Dystopias in fiction

A couple of weekends ago I saw Mark Romanek's film adaptation of Never Let Me Go, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005). I hadn't read the book before, but I have since.

Both the novel and film are a haunting take on a recurring trope in fiction: portrayal of an imagined, dystopian present or future. Examples abound. I'd say the most prominent among 20th century novels in English are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell's Animal Farm (1946) & 1984 (1949). On The Beach (1957) by Nevil Shute is another that most of my contemporaries read in high school. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003), in a category the author calls "social science fiction," fit the dystopian bill; I still have Atwood's dystopian follow-up to Oryx and Crake, The Year of The Flood (2009) on my own to-read list. Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog (1969), Jose Saramago's Blindness (1999), Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) ... the list goes on and on.

The premise of Ishiguro's novel, and of the film that hews closely to its dramatic arc and dry-eyed affect, is that human cloning became possible soon after World War II, and that human clones -- including the narrator, Kathy H., and her closest friends, Tommy and Ruth -- are raised for the exclusive purpose of providing "donations" of vital organs upon reaching maturity. After some number of "donations," two or three or four for most, the clones "complete." Of course the "donations" are not donations at all, as there is no free will whatsoever involved in the "donating" ... the cloned characters receive notices from some vaguely off-stage "they" and proceed to "centers" where their bodies are harvested. "Complete" is whitewash for "slaughter."

I found Never Let Me Go haunting for a couple of reasons. First, there's the present-timeness of the story. The science is fictional of course -- it will be the 21st century that sees human cloning, it was not the 20th -- but by constraining point of view to the world as it appears from the narrator's isolated circle the details are conveniently and convincingly allowed to remain fuzzy. The setting is England in the late 1990s, and readers and viewers are inexorably drawn into the conceit that this is the world we currently inhabit. Second, and for me most chilling, there's the utter lack of resistance to the fate that has been ordained for these people. (They are people. The novel is significantly concerned with the non-cloned world's exploration of whether these "creatures" are human, whether they have souls; but the reader is not left to wonder at all, as the view through Kathy H.'s eyes is as particular and humane as the view through our own.)

Tommy falls into inchoate rages. That's as close to railing against their inevitable slaughter as these poor "creatures" get ... Ishiguro gives us not even a whiff of organized resistance. It doesn't occur to the clones that resistance is possible. The characters in this novel are raised as farm animals, destined for an antiseptic abattoir. They accept their fate as if they were sheep or cows. I can't be the only person who "completed" this story filled with a queasy uncertainty about my future as a carnivore.

Ishiguro's fellow Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood reviewed Never Let Me Go for Slate soon after the novel was published; her review was titled Brave New World: Kazuo Ishiguro's novel really is chilling. She wrote: "It's a thoughtful, crafty, and finally very disquieting look at the effects of dehumanization on any group that's subject to it. In Ishiguro's subtle hands, these effects are far from obvious. There's no Them-Bad, Us-Good preaching; rather there's the feeling that as the expectations of such a group are diminished, so is its ability to think outside the box it has been shut up in. The reader reaches the end of the book wondering exactly where the walls of his or her own invisible box begin and end."

Indeed.

At the time I saw and read Never Let Me Go I was in the middle of a polishing edit of my own current fiction project, Consequence, prior to sending out queries to literary agents. It was therefore natural to think about Ishiguro's work in relation to mine, as well as to the dystopian novels that I listed at the start of this post.

Consequence is also concerned about collateral damage that has been and will be caused by genetic engineering. Two differences between Consequence and the world Ishiguro portrays have a lot to do with why I found his work so haunting and unsettling. First, Consequence is set in the early 21st century and the deep moral and ecological compromise with which cloning (humans, other animals, bacteria, and plants) will taint our world has yet to be realized, or realized fully. There's still some hope that we won't catastrophically fumble this one. Second, the characters in Consequence are all about preventing that dystopian taint. My novel portrays activists resisting a fate that vast, impersonal forces are trying to impose on all of us. Ambling peacefully into the slaughterhouse -- as cows, sheep, and Ishiguro's characters do -- is a dystopia to which my characters are certain they will never submit.

At the end of the film Never Let Me Go -- but not of Ishiguro's novel -- the narrator Kathy H. is thinking in voice-over: "What I'm not sure about is whether our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all end up dying. And none of us really understand what we've lived through. Or feel we've had enough time."

