Strange and Occluded Dreams

Front Wall of the South Australian Museum, North Terrace, Adelaide, July 1988.

If this glass exploded the slivers and shards of Australian pre-history, Aboriginal land rights, the Europeanization of the landscape, global warming (Tim Flannery - The Future Eaters, The Weather Makers - will be  director of this museum 10 years later); the notions of museum (that embodiment of pious theft), university, law, rigidly academic education (examinations held in one of the reflected halls), science as separate from life – the entire British Empire of hierarchies would embed themselves in

whatever they found.

The strange and fearful dreams of childhood, my inability to disentangle this clotted and occluded mass except by leaving, by stepping away, looking back.

(Photos: The Great Family Photo Project)

From The Gutter Press

Lists & what they accomplish

In her essay Toward a More Complete Measure of Excellence, Roxanne Gay remarks:

In Best American Short Stories 2011, six stories were published by a little publication called The New Yorker. Granta, Tin House, and McSweeney’s each had two stories in the anthology. These magazines are undoubtedly publishing excellent writing but their dominance also tells us that beyond the elite tier of magazines, it is more challenging for excellence to be recognized or acknowledged.

The three most interesting parts of BASS 2011 were the foreword by Heidi Pittlor, the introduction by guest editor Geraldine Brooks, and the list of Notable Stories at the back of the collection, a list that does include stories from a broader range of literary magazines while also listing a mind boggling nineteen (by my unofficial count) stories from The New Yorker and several stories for each of a number of other elite magazines like Ploughshares, Tin House, Ecotone, and Granta.

And so Roxanne Gay identifies the literary equivalent of the ruling class. As things stand now, the peasants are unlikely to appear in those pubs, that pub, or any pub those pubs & that pub will deign to acknowledge.

Which wouldn't matter two hoots if there weren't further commissions and royalties at the end of the procedure. Advances and royalties are money, and money is time.

Oh, and respect. Respect for breakfast can set you up for the day.

(At the same time this is not a new situation. The NY Times Book Review was founded to showcase the products of the paper's major advertisers. [See The end of intelligent writing: literary politics in America, by Richard Kostelanetz.] Institutional log-rolling is as old as mass publishing.)

However, in addition to its ability to pickle you in annoyance, this situation cripples the creation of culture. We need to see these books, these stories, these poems; we need them as readers and as writers; we need to interact with the most true and resonant things that are being pointed at and exclaimed at and WTF'd at and wondered at and written about, the inner worlds and the outer –

And we need to be able to do it now.

Not being able to readily read the material that is not included, not alluded to, rendered invisible; not being able to hear about it and thereby find it is killing our ability to make and remake our understanding of ourselves and everything else.

This situation – the ruling class and the invisible ruled – closes down our possibilities at the moment we need them most.

Globally, André Schiffrin has it nailed.

And, as Schiffrin points out, implicitly, the issue isn't power; it's control. Ownership gives control. Over what is said, what is permissible to say – not under my roof – what is effective speech, what not.

Yes, there is the internet. That marvellous device which removes your distribution problem and replaces it with a publicity problem. We can do it without the mass organs of yesteryear – we can network and link and post and comment and create and… But we have to keep at least the net free. We, collectively, have to control something. We have to occupy our voices and our contacts and our contacts' contacts – or our future will not be ours to occupy, at all.

Creation Stories

Just finished watching Revenge of the Nerds (a 1996 PBS / OPB / Channel 4 production about the history of the computer revolution) because we're still waiting for Pirates of Silicon Valley. (I should have Pirates on hold as soon as I thought of it.)

Though this was provoked by Steve Jobs's death, I remember watching it the first time and had much the same reaction - I like hearing this story, not because it's an American success story - in South Australia, when I grew up, ambition was not a virtue and sudden accesses of money were very suspicious - but because it is a creation story.

And, like most creation stories, it's rich in circumstantial detail, but fundamentally mysterious. We still have no idea why we think of things... Kekule's dream, Woz's trip. Creation is not at its heart Apollonian. It's not even necessarily male.

It's doubly strange watching this 1996 production because it ends with Jobs being fired by Sculley (the sugar-water salesman) and fading into mere movie moguldom.

Even when he was young, Jobs's face was opaque in ways that Gates's wasn't. You could see, as he paused while he was speaking, that he ran his perceptions through some sort of mind-body matrix. It is in the body that the connections are made.

He continues to fascinate because he's the only one in the entire computer / wizarding bidness with a second act, with potential that wasn't yet visibly withered and gone.

