Listing entries tagged with fiction

1 | 2 | 3 | 4

the novelodeon   11.26.2007, 12:40 PM

This past April, as the final season of The Sopranos hit the airwaves, with seemingly the whole country bracing for impact, I'd still never seen a single episode. Gradually, my indifference turned to concern. It felt like every talk show, news culture section and conversation on the street was about the fate of Tony Soprano -? a latter-day American anti-hero, a titanic figure with the air of myth about him. I began worry that I'd missed out on something big. A cultural touchstone of rare proportions.

So, as the end drew near, I took a deep breath and decided to start from the beginning.

Six months, 86 episodes, and over 70 combined viewing hours later I'm finally done, and while I may have missed out on The Sopranos as a broadcast event -? seven seasons of weekly appointments with Tony, Carmela, Meadow, AJ and the whole crumbling world of New Jersey gangsterdom -? I got to experience something perhaps more satisfying: a hyper-concentrated, solitary viewing experience, curled up nightly in bed with my laptop. Episodes flowing into each other almost seamlessly like chapters of a book. The pause button like a dog-eared page or bookmark inserted as my eyelids began to droop. An experience not unlike reading a big novel.

Book lovers frequently insist they could never get in bed with a computer, but it seems that this is happening all the time. Any of you who have indulged in a multi-season TV binge can probably attest to this -? hours spent prone, the laptop huffing away, plowing through disc after disc (Bob made a similar observation a while back). Substantively too there's something that recalls leisure reading. It has oft been remarked that The Sopranos heralded a major shift in television into terrain once solely occupied by the novel: serial dramas that transcend their episodic structure and become a new kind of literature. Big cross-seasonal plot arcs. A broad social canvas. Intricately interwoven narrative. A large cast of deeply drawn characters. Not to mention a purchase on the country's imagination that recalls the popularity of the great serial fictions of Dickens a century and a half ago. With the spate of high-caliber TV serials originated by HBO and then proliferated by channels across the television spectrum, film has moved onto the novel's turf, matching not only its narrative scope but its expansive dimensions. Stories as big and sprawling as novels can now be told in moving pictures, and thanks to a host of new individualized distribution channels, experienced as intimately, on a laptop or iPod.

Of course I'm not suggesting that film and prose fiction aren't very different things, just that their roles seem to be converging. From its early days, film has been in conversation with the novel, frequently operating on canvases as vast as Anna Karenina or Great Expectations, but it necessarily has had to compress, select and distill the worlds it shows into something in the vicinity of two hours. When a film edges toward the three-hour mark it is considered epic. Simply in terms of duration of story and investment of time by the viewer/reader, movies and novels have always been very different kinds of fiction requiring very different sets of commitments from their audiences.

The shift arguably began with the multi-episode adaptations of classic books pioneered by the BBC in the 70s -? shows like I, Claudius, on through the 1995 hit rendition of Pride and Prejudice, right up to last year's Bleak House. Here, television began to stretch out novelistically. And indeed, novels were the source material. Still, the solitary "reading" element was absent here. These were broadcast events, viewed in living rooms at an appointed time set by the channel, with little or no control by the spectator. Soon enough, however, VCRs entered the home and television audiences became time shifters, capturing and bending the broadcasters' schedules to fit their own. From there the die was pretty much cast. A parade of new "narrowcast" technologies -? DVDs, TiVo, personal computers, iTunes, bit torrent -? imbued these shows with book-like qualities: reader-driven, personal, portable... an intimate cinema of one.

Immediately upon finishing The Sopranos, with the pangs of withdrawal already setting in, I found solace in Wikipedia, which has extensive articles on each episode and character from the show. With the help of the external links, I soon found myself on a strange digital dérive through various arcana: press clippings, blogs, and an forums debating the show's ambiguous ending, personal web pages of supporting cast members such as Joseph R. Gannascoli, who played the gay mobster Vito Spatafore, and from whose site one can purchase such fine collectibles as t-shirts emblazoned with "I Love You Johnny Cakes." Through the drifts of trivia, I eventually dug up several interesting quotes from contemporary authors ruminating on the novel's place in American life and the increasing overlap with television. The first bits were from John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, who published a piece in The Guardian during those fevered months surrounding the Sopranos finale entitled "Has the novel been murdered by the mob?"

