New Media in Fiction: Will There Ever Be an “iPhone Novel”?
There’s really only one author right now who writes about message board activity and email exchanges without boring or distracting the reader. Unsurprisingly, that’s William Gibson. No one else has quite figured out how to integrate the action of reading an email without breaking up the narrative. As soon as you introduce everyday communicative technology, the novel takes an experimental, scrapbook feel (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.)
Since publishing houses insist on signing authors from the same several area codes, from the same age bracket, writing books with protagonists that age and of that area code, their fictional characters are probably iPhone owners. Considering the lag between submission and publication, summer of 2009 might be the first time we’ll see it mentioned in fiction. But I doubt there will be a “iPhone novel” — it will be mentioned by name but the actual experience of using it will be ignored.
I’m not a tech-pessemist and don’t agree with much of Nicholas Carr’s arguments, but I think the absence of technology in literature is worth investigating. Does this mean that all fiction is now science fiction: a thought experiment in plotting a world without technological distractions?
Many contemporary novelists do away with any mentions of mobile phones and email, even when it seems implausible. This is especially curious in science fiction. (I haven’t yet read Neal Stephenson’s newest novel Anathem, but my understanding is its an allegorical critique of the Internet.) Typical sci-fi plots now tend to be about post-scarcity/ surplus information or revisionist histories cherry-picking which technologies to exclude and which to imagine. The steampunk trend is the perfect example (its tendency toward cliche I discussed previously.) It eliminates the communicative uses of technology and considers instead transportation and mad science — basement laboratories, solitary undistracted efforts.
The intensity of the 24-hour news cycle, the impatience of waiting for email replies, these frantic, perpetually-shifting day-to-day Internet journeys … can these be novelized? Let me try…
None of my friends were at the party so I pulled out my iPhone as I waited. I checked out Mary on Facebook and realized she has a new boyfriend. His profile was set to private so I looked him up on google and found an old Myspace profile he hasn’t updated in 2 years, but it says his favorite band is Wolf Parade and someone left a comment that he left his white Wafarers at her place. What a wanker. I twittered something passive aggressive about how I hate hipsters. I click back on his Myspace and see on his “top friends” is my old roommate Andy, so I went to Andy’s Tumblr, when he reblogged something from him that was reblogged by my other ex-girlfriend. Why does this dude know all my girls? There aren’t any pictures of him anywhere so I don’t even know who he is. Anyway, I’m avoiding the show this week cause I just don’t want to see Mary. I twitter something about being sick and probably unable to catch the Ratatat show, thinking maybe she will check and realize I’m not just not showing up cause I don’t want to see her.
Ok, that was a weak attempt, but you see what I mean? It’s the mental process of internal conflict inside another internal conflict, like Russian dolls: each seeming more hollow and insignificant.
It is as of yet untested in the marketplace, but I’m optimistic that the generation growing up with mobile Internet is going to demand novels, and have a hunger for that linear, patient escape that only a good book provides.
I could be wrong here. Reading Radar the print magazine feels just like surfing a bunch of blogs, but it’s not a bad thing. Maybe one day we’ll see a full novelization of someone’s daily experience on the Internet (but please, please don’t write this just because it hasn’t been done before. If you think you can do it well, by all means try, but contemporary literature is not for want of high-concept, shoddily executed work.)
In film and tv, connectivity can be a narrative device (Gossip Girl) or it is just something you don’t show — like characters going to the bathroom. Zachary Pincus-Roth recently wrote an article about how storytelling has changed for the LA Times:
“You would normally do scenes where people would come together face to face,” says Josh Schwartz, executive producer of the network TV shows “Gossip Girl” and “Chuck.” But now, “Why would they come to the door? They would just call.”
Could “24″ exist without cellphones? Jack Bauer would spend 20 minutes every episode searching for a phone booth. The “Gossip Girl” characters would die of boredom without their stream of salacious electronic chitchat.
While cellphones appear to help storytellers, since they allow anyone to talk to anyone at any time, “that seeming freedom only makes it all the more difficult,” says Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru and author of “Story.” “It takes away a possible source of conflict — the difficulty of communicating, the difficulty of calling for help.”
