Publishing Dialects and Dialectics

So here's a "future of publishing" wrinkle to throw out into the sloppy pool of the Internet:

The eminent Bruce Sterling has written a foreword to a new publication of Zamyatin's We. Not the most interesting publishing event of recent memory, perhaps. But, it's a great book, a classic, one might say. I first read it for a course my first-year of college about concepts of freedom and power. I can't remember what the name of the course was, but I very much remember the book. I love how the main character has a changing relationship to the hair on his arms. I think about this all the time, especially when I'm writing about the body.

So, I'd like to see what Mssr. Sterling has to say about the book. He's been named one of the most visionary and interesting SF writers of our day by any number of visionary and interesting sources, so maybe he has something interesting to say as a prelude to the reading experience of We, a very visionary and interesting book, which in its own way is a foreword to the interestingly visionary genre of SF writing.

So it's been decided. I should definitely read this foreword.

But wait a minute: it's not on the Internet.

I know--one wonders if it is a hoax, because a critically-interesting essay by Bruce Sterling is not available on the Internet. How can we be sure the foreword actually exists? Sure, it's mentioned in an Amazon listing, but lots of fake stuff ends up on Amazon. I guess I could go down to the local book store and buy the book. But I already own a copy of the book, it just doesn't have the foreword. I suppose I could upgrade, but $10 is a lot of money to pay just for the foreword. And plus, then I'd have to carry around duplicate pages I don't need, unless I ripped out the foreword pages and glued them to my copy. I could give my old copy to a library or a friend, but it has all my class notes in the margins, which I want to keep. And plus, it's all dog-eared from use.

You know, this reminds me of a similar situation.

The similar situation is my experience with Adobe's Creative Suite, made by perhaps one of the most neurotically anal retentive Intellectual Property controllers in the world. At work, I have the original version of CS. I know, right? Well, it still works, and it cost a damn pretty penny to buy in the first place A WHOLE EPOCHAL SIX YEARS AGO so my employer is not going to upgrade my work station to the current version, which because they are now up to version 4, would mean buying the new software outright. Meanwhile, while I can work fine on my own computer, all the files that customers send me, created with CS versions 2 through 4, are as completely useless to me as if I had no top-of-the-line graphics editing software at all. I am cut out of the graphics editing community, which as anyone in this community will tell you, is tantamount to being able to work with graphics at all. Artists gotta talk to layout, who gotta talk to publishing, who gotta talk to prepress, who gotta talk to press. Me and my poor CS1 are an island on this tempestuous sea.

So what is the connection here? Besides the fact that I'm poor, and totally behind the current wave of publishing?

The connection, my Internet friends, is the nouned adjective of "Canon". Canonicalness. The state of being akin to the canon.

Zamyatin's book, in addition to being a wonderful element of the human literary record, is in the public domain. [CORRECTION: it is NOT in the public domain, because the copyright was renewed in 1954 by the translator! I can't find info for the original Russian copyright status. Translating throws a wrinkle on the wrinkle, so instead of altering my argument, I'm leaving it how it is, and will let you interpret this additional conundrum of translation yourself. The actual status of Zamyatin's book is not my argument.] The copyright is null and void, because it was written so many years ago. There are various, complicated rules for exactly how a book enters the public domain in various territories and jurisdictions, but basically, it was published so long ago that we as a society have determined that the right of the author to sell the book for cold hard cash has lapsed, and now the book belongs to all of us, or more properly, whomever decides to spend the money printing the words onto paper. The Intellectual Property aspect of the work has joined the idealized world of the literary canon, from which aetherous realm it can be channelled by any press-savvy patron of the arts, and delivered into mine hands.

So, if a work is free, and anyone could potentially download it on the Internet, why would a publisher bother reprinting a new edition, especially when another publisher could do the same thing? Well, there are several reasons. One, is because people still like reading paper books, surprisingly enough! Another is that they might remarket the book for new audiences, or for particular markets, say, on the 75th anniversary of the book. Often for anniversaries, they will remake the book as well, in a special edition with new translations, extra critical material, and really sweet new cover designs. In this particular edition we are discussing, Bruce Sterling's foreword is the new part. Oh, the cover is new too. I'm willing to bet that Creative Suite had more than a small part in the cover design.

But the part of the book that is in the public domain does not include this new material. Bruce Sterling no doubt retains the rights to his foreword, no matter what it is published afore. You cannot reprint the edition of the book precisely, because the design is owned by the publisher. Only the text is canonical, and only this text is in the public domain. We, the literary society, does not own the extra features. We only own the nebulous, ideal, (and strangely, valueless) part of the "work", not the actual book itself. The mind belongs to us, but the body is sold by the publisher.

One might say that this same mind-body philosophy dictates Adobe's view of software. We do not own the Creative Suite itself, or any claim to the power of the program that allows such wonderful graphic editing. We own a license to one particular version of the programming, to use this programming up to the limits of its purposeful publishing in this manner. We own the "printed pages", but the aethereal, ideal qualities of the software is Adobe's trade secret.

In software, as far as I know, there is no public domain. First of all, usable software is pretty much less than fifteen years old. Second, there is the thing called "source code", which drastically separates the usable features from the programming that actually makes it work. A metaphor to a book could be a text that you are not allowed to read, but only allowed to listen to someone else read aloud. Of course, back in the day, all text was read aloud, and remembered, so if you heard a story, you could read it and publish it as well. Programs used to be only "source code", too.

But the point isn't simply about establishing a metaphor. The point is about what it means to establish a philosophy of the relations between authors, publishers, and readers.

Some in the software world view Adobe and other software companies' philosophical position as draconian, and untenable. These "some" prefer to set up different philosophies, such as the GNU public license, and other metaphors, like the "free-as-in-beer" philosophy. Some of these variations are probably the closest software gets to the public domain. Not only are you allowed to use the software, and distribute it as is, you can change it, repackage it, and sell it, if you want. Certain licenses mean that the free aspects have to remain free, no matter how you package it. But in the most free varieties, you can do anything you want. It's yours, and you have no responsibility to anyone else in your use. I've heard the programming described like a spoken language--if you hear somebody say something, you can repeat that language however you like, because this is part of being a free individual. You are responsible for your own use of language, and nobody can impose proscriptions on your speech.

Now, with the caveat that I've probably crossed a bunch of categories in the world of open source software licensing with this last paragraph, let me say that a book is still different. Programming language is similar to written language, and yet different. Firstly, from a pure semiotic standpoint, programming language is a written language (mostly English and general Math-speak), with syntactical variations to allow easy logical functions, and then also codified so that it can be parsed into binary, which is the written language a computer understands. So a programming language is not a language per se (ha!), but local dialect, meant to convey a certain sort of meaning in a localized framework, i.e. the programming and parsing relationship between programmer and computer. So, source code, the "body" of a program, is not actually a proprietary language from a semiotic point of view, any more than a computer kernel is the "brain". In fact, both are textual works, written in a unique language that can be expressed by a computer and programmer alike. But without the technology, the computer, in the middle to transcribe and "read aloud" this special text, the book is unusable. When the computer and the user both read the same language at the same time from their individual perspectives, amazing things happen. This sounds a lot like magic for a reason.

But these program books only seem different, because thus far we've only considered the side of books that are written. We've discussed the programming, but not the parsing and program execution. Naturally, the author has a feeling of filial implications for his/her work. "I made this; it belongs to me." Sure, to an extent. But remember, the reader is involved as well. Without the reader, your novel just becomes a very strange, third-person fantasy diary. The technology by which the reader parses the text must be part of this relationship.

So what about the reader? Well, back in the day, the reader had to make a choice. That is, s/he had to choose to buy a book, and stick with that decision. If you wanted to have a bound copy of words all to your very own, you had to pay somebody to put them there, because books didn't grow on paper. Fair enough for free market philosophy. Of course, the publishing industry was willing to work with the consumer on this. Most people didn't have enough money to buy a new hard-back encyclopedia every year. So, we got cheap paperbacks. Dime novels--an entire genre of fiction based around a particular sandbar in the massive river delta of supply/demand curves. Serials. Pulp. There are certain ways people would buy books, and so, wouldn't you know it, people starting making these particular books. Publishers even began to support the ultimate non-consumerist, socialist revolution in literature--free, public lending libraries--because if literacy was universal, they would still sell a hell of a lot of copies, because not everyone could read the same book all the time. Besides, libraries were a good market for hard-bound copies.

