HOW NOT TO GET RICH AND FAMOUS

Cory Doctorow

Dave Lull, a librarian administrator who is an alert scout and tips the rest of us, whether or not they have a hat, sends me an article by Edward Kosner that appeared in the Wall Street Journal and that is a review of Cory Doctorow’s “Information Doesn't Want To Be Free: Laws For The Internet Age ,” a slender book from McSweeney’s.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-information-doesnt-want-to-be-free-by-cory-doctorow-1416355531

This link below also proved to be interesting, though my comment wasn't posted.

http://io9.com/cory-doctorow-is-here-to-take-your-questions-1660631716

Edward Kosner

Following is from Wikipedia,therefore unattributed and not copyrighted:  “Edward Kosner (born July 26. 1937) is an American journalist and author who served as the top editor of Newsweek, New York, and Esquire magazines and the New York Daily News during a forty-five-year career. He is the author of a memoir, “It’s News to Me,” published in 2006, and is a frequent book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. He lives in New York and on Amelia Island on the Atlantic coast of northern Florida.”   Kay Graham fired him as the editor of Newsweek.  I have no idea why, except that he’s aligned with the 2%.  He’s an example of what Tom Sheehan imagines to be a person sitting at a big desk deciding who gets in and who’s out.  Those who have actually edited know that in a sense they have reality by the throat (censorship of a kind), but reality fights back through advertisers, paper prices, and readership numbers.  As an editor he probably makes a lot more money than most authors.

The single best and surest way to make money on the Internet is to compile lists of people that connects them to their interests and histories.  These lists are valuable, esp. when the numbers are large and interrelated.  So when I responded to a promotional dialogue with Cory Doctorow, I was handing over a particle of gold dust to Kinja.  Since this was promotional, I also acted out the position that the Internet is an instrument of promotion, not publication.  I suppose Doctorow might be expecting that his book will be pirated.  I’ll wait until it’s a used book that drops below 99 cents on Amazon.  By that time the conversation will have moved on.  Maybe not very far on this subject, which seems stuck.

Caxton demonstrating his printing press

When copyright was invented in England to defend against the newly invented printing press (it didn’t, esp. after offset printing was invented), it was a matter of national law and then international treaty.  (If there was no treaty with another country, material could be legally copied there.  Doctorow calls this “geofencing.”)  In the Eighties, when I was going back and forth between the US and Canada, I had to check that I wasn’t carrying any books because they would be impounded at the border, at least if entering Canada where they were hypervigilant about the Great American Elephant rolling over and squashing them.  Now I buy books on Amazon.CA as freely as the US version of the website and with no particular tariff -- just the exchange rate.  I buy books from Ireland, which never had much use for English anything.

One of the uses of Internet-compiled lists of people is surveillance by law enforcers.  Dirty books are the least of it. Libraries in the US are constrained by law not to release the names of borrowers and their interests even if they are borrowing books about bombs or torture.  The Internet “feels” secret and out of the local social context, but it is quicksand revealing where and who you are, what you look at online, who you talk to, what you buy.  And we notice that it indicts governments and law enforcers as well as law-breakers.

Elizabeth R. Scheffler Appointed Director, 

Office of Public Records and Repositories

But the real dirty secret is that laws are only enforced if they are funded and they are only funded if the general public will support it or if the party in question has deep pockets or a bully pulpit.  So Doctorow, Kosner, McSweeney, and Kinja all either feel they have the resources to insist that copyright be enforced or feel that there is enough profit even if pirated.

Another vicious little aspect to copyright is that unless you can prove that you created something and the date when you did, someone else with deep pockets can claim your work, copyright it, and sell it legally.  In lieu of viable copyright law, I publish my work on the Internet, mostly on blogs but also with “print on demand” websites like lulu.com.  In that way I can prove the identity and date of creation.  Bob Scriver spent many hours and dollars to get his sculpture recorded with the National Copyright Office.  Since he created more than a thousand large and small sculptures, it amounted to a good bit of money.

"No More Buffalo" by Bob Scriver

His earliest copied and most commonly pirated sculpture.

