Colin Marshall

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 30. Cory Arcangel's Clouds (2002)

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Clouds. 5:15 min., color, silent, 2002. By Cory Arcangel. Ubuweb's description:

Cory took an old Super Mario Brothers Nintendo video game and erased everything but the clouds.

Easier to describe, I daresay, than to hazard a guess as to how he did it. The easiest explanation is that he played Super Mario Bros. in an emulator, recorded it, and then visually erased everything onscreen but the clouds and the blue background. But no! He actually hacked the physical NES cartridge, which he shows you how to do on his site. So the "video art" here isnt so much what's embedded above as what you get when you put the home-soldered cart into the machine.

Even watched in the form of Ubuweb clip, Clouds (a.k.a. Super Mario Clouds, or whatever) is actually pretty hypnotic. I somehow never realized, in all my childhood hours of playing that game, that the clouds drifted to the left by themselves, even absent the player's scrolling the screen by walking ahead. Here's a picture of Arcangel's own modified game — note that it is, and must be, just Super Mario Bros., not the Mario/Duck Hunt pack-in everyone has seven of — for no better reason than that it amuses me:

The unsavory

(not this year's festival)

Visiting the L.A. Times Festival of Books this year, I spent my time between panels checking out exhibitors' displays. Just like at the AWP bookfair, it got me asking questions about heady issues of marketing, attention and connection. But this time I wasn't pondering why certain exhibitors weren't drawing me; I was pondering why certain exhibitors were actively repulsing me.

Unlike AWP, the #LATFOB (as were instructed to tweet) doesn't limit its fair to presses, journals and academic institutions. Booths, or at least tables, seem to go to whoever lays down enough cash, so mixed in with the relatively attractive likes of Taschen, Kinokuniya, Tin House, C-SPAN and Book Soup are the desperate, the creepy and the gut-level undesirable. There are certain booths I notice myself giving a very wide berth year after year:

• Scientology/Dianetics
• Religions of any stripe
• The "9/11" truth movement (resident in a corridor of the UCLA campus I've come to call "Truther Alley")
• Self-publishing firms (especially self-published children's authors who've rented a booth to pimp the character they've invented)
• Conspiracy theorists of any stripe
• Latin American revolución fetishists
• Political causes of any stripe
• The Ayn Rand Institute

What do these organizations have in common? I suspect that an answer, however provisional, will reveal something important about what's succeeds in earning meaningful brainspace and what doesn't.

I mentioned religions, but are all these entities are in some sense religions, or at least religious in their psychology? By that I mean how they urge you to accept propositions that are apparently untrue, untestable or both — also known as "beliefs." The religion-religions hammered their wedges' thin ends pretty hard: Scientology offered their usual "stress tests," the big Islam tent handed out copies of the Qu'ran pretty aggressively and I accidentally met the gaze of one Falun Gonger. (Pleading, shaky question asked Madelaine by a Falun Gong representative at Santa Barbara's Earth Day fair: "Will you help me?")

Who could argue that Truthers, hand-wringing JFK paranoiacs and dour revoluciónistas lack their own suites of religious-y beliefs? I foresee some blowback from lumping the proselytizing Objectivists in with this motley crew, but they've got their cool-kids-accept-this axioms too, even if they're, like, "A = A." Only the self-publishing segment doesn't quite fit, but many of the self-published are by definition pushing ideas of such weird marginality that they might as well be religious beliefs.

Is it simply that they all try so hard to convince you of something, kooky or not? Maybe the U.S. did conduct a secret war in Guatemala between May 1986 and September 1988. Maybe your self-published book of stories about "LeRoy the Wonder Marmot" does have actual literary value despite its inability to win any kind of imprimatur. Hell, maybe Muhammad was right. But jeez, must you be so freakin' insistent about it? It's the sebaceous desperation of the car salesman secretly terrified that you'll walk off the lot or the dude at the bar who doesn't quite think you believe his story about the two chicks at once.

Is it that, like any sales operation, they want something from you? This at first seems not to hold, since the booths I make a point of visiting surely want something too: specifically, my money. Kinokuniya didn't set up shelves and a cash register for their health. The distinction might be one of attitude, of signaling: there's a world of difference between implicitly wanting someone's cooperation and visibly needing it.

The intersection of overt salesmanship and alien beliefs is a bad place to be, especially if there's an ingroup/outgroup distinction at work: you're out and they want you in. because that'll raise their own status in the ingroup. Paul Graham astutely made a relevant point about identity:

You can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people's identities. But you could in principle have a useful conversation about them with some people. And there are other topics that might seem harmless, like the relative merits of Ford and Chevy pickup trucks, that you couldn't safely talk about with others.