You see, books are in their own way a particular local dilect(ic), (hey! who put that parenthetical there? this isn't a marxist concept!) that communicates between the author and the reader. Publishers, out of necessity, have been the mediator of this. They sell the computers, I mean, the technology, I mean, the books. You might have noticed Adobe gets along pretty well with Apple. That's because Adobe wouldn't be able to sell so much graphics editing software, if there weren't shiny new MacBookPro's just itching to run the software. The necessary technology for forming the semiotic/mechanic dialectic between two material points in a productive relationship functions as a part of the whole. The particular iteration of language used in the process is developed by and for the communicative relationship, always already part of the process. It is not so much a mind and a body developed in Cartesian dual-unity, as a Bergsonian echo of duration between phenomenologically linked network nodes. Shifting back and forth, the sand is already going to be forming a river delta...

Sorry, got carried away. Let's get back to today. In the past, books were published in these ways... etc. But what about today? Does technology require me to purchase a new copy of a book I already own, simply because my curiosity and investment in this particular node within the canon of literature pushes me to want to read Bruce Sterling's foreword to a historical proto-SF novel? Is this the current state of reading technology? Am I so obscure in my interests to be a specialist, or a collector, or some other fetishistic anomaly that would cause me to overbuy this particular literary-material language group, like someone buying a supercomputer to analyze the human genotype, or a collector desperately trying to find a working Atari to play the original Asteroids cartridge? Am I a polyglot by need, or simply because I want to be? Why would I dedicate myself towards communicating in the multiple languages of both "New Canonical Release" and "Old, Dog-Eared Text", basically to communicate the same thing?

This is the era of the iterative web app, of atemporal Internet usage, and of crowd-sourced wikis. I think we can do better than having to make a choice between A and B.

We, the expressively speaking/writing/reading culture of humanity, is very quickly getting used to a new way of communicating. Our nodes of communication are proliferating very rapidly. We are now developing new idioms and syntaxes based completely around the ability to transmit idioms and syntaxes quickly and succinctly. Our technology is engendering new technologies. Our programming languages now form carefully considered Graphical-User-Interfaces, which communicate through meta-data messaging services alive on a hyper-fast, always-on protocol networks, these Interfaces competing to write their own logical search algorithms, tracking the latest in spontaneous cultural generation of slang and communicative semiotic gestures, whether acute or obtuse, as long as they are usable enough to carry meaning within them, among as many people as we can still process a continued conversation, using all of these language tools. Yeah, I just described Twitter's Trending Topics. 140 characters never sounded quite so big, did it?

So the canon is growing, and even more so, canonicalness is growing. Comments, crowd-sourced translations, linkbacks, live search, hashtags. Some of this new communication is important, and some of it is not. But how can you tell what's important, without having some way to access it? Maybe Bruce Sterling's foreword is less than 400 words, and is just some glowing name-check to the idea of SF under totalitarianism. Maybe I don't need to read it at all. But how do I know that? I've followed the link, and come to a dead end. Maybe I click through it in under twenty seconds, but if access is denied, how will I ever know? The canon is shooting itself in the foot. Publishers could not, at one point in history, have said, "well, once universal literacy happens, then we'll start thinking about changing our publishing strategy." A growing canon is an ecosystem. It doesn't simply track a curve, or a timeline to decide the public domain. If somebody wants to join the canon, if somebody has something important to say, they must put it with the canon. And the canon, the realm of the literary, where linguistic worth is not so much a nebulous idea as it is a ever-present, living, conversation in mutated dialect, is something that is shared, and networked. It always has been, and always will. All that's changed is that it no longer needs paper. If one piece of technology changes, then the way we communicate in a language previously dependent on that piece of technology changes, even as we continue to use that technology. You can still own a landline, but you better believe you're going to be calling people on cellphones. I'm not looking for an updated ebook here. I want to read Bruce's foreword on pages, in a book, as a preface to Zamyatin's We, in the same edition I read in college, will all my notes still there. Is that an insane request? Maybe a few years ago. But I'm posting this idea on a cumulative public diary stored on a computer I have never seen, with a public network address, written in syndicated meta-language across any number of syntax parsing programs, updateable instantly from any terminal attached to the same global network. Don't you get it? Blogs ARE insane! You try to tell me what technology is insane. The mind/body distinction is not just dissolved, it's scratching it's head in Intellectual Property court, stymied by legitimately elected political parties comprised of people under thirty. The insanity of the real semiotic mechanisms of human communication are not just some wacky internet theory--they actually are the Internet.

I don't expect publishers to understand. Most of them have their only speaking language in the dialectic of profit, which has been a popular idiom for a while now. However, as ubiquitous as the capitalist language is, and however deeply in conversation it may be with our other technological languages of production, consumption, and communication, "the ability to make money off of something is the tautological reason for its existence" is a relatively new work of literature. Capitalism may be a fact, but it isn't the prime cause of our communicative culture. So, while meanwhile, publishers do such things as DELETE EVERY COPY OF 1984 OFF OF ALL KINDLES WORLDWIDE, in another one of those "I-can't-believe-it's-not-a-parable" moments, I have no doubt that I will one day hold an iterative paperback book in my hands. And even if not that precisely, something else that represents ability of the literary canon, which after all, is no more than the vast tide of cultural communicative forces circulating around a collection of particular nodes, to adapt to the speakers of its collection of dialects and idioms. I can't predict the future. Maybe in some years, nobody will even read Zamyatin anymore. Maybe I won't either. But regardless of the subject matter, language will continue to express itself between creators and consumers, finding new ways to do so, and adopting new languages of expression as they become available. Because this is what communication does. The saw "information wants to be free/expensive" is stuck in the capitalist language. What it should say, and what is the most true tautology of them all, because it DEFINES tautology, is that "communications communicate". They don't want anything, but by sheer fact of their existence, they do what they do. Regardless of through what technology you choose to express communication, it will seek to communicate, or it will fizzle, and other communication will take its place. Just try to make the human race shut up. The amazing part is, through all the noise, little by little we slowly start to make more sense.

Meanwhile, my version of CS still has Adobe's stranglehold all over it. Guess we're lucky that there's more than one slick standard for distopian, proto-SF novels out there. Adobe brings you the new cutting edge standard in SF--Jules Verne, version 2375! Now upgrade from version 2374, only $499! Limited time offer!

Now Is The Time To Establish Moon Bases!!!

So, I was preparing a long post about Sci-Fi and SF, and the future of literature, but it got way too long for a blog post, and I was dreading trying to find pictures for its entire, narrow length.

But luckily, that means it became a Brutalitarian article! Now there is only one picture at the top.

You can read about human capacity for the speculative, the death of form and plot, and the routing of busty Sci-Fi sidekicks by the forces of cyber-time here.

Also! There are two new short stories on Brute Press as well. Both are very short, and very speculative. One is about a piece of paper. That's it. Just a piece of paper. The other is a short piece of action/fantasy involving wetsuits, protazoan light sources, and sexy tentacles. Just for fun, and because I thought it up.

You can read "With Due Warrant" here.

You can read "Around Me, Dark Tentacles" here.

I'm finding my sci-fi-leaning work getting shorter and shorter. Largely in line with the arguments I put forward in the Brutalitarian essay: it seems difficult to advance a long SF plot without straying into territory that has been covered elsewhere, and by others. That's okay though. The short stuff is fun. Also, if you don't have to spend a long time figuring it out, you can write more of it, and more like a fun exercise or a break. And besides, who wants to read a long cephalopod romance/action/adventure novel?

I sure wouldn't. Nope.

You can read a few more author notes about each piece on the front page of Brute Press, if you're interested.

The Heaven Makers

Coincidentally enough, because what is the Internet if not a maze of incidences that we are now about to deem "co-", Cory Doctorow published this interesting column for Locus online about Makers and the horizontal growth of technology, relevant to my last post.

Here's a lever pull for ya:

In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it.

This means that invention is now a lot more like collage than like discovery. Bruce Sterling's new Imaginary Inventions project is seeking to catalog the imaginary inventions of fiction, hucksters, failed entrepreneurs, and other imaginers. I sent him some excerpts from my forthcoming novel Makers (Tor, HarperCollins UK, Fall 2009), which concerns hardware hackers whose principle activity is thinking up stuff that would be cool, then googling to figure out how to build it, and Bruce replied,

There's hardly any engineering. Almost all of this is mash-up tinkering. It's like the Burroughs cut-up method applied to objects. These guys are assembling hardware in the same crowd-pleasing spaghetti at the wall approach that Web 2.0 web designers use in assembling features and applications.

