Not Providence, Finally

Train breakdowns and poorly coordinated shuttle schedules cannot stop Not Providence Part 18! I think the word is "denouement".

No annotations this week. You know what to do.

Also, my head feels full of dead leaves. I still can't figure out what day it is except by the fact I'm updating the serial. I must be a creature of routine.

Like Ice Cubes in My Sternum: Funny Games

This might technically be a review. But I can't call it a review. Because I can't talk about it with you yet.

I spoke a few posts back about my attitude about the flinch; about getting up and walking around, about being so upset that one had to turn away. I spoke about my unwillingness to do so.

There is now, officially, a film that made me wish I could. And just as I was wishing I could this movie prevented me from doing so.

There is a movie. A remake, really, by the same director, shot for shot. The movie is called Funny Games. It stars Naomi Watts. It stars Tim Roth. It stars Michael Pitt. And it stars your stomach being punched as hard as it can by the Abominable Snowman.

I cannot explain this movie. I cannot explain this movie because to explain this movie is to rob it of some of its power over you. Though that isn't saying much; I went in with a skull full of lit theory and some vague idea of what the film was about, and I was still skewered through the brainstem and anchored to my chair.

This movie is, as best I can describe it, Brechtian horror. It is a movie about violence, and about what violence really does to someone, and about what we'd really do when faced with a monster. And this movie will never make facing that easy for you.

This movie conquers you. This movie plays with the medium, and this movie plays with you. This movie molests you; it makes you watch, and it makes you feel bad for watching. This movie is about how easy it is now to watch someone be disemboweled; and when you're done this movie will make you wish that was all it was. But it doesn't need special effects do it; it really doesn't. Everything about this movie is here to make you uncomfortable; viscerally, spiritually, deeply uncomfortable. This movie makes you question the media in a way you never considered.

Carpenter. Hooper. Craven. These men are great filmmakers, and they make classic films. They made horror films.

But the director of Funny Games made horror.

Watch it. Or rather, don't watch it. Because you don't watch Funny Games. You survive it.

The gauntlet is thrown. Pick it up.

Yes.

Re-shared from my Twitter feed, because the link is that valuable and that awesome. Originally shown to me by Laura Houser, and printed in the digital pages of Salon: the truth about journalism.

Tennis's advice could apply to any writer, though, and it's exactly what I needed to hear: that he's right, and that the world is kicking our asses because we need to be toughened up before we're really ready to do this job. So I'll have to say, fuck the small stuff; and also carefully consider his advice about being drunk.

Well-Tempered versus Well-Made

or: Tyler States the Obvious

I have a curious relationship with grammar.

On the one hand, grammar is part of the package of rules and skills by which I currently pay the rent on my apartment. If there weren't rules I'd have a much harder time in this line of work. (Whether or not that's a bad thing is an entirely different topic.)

On the other hand, in my own writing...I sometimes have trouble staying within the lines. Sometimes nouns want to be adjectives; sometimes sentences need to end halfway through. Sometimes I will sense that in a list of items, they need to go in a certain sequence that has nothing to do with any logical way of ordering it. Recently someone told me a section of Not Providence looked wrong, and I fixed it by shifting one sentence up a paragraph, against all laws of grammar or the order in which things would have happened in the world of the book.

This is not to say I hate grammar. I love grammar. I need grammar. Not only does it pay my bills, but sometimes bad use of punctuation marks is precisely what's wrong with a crippled and ugly sentence. And it happens quite often the rules of grammar are all at the separates me from flogging your eyeballs to death with a legion of semicolons and commas.

But sometimes literature feels like poetry, regardless of how many zombies or over-angled horrors are in it. Sometimes Kerouac is right. Forget the well-tempered sentence; I'll settle for one that's well-made.

I don't quite remember Fridays like this.

I remember coming home after work...I remember dispensing with the chores so I could focus on it being Friday. I remember the notes for tomorrow's D&D game*, tucked safely into my shoulder bag, and all the little details and shibboleths addressed so that getting out of here tomorrow is quick and simple.

I do not, however, remember the night's landscape feeling quite so flat after I finished my dinner, and I don't remember this weird itch under my skin. Nor do I remember being unsure of whether I want to do something here in the house or out there in the world.

I think San Francisco and I came unplugged somewhere back there. Unfortunately I don't think tonight is the night to try to rekindle the connection.

Putting Print on Life Support

So, I've avoided talking much about the so-called "death of print" here, mostly because I find the whole debate tiresome. However, said debate came home in the form of me actually seeing a blog post in my little personal social sphere that suggested this death would be a good thing and fully embracing the new era of Open Source information.

I completely disagree, but the discussion on the subject in said post seems to have died out, as blog discussions tend to do within about an hour. And so I blog about it myself.

The discussion stems from this Crain's article, in which the Chief Executive of Dow Jones discusses Google's role in the current dire situation newspapers face, and also confesses the ways in which newspapers allowed Google to help their demise along. I agree with Hinton, on both points: Google is doing serious damage, but the newspapers started it. Unfortunately, the newspapers started it with the best intentions: they started offering their articles online, for free.

This is fantastic. One of the best things about the Internet, as I have often babbled, is its capacity to spread data very far very fast, and to put it in the hands of people who might not have seen it offline. However, this does kind of damage the newspaper's current business model; why pay for it, right? It's right there for free. God knows I don't pay for my RSS feeds from the Times or the chronicle.

Now, newspapers helped to dig this grave. And now they're in danger, and it's possible print editions will become extinct, or at least rare (possibly Print On Demand rather than running off a million copies every morning?). And that is not something I take much issue with; save some trees, leave the paper for more permanent artifacts like textbooks. I don't care if we lose newspapers in a literal, printed-object sense. What I care about losing are two things which are far more important: newspapers as a locus for journalism, and the capacity for writers to get paid for what they do.

