is bananas, though:

Their cover of "Don't Stop Believin'" is also a lot of fun, if for no other reason than their handling of a particular guitar part.

This adorable video of kids covering the song gives me an opportunity to express how much I hate it when kids cover songs and I have to sit there and pretend it's good. It's not! Even when they're good for kids, their voices are still awful and overbearing. That's right: screw you, children of America.

This one meanwhile is a bit weird and ineffective, so I'm not embedding it. Not embedding this entirely predictable Alvin and the Chipmunks cover either. They're almost as bad as the kids! I love the way this guy says "oh yeah." He doesn't seem to know some of the parts very well, or, honestly, at all.

Shirtless college students! The screaming guy is... weird. I guess he's the "throat." YouTube consensus: these guys are totally gay.

There are a couple other songs called "Heat of the Moment" on YouTube which gives me mixed feelings. On the one hand, it's a cliche, so obviously it's up for grabs. On the other hand, it feels a little hubristic, doesn't it? This singer's weird singing faces almost make you want to believe, though:

Unnecessary techno cover! I like the part where it just gives up and becomes the original song:

This one is outright surreal. Only one of the guitarists seems to have any idea how the song actually goes, but he doesn't care. The drummer is in his own world playing a totally irrelevant rhythm. The guy in his pajamas with the guitar seemingly bolted to his chest isn't quite sure what he's supposed to be doing here, and meanwhile the singer (who has to get out the lyric sheet at one point to figure out what's going on) mostly wanders around confronting his bandmates and rubbing their faces. I... I think he just wants to kiss these guys, and that's why he brought them to his basement, but they somehow heard "makeout party" as "band practice" and he can't figure out how to break the news.

This one isn't really a cover, it's just pointless. A guy demonstrates the quality of his speakers by playing "Heat of the Moment" on them, then recording that with a camera, then uploading that to YouTube, which will naturally eradicate the sound quality. I don't even know:

I think we have to end it with this "drum cover," though, which I'm too nice to say anything about. Pure, 100% YouTubiness. Play it with this bass cover and this video of a guy playing the solo over the song and you'll have like almost a whole band, albeit playing over three copies of the original whole band:

A conversation with Gabriel Blackwell

Gabriel Blackwell, author of our latest e-monster Neverland, did me the kindness of a brief conversation. You can read it, and then you can read Neverland.

Neverland draws from some very disparate sources. There's the La Brea Tar Pits of course, and maybe the idea and rhetoric of Creation Museums, and Br'er Rabbit stories, and then Peter Pan, and the truly awful sci-fi movie Future War, which I have actually seen (in MST3k form), and more. What lead you to this wild combination? Was it something you discovered through the process of writing, or did you have it figured out to some extent before you started?

"Future War" was obviously a major inspiration, in terms of "wild combination[s]." There is a rather clumsy attempt throughout the movie (which may or may not be clear in the edit shown on MST3k) to make Runaway (Daniel Bernhardt) into a Jesus figure. Certainly the storyline of Sister Ann is pretty blatantly reminiscent of Mary Magdalene. In my very first draft of Neverland, I annotated a review of "Future War" that I found, I think, on allmovie.com. I even remember sending allmovie (which has apparently been renamed "AllRovi" -- someone there must have been trying to get fired) an email asking if I could have permission to use the review. They never responded, so I decided to move more fully into the narrative, which is when these things which had previously been just references (in an MST3k-kind-of-way, or perhaps, more to the point, a Nicholson Baker-kind-of-way) became vital elements of the narrative. 

I think just Creationism itself was a major source of inspiration. It is inherently irreconcilable and anachronistic, but ecstatically so; it's an attempt to synthesize two very different things -- science and religion -- which is an artistic impulse, even if Creationists don't see it that way. Though I am fully conscious that there are plenty of pious scientists (we're all contradictions -- logic isn't natural, not even natural logic), scientific inquiry and religious faith are two very different ways of looking at the same problem, products of two very different times and two very different peoples.

Once I saw what it was that I was looking at, I wanted to grab hold of as many different narratives as I could possibly cram into this thing. I can't remember how the tar pits came into the picture, but the Tar Baby follows from the tar pits, and the whole Jesus thing brought me to Peter Pan, which then echoed against Runaway and his gang in "Future War." There are others, traces of which may remain, that I had to cut to keep the thing at a readable length.