It's a Hollywood ending, telling the viewer so directly what to think, how to package the preceding 103 minutes, how to shrug off any implicit call to active engagement in political culture (which wouldn't leave nearly enough time to consume film and television industry product, now, would it?). Ishiguro was an Executive Producer of the film, so it would be pretty risky to guess that he had nothing to do with the wrap-up.

The novel ends more ambiguously, and thoughtfully. It is evocative of what the "creatures" who inhabit this story have been denied. It left this reader straining against the limits and fate that Kathy H., and Tommy, and Ruth placidly accept. Ishiguro's novel absolutely does not make it all okay. That fits my sensibility much better than the film's ending -- to which, I admit, I responded with tears -- but only because I'm constitutionally a sentimental fool -- not because I prefer or permit myself to create sentimental art.

I recommend Never Let Me Go very highly. I also recommend that you do not make the mistake I did: you should read the book first.

I hope it will stir you to make the world you want to live in, rather than accept a predetermined fate. I hope too that it will predispose you to pick up Consequence in your local bookstore ... someday.





Thanks to hugefluffy for the photo of Kazuo Ishiguro signing his novel, Never Let Me Go in March 2005. Yeah, I know, it's out of focus & a bit shaky besides.

Making a world where queer kids thrive

A lot of words have been written since Justin Aaberg, Billy Lucas, Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, and Tyler Clementi took their own lives after being subjected to callous humiliation and, in most cases, outright hostility by their peers. These young men ranged in age from 13 to 18, and lived in Minnesota, Indiana, Texas, California, and New Jersey, respectively. Justin Aaberg took his own life in July; the other young men committed suicide in September. Each of them identified himself as or was perceived by others to be gay.

I haven't attempted a real analysis, but I'd say most of what I saw and read about this harrowing series of suicides focused on the bad behavior of those who humiliated and tormented these five young men.

Let's not beat around the bush: that behavior was bad. It was awful. Those who humiliated and tortured Justin, Billy, Asher, Seth, and Tyler will have blood on their hands for the rest of their lives. Should they be legally punished for this bad behavior? I don't know, and I haven't got much riding on cookie-cutter answers to such a crude (as in not-nuanced) question. Whether or not or how severely they are punished doesn't change the fact that they must now and for decades to come bear responsibility for the fatal consequences of their actions, which cannot be undone.

But bad behavior is not what I want to focus on. I want to focus on three good things.

First good thing: cultural change can strengthen kids against the inevitable predation of bullies. Second: parents can help to better proof their kids against a culture in which those changes have not yet been realized. And third: kids can and do actively claim their right to be who they are.

None of the ideas in this blog post are original. In fact, I'm going to render what I think needs to be said in other people's words. This post is not about being the first to come up with an idea; it's about recognizing what's essential amid all the hullabaloo -- about separating the wheat from the chaff.

Cultural change

Richard Kim blogged on The Nation's site on October 6th. He eloquently separated wheat from chaff and needed fewer than 1500 words to do the job.

The chaff, with respect to Rutgers University students Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei (who used a webcam to spy on Tyler Clementi having sex with another man days before he jumped from the George Washington Bridge): "What Ravi and Wei did was immature, prurient and thoughtless; it undoubtedly played some role in what became an awful, awful tragedy. That they acted with homophobic malice, that they understood what the consequences of their actions might be, or that their prank alone, or even chiefly, triggered Clementi's suicide is far less clear."

And the wheat: "So when faced with something so painful and complicated as gay teen suicide, it's easier to go down the familiar path, to invoke the wrath of law and order, to create scapegoats out of child bullies who ape the denials and anxieties of adults, to blame it on technology or to pare down homophobia into a social menace called "anti-gay bullying" and then confine it to the borders of the schoolyard. It's tougher, more uncertain work creating a world that loves queer kids, that wants them to live and thrive. But try -- try as if someone's life depended on it. Imagine saying I really wish my son turns out to be gay. Imagine hoping that your 2-year-old daughter grows up to be transgendered. Imagine not assuming the gender of your child's future prom date or spouse; imagine keeping that space blank or occupied by boys and girls of all types. Imagine petitioning your local board of education to hire more gay elementary school teachers."

