Richard Eoin Nash and Social Publishing

Richard Eoin Nash, former editorial director of Soft Skull Press, editorializes here about new business models for publishers:

"Given that books are orders of magnitude more demanding of our minds than any other media, they are commensurately better reflections of our minds and identities than other media. We publishers should be servicing readers’ desire to communicate about themselves with peers, offering books as the basis for connecting."

Here Nash prophesies:

"Basically, the best-selling five hundred books each year will likely be published much like Little Brown publishes James Patterson, on a TV production model, or like Scholastic did Harry Potter and Doubleday Dan Brown, on a big Hollywood blockbuster model."

"The rest will be published by niche social publishing communities."

And in this thought-provoking Publishers Weekly piece, Nash talks about his new social publishing venture -- "social" because:

"To call Cursor 'niche' or another 'independent' publishing enterprise would be a poor approximation, because those terms fail to capture the organic gurgle of culture at the heart of the venture, the exchange of insight and opinion, the flow of memes and the creation of culture in real time that is now enabled by the Internet."

Reading the phrase "organic gurgle of culture," I can't help forming a mental image of T. S. Eliot choking on his cucumber sandwich. And the idea of "creation of culture in real time" terrifies me. To clarify, Cursor is intended to be "a portfolio of self-reinforcing online membership communities:"

"The business will focus on developing the value of the reading and writing ecosystem, including the growth of markets for established authors, as well as engaging readers and supporting emerging writers. Each community will have a publishing imprint, which will make money from authors' books, sold as digital downloads, conventional print and limited artisanal editions -- and will offer authors all the benefits of a digital platform: faster time to market, faster accounting cycles, faster payments to authors. But the greatest opportunity is in the community itself. Each will have tiers of membership, including paid memberships that will offer exclusive access to tools and services, such as rich text editors for members to upload their own writing, peer-to-peer writing groups, recommendation engines, access to established authors online and in person, and editorial or marketing assistance. Members can get both peer-based feedback and professional feedback."

Reading and writing are types of networking? Submitting and accepting and even rejecting manuscripts -- also types of networking? There was a time when I would have rejected such ideas out of hand...

Outlining Novels

A few years back I thought a lot about whether one should outline a novel or not -- that is, whether it's best to figure out the plot in advance...

Stephen King, in On Writing, says he never outlines his novels. I believe this, ideally, to be the best way to proceed. However, if you've read several Stephen King novels, certain structural similarities become apparent. So some form of outlining must be taking in place in Stephen King's subconscious mind.

The first few dozen times you drive a car, or ride a wave on a surfboard, your conscious mind has to treat the task as a set of ordered instructions to follow. But once you get good at these activities, your unconscious mind handles the mechanics of what you're doing. Is novel outlining sort of like that? Is breaking the task down conceptually a good idea for beginners?

Norman Mailer, in The Spooky Art, wrote, “Over and over again, I discover that my unconscious is going to disclose to me what it chooses, when it chooses. You can, to a limited degree, force it to respond, but that rarely occasions much happiness on either side. Sometimes I think you have to groom the unconscious after you've used it, swab it down, treat it like a prize horse who's a finer animal than you.”

Local News

Tourism revenues are way down, and Maui's public schools and libraries are confronted with big budget cuts, but I'm told the newspapers here are still doing pretty well -- that's one big contrast with San Francisco.

The conventional wisdom is that there's still plenty of demand for local newspapers. Since local news tends to be news locals already know, part of the point of putting it in a newspaper is probably to affirm the local community's importance.

Nearly half the cover of this week's "Lahaina News" is taken up by an article by reporter Walter Chihara about "Lahaina girl Teri Sutherland" who was shot in the neck by her ex-boyfriend in Southern California two years ago, and has since been steadily recovering with the support of her family. The newspaper article begins, "Guardian angels come in all different shapes, colors, and sizes, but more often than not, these warriors of mercy wear the uniforms of the police force, emergency medical technicians and firefighters of of our communities." Of the firefighter who administered mouth-to-mouth rescuscitation, we are told, "God tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'Thomas Barilla, it's time to pay it forward.'" Sometimes Chihara is more subtle, telling us that the ex-boyfriend died in jail of an apparent heart attack on "All Saint's Day -- Teri's birthday," and letting us draw our own conclusions about the degree of Divine involvement.