There's no honesty in identity-poisoned discussions. Hence my advanced equation: implausibility + identity + obvious selling = yuck. You might argue that this it too specific to me. After all, somebody must have gone to all those displays I take pains to weave around. And you'd be right; stress testees weren't in short supply, nor were Qu'ran-grabbers, but then again, a lot of people want somethin' for nothin', even if that somethin' ain't much. (The science fair-style tri-panel posterboards about the Twin Towers' physical composition structural integrity didn't draw many onlookers, though I did at one point see the Reduced Shakespeare Company's Reed Martin squinting at one in bewilderment.)

But these whiffs of implausible identity-hawking wafted so thick and so rank from their pushers that I'm forced to consider the uncomfortable proposition that these exhibitors only convert people to their cause who already, in some sense, believe in it, even if they don't know about it. Only these "seekers," as I believe they're called, wouldn't be repelled like I was. Did they go in pre-inclined to believe that a 22-pound self-published autobiographical erotic thriller could be a success, that Tai Chi for Jesus is the one true path, that Xenu is the root of their problems or that Jews did WTC? Furthermore, did I go in inclined toward receptivity of whatever Taschen, Kinokuniya, C-SPAN, etc. had on offer?

Axes of interviewing impossibility

David Pierce at Digitizd wrote a neato post running down fifteen podcasts he thinks "your brain and ears will love." Among them are such universally-bowed-to greats as You Look Nice Today, The Moth, TEDTalks, MacBreak Weekly, Fresh Air, Adam Carolla and... The Marketplace of Ideas? Zuh?

Yeah, I know, right? I wonder how I snuck into that ultra-august lineup too, but if the wave's there — to use a metaphor tailored to my city of residence — I'm sure as hell gonna ride it. In his brief comment on my show, Pierce dropped a line I found resonant indeed. While I've thought this and have to some extent even written it, hearing someone else put it in their own words makes me consider it in a more sustained way than I had before:

The more I consume information, the more I realize that what’s interesting are not theories or events; what’s really interesting are the people behind those things.

Thus far, I've consciously steered The Marketplace of Ideas by a bright but hard-to-locate star: "What stuff is interesting, and who's associated with it?" If I'm intrigued by a book, album, blog, film or wrought thing of most any kind, I find out who's behind it and invite them on the program. But I've taken it as less a mandate than a helpful tip that I should, in time, get behind the boilerplate to the real person and their real thoughts, opinions, reactions. Should promote that bit to raison d'être? Should the whole shebang be "a show about the people behind the ideas"? How much is it already that?

This adds another impossibility to my interviewing task. The first impossibility, which I believe I laid out on Twitter — and various e-mails to people, which are my crackpot ideas' proving ground — is that the ideal interviewer must speak directly and one-on-one to the guest, and directly and one-on-one to the listener. The trick is holding a genuine human conversation with the guest without making the audience shouldn't feel like a lousy pack of eavesdroppers. This, of course, can't be done.

The freshly-minted impossibility is that of holding conversations that are both idea-oriented and people oriented. I touched on this in my list of tips as follows:

Whenever possible, interface with your guest as a human being, with all the complications that entails, rather than as a mere vehicle for ideas. The danger here, of course, is that you might lose sight of the value of ideas and turn into StoryCorps. The trick, to the extent that I've figured it out so far, is to conduct ideas-oriented conversations on a human level. And not, you know, to make Eastern Europeans weep in a bus.

But I didn't realize that this was just the same form of impossibility as speaking straight to both guest and listener. Naturally, twice as many impossibilities makes interviewing twice as fascinating, and I want to accomplish its goals twice as much as a result. If you can think of a third axis of interviewing impossibility, I'd appreciate it.

Commenting as art form: the wisdom of Dan Owen

Dan Owen, a fellow whose feedback occasionally pops up below my posts, is one of those über-thoughtful commenters for whose readership on your blog you'd cut down massed innocents like wheat. Today, I thought I'd highlight some of his responses that have been especially valuable to me. I've hyperlinked up his mentions of interesting/relevant content and bolded what I consider to be his choicest lines.

On This Shifting Media Landscape in Which We Find Ourselves:

As both a Creator and a Consumer, you're going to get whacked by this future twice as hard as a guy who is merely trying to choose between buying Maxim and any of its competitors once a month. Your point about "profile" is well taken. I hope you don't mind if I apply it to ... you.

Bob Edwards (XM Radio, subscription model, "push" method of distributing content) . It was the first time I'd heard him, and I was blown away by the quality of his insight about what's happening right now in publishing. I set out to buy the interview, since apparently I can't hear it for free through Bob Edward's site. It looks like I'm going to pay $2.99 to own it through iTunes (internet, by the piece rather than by the pound, as it were, "pull" model of distributing content). But you mention here in your blog (internet, free, push/pull hybrid) that you interviewed Nash on your podcast (internet, free, push/pull).