There will always be people -- kids and adults -- who commit cruel acts against children and youth. Some of these acts will be deliberate and conscious. Others will be thoughtless, callow, inadvertent, stupid, or fueled by antediluvian cultural values. What can be done? To the extent possible, we can each help to build a world in which kids understand that cruel acts committed by cruel and callow people are exceptional and wrong. That these acts are not the whole of the known universe. That the world is better than that, and they can be part of it. That's what Dan Savage's It Gets Better Project has been about. If you haven't heard of it, follow the link (and ask yourself: where have I been?). By speaking person-to-person across the internet through the medium of videos, the project does an end run around isolationists, reaching kids who need to know that queer people grow up to live satisfied, productive, emotionally rich lives in communities of their own choosing.

If there's a heaven, Dan Savage has secured a place in it, make no mistake.

Speaking of heaven, let's not pretend for a moment that cultural change will go down easy. This weekend, the NY Times published an article In Efforts to End Bullying, Some See Agenda. As they have since time immemorial, social conservatives -- a.k.a. people who try to isolate kids from truths they need to know -- are whipping out scripture and ferreting out the hateful passages. In Helena, Montana, school officials proposed "new guidelines for teaching about sexuality and tolerance. They proposed teaching first graders that 'human beings can love people of the same gender,' and fifth graders that sexual intercourse can involve 'vaginal, oral or anal penetration.'" In the actual real world that human beings inhabit, these are facts. The guidelines propose teaching about things that happen. Indeed, these are things that happen with significant frequency, often between people who make considered moral choices about them.

So what does one mother quoted in the NY Times story think about teaching facts to children? "'Anyone who reads this document can see that it promotes acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle,' one mother said at a six-hour school board meeting in late September." And Pastor Rick DeMato explains: "Of course we’re all against bullying. But the Bible says very clearly that homosexuality is wrong, and Christians don’t want the schools to teach subjects that are repulsive to their values."

Well -- leaving aside the further evidence that socially conservative Christians have a deceitful habit of pretending they speak for all Christians, which is absurd on its face but not the topic of this post -- there's the rub.

Anybody can say they're against bullying. But in communities that actively refuse to teach or accept that it takes all kinds to make a world -- communities that refuse to pull difference out from under what Richard Kim called "the denials and anxieties of adults" -- humiliation and torment breed like sewer rats. History has taught that lesson over and over again.

Being a good parent

A week ago today, a Midwestern mother of three who blogs as "Nerdy Apple Bottom," posted a blog titled My son is gay. If I were put in charge of assigning required reading for parents of young children, I would assign this blog post.

The post begins, starting with the title: "My son is gay. Or he’s not. I don’t care. He is still my son. And he is 5. And I am his mother. And if you have a problem with anything mentioned above, I don’t want to know you."

In short, an adorable boy, age five, chose to dress up as a cartoon character for Halloween this year. The cartoon character is female. When the blogger escorted her adorable five year old to preschool on Halloween, dressed as he chose, a number of other mothers whose children attend the preschool tried to make the boy and his mother feel very very icky because they are so positively certain it's wrong for a boy to choose to dress as a girl. On Halloween, mind you.

(Is it worth noting, as the blogger does, that her child's preschool is a church-hosted program? I'm not sure. As implied above, I am not one of those who thinks all religion is tainted with hatred and conservatism, or that all religious people are, at bottom, haters. I think ideas like that are ridiculous and patently false. And, indeed, Nerdy Apple Bottom proves this in her post: both she, who loves her child as he is, and the mothers who spew denial and anxiety as though possessed all send their kids to the same church preschool. It ain't about religion. It's about bigotry.)

Here's how Nerdy Apple Bottom ended her blog post: "If he wants to carry a purse, or marry a man, or paint fingernails with his best girlfriend, then ok. My job as his mother is not to stifle that man that he will be, but to help him along his way. Mine is not to dictate what is 'normal' and what is not, but to help him become a good person. I hope I am doing that. And my little man worked that costume like no other. He rocked that wig, and I wouldn't want it any other way."

'Nuff said.