I like it about this story that we know whose side the reporter is on. The major U.S. newspapers strive to be unbiased. It's physiologically impossible for humans to be unbiased, so the result is lifeless prose. Having a bias is an essential component of having a style, of having a voice. Local newspapers have the advantage that they're allowed to be biased in favor of "local values."

I hope Ms. Sutherland continues to get better.

More Musings from Maui

My daughter went surfing for the first time today. I myself, amazingly, managed to stand upright on a moving surfboard for several seconds.

Towards the end of our stay in Maui, I'm starting to relax slightly. Blogging is a pretty uptight thing to do, really -- it requires a functional Internet connection and a decision not to just go to the beach and watch the clouds move instead. Although perhaps Twitter is starting to make blogging seem like a monastic, contemplative activity...

Years ago, I saw a driving map to Maui that included the instruction to ignore stones piled by the roadside, because they were done by "visitors who imagine there is some significance. THERE IS NONE." This is the same tone the literati take when telling people not to be interested in the "wrong" forms of culture -- it's an injunction I thought of while walking the trail to the blowhole, near Napili, a hike I love to make with my daughter. The piles of stones that indicate the trail are very inviting in a modern primitive, DIY religion sort of way. A holiday is a holy day, meant for spiritual recreation -- traveling and tourism recreate the world in a way that is destructive the same way democracy is destructive.

We also met up with Jack Boulware and visited the Surfing Goat Dairy, an excellent source of cheese -- “Da' Feta Mo' Betta!” is their slogan. JB told me there were at least six hundred thousand Polynesian gods.

Scuba and What Huxley Calls the "Mind's Visionary Antipodes"

Aldous Huxley's account of a typical psychedelic trip, from Heaven and Hell, makes me think of a scuba expedition:

"The typical mescalin or lysergic acid experience begins with perceptions of coloured, moving, living geometrical forms. In time, pure geometry becomes concrete, and the visionary perceives, not patterns, but patterned things, such as carpets, carvings, mosaics. These give place to vast and complicated buildings, in the midst of landscapes, which change continuously, passing from richness to more intensely coloured richness, from grandeur to deepening grandeur. Heroic figures, of the kind that Blake called 'The Seraphim,' may make their appearance, alone or in multitudes. Fabulous animals move across the scene. Everything is novel and amazing. Almost never does the visionary see anything that reminds him of his own past. He is not remembering scenes, persons, or objects, and he is not inventing them; he is looking on at a new creation."

People appear larger underwater, like Blake's Seraphim. Also, anything that disrupts your ordinary pattern of breathing -- yogic exercises, chanting, scuba diving -- increases your overall receptiveness. Other thoughts that come to me while reading Huxley in Maui -- tourist resort islands resemble the Other Worlds of comparative mythology, which may bear on why there are so many kistch shiny things for sale here.

Transmitting my British Cultural Heritage

My daughter was dancing along the beach at dusk, singing the Hannah Montana song "Ice Cream Freeze," and I remarked that it reminded me of Spitting Image's chicken song. She insisted I teach her all the words of this, so later we looked it up on YouTube. Any middle-aged British readers of this post will hate me for reminding them of this song, a parody of an annoying catchy British number one hit that went on to be an annoying catchy British number one hit. "Though you hate this song, you'll be singing it for weeks," is one of the lyrics -- and in fact I still remembered the song twenty-three years later, although I can no longer remember half the celebrities caricatured in the video.

Cultural heritage transmission is of course part of the purpose of these father-daughter trips. Since my daughter really got into the chicken song, we sat up late looking at other Spitting Image videos and, receding into the earlier half of the 1980s, a Not the Nine o' Clock News song or two -- that show was the emotional highlight of my week during much of my early teen years. Incidentally the song I linked to there is misidentified by YouTube as having to do with Mr Bean, a character Rowan Atkinson did not play until much later in his career.

My daughter liked most of the Spitting Image and Not the Nine o' Clock News songs we saw, but I was unable to sell her on a Goodies cover version of the Troggs. The 1970s are of course especially hard to justify culturally...

It was hard enough training my daughter to like Monty Python. She said to me once, "I like to watch Monty Python because it's impossible to be sad watching that show," but she was unable to persuade any other Californian fourth graders the show was funny, and since peer pressure is important at that age, she's gone back to being ambivalent about the Pythons.