First I heard of it, even though I already subscribe to Marketplace of Ideas. Why hadn't I heard your interview with Richard Nash? Part of it is the profile problem. I subscribe to 20 podcasts -- a few too many to listen to, so I filter. The way I filter is by reading the little description in the listing for each episode of the show. The description for your interview with Richard Nash reads as follows: "Part three of our ongoing series of conversations about the future of books and reading, t" That's it. That's all you get.

By now, I can't remember how I found you -- whether iTunes recommended Marketplace, and I then searched further and found the blog, or whether a blog linked to your blog and I then found Marketplace. These days, I'm almost entirely focused on finding good, efficient filters, though, and anything you can do to raise your profile will help the both of us. You have a lot of content that I'm sure I would love but that is completely inaccessible to me, and I'm more persistent than the average person. At various times you circle the issue of where you're going with your work, how you can support yourself doing it, and why so much of what you produce is met with silence. As such, you have a lot in common with the publishers at the AWWP book fair.

But as somebody with cash-in-fist looking for content, you have a lot in common with ME. My interest in Richard Nash is such that, at this point, I'd probably be willing to pay to listen to your interview with him. Help me help you. What other content of yours might I be interested in? If I was a writer who had been published by, say, Writer's Collective Two, and had read this post, I would have a number of reactions, chief among them FURY at my publisher.

But you are light years ahead of these stylish, hip, super-smart and sexy young entrepreneurs, because you are dialed directly into my network of filters. My next content purchase (through Amazon: internet, by the piece not the pound, incredibly effective push/pull model) is going to be Greg Whyte's "Fatal Traps for Helicopter Pilots," content that, I assure you, is not and never will be available for free. But I should be paying YOU for your Richard Nash interview (too late: it just finished downloading).

From the same post, on MFA programs:

At their core, they are nothing more than containers for 10,000 hours of practice. Laboring for so long without the benefit of "success" can be a soul-deadening experience. The MFA degree is a trail of incentive-izing breadcrumbs -- hopefully, but probably not, with a better outcome than Grimm's, but so what?

"It gets at the reason you won't find me in an MFA program, or indeed, in any other branch of academe: the academy talks to itself." But you are in the academe: you're taking a class in film-making. And the experience you're having there -- some people love your work, some people hate it, some people can't offer you anything beyond "I'm confused" -- is part of the value of these programs: you're learning stuff you might not otherwise -- certainly you're learning how problematic the idea of "audience" is to a creative person -- and you're getting to practice within a highly structured environment: assignment, execution, feedback, grade.

That's not the only way to practice, but it's not the worst way. [Question to self: is writing long comments to blog posts a good or bad way to practice one's art?]

On squirreliness about feedback:

These posts, in which you wonder why you get so few comments and what that might mean, always make me anxious. There's some fundamental, unspoken assumptions behind these posts, and I find myself reacting against those assumptions, even though they're unspoken and I'm probably even wrong about them.

For example, I've subscribed to podcasts you've reviewed on Podthoughts, although I've never commented. As you know, I'm not shy about commenting, but on the other hand, why bother? I post essays and what amount to blog posts on my Facebook page. Zero comments. But these are my friends, people I see frequently, and it inevitably turns out that everyone has read what I've written closely, has strong opinions about it, and they eventually will bring up some long-forgotten piece in conversation apropos of something related.

And, of course, I post this crap because I want them to know me and what I'm thinking. Commenting amounts to another art form -- I'm a poet, I'm a musician, I comment on people's blog posts. If your goal -- and you know, Colin, how cagey you are about discussing your "goals" -- is to generate comments, I'd be inclined to ask commenters why they comment, rather than asking people who don't comment what might motivate them to comment. Also, since I'm convinced that the number of comments is driven solely by the number of page views, I'd research high-comment blogs to look at that ratio.

[Ben] Casnocha must have an order of magnitude more page-views than you, but his comment count is, shall we say, modest at best. But, on a deeper level, if creating art in a vacuum is a problem for you, hoping for comments in a world of people who don't comment strikes me as an ineffective strategy. Hoping as a strategy: what are you, Cinderella? What's the problem here? Is there even a problem? This posts concludes, like most if not all of the others you do on this topic, with the artist's battle cry: I think I'll keep doing what I'm doing and see what happens.