Claiming a place in the world

Sayre Quevedo is a 17 year old who lives in the same city I do: Berkeley, California. (I do not know him.) He's a reporter with Youth Radio, and published an op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle on October 26th. Sayre was nine years old when he came out to his mother. She asked him if he was sure, Sayre wrote, then said, "Well, I'm happy for you, honey. Now get ready for bed."

(Word to the wise: that's not the way it goes down for most kids who come out to their parents. Heck, I waited until I was 23 years old and it wasn't that way for me.)

Sayre wrote about supportive experience in his life, and also about tough times, when other kids screamed at him that he was "sick" and was "going to hell." He wrote that he likes Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" campaign, because it's something that can make a difference during those tough times. Most importantly, he wrote about what he has found and made to claim his place in the world: "But what made the difference was the support system that had my back. My friends, my family, my Gay-Straight Alliance and the staff at my school who I knew would enforce rules regarding homophobia."

Sayre Quevedo doesn't live in a perfect world. Kids in his school scream hate and scorn in his face. But he's got the support at home (see previous section) and in his community (see the section before that) to understand that hate and scorn do not define the borders of his world. In fact, while Sayre has to wade through hate and scorn and other forms of human idiocy -- because he's human like the rest of us -- he does not accept that hate and scorn have any rightful place at all in his world.

This is a lesson to all of us.



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Thanks to jglsongs for the photo of the Gay-Straight Alliance school bus from Seattle Pride, 2008.

Evolution of the college textbook, redux

There was a lot of buzz in late February about a publishing platform called Dynamic Books that Macmillan was rolling out, timed to launch with about 100 titles students would be able purchase for Fall term of this year, according to a Publisher's Weekly article.

If you go to the Dynamic Books catalog page today, you'll find two Economics textbooks listed, one each in Life Sciences and Math / Statistics, and a dozen in the Physical sciences. That's a total of sixteen. And guess what? Well into Fall term 2010, only one of these books is for sale -- the rest are "coming soon."

No surprise, right? Things take longer than Marketing VPs might hope before they actually gain traction.

Since last week the blogosphere has been lighting up over a new new development in the world of wishing universities and the students who are their raison d'être would help e-books make inroads into a market worth something on the order of $7-12 billion (depending whose numbers you trust). The brave new idea? How 'bout if "colleges require students to pay a course-materials fee, which would be used to buy e-books for all of them" -- to quote a 24 October article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. And why would such a measure be necessary? Because "students tend to be more conservative when choosing required materials for their studies. For a real disruption in the textbook market, students may have to be forced to change."

Wow.

I work as a staff member at UC Berkelely, and have a cousin who is currently an undergraduate at Cal. That means I have an up-close view of the pain students and their families are feeling due to an unrelenting series of tuition increases over the past several years (32% last year alone), as state support for higher ed has dwindled. The California State University system was in the news (again) just last week: its trustees are considering increases of 15.5% this year and next, just as they warned was likely when the last increase was announced in this past June.

Part of my up-close view of students' pain comes via Facebook's Questions feature. Because I'm FB-friends with my Cal-enrolled cousin, I see questions stream by from her friends who are desperately seeking copies of a textbook someone else might have from a prior semester so that they can share or buy or rent or something as they study for exams in a class whose books they can't afford to purchase. Ouch.

I think it's pretty certain that students who are "forced to change" to a system that charges mandatory course-materials fees on top of rapidly escalating tuition costs are going to be ... unhappy, let's say. I think this is probably so even though the administrators who are experimenting with such models are aiming at lowering textbook costs for students, which is a very good thing.

It'll be interesting watching this one play out.

E-textbooks are certainly coming. Whether it's textbook publishing platforms that make it easier for professors to contribute to and pick-and-choose from available textbook material; or professors who choose books students can opt to purchase in electronic form; or administrators who ram e-texts down impoverished students' throats, ready or not ... one way or another, the future is nigh.

But university administrators are going to have to make a very clear case -- to students -- for near-term savings for students who are subjected to course-materials fees or similar mandatory schemes. Otherwise you can bet the building take-overs won't be reported from the Berkeley campus alone...




Thanks to Janne Huttunen for making her photo of the November 2009 occupation of Berkeley's Wheeler Hall available on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

Californians aren't whores

I'm going to risk it. I know, it got the Chicago Tribune in trouble back in 1948, when they called the presidential election for Dewey over Truman (Dewey who?). But sometimes you have to step up, throw caution to the winds, and hope like hell the pollsters got this one right. If the Goddess of Democracy smiles on California, Meg Whitman will be a has-been by the end of the week. She'll be the candidate who dug herself the most expensive political grave in history.

