• by Rick Moody , May 11, 2010

From: Rick Moody
To: Media Magazine
Subject: Signaling Through the Flames: Some Notes on the Future of Literary Language

Dear Media Magazine,

I confess I'm writing these lines directly into the email form, because I think if you are going to make critical commentary on digital things, you must, these days, make clear that you are not writing with pencil and paper. Few do. Accordingly, I am implicated. I use email every day, and I write on a "word processor," though I dislike this term. (I do the processing, not the machine.) And while we are speaking of words I dislike, I dislike the word "email," and I dislike the word "blog," and I'm not even going to touch "vlog," which is unpronounceable, and I further find the "i" prefix, added to so many devices these days, juvenile and irritating.

Tonight is the evening of the day on which Steve Jobs announced the new Apple tablet, the iPad, and so it is probably a momentous day on which to begin discussing the proliferation of literary formats, and what it feels like to watch these new media spin out into the world, therefore to worry (as, for example, Clive James also does in the most recent issue of Bookforum) about the future of language, specifically literary language.

Still, do I use electronic mail? I do. And do I have a "Web log?" I do have something like a blog, or at least an occasional column on music (at therumpus.net). And I do possess a Kindle, the Amazon reading device, and I have, on occasion, used Twitter and have even written a short story that was "published" on Twitter. I am implicated.

Despite disclaimers, though, I do consider myself a books person, a flesh-and-blood books person, who likes physical objects, and who believes that the time it takes to make a physical book - the months after you turn the thing in to your publisher, the copyediting stage and the proof stage (used to be two proof stages), that long leisurely interval of revision - is time well spent. In fact, it wasn't until 2005 (with my last novel), that I acceded to the new digital way of publishing - I turned in my first Word document. It was just a couple years after handing in this first digital file, while teaching a class in Tempe, Ariz., that a student presented to the class an example of the first generation of a Kindle. She passed it around. A time of great change! I thought the device was cute, sexy even, but could not imagine reading on it. In order to create some in-class controversy, however, the student pointed out the text that she was sporting on the Kindle that day: my own book. I didn't even know that there were electronic editions of the digitally delivered novel, but here one was. Far from being seduced, my initial reaction was horror, because the unpaginated quality of the electronic book - the freewheeling repaginating quality - didn't accord with the carefully conceived way that I write my stories. Also, I hated the default typeface, and I hated that there were no running heads, hated that the cover was just a jpeg, etc. There was a lot to hate from my point of view. Furthermore, I could not then and cannot now read very well on a screen. I find I can read about 500 words at a clip if I am screen-reading. Anything exceeding that length is going to lose me. Arguments that are more complex, more subtle, are lost in this online textual landscape, which is all skim, skim, skim. So how was I going to find a way to make peace with this thing - this thing with my novel on it - from the point of view of the ongoing compositional phase?

It's undeniable that there is a diminishment of ideas in the space of digital literature. People who think otherwise are not thinking rigorously, and it's likely that they are engaging with the controversy, typing out their furious replies, flaming their antagonists, on a screen. Those ideas that require length in order to communicate themselves, those ideas that are continuous, unsegmented, in that they don't deliver easily digestible morsels for the ADHD reading crowd, are going to be fewer and further between in the future of digital reading, and since these are the kinds of ideas that I favor, and since these ideas are normally expressed in the kinds of prose that I like - the long tangled kind - it would be easy for a writer like me to feel that what comes naturally, an affection for digression and reticulation, will be, in the post-modern digital environment, endangered; finding my voice, as we say in the literary world, was the experience of finding and coming to love complexity and flow and circularity and admiring these over simplicity and the staccato rhythms of declarative grammatical units, and while it is true that in part this complexity was made easier for me and more satisfying with the perfection of MSWord (easier to italicize, for example), in general my voice feels less like my own when it's on a screen (in this text, e.g.), and more like my own when printed out in hard copy. The American tongue will likely be remade in this revolution, I suspect. And abbreviation will be made easier, and longer words will become counterproductive (especially if they aren't contained in the learning-disabled spell check database), and narratives will either need to be shorter or will need to be enough heavily plotted, story-oriented, that they appeal to the average person who can read no more than 500 words at a clip. This is my conjecture.

I'm going to write more about the Kindle, and the iPad, tomorrow but first I need to do some research for this book I'm writing. And I need to do this research online.