That's exactly right. That's the plausible premise right there — spaghetti-at-the-wall hacking that assembles, rather than invents. It's not that every invention has been invented, but we sure have a lot of basic parts just hanging around, waiting to be configured. Pick up a $200 FPGA chip-toaster and you can burn your own microchips. Drag and drop some code-objects around and you can generate some software to run on it. None of this will be as efficient or effective as a bespoke solution, but it's all close enough for rock-n-roll.

From one of the lords of Democratized Technology himself y'all, and BoingBoing editor to boot.

The interesting part to me is that Cory is bringing up this article in the context of SF--he says, while back in the day the SF author had a lock on the sort of new/cool tech ideas that could be thrown out into the sphere and then later actually invented, these days the makers are the one's doing the speculation, and then the inventing/building right afterward if not at the same time.

In my last post I somewhat hinted at the negotiation between the ascetic ideal of technologists and those of writers. Scientists study the human facts of "anger, fear, voluptuousness, revenge, hope, triumph, despair, cruelty." But these emotions, the Nietzschean "pack of savage hounds," are detrimentally taken advantage of by the ascetic priest to further his own goals. Technologists, often just like these ascetic priests, utilize these emotions to further their own pursuits, via their clever devices that latch into our emotional fetishes rather than our actual needs (though, granted, with a certain amount of tangible benefit, much as religion has provided both the good and the bad.)

But writing, as an art form and a technology, is in a rare sort of middle ground as most of the arts are. It uses the emotional retinue as its material, but purportedly with a purpose. This purpose can be small or large, but mostly it is more complex than the generic "market cool" self-promotion which many techologists are after.

And of course, writing can also be worse. The power of writing is a demonic technology itself, causing humans to call it a crime, persecute its users, and control its material throughout its history. The democratization of writing is in this way little different from the democratization of technology; open-source and free speech go hand in hand, giving the masses the power of these powerful tools, for self-determination, self-discovery, and self-empowerment. Despite how prevelent writing and technology are, few are interested in analyzing the forces behind them, or how they might best be used.

I love the psychoanalytical model of treatment, and I try to replicate it as much as possible in my writing. Without delving into the dearth of clinical history, let's just outline it by saying:

-The clinical relationship between the patient and the analyst is one of power, and is therefore strictly controlled.

-Language (both spoken and with the body) is the clinical material, but it is not the entirety of the problem. It is only the tool for accessing the unconscious, where the real work must take place.

-The working-through of trauma is an ongoing process of repetition, and well, work; both members of the clinical partnership must be equally invested in the process; there may be multiple levels of trauma that are only uncovered as the analysis progresses.

And so on. There are many, many more important aspects of the clinic, but I think you can see where I'm going. There is an almost eccesiastical level of seriousness to the process--bordering the magical. My metaphor is chosen purposefully, because we see the origin of many people's distrust of psychoanalysis. It's like letting some priest of a religion only 100 years old go transubstantiating around in your memories and unconscious desires. Heresy! Almost as dangerous as writing, or, say, inventing gadgets.

But what is different between psychoanalysis and Maker/technologist culture, however, is what separates a White Mage from a televangelist/medium/new-age hippie. (Not that I actually believe any of these things exist in real life, of course.) Psychoanalysts, while perhaps having certain personality traits leading them to be the butt of Woody Allen jokes, do have an understanding of their power and a professional ethic. Makers, on the other hand, may sell kits and write Instructables, or merely make cool YouTube videos, or sell out their open-source buddies to VC capital. Other than the general free-vibe of the culture, there is no ethic whatsoever. And I'm not talking about a control structure--I'm talking about a professional ethic, taking the culture, the task, and its material effects seriously. You ever visit a "free-culture" house? Freegan/anarchist/etc? Sometimes they work great. But sometimes the void of "constraints" leads to chaos, or worse, to let autocratic and self-righteous personalities take over a supposedly "free" space.

And all this coming from the anarchist, anti-state, up-bloggers guy.

But anyway, back to SF.

I'm not aware of any professional SF ethics that have ever existed, but in some ways, it might have never needed them, because the authors had their own. I think of the golden age authors I know and love--Asimov, Heinlein, Dick, Herbert, Blish, La Guin. When you read these guys (and gals), you know they have a plan. There is no void of "the point" here. There is plenty of the emotional orgy of human feelings (I'm mean, these guys are still selling novels, here) but there is always, and ultimately, a point of the book, even if it ambiguous or troublesome. They are speculating, and in the course of this we get cool tech. We also get some male heroes, constantly in the horrible state of searching for existential meaning while beautiful women through themselves at them. We get utopias, and we get paranoid delusions. And we get god-men, and secret agents, and cities flying through space. But while we are wide-eyed with wonder, we also get the point. And I often disagree with the point, especially when it comes to folks like Heinlein. But at least I can engage with it head-on, because the reading-writing relationship is almost clinical. I can mess around with my unconscious almost anywhere these days; but with these authors we get the whole clinical package, the emotional pieces and the ethic, and that package is the point of SF.

So I have to disagree with Cory. I don't think SF will be reduced to the point where it is completely crowd-sourced, and flying along the nape of the technologist's flat earth. The more technologically crazed the world is, the higher SF is going to have to fly to be able to maintain coherence on its "point". If your telecommunicator badges are being outdated every six months, it's time to think of plot lines that will not succumb. Otherwise, the point get's lost, and you'd really be better off reading a tech blog. I would imagine we see less tech in SF. Steve Jobs and his ilk are the gadget swingers now--the SF authors of the near future will be known for other things.

And while I take Bruce's comment out of context, I think it is a good description of what would happen if SF falls into the gears of the technologists. "These guys are assembling hardware in the same crowd-pleasing spaghetti at the wall approach that Web 2.0 web designers use in assembling features and applications." He's talking about the Makers--but the point is about the ethic, and applies to writers as well. "Crowd-pleasing", "spaghetti", "Web 2.0". Do you really want the future of SF to look like a MySpace clique? How about the future of technology? There is no plan, other than what feels good, looks good, is cheap, is possible, and will generate some hits on the blog. Most technologists are designing memes, not materials. In writing, they call this flash-fiction. Cut out all of the contextual work, the characters, and just write something quick. Wanna see a squid get shot with a steam-punk turbolaser? Bam. You got it. It's similar to fan-fiction, the remake, and the sequel. Let someone else do the hard part and develop the point. Now all you have to do is say, "Hmm, what do I want my action figures to do today? Sexually explicit robot submarine chase? Fall over some CG waterfalls? Done and done." There's no point anymore, except tickling the brain's emotional orifice.

"Close enough for rock and roll", but aren't most of those rock and roll guys dead or suing to try and up the millions they receive on DRM-encrusted media bits?

I envy the well-read writers as much as I do the guys and gals fabricating circuit-bent roller skates and flamethrower chopper bikes in their garage, and wish I had some cool output from my own hobbies. But the further folks get into these techs, the more they are going to have to think about what the "point" is. Mainstream industry (both publishing and tech goods, and even infrastructure) clearly haven't gotten to it. Will the "democratizing" forces? Or by the time that Makers are the only technology left, will it be laisse-faire free for all?

Computerized Counterpoint

A sample of the music I'm referring to can be found here. You could even download it and listen to it while reading this post, if you like.

I believe I have Tweeted several times, while in unconditional throes of synthesized ecstasy, my overwhelming enthusiasm for David Borden.

"Synthesized" refers to synthesizers, by the way, and not the org-chem creation of ecstasy, as in the drug. My ecstasy resulted from the electrical pulse modulation noise.

And synthesizers refers to the archaic instrument of the future, not to a SF-induced category of as-yet-nonexistent drugs, which enable your body to meld across time-space by implanting tachyons directly into your time-cortex, via nanomachine pump. After proper mutation only, of course.

I just want to make sure we're all on the same page here.

David Borden is one of a school of musicians playing experimental compositions from the 70s into the 80s and beyond, playing with large amounts of choreographed repetition, and such techniques as counterpoint. By counterpoint, I mean the not-necessarily new technique (Bach was the original popularizer) of playing different sequences of notes that would not be harmonic on their own, but when synchronized together, they still form a musical effect.

By experimental, I mean his records are really hard to find, and are often collected by people into other experimental artists, like John Cage, Robert Reich, Philip Glass, and so on.

But the synthesizer! Oh the synthesizer!

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is about the synth that gives Borden's music such a rare dynamism. The synth has such a varied history. It ushered in the era of "electronic" music, sounds created not from any physical vibration of strings or soundboxes, but instead vibrations in the circuit--transistor induced oscillations, resistor-sculpted sine-waves riding the harsh green light of early monitors, modulated intensities of pulse energy, pulled from its light-speed stream to flow through paper-covered magnets, condensing the background hum of the radiative universe into sounds our antiquated bodies were able to perceive.