Fox News was so proud last month to trumpet a garbled recording that proved somebody in the office of once-and-future governor Jerry Brown called his super-rich, opportunist opponent "a whore." In all the brouhaha, though, both the crass Brown campaign and the reactionary media got it backward. Meg Whitman's not a whore. If the concept applies at all, she's a john. The thing is, Meg Whitman's campaign -- into which she has poured $141 million of her personal wealth -- has been organized around the principle that California voters, as a group, are all whores. And that we're cheap whores at that: Meg's spent eight bucks and change on each of California's registered voters (figuring from the Secretary of State's stats as of 18 October). Even if she spent judiciously, targeting only the half plus one of Californians whose vote she's, um, soliciting -- we're still talking less than a Jackson.

Meg ... I'm sorry. Even in loose and licentious California you can't bid that low and expect to win the auction.

I'm generally pretty cynical about elections -- though eligible voters' absence at the polls prove more than 60% are more cynical than I am in midterm election years this far into the century, in that they don't even show up. Still, it would be nice to think that Meg Whitman's polling makes it safe to infer that there are limits to the insult that citizens will swallow.

No, Jerry Brown isn't many people's hero. Not by a long shot. But when some rich tyrant stirs from her lethargy as a citizen and attempts to buy her way into the CEO position of the 8th largest economy in the world, it's comforting to see that most people get that a lifelong politician, wrung out and flip-floppy as he may be, is going to be a lot more competent at actual governance than someone who couldn't be bothered to cast a vote for most of her adult life.

I voted by mail last week. But I'm looking forward to tomorrow night, when we all get to see what a $141 million concession speech looks like.




Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the photo.

City vs country

Last month I visited New York City with my partner, and managed to squeeze five blog posts out of a week during which we visited eight art museums. Never did get around to blogging about the two Off Broadway shows we saw, each of them compelling and flawed in ways worth blogging about. Oh well. Maybe I'll work 'em in someday.

This month I spent a weekend with an old friend in his primitive Forest Service cabin on the south fork of the American River. The whole trip, including a few hours up and another few hours driving back, advanced the clock by a bit under 36 hours.

Having a blast in the city, kicking back in the country: all in a season's healthy appetites, I'd like to think.

By "primitive Forest Service cabin" I mean what exactly? Well, the cabin in question -- on Forest Service land, leased not owned -- has no plumbing and no insulation. There's a nicely engineered, self-contained composting toilet that never seems to work quite as advertised, but it beats the heck out of the old outhouse-over-a-pit that the Forest Service insisted be shut down not many years ago. (You really didn't want to go to the outhouse after dark ... for fear of ... The Butt Scratcher, lurking in the muck! Legends were built around The Butt Scratcher ... in actual fact, somebody probably got startled by a mouse once. There were about a trillion spiders, I swear.)

In the absence of plumbing we haul water up from the river in 2-1/2 gallon containers (I prefer two at a time, for balance when walking back up the granite slope). For heat we burn wood in a well-made stove that, weekend before last, kept the embers from Saturday evening's almond logs aglow 'til morning. It was a one-match weekend, there's got to be a merit badge for that. The cabin has electricity, and a two-burner hot plate. We ate very well. It's amazing what you can do with a couple of burners and made-ahead soup and a galette from the bakery down the street from where I live when I'm not skipping among the Jeffrey pines. Oh, not to mention pancakes cooked on an electric griddle in the morning. Bathing? That's what the river is for. It's cold. This is the warmest time of year for a dip in the river, with last year's snow melted and this year's not yet arrived, and it's still a get-in-get-the-hell-out-quick-as-you-can sort of thing. In May there's no way to escape brain freeze.

Let's be clear. I am so so so far from complaining. This little cabin is about as close to a certain sort of paradise as I'm likely to get in the rest of this lifetime, now that I'm too creaky to pack into real back-country. The cabin is quiet, it's comfy, it's got a fabulous deck, there's a great swimming hole just downhill, and it's saturated with great memories of hanging out with some of my best friends in the world. Yeah, sure, there are ghosts. I never saw them myself, but others have. Whatever. I wasn't there (and so I wasn't traumatized) when the bats got in, or when a garter snake slithered out soon after somebody's arrival. (There are rattlesnakes in the 'hood, but we've only spotted them on the far side of the river.)