McKee compares the situation to the loosening of rules about depicting sexuality — writers have more options, but they lose the tension created when they’re forced to be implicit rather than explicit. Still, he doesn’t see the development as negative. “All it means is that the writer has to be even more ingenious in building the conflicts and the tensions in a credible way,” he says….
That implied phone creates the potential for audiences to think, “Why doesn’t he just call?” For instance, in “Superbad,” after Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) appears to be getting arrested after buying alcohol with a fake ID, why doesn’t he call his friends to tell them he’s just partying with the cops?
The typical solution is simple: Kill the cellphone. It can be lost (”Sex and the City”), out of range (”Damages,” when Ted Danson is trying to re-call a hit man) or out of battery (Jamie Foxx at the end of “Collateral”). The cellphone death has become the 21st century version of the car not starting when a killer is after you.
You can also listen to Pincus-Roth discuss his article with Brooke Gladstone on On the Media.
At least one film — the wonderful, wonderful All About Lily Chou-Chou — is about activity in chat rooms and message boards. And there’s that movie about the people who met on Criagslist I’ve yet to see.
The seemingly mundane, but actually emotionally complex experience that communicative technology creates might be the exact thing that we’re looking to avoid when we pick up a novel. This is why, with the exception of Gibson, I think it’s for the best novels exist as minimal-technology thought experiments.
Art by Dan Witz
Previously:
Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men
Will Kindle Save “Hypertext” Fiction?
How to Frame the Internet: Attention and the New News Cycle
Update: Interesting comment from Rex Sorgatz, who links to Nick Douglas’s post “The Diablo Cody Effect” and Nav, who writes, “There’s a writer named Zulfikar Ghose who’s classified as a ‘South Asian postcolonial’ writer - but he generally writes vaguely magic-realist stuff set in South America. He still tackles the usual postcolonial themes - exile, migration, hybridity, indeterminacy etc. - but, instead of using the same ole’ locales and ideas, he does it all analogously. I think that’s a possible place to start - in stories about documentation, making the private public, the other ‘virtual space’ as social proxy or prosthesis. But I think what the TM piece said was crucial: that this has to be about stories and people, not (just) ideas.” Also Jeff Sommers explains how when writing novels he will “purposefully avoid mentioning technology explicitly as much as I can. I don’t have a defined theory on this, but in my own reading I find that the easiest way to jolt someone out of a narrative flow is to mention some bygone technology that is no longer even the slightest bit relevant.”
Brody Condon just won a Rhizome award to adapt Neuromancer at a “red barn theatre in rural Missouri with a local, former political activist in the role of the protagonist.” This could be very wonderful or completely terrible, either way I want to see it. With the news The Fly is the source of an upcoming musical, maybe Broadway is next for William Gibson’s book. The full list of Rhizome Commissions Program winners includes several interesting projects, especially “Marfa Webring” by artists Claire Evans, Jona Bechtolt and Aaron “Flint” Jamison. It is described as an “attempt to alter the Google search results for the town of Marfa, TX by creating a Webring and, then, (with the cooperation of the town’s permanent residents) investigating the results of this action on the daily life of the town.”
Collection or Clutter: Do You Toss or Save Grampa’s Old Paintings?
Last month, I finally threw out a dozen paintings I made in high school, but not without photographing them first. The paintings are angry, amateurish, and hasty — some I spent little more than several minutes on — but they are a part of me. I may never look at these files again, but the thought of losing these pictures entirely to my unreliable memory filled me with anxiety for many years until I finally got them out.
Everyone has an aunt or grandparent that paints, but there is limited bathroom wall space for fruit bowl still lifes. We like to think there is value in a painting just for being a painting, but there isn’t. If you, as the descendent of a deceased “artist” cannot bother to store their collection in your attic, than it costs more than it is worth. I wonder how Salvation Army deals with the glut of artistic donations. Do they burn them? A lot of thrift store goods are bought in bulk by Haitian and African immigrants to bring back to their home countries, or are simply donated (this is detailed in a wonderful short documentary called Secondhand Pepe.) But few if anyone in the third world overseas is hankering for an 11×25 seascape.