But it made no difference.  The copying went on and not only was it too expensive to stop (and anyway we usually didn’t find out it had happened until quite a bit later and there was no “recall” as there is with automobiles) but also it undercut the value of the legitimate and legal castings by casting doubt on their origin.  A “good” copy is hard to distinguish from the “real” thing.  Usually patina is a giveaway or maybe carelessly set-up molds.  Not many people can tell and so the entire market for bronzes has been undercut.  Many, if not most, of the people who think they own “Remington bronzes” only own bad knockoffs.  But, hey, haute couture has the same problem.

Represented as a Remington, it's not even the right sculptor!

Fraser, the true sculptor of "End of the Trail"

This law, meant to address print, was made useless when the easy reproduction of almost every art form (including sex, if you don’t insist on real flesh) coincided with devices allowing music to be portable as much as reproduced easily.  When movies and books followed, those art forms became part of our lives, creating desire and all its fetishes.  Our lives became so easily virtual that some people are quite content to avoid reality.

One of the realities they evade is that the worship and privileging of “creativity” per se is a fetish, a conditioned response.  Say you’re a writer or an artist or a musician and there will be an immediate gasp of admiration and the assumption that you can make money out of thin air, even if you aren’t at the moment. Those who seek to enforce copyright law are using that idea of the sanctity of creativity to cover the REAL desire, which is for money.   What if we passed laws saying that all productive and valued creative people would automatically be granted enough money to live on?  Who would decide who they were?  (Their friends.  But that’s already the way it is.  Publishing is a circle jerk.)

For some unenlightened populations, there is no consciousness of the actual creation of something like writing or music.  It just seems THERE like a tree.  The law allows for certain uses:  quotes while reviewing or referring to research, copying while learning to paint or write, and pastiche which is an art form in itself.  “The Wind Done Gone” has been ruled legitimate as satirical comment on “Gone with the Wind.”  Curly Bear Wagner went a bit far when he tried to copyright Chief Mountain and charge a fee to everyone who took a photo.  Of course, the ensuing controversy was a good example of promotion.

Chief Mountain

Doctorow is right that in order to make money it is necessary to create desire for your work.  If no one gives a rip, copyright will have no impact at all.  But if people are obsessed with it, no amount of law-making will keep people from pirating it.  For both Bob and I, the obsession is not even with our  personal creative work, but rather with the fetish of Plains Indians, that 19^th century “feather fetish” that is a pain in the ass for real Indians.  As satire, Curly Bear copyrighting Chief Mountain really works. 

SHALL WE CALL IT RAPTING? (Not rapping, not rafting)

Since I’ve been aggregating Tim’s writing for four years, lately I’ve been wanting to begin curating.  For instance, I’d like to edit a small chapbook of his more recent poems.  He said,  “You are welcome to collect or archive or organize anything of mine you want. . . . [but] my stuff has no beginning, middle, or end where there's closure or a logical conclusion.”  He thinks this is a fault.  It’s been clear all along that school teachers, publishers, agents and editors have hounded Tim about the “bell curve” of writing structure: beginning, middle, end and all that.  A school ma’rmy idea for an autodidact in a new age and a new medium.  The old rules depended on linearity, hierarchy, classification, and all that curricular canon stuff.

I got to thinking about that.  Suddenly the obvious came clear.  I saw that being able to present, all at once, print, spoken word, image, video, narrative, metaphor, instrumental music is as much of a break-through as opera once was.  I mean, for the first time the multi-gifted person who never did fit onto a bookshelf or a phonograph record or even a theatre stage, is free to stretch out and let ‘er rip.  Luckily, the new audience does not require a plot or melody -- they are willing to accept a sequence of moments as pure experience and knit them together with their own emotional life.  (Think what John Cage or Jackson Pollock or Andy Warhol have taught us.) The old limits and assumptions about what things ARE or (worse) OUGHT TO BE don’t matter to them.  Curating for such an audience is an entirely different proposition.