Best of all in this day and age? In three words: no internet access.

Yeah, there's cell coverage, not that I've ever brought along means to take "advantage" of it. This is not way out in the boonies, you can hear Highway 50 from the deck. If you looked hard I'm sure you could spot the cell towers dressed up as conifers (but why spoil the view for yourself?). So, cell coverage at three or four bars, but I don't have an iPad or any other 3G or 4G or any-G devices, so as far as I was concerned: No. Internet. Access. O, bliss.

In New York last month, Matthew and I stayed in Nolita, a real estate agent's moniker for the blocks NOrth of Little ITAly, west of the Lower East Side, and east of SoHo. It was a great neighborhood, the street we stayed on was quiet as you could reasonably wish for and still be in Manhattan. Great coffee, restaurants, book shops, whatever-you-can-imagine shops, access to transit ... and all those museums & shows. The flat we rented through airbnb.com was comfortable, we had a kitchen ... and ... wait for it ... wireless network too!

My partner has never been up to the cabin on the American River. He doesn't do primitive, jumping into freezing cold river water is not his idea of a good time, and the switch from The Butt Scratcher's pit to the composting toilet didn't change his hell-no attitude. Not even a little bit. City slicker, all the way.

Funny how that is. I wolf down those art museums almost as tirelessly as the painter I travel with. But there's nothing that clears my head better than sleeping surrounded by the sound of a rushing river. With no internet access, thank you very much. (Of course, I do admit it, the return to 'civilization' is part of the fun. The internet and proximity to that bakery down the street does have its advantages.)

Here's a story that, for me, epitomizes the differences in outlook I have with Matthew about vacations in "natural" settings. Imagine your way to Brugge, in Belgium ...

There's a little park in Brugge whose center is "Lover's Lake" in a southern part of the city called Minnewater. Now, if you haven't been there, you'll have to take my word that Brugge is a lovely city, one of those fine, survived-WWII-without-massive-destruction small cities in which it is easy to imagine oneself in an earlier century -- it reminded me, in that respect, of Prague or Perugia. It is not a big city by any stretch of the imagination. Nor is it a village. Minnewater is a park, it's not the countryside. In fact, Lover's Lake is not actually a lake. It's part of the system of canals that encircle and cut across the city, only widened a bit. The edges of the "lake" are paved. The "lake" is rectangular. The trees alongside the "lake" are planted. They are planted in rows. Straight, neat, unwavering rows. So imagine walking in this lovely, well-groomed park, with one's lover alongside a lake called Lover's Lake, in a charming city in which one's hotel is installed in the building that was once home to Giovani Arnolfini, whose wedding portrait one saw in London a couple of weeks before in the National Gallery (it was painted by Jan Van Eyck in 1434). That's just where Matthew and I were some six years ago when he turned to me and said, "I love this place. See? I do like nature!"

I nearly fell in the canal laughing.

To Matthew, "nature" is a meticulously groomed park in a pretty little tourist city. Forest Service cabins within earshot of a federal highway, then, are uncharted wild wild wilderness? And actual wilderness? Nice people who grew up in cities of eight million people don't think about things like that, I suppose.

Our differences aren't the problem one might imagine, actually. We had a great time in New York together last month, as I said, and even took a walk across Central Park (which is less not-nature than Minnewater, but, sorry, it's still an artifact of city planning). I'm permitted to visit the Forest Service cabin wilderness with my granola-head California friends, so long as nobody exerts pressure on anybody else to come along.

It is remarkable how universally it's true: there's no accounting for taste.



For the record, Matthew gave me permission to tell this little story on him, though he maintains that there's no story to tell and that our experience in Brugge did indeed demonstrate his love for nature. Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the cell phone tower image. Yeah, it's from New Hampshire not the Sierra Nevada, but it sure gets the point across. Also for the photo of Minnewater in Brugge.