Calm Before the Storm

A helpful person sent me a link to Bernand Lunn's "Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Industry" Part One and Part Two, which envisions Google Search, e-books, and print on demand as three big waves crashing over the publishing industry.

I just have time to quote Lunn's predictions for authors, prior to returning to the waves myself...

"1. The end of advances. The irony is that the authors who really need advances, the new ones scraping by on Ramen noodles, cannot get them. Meanwhile authors who don't need them, the ones living the high life off of previous royalties or whatever made them famous enough to get an advance, are showered with ridiculous advances at the end of bidding wars between big publishers. Authors will write without advances. Unlike movies, books are relatively cheap to create. In the digitized world of e-books and print on demand, authors get paid as soon as someone buys the first copy. The lack of an advance will be compensated for by a bigger share of the revenue pie."

"2. Authors getting a bigger share of the pie. It makes no sense for authors to get only 10% in a digitized world. We expect this to grow from 10% to 30% or more. Digitization takes most of the costs out of the supply chain. So, unless an intermediary such as Amazon charges monopoly-like rents, authors will get a bigger share. Amazon has amazing power today and will squeeze everyone in the supply chain. But new competition will emerge (we'll look at this later), and keeping authors happy is critical to the success of publishers. Authors are like software developers, not powerful individually but incredibly powerful en masse (and just as ornery!). Authors will need a bigger share also because prices will be coming down. But the drop in price, coupled with globalization, will open up new markets in which to sell books and therefore generate more revenue. "

"3. Authors creating the finished product. Today, authors write and publishers look after the cover art and editing. If authors were to get 30% or more, they would have to take on these two other jobs. But in a world of desktop publishing tools and social networks to organize work and editing, this will not be hard."

"4. Online marketing replacing book tours. It is the bane of the author's life. The book tour is wonderful the first time: "Wow, I am a real author now." But this is not the same as musicians going on tour. Musicians are performing their job in its natural environment during live shows; not true of authors reflecting on their books on stage. There are many and much better ways to promote books online."

On Scuba Diving

Vacationing in Maui, wireless connection a bit slow, blogging nonetheless...

Today was my ten-year-old daughter's first experience of scuba diving. We explored avenues of coral, while impossible-looking fish slipped everywhere. Our guide handed us sea anenomes and other creatures to hold, to photograph us with them. Predictably, he later tried to sell us the photographs for an outrageous price, making me reflect on how desperately people want their experiences to be represented somehow, and on how inadequate are our means of representation.

Because a photograph of someone holding a sea cucumber with MAUI written on it -- while possibly useful as an alibi -- conveys nothing of the experience of putting on masks and costumes, as if in preparation for tribal warfare, and venturing into a realm where one has imperfect control over one's altitude, and the sea surface has become a sun-splattered, shifting ceiling, and the need to communicate with gestures fosters a sense of conspiracy. A scuba expedition resembles a shamanic dream-journey, and perhaps, if we entertain the Aquatic Ape hypothesis, awakens memories from even deeper in our history. Will there ever be an underwater camera that can capture such feelings?

Elephants Teaching Zoology

Not so long ago I read a piece by a sexologist of some stamp, a daughter of the sexual revolution, who'd just traveled around the U.S. lecturing undergraduates, and was plainly put out at how uninterested the younger generation appeared to be in sex. At the end of her lectures she'd open the floor to questions, and hear things like “Are there any health reasons why you can't just be celibate all your life? Do people actually have to have sex?”

From what I hear, teaching literature must be like that. It can't be easy for any person to face inexplicable group indifference to whatever he or she is most passionate about. Samuel R. Delany's early critical writing, in such periodicals as “Foundation,” has the brilliant confidence of a man addressing fandom -- a readership whose enthusiasm can be taken for granted. But in Delany's collection About Writing, one encounters many notes of weary truculence, the consequence of decades of his having to explain the basics professionally to an audience who sullenly question why they should have to know anything in the first place. The best solution, probably, is to reintroduce corporal punishment.

A story – when Harvard considered hiring Vladimir Nabokov to teach literature, Roman Jakobson, then a professor of linguistics there, is supposed to have asked whether the university was also prepared to hire an elephant to teach zoology.