“Blog” is short for “weblog” and was a response to the “hyperlink” which allowed a person to jump from one spot on the internet to another.  The original idea was that when you went jumping along (like a frog on lilypads), you’d find great stuff that you’d like others to know about, so you’d keep a kind of log, like a ship’s log, of the islands you had visited.  That’s one dimension.  Another is more like a diary in which one records thoughts over a series of days, so the spacing is in terms of time.  People seem to think of blogging as requiring great technical mystery, but it’s really very easy.  (I do long-form, an essay a day.)  It’s a very simple version of a website, because the formatting is all done for you.  Just choose your template.  (A website is custom designed and has more bells and whistles.)  It needn’t be tweeting or sexting or any of the slightly dubious adolescent sorts of things the media tries to sensationalize in an attempt to wring money out of blogs.

Some of us have seized this new mixed-media, direct, always-in-process mode of communication and gleefully expanded it in much the same way that youngsters nowadays have jumped over all restrictions on what to think about and in what way.  Many of them are autodidacts (sometimes of necessity since no school will have them), learn as you go, forget boundaries, give-me-passion, sensory-wink-and-nudge right alongside the most rarefied and crystalline classic theory.  It’s all music to them, mashing, inventing, mocking, looping, fusing, reversing and reverberating.  If you can think of it, why not do it?

How then does one keep order in one’s head, whether as creator or consumer?  Keep furor and tumult from just being noise and mess?  Themes.  Tropes.  Issues.  Codes.  Part sci-fi/part rock ‘n roll/part computer algorithm/part inside references to cult movies.

http://www.powells.com/review/2010_12_04  Review by Jill Owens.  “At the beginning of Joanna Klink's third and newest book of poems, she defines the title, Raptus:

“(1) A state of rapture or furor. Also: an instance of this; a fit of intense emotion. (2) A seizure; a sudden or acute attack (as in a raptus of the blood, Impulsive Raptus, or Raptus Nervorum). (3) From rapio: A carrying-off by force. (4) A state of spiritual rapture marked by anesthesia. (5) A pathological paroxysm of activity giving vent to impulse of tension (as in an act of violence).

“These definitions serve as descriptions of and directions through the explosive, rapturous, anguished poems that follow.”
Consider the work of Art Durkee, a photographer, musician/composer, poet, and philosopher -- a unique individual choosing his own innovative way in life and sharing it on a set of blogs.  The one I follow most is  http://artdurkee.blogspot.com/  on which he constantly explains what he’s doing, how and why he chooses his processes.   He follows my blog and is one of my most deeply perceptive commenters.  I’ve never met him. 

http://www.arthurdurkee.net/poetry05.html   Art presents a sequence of poems based on classical Greek concepts, which sounds impressive and traditional but is so sensory that the informed brain soon swarms with new ideas and images, which is the point, isn’t it?    Here are his titles:  Veriditas (green truth), Kainos (new), Katabasis (the place of descent), Kenosis (emptiness), Apokatstasis (restoration), Kerygma (proclamation), Imago (image), Hesychia (stillness, rest),  The words are a map to the provinces where psychiatry, sexuality and theology meet and play.  He could add photos and music composed by himself.  Read the poem, check firefox/safari/bing/yahoo/opera for associations, lie down to visit your own associations, then come back to read the poem again.

The point I’m trying to make is not that some individuals are talented in many different aspects and media -- true as that is.  The point is that this is work that could not have been presented to others, shared around the planet, before there was such a thing as a blog.  In fact, until people began to realize what could be done with this new linked-media-combining instrument, I’m not sure they worked this way.  They composed, they painted, they acted -- but could they do it all in the same artwork?  It’s a mistake to think of it as a book.  A book has heft and smell and texture.  It requires a font and illustrations.  It was exciting when a reader device or an iPod would let you take along a whole library and orchestra, just walking down the street. But this is even more radical, planetary, outside the rules I used to teach in high school English.  Language in words is only part of this new composite language.  So is music, color, shape, movement.