From: Rick Moody
To: Media Magazine
Subject: Signaling Through the Flames: Some Notes on the Future of Literary Language

Dear Media Magazine,

Despite my hatred of the first incarnation of the Kindle, I decided I should get myself one when the second iteration came out, because I believed I should know the enemy, and if this Kindle was going to be the downfall of the book, as some fear (as I fear), I should know about it. Therefore, I took delivery of a gift Kindle this just past Xmas (the day on which Jeff Bezos claimed that downloads exceeded sales of "traditional" books at Amazon). And I must admit my first ownership-type feeling was of contempt, but that night, Xmas night, as part of a thundering stampede of international Kindle downloads, I did indeed procure a bunch of free texts for myself, that is, texts that were part of the Project Gutenberg and thus public domain, readily available to the public. I got some early Melville (Typee and Omoo and Redburn), I got some Montaigne, I got some Rabelais, and I got The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, by Poe. Of these, I set about reading the Poe. Initially, because the Poe was so good (and because I was really happy to have the Poe for free, as all the classics ought to be), I found I could not have complete contempt for the Kindle. I mean, the reading experience it offers is undoubtedly inferior, as I've already said, and the device is too heavy, not balanced well, and the screen is imperfect, and it takes too long for a page to load, and you can't browse through the text unless you can remember exactly what you're looking for (in which case you are not browsing, not in the traditional sense), and the library of titles is bad, awful even, and I really dislike the pretentious screensavers that come with the device, such as the picture of Jane Austen or the picture of Emily Dickinson - as though the Kindle represents that triumphal history of English-language literature; still, I couldn't hate the Kindle entirely, not while reading the Poe.

Eventually, I even paid for a nonfiction book written by a friend of mine, and this book, a very moving polemic against meat-eating, had some collagelike aspects to its form, and some nice page design (I owned a hardcover copy, too, so it was possible to ascertain these things at the source). I managed to get through the book on the Kindle, and I liked, it's true, that you could make the type bigger in low light. Still, I started to revile the Kindle somewhere in the middle of reading this friend's book. Or, more correctly, I began to long for the old flesh and blood kind of book, the kind with acid-free paper. I even willingly read a rather abstract book on the theory and meaning of poetry by Breyten Breytenbach just because it was a book and it was at hand, and despite its slightness, it was so much pleasanter than reading the screen. Jeff Bezos may have said that he gets impatient with physical books, but I actually got impatient with the Kindle, very impatient, and, in the process, I got impatient with Jeff Bezos. I have come to distrust people who love their Kindles, even if they are otherwise people of insight, because it means that they have given up on subtler reading experiences. These days, I have a few titles on my Kindle (things that I know that I am going to skim or read partially), but I sort of feel disgust when I pick the thing up. And instead I rush back into the arms of a book as though the book were my lover and I have been too long away from her.

Still, the question I'm trying to answer is how to write in this environment, knowing, or suspecting, that the limitations I experience as a reader of digital storage media are limitations that many other people are experiencing as well. Do you try to make books that will work on the Kindle, which is to say unsophisticated books with a lot of plot, or do you just write what you are given to write by the muses and hope for the best?

Perhaps the best way I can answer this is to talk about my Twitter experiment a little bit. My wife alerted me to Twitter a year or so ago. She was following some "mommy blogger" types online, who also posted on Twitter. My initial reaction to this new form was to flee in the opposite direction. For myself, I imagined, reasonably, that I had nothing to say about my daily rounds that was of interest to anyone, nor did I feel that I wanted to read the hourly press releases of Kim Kardashian or others who seemed to believe that the minutiae of their lives, on Twitter, was of genuine interest. (I'm leaving out the "tweets" from Iran and Myanmar, etc., which are obviously of great value.) And yet what I did come to love about Twitter was the impediment of the 140 characters. It's a very compacted space, when you think about it. It's no room at all. And since I am far more interested in long lines and long thoughts, it would seem that 140 characters would be impossible for me. Right away, though, I began to harbor this desire to experiment with making a narrative in the limited space available in "tweets." Just then, it turned out, I was approached by some guys with a new magazine (Electric Literature) whose idea it was to find non-traditional ways to market literary work. They seemed to like my Twitter idea. I got to work.

I guess I should say that what I did NOT do was type the "tweets" into the box on the spot, without revision. Nor did I write a whole story and then just carve it up into 140 character morsels. What I did was write little haikulike texts in the character-counting box, paste them back into a Word doc, revise them, and then paste them back into the character-counter to make sure they hadn't become too long. What I did was: I tried to write literature. I wrote lots of drafts. I ruminated. When I was done, the Electric Literature editors "tweeted" the text for me, over the course of three days, one "line" of text every 10 minutes. It was a really exciting experiment, but it had an unpredictable result. The Electric Literature guys got some partners for the project, who "retweeted" some or all of the text, with the result that some people, some very plugged-in people, got multiple versions of the story. This confused and irritated them. Many of these plugged-in personalities were book bloggers, and, therefore, I personally got an earful about their misery. Moreover, I was also told, by some, that my story should have been simpler, that it was too complex for Twitter. What to take away from this experience? That the experiment was invalid? That a contemporary writer who loves books should not tinker with using new media to make narrative art? I think the lesson is more that there are unforeseeable consequences in the ether of the digital world, resistances, and these are part of breaking new ground. If you don't try to break new ground, you doom the form to repetition or irrelevance. And, if you do, you will get an earful.

