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.

The San Francisco Experiment: Day 3

There is nothing like a San Francisco morning.

San Francisco reaches a curious temperature in the mornings, a chill just short of wintry I can enjoy in jeans and short sleeves without a trace of a shiver. It makes me want to walk places, or go to the Academy of Sciences for shark-viewing and burritos (nostalgia, pardon me). It makes me love the hills and the quirky houses and the mattresses left out on sidewalks. I want that to come to Mountain View more often.

My old room is still strange, and I had forgotten how much of an aural sledgehammer my old alarm clock was. If that's what I used in college I can understand why one of my strongest memories are of sleep dep.

Something about San Francisco makes me want to watch some sort of bizarre stage show, then go home and blog about it after I've had mysterious see-through cocktails with the people who worked the show, at least one of whom I must know disturbingly well and at least one of whom I should feel strangely comfortable being touched by despite not knowing them. San Francisco makes me think of LED lights and sleeveless shirts and peasant dresses and pancake makeup, all at once or separate. It tastes like fresh lettuce and ginger. I have a particular relationship with the city.

I think, eventually-soon, I need to move back. For now, though, I'll be alright. I just need to visit more often.

Back into the breach; when the grammar is corrected, the riding and the writing can begin, and there is Alan Moore's rendition of Swamp Thing to keep me company.

The San Francisco Experiment, Day 1.5

I came into San Francisco last night, after a birthday dinner with my sister. I slept in my old room, and marveled at the cocktail of familiar and strange down there—walls I know and a closet I no longer use. This morning I woke up about when I usually do, and got a ride with my departing parents to work.

Today, work was work, barring (excitement of excitements) some photo time with a co-worker and his erstwhile protégé (which might actually produce a workable headshot, lucky me, and provided some interesting insight into the photo process—who'd have thought a white car was a useful photography tool?). Then after that shoot, he dropped me at the train station, and I took a ride north I have not taken in over a year.

Caltrain from Hillsdale to Millbrae; from there, a BART ride to Daly City; and from there, a walk up a hill I am fairly certain exists to ensure the world never lacks for sharp angles. Food for the cats, both tame and stray, and food for myself once that was one. And then, some time alone with Not Providence, which ended with 1200 words and some burning questions about what I'm doing in this chapter to advance the plot (an important question which I'm really glad I've started asking with regularity). And now, it is a quarter to ten, and feeling the pulse of worry and doubt, I am going to retire from writing for the evening and go read some Charles Stross before I sleep; I've got a nice long commute in the morning.

Today's thoughts on the experiment are as seen in the first paragraph: this place feels all at once familiar and strange, the associated routines both fresh and unrehearsed and very natural. I was halfway up the hill from Daly City BART before I had to even consider my route. Yet all at once, this house is eerily quiet, and there is a feeling of isolation that I don't have in the suburbs of Mountain View (yeah, figure that out; maybe it's excess debauchery leaking in from Castro Street). I am happy to be here, to be able to help my family, to have a change of pace, and to revisit a house that was home for five years. But I'm also going to be glad to go back to my bed in four short days.

Enrich Me.

I realize I usually let the N*P update sit longer than this, but today I had a request I wanted to make sure I got out there.

I just finished this TED Talk (if you don't know the TED Talk series, you should check it out; every one I've watched has been great, and I all but guarantee that you will find someone who shares a passion of yours and talks about it brilliantly), and I find myself wanting to seek out classical music. Unfortunately I cannot afford SF Symphony tickets right now, so I am forced to go canned.

So my request is, recommend something to me. A composer, a piece, a movement of a larger piece, a specific arrangement or a symphony whose arrangements you love; whatever it is, drop it on me. My brain requires new wrinkles. In advance: thanks.

Not Providence: From My Thumb Drive to Your Eyes

May I present Not Providence 17, in which we put the "who" in "whodunit".

No annotations to report this week, but bring 'em on if you got 'em!

What Is Not Providence?

