JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

[ via John Gruber ]

This article about iPad / eBooks / physical books pointed out things anyone creating books / eBooks has thought about. How to present the content. I’m currently working on two books and so the idea of presentation floats in the day to day for me.

The author, Craig Mod, thinks that eBooks present in a “formless container” — a useful designation, and I agree; one reason I have so many posts on the index page of this weblog. Why not take advantage of the long form the web page can display? Enforced scrolling is sometimes disdained in web design, but a long page format seems a natural for the digital framework, far less intrusive than “paging”, which often leaves the reader suspecting ad views are the basis of the truncated content. The eBook form, at least as epub, is a web page really.

That said however, my take is slightly different than the author as to the value of the eBook “container”. Currently eBooks are a dumbing down of books as demanded by the limitations of technology. The nascent eBook form demands no aesthetic. Rather the technology has to get better. The formatting and presentation of books was honed over centuries. It contains the wisdom of those centuries in its form. Nifty eBook effects like page turning work because, like desktop folder icons, they are familiar. Sometimes familiar is good.

Did you see how engrossed uber-geek Steve Jobs was when he turned the page of an eBook in his iPad demo?

To his credit, Mod says each to his own. That some books work better as physical books. But some of his examples are dubious and vitiate his arugment; he admires some books that are art school high concept non-books — the tired postmodernist default, where idea and form are all, aspiring to drained coolness (what a reviewer at the NYR called “the dread hand of design”); or alternatively, he provides examples of handmade books, which are really craft objects and, in that same framework, old books, which are sentimental artifacts. Such stained warriors have an Antiques Road Show charm, but for the wrong reason, given his argument — i.e, their interest is not as books but as, once again, grunge craft objects.

One of the great unintended jokes of technology is that the more precise and golly-gee-it’s-real things get, the more grunged up, stained and flickering the most “advanced” digital creators get. Anal retentive precision forgets the soul of the image. The lack of content’s centrality in the high concept formalist approach to books is what drives people to the popular culture for content. Any content to which they can connect.

The idea that “new forms of storytelling” are intrinsically good seems a reach, both as content goal and format benefit. It’s not even clear if there is much new there. Such outlier experiments may inform more traditional storytelling, but we shouldn’t be fitting our inherent inclinations to the demands of technology. Vice versa. Good TV shows like Damages, and bad ones, like Lost, use time shifting to affect a new form of storytelling. But this tactic is an annoying artifact which does not serve the story or the viewer. The central argument: is a predisposition for the physcial book form inherent, honed by the generations into a wonderful “container” that speaks to human needs or simply a product of necessity?

My current feeling: Physical books are an expression of the genius of our species; the physical book as form, now established, is worthy of retention in the virtual world as well.

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Some
of
my
books.
(A few are available as eBooks.)

I haven’t read Susan Orlean’s books but I’ve liked many pieces by Walter Kirn. These writers discussed film adaptations of their books @bhtv. It went on too long, but it is an interesting subject: writers and pop culture.

Kirn pointed out to Orlean that because she admired “The English Patient” Elaine (Seinfeld) wouldn’t like her. You gotta love Kirn.

About having their work adapted by the movies:
Orlean despaired that being anointed by Hollywood is perceived by some as being a better writer. She is right. Kirn felt movie interest means that he “created a character”, and that is an affirmation he appreciates. Kirn thinks that if the movies have a character they “can find a story”. Kirn is wrong about the centrality of character. Movies are storytelling machines. The characters stay with you because of the acting. Story and directing is what makes a movie.

Kirn was quite effective in describing the shallowness of movies — their skeletal narrative capacity — and at the same time accomplished the hat trick of admiring the adaptation of his own books. He seemed sincere.

Orlean said she doesn’t look at all like Meryl Streep, who played her in a movie which was based on her book. But she said that people are so benumbed by the movie form that they overlay Orlean and Streep. Strange effect the movies have. Orlean does belong to the same gene pool as a Seinfeld character however: a woman who dated Kramer but drove Elaine crazy, describing this character as so enthusiastic she was like a “game show contestant.” This is the character who thought everything was “really, really great” — the actress does resemble Orlean, although Orlean is nothing like that ditzy character in manner.

Kirn said he wasn’t looking foreward to Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” — comments that reflect my own sentiments. Burton is limited — an illustrator attempting to inhabit a masterwork of imagination. Movies lately, in their imagery, have adopted a video game gothic kitsch; very well done as an expression of craft, but dreary as engrossing visual material.

Avatar is a huge industrial project, said Kirn. He feared movies would become like Avatar. They already have.