Are you more interested in the difficulty of reconciling these sources -- in the friction that results from their combination -- or in the creation of a relatively logical, coherent product? In other words, do you find it more interesting to jam your sources awkwardly together or to draw our attention to their underlying sameness?

To me, there isn't much difficulty in reconciling things. There is pleasure, the pleasure of solving a puzzle or of creating one, but no difficulty. I don't know how much I've reconciled things, anyway. I tend to be elliptical in my thinking, and so probably confusing to others, but to me, the arrows all point in the same direction and one thing follows from another. But to answer your question, despite the appearance of logic in my fiction, I think I'm probably more interested in the friction you mention. Though I don't necessarily see the two as competitive. 

I will say that I love what Lawrence Weschler calls "convergences," and I view the third-person narrator as a type of aggregating intelligence -- that is what a story is, after all. "Just a bunch of stuff that happened," to quote Michael Martone quoting "The Simpsons," that that narrative entity says is related. If my materials seem a little more heterogeneous, I think that it's probably because I am also interested in my materials' materials, how they were put together. 

In answering your thoroughly straightforward question, I seem to be reconciling the two options you've set before me in a pseudo-logical, (in)coherent manner. My apologies.

What was your strategy for editing together the hilarious YouTube clips? I laughed at them so much when I was first watching them, so I feel like whatever you were doing, it worked.

I'm really glad that you liked them, because I procrastinated very diligently while I was supposed to be working on them. You've never seen such diligent procrastination. 

In my first drafts, these clips were imaginary "dioramas" (more on that below) augmented with photos. But, since I couldn't do a diorama on the internet (or in life -- I'm not much of a sculptor, and I don't have the budget for the really fancy, super-articulated action figures (or their proper wardrobe) of "Marwencol" which I sadly didn't see until after we had finished putting this thing together), I figured I ought to at least do a video. I did the first one proceeding entirely by accident; I used iMovie, which has this bizarre setting for still photos that tracks from one end of the image to the other, or else zooms in, Ken Burns-style, which I had either unknowingly set iMovie to, or came as the default setting. And I was using still photos because I couldn't figure out how to rip a clip of the film from the DVD (or how to then clear the rights for that clip) using the software that I had. As with my short career as a film student, then, my "success" was a direct result of my ineptitude. But "amateur" was definitely what I was going for. If you look at most of the Creationist and Intelligent Design sites out there, they're labors of love, a kind of Outsider art not terribly different from that of Howard Finster or James Hampton. 

If anything, Neverland isn't amateur enough; as the various illustrations were coming together, I thought more and more of The Church of the Subgenius, too, and how I should fight the urge to trick it out even further. Ultimately, it is a fiction, no one should mistake it for anything else, and, as a fiction, it has to be readable, which meant toning it down a bit. I love Stang's style visually, just like I love Finster and Hampton, but I think it also tends to repel actual reading. There's just way too much there to take in, and so I, at least, tend to have trouble assimilating it all.

But back to the clips. I liked the result of all of my iMovie fumbling, but I didn't want to do the same thing each time and risk boring the reader/viewer. Also, of course, I did learn slightly more about iMovie and how to use it as I went on, which I think is probably evident if you read Neverland straight through. By the last one, I've figured out how to use iMovie's idiosyncrasies against its homogenizing tendencies, and even managed to remember some of my editing training from those student film days. Rhythm!

Apart from the works and artifacts you appropriated, can you trace an inspiration for Neverland, something you were imitating as you wrote it?

I initially composed Neverland as a tour of an actual museum, or, I should say, an actual imaginary museum, which strikes me as an entirely appropriate way to speak of Creationism and ID. I've even delivered parts of it, as a fake tour guide, on a couple of occasions.Because I am always both drawn to and repulsed by the pathetic, I am a real connoisseur of guided tours. Neverland was composed with that very naively-confident voice in mind. But the plainspokenness of that voice muted some of what I wanted to present. Before I sent Neverland to you, I completely overhauled that aspect of it, which overhauling, in my mind, is what made it viable as an internet thing, as opposed to a performed thing. Some of the enthusiasm of the physical presentation of it has been shoehorned into the language. But there was one more transformation that I didn't see as necessary until you sent me the proofs, which was to move it even further from that "tour" to something that read a little more internet-native.