From coast to coast, from white-wine sipping yuppies to real life mobsters, The Sopranos has had Americans talking - even those of us not familiar with the difficulty of illegal interstate trucking or how to bury a body in packed snow. While the New York Times called upon Michael Chabon, Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly to resurrect the serial novel in its Sunday Magazine, critics were calling Chase the Dickens of our time. The final episode roped in some 11.9 million viewers. One major question, though, remains. Has Tony Soprano whacked the American novel?

....America's most powerful myth-making muse long ago moved in to Hollywood (and the White House press room), so the ascendancy of The Sopranos to the level of quasi-literary art should have been expected. Indeed, this wouldn't be troubling were Americans reading other, actual novels. But they're not - at least not in the numbers they once did.

Freeman cites two authors, Gary Shteyngart and the late Norman Mailer, both of whom have discussed The Sopranos as a story of novelistic proportions. First, here's Shteyngart, in a Slate dialogue last year with Walter Kirn:

Our time...is more mutable. Change occurs not from year to year but from day to day - ?the fiction writer's job of remaining relevant has never been harder. And I don't think this will be true only of the present age. I think we are entering a period of unprecedented acceleration, of previously unimaginable technological gain that may be derailed only by the kind of apocalypse found in Cormac McCarthy's latest novel.

The Internet, I both fear and hope, is only the beginning.

But the emotional need to connect with a story remains. One of the folks behind the popular HBO series The Wire recently said that he sees each season as a novel, with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. The Sopranos, which may one day be acknowledged as the definitive fiction of the early 21st century, puts an emphasis on detail, setting, and psychology in a way that could resonate with a reader of, say, A Sentimental Education.

And here's Mailer, in a 2004 interview on Poynter Online:

The Great American Novel is no longer writable. We can't do what John Dos Passos did. His trilogy on America came as close to the Great American Novel as anyone. You can't cover all of America now. It's too detailed. You couldn't just stick someone in Tampa without knowing about Tampa. You couldn't get away with it. People didn't get upset if you were a little scanty on the details in the past. Now all the details get in the way of an expanse of a novel.

You can take a much broader canvas with nonfiction ... and Americans want large canvases because America is getting so confusing. People want more information than you can get from most novels. You can read a novel about a small subject like the breakup of a marriage, but that's not a wide enough approach for some. It takes something like "The Sopranos," which can loop into a good many aspects of American culture. As I said, I don't think the Great American Novel can be written anymore. There will be great novels ... forever, I hope ... But the notion of a wide canvas may be moving to television with its possibilities of endless hours.

I think it's this element of time that lies at the heart of this over-drawn analogy. The storytellers of television are driving a golden age of magisterial fictions roomy enough to capture the full flow of time. TV serials used to be a way to kill time: repeatable formulas, the same story told again and again, a tradition that's alive and well in shows like Law & Order. You can check in, check out, it doesn't really matter. TV has always been sort of timeless in this way. Whereas prose fiction has long had a special relationship with time. Time, in its fullness, takes time for the author to convey, and the time it takes to read book-length fictions is I think equally part of the reward -? it's an endurance sport, long-distance running. I always assumed that only a book could show me the landscape of time in this almost bodily way, but my recent odyssey with the Soprano family appears to have blurred the usual distinctions.

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:40 PM | Comments (8)
tags: books , fiction , film , novel , reading , sopranos , television

not drowning but waving   11.20.2007, 12:28 PM

On the Suffolk coast where we stayed last weekend they had been warned of floods comparable to the deluge of 1953 which submerged whole villages and killed hundreds. In the event the high tide wasn't as high as predicted, although a breach up the estuary submerged the fields beside the river. Local residents were relishing stories of alarmed visitors; they've seen it all before round here.

We walk along the river bank and my novelist friend is keen to discuss the future of the book. Her publisher has been circulating their authors with letters about the impact of digitisation; she's convinced big changes are coming in how novels are distributed, but doesn't believe there will be much interest in using new media in literary storytelling.

We visit a fish shop by the river that was flooded out. They'd only just opened an extension built at a height recommended by a local fisherman who had told them, "That's as high as the tide went nine years ago - you'll be all right." They weren't.