Here is a link to an interesting interview with Terry Teachout. Teachout is a writer on cultural matters for the WSJ. Teachout has written a book about the great Louis Armstrong, which he discusses in the interview. Armstrong was at one time criticized unfairly for being too ingratiating; but his enormous talent and authentic ebullience as a man overcame many barriers, including those partisan criticisms. Armstrong was underestimated as a musician and as a man. Teachout said Armstrong was “a man who embraced and loved life”.

Teachout, whose name is Dutch — he is from Missouri — has a nice easy going manner that one doesn’t often encounter in the media.

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Speaking of audio, just finished listening to a really excellent audio CD rendition of Joseph Finder’s “Paranoia”. It is an industrial espionage thriller. Cleverly and tightly plotted. The book isn’t dumbed down the way many mystery writers affect a common man persona to seem more “authentic”. Of particular note, Jason Priestly did a wonderful job reading the book.

Any artist should be grateful for a naïve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.
—Saul Bellow

Reasoning has its limitations. It can’t express, only conclude.

Holden Caulfield was such a brilliant expression of cranky adolescence that the persona persists, an icon, since the character was first created by Salinger. Figures from folklore are honed over the ages into group memory, but Salinger by himself created a figure that has the resonance of myth. Who didn’t as an adolescent, (and doesn’t still?), see the world as phony?

Salinger’s fame, from that singular creation in Catcher In The Rye, was enhanced over the years by his self-exile. “I vant to be alone,” wasn’t a tactic, it was revulsion at the pop culture’s sleazy stare.

In this post a writer for the NYR says,

In The Catcher in the Rye, a virtuosic jazz pianist has stooped to “dumb show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass.” The people in the club listening to the pianist roar their approval, “the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn’t funny.” Attending a Broadway play starring the universally worshiped actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Holden remarks “…they were good, but they were too good.” … Holden is instinctively postmodern, too knowing to suspend disbelief, and hyper-aware of the motif or trope that is behind every formal performance. At Radio City Music Hall “a guy came out in a tuxedo and roller skates on, and started skating under a bunch of little tables, and telling jokes while he did it. He was a very good skater and all, but I couldn’t enjoy it much because I kept picturing him practicing to be a guy that roller-skates on the stage.” To be a true artist, the performer must give up being on stage… [Salinger] seemed to regard his literary success as a moral stain.

Louis Menand’s book about education, “The Marketplace Of Ideas,” is under review at the NYT. Menand is a subtle writer and fine-grained thinker, so it is worthwhile paying attention, especially given the serious subject matter, and the  useful summary provided by a credible reviewer.

Menand shows that general education curriculums have been criticized since their inception less for being too broad in focus than for being too narrow in intent, more invested in making education socially “relevant” than in encouraging the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The earliest exponents of general education — John Erskine, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Mortimer Adler — believed in teaching students the wisdom of the ages to prepare them to confront the pressing issues of the day…

The reviewer indicates that Menand does not usefully confront the glaring, obvious distortions in contemporary education — partisanship has poisoned the landscape. A lack of overview is denied students, cultural survey courses intimidated by politically correct directives.

[Menand] … does not explain, say, why Democrats outnumber Republicans 10 to 1 in departments of physics.

Some might say, “What’s the diff?” After all, it is physicists, and their charge is fact. Fact is slippery, is the answer. And the colored glasses worn outside of a discipline can make any judgment toxic. It is the way of thinking that poisons. This seems obvious, but for Menand, perhaps, being part of the club makes one reluctant to make a hard won membership precarious in criticism.

The reviewer suggests in conclusion that a more robust look at academic prejudice might be worthwhile.

A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously, in a form which frees his mind, his energies.

Why should he hobble himself with formalities?

—Saul Bellow

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Although theory is necessary to figure out what you are doing, it should come later, after you have allowed out into the world what needs to get out — after you have a lot of work under your belt.

Theory should extend work and not be a Procrustean bed to which the work is fitted. Theory at its best is not a defense, nor a pedestal — it is an appreciation.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide not long ago. A terrible loss under any circumstances, but Wallace additionally, was very clever and talented; what he would have been able to offer is gone with him. His longstanding depression drowned his promise.

Here are reminiscences from people who knew him. This is a PDF download. The English publication Five Dials is making it available for free.

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His sister,

David was not always an easy brother – forget winning an argument or having the last word, ever. But he was loyal and good and protective. It took him some years to get over the disappointment of being stuck with a female sibling, but he did. Although as children we spent a great deal of time simply avoiding each other, it was understood that he was there if I really needed him.