But synth has also represented the height of cheese in music, taking the rebellion of the Moog and fitting it to the reactionary keyboard sound of pre-programmed melodies, for pre-programmed people. It became the cheap copy of music, showing up in the back of TV shows, elevators, and cheap lounges, where the digital revolution hadn't yet reached to free music from its expensive arbiters, and the cheap reproduction of brass, drums, and strings would do well enough, though slowly driving us mad through its insidious appropriation of the quiet corners in life--the silence of a waiting room, the pauses in waiting on phone lines, and the places within buildings where radio waves could not penetrate and the Internet/mobile universe had yet to explore. Porn films, muzak, and discount discos. Synth became synonymous with cheap noise, a lack of quality and a papering-over akin to bulk-purchase paint.

But listening to David Borden, this collection of faded wax begins to break down. I can feel the excitement of the future once again. The sound of the wall being broken down by new technology. The wonder and the mystery, the fear and the danger, of sounds coming from a mere jumble of wires.

Listening to "The Continuing Story of Counter-Point", I feel this enthusiastic fear of the future. Between the counterpoint notes lies the wonder of the computer age as it was originally felt--in the mystery of the molded plastic box sitting on the desktop, the strangely mechanical and yet knuckle-popping eroticism of a 5 1/4" diskette being inserted into its drive, and in the shadowy mystique of green graphics splayed across the black mirror of a CRT screen. In those interior circuit boards, entire metropolises might very well exist, their uncanny future of dystopic speed a vision of our own, understood in fantasies of digital ghosts and disembodied electronic doppelgangers, dreams of viruses not even microns in length because their existence was in the ideal reality of information, and of sentience so new as needing to be taught to speak. A potential deux ex machina to the human race, simultaneously the prime mover of the next; these are the haunting specters not of old crimes, but of potentially apocalyptic dreams. The only thing worse than the memory of past misdeeds is the oracular-telephony--Oedipus' new technological prototype--the uncanny digital-prolapse in knowledge of the unavoidable fate of the future's cataclysmic desires.


SF felt this wonder mightily, and imbued their creations with its aesthetic of future trauma in the language of the present tense. In David Borden's oscillating score I hear the insinuated anxiety of flying above Blade Runner's Los Angeles, the diving rhythm more than compensating for the lack of visual flames, and the steady drone of Vangelis' own synth compositions radiating from the environment. In this world the advertisements are the only visible feature in the sky, and the synth warms us to the concept of new diseases, the synthetic frailty of life we are currently in the process of inventing.


I can feel it also mirroring the excitement and tremor of coming events, like in the opening subway ride of The Warriors. Barry De Vorzon's synth in this sequence is the teenage push, the libidinal id overly prevalent in these futures, because regardless of whether or not we are aging rapidly or finding eternal life, the world is constantly new to us, an uncomfortable ocean of emotional triggers we will never learn how to respond to properly, because the hormonal imbalances brought on in the desiring-milleau of the future can never resolve themselves to a millenial cosmos forever on the first-day of its unfolding. The guitar riffs may be the same, but they'll be heard looking out of the front of a high-speed subway car, looking down into the darkness of the tunnel ahead. In this future, everything will always be violently different.


Even in the misunderstandings of the technology we find the same aesthetic. Take Tron, Disney's paradigm of anthropomorphism. The humanity of computing components aside, this world is painted in glowing luminosity on its edges, but its planes are composed of the dark void. Power is rampant, though it takes the storybook guise of the evil sorcerer of old. In this current-future we live above entertainment arcades, working on designing what plays out below, even entering this circuit system ourselves. But whether the ligature of the circuit actually is the highway it resembles, we are still in the system--and isn't this the source of our anxiety, and the basis of our charge of thaumaturgy? Computers are the demons we so welcomingly invite into our homes. Journey may grab the title tunes in the soundtrack, but Wendy Carlos' synth score is the main-stream nightmare, Disney-fied.


The paranoia finds its climax in Terminator. Nothing more than a B-grade stalker/shooter on its face, we are forced into the depths of speculative fiction to think about the cyber-time'd cyborg sex roles between human and machine. Anxious, murderous death represses the orgasmic little death in this film, as red-eyed, mindless pursuit replaces our truly dangerous desires of fusion with machines. The dance club is called, "Tech-Noir", and the fashion-stagnant crowd dances to the synth beat in a despicable love of newness and consumer technology, while meanwhile the machinery underneath the flesh stalks its female victim, naturally attempting to forestall the the future fecundity of its womb. This might be the caricature, and the tag-line bringing them into the theater. But when you watch the chase scenes, seeing bullets traded between these species from the windows of the now archaically-huge detroit dinosaurs, flying under one present's Los Angeles circuit board of highway structures, molded in history's undestructibly cheap concrete that will one day form merely the rubble, like a beach of our smashed skulls, the synth takes on the aspect of pure fear, pumping from the speakers like adrenaline into our blood stream, emoting the danger and darkness of 80s LA with thermonuclear blast punctuated by a laser's harsh glare.

This is an synth-aesthetic that is now dead to us. When we view these representations of the future, they seem retroactively passe, trapped within a time-period of hairstyles, pop music, cars, and obsolete technology.

But maybe this technological-consciousness is not obsolete, but simply changed. Our technology now serves a different role, prompting us to explore nowness, rather than the future. Our technology is developed and designed to blend in, and to form a seamless element of our consumer environments. The aesthetic replaces function in many instances, rather than stemming from the function, or its future-potential function. We no longer look at disk drives as a remarkable fusion of the mechanical with the ideal. Now we design our flash drives to look like other things. We don't hunch in front of work stations, cramping our bodies around the square physicalities of glass-enclosed electron guns, relying upon our imagination to translate text into space. Everything is ergonomic, designed with clean lines and recessed flat screens, fitting in the pocket as easily as a neoprene bladder, becoming flat and light, meant to blend in with its surroundings rather than be the component center of attention. The electromagnetic consciousness has been reduced to nothing. Now we expect our machines to survive drops to the floor, and being dunked in a latte. There were days when we purged our workspaces of all electromagnetic interference, from too-large electric motors, to tiny refrigerator magnets and toys. We were conscious of fields, and their effect upon the data. Magnet data extended its importance into a presence, a scientific element of the environment, and storage material was treated with a necessary respect. Now this is outsourced to server farms, almost never touched by human hands--to the "cloud", the ancient coupling of existence without weight, bespoken of the Olympic firmament, rather than the world we inhabit. It isn't humans that have been isolated, enslaved, and reduced to their usefulness like slaves. We have enslaved the computer, and destroyed its humanity.

We have removed its life-blood, we have reduced its sense of speed. They grow faster all the time, but now in invisible ways, beyond the scope of our keeping pace with them. The speed must be measured to be understood, rather than felt through the clicking of servos and circuit diagrams. The chase is over, and the war is won. The power of information conjured from thin electricity is now about as mystical as running water, a din covered over in the background, which we can turn up our headphones to avoid. The clicking of the hard drive was the sound of a heart beating, but now a good machine is a quiet machine. Synth no longer stands out, imbuing sound with a bursting fullness of modulated frequency, but forms the back beat, made ambient by the continuing presence of fashion and character, that everpresent reality of commodified music, technology's intrusion into this field no more than a passing fad of notice, easily outsourced to samples and re-instrumented hooks.

Computers do not stand in counterpoint to humanity any longer. This surfacing current has been smoothed over, pushed back into the desiring-flow of culture, resurfaced only reshaped and appropriated, as a bit of kitch, or a example of the pace of history: a beginning point for the graph of Moore's Law. The alien quality of the digital was once its allure, but now it is a measure by which it can be placed into dead history.

Luckily, counterpoint itself seems to be a technique never fading in the human sense of aesthetics. The rebounding, echoing repetition of contrasting patterns is hardwired, we might say. The one to our zero, perhaps. Or maybe the zero to our one. It is no time at all to wait for its next instance, when the accelerating rythym swings back the other way, bathing us once again in that uncanny green glow of the free-radical of time.

Until then, we still have David Borden's music, if you can find it.

The Future is Totally Crazy

I also wrote a new article for The Brutalitarian, during an accidental caffeine and pseudoepinephrine frenzy.

Don't worry, I did go back and edit it later.

But, the article is still a thick circus of time-travel, Internet/informational riffing, Kantian metaphysics, and Science Fact/Fantasy.

