on tragedy & writing [creative impulses]

neil gaiman is, as ever, sensible:

I don’t think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it’s raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn’t mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.

i think this is exactly right. people say to me, sometimes, they do, “oh, i had my heart broken so i am going to write a poem about it,” or something along those lines, & i think that writing because you have been hurt is all well & good but that the name of that writing is rarely, say, “a poem” & is, instead, “a journal entry.”

which is fine; but you have to know the difference between them.

hotel st. george press [journals]

it’s rare that i get to say that i truly love a magazine, literary or otherwise. but i’m saying it now.

the hotel st. george press is wonderful.

part of what excites me about this particular online journal is its site design: the reader explores the hotel, clicking from room to room, knocking on the walls, looking for the secret. there are many.

another delight is its commitment to mixed/intergenre work. from the submissions page:

If you feel you have an idiosyncratic, truthful and illuminating vision for which no clear-cut category exists, we invite you to share it with us. When we encounter an idiosyncratic work for which no clear-cut category exists, we become excitable.

When we become excitable, we publish.

from interactive postcard projects to mixed-media puzzles, the hotel is a hive for interesting agents and strange work.

and, because the combination of literature and science is one of my favoritest things, i will leave you with a link to a really wonderful piece called synapse.

CCL, e-books, & cory doctorow on the future of reading

A few days ago I found myself wondering what kind of sci-fi a man like Cory Doctorow—of boingboing fame, as I am sure you are all aware—would write. Which isn’t all that difficult a leap, since Doctorow’s a sci-fi writer. Like Charlie Stross, he releases much of his work for free, under Creative Commons Licenses. Difference: the vast majority of Doctorow’s work is available for free download (Stross’s coverage is more spotty & tends toward the dated), &—I think very relatedly—Doctorow’s quite outspoken about CCL.¹

So I availed myself; grabbed a copy of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can, too!). Out of curiosity opened the .pdf this morning but got derailed by the cover sheet, in which Doctorow explains why he releases his work under CCL. With respect to the long-term, he writes:

Some day, though, paper books will all but go away. We’re already reading more words off of more screens every day and fewer words off of fewer pages every day. You don’t need to be a science fiction writer to see the writing on the wall (or screen, as the case may be). Now, if you’ve got a poor imagination, you might think that we’ll enter that era with special purpose “ebook readers” that simulate the experience of carrying around “real” books, only digital. That’s like believing that your mobile phone will be the same thing as the phone attached to your wall, except in your pocket. If you believe this sort of thing, you have no business writing sf, and you probably shouldn’t be reading it either.

No, the business and social practice of ebooks will be way, way weirder than that. In fact, I believe that it’s probably too weird for us to even imagine today, as the idea of today’s radio marketplace was incomprehensible to the Vaudeville artists who accused the radio station owners of mass piracy for playing music on the air. Those people just could not imagine a future in which audiences and playlists were statistically sampled by a special “collection society” created by a Congressional anti-trust “consent decree,” said society to hand out money collected from radio stations (who collected from soap manufacturers and other advertisers), to compensate artists. It was inconceivably weird, and yet it made the artists who embraced it rich as hell. The artists who demanded that radio just stop went broke, ended up driving taxis, and were forgotten by history.

I know which example I intend to follow.

I should probably be on the bandwagon with my colleagues, rioting against the death of the book, but as a someone with just as much loyalty to tech as to literature—&, more importantly, & as Doctorow points out, to the inevitable union of the two, which should be (cautiously) celebrated, rather than feared—his sense of this is right. (This notice was penned, apparently, in 2005; e-book readers seem to be somewhat less awful, now, but does anyone actually use them? I’ve never met one.) He’s right, though, regardless. Because what appeals about a book isn’t the masquerade of bookishness; it’s the physicality of the object. I relate to books according to an established protocol: a personal code of underline, box, circle, various symbols; self-kept indices; &c. If I’m going to interact with a text digitally, I don’t want it to pretend like it’s a book. I won’t draw an analogy here, because Doctorow’s done it for me.

& now it’s given me something to think about today—&, perhaps, you, oh reader of the digital—: what could the book of the future be?

But damned if I don’t need something to read on the plane Friday, in good old-fashioned hard-copy. Perhaps I’ll take a gander at SCTSLT in the next day or so, & maybe make the transition from digital to print.

—c

PS: I can’t speak for Doctorow’s fiction yet, but I enjoyed Stross’s Accelerando!, which is available for download here. I recommend you check it out. Perhaps a mini-review of Stross &/or Doctorow to follow.

1. Much of Stross’s work is copyrighted, not CCL’d. He explains here that he’s thinking about swapping in a CCL for his copyright, which, as he puts it, “is nearly old enough to vote;” but the bureaucratic nightmare of anthology publication currently prevents him.