And yet it’s not outside those old rules.  We’re still using hyperbole (exaggeration), metonymy (one name substituted for another), synecdoche (a part to stand for the whole), malapropism (a word that’s not quite the conventional one), a metaphor or simile (kinds of comparison), personification and the other crowding host of rhetorical tricks our brains can play, except that now you can “say” a word is a musical phrase you’re hearing, a woman is a painting you are seeing, loneliness is a beautiful young man walking on the beach while faintly overlaid on that is a crowd of dancers and underlying that is a man speaking poetry that recalls his youth while an instrument plays.  Onomatopoiea means you can mix a word like “bow-wow” with the sound of an actual dog bark or a cartoon of a dog or real dogs running.  Catachresis (mixed metaphor) is no longer a fault but a strategy.  It mixes not comparisons but mediums.   This is the realm of autodidacts because there is no school prepared to teach it.  Yet.  There are few critics prepared to curate such work.  Yet. 

We don’t even know what to call it.  How about “rapting?”  Outside my window the sun is rapting frost-jeweled branches into floating feathers.  What music should I suggest?  What is the feeling, the reference to memory?

ON THIS SHORE OF CATAPULTING TIME

The dialogue between Tim and I came out of early blogging when I was writing short essays and Tim and his crew were experimenting with digital images, even if they had to use sat-phones in the desert. Then they settled in Paris, inhabiting a loft studio plus increasingly sophisticated equipment, Tim has been an excellent photographer since his San Francisco years and the boys quickly caught on. Another of Tim’s media has always been poetry, the kind of ecstatic free-form word play familiar to us through the Beat movement.

At that time blogging seemed to be a way to go around a publishing embargo. Both Tim and I were blocked but still thought of books as a goal. One of the most ancient and intriguing genres of writing has always been correspondence and since Tim was blogging the ongoing saga of his art school for boys with HIV/AIDS, I saw it was a kind of Odyssey, especially if I could make it more accessible by adding a context or frame. The result was “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs,” which refers to the boys who die in spite of every effort on the part of Tim.

Innovative as this dialogue was, it was still print, for a book. At the same time the videos had become multi-layered: one moving image on top of another, carefully planned and edited so that your eye was guided. A good example is a simple sequence of two boys dancing. They are not in the same space or time, but they are in a pas de deux of visual space, actually moving through each other.

One day the concept of Vlogging leapt out -- combining videos with print, voice-over, music, talking head -- so Tim and the guyz plunged in. The video I’m analyzing here combines different media as well as different genres. It is not a conventional story and yet there is a narrative embedded into it. How does one watch this mix of genres?  How does one deal with the knowledge that this is something happening right now?  To real people?  And how does the artist cope with image, word, and music while shaking with his own emotion ? Shoot vid, go straight to editing that same hour, then post as soon as it is compressed?  Incredibly producing something that is permanent while still steaming with body-temperature life?

Is this a straight line from James Joyce?  Yes, yes and yes. The strategies are more symphonic and liturgical than they are literary. The familiar “entry,” “rising action,” “crisis,” and “resolution” might be there but they might not. Meditation -- holding one’s focus on one concept until seeing deeply into -- might dominate. Rhythm and motif are very important. It is experiential. It does mean, but also simply is.

I'm being very head-trippy here. Tim doesn’t like backstage tours: he doesn’t want to dispel the magic. He is a natural auteur who internalized all this stuff long ago. But my unfinished seminary thesis is about the poetics of liturgy, which I’ve used in conventional Sunday services, memorials, and private ethnological ceremonies -- it’s not just theory, it really works. But I worry that if people aren’t helped to see what’s going on, they will flip it off without really seeing it. It’s hard enough to grasp that it’s a technique developing alongside and within new instruments: NOT a way of reading on a computer tablet imitating paper, but a new way of shaping communication in several genres at once. Kids can get it.

The video I’m going to link at the end is in three parts, a triptych of movements. The first will be recognized and “enjoyed” by lots of people because they are used to “pretty pictures” with symphonic music, this time a cello. What transforms the vlog is Tim’s poetic words: shocking, death and sex entwined, as we realize that Tim has brought this boy with AIDS dementia to a distant stony place to protect him as he dies. Tim says that poetry is all that can keep him sane in the face of this, but fishing also works. Poetry and fishing entwine in his emotional life.