It all started when @greatdismal, (who I guess is some guy who writes SF books), posted a flurry of updates about atemporality. It got me all in a tizzy, because I have this little twitch about time and history (yes I am the sort of person that has a twitch about time and history). It has a lot to do with politics and post-structural theory, but to cut off the story of my theoretical life, let's just say I have a certain feeling that the world would be a much better place if we all thought about time more in terms of Bergson's concept of "duration", rather than according to a humanistic timeline of history. More feeling, less fascism.

Anyway, you may say I'm a loony, anarchist metaphysician, but I'm not the only one.

So, reading Mssr. Gibson's tweets got me all a-thinking, and I had to go read the second section of Bergson's Time and Free-Will again. Which naturally, got me thinking of Kant by way of Deleuze. (Both of Deleuze's essays about Bergson and Kant respectively, are very highly reccomended. By someone, probably. By someone with an interest in blowing your mind.)

Now, I was planning one of my "positivity" posts about Kant's metaphysical exposition of time, because it's pretty cool, and one of those things I keep returning to in philosophy, case in point. But because I was also thinking about cyber-space, and because I am always, always thinking about the Internet (help me. please, somebody help me) I put away that blog post for a minute, and started thinking about cyber-time.

At this point, I was already on my second cup of coffee, and then had a bout of sneezes, which sent me to the medicine cabinet.

The rest, as they say, is totally cognized cyber-time.

But this article is actually pretty good. Yes, it is bizarre how 5000 words can land in a flurry of three hours, and yes, it will probably not appeal to anyone not interested in the metaphysics of time and cognition, and yes, I had to go back and do a significant amount of editing upon the realization I had used the word "consciousness" over fifty times in six pages. But, I already did all that editing! Now it's pretty tight. If I added a little Bergson and made the language a bit more academic, I would totally turn this in as a course paper.

But seeing as the only course I'm currently enrolled in is, "A Literature Tinker's Guide to the Ever-Increasing Spiral of Crackpotism", (my average is currently a C+) I have instead uploaded it to the Internet.

Basically, the gist is, although the timeline of history is a perfectly good metaphor for our temporal understanding of the world, the Internet and a capacity for abstract thinking we will simply abbreviate as "SF" is allowing us to get more towards the root of our intuitions of time-relations--and as such, we are now, bit by bit, being able to violate that temporal timeline in what we might, according to the metaphor, call "time-travel".

LOL

So, there you have it. Crackpot Metaphysics Ltd, free for you on the Internet.

No, Not Illegal Aliens, But All the Other Kinds

Okay--you're going to love this one.

Well, I'm going to love it. I don't know what you're going to do.

Alien. Yes, you all know it, you've all see it, (You haven't? What the hell is the matter with you? Get your ass to a video store.) you've all analyzed it.

I mean, there are just so many different directions to take.

-The sexual aspects of the film

-The bio-mechanical aesthetic of Giger, and the other designers

-The literary allusions to Conrad, and others

-The religious (especially the Book of Job, and Genesis--Kane is the one to birth forth the monster, remember?)

-The late seventies, and the noir/industrial/organicism trifecta

-The good old horror movie cross-genre critique

But these aren't any of the routes I'm going to take to introduce you to one of my favorite movies of all time. Oh no.

Prepare yourself for the Marxian, Proletarian-Organic Revolution of the Means of Production Critique of Alien.

This would be a perfect opportunity to excuse yourself back to YouTube or wherever, if you have not done the course reading.

It's long been a desire of mine to write a punk/hardcore song, with lyrics from the point of view of Engineer Parker. The man simply wanted to discuss the bonus situation, and now he is being chased by and un-holy organic horror around the spaceship he has barely managed to weld back together, only to be eviscerated by it. Do you think his benefit plan covers biomechanical terror-organisms? I doubt it. That is real proletariat rage, there.

But seriously--we are well aware of HR Giger's brilliant design of the aesthetic of one angle of the film's antagonist. But what about the other antagonist? The one we never see at all, not even leering at us behind multiple jaws in the dark? This antagonist is Weyland-Yutani, the corporation they all work for, and on who's directive they are taken to the planet, and on who's programming Ash, the android science officer, exposed them all to the alien.

In SF since Alien, the megacorporation is always an instant fall back for an antagonistic enemy, with all the powers of deux ex machina a writer can dream up. Alien was not the first story to make use of such a trope (we see it to some degree in almost every PKD story), but it brought it to the fore, and made it the standard. Imagine if a "dark side" of some "force" had become the trope, such as the specious concept launched in some forgettable movie released two years earlier? Oh, some unfeelable badness? How many movies could you really pull out of that? The corporation, on the other hand, is precisely the sort of modern devil any audience can readily get behind, because if we haven't had a conversation with it at some point in our modern lives, we certainly have met its agents--the professionally-ruled social arena, the backfiring commodity, the insidious brand, the corporate mission statement, and the faceless bureaucracy.

But when we look into Alien, we see more than the consumer-oriented antagonism we experience at the mall, on the interstate, or in the office. We see in the film a unique depiction of the worker, the organic, the corporate, and the technological, all coming together in a situation from which no one will escape alive.

Now, the dry part, which I will attempt to streamline as much as possible. If you could all *cough-cough* please turn Part IV, Chapter XV, Section 1 of your edition of Capital, Vol. 1. *shuffle-shuffle-shuffle* Does everyone have the International Publishers edition? No? Does some one have the page number? Page number anyone? Yes? Okay, let's begin.

Anyone who has taken an undergraduate class on Marx is probably familiar with the idea of his "problematic" view of technology. He is not a fan, because technological advances are often used to increase the relative surplus labor the bosses can withdraw from good ole Buddy Proletariat. In other words, you get a machine that can make twice as many Homborg Hats per hour, the worker gets the same pay, and the boss pockets the extra money made from the extra profit. And the worker might even get exposed to greater danger from the machinery, without being compensated for this risk, nor for the learning s/he had to do to operate the complicated machine.

But like anything Marx discusses, (the book is over 700 freakin' pages long) it is rarely as simple as what he says in the introductory paragraph. And, if it is some fact of capitalism, it stands inthe theme of the project that there is a major aufhebung just waiting in the wings to swing the good to the bad, with a little bit of revolution of the means of production.

Surplus value takes place by alienating the labor from the worker and the relationship between him/her and his/her product. You make it, but for X/hour, and all the product is the property of a boss who never touches it. Classic alienation.

Machinery does the same thing, even if it not the boss itself. Marx, living in the age he lived, connects work to the person via the line of "man as motive power". It all comes back to the hands, in other words. You make something with your hand, or a tool held in your hand, and you are the power, the root of the motion and action, and the laborer.

Here's another, algebraic/vector way of putting it:

Hand (power) x tool (direction) = labor

This is what Marx calls handicraft: work owned by the worker. Now, once the tool has been removed from "man as motive power" and is attached to a water wheel, or a horse, or some other power, the tool has been alienated into an "implement", controlled by a mechanism.

Mechanism (power) x implement (direction) = work

Because, who owns the water wheel? That's right, Herr Boss. In this way, the relations of the production have been slid another inch towards the controlling hands of the capitalist. You, the worker, have even less control over the product, because you now have to come to the factory, use the master's tools, and can't even leave a sweaty finger print on the item by way of signature. You are one step closer to a simple cog in the machine.

Now of course, workers are still totally necessary to run the machines. When a worker is a cog, it means s/he is inserted among a bunch of other cogs. These cogs are both the machinery, and the other workers. All pieces are necessary, within a certain set of relations of the larger, metaphorical machine, for the individual, actual machinery to function. You couldn't get to the factory without the bus driver, you wouldn't get paid without the cashier, and you couldn't run your machine and get paid if the mechanic didn't keep it working. This is the division of labor, which also adds to the steps at which relative surplus value can be extracted (you ever pay a check-cashing fee? or any other bank fee to access your own money?). The larger the machine is, both the larger, societal division of labor or the local hat press you work at, the more diverse the division of labor becomes. Each cog spawns other cogs, which must mesh with other cogs, and etc. To take a biological metaphor, each organ of production now develops its own intra-organs, from town, to factory, to union, to shift, to floor, to position, to hat press.

Marx points out in a footnote, that this is not really a new way of understanding things at all. In footnote 2 of the above mentioned chapter, he states:

"Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature's Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? [...] Technology discloses man's mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them."

This is why I love Marx; it may be the most fertile philosophical ground ever. Just look at that last sentence! What a can of worms! Each piece seperated by a comma, of which there are four, could be its own book, and this is just one sentence of a footnote!

Let's pay a little equal attention to human organs, as well as the organs of material production. Marx already has--remember man's motive power links back, through a functioning net of tools, to his/her hands, or feet as well. These cogs must link in a productive relationship for the production to take place.