Association of Ideas

“Superior intellect, as Professor Bain has admirably shown, seems to consist in nothing so much as in a large development of the faculty of association by similarity.” This footnote appears early in William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Some of my own associations with this:

Douglas R. Hofstadter says somewhere – I can't find the quote, so I'm paraphrasing from memory -- that some people are too limited in the mental connections they make, and think too rigidly to be innovative, while other people link ideas too profusely and loosely, so that their associations aren't that useful -- and that there's an ideal point to be at on this spectrum, where one's associations are creative yet not too weird to have some kind of application.

“Superior intellect” is an unpleasantly stuffy idea, but I do like to think of learning as the tuning of synapses, the training of one's brain not to associate too tightly or loosely.

Also, Stephen Jay Gould denied somewhere that he had read more than other people – he said his advantage as an essayist was rather that, when he encountered an idea, he was better than other people at recalling other ideas that could be usefully juxtaposed with the one just encountered. I find it a beautiful thought that we have to read new things in order to be able to summon from memory the old things we've read...

Silver-Fork Novels

Figure 9 of Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees shows forty-four different novelistic genres that existed at various times between 1740 and 1900 – in many cases, no book from the identified genre is still in print.

Silver-fork novels, for example, were a Regency genre, written by the sort of writer who, as William Hazlitt wrote, in the piece that apparently gave the genre its name, “informs you that the quality eat fish with silver forks. This is all he knows about the matter: is this all they feel? The fact is new to him: it is old to them.”

An early incarnation, then, of the plutographic novel. Didn't an acquisitions editor once write that slush piles were full of books about poor people by rich people and about rich people by poor people?

In Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900, Moretti suggests that the silver-fork novel also provided the simplified geography of London that Dickens borrows for Oliver Twist -- a West End where the rich live, an East End full of criminals. Moretti then looks at how, in later novels, Dickens reinvented novelistic London in greater complexity.

I hope to blog about Franco Moretti a lot. He is to distant reading what Christopher Ricks is to close reading. Ricks sees the microstructure of the leaf, Moretti the contours of the forest. Most critics only see the trees. Samuel R. Delany comes to mind as an example of a critic who sees all three.

The Problem of too Many Experts + InsideStorytime L O N G I N G

Here's a piece by Brandon Keim on why, given expert advice, brains shut down. So stop listening to the experts and come to Cafe Royale tonight, Thursday July 16th, 6.30-8.30 pm, for InsideStorytime L O N G I N G.

Joshua Mohr will read from his book Some Things That Meant the World to Me, reviewed by Joshua Furst for The Rumpus here. Joshua Mohr blogs here.

Chelsea Martin will read from her book Everything Was Fine Until Whatever, reviewed by John Madera for the Rumpus here. Brandon Scott Gorrell interviews her for Powell's Books blog here.

Also reading will be Vauhini Vara, the Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, on leave from her day job as Wall Street Journal technology reporter, judy b., a jazz vocalist and former culture editor for Wired News who tweets microfictions daily, and Carrie Hall, whose story "The Floor Champion of Foosball" appeared in Identity Theory, and on the strength of which story a major publisher contacted her and asked to see more of her work. That's a great story if you haven't read it yet.

So actually all those people are experts, but never fear -- I will introduce them all so inexpertly that your brain will continue to function. Tell us you heard about the event from this blog and we'll waive the customary $3-$5 cover charge.

Some Sexual Similes in John Crowley's Four Freedoms

This one's about cunnilingus:

"Like those paperback novels where you read one story going one way and then turn the book over and upside down to read another going the other way: as you read you might finger open the pages that you'd discover later and see them upside down and backward but they wouldn't be when you went to read them. You'd just dive in.”

While this is about sex generally:

“He would come to learn – he was learning already – that these moments, different as each one was from all the others, were all more like one another than they were like any in the rest of his life: they were like the moment in some movies when a scene changes in an instant from black and white into color, and everything is the same but now this picture has become one of those rare ones that are colored, it joins that richer life, and for a time you live in it, until the gray real world comes back again."

Both passages portray sex as something that might be magical to a younger person but that, to someone older, depending on temperament, might seem tired and gimmicky, if perhaps still somewhat flecked with magic. Technically sophisticated, but still leaving one with a feeling of hollowness... a mechanical attempt to simulate transcendence.