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Getting a grip on attention span

Last week I had an exchange with Steven Long, the proprietor of FoesOfReality.com and a member of my on-line writing group. Earlier this month Steven posted Krakatoa Katy, a piece about the particular ways he is haunted by a Mighty Mouse cartoon released in 1945, called Krakatoa, and what that particular haunting suggests about what endures in memory.

I enjoyed reading Krakatoa Katy, but was bothered by an omission, an odd omission to my way of thinking, in its presentation. Though published on a website that is powered by Wordpress -- that is, the piece was published as a blog post, meant to be viewed in a web browser -- the author didn't include a link out to the cartoon that seeded his meditation. Not even to an article that would contextualize Mighty Mouse for readers who know little or nothing about the cartoon, or a link to the Mighty Mouse in Krakatoa entry on IMDB.

As readers of this blog know, I'm pretty liberal with hyperlinks. Not everyone will care, but readers might become curious about this or that reference, and the blogging medium -- hypertext -- lends itself to relatively painless slaking of that sort of curiosity. So, wondering about Steven's choice, I started a dialog in the post's comment thread. Steven wrote that he did think of including a URL to the cartoon on YouTube, "but ultimately decided it would be more of a distraction." I replied: "I suppose one could blog as a text-purist, but I think that in a hyperlinked medium it’s not so fitting — it’s almost inconsiderate? — to refer to linkable stuff without linking it."

We went on a little bit from there, and Steven did cough up the YouTube URL as soon as I asked for it -- but the core of our exchange is in those initial, short comments:

To what degree should a writer expect and attempt to control a reader's mode of engagement with her/his work; and to what degree does medium shape message?

These are some of the issues at the core of the tsunami of change sweeping the world of published text -- a.k.a. books -- in recent years.

One of the cozy things about books printed on paper and bound into a volume of pages is that they're wonderful vehicles for slipping into richly rendered worlds that are seeded by an author's imagination and craft, and brought to life by readers' imagination and experience. The medium is available to anyone able to read, and interesting to anyone who gets a kick out of participatory exploration of a world. A skilled author provides a rich framework for imagined experience, and a reader meets the experience partway, filling in a skein of image, gesture, smell, sound, taste, memory, and resonance that can be suggested by words, but not actually rendered. One could argue that books are the closest humans have gotten to the Vulcan mind-meld.

Blogs, tweets, links posted to Facebook, hyperlinked books published on web sites, and what people are imagining for internet-enabled reader devices like the iPad are a different story. In fact, they're a different form of story. What makes them different is that the medium itself enables readers to go traipsing off in directions that tickle their fancy, most often to other stories, perhaps in other media (e.g., from essay to cartoon). They might come back to a blog, tweet, Facebook page, web site, or e-published text once their fancy is satisfactorily tickled. And they might not.

The experience is no longer one between an author and a reader; or even between author, reader, and a background murmur of secondary criticism, interpretation, and scholarship -- the way, that is, one might read scripture, Homer, Shakespeare, or Joyce. Instead, it's a reader's world. The reader sticks with an author (or cartoon producer, or ...) until curiosity or whimsy or boredom sends her attentions elsewhere. She can stick with the author's presentation all the way through, or easily explore the byways.

I love reading books, and writing long-form fiction really floats my boat. The deep synergy between author and reader, and the satisfactions of deeply imagined and considered idea and emotion that arise from reading texts with engaged attention have yielded some of my life's richest pleasures. I don't think I'd trade a bookish mode of reading for anything.

At the same time, I read and write and surf hyperlinked-space too, and get a great deal from it. One thing leads to another, in ways that constantly surprise and educate me.

So it was interesting to see in a post -- Steven's Krakatoa Katy -- a piece that I might have been happy to read as plain old text in a magazine or a book, but that seemed somehow off when it was presented in a hyperlinked medium because it failed to take advantage of that medium to ease a reader's path to its referenced subjects or antecedents.

In last week's New Yorker, Richard Powers published a short story titled "To the Measures Fall." It's a romp through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, through the prism of an obscure novel by an obscure British author (fictional fiction) -- the title of the story is the title of this made-up book. The story is its narrator's account of her personal, romantic, and academic attachment to the Wentworth novel from age 21 until the brink of death. In the course of framing her life in terms of this object of obsessive attention, Powers' unnamed narrator describes the rise of the internet: "Overnight, the World Wide Web weaves tightly around you. A novelty at first, then invaluable, then life support, then heroin. [...] Your online hours must come from somewhere, and it isn't from your TV viewing. [...] The last print newspapers head toward extinction. More words get posted in five years than were published in all previous history. [...] Name the book that best captures life as now lived."