It occurs to me Not Providence could be sucking in people who do not know me via real life or Blogger (is, in fact, judging by my analytics); and that the original introduction to Not Providence happened about 4 months ago, was made via a blog post that is buried and linked pretty much nowhere, and is full of introductory statements that are not necessarily relevant now. So, in the interest of fostering understanding and having an excuse to link to something on my Twitter feed besides Nicer Film Titles, here I go, stating the obvious.

Not Providence is, as the sidebar link says, serial fiction, updated weekly. Every Tuesday at about 9am, I upload the newest section of the story for your reading pleasure. Over the course of the week I answer reader questions, prepare annotations, and otherwise get ready for the next week's outburst (in addition to working on the writing I get paid for and that proofreading thing that keeps me fed and clothed).

Some have called it a "serial novel", but that's not quite accurate; it is more a series of serial novellas, with a contiguous universe and a clear continuity between them—Book One feeds into Book Two and so on, but with each book clearly telling one story in and of itself as well as the greater story of Randall, the peacekeepers, and the angle men. That said, reading them like a novel probably won't hurt, at least as far as avoiding spoilers.

Now, what's it about? Well, I believe in the narrative revealing a lot of the story for itself; but the closest genre term I have heard for it is China Mieville's "weirdboiled". It's a little bit Raymond Chandler, a little bit H.P. Lovecraft, a little bit Jack Kerouac and a whole lot me. It's a story about a 2009 that is, like so many 2009s, not quite our own; about a world still recovering from a moral panic and a massive disappointment; and about the little sparks of something special and wicked left in that world. It's also got vodka gimlets and some jokes at the expense of English majors.

Not Providence (God, HTML makes that a bitch to type) runs under very few rules outside the rules of English; but what rules it does have can be found here. Mostly, it's a promise that I will end it on an actual ending; that I will respond to your emails about it; and that all I require from you is enjoyment.

There. That's all I have to say on the subject. Now go. Read. And thank you.

Drudgery vs. Insanity

This won't be long. I promise. For one thing, I have to do some work.

The days in Foster City of late have been what I think of as perfect San Francisco days: fog banks like cotton, high grey skies, marine air just cold enough a sweatshirt seems like reasonable wear. Work has been mellow enough I can really focus on the challenges of proofreading, individual odysseys instead of a gauntlet. So of course my mind has time to chew on itself, and of course I'm thinking about San Francisco, and my five years living there.

And I find, in a weird way, I am missing it. It's a lovely place, honestly, full of the kinds of quirky people I really love, full of the sort of wild creative energy and youth I sometimes find my life lacks. But I think, like my homesickness for Santa Cruz (detailed in a far more personal journal), I am not so much homesick for the place as for a perspective on that place.

When I lived in San Francisco I was a grad student and a bookstore clerk, neither of them full-time jobs in the sense of cubicles and offices. I worked hard in both cases (well, as hard as a faltering business allowed), but that hard work came in small bursts—an hour of rushed register work here, a night of thesis-writing there—that left plenty of time for playing, and plenty of energy for it, too. And then when the thesis was done and the monumental accomplishment over, that time I spent on school could be spent on...wait for it...writing.

Something in San Francisco inspired my writing; I was productive there in a way I have trouble being in Mountain View. Of course, on reflection a lot of what I wrote there was also deeply immature—Done with Mirrors is the best thing to have come out of that era of my writing, with "Live from the Serpent Room" perhaps a close second—but there was a sense of freedom there, of exposure to ideas, of experimentation and learning.

My point in all this, which is not as short as I'd hoped, is the deep effect space can have on writing. It's perhaps a trite point, but writing really is a lot about perspective. Something in my Mountain View life injects a doubt into my writing process I did not have before. In some cases, that's good; it keeps me away from some of the more trite plot elements I might introduce, makes me think about my characters more deeply. But doubt it is; and for the time being, "doubt" is the word I will associate with Mountain View, while San Francisco will be connected with "vitality". At least until I spend some time doubting myself in San Francisco.

Speaking of which, I'm house-sitting next week, coincidentally at my old place of residence...let's call it an experiment.

Not Providence for Breakfast!

Part 16 exists. They're on a road to nowhere.

We also have an annotation request from Kate, for Part 13: who wants a Tarot lesson?