Bloggers mix text with still images with moving pictures embedded from YouTube etc. - young people take that media mix for granted, and as consumers we all do, watching tv adaptations of favourite books, using the web to research more about the author to discuss at our reading group. A new generation of more consciously transliterate reader will take it as read that the text is surrounded by researches, images, networks of reader response to the point where these become an entirely integral part of the work of art, the author's creative voice distinct but no longer so alone.

The flooded fields are rather beautiful and it's already hard to recall what the landscape looked like before. Nature can adapt instantly to change; it takes longer to redraw the maps. At this week's if:book:group at DEMOS in London we're discussing authorship and user generated content. Let's push off into uncharted waters and see not if but where we float.

Posted by chris meade at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)
tags: author , books , fiction , water

booker shortlist set free   10.23.2007, 5:53 PM

CORRECTION: a commenter kindly points out that the Times jumped the gun on this one. What follows is in fact not true. Further clarification here.

The Times of London reports that the Man Booker Prize soon will make the full text of its winning and shortlisted novels free online. Sounds as though this will be downloads only, not Web texts. Unclear whether this will be in perpetuity or a limited-time offer.

Negotiations are under way with the British Council and publishers over digitising the novels and reaching parts - particularly in Africa and Asia - that the actual books would not otherwise reach.

Jonathan Taylor, chairman of The Booker Prize Foundation, said that the initiative was well advanced, although details were still being thrashed out.

The downloads will not impact on sales, it is thought. If readers like a novel tasted on the internet, they may just be inspired to buy the actual book.

Posted by ben vershbow at 5:53 PM | Comments (4)
tags: books , ebooks , fiction , publishing , reading

playing with words   10.20.2007, 5:25 AM

In London next week our first if:book:group brings together a small group of people from the worlds of new media, literature, theatre and playground design to discuss Narrative, Interactivity and Play.

New media fiction has been described as writing in colour rather than black and white. It's a winning description, but they say radio has better pictures than TV, and the same may still be true of a good story in print versus a slow and clunky multimedia experiment with swimming text and sludgy soundtrack. But things are changing fast.

A funky new reader device - like the pinchable, strokeable iPhone perhaps - and, more importantly, a truly riveting, essentially digital masterpiece could quickly bring a mass readership to this kind of literature.

My sister and I have just bought my mother a widescreen tv. Mum felt I was trying to foist a monstrosity on her. Why would she want some huge, ugly screen dominating her sitting room, what was wrong with the (tiny) telly she already owned? After sleepless nights worrying she'd hate it, in the event, her conversion took less than five minutes. A schools' programme about the Nile won her round. The quality of sound and image is outstanding; instead of getting an illustrated talk about a place, this screen transports her there.

The boundaries between page and screen, inside and outside, imagination and reality are shifting around us. We are fumbling towards new ways to make and publish fictions online. Interaction needs to be more than the multiple choice options for what's next. Readers want to inhabit a good book, not be pressured into helping to write it. This was a point made by Guy Parsons, one of the team involved in the PerplexCity game, at a seminar on 27th September on the Reader/Writer Mash Up organised by the Reading Agency and Creative Partnerships in London

Earlier that month an 'Unconference' at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, raised the question of what skills we need to make and read multi-platform narratives. Are the channel hopping, multi-tasking children of today exhibiting attention deficit or vital skills in transliteracy?

Instead of visiting one site a time, now we go to our screens and mix up for ourselves a cocktail of activity: emailing friends, checking news feeds, googling for information and surfing fpr pleasure, writing our own documents while listening to music, taking a break to watch a youtube or two... This is the wwwreader in creative control.

Snug & Outdoor is a playground design company I work with which has developed a kit of abstract shapes that children themselves can arrange as they wish to reshape the schoolyard into a changing playscape. The Snug Kit, launched this November, has grown out of observation of how children actually play; they don't enact complete adventures but drop in and out of narrative threads - walk along a wall and you're escaping across a chasm; clamber up a tree and you're creeping up on an enemy; enter an enclosed space and it becomes a homestead where imaginary meals are cooked and served.