Details, Moments

During one of our initial discussions about how to structure Golems Waiting Redux, I showed Daniel some details I'd cut from xeroxes of some of the photographs. I had them tucked away in my work-diary as a talisman against work and the way its sameness and its neverending tiny crises can drain the time out of you till you're at the end of another year with nothing done, and exhausted nonetheless – And as a reminder that the project would be done, because Daniel wanted to do it and I would see to it that we didn't let it slip out of sight and out of mind.

Daniel liked the details a lot, suggested we put some of them in the book. "…And so then there are these little moments happening…"

I'd never heard details called moments before. They'd been details since the time of Ruskin, if not Vasari.

It was an odd usage, so I put it away to know about and remember for its oddness, for the way it cut the piece out of the whole, and, somehow, speak as though the whole were momentarily forgotten. The word seemed to me to do this in a way that the word detail could not, because detail always suggests the whole.

Well, the neverending tiny crises continued and I forgot about moments/details, until I read (crisis interruptus) this on Lidia Yuknavitch's blog some months later:

Someday they will write about these things.

Look: this is as far as I've got. Perhaps this is all I have to say.

Theo already enjoying the idea of the cigarette he plans to light upon reaching his production company in fewer than ten minutes.

Look: just here just like this.

We must try to mature more quietly.

The nicotine inhalation. The energizing burn. Pleasure's smoky rush.

Like this and nothing else.

This is part of a page from Lance Olsen’s novel Head in Flames, published by Chiasmus Press. The typefaces represent the 3 different voices in the book – but it's not the fragmentation and interweaving that struck me so much as the insistence on the micro-moment within each fragment. Like this and nothing else.

Lidia goes on to say that Chiasmus books are meant to wake you out of the mental sleep that other books maintain and serve. I take it that she means, largely, corporate publishing.

(There are honourable exceptions here – Le Carré's subject has always been fury at the sheer bastardry of the people he went to school with, the British Ruling Class. The Cold War wasn't the subject, it was the setting of his signature works.)

And so it seems to me that there are 2 sorts of fragmentation going on right now in the semi-unconscious processing in our mental lives: the first, the detail becoming the moment, space-based art becoming time-based art, seems to me to not only invoke flow instead of stasis, but to reject stasis and the whole picture. Even the idea of the whole picture. (Although, if you are teaching and critiquing a piece, or even looking at it, perhaps what you call a detail doesn't matter so much. You're pointing and talking and the whole piece is right there.)

The second acknowledges the whole picture: the ruling philosophy and apparat of our (political, experiential) lives, and rejects it overtly (on political, experiential grounds) to build again from the experienced moment on up.

The universe beginning with a grain of sand.

Digital Rights Management

Until now publishers rewarded writers on a sliding scale: the more copies sold, the more the writer earnt.

Digital Rights Management could be seen as a way to track the published copies for honest royalty purposes. However, because DRM does not prevent piracy it cannot track all the copies of a file. Putting DRM on a book does not ensure proper payment for either the writer or the publisher.

An illustration:

There is no legitimate e-book version of Curse & Berate in 69+ Languages. Those copies are all pirated; the publishers and editors make nothing from them. I don't think there was an e-book clause in the contract; if there was, we removed it, wanting to deal with that separately. Several major illnesses & one merger & acquisition later, we still haven't broached the matter – firstly, the creators and publishers have been pre-empted by the pirates, and secondly, the creators need to get other projects done. GobQ is a very small operation.

For very small-scale operations, piracy really does matter: it does the producers – the writer/editors, the small publishers – out of income that is significant on that economic scale.

As Doctorow says, DRM essentially locks a customer into a particular supply-chain, and this has nothing to do with paying the writer or covering the costs of production and publication. All DRM does is limit the number of copies the less technologically-savvy can access. It creates an artificial scarcity in certain paying segments of the market. DRM exists to make the e-world mimic the hard-copy world and so maintain old (read mega-corporate) commercial structures.

The real question is how to compensate writers and publishers. The answer seems to me to lie in moving away from the per-copy model.

The trouble is we don't know what to replace it with.

Homework: What would happen if Stephen King made no more than, say, Tom Spanbauer? What would that world look like? How would attitudes to writers and writing and publishing change? What would happen to the book trade?

(Due Fri. Sept. 24, at 5 p.m. No extensions.)

Half an Hour Well Spent

I went right through the 800s at my local library the other day. I'd never done that before.

Found a book of Grace Paley's poems (a real poet), a late book of Annie Dillard essays, and Antonia Fraser's memoir about Hard Pinter.

Snagged 'em all. With a graphic novel in drawings and photos about Afghanistan, from 1986, from the graphic novel section.

The bag is full of riches. Life is full of amplitude.