As John Crowley says elsewhere, "You can come to the same old conclusions. What's important is the effort you make and risks you take as a writer, what it costs you to affirm the same old conclusions."

A Parable Concerning the Resolution of Narrative Difficulties

There's a story, attributed to more than one nineteenth-century London publishing house, of a serial writer who disappears in the middle of a story. As he shows no sign of turning up, it is decided to carry on without him. Unfortunately, he has left his hero bound to a stake, with lions circling him, and an avalanche about to fall for good measure. Relays of writers try to think of a way out, and give it up. Then, at the eleventh hour, the missing author returns. He takes the briefest look at the previous installment and, without a moment's hesitation, writes:

“With one bound, Jack was free!”

The rest, as they say, is commentary.

Some Writing Advice From Thomas M. Disch

In his essay “Of Doubts and Dreams,” recently republished in About Writing, Samuel R. Delany tells this story, which concerns the late, great Thomas M. Disch – may he rest in peace – and which takes place (from here on I'm quoting Delany) “at a science fiction writers' conference in 1967 during a discussion about what to do when a story or novel runs down in the middle and the writer loses interest. The usual half-hearted, half-serious suggestions had been made, from 'take a cold shower' to 'kill off a main character.' Then Disch commented that the only thing you can do in such a situation is to ask of your story what's really going on in it. What are the characters' real motivations, feelings, fears or desires? Right at the point you stopped, you must go down to another level in the tale. You must dig into the character's psychology deeply enough (and thus build up your vision of the story's complexity enough) to reinterest yourself.”

I first read this at some point in the 1990s, and I think it's the piece of fiction-writing advice I've found most personally useful. Not always simple to follow, of course, if the ground is made of reinforced concrete, and the only spade is a plastic toy, and there's a tornado coming...

John Crowley and Scale

If you make a small prototype machine that can fly, then create a bigger version of it, the bigger version will not necessarily be able to fly -- a problem for the airplane designers in Crowley's new novel Four Freedoms:

"But the small flying 'bats' like those the Van Damme boys played with worked by twisted rubber strings that turned a screw, craft that might carry miniature people on tiny errands in toyland, always failed when scaled up to carry actual gross fleshly people.”

Later in the novel we get this critique of the U.S. economy from Pancho, a worker in the Van Damme bomber factory:

"They say that this new finance capitalism's efficient. Actually it's inefficient, and the more the owners are divorced from the operations of it the more inefficient it can get. They claim 'efficiency of scale' – they don't know that when you scale something up it doesn't always work the same. It's just as when a great corporation claims the same right as an individual to the freedoms guaranteed by our forefathers in 1776. A nice piece of sophistry.”

Four Freedoms shows us other phenomena changing fundamentally as they get bigger – war, for example, and America.

Quantitative changes bring about unpredictable qualitative changes. Perhaps this is also the way to think about how a novel differs from a short story – scale changes everything. There are still words, sentences, and paragraphs, but when you're working on a larger scale, none of them have the same structural properties any more.

Crowley posts here about Alice In Wonderland syndrome. Apparently the author of Little, Big and “Great Work of Time” has a neurological condition that “makes objects (including one's own body parts) seem smaller, larger, closer or more distant than they really are. It's more common in childhood, often at the onset of sleep, and may disappear by adulthood.” This syndrome will sound oddly familiar to those who've journeyed through Crowley's worlds, which are always notably capacious, spacious, and gracious, yet full of transformations as tricky as those occasioned by puberty.

A Surfeit of Lampreys

From Graham Greene's Ways of Escape --

"With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed -- he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, 'The Lady with the Dog.' It is the consciousness of that failure which makes the revision of the novel seem endless -- the author is trying in vain to adapt the story to his changed personality -- as though it were something he had begun in childhood and is finishing now in old age. There are moments of despair when he begins the fifth revision of Part One, and he sees the multitude of the new corrections. How can he help feeling, 'This will never end, I shall never again be the same man I was when I wrote this months and months ago.' No wonder that under these conditions a novelist often makes a bad husband or an unstable lover. There is something in his character of the actor who continues to play Othello when he is off the stage, but he is an actor who has lived far too many parts during far too many long runs. He is encrusted with characters. A black taxi-driver in the Caribbean once told me of a body which he had seen lifted from the sea. He said, 'You couldn't tell it was a man's body because of all the lampreys that came up with it.' A horrible image, but it is one which suits the novelist well."