So if children so effortlessly switch narratives in their play, how come I still get hooked on formulaic TV and film, over and over and over drawn in by the need to find out whodunnit, whether boy gets girl or goody escapes baddy, when we all know what's bound to happen and have no reason to care if it didn't? Can we overcome our addiction to conclusions and find more compelling ways to play with those seven core stories of which all fiction is made?

To be continued...

Posted by chris meade at 5:25 AM | Comments (2)
tags: DMU , fiction , play , transliteracy

doris lessing wins the nobel prize   10.11.2007, 8:43 AM

Given this morning's announcement i could kick myself for not having written up this post weeks ago. each summer i choose an "important book" to read on my vacation. this year i decided to re-read The Golden Notebook. When I first read it, in 1970 the women's movement was just taking off and i devoured it hungrily looking for understanding into the sea change that was roiling all our lives. Reading it this summer was a revelation on many levels. i'll write a longer post after the Really Modern Library meetings explaining this in some detail and also some of the interesting ideas i've got about how we might "read" this novel in a networked environment.

Posted by bob stein at 8:43 AM | Comments (0)
tags: dorislessing , fiction , nobelprize , reading

cellphone fiction in japan   09.27.2007, 10:13 AM

Peter Brantley points to an interesting WSJ piece (free) on the explosion of Japanese cellphone fiction. These are works, often the length of novels, composed specifically for consumption via the phone's tiny screen. In some cases, they are even written on the phone. Stories are written in terse, unadorned language, in chunks crafted specifically to fit on a single mobile screen. Dialog is favored heavily over narrative description, and from the short excerpts I've read, the aim seems to be to conjure cinematic imagery with the greatest economy of words. The WSJ reproduces this passage from Satomi Nakamura's "To Love You Again":

Kin Kon Kan Kon (sound of school bell ringing)
(space)
The school bell rang
(space)
"Sigh. We're missing class"
(space)
She said with an annoyed expression.

This novel clocks in at 200 pages, and was written entirely with Nakamura's thumb!

About seven years ago, some of these works started making their way into print, initially through self-publishing websites like Maho i-Land. But the popularity of mobile novels soon caught the attention of mainstream publishers and numerous titles have been made into bona fide hits in print, some selling into the millions, with film adaptations, the whole bit.

But if any industry lesson can be taken from this mini case study of Japanese cellphone fic, it's not the potential for crossover into print, but that emergent electronic literary forms will most likely find their economic model in services and subscriptions rather than in the sale of copies. The WSJ article suggests that the mobile lit genre exploded in Japan in no small part due to recent changes in service options from cellular providers.

About three years ago, phone companies began offering high-speed mobile Internet and affordable flat-rate plans for transmitting data. Users could then access the Internet as much as they wanted to for less than $50 a month.

The now-bustling Maho i-Land has six million members, and the number of mobile novels on its site has jumped, to more than a million today from about 300,000 before the flat-rate plans cut phone bills in half. According to industrywide data cited by Japan's largest cellphone operator NTT DoCoMo Inc., sales from mobile-book and comic-book services are expected to more than double, to more than $200 million from about $90 million last year.

This would suggest that at least part of the reason cellphone novels haven't taken off here in the States is the comparatively impoverished service we get from our mobile providers, and the often extortionist rates we pay. True, the mobile lit genre was already a phenomenon there before the rejiggering of service plans, which suggests there were preexisting cultural conditions that led to the emergence of the form: readers' already well developed appetites for serial comics perhaps, or the peculiar intensity of keitai fetishism. In other words, improved telcom services in the States wouldn't necessarily translate into a proliferation of cellphone novels, but other mobile media services would undoubtedly start to flourish. Broadband internet access is also pathetically slow in the US compared to countries in Europe and East Asia - ?the Japanese get service eight to 30 times faster than what we get over here. What other new media forms are being stifled by the crappiness of our connections?

Posted by ben vershbow at 10:13 AM | Comments (4)
tags: cellphone , fiction , japan , keitai , reading

stencil hypertext   09.11.2007, 1:31 PM

Not sure if it's been washed away yet, but folks in the Bay Area should keep an eye out for this charming urban hypertext:

The mission stencil story is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spraypainted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of text.

More images and some press links on this Flickr photoset.