Childhood mementos are just as sacred. How many of your old dresses and toys are in your mother’s attic? At a book reading last fall, William Gibson explained the predicament of wanting to see an old toy from childhood, but not caring enough to actually buy it. His solution was to save a search on eBay for it, and when the toy was finally listed, he saved the images to his desktop. If you grew up in the 80s you might recall the Sylvanian families. Here is every reason to dump (or sell) that old box of them somewhere.
Obviously the experience of an object as an image is different than as a shape. And the sentimental impulse just might not be there without it. Says Art Fag City on this subject:
People experience sculpture differently than painting for example, because there is a different physical and spatial relationship to the object. In many ways these concepts remain the same when viewing art on a computer even if the variables change. So for example, unlike a photograph or a sculpture, a net artist has less control over a viewers interaction with its framing mechanisms. The size of screen or the color of the browser a user choses to view their work in, vary from household to household, and there’s very little an artist can do to customize that experience. Other aspects remain constant — viewers will experience work on a flat screen, images will be always seen at 72 dpi, they will always be framed by a browser, in all likelihood the smallest screen size will be 800 pixels which informs how an artist works.
All of this of course is old hat to designers and net artists, who have been working with this set of problems for a while. However, for those who don’t think about these concerns all that often, it’s worth remarking that a large part of an artist’s web practice — whether they think too much about it or not — is implicitly concerned with image file management and display. In other words, decisions about the size and placement of a jpg or video file are always being made. In this way, I see a lot of aesthetic similarities between net art to collage and photography, because frame, composition, and layering, are always a concern.
The tactile experience is often what makes objects meaningful to us. Other things, like books and moleskines, are too time consuming to transfer. Somethings aren’t even worth the disk space when you really think about it. But you never know when it comes to photos. Unclutterer recommended the snap-and-save method in recent post. One of the commenters says:
About 25 years ago, while in college, I took a picture of three people that I have not seen since. They were good friends at the time, but school ended, we all moved on. Although I often came across that picture and had fond memories of those people, I would also think, “Why do I have these piles of pictures of things, or in this case, people, who I will never see again?” So, about six months ago, I started sorting, and tossing old pictures, trying to unclutter– including that picture.
Flash forward to two months ago. I was visiting a hospital as part of my clinicals as a student nurse. I recognized one of the nurses, but couldn’t place her. It was driving me crazy. We started talking, and one of the first things out of her mouth was, “You used to live in the dorm right across from us, 25 years ago.” You guessed it. She was in the picture that I threw out. I should have scanned it. I still have it on my todo list to look through my negatives and see if I can resurrect it (I think that day of uncluttered was spent in front of a shredder). To make matters worse, her old boyfriend, that she never fully got over, was in the picture as well, and she wanted to see the picture.
But these things happen. I find the less I save, the more I value what I do save. It isn’t worth it to feel sentimental for a garage full of what might be garbage, when you can really cherish a few select things.
Related links:
- “Evocative objects” edited by Sherry Turkle
- The PSB Gallery of Thrift Store Art
- Eddie Breen “Piggyback Art”
- “Throw Away, Give Away, Put Away” at The Psychology of Clutter
- Alexander von Vegesack’s “Adventures with Objects”
“I wasn’t going the post-apocalyptic route, which, as a regular civilian walking around the world, was pretty much what I expected to happen myself” - William Gibson, (via)
Oliver Stone’s Prescient SFnal Scientology Critique
“Why should this reality be public domain? What’s so great about it?” asks a Clara Bow-bobbed Kim Cattrall in the 1993 miniseries “Wild Palms.” “Tony wants a new and improved reality: controlled by Mimecon and sold straight at 7-11… A world where we don’t have to be afraid to leave our dreams open at night.”