The first section is an essay and a moving painting at once.  It "quotes," sets themes, gives us beauty, fallen leaves like butterflies, gulping bright fishes. All the symbolism an analyst could want. Fish and fishing are abiding classic metaphors to many people. The rushing stream means the catapulting through events that we call “time,” urgent morphing as we try to study it out: where are the fish we want for supper? Where are the dangerous places that will drag us under?

The second part, “Intermission,” which is simply Tim with his dogs, will seem artless, but it is not. This is a deliberate genre that grows out of what Qi used to call “impersonating yourself.” Tim with his Harley-Davison hat on backwards (Hells Angels meets hip-hop) and his dark glasses is telling us the straight facts as clearly as he can. Tim used to do stage soliloquies “in character.” Though he’s here as himself, he is showing himself in a certain way, a disarming and protective mode, innocently physical with the dogs. He does not allow this kind of petting and hugging with the boys -- at least not until they’re dying. Human beings are not less sincere or real for being able to portray themselves. Even “reality” TV shows are shaped and edited by a director. So far the only real “reality” videos have been the Andy Warhol films of a fly crawling on a naked person for a VERY long time. Most people find it intolerably boring.

The "intermission" reminds us that Tim is a real man with dogs, sitting alone in a room with a camera and letting us into his private life as though the camera were us.  The dogs are enough of a distraction to keep him from bursting into tears, but only barely. This is a test of empathy. “Can you get it?” The purpose is to WIN. But if the reward is more suffering, then . . .?

Third we see who this anguish is about:  Tris -- or someone very like him -- in seduction mode, halfway between Grace Kelly and Brad Pitt, plunging down the stairs as if to say,  "I'm a fly-high bird, but my wing has been clipped -- you might be able to capture me if you were up to it."  It's a portrait but the aware viewer will realize that this beautiful young man is a reality and it is this seductiveness/vulnerability that has signed his death warrant.  And yet he is so innocent, so truthfully acting. Watch for the sleeping babe.  AIDS is paradoxical, unjust, and final. Images of an androgenous still-transforming boy have been valued among human beings everywhere, celebrated in painting and sculpture, not least in the pages of our contemporary slick magazines where they ensorcel perfume and designer clothing. Yet it is among our most forbidden sexual transactions, because the boy is drunk on testosterone in a way some men envy, even resent, but use.

Another dimension is added outside the video. These posts are going on Facebook, among other places, as they are completed. Tristan and Tim are fighting this battle REALLY ACTUALLY NOW. This is not a memoir. Tim has found a community of poets who comment. Aad de Gids says, “As a bedouin woman, as an inuitman, as a yanomami woman in the amazonian abyssal river of death, tristan now knows these voyages too and already is longing for them, darkening his shadows into the dark refuges of the shack, loosing himself in sleep, painfully for his friend disremembering the last beacons, dismembering the last threads, loosening, like a young albatross fostered by his mom, fostered by his real dad in the heart, now he is learning to walk, to fly, to use his brilliance in pure radiation and velours indigo drapérie, the drapérie of death and elevation, and he is loved, he lives, and we're preparing for his ultimate event, and we love him.”

Carolyn Srygley-Moore and Dom Gabrielli also making these inspired singing responses, like a kyrie elieson in the Mass. This is community. This is not creation alone in some self-indulgent or therapeutic way, but congregational sharing. For those who get it.

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=154151904597478&comments=

AN OPEN LETTER TO CLAY SHIRKY

Here are two lists I sent in an open letter to Clay Shirky, who is doing the leading-edge thinking about these issues.

ALL THE SCARY CHANGES:

1.  The general reading public almost realizes that “publishing” is not the same as “printing.”  All the uncles who got their life story printed by a “vanity press” and boasted that they were “published authors” (though now all the books are under their bed) don’t like to hear this.