Horrible indeed: a lamprey resembles a phallus with teeth. Here is some further encouraging marine biological imagery, from Lorrie Moore's story "How to Become a Writer."

"Thank god you are taking other courses. You can find sanctuary in nineteenth-century ontological snags and invetebrate courting rituals. Certain globular mollusks have what is called 'Sex by the Arm.' The male octopus, for instance, loses the end of one arm when placing it inside the female body during intercourse. Marine biologists call it 'Seven Heaven.' Be glad you know these things. Be glad you are not just a writer. Apply to law school."

Great Story: "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street" by Herman Melville

In this story, first published in 1853, Melville aptly describes an office as "a building entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associations." That "unhallowed" is a great word choice -- Melville knew office life as well as he knew life on ship.

Maybe it shouldn't even be possible for a writer to make someone like Bartleby function as a hero -- but a hero he is, even though the reader has the option of sympathizing more with Bartleby's bemused employer. This haunting, obscurely Calvinist story makes me wonder if to exercise free will is to become a spectre. Here's an Oronte Churn blog post about teaching the story to undergrads the day after 9/11.

J. Brisbin goes into some of the issues regarding Bartleby's behavior. Tom Conoboy has some thoughts on the story too.

Also in 1853: an envelope-folding machine was patented, and Harriet Tubman started the Underground Railroad.

James Purdy's Malcolm

James Purdy's Malcolm was published fifty years ago, in 1959, when Purdy was forty-four. My copy, a grubby paperback with many phone numbers written on the inner front cover, is a third printing, dated 1965. The blurb uses the adjectives “ribald,” “blasted, “disgusting,” and “mordant” -- all possibly code for homosexual -- and the cover is purple.

Dorothy Parker is quoted on the front calling Malcolm “the most prodigiously funny book to streak across these heavy-hanging times." The tone of Malcolm is actually quite chirpy. It feels typewritten. Pre-Stonewall, it presumably also felt risqué, although not long after that it must have started to seem oddly reticent.

Malcolm is an innocent taken up by a society of decadents, but the tone is more reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland than of Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall. Malcolm starts the book as a beautiful fifteen-year-old boy, a focus for desire, waiting expectantly on a bench outside a hotel. Everyone who meets Malcolm loves him, and before long he is waking up in bed with strangers, but what happens in those beds is not described. It's a bit like reading a pornographic novel with the actual pornographic parts censored out.

Malcolm's world is a camp pastiche of what in 1959 might have been considered normal American life. Incidentally, there's a magnate in Malcolm called Girard Girard, leading me to wonder if American fictional characters having the same first name and last name all date from the 1950s-1960s, and why this should be? Humbert Humbert, Major Major Major Major...

Christopher Hawtree's Guardian obituary of Purdy began, “James Purdy, who has died aged 94, wrote outlandish, idiosyncratic novels that did not sell in large quantities but survive, sometimes in print, while many workaday bestsellers are vague memories." Here's an interview with Purdy in very disaffected mood, including the line, “Well, we know now that bread is a poison.”

Knowing who You're Talking to

When a writer feels misunderstood in a critique group setting, and starts explaining what he or she was getting at, the response is often, “That's brilliant, what you just said, right there, that's the line that should be there on the page...”

If I need a sentence that perfectly defines one of my fictional characters, I sometimes imagine I'm having a conversation with a friend of mine who's isn't present, and immediately come out with the line I want. The problem with this being that my daughter for some reason finds it embarrassing when we're walking down the street and I talk to people who aren't there...

Here's an idea I found in Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Cooper says when designing a user interface for a software product, the trick to making it user-friendly is to imagine a specific user, a fictive individual with clearly-defined gender, interests, class background, and so on. Then while designing the interface, imagine the experience of using the interface from the point of view of this imaginary person.

We evolved to be good at communicating to individuals, not to demographics. So conceiving of your demographic as an individual might help you access the part of your brain that's good at communicating. What happens if, while writing fiction, you bear in mind a target reader who is not an abstraction, but as fully fleshed out as a character in a novel?

This connects to why I feel justified in posting comments on my own blog entries. Sometimes other people's comments help push me towards the thought I didn't quite manage to encapsulate in the original post.