I was in a Starbucks a few weeks ago and listened to a woman patiently breaking up with her boyfriend. It took a Frappucino and forty minutes. I suspect that management at the Bucks hates the seating area: why put tables and chairs there when they could fill it with t-shirt racks and greeting cards with YouTube screen caps of kittens? The only people I know who don't want their neighborhood Starbucks to be different than it is are the homeless people who sit in the arm chairs and repack their shopping bags.

On the video art of my friend Keng:

I found the discontinuity between the audio content and the visual images jarring and gripping. The contrast between the happy, celebratory images and the fraught content of the audio was part of what made it gripping. These juxtapositions, which might have been merely ironic, become laden with portent, implication, tension. I'm amazed and impressed at how narrative can emerge from non-narrative elements.

There is a story being told here, although part of it comes from my knowing that this is Skype conversation, which led me to believe this is a son calling his mother abroad. I only know this because you told me. I think this should be conveyed more explicitly in the piece itself. I like that the audio narrative "breaks down" -- at the end, part of what she says is not translated into sub-titles, leaving us mystified -- and I love that it circles back to her saying "Hello" (and that that is proceeded by her laughing, which alters the mood of the piece.)

There is a resonance here: an older woman talking over photos of her younger self -- the start of her adult life -- a conversation looping back onto itself -- the start of the conversation. I like the punctuation of sound at the end, and its abrupt "transmission ended" termination, since part of the narrative here is the mother arguing that the son can return. The sound punctuation says no, he can't, or won't.

The sampan background noise sounds like street noise, and I didn't know what to make of it. It adds texture, which I liked, and I liked that he introduced it well past the half-way point. Actually, as I try to articulate what he might have been doing with this sound (instead of just giving you my opinion about whether I liked it or not), I'm realizing that by introducing another layer on top of the photos and the language, he's making the world of Thailand -- and the possibility of a life there -- more real.

Then he cuts it off. But even if narrative didn't emerge, or if I have the narrative wrong, there's still tension and movement in this piece, and feelings emerge around a theme. They're drawn out of the viewer by these elements -- juxtaposition of elements, layering, texturing, pacing -- which have been carefully placed. There's intention here.

I'd hammer away pretty hard at your confused classmate. He needs to be made to articulate what he's confused about, and whether he's merely disappointed because an expectation he has about narrative structure was disappointed. Why is he unable to respond to the discreet elements at work here? Is he even able to see them? Can he deconstruct this piece into its parts and make some guesses about why it was assembled the way it was, what Keng's intention might have been and whether he legitimately met or failed to achieve those intentions? How did the instructor respond to this person's confusion?

Excellent work. You should collaborate with Keng. With regard to your piece, Marshall on Marshall, I liked it also, but I was only engaged on an intellectual level with it -- I liked the jokes, especially Marshall abruptly cutting off the interview with himself, and the interviewer addressing him by name -- that was an inspired touch. Your technical proficiency is impressive (was the scratchy sound intentional? I liked it -- it was an auditory reinforcement to the idea of the unreliable narrator, along with the black and white).

But what most struck me was your debt to Errol Morris. The graphics, the clear chapter headings and walled-off content of each segment, the emotional nudging by the soundtrack -- you've learned well. So much of the content of your work -- blog mostly, but even the radio show and now this video -- is ironic, self-deprecating, light and somewhat dismissive in tone. I like that, and I assume that's your natural voice, but if I were working with you I'd want to know whether you're hiding from failure by adopting a posture of dismissive, self-deprecating humor.

The problem with irony as an artistic strategy -- like sarcasm as a conversational strategy -- is that it's a one-trick pony. It can make one point well, but it can't go deeper, it can't explore an idea metastatic-ally, if you will (I just made that up, but you get the idea I hope). I know that in your 2 min piece you were working out a thinking exercise, but I'm struck by just how emotionally engaged I was by Keng's piece. For the long haul, that kind of engagement suits my taste better than witty observations, however incisive, articulate, and keenly perceptive, as yours always are. As always, I note zero comments. Merlin Mann has "Inbox Zero." Should you brand "Zero Comments"? I continue to think that as long as people are cowed into silence you're doing it right.

I don't have much concrete data about Dan except that he's from Maine, but I do know that he's got sound instincts, he's a fine reader, his insights have helped me think more clearly and he should really start bloggin' his own self. Aim to earn readers like Dan. Better yet, be a reader like him.

The case for/against a Tumblblog on Japanese jazz

Arguments for starting a Tumblblog on Japanese jazz

• So, so many internet people insist to me that the only way to gain a real audience in This Fragmented Media Lansdscape is to dial into a sub-subspecialty of a subspecialty of a specialty. These aren't just the words of pompous blowhards, either; no less grounded a figure than Merlin Mann often discusses how you'd do best to blog about and thus become the guy for, say, one individual Jawa, or a particular obscure X-Man who died a long time ago. I think Japanese jazz is in that league.
   
