"If the bigshot at Google was no longer capitalizing 'google,' could the end of civilization be that far behind?..." blogs the Con Man. "A funny thing happened on the way to written anarchy. My emails started to grow truncated, abortive. For years I had prided myself on watching the typos and ending with a spiffy salutation to my emails. All of that has gone out the window. It’s all I can do now to manage a period at the end of a one-sentence email. If you’re in this world you know what I’m talking about, and if you know what it all means please let me know. The best I can do is to say truncation says something about what we are becoming and what we are destined to become, with substance giving way to speed faster than fresh wheels on the autobahn. If we can eliminate whole words and then excise punctuation, will we not reach a point where you need GPS to find out what anything means? Don’t u c?"
The Con Man is convinced that everyone has missed the ultimate importance of the iPad to the evolution of media. "In the rush to slobber over one’s self," he blogs, "the real point of the iPad was either missed or dismissed in a whiff of epic proportions. To whit I submit this humble rejoinder to the hordes. At the end of the day, at the end of this decade, the iPad will be seen as the first device that collected all the media together in one truly portable place. The real power of the iPad model will thus come not from the monetization of any one thing but in the creation of a whole new form—a form of forms, if you will."
The Con Man liked James Cameron's "Avatar" but.... "In a movie this big, EVIL in all caps ends up making the movie smaller," he blogs. "Then there is the kumbaya natives of Pandora to consider, a people so in touch with their own souls and the souls of their ancestors that the entire planet is a throbbing Internet gone viral, vital, and all-natural. Almost the entire second half of the movie is the story of how these poor innocents, who know how to use a machine gun, are stunned into near-submission not unlike the metaphorical subjugation of Native Americans and the Napalming of North Vietnam and Cambodia. I’m as willing as anyone to concede the United States lost some of its soul in these campaigns, but it would not have hurt 'Avatar' one bit to at least hint that a good backstory for bad guys makes for a mo’ better movie."
Posts filed under 'Technology'
I once met a bigshot from Google who had decided, as bigshots so often do, that the rules of decorum no longer applied to his kind. In this case that meant Mr. Big decided that he no longer need to bother with capital letters in his emails.
Why? For the obvious reason: creating a capital letter requires an extra step, the ultimately unhip pressing of the shift key.
It struck me at the time as a seismic shift. If the bigshot at Google was no longer capitalizing “google,” could the end of civilization be that far behind? Like everyone else I have watched as texting on cell phones became its own language: wtf, where r u ? is not a bad starting point for this discussion, but to see the means of communications changing was not to know what it all meant.
Continue Reading February 4th, 2010
The mutually orgasmic chortle of the cognoscenti missed the point about the announcement of the Apple iPad by a citified mile because a preponderance of yappers were obsessed with where said tablet fell in the pluperfect Apple pantheon of digital inamorata.
Was it cellphone or laptop? Would it set the Kindle aflame? Would it render all that had come before pale paleocentric imitations of what was meant to be?
Or is it just a beloved billing mechanism that newspapers, magazines, and movie-makers have been looking for since Indiana Jones found the Holy Grail?
In the rush to slobber over one’s self, the real point of the iPad was either missed or dismissed in a whiff of epic proportions.
Continue Reading January 31st, 2010
Darwin’s restaurant was packed, so we went next door the day after Christmas for the next form of evolution: James Cameron’s “Avatar,” albeit in 2-D, the standard stuff that fills screens to bursting and the stadium seating to capacity. Instead of plush, lush 3-D, we ended up in one of the end-of-civilization screens the Bow-Tie Cinemas keep alive at the frontier outpost of El Jebel, Colorado.
All in all, in other words, the worst possible set-up for a movie set up to break the glass ceiling of film with three-dimensional computer-generated movie-making. Even so, with the deck stacked against it, “Avatar” was much better than good: Cameron—he of “Terminator,” “Aliens,” and “Titanic” fame—has now set the bar so high that Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas will spend the rest of their careers trying to reach the planet Pandora, home to foxy and fierce nine-foot, blue-skinned babes with tails who know how to mate, bro.