While Hinton's language is inflammatory, Google is part of the problem, not just for newspapers but for people getting paid for content generally. Google is one of the big names spearheading the loathsome "exposure as compensation" movement that small-time publishers are getting in on, where an artist or writer's payment for their work is the privilege of being put in a magazine or on a site where people will see it. It is behavior like this that encourages people to think they can and should get everything for free, which of course has nothing to do with the companies backing this movement getting work done for free.

But even beyond my own desire to see myself and my fellow creators getting paid to create, I am worried about the dire consequences for media if newspapers die out. Alternate methods of revenue generation based around free content make perfect sense. Dr. Horrible and FreakAngels are my favorite examples, but those are works of fiction. They are not where we go for information about what is happening in the world right now. As outmoded as print supposedly is (and I disagree that print is the problem, it's the business of print that needs to grow up), I worry that the loss of newspapers will mean the loss of journalistic rigor.

Newspapers have fact-checking, editors, various other mechanisms to (at least theoretically) ensure that the news they publish is the truth. The trouble with the storm of free content is that it's got a very bad signal-to-noise ratio. For every blogger who is a well-trained journalist who practices good rigor you have ten LiveJournal accounts full of vitriolic sensationalism that had their code scraped and slapped up into a tasteful-looking template. At least when the New York Times makes a factual error it tends to get reported on and retracted; relying on Internet sources for our information is how things happen like TMZ.com reporting Jackson died nearly an hour early, and how Australian news sources wind up reporting Jeff Goldblum is dead.

Print is dying because the model needs adjustment; publishers need to be looking at new ways of getting the money to pay themselves and their artists, artists need to be considering new profit models, and newspapers need to start thinking about how they'll get people to pay for their content. The print-on-demand idea could work, new methods of generating ad revenue that could compete with Craigslist, ideas that I'm sure it'd take people more brilliant than me to come up with. But this is not a simple case of survival-of-the-fittest; "free" does not making something more "fit". As a concept and delivery system, the newspaper and book industries need to survive in some form, or the adaptation to the new media is going to be a lot rougher than expected.

Paying for it is not inherently bad, and Open Source is not inherently good, any more than I am inherently a better person because I have a Master's degree or earn a salary that's above the poverty line. Open Source and Internet publishing have the potential to do great things, or to strangle intellectualism just as badly as the current outmoded model; the only difference is that these ideas are (relatively) new and shiny, which has us dazzled into excited complacency. So in that sense, Hinton was wrong to call Google a vampire.

It's more like an angler fish.

(Portions of this piece have been adapted from my comment on the aforementioned defunct discussion thread; my own writing, I assure you, is used with full permission by me, but if it looks familiar, that's why.)

This is important.

This happens to me a lot, and I have learned to accept it. Someone said this better than I was able, this someone being fellow writer-in-waiting, Kat Howard.

The patronage model of artistic endeavor has periodically come up for me, oh, since I first considered the idea of being paid to tell stories; I used to joke, in my most rejection-spackled, miserable moments, that I should email Bill Gates and ask him to pay me to write. And Ms. Palmer's success has me thinking maybe we're coming up on a resurgence of the patronage model, as Ms. Howard suggests: that maybe technologies like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and PayPal and PayPal-like systems will allow for fans to actually directly pay artists. Not merely on a piece-by-piece basis—not $10 for a book, $30 for an art print, $20 for a movie, but to actually create, via donations, a fiscal support network for the creators they love.

Now, the patronage model has its problems; as is often stated, controlling an artist's purse strings also meant that sometimes the artist could be turned into their patron's catspaw. I can imagine, say, my doctor being annoyed that the story he helped pay me to write says something negative about Kaiser Permanente; or the Senator who put a thousand dollars in my pocket wanting me to not deconstruct Washington politics quite so scathingly. And of course, there is the simple fact that Amanda Palmer made that nineteen grand partially because she is Amanda Palmer, and did put out that amazing, Ben Folds-produced album; without the fame she has from the album that has earned her nothing, it's likely her followers on Twitter would not be so numerous and therefore that the people watching her attempts to earn her rent would not have enough people among them who can afford to help.

Of these two issues, the former is the less immediate. The trouble with the patronage model stemmed, to my mind, from a distribution of wealth: using social media as one's personal Lorenzo di Medici, one obviates some or all of the possible political leverage those donations provide. Now at that point the donors could start arguing, against what Neil Gaiman has said, that the artists now really do owe them something; but the hope is that the money would make the artist produce more of the work they want to produce, resulting in higher quality, tighter production schedules, etc. However, possible influence, still a major flaw in the plan.

The latter issue is one I've been discussing lately, and it ties into something I really can't address in this same blog post: the fate of current media and the possible death of the publisher. As it stands, I think that Amanda Palmer (and my favorite example, Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible project) are examples of how I expect to start seeing networks, record labels, and marketing firms to be used: as springboards for one's own self-published career. The album and subsequent campaign and touring gave Amanda Palmer the fame to make money off Twitter; Mutant Enemy's network productions put Joss's name on the map boldly enough to get the DVD sales Dr. Horrible needed.

I really think we are coming up on a dismantling and/or rewiring of the current system; on an era of creator-owned content, of greater cultural cross-pollination, of a new publishing and a new journalism. I'm just trying to figure out what shape it'll take; and perhaps more importantly, how to cash in and become ultra-mega-famous, so I can laugh at all you plebeians from my throne of money.