• I would learn what, exactly, Tumblr is. I realize that it's a blogging platform of some kind, and that it may or may not be optimized for the posting of videos, images and sounds. That doesn't tell me why it exists, though, and it certainly doesn't tell my why it's (apparently) a success. Despite its disorganized fan base, Japanese jazz is quite well represented in terms of multimedia artifacts coursing through the tubes, all of which I presume could be easily Tumbl'd.
   
• Japanese jazz is Japanese, yet, lacking the shameful associations of more popular Japanese exports like anime, manga, video games, wall scrolls and used schoolgirls' socks, I feel it is somehow "okay" to be enthusiastic about.
   
• Jazz itself is too big and diffuse a subject to get a handle on. One strategy is to latch onto a specific subspecies of jazz, but that way lies obscurantism and crankery; you might wind up spelling it "jass." Better, I imagine, to focus on a certain region rather than a certain style, though jazz played by the Japanese does seem aesthetically distinct from its Western counterpart, and in a thousand ways, though each difference is infinitesimal. (Free musicology PhD thesis question: "To what extent is Japanese jazz a regional instantiation of a style; to what extent is it simply a style?")
   
• I've never been to Japan, unfortunately, but that's a problem I'll rectify. Irrationally averse as always to playing the usual tourist games, slouching around shrines and pachinko parlors and whatnot, I've long planned to organize my first trip there around hops from Japanese jazz club to Japanese jazz club. They've got so many there, most of them in cities by which I'm fascinated, that a map of them provides a handy travel route indeed. (Side note: Haruki Murakami once owned and operated a jazz club. It was called Peter Cat.)
   
• I might make big bucks. (Extremely unlikely, but no less likely to get me those than anything else I do.)

Arguments against starting a Tumblblog on Japanese jazz

• I perhaps don't have the free life bandwidth for it. (But how much would it actually demand? Surely I can cut the cloth to fit.)
   
• The world of Japanese jazz might itself prove too sprawling to comprehend. (But it's a smallish country.)
   
• Do I have room for much more vinyl? (No, but I could just get rid of other stuff.)
   
• I would have to explain, probably with some regularity, why I have a Tumblblog on Japanese jazz. (But I could refer them to this post.)

If rationality is right, I should also be wrong

I've long sought to be rational, but I've recently found that I also want to be irrational. Rationality has its benefits — you get to know the truest possible nature of reality, you get to be right about stuff — but it seems to take you only so far. And, yeah, I know what you're thinking: "Woah, slow your roll, new ager." But hear me out. I'd agree that rationality is infinitely good at accomplishing what rationality can accomplish, which I suppose is a tautology. But the more I consider irrationality, the more it, too, seems to offer.

When I think about people I admire, whose lives and careers I respect like whoa — and I think about them a lot — I face the unavoidable conclusion that almost all of them are, in some respect, irrational. Worse, the very actions I admire them for taking are irrational. I thought rationality was pretty sweet until I realized that all my heroes, and many of my friends' as well, got famous by being irrational.

It isn't rational to pull a steamship over a hill in the forbidding Peruvian jungle. It isn't rational to write hyper-erudite live theater in the 21st century — or, for that matter, the 20th. It isn't rational to make albums out of just overlapping loops of stuff. It isn't rational to put long-form, black-backgrounded conversation on television. It isn't rational to write a 1079-page novel, 100 of whose pages are footnotes. It isn't rational to travel around the world doing art happenings. It isn't rational to start computer companies in a recession. It isn't rational to simultaneously act, direct, paint, write poetry and host comedy shows. It isn't rational to write poems in DNA. It isn't rational to write insane novels about obese survivalists and men living in cardboard boxes. It isn't rational to simply up and relocate to Japan in 1963. It isn't rational to secretly run a wire between the Twin Towers and walk across it. It isn't rational to walk away from internet tip culture when it's paying you handsomely. It isn't rational to spend six years and pretty much all the little money you have on a surreal 16mm black and white nightmare.

Rationality has done a lot for me. But clearly, if I'm going to take it to the next level, I have to be irrational.

What you learn from failed attempts at literary gambling

If you listened to my Denver travelogue, you know I attended the 2010 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference there. Its sights, sounds, conversations and panels provided lord knows how much grist for my riff mill, but one part of the event indirectly gave me more to think about than anything: the bookfair.