In mechanical machinery, when we have separated the tool from the power of the hands, this does not mean the links to the human's productive organs has been severed. Of course, the hands still play a role by throwing switches and levers, but another organ begins to come into play, in a dramatically increasing role. This organ is the brain--the source of a human's motive knowledgeable power.

Of course, it wasn't until the facts of material production became readily aparent in the latter part of the 20th C that any student with a little touch of the prole poesis could raise a fist and say, "knowledge is power!" Of course, Marx gets it (it's all over this book), but he's not raising a fist. In this chapter, it's easy to see; new forms of production simply require a shift in the productive relations, and the intellect takes the fore as the organ of power for the worker.

Naturally, capitalism isn't going to take that sitting down. There are sorts of ways, via extending the division of labor in the productive relations, to take advantage of this. There is the non-disclosure agreement, which doesn't go so far as to call your brain Company Property, but pretty much implies it. There are the publishing and copyright relations of major corporations and universities, telling you if you are on the clock, any original and profitable thought you have is also on the clock. There's Intellectual Property--to make sure you aren't sneaking out of the office with some tasty tidbits for the kids. And the EULA, so all those division-of-labor attorneys can make sure you as the consumer (a very important element of the productive relations indeed) aren't thinking about a product in any sort of illegal way, which might inhibit the Boss' ability to make a profit on it. As production extends into the organs of intellect in both directions, into the worker and the producer, there are many people hard at "work" to ensure surplus value can still be milked from your labor.

Lucky for us workers, materialism is on our side. (hooray!) For one thing, the Boss has worked him/herself into a corner with Intellectual Property. It may be the biggest industrial mistake since slavery--doomed to fail by its logical inconsistency. Also, while they can scan our email, they can't get into our brains (yet). We can glean our own surplus labor back from them, by thinking on company time. Also, our skill, which is a major cog in between our brains, hands, and our tools, is growing in importance as its own source of labor. Seated in the intellect, this is the one tool they can't make us leave at the factory. Proprietary mechanisms try to put a chastity belt on the brain, but again, these divisions of the machinery can't fully separate something so laterally networked as intelligence.

But the glorious worker's future is not here yet. Still lots of work for us to do, comrade. Division of labor, while being a necessary fact of societal existence, is still a source of power for the Bosses--their own anti-production, keeping us working in neat little rows. This is a much more endemic division than the old rhyme of Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Studies Professor. It is in the productive relationship, not just our college major. Plenty of people make their money on the fact of tertiary industries--the meta-labor middlemen. This is not simply to scrape a little off the top; it also serves as a stratification, an ossified layer of industry that is unwilling to change, and difficult to do so. Labor organization is difficult, because it is so easy to set workers against each other. The machine operators may get their contract, but what about the security guards? Or the bathroom attendants? Or the cafeteria workers? These are the sorts of seperations ripe and ready to be plucked by those who wish to consolidate control, or at least make it inaccessible to the worker. The industries are developed along these lines, vertically, or at least in a monocultural view, without considering the vast network of the societal division of labor as a ecosystem, within which all components, machine, human, and mind, must work together, for prosperity, the future, the glorious singularity, whatever.

So what was I talking about?

Oh yeah, Alien!

The first character to speak in the film is technology. In a cold and dark spacecraft, looking already burnt out by some sort of industrial accident, causing all signs of life to evacuate, a computer switches on, and begins to click and hum, making intellectual calculations. After some minutes, a human is born from a white womb of light (or is it a coffin?), and the workers are born.

This is a workplace, after all, and we are quickly introduced to the stratification of labor. There is a commander, an executive officer, a science officer, a warrant officer, a navigator, and couple of engineers. There is some disagreement about pay, but no, let's discuss that later! We have a mission here. This is the greatest element--we never really find out what the "bonus situation" entails, other than that Parker and Brett are getting less than everyone else, though they seem to be doing a lot of the work.

In fact, it seems as if the amount of work done is inversely related to the crew's standing. The captain spends a lot of time chatting with the computer, called, "Mother", interestingly enough. The science officer broods a bit, speaking of "research", Ripley flies the ship with the navigator, but also is saddled with the task of bitching at the engineers for not working fast enough, and continuing to make trouble about the "bonus situation".

In the end, we find out the truth, which is that the entire crew was lied to. The corporation, via their proprietary computer, and their own scabby plant of an android, invented a situation in order to grab at a potential profit, putting their workers at horrible risk. The computer system is alligned with the antagonists to the last, presenting a danger of being lost in space if not expelled into a vacuum, faulty diagrams and systems allow the alien to stalk them more effectively, and even sabotage, the only weapon Ripley has at the end to trap the beast, becomes a liability as the countdown goes out of her control.

But how exactly does this technology wind up at odds with its users? Because, it is divided from them, clearly property of the bosses, and therefore easily set against the workers forced not simply to use the equipment, but live within it. It is protected from their access by chains of command and secret codes, and even infiltrates their relationship with their own bodies in the form of the simulacrum, Ash. This is technology working against them--invasive, alienating organs, not implements they can graft to their own bodies, extending their own motive power. (Speaking of invasive organs, how about the scene when logical conundrums send Ash spiraling into a living-blender of synthetic organs? How gnarly-awesome is that!)

And then, we are left with the biomechanical fetish symbol in the room: the alien. When the corporation has set workers against workers, installed dangerous prototypes, and insinuated proprietary psychological warfare against its employees, it is not enough. The biologic-horror enters, right out of the stomach.

The alien is the singular point of contact with the alienated system these workers have been born into--it is not its metaphor, so much as its defining moment, its quintessential attribute, and the axis of the web of control the corporation has woven. There is no hope for the crew against such an enemy, and alienated as they are, they have no fate but to die alone, one after the next.

It is a biological entity, a parasite, an organ working against the network of organs, for its own benefit. And what is its own prime motive force? It's destiny to be commodified and sold as a weapon. A biological weapon, its function too horrible to be conceived by those forced to work with it. It incubates in the belly, the negative space of the worker, which s/he works to fill, and it the pinion point of the bosses' shackles since time immemorial. It is the danger, the death, and the suffering, lying dormant in the warehouse until tapped by the employer for production. Each worker is converted into a machine, extrapolated to the final extent of his or her body, exploited mechanically until the limits of pain cause them to slip into death. From the remains is borne a new alien, which will stalk, ensnare, and kill another worker, until every worker everywhere is gone. Once they are all consumed, it simply goes dormant again, until the next time the relations of production allign, and it can leap from its egg, and begin again. In this film, it is the mining industry. In the second, the army. The third, the prision-industrial complex. In the fourth, scientists and mercinaries, the line quite thin.

So what's next? Not sure. I had an idea for a SF film once, which pitted machines against humans, but also had a third set in the equation of cyborgs, who never really won any battles, but never really lost any either. Call them the anarcho-syndicalists of the anti-capitalist SF universe. I had a pretty good cosmos drawn up for the story. But it's one of those things, you know, who wants to hear a story about politics? I swear though, I had some pretty kick ass vehicles conceptualized, as well as some great body-mod ideas for the cyborgs. Not just lens eyes or claw hands, either. I'm talking about losing your bipedalism. Take that, Vitruvian Man!


Stay-tuned for our next episode of Hollywood Critique/Self-Critique - Outland: Connery and the Cops of Capitalism!

It Came From Italy....

In the cross-over interest category between book design and SF, I feel some of the distinguished readership may enjoy this post from the Caustic Cover Critic:

"Since 1952, Italian science-fiction magazine Urania has been publishing a novel or short-story collection (usually translated into Italian, rather than by an Italian author) each month. Over that time the covers have ranged from standard 1950s pulp to thuddingly obvious literalism to a sort of thick-eared surrealism that almost approaches genius with the extent of its awkward invention--like the work of a brain-damaged Dali forced to use his left hand only. The shoe-horning-in of a nude or semi-nude woman is also frequently necessary. Just sit back and marvel."


Follow the link to see a nice collection of covers. Worth it.

Myrna Loy--Oh, and my writing too

Hey hey hey it's Monday.

I posted late Friday about my new article in The Brutalitarian--but I know most of you are weekday blog reader sort of folks (how do I know that? Well, why don't you think about it tonight while you're tossing and turning, trying to get to sleep...) so there it is again.

But ALSO: I have a new short story up, on Brute Press Live. It's SF--cyberpunk, time-travel, aktion, the works. If you're at all into that sort of thing, you should read it, and let me know what you think. I'd be interested. It's a fun story too, you might even like it.