In other news, I have not been posting as much as usual lately—life's been busy. But I assure you it is only because I am hard at work composing new stories for you. In a way, the more boring my blog is the more exciting news I might have for you down the road; it is like a barometer for my writer's block.

[Edit: The broken link has been fixed.]

You, My Loyal Editors

Not Providence and You
So, for those of you who noticed it and were smirking silently, I fixed the situation wherein some far inferior writer (who was most certainly not me) snuck onto my website and inserted (entirely without my knowledge) a grievous continuity error into one of the recent updates. The issue has been fixed and I will be on the lookout for this monstrous literary predator.

On this note: I've been getting questions about this, and I thought I'd answer here. If you notice a grammar or spelling error, or another terrible violation of my immaculate narrative form, please don't hesitate to drop a line (you can use the same contact info as I use for annotation requests). I try to copyedit as thoroughly as I can, but I am but one man who is not currently being paid to do this full-time, and so things slip through. There is no pressure to copyedit it seriously, but if you notice something that needs correcting, I, your fellow readers, and the English language would thank you.

Not Providence Time, Again

Part Fifteen is go. I like to believe that somewhere, there is a group of Not Providence fanboys who just had a pet theory defused. Really, I just like to believe that somewhere, there is a group of Not Providence fanboys.

No annotations again this week—I desire your inputs!

Do It.

Last night, I watched Stranger than Fiction.

This is an older film (I'm just slow picking things up sometimes), so I won't trouble you with a full review; but I will say, this is one of the most charming, gripping, heartfelt films I have seen in years, and does not shy from being quirky or showing people the way they really are—which is to say, it does not shy from showing that no-one's really normal unless they're forcing themselves to be.

More importantly, perhaps, this a movie that makes you think, really, truly think, about life. About love. About your life. About the way you spend your time.

This movie makes me want to play the guitar.

This movie makes me want to run a bakery.

This movie makes me want to quit everything, to run, to put up quirky decorations in my living room and some multi-colored afghans on the couches and to snuggle up to someone and watch a great movie and to live the parts of life that matter.

I need money and I need health care, and so I pull up on the tailspin; but I say to myself and to the rest of you out there, Do It. When you see your dreams, follow them. I don't care how insane they are, I don't want to hear about how they're dangerous. It may take saving and it may take struggling, but Do It. Now.

I'm going to be saying this a lot on this blog, apparently. I'll label these posts so you can ignore them...but that doesn't mean you should.

Again: Do It.

Review: REPO! the Genetic Opera

This movie came out in 2008 and is available on DVD.

It is a rock opera set in a dystopian future where "Repo Men" commit legalized organ theft. It starts Anthony Stewart Head, Paul Sorvino, Paris Hilton, and one of the founding members of Skinny Puppy.

That should be all the review you need.

In all sincerity, REPO! is tongue-in-cheek heavy-metal operatic fun. It lacks depth in several places, and the narrative is by and large an opera standard; but it's in the meat of it and in the sheer ballsiness of the idea that the film stands out. The visuals are great, the acting is wonderful, and the music is generally very good (though I feel like a plebeian for feeling like the meter is kind of off in parts of the earlier numbers). Moreover, it's got a Gothic quirkiness to it that I just don't see enough places anymore, and I cannot help but encourage it. Really, how can you argue with Anthony Stewart Head in a leather trenchcoat, singing a hard rock song while performing surgery without anesthetic?

I give this movie four out of five strange hybrids of a scalpel and a melee weapon. It'll cost you the price of a rental or a slot in your Netflix queue; give it a try and discover that sometimes you have to spell awesome in all caps.

It's Not Providence Time!

Chapter 14 is up. Yes, he really said that. Enjoy!

(No annotations this week; lack of responses led to this situation. If you want to see it rectified, I suggest you respond.)

A Little Advice

I noted this in Google Reader, but this advice for writers stuck in a narrative corner was too good to not give a little extra exposure. The advice may seem obvious in places, but it is sincere and accurate; and trust me, when you're really stuck on something, walking away and letting it sit is one of the hardest things to do.