This bookfair (compound theirs) collected into a vast cavern hundreds of exhibitors behind tables, in booths, on kiosks, etc., most of which were publishers, literary journals and MFA programs. The biggest names present were outfits like Melville House (from whom I bought Madelaine three novellas and Tao Lin's Eee Eeee Eeee), McSweeney's (with whom I tried, briefly and unsuccessfully, to haggle for Nick Hornby's Housekeeping Versus the Dirt), Tin House (I don't know anything about them except that they're relatively well-known), the Paris Review (who wanted ten bucks an issue at the start) and Bookforum (who were giving away free copies of all the issues I've missed recently).

But it was the small names that made me think. I returned to the bookfair on the conference's final afternoon, which I understood was when the exhibitors, saddened at the prospect of schlepping boxes of unsold stock back to the University of Southeastern Wherever, got ready to deal. After the Melville House buy, I took my remaining cash in hand and dove into the ramshackle small-press and tiny-journal village, looking to make a gamble on a oddity or five.

My enthusiasm quickly disintegrated into paralysis and disorientation. I wanted to buy something from one of these tables, but how to choose which table, let alone which thing from that table? I was lost in a landslide of unknown titles, unknown authors, bearded dudes and horn-rimmed girls. My only recourse being to the shockingly superficial, I started going by the books' cover designs (some of which were cool), the journals' titles (some of which were clever), the dudes' tweed jackets (some of which were ironic), the girls' tight patterns (some of which were striking) and the tables' giveaways (some of which were liquor).

Even that didn't work; I still couldn't pick anything. A copy of Affinity Konar's The Illustrated Version of Things sitting on Fiction Collective Two's table briefly caught my eye, but only because I recognized the name as that of a former fellow contributor to 3QuarksDaily. That's when it struck me: this chaos was a grand mal case of filter failure. I didn't have the filters to guide me toward any one option — or even a subset of options — and few of the option providers bothered to position themselves in filter-favorable ways.

The gates were all open; pretty much nothing stood in my way. With the exception of Mathew Timmons' Credit, an enormous book of credit card application text that retails for $199.99, everything was cheap to free — and certainly abundant. I know that (a) I was willing and in fact actively seeking to drop some bucks on unknown literary quantities and (b) there were novels, magazines, chapbooks, journals, reviews and what have you somewhere in the heap that I would love. But I didn't even have a guess as to which direction to turn to maybe sort of find them. What happened?

Possibility one: I just don't know enough. While I am a "writer" inasmuch as I spend a substantial chunk of my time arranging text and presenting it to an audience and a "reader" inasmuch as I spend another substantial chunk of my time reading text others have arranged, I'm an outsider in the world of Writers and Writing Programs. If I was an insider, I'd be aware of which house was which, which journal was which, which university press was which. I'd know who I'm compatible with, who's most likely to surprise and delight me. But then again, it's not as if I'm totally ignorant of publishing; I'm in contact with publishers on a daily basis because of The Marketplace of Ideas. I'm just not tapped into this subscene of a subscene, about which more in a bit.

Possibility two: The exhibitors offered a too-small, too-narrowly-defined and thus too-similar range of products. Most everything on offer, save McSweeney's Wholphin DVDs, was some kind of bound-paper text delivery system; only title, author, length, width, thickness, paper weight and surface design differentiated them. Nothing I could see, hear or touch gave me useful information about how much more interesting I was likely to find any given bound-paper text delivery system than the others. Astonishingly, this was as true for the exhibitors themselves as it was for their wares! I could easily find out the name and location of a small press, say, but what about their mission? Their principles? Their sensibility? Their aesthetic? Their territory on the map of literature? The painful part is that some certainly were extremely interesting — and some were undoubtedly so uninteresting that they'd sap out my interestingness.

Possibility three: The exhibitors aren't talking to the wider world. I was looking to buy a bound-paper text delivery system sending a certain sort of message. Were all my filters not stuck in fail mode, they'd be selecting for the works sending messages like "You'll find this poetry intriguing and funny," "This novel will enrich your inner life," or "This publication will point the way to interesting things." But everything around me seemed to be sending messages no more specific or enticing than, "This is a literary paper," "This is a novel," "This is a chapbook."

Worse, I feel a sneaking suspicion that the real messages might amount to little more than signals sent from and to the members of the aforementioned sub-subscene: "This author wrote a novel," "This author is really smart," "This author won the imprimatur of such-and-such press," "This book will make you seem like you Know What Time is Is, literarily speaking." I get the impression of MFA people — students, holders or aspirants — writing to, for and, to an extent, about other MFA people.

I read a New York Observer profile of young novelist Joshua Cohen, which revealed his none too pro-MFA attitude:

The novel [Witz], which comes out in May, was nine years in the making. Mr. Cohen began it the summer after he graduated from Manhattan School of Music in 2001. Unlike most young American novelists, he never sought an M.F.A. "The M.F.A. is a degree in servitude." Mr. Cohen said. "It is a way to keep writing safe — to keep reading safe from writing. That I would be criticized as being romantic, or impractical, for making that statement just goes to show everything that's wrong. Writing is a conviction before it is a craft."