(Thanks sMary!)

Posted by ben vershbow at 1:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
tags: Games , art , fiction , gaming , graffiti , hypertext , urbancomputing , writing

edit the galaxy   07.23.2007, 1:42 AM

Galaxiki is "a new kind of wiki based community portal that allows its members to edit stars, planets and moons in a virtual galaxy, creating an entire fictional world online." The site uses primarily public domain NASA photography.

Millions of stars, planets, moons, pulsars and black holes can be explored using an intuitive 2D map. The site software manages most of the physical properties and behaviours of the solar systems, from orbits to the chemical composition of planetary atmospheres. Some planets offer conditions that may allow life - the idea behind Galaxiki is that community members can create fictional life forms and write about their histories on their planets....For only USD 12.- (or EUR 10.-) you can purchase your own solar system that only you can edit.

Posted by ben vershbow at 1:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
tags: collaboration , fiction , wiki

why is 'world without oil' such a bore?   05.15.2007, 4:40 PM

I just had the following email exchange with Sebastian Mary about the World Without Oil alternate reality game (covered previously on if:book here and here). It seemed interesting enough to repost here.

BEN - Mon, May 14, 2007 at 4:59 PM EST

Hi there,

You found anything interesting yet going on at WWO?

I keep meaning to dig deeper, but nothing I've turned up is much good. Maudlin postcards from a pretty generic-feeling apocalypse is what most of it feels like to me. Perhaps I haven't been looking in the right places, but my instinct at the moment is that the citizen journalist conceit was not the way to go. It's "participatory" all right, but in that bland, superficial way that characterizes so many traditional media efforts at "interactivity." Honestly, I'm surprised something like this got through the filter of folks as sophisticated as Jane McGonigal and co.

I think players need smaller pieces and hooks, elements of mystery to get their wheels turning -- a story. As far as I can tell, this is the closest to intrigue there's yet been, and it turned out to be nothing.

Would love to be shown something that suggests otherwise. Got anything?

Ben

SEB MARY - Mon, May 14, 2007 at 5:25 PM

Haven't been following it closely to be honest. Up to the eyeballs with other work and don't really have time to trawl acres of second-rate 'What if...'. Plus, if I'm honest, despite my fetish for collaborative and distributed creativity I'm fussy about good prose, and amateur 'creative writing' doesn't really grip me unless it's so far from tradition (eg lolcats and the like) as to be good on its own terms. So though the idea intrigued me, I've not been hooked. I think it probably needs more story.

Which problem actually resonates with something else I've been pondering recently around collaborative writing. It bothers me that because people aren't very good at setting up social structures within which more than one person can work on the same story (the total lack of anything of that sort in Million Penguins for example), you end up with this false dichotomy between quality products of one mind, and second-rate products of many, that ends up reinforcing the privileged position of the Author simply because people haven't worked out an effective practice for any alternative. I think there's something to be learned from the open-source coders about how you can be rigorous as well as collaborative.

sMary

BEN - Tue, May 15, 2007 at 12:50 AM

I don't see why an ARG aimed at a social mobilization has to be so goddamn earnest. It feels right now like a middle school social studies assignment. But it could be subversive, dangerous and still highly instructive. Instead of asking players to make YouTube vids by candlelight, or Live Journal diaries reporting gloomily on around-the-block gas lines or the promise of local agriculture, why not orchestrate some real-world mischief, as is done in other ARGs.

This game should be generating memorable incursions of the hypothetical into the traffic of daily life, gnawing at the edges of people's false security about energy. Create a car flash mob at a filling station and tie up several blocks of traffic in a cacophony of horns, maybe even make it onto the evening news. Or re-appropriate public green spaces for the planting of organic crops, like those California agrarian radicals with their "conspiracies of soil" in People's Park back in the 60s. WWO's worst offense, I think, is that it lacks a sense of humor. To sort of quote Oscar Wilde, the issues here are too important to take so seriously.

Ben

SEB MARY - Tue, May 15, 2007 at 5:34 AM

I totally agree that a sense of humour would make all the difference. There's a flavour about it of top-down didactically-oriented pseudo-'participation', which in itself is enough to scupper something networked, even before you consider the fact that very few people like being lectured at in story form.