Continue Reading December 27th, 2009
Okay, it’s official: the bound and tattered book is dead.
For me at least.
Continue Reading May 22nd, 2009
No I am not kiddin' ya. Pluto and some selected Kuiper Belt Objects and possibly some Oort Cloud objects should be considered planets. Here is why. First some of the variables to consider; mass, orbital divergence from the plane of the ecliptic (remnants of the solar disk are generally found here), whether there is a solar orbit, composition, and temperature.
Why is mass imprtant? With enough mass, there is what is called hydrostatic equilibrium. There is enough gravity to overcome structural rigidity to form a fairly spherical body, subject to inertial deformation from rotation. Simple enough, the possible planet should be ball like in shape.
Continue Reading April 15th, 2009
I have just gone online searching for “multimedia novel” and “online fiction” and can’t find anything that remotely approaches what I’m trying to do, though I did see a novel on a T-shirt and a mobile phone (no kidding) and plenty of online short stories and novels. For some reason I’ve had no fear that I was missing anything for fifteen years and now I have an idea why: the concept is overwhelmingly difficult (see above) and there’s no money in it. So lots of luck to anyone who tries it.
I finally figure out “hypertext” seems to be the active phrase these days. (Note the word “text” betraying historical origins in print.) The “hypertext” entry from Wikipedia, circa today...
Continue Reading March 26th, 2009
A few more thoughts on complexity: i.e. complexity in the Supernovel can get complicated. Think about how different the whole deal is from writing a book:
n Morphing of text into hypertext.
n Inclusion of all things digital.
n Literal appropriation of source material, sometimes in toto.
n Incorporation of “found objects.”
n Importance of contributors and contributed material.
n Idea of the unfinished symphony.
n The author who becomes an “originator” and no longer has complete control.
Milan Kundera likes to say the novelist must discover what only the novel can discover—but that was then, but the so-called Supernovelist has the same job albeit with a toolkit that just went from a putty knife to a chain saw with all the attachments.
Continue Reading March 9th, 2009
So how to tell the story? How to get started with the so-called Supernovel? In a class at Breadloaf I once heard John Irving say the more you knew about the story before you started the better off you would be. I thought he was wrong about that when it came to the novel but he’s probably right about the Supernovel, which presumes a far greater level of complexity than the novel because of multiple media and multiple forms.
Still, if it’s all about story, I am ironically going to unveil THE BOOK OF O’KELLS by holding back on story—by withholding it withal. When I first started I thought I would simply post everything I had online, all at once, with a guide that got you into the story by character or media or timeline. Now I actually think there has to be a story about the story, story, story.
Continue Reading March 8th, 2009
Found objects, appropriated content, sampling, and source material can be thought of as the “stuff” of the Supernovel, like Rauschenberg’s goat, and though I’ve barely tried any of this just yet it strikes me as being on target. Like the illustrated manuscript of THE BOOK OF KELLS—now that’s an interface for you—this concept of incorporation (my term for all of the above) means almost nothing remains outside the wrapper of the Supernovel as long as you can break it down to some kind of digital form.
Continue Reading March 3rd, 2009
But what lies beneath the text? Instead of a direction sign—go here—what if a hyperlink was a trap door or a secret passageway? What it took you somewhere you did not expect to go? Sure, it breaks the basic contract with the surfer of the Web, but when you write the Supernovel you get to do what ever you want, as long as you have what passes for a reason. Or maybe the text is a window onto additional layers, the way videogames are sometimes created. Like the aforementioned fourth or fifth dimensions: forces unseen acting for reasons unknown. Something found deep within a hyperlink could be the key to the entire BOOK OF O’KELLS (Who knew?)
So there are endless unspeluncked possibilities when it comes to hypertext in the Supernovel.
Continue Reading March 2nd, 2009
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