2.  Of the many components of publishing, only one can be addressed by “printing” and that’s the creation of an object, usually in multiple copies because that’s the only way all the setup of ink and paper was economically feasible.  But now we can print one copy at a time, replicate it later, or easily re-print it with changes.  If you accept on-line manuscript as a “book,” the content can morph daily, which is GOOD if the content is directions for something that is changing all the time.   And we have audio-publishing as well as ePublishing.

3.  Some of the arts of printing should be done by experts:  pagination, layout, photo resolution, indexing, choice and arrangement of fonts, paper and cover.  These cannot be done by machine, though a computer will help.   One can learn to do them, but it takes time and effort. 

4.  Preparation of actual content (beyond the quality of the writing) also requires some expertise:  the illustrations, graphs, indexing, line-editing for errors, and curation, which historically was done by editors and critics but is now hollow, driven by sales predictions.  If valuable curating had continued in the hands of critics and editors, it would not have been so easily discarded.  Another twist is that now academic presses require authors to pay for the preparation of their own photos and graphs.

5.  If the “book” is an object then it has to be sold like an object: a marketing plan must be devised, a network of salesmen and bookstore destinations must be activated, a catalog, registration with ISBN or wholesaling businesses, blurbs to be collected from someone (who?), an interview schedule set up, shipping, an exciting dust jacket and posters for bookstores. This is the part that makes publishers worthwhile (aside from an advance!) but they just don’t DO it.  And newbie authors don’t think to ask.

6.  Books that are done one-at-a-time (“art books”) or maybe as a set of a dozen, can be very tricksy, origami, hand-painted, pop-up or beautifully leather-bound with gold leaf, and so on.  They cannot be priced like mass-produced books.  They are a different KIND of object.  They are not much affected by this momentous shift.

7.  But remember “Bunny Esmond?”  It was a book that came in the box with a baby blanket and there was a little square of the blanket material glued to the inside of the last page and holes were centered over it so that the illustrations included a place to “pet the bunny” through the holes.  The cost of that book was added to the cost of the blanket.  A book can BE a promotion.

8.  Readers have not made the transition from passive to active.  They still tend to treat the computer as though it were a television screen.  They wait for the outreach via cookies.  Never go past the first five listings on Google.  The bridge is probably computer games which encourage initiative.  Otherwise, people only go seeking when they want to buy something cheap.  
This is a split that has long been in our schools:  most education is something you sit and receive until you reach a fairly high level when you begin to go seeking and then, even higher, synthesizing what you find into something new.  This gap is what tips some people into copying: they are shopping rather than thinking.  “Low synthesis” is more or less aggregating a lot of quotes on the same subject without much challenging them  or “high synthesis” means disassembling the thought systems, analyzing them, and recombining them into something new.  It doesn’t have to be at the university level.

9.  Traditional publishing  de-valued the “old” book.  Publishers want to sell “new” books or at least “new editions.”  When I looked at a new edition of “Rhetorical Grammar” it was heinously expensive.  So I bought a previous edition (only a few years old with basically the same content) for $4.  The computer has made the used book easy to find.   Some fields have not been addressed by any improved new books for fifty or a hundred years.  Luckily, now you are more likely to find those old key books, once you find out what they are.

Because all along old books remained valuable and were wanted by people who could find them, the used book business once depended on networks of “book finders” who used mail and the phone, plus travel.  But now lists can be easily accessed through Abebooks, Alibris, Powells, and so on.  This means that books go to the people who want them and are less likely to be discarded, even ephemera.   My little kitchen-table books about Bob Scriver are out there circulating on Amazon alongside the U of Calgary Press formal and accredited book “Bronze Inside and Out.”

10.  To keep values up, old books (meaning those that didn’t sell out in six months) were pulped.  If you didn’t have the money or didn’t find them during that window, they were gone.    This practice, plus cynicism about the value of Native American Renaissance books limiting the number of copies printed and baffled marketing (never to Indians!)  meant that a lot of books popped up, were praised by white educated people in cities, and quickly died.   Drives me crazy!
Pulping is also a result of property taxes on books in warehouses where large printings must be stored.  Combine this with the practice of letting all bookstores return any books that didn’t sell and Russell Chatham’s boutique publishing business in Bozeman, MT,  was garroted.