The accusation that it's "a way to keep reading safe from writing" feels reasonably sticky, even if it's less than transparently clear. It gets at the reason you won't find me in an MFA program, or indeed, in any other branch of academe: the academy talks to itself. I want — and many of my friends want, and since you're here, you probably want — to talk to the world. I would blame my difficulty in finding something to buy at the AWP bookfair on the fact that its small presses and such don't talk to readers beyond their circle, but I'm not sure that's quite it. They may not care about connecting with the world too far outside the ivory tower. And that seems like the road to extinction.

This is why (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Richard Nash is the smartest dude in publishing: he knows, and goes around saying, that the publishing business is the business of connection — of connecting readers with writers. Making more books isn't so much the issue, given that this country's coming up on 200,000 new ones per year. Making more books out of pulp, ink and glue is even less the issue, as medium and readership become ever more disconnected concepts. As someone who writes, I'd say it's all about readership; I'd write in iambic pentameter for the Cybiko if it meant more and greater reader connection.

But one critical step in the quest for reader connection is for readers to, like, know who the hell you are and what the hell you do. Wandering the bookfair's aisles, desperately trying to give some tiny publisher my money, I meditated upon the idea that profile height is the most precious thing in the world. If the profile of any of these books, authors, houses, poets, etc. stuck up just a bit higher, they'd have my cash now. Fortunately, a profile is, in theory, pretty damn easy to build in these days of Internet, but most of the books I passed by appeared to have been put out as attempted profile-boosters themselves. I don't know if that's a good idea. I'm sure I wouldn't put out a book without the profile to support it. Going the other way around seems perverse.

I ended up, by the way, at TriQuarterly's table. Unlike the vast majority of the other exhibitors, they offered their back issues from the early 1960s on, which already made them stand way out in a sea of late-2000s releases. The filter of time was at work: a volume of a journal that still holds up decades and decades on has its very existence to recommend it over the mass of stuff that all came off the presses in the last few months. My purchase was the fall 1972 issue, a hefty thing with neato graphic design and the theme "Prose for Borges". Borges — now there's a name you can trust.

Portrait of a shitheel

Jason Kottke posted about "I am an American conservative shitheel", a few-paragraph story a guy once wrote on Something Awful. It's told in the first person, from the point of view of a narrator who describes his day, naming a bunch of the state-funded or -run services he uses both directly and indirectly, then wraps up the account by saying that he went to "post on freerepublic.com and fox news forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right." A tired point, perhaps, but a lot of people seem to have found it effective.

Predictably, someone responded with "I am an American liberal shitheel", wherein the narrator names the corporations whose goods and service he uses while going about a day that culminates in him "posted on the Huffington Post and Daily Kos about how capitalism is the source of all evil in this country." While both stories are kind of dumb in isolation, I found much conceptual interestingness in mashing them up into this:

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock, manufactured by the Sony Corporation and powered by electricity generated by Southern California Edison under the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy. I took a shower in my house, constructed by Centex Homes, sold to me by a Century 21 real estate agent and mortgaged by Citibank, in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility.

After that, I turned on my Panasonic television, which I purchased with a Washington Mutual credit card, to a local NBC Corporation affiliate, one of the FCC-regulated channels. I saw what what their team of hired meteorologists, using their weather radar system and the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

While watching this, I ate my breakfast of US department of agriculture-inspected eggs and bacon, both produced by a local farm and sold to me by my local grocery store, and took my prescribed medication manufactured by Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Astra-Zeneca, and Novartis, which have been determined safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

When my Motorola-manufactured cable set-top box showed the appropriate time as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I got into my Toyota-manufactured, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved Prius vehicle. I set out on roads built by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation to my workplace, stopping to purchase gasoline refined by the Royal Dutch Shell company of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency. I paid with legal tender issed by the Federal Reserve Bank via my debit card issued to me by Bank of the West. I dropped off mail to be sent by the U.S. Postal Service and a package at the local UPS store. I dropped off one of my kids at a public school and the other at a private school.

Having spent another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the company-mandated standards enforced at my workplace and regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, I drove back to my house. It had not burned down in absence because of state and local building codes, the fire marshal's inspection and the high manufacturing quality of the products from which the company built it. It had not been plundered of its valuables thanks to the alarm services provided by Brinks Home Security, and the local police department. I could rest easy knowing that, had this happened, my Allstate insurance policy which would cover any damage and anything stolen.