More tomorrow, off to check Facebook!

From: Rick Moody
To: Media Magazine
Subject: Signaling Through the Flames: Some Notes on the Future of Literary Language

Dear Media Magazine,

There are a lot of jokes floating around this morning, even in the venerable New York Times, about how the name "iPad" sounds like a feminine hygiene product. This would seem to be a purely public-relations-oriented problem, but maybe a public-relations problem is the leading edge of some deeper issues with respect to the newly minted Apple tablet. Somehow, and I know this is a stretch, the whole controversy reminds me of that line from Antonin Artaud's The Theater and Its Double: "And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our accursed dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames." Probably it doesn't seem as if the iPad has anything at all to do with Antonin Artaud, but hear me out.

What the iPad represents is a new midsize way to read, somewhere between attempting to read on an iPhone, and attempting to read on a computer screen. The iPad offers all kinds of dazzling colors, and it can play audio and video clips. But the iPad is still a machine, not a book, and as such it represents a new form, and thus, for writers of literature, it represents an enforced retooling of what literature is, because every time literature is repackaged into a different device, we who make it have to think about what it is again, and to make it work along those lines of the container. I am for thinking about what literature is! But I am also against gimmicks, and even though I imagine writing a story in the little Twitter character-counting box is a fine experiment, because it makes you think about how to tell a story in a very foreshortened space, I also think that it is catering to forms, it is being too much the supplicant with respect to technology. Gimmicks, in the final analysis, do not make for good stories. For really good stories, for novels that stand the test of time, you need to take the form itself back to its most simple package, which is some words printed on a piece of paper. (Well, the first literature was probably people sitting around a campfire talking. But you get the idea.)
 
Reviewers keep talking about how the Kindle doesn't offer a real multimedia experience, and that on the iPad people will want to write novels that have bits of songs embedded in them, or bits of video. But you know what novels like this sound like to me? Bad novels.

Because novels are made out of words, and they are secretive things, they are like the whispered vows of an intimate, and you read them alone, or somewhere where no one is paying any attention to you, and you don't want to have to wear headphones to read these novels, because that makes your book into a television show or a pop song. This isn't the intimate thing. It's the faddish thing. And maybe in some way that's why, preliminarily, critics are reacting against the iPad. Whatever the Kindle is, it's sort of homely and ridiculous, in the face of the iPad, and people who read appreciate homely and ridiculous things, because they seem really human. Whereas the iPad is all sexy and futuristic, which means it will also be good for keeping tabs on your whereabouts and reporting you to the authorities in some neofascist future.

In fact, I'll go even further, and say that when I think about trying to write work that will be read on this new multitude of forms, the Kindles and the iPads, I sort of think that what I am not doing is writing for new forms as much as I am writing for large corporations. I am writing onto the spaces made available to me by large corporations. If I write straight to the Kindle, which some people are doing now, I am bypassing the Random Houses or the Simon and Schusters, but I am instead writing for the corporation of Amazon, and if I write so as to be available on the iPad, I am writing for one of the truly large data-storage operations of futurity, the Apple Corporation. (Not to mention the possibility of writing for Google, which seems imminent for any American writer.) If I am writing for a small literary magazine out of the University of Southern Mississippi, though, I am writing for no one but their 3,000 readers and myself. This seems preferable.

I suppose this is part of what Artaud means when he says that we should be "victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames." He means that we should have this much commitment to the bloody entrails of writing, and we should be unconcerned with the medium of our composition, with the form thereof, because the only work that means anything lasting is work that is as desperate as people "signaling through the flames." This is an impossible task, of course, nothing that can be accomplished in this lifetime, and Artaud went crazy trying to achieve his lofty ambitions himself, but the impossible is ennobling, and it least it sets us on the right path.

The beautiful, seductive screen of the iPad, with that relentless and egomaniacal i in front of its name, will change language, because it will cheapen language, yet again, and make it secondary to video, and it will coerce the material in certain directions, and for these reasons, if you care about literature, you should probably think $800 is too high a price. But maybe this is why people hate the iPad a little bit, at least so far, because they don't yet want to give up on the old flesh and blood stuff and the language that goes with it. It's hard to imagine that Steve Jobs and his marketing geniuses might have miscalculated, might have replaced an old, homely used car with a Hummer, and if they did miscalculate it's likely that they did so for only a short period of time. But let's say it again, while there is time: The old forms are plenty good.
   
Best wishes,
Rick Moody