NEW MEDIA

1.  New media leaves print behind, leaves solid object existence behind, and possibly even leaves language behind, going to a new way of communicating (think of sign language) by the flow and juxtaposition of images and music.  This terrifies the traditional print author and even the publishers because they just don’t have the expertise.  They try to buy it, which means another layer of copyright and editing expertise.   Or they assume they must assemble it from copyrighted materials.  Cinematheque generates their own images or uses Creative Commons.  So far no composers have shown up, but good old Foley sound effects work.  Barrus uses a layered image technique that’s highly suggestive and ambiguous, dreamlike.  Every kid has an iPod and a Flip vid camera.

2.  Kids today, esp. underground street kids, easily communicate among countries through visual/sound media without print or sometimes with print.   Some learned by running porn shows online. This is far more true of European, Asian and African countries.  Tech-hip practically from birth,  they CAN author expressions/narratives without any print at all, or with print reduced to icon-status, like stop signs or advertising.  In fact, communication (publishing) will be far more like advertising and that expertise can be very deep and useful.  It’s not all scam and spin.  (See the movie “Art & Copy.”)  At seventy I’m being crowded to learn iMovie and I CAN!

3.  What modern kids DON’T normally have is life-experience.  They tend to be urban, to stay in one social class, to pick up most of their info from television -- though now not even that because they seem to have migrated from sit-com to song-vid.  Their world is iPodized.  They don’t know about options, strategies.  But again, they learn through vid games.  And Barrus’ theory is travel.  He had a kid who was mute -- too traumatized to talk.  He packed the two of them off to Australia where the sight of kangaroos shocked the boy back into speech.   He was filming:  “Faster!  Closer!”

4. Shirky: “ There are revolutions in which people’s principal skill is not being afraid of what they don’t understand. These people do well in revolutionary times.”   That’s us: Barrus and Scriver, two renegades with backgrounds that relate as Venn diagrams.  Barrus running his Cinematheque school for at risk boys; Scriver out here on the prairie living off SS and friendships with the Blackfeet.  We’ve been in and out of the fire all our lives in every kind of place.

5.  Maybe the university is no longer relevant for many people, though it has become the new standard.  The real energy may be at the level of the local community college, which used to be strictly hands-on stuff, but now is often a people re-cycler, a transitioner, a now-that-you’re-grown-up locus.

6.  Shirky: “Look at the difference between how a library shelves books, how serious fiction as a category exists in bookstores but not in libraries.”  The line was always blurry -- it is a marketing line, not a morality line.  One of the most tenacious and devious ethical errors (they teach this is at the U of Chicago Div School) is assuming that whatever “is” then “ought to be.”  The status quo as the rule of thumb. But for Barrus’ underground and for my rez friends, transition is all there is, the only way to survive.

7.  What brings the “revolution” home to us is the fact that we’re disenfranchised people now displacing the Ivy League educated, net-worked, prosperous, access-to-money people who previously controlled publishing.  The irony is that their resistance almost forces us into New Mixed Media.  The other factor (much more underground) is that they are so structured and confined by their own lives that they go “slumming” in our milieu and almost accidentally teach us how to challenge them.

http://timbarrus.tumbler.com/

GAD VOOKS!

Yesterday an article appeared in the New York Times about a new publishing paradigm called the “vook.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/books/) This joins the “blog” which is a “web log”-- or was in the beginning -- and the podcast, which is a spoken-aloud essay like a broadcast, and a lot of other new words that have had to be invented to describe new “things.” I am grateful that instead of going with Latinate exclusivist academic terms, the preference has been short, preferably four-letter, acronyms like the good old Anglo-Saxon words we use for curses, sex and other intimate and emotional concepts. Because “vooks” are very much along those lines.