I don't know why my only two SF stories have been the only ones to end up on BPL, but that's just it. I think another one will be going up soon, however, which will NOT be SF. So, yeah. Look out for that.


In case you haven't put it all together, Brute Press is my web publishing imprint. Not constrained to only my own writing by rule, but as of now it is only my own writing, just because nobody else is really interested. So this is why you might hear about it here, intermittently.



Anyway, cheers; and let's try and not have as braindead a week as my weekend was, okay? I mean, that's more to myself than it is to you.... but, still.

And LASTLY (but not leastly): Here is the lovely Myrna Loy--just because.


Thanks, Myrna! For all that you do!

The Horror of Genres (late 80s edition)

Some of those in the know like to refer to severely conceptual architecture as "architectural fiction". So, file this under, "Fictious-Arcitectural-Fiction":


"These drawings were made—in Hollywood and Pinewood Studios, England—for a movie that was never made. The movie called Alien3 that was made and seen around the world was conceived and directed by David Fincher, and is notable for it’s unremarkable sets and its unrelenting grimness. The movie I made designs for was directed by Vincent Ward, but ended in its early stages, when he left the project.

The story of the Ward movie was radically different, though it deployed the same basic characters, in that the setting was a religious colony that had escaped the earth and inhabited an abandoned commercial facility deep in space. They had adopted a Medieval way of life, without electricity or modern technology. The Ripley-Alien drama was to be played out inside this crumbling, artificial world. Under Ward’s direction, this would have become something highly original, a movie in which the architecture would have had a central part."



The original Alien, in my conception, spawns a new genre of SF called, "SF Horror", (carrying on by such films as Event Horizon, for example) in an aesthetic (while we are genre-fying like nobody's business) I would title "techni-organo-gothic" (you can just shoot me now).

Obviously, if this potential third movie had been made, techni-organo-gothic would not be my categorical fantasy, but an actual term, and there would be discussion lists, blog-rings, and fetish porn for "Toggers" who dreamed of going into space, colonizing other worlds, and becoming infected with apocalyptic parasites.

So, like, too bad and stuff.

The Rabbit Hole of Ambition

So I was kind of stressing about Rabbit Hole Day. It sounded interesting and fun to blog with a Halloween costume. But, as the day loomed, I was having trouble finding a project. Anything that I could blog about with any real intensity, I pretty much already do. I thought about masquerading as a gadget blogger, or a hardcore liberal political blogger, or a philosophy blogger, but I kind of do these things already, albeit in my own way. I thought about making up a blog post like a teenager's MySpace page, but did that satire already with my own MySpace page (which unfortunately seems to be lost to the depths).

Then I read Cory Doctorow's Rabbit Hole post on BoingBoing, (where you can find out what it is, if you haven't Googled it already) and thought that was the perfect idea. Safe, perhaps; but at the same time, isn't revealing details about oneself that one never would a perfect mask to hide behind? Hiding behind the facade of the truth, which is essence is supposed to be a fundamental element of blogging: millions of anonymous strangers revealing details about their life to the world, which they wouldn't ordinarily tell their own mother. I've always taken the opposite approach in my online writing. I have never used a pseudonym or screen name, and only write things that I am prepared to represent as written and published by myself. So, now I am going to take the opportunity to cut in a completely different direction and tell "you" all about a part of myself. (This also fulfills half of my promise regarding my Blog Poll; I received two responses, so I must blog about the chosen "favorite topics" at somewhere near half-quality. Paula responded that "she doesn't like math"--I still haven't figured out how I'm going to blog about that. But Betabug, kind fellow that he is, chose to (perhaps lie) and say that he reads because of me, even though he doesn't know me. So, this post is about me! And maybe only halfway-readable!)

I'm going to write about my writing. Not my blogging here, that is. I mean, write about the fact that I want to be a writer. I am one of those people. To prove it, here is a list of asshole-wannabe-writer things that I have done recently:

-I have been non-apologetically expressive about my personal coffee fetish

-I have read pretentious literature and compared my own work to it

-I have struggled to write short stories about an author struggling to write

-I have "worked on a novel"

-I have felt a deep sense of annoyance at a rejection letter, "because my work is better than everything those assholes print"

-I have used a typewriter

-I have written in a Moleskine notebook, possibly while sitting in a coffee shop

-I have finished writing in a Moleskine notebook and looked up to see another person at the same coffee shop writing in a similar notebook and thought about how they are probably not as good of a writer as myself

Quite guilty. But of course, you knew I was a jerk, so why would anything change once I picked up the pen? So let's not talk about that. Instead, I'd like to share more about my writing and my writing process, for no other reason than that I have never done so before.

Originally I thought that I wanted to write SF. I even started, a couple of summers ago, writing a SF noir about a cyborg-alien detective investigating a strange streak of "psycho-terrorism" on a planet that's entire economy was based on tourism. It was called "Vacation Planet"--all my working titles are base and simply self-descriptive. The character, by name of Enoch (which has been the name of at least three separate potential characters since) finds the lush resort destination disconcerting after traveling from his own desert planet at the expense of the Tourist Board. He tries the vacation lifestyle, meets the underground resistance organization of the service class of the planet, and eventually determines that it is not terrorism, but a self-induced psychosis brought on by living in a world that is a constant buffet line for outsiders. I had the idea while visiting my brother in Orlando. While my plane was landing, I saw strip mall, hotels, and amusement complexes and their infrastructures all the way to the horizon. I imagined what it would be like if I had to live there. It was such a full, bright city, but empty in a way that only Disney World's Main Street USA can be.

I worked on a few other SF projects, only one of which ended up finished. I found my attention mainly drawn to the brainstorming. Simply writing out my idea after all the fun of thinking it up was a bit of a chore. When it came to the actual writing, my interests were leaning towards a speculation of prose, rather than of concepts. To speculate with literature itself, I found it more helpful to stay with the most basic plots. Naturally one can do both; but I'm only a beginner, after all. Here are some examples: a derelict of a man eats a sandwich on a subway, disgusting his fellow passengers. A man dies, and finds that the afterlife consists of walking over a bridge. A middle school boy listens to his peers, perhaps more closely than anyone of that age should. These are ideas that are not really original or enlightening in themselves, but I try to think about a way that I could tell them so that the mundane appears exceptional. I like to think that this is my skill: what I am able to do with words. Perhaps I succeed, and perhaps I don't.

I think that I do succeed. I feel that my writing is not just good, or readable, but I think that it shares something new and creative, in a way that might be called art. I write a lot on this blog about what I think "creativity" is, or what "literature" is, but in truth, I don't think of my own work in any terms other than "worthwhile" or "worthless" once it is sitting on the page. Most of it does seem "worthwhile", and so I keep making it.

I have to, in a way. If I end a week with less than 20 new pages (pages that I am happy with), I feel anxious and disturbed. After work, if Megan is working, I might be able to get 3-5 pages, if I'm not too tired. Then I try and set one weekend night aside for writing; I nap in the afternoon, and then begin to up my caffeine level. If I can write for 8-10 hours (normally resulting in anywhere from 5-20 pages), I consider it a success. I normally shoot for Friday nights. If I come up empty on Friday, then the pressure is higher for Saturday, and my anxiety builds. The anxiety isn't bad in itself--it can act like a wave, pushing me once I start, and keeping me going rather than letting my mind head off towards the Internet, video games, too much alcohol (during the writing) or other things. But when I'm sitting with a blinking cursor, or trying to "have fun" knowing that I've only written 3 pages in the last 10 days, the anxiety can be a lot less than comfortable. I haven't really analyzed this or tracked it down in my psyche. I think I'd rather not, at least for now. I consider myself lucky to have it. Tomorrow I could be old, and content with my day job, and willing to just push that anxiety back and let life take its course. Psychoanalyst's translate it as "drive" for a reason, I think.

To be completely honest, I do hope to be a well-known writer some day. Not famous, necessarily. I wish for these two things, specifically: one, to make enough money with the writing that I like, so that I may live comfortably and concentrate solely on my own projects; and two, to have enough of a following in readership that I can easily be aware that others care for and appreciate what I write. I don't think these are selfish or unreasonable goals. Of course, the publishing industry isn't really a well of hope right now. I've thought about the possibility that almost all writers would have to work for free (or almost so) in the near future. I think I would be okay with that, though it would be fun to live like Hemingway or Capote. But weren't they both independently wealthy before they were authors?