I then logged on to the internet, developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and financed and run in part by such private corporations as Google, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. I posted on Freerepublic.com and Fox News' forums about how socialism in medicine is bad because the government can't do anything right, and I posted on the Huffington Post and the Daily Kos about how capitalism is the source of all evil in this country.

The result reads, to me, a little like Bret Easton Ellis. Naturally, I also made a few passes through to comb out the grammatical, tense agreement, paragraphification and capitalization-related issues. I know these were just forum posts, but damn.

Interesting and popular

Can't decide what to read on the net today? Pull down an interview with Brian Eno. He's beyond articulate, he's been perpetually pondering fascinating things since the 1960s and, best of all, his fans love to archive his press. You can browse two massive caches at enoweb and More Dark than Shark. I've read almost all of them and can vouch that they are quality.

Nevertheless, I somehow managed to miss a recent one in Pitchfork in which a gem is dropped not just by Eno himself but by the interviewer as well:

Brian Eno: [U2] have made some significant turnings at various points in their career. They're actually a very experimental band, but because of the form of their music people don't recognize it. If they were some rather obscure indie band, people would probably think, "God, they're amazing, they keep coming out with completely new things!" But because they sell millions of albums, that's how it gets overlooked!

Pitchfork: There's always a catch.

Brian Eno: [laughs] Yes.

Pitchfork: In some ways, making something that's both interesting and popular is the ultimate experiment.

I've recently come to find that making something interesting and popular is the only creative goal worth pursuing. Sure, you can gun for popularity alone, but the easiest way to that is to crank out something bland that zero love but millions find acceptable. On the coin's other side, you can make maximize only interestingness, but then you risk making something obscure that your potential audience, the pool of people with pre-existing proximity to the work — dwindles to zero.

But examples, please. Where are these intersections of interestingness and popularity to be found? Obviously Eno claims that U2 have managed to produce some of them, at least when Eno himself was in the studio. Now, I've never been a big U2 listener, but I do know that a lot of people actually regard them as somewhat humdrum.

Perhaps U2 are just uncommonly interesting by the standards of bands unfailingly fill arenas the size of Scandinavian nations. If you don't feel that, though, take Eno's own albums, especially the early ambient ones like Music for Airports. Interesting and popular! Or the early Roxy Music albums on which Eno made his name playing the synthesizer. Interesting and popular!

This leads me to the revelation that most of my icons — and maybe most of yours, too? — have made stuff both interesting and popular. Takeshi Kitano's films (and his variety shows and novels and whatever the hell else he's known for over there in Nihon). David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, not to mention his so-widely-read essays. Tom Stoppard's plays. Paul Graham's essays. Clive James', uh, everything.

I also like the goal of maximizing both accessibility and experimentalism because it's "impossible": you can't technically maximize two variables at once, especially when legend has it that they're directly opposed. It's literally impossible if you define interestingness as the opposite of popularity, which some implicitly do, but I find that wrongheaded.

The thing is, you can't afford to ignore either horn: connect with people or why bother; make it interesting or it's not worth making. I would quote that Philippe Petit line — "Impossible, yes, so let's get to work" — but the rare examples floating around out there make me think that it's not quite as impossible as all that.

Talking my way through Denver

In New Zealand, I took more or less speechless field recordings. In the "Mile High City" of Denver, Colorado, where I spent last weekend and a healthy chunk of last week, I've recorded a narrative travelogue. There for the 2010 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference — and, of course, to explore some urban terra incognita — I kept my Zoom H4n in tow to yammer into whenever a question or observation struck me. If you think it takes a good deal of mind over matter to unselfconsciously walk around an urban center talking into a recorder, you are right. But the transformation happens quickly. Yet another inhibition shed! Damn inhibitions.

So submitted for your enjoyment is my Denver travelogue (MP3, 17:30, 16.1mb), the first in what I imagine will become an irregular series of city podcasts. Subjects covered include:

• Denver's preponderance of brown-brick-and-glass architecture
• A presentation from artist/animator Kota Ezawa
• The Hyatt Regency's elevator-based ambient television
• Denver's unusually high amount of public sculpture, included but not limited to Claes Oldenburg's "Big Sweep" ("no fondling the broom, no caressing the broom")
• Lessons about publishing and creative work in general learned while browsing the AWP bookfair (more on this to come)
• What a glass-encased Quizno's is a synechdoce for
• What you have to do when you forget to pack any boxers

I now travel somewhere interesting at least once a year — and if things go right, that number will rise steadily — so expect more where this came from. Suggestions are welcome, though I realize I should've captured more conversations with other people. Maybe when I go to Mexico City. I still have some of my, uh, high school Spanish.