A vook is an ebook with a video insert. On your Kindle you’re reading along in a narrative, it says, “The party rode on over the hills.” At that point a video plays itself: there they are, on horseback. You see the hills and pick up much information from that: the weather, the geology, the distances, the effort required. You get closeups of each face. Back to text: “Suddenly . . .” Back to video: (Insert what you can imagine right here.) Then more print, discussing what it was that happened and its significance.

From early in our working relationship Tim and I have had vooks in mind, partly because I’m such a print freak and he’s focused on image. I have barely enough tech skills to get this blog out daily and Tim is way beyond that -- led, taught and guided by those boy-techies who grew up with their fingers on electronics. Sometimes I’ve written about their vids and sometimes they made vids about what I’ve written. Now we’re ready to go seamless.

One need not be writing fiction/non-fiction as discriminated categories. This throws all the academic parsing and splitting and defining of categories out the window. What do you believe now? What you’re told? What you see? What you hear? What you deduce? Maybe none of us will agree. The shift of media has entirely shifting the discussion and deconstruction is on entirely different terms that must be invented as we go.

When I went to Google “vooks” to locate the NYTimes article that everyone was forwarding to Tim yesterday, there were so many articles and secondary comment that I couldn’t choose which to link. So -- go to Google and knock yourself out! Simon and Schuster are the daring publishers who are going first, meaning that everyone else will soon be building on their shoulders.

At that point the lawyers will be chortling, because this is part of the shift from the actual (like paper books) to the virtual (like pixels accessible many ways and originating in many places). The questions of who-owns-what, how to write a contract that accounts for all contingencies and transformations, what to call the product, what the content ought to be, will not settle down for a long time after many lawsuits. For one thing, national copyrights, even backed up with international treaties among the major countries, will be unenforceable. The only limits will be imposed by who has what in their hand or on their desk or knees. Tim has already been keeping our vids in Apple-friendly mode so they can go anywhere iPhone can go.

But the demographic of people who absorb ideas by iPhone will be different and maybe not homogenous. Even with the great shared affinity of music as a force across cultures, tastes differ. Does this mean soundtracks for vids must differ? How much ambiguity can watchers tolerate? Cinematheque uses an overlay technique -- image on top of image, carefully matched and timed, then calibrated to music -- that multi-tasking kids are fine with. But a grandma like me has to go through several times to really “get” what happened. Some people simply won’t have the eyesight for it, but could get through a print book with no trouble.

Imagine you’re reading a lecture about something arcane. Suddenly a video unfurls and you either see a microscopic actual visioning of what the print has been discussing or an inspired metaphorical graphic cartoon of the same process or even both, one after the other.

Or let’s go the other way. Suppose you open the first page and find a video that is seductive, baffling, and emotional. You can barely tell what’s happening, much less what it means. Then comes print with some explanation or simply poetry that brings the image and music to more of a graspable metaphor, something like a dream explained by a psychoanalyst -- or a gypsy. James Joyce, eat your heart out!

Or what if you read print that seems clear enough, but there are cutaways to the actual event which are NOT what is being described. The print is lying. But why? Didn’t I see a movie like this? The voiceover said, “I was a lovable child who was never destructive,” and we see vid of a child smashing a toy. Maybe a closeup of a desperate doll face doomed not to survive -- but then back to the child’s face, which is an echo. And then the print discusses how much childhood tendencies play out in adult life. Or what if the print is a crime report but then you see something quite different. Are the images all lies?

Is any law going to be able to keep people from driving while distracted if they have access to this kind of stuff? But won’t it teach people the importance of paying attention and maybe thinking for themselves? Will this new hybrid take right off or will it stall out while publishers regain their nerve? Perhaps the very fact that publishing is mostly a pile of rubble these days will make way for “vooks.” It will also make it very hard on authors who can’t adapt. Can a Philip Roth novel simply be translated to a vook? Where would we buy vooks anyway? I’m not even sure where to buy an eBook, though I’m pretty confident that I can get a Book on Tape from a bookstore and also confident that whatever kind of widget comes next will show up on Amazon soon.

But excuse me. I’m needed to write continuity for a VOOK.