State of the Author: thus far, I haven't had anything published (not counting self-publishing). I have two pieces submitted, I have been asked to read at a literary reading in April, and I put a piece on Authonomy recently. As part of my "let's figure out where we're at" process, I made this tally last week:

Finished Work: seven (one novella, four short stories, an essay, and... err, Punk song-lyrics)

In Editing: five (one novella and four short stories)

Writing/Stalled: four (one novella, two short stories, and a poem. Novella is almost finished, the rest might never be, though the poem is close)

In the Aether: four (two novels, one short story, and one essay)

Even More Vague: I have a shit load of ideas scribbled down. Some of them are really good. Others are really funny. A few are illegible. At least one is probably really offensive, and I would tear it out of my notebook except that I can't bring myself to do it because that would make me feel even more guilty. My plan is that eventually all the unused ideas will be compiled into an epic poem of sorts. I write my notes in complete sentences or at least phrases (I always have) so it actually reads pretty well, if a bit esoterically.

I think one of the novels in "the Aether" could actually be something. This is what I'm working on now. My plan is to finish all the short stories that can be finished, bomb the shit out of the journals, and write the damn novel. I'm literally bursting with ideas for the novel, so I think it's going to be good. I'm actually worried that I'll ever come up with something to match it once I'm done. Of course, this could all change tomorrow, and it could go back into the stack.

I hate, absolutely hate, submitting my work. The entire process is so antithetical to why I write. Of course, I write largely to fulfill my inner desire, so getting rejection letters is obviously antithetical to my ego's pursuits. But I wouldn't mind being rejected if I didn't have to wait five months to get a form letter. It's disgusting--everybody bitches about how literature has gone to shit, and then they treat potential authors this way. Naturally, most potential authors aren't about to be the saviors of literature. But it certainly seems to be an odd system of improvement and support. Imagine if education was run in the same way--you work hard at some abstract task for nine months, turn in your work, and then wait for months to receive a form with almost no feedback except for "yay" or "nay", which itself is largely subjective or at least meaningless to a point where it might as well be. Oh, wait... that is how education works! Well, no wonder people like TV. Television is always there and loves you just as much, no matter what you watch or for how long.

Well, so there it is: Adam Rothstein, the hopeful writer. Probably not too different from most hopeful writers, but hey, I'm me, goddamn it!

I don't discuss my writing on my blog because my blog is not about my writing--or at least not about that writing. It's nice to keep them separate. This blog is a publishing tool: a portal to a certain audience to whom I write in a consistent voice more my own conversational tone than anything else. My subjects are things that I am interested in, and about which I choose to comment. But, this does not really include myself, or the things that I write about when I write. When I write off-blog, I am crafting individual pieces, works that would stand alone unchained into the subjective network of the Internet. I am in those individual works, but as "author", not specifically as the narrator. My blog is more of a pipeline that I log into, after which I begin to transmit straight from my own mind. Therefore, I let Author Adam do his own pretentious work, and here Writer Adam just tells it like it is for the peoples. They interact, of course. But form is as important as substance, and the Author in me knows his form, and the Writer in me knows his as well.

Have you enjoyed hearing about Adam the Author? I tried to tell you about him as truthfully as possible, though I am certainly a bit biased. It was a bit of a release to just talk about him freely, in this blog form. Certainly different than my usual rantings and ravings about the economy and technology. If you ever do want to read some of his work, you can always check out Brute Press, where he publishes online. I'll update you about him from time to time, of course.

Okay, I'm going to cut it here. I seem to have slipped into a disconcerting third person, which has some humorous, ironic possibilities, but also is starting to allude to the fact that this split-writer personality internet-publishing-form thing might have more uncanny consequences than we'd all like.

Happy Rabbit Hole Day!

This Museum Belongs in a Museum

I was in Seattle this past weekend--not for any reason in particular, just a little weekend trip. Megan and I visited the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, which until we drove past it, I did not know existed.

We had to go, even though it looked a bit touristy--it is actually part of the Experience Music Project, which is sort of like the Basketball Hall of Fame for music--if you have never had the pseudo-pleasure, it is sort of an Epcot Center. Lots of video-mentaries in enclosed monitors, a bit of memorabilia, and some high-tech diversions like virtual reality basketball, and such things. So, the ticket was $15 a piece for admission to both the SFM and the EMP. Pretty expensive, yes, but I had to see what a SF Museum was like.

The answer: not so bad, actually. There are good points, bad points, and missing points that could eventually become good points.

First, the bad:

It is heavily movie (read: Star Trek/Wars) weighted, in an obvious attempt to get people in the door. The lightsaber duel theme from Episode One played on a loop outside the building. Most of the memorabilia and artwork in exhibits come from SF movies, or from the movie adaptations of SF books. But, a museum is a largely visual experience, so what do you expect?

It is also small. There are two floors, with a winding trail through each. The overall size equals about one wing in a "real" museum, like the Museum of Natural History or the MOMA.

But, the good:

Among the artifacts that were not bought in studio lot/prop warehouse actions, are some actual things of historical value. Almost every exhibit that features a particular book or author contains a good-condition, first edition copy of the work in question. See the photo to the right, which I snapped before I was informed there were no photographs allowed (sorry, there was no sign, and I was taking pictures of artifacts, not works, with no flash). Behold! The entire 17,000 page manuscript of Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle! I have to be honest; I got a bit choked up while standing there in front of it. Not out of any sort of fanboy awe. (I also have to admit that the trilogy is still on my exponentially expanding "to read" list.) I felt a sense of overwhelming admiration for the amount of work that had to go into such an expansive, creative project, and the sheer magnitude of what 17,000 written pages looks like. I can't judge the literary content standing on the other side of the glass, but still, the amount of effort that went into creating these pages is obvious. I know how I feel about my own petty manuscript notebooks, and how I would feel if anyone of them ever escaped my grasp. So, to think that Neal Stephenson lent this massive, handwritten accomplishment out of his grasp is the essence of creativity indeed. Oh, and if you were curious, the little larvae looking things splayed out like armament for a stealth bomber are all the ink cartridges that he used writing the pages.

These are the things that the museum gets right. The annals of SF that are not still possessed by their creators, I would imagine, are largely in the hands of private estates or collectors, and in the words of Dr. Jones, "belong in a museum" for the sake of preservation and public display, if nothing else. This manuscript is a rare artifact of the writting process, and not to automatically conclude that Mr. Stephenson will or will not join the same canon as Shakespeare, Homer, and Isaac Asimov (chuckle), but these are things that could all too easily become lost, come the all-too-near apocalypse. I, for one, pledge to trek via zombie-sled to Seattle, to form a militia to guard these treasures of humanity.

Anyway, back to the museum. Also on the plus side is the layout. Rather than show the stuff in plot lines (the Star Wars section, the Lost in Space section, etc.) they arranged the museum thematically. You are presented, at each exhibit, with a currated view of a particular aspect of SF. For example, "dystopic stories", or "travel to mars", or "confronting social issues". It made for a much more informative and holistic experience than simply seeing A REAL STAR WARS BLASTER RIFLE!!!!!! Highlights of this aspect include the section on the evolution of fictional spacecraft design, and the behavior and motivation of aliens. This museum is laying the groundwork for college majors in Speculative Fiction Theory, so nerdy teenage males, listen close.

But there is certainly room for growth. There was alot of interesting entertainment-tech, like a hands-on computer that would present various famous spaceships through a widescreen, spacestation-esque view screen. Certainly alot more worthwhile than many other museums' hands-on offerings, but it could be better. SF has, beyond doubt, changed the way that our technology has grown in development and use by predicting and speculating on humans' relationships with their cutting edge tools. Why not do the same in the museum? I'm not suggesting lazer-tag, but maybe a little internet? WiFi units to interact with exhibits, like the audio tours in art museums, perhaps? Other Web 2.0 user particpation could not only enhance the visiting experience, but also build support for this new-concept museum. At the Hall of Fame display, one can email oneself web links for further reading about the inductees. This is a good step, but as fast as the web is expanding, the SF museum has a lot of catching up to do. Just look at the inadequancies of their web site!

One last thing that I would think critical to a study of SF is not only the holistic view point across the "genre", but also a view of it in place within the rest of culture. What does it mean that SF largely consists of marketable media such as toys, books, movies, and other associated paraphenalia? How does being a commodity shape the speculative aspects of SF "vision of the future"? And what is the relationship between speculative fiction and fiction in general? Do we expect different things from them?

Truth told, I had a great time at the museum, though it was only about an hour and a half. It's a great museum, though expensive because it is a for-profit venture rather than a subsidized entity. I suggest you check it out if you are in Seattle with an extra hour, and an extra $15. Frankly, I would love to be a currator for the museum. I can put that on my list of possible careers right between "Pocket Battleship Captain" and "Columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picaynue".

Hooray SF!