“Wild Palms” isn’t dark enough to be “Twin Peaks” and it isn’t campy enough to be “V,” but the show holds up as a odd document of early 90s speculative fiction (the film is set in 2007.) Producer Oliver Stone might not be known for his futuristic vision, but he certainly is paranoid, and that’s what every dystopic fiction needs. Said EW at the time:
“It was dreamlike and hallucinatory. I put my friends in it. I put famous people in it. I didn’t care about the story. It was a tone poem.” [Writer Bruce Wagner] hangs a right onto La Brea. “Then Oliver saw it.” Oliver Stone knew Wagner from purchasing the film rights to Force Majeure (a movie Stone still hasn’t made), and the Palms cartoon struck a special conspiratorial chord with the JFK director. ”It was so syncretic,” Stone says. (Syncretic? ”Look it up,” he says.) ”It was such a fractured view of the world. Everything and anything could happen. Maybe your wife isn’t your wife, maybe your kids aren’t your kids. It really appealed to me.”
Like much of early-90s science fiction, the focus is on televised holograms. A corporate body, with some zen-relgious pretensions and Hollywood ties — not unlike L. Ron Hubbard’s sect — is experimenting with bringing TV to life. These “New Realists” — insisting they are just Buddhists in practice, freeing the mind from the body — work with a narcotic drink “Mimezine.” Inspired by Philip K. Dick’s idea of corporately-distributed hallucinogens in “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” and William Gibson’s virtual worlds (Gibson even makes a sheepish cameo as himself in the first episode,) the most surprising thing about Wild Palms is it is actually pretty good.
It was originally a Bruce Wagner-penned comic in Details magazine that eventually spawned a book, “The Wild Palms Reader,” containing timelines, secret letters, and bios of all the characters, as well as contributions from scientists, sci-fi writers (Gibson, Thomas Disch, Bruce Sterling,) musicians (Genesis P. Orridge, Malcolm McLaren, Lemmy from Moterhead) and others like Mary Gaitskill, Jane Pratt, and ex-CIA Operative E. Howard Hunt. To hype the program, ABC offered 900-773-WILD (75 cents per minute,) offering tips and storyline cues. It was ultimately a flop, and still is, unfairly. Maybe it’s just to early for cult-classic status? Or maybe the miniseries format is just too awkward in length, which is why only PBS still airs them (”V,” for that matter, isn’t as cult-y in popularity as it seems it should be.)
Kathryn Bigelow (”Strange Days”) directed some of the episodes, and Ryuichi Sakamoto composed the creepy minimalist soundtrack. James Belushi plays Harry Wuckoff, a patent attorney, offered a job with the “Wild Palms Newtork” — Channel 3 — run by Senator Anton Kreutzer. Sen. Kreutzer used to be a sci-fi writer, his motto is “everything must go.” In addition to virtual programming, the “Fathers” have been kidnapping children since the 1960s. Wagner doesn’t even try to conceal the resemblance of “Synthiotics” to “Dianetics,” but Scientology was more benign in those days (Tom Cruise had only just begun his studies.) One doesn’t have to be Theresa Duncan to doubt this script could ever be filmed now.
In addition to the virtual worlds and Scientology send-up, the joy in watching “Wild Palms” is its naive perception of what the world of today would look like. Oliver Stone appears as himself, talking about “recently released” documents that prove his film JFK was correct and alluding to the “late” Jack Valenti (who did in fact die last year.) There are no cell phones and nothing like the Internet or email, and people smoke freely indoors, but the looks and feel of people’s homes is what seems most “off.” The utilitarian office tables and chairs, beige walls, and Times New Roman fonts show just how far we’ve come with design, in that future-speculating set designers couldn’t even imagine a world where college students decorate with IKEA and Trader Joe’s enables gourmet-enough hors d’oeuvre for the most casual get-togethers.
Ironically, the wardrobe stylings are what give the series a modern look—mostly because early 90s looks have yet see a revival on the runways. Those boxy silhouettes and monochrome jewel-tones are exaggerated with a Jetsons-spin. In an early scene, Cattrall wears a beautiful burgundy satin dress with an unusual Grecian-inspired satin draping, but just about everything she wears could easily be in Proenza Schouler’s next collection. That being said, I can’t really see a future in menswear for the Edwardian collars and neckties Belushi wears.
Related links:
- Wild Palms and the “Wild Palms Reader”
- “Neuromancer” by William Gibson
- Erik Davis’ review in the Village Voice
- David Cronenberg’s Videodrome
- Coilhouse, “Inside Scientology’s ‘Psychiatry Kills’ Exhibit”
- The New Yorker, “Chateau Scientology”
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