Knowledge That Carries no Validating Mark of any Current Trend

An artist asked me if my writing had a common denominator, if there was a concept that summed up everything I wrote. He clearly thought that there ought to be, and even said he felt it was “arrogant” to attempt to use more than one concept over the course of a creative career.

Tom Wolfe wrote a whole book, The Painted Word, about this phenomenon of modern artworks being embodiments of ideas.

When one visits an art show, there are usually explanations located near the art works, claiming that a particular piece “transcends the dichotomy” between one abstract noun and another abstract noun. Although I actually think some artists just make stuff that's fun to make and fun to look at, and are about as enthusiastic about figuring out which dichotomy they've transcended as writers are about writing cover letters and synopses...

Brian Christian has a fascinating essay in Agni #69, “High Compression: Information, Intimacy, and the Entropy of Life,” about art and the compressibility of information. He throws around such ideas as that, when one is reading a genre novel, it will tend to be more predictable what the next word's going to be than when one is reading a literary novel. He talks of “the reading experience as a kind of extremely rapid sequence of guesses, and much of the satisfaction, it would seem, is in the balance between YES and NO...”

People read novels for pleasure. People don't read CliffsNotes for pleasure. So it's what's in the novel that isn't in the CliffsNotes that's important – an obvious fact, but one that surprisingly many people manage to unlearn at school. Other things people don't read for pleasure are blurbs, marketing pitches, and the descriptions found on the walls of art galleries.

There's a worrying passage in Dark Reflections on how graduate students think about literature. "Graduate students up to thirty-five Arnold could generally impress with his downright encyclopedic knowledge of the Beats,” Delany tells us, but “the work he actually loved from that era, the rough poems and angular stories of Paul Goodman, even Goodman's dry, dry Empire City and Don Juan, the soaring intellect of his literary, psychological, and educational essays, Orlovitz's Milkbottle-H, the pyrotechnics of Davenport and Gass, Sontag's offhand excellence, the poems of Frank O'Hara, Lorine Niedecker, James Schuyler, Richard Howard, and Mona Van Duyn, these he'd learned he'd best not mention, or he would receive dull stares. To praise them intelligently only called up embarrassed, bland silence – the hostility the ignorant always displayed when faced with knowledge that carried no validating mark of any current trend.”

Joe Quirk and the Evolutionary Psychology of Hang Gliding

Here's an interview I just did with Joe Quirk, novelist, popular science writer, and hang-glider. I still wonder if there isn't some kind of contradiction in being an expert on evolutionary psychology who also hang glides?

In his nonfiction, Quirk tells you everything you need to know about sex, in punchy style, e.g.

"Let's define love biologically: love is when your genes kick your ass.”

In his novel Exult, Quirk does for hang gliding what Hemingway did for bullfighting or Saint-Exupéry for early aviation. For the duration of this book, Quirk will convince you that hang gliding is the only subject vital and intense enough for literary fiction. Exult is also about the difference between men and women, and full of such painful flashes of insight as the following:

"She didn't mention the sex. All she mentioned was the listening. Why can't I remember what she said?”

Exult will soon be out in paperback and is already available as an e-book, which increasingly seems to be the distribution mode of choice this summer...

Electric Literature no. 1 (Summer 2009)

I just read the first issue of Electric Literature, a periodical containing five great pieces of new writing.

There's a Jim Shepard story about Swiss avalanche researchers in the 1930s -- it already sounds like a Jim Shepard story, doesn't it? A convoluted, self-doubting account of hopeless endeavor, humorous yet devastating in Shepard's best manner.

There's one from Diana Wagman, about a one-breasted woman, that will leave you uncertain whether to laugh or cry.

T. Cooper contributes a furious, touching story about jealousy.

There's an excerpt -- a history of the relationship between two brothers -- from Michael Cunningham's novel-in-progress Olympia, which judging from this excerpt may well prove to be a masterpiece.

And a brilliant Lydia Millet story that gets inside the heart of an über-professional dogwalker.

Not only is this state-of-the-art fiction, but the editors have really thought through the question of distribution -- you have the choice of acquiring this magazine in the form of an e-book, or on your iPhone, or as a print-on-demand paperback. Electric Literature will make you freshly optimistic about the future of the literary magazine.