Jonathan Franzen,

So the year was up and down, and he had a crisis in June, and a very hard summer. When I saw him in July he was skinny again, like the late adolescent he’d been during his first big crisis. One of the last times I talked to him after that, in August, on the phone, he asked me to tell him a story of how things would get better. I repeated back to him a lot of what he’d been saying to me in our conversations over the previous year. I said he was in a terrible and dangerous place because he was trying to make real changes as a person and as a writer.

Can’t say I’ve been a big fan of Sam Shepard’s, but this review by Walter Kirn does as much as a book review can to make you feel well disposed towards Shepard’s new book,

Using fanciful anecdotes, lyric riffs, seemingly lifelike reminiscences and quotes from our nation’s founding thinkers, he drills down through the strata of our history into the bedrock of American myth. He sinks his wells at random, in offbeat spots, taking core samples from all over the country that often contain fossils of shared experience, some of them heavily crusted over with legend. His words have a flinty, mineral integrity, especially when he describes the people around him, who come off as distinctive individuals but also have an enduring archetypal feel, like the iconic figures in Whitman poems. His crackpot vagabonds, working-class survivors and footloose fellow wanderers have been with us always and probably always will be.

Talk about good writing, that Walt Kirn sure can write.

Stewart Brand’s book, “How Buildings Learn”, was made into a BBC 6-part series, which you can see here. It is a well done series about an outlier subject. The English have mastered the documentary.

Brand is a gentlemanly figure from the 1960s. He found a niche, not out of calculation, but simply of personal interest, and built a cool tool empire in “The Whole Earth Catalog”. It was a New Age publication before the word had ambivalence — sanctioned consumerism. Politically correct privilege.

Stewart Brand believes in “the people”. He likes aging buildings, repurposing spaces. Stewart Brand picks schlock over blandness, the idiosyncratic over the unique expression. He thinks buildings learn — Brand’s quaint way of putting those ideas.

Brand begins his BBC series by denigrating modernist architecture. The ego of architects are derided, as exemplified by Frank Lloyd Wright; Wright’s lack of concern for the people who lived in his structures an easy target. Wright’s ego was all, and the people who lived in and worked in the buildings he built were secondary. The Guggenheim Museum is really a structure built by a wannabe sculptor as a hymn to self — at least that is how I always felt about it. Not a good place to view art. So there is some traction to Brand’s ideas about modernist architecture and its often noted soullessness.

Like many pop culture writers he decorates a thin reed of a premise with interesting factoids. Reminiscent of Malcolm Gladwell. But Brand is a more attractive, less careerist thinker. He isn’t trendy — Brand is rather an authentic American academic eccentric.

Brand’s low key pronouncements ring a populist chord. He is affirmative to the point of being cultish about just average folks. Brand rallies behind a banner that is suspicious of elites. Brand went to Phillips Exeter Academy and Stanford University.

His target is not elites of power or money — attributes he could be said to possess — but of the culturally or intellectually evolved. It is all very ‘Sixties. To be privileged and of the elite, but consider oneself on the side of Everyman, is the hat trick. Brand is very much of our time in his underlying collectivist impulse and the ambivalence one feels when listening to him.

Like most collectivists, Brand ignores individual achievement, evolved aesthetic sense, intellect that derives from study. He likes the ad hoc, the jerry-built. He personifies buildings, generalizes human beings, cherry picks examples that support a thin premise. Brand’s philosophy might have a recrudescence now, with collectivist mind in ascendancy. Perhaps a necessary balance to the vaunting, obnoxious ego and narcissism of contemporary culture. Perhaps throwing out the baby with the bathwater — the pendulum, once again, swinging too far.

I love the comic book form, even if more of a fan of the art. I’m thinking Alex Raymond, Will Eisner, Mad Magazine art. Current work — well, we will let others judge. From the comic book mind of pop culture have emerged movies based on comics and comics based on novels, and novels based on comics. M. Night Shyamalan’s career has been rooted, thus far, in attempting to transcribe the fun of comics to the screen. The comic form as literary form, by its nature, tends to be shallow; that has left little for the director of The Sixth Sense to work with. But some comics, like Batman, have had a few good outcomes.

Stephen King has entered the fray by releasing a “new form” comic. These are two minute animated digital comics. You can see 25 here. Not really animation, but easy, bite(byte) sized pieces of an imaginary, gothic realm.

Exciting idea. Anything that gets people reading, entering imaginary territory, looking at images in a thoughtful, maybe interior way, on new gadgets for reading and thinking — what’s not to like?