We're living that story now. What hypertext does to bookish reading is a history unfolding even as I type.



And, of course, there are a raft of judgments one might make about the value of bookish reading vs. hyperlinked reading, and the trends in so-called content consumption that follow the evolution of technology. Many have made such judgments, and some have changed their minds about those judgments as time and technology move along. If you use a search engine and follow the links you can find new judgments every day, in every corner of every venue of content creation.

I'm going to steer clear of that swamp in this post. But feel free to sound off in the comments!





Thanks to Knut Nærum, Øystein Backe, Rune Gokstad and the Norwegian Broadcasting show Øystein og meg for "Medieval Helpdesk" (2001).

Crowd-sourcing editorial feedback: a novel approach

Rafael Lima is an author, screenwriter, and lecturer at University of Miami in Ohio. He's been selling a draft of his novel-in-progress on Amazon for $0.99 (as an e-book for the Kindle) in order to "crowd-source" responses that he has been using to refine his manuscript. Lima's novel ploy for soliciting editorial suggestions on his novel manuscript came to my attention last week via Jennifer Howard's blog in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a post titled Finding an Editor -- or Lots of Them -- in the Crowd.

According to Ms. Howard's post, "Having watched the shrinking of the publishing industry and the dwindling of old-school editors, Lima didn’t like the odds of getting much creative help with the book if he went the traditional route. He uploaded a draft of the book to Amazon’s Kindle store as a 99-cent download and invited readers to tell him what they liked and what they didn’t."

I've had twenty or so readers of my own current novel project, Consequence, a dozen of whom have read the full mss. in one or more of its incarnations. Their feedback has been beyond helpful, it's been essential to refining my manuscript. Some have given big-picture feedback (this character is superfluous; that chapter sticks out like a sore thumb; the core plot is terrific but that sub-plot needs to be yanked; are you nuts? -- etc.). Others focus on the small stuff (word choice, the verity of a line of dialog, even the fine points of punctuation).

Much more often than not, a reader's suggestions help me out ... sometimes in ways they didn't necessarily intend. One reader, for example, told me that Consequence gave her nightmares. I jumped for joy! Not because I'm mean, but because her experience told me that my characters were real. They got under her skin.

But the art of interpreting readers' feedback is often complicated. In general, I'd guesstimate there's about a 15-30% chance, depending on the draft and the pool of readers in play, that if two people comment on the same aspect of my mss., their opinions will diverge. Now, don't get me wrong! Even that divergence is valuable. It's an essential reminder that I have ultimate responsibility for filtering feedback and measuring it against my own intention and craft. While my readers often lead me to see a sentence, scene, or chapter in a new and improvable way, sometimes a reader's opinion is, well, idiosyncratic. Sometimes, for example, readers fixate on exactness in rendering of place that is not so important to my story, or in rendering an obscure historical event -- to the detriment of drama that is better supported by a sprinkling of poetic license. Sometimes they want me to write a different book than the one I'm writing.

Making the most of my readers' feedback takes time and attention. And I do want to make the most of it, especially considering the hours and effort I know that each of them has so generously given to responding to my work-in-progress.

Rafael Lima, who not only solicits feedback from Kindle readers of his $0.99 draft but also from the students he teaches in the School of Communication at University of Miami, receives feedback from all angles. His mss. for Screenwriter hit "number 27 on the Kindle Store’s list of most-downloaded paid-for titles," Lima says (it has since come down several orders of magnitude, but, hey, life is flux). So when I read in Ms. Howard's post that Lima says of his experience, "There’s all these pluses, and I have found no minuses in the experience at all" I've got to wonder: how does he do it?

It sounds straightforward the way Lima explained the process to Jennifer Howard -- opinions that pop up frequently are the ones he pays attention to -- but I have a hard time imagining tracking and filtering dozens or hundreds of converging and diverging opinions coming at me from all sides. Three or four or five at a time is about as many as I can productively juggle.

I'm curious what other writers think. Is crowd-sourced editing something that would help you refine your novel? Would it distract? Confuse? Clarify?