The trouble is, that humour around topics like this would index the PMs squarely to an activist agenda that includes people like the Reverend Billy, the Clown Army and their ilk. That'd be ace in my view; but it's a risky strategy for anyone who's reluctant to nail their political colours firmly to the anti-capitalist mast, which - I'd imagine - rules out most of Silicon Valley. It's hard to see how you could address an issue like climate change in an infectious and mischievous way without rubbing a lot of people up the wrong way; I totally don't blame McGonigal for having a go, but I think school-assignment-type pretend 'citizen journalism' is no substitute for playful subversiveness and - as you say - story hooks.

The other issue in play is as old as literary theory: the question of whether you dig ideas-based narrative or not. If the Hide & Seek Fest last weekend is anything to go by, the gaming/ARG community, young as it is, is already debating this. What place does 'messaging' have in games? Some see gaming as a good vehicle for inspiring, radical, even revolutionary messages, and some maintain that this misses the point.

Certainly, I think you have to be careful: games and stories have their own internal logic, and often don't take kindly to being loaded with predetermined arguments. Even if I like the message, I think that it only works if it's at the service of the experience (read story, game or both), and not the other way round. Otherwise it doesn't matter how much interactivity you add, or how laudable your aim, it's still boring.

sMary

Posted by ben vershbow at 4:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
tags: ARG , citizenjournalism , collaboration , fiction , worldwithoutoil

the alternate universe algorithm   05.07.2007, 8:52 AM

"What if you could travel to parallel worlds: the same year, the same earth, only different dimensions...?"

That's the opening line to one of my favorite science fiction shows in the 90s called "Sliders." The premise of the show was simple: a group of lost travelers traverse through different dimensions where history has played itself out differently, and need to navigate through unfamiliar cultural norms, values and beliefs. What if the United States lost the American Revolutionary War? Penicillin was never discovered? or gender roles reversed?

An aspect of the show that I found interesting was in how our protagonists quickly adapted to subtly different worlds and developed a method for exploration: after their initial reconnaissance, they'd reconvene in a hotel room (when it existed) and assess their - often dire - situation.

The way they "browsed" these alternate worlds stuck with me when reading Mary's recent posts on new forms of fiction on the web:

Web reading tends towards entropy. You go looking for statistics on the Bornean rainforest and find yourself reading the blog of someone who collects orang utan coffee mugs. Anyone doing sustained research on the Web needs a well-developed ability to navigate countless digressions, and derive coherence from the sea of chatter.

Browsing takes us to unexpected places, but what about the starting point? Browsing does not begin arbitrarily. It usually begins in a trusted location, like a homepage or series of pages that you can easily refer back to or branch out from. But ARGs (Alternate Reality Games), like World Without Oil, which Ben wrote about recently, require you to go some obscure corner of the internet and engage with it as if it was trusted source. What if the alternate world existed everywhere you went, like in Sliders?

In college, a friend of mine mirrored whitehouse.gov and replaced key words and phrases with terms he thought were more fitting. For example, "congressmen" was replaced by "oil-men" and "dollars" with "petro-dollars." He had a clear idea of the world he wanted people to interact with (knowingly or not). The changes were subtle and website looked legitimate it and ultimately garnered lots of attention. Those who understood what was going on sent their praise and those who did not, sent confused and sometimes angry emails about their experience. A

(I believe he eventually he blocked the domain because he found it disconcerting that most traffic came from the military)

Although we'll need very sophisticated technology to apply more interesting filters across large portions of the internet, I think "Fiction Portals", engines that could alter the web slightly according to the "author" needs, could change the role of an author in an interesting way.

I want to play with the this idea of an author: Like a scientist, the author would need to understand how minor changes to society would manifest themselves across real content, tweaking words and ideas ever so slightly to produce a world that is that is vast, believable, and could be engaged from any direction, hopefully revealing some interesting truths about the real world.

So, after playing around with this idea for a bit, I threw together a very primitive prototype that alters the internet in a subtle way (maybe too subtle?) but I think hints at a form that could eventually allow us to Slide.

Posted by eddie a. tejeda at 8:52 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
tags: ARG , fiction , multimedia , storytelling , worldwithoutoil