(on Interactive Fiction Database)
(play it now!)

I had had the copy in a short story (well, obstenibly one) for awhile but the linkages in Twine seemed to suit it better: particularly in bringing to light what isn’t said. And also to have variations in the text that function kind of like the lines of a villanelle–same lines, different context depending on the replay.

Twine itself is incredibly cool and at some point (when I’m feeling less sick) I want to write about it as a gaming tool, and some of the amazing, subversive games made with it.

Youth is important at first, especially when you are young. Those ambitions will serve you well in college. Your precocity–especially if you are a man–gives you a natural base for success at writing. Precocious ideas become an extension of maleness. But DON’T WORRY–even when you get older, being older becomes important.

Move to different cities. Experience them. Only go to the Midwest, however, if you go to school there or are invited to speak. And then get out as fast as you can. Use acronyms like “LES” in your biographical statements.

Go to conferences. You will be invited. Others will have to pay–and they have the money to pay, and even though you have the money to pay too, it will be better for you. Confer with others. There is a restaurant inside the hotel. Often there is more than one restaurant inside the hotel. There is a health club. If you write, they will pay. You will go places. You will go to other countries. Trans-nationalism is the world’s greatest gift to you. You will talk about your writing. There will be a reception. You will stand and talk.

Perhaps you will even write about your travels. This can make its appearance in your next book. Always look ahead.

You can always change the names.

Eventually people will listen to what you have to say. Eventually people who have written less than you and published less will ask favors of you. Assess these judiciously. Consider “favor” as a limited natural resource, like zinc or tungsten. Extract it carefully. But appear humble about it! And never forget the balance of accounts. One of the best ways to exchange favor is to teach. The students will come and go. But it’s the conferences themselves that remain, year after year, as your closest compatriots. Flirt. Exchange promises. Drink. As the years pass it almost appears like the same gin and tonic is in your hands, an everlasting cup. Everyone is getting younger, and soon it’s time to go to bed.

And when you die, you can know that you have succeeded. You will have the material to prove it: a few chapbooks, a couple of out-of-print books from defunct presses, the author copies still in an unsealed box in your garage, preserved like an Egyptian tomb.

Let’s look at a more or less standard definition of “emasculate”. (I generally hate arguments by pedantics who pull out dictionary definitions as a kind of proof text for an argument, but I think this is worth it).

1. Make (a person, idea, or piece of legislation) weaker or less effective.
2. Deprive (a man) of his male role or identity: “he feels emasculated because he cannot control his sons’ behavior”.
3. To deprive of virility, to castrate.

A few things jump out at me here–it’s not much of a stretch to tie this thought, at least implicitly, to a kind of subliminal misogyny, in which a fear of (social, technological) castration can be invoked in order to create buzz for male early adopters. This is the tech field we’re dealing with after all! I’m reminded of the semi-mythic recent rise of the “brogrammer”.

This is the same smug certainty of any early adopter-speak; to try to lure men into being more virile through, er, glasses (made by FOXCONN, let’s not forget) strapped to one’s face. Here’s a good example here of the breathlessness and pliancy of a mainstream tech-press organ framing this not in terms of information, but desire: YOU WILL WANT GOOGLE GLASS (I mean, seriously, this is almost a parody on the levels of the rock journalist going to Ozymandias’ palace in The Watchmen). But this righteousness is compounded by the product itself:

Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device – every single day, everywhere they go – on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.

(source)

It’s the coolness of cyberpunk with all of the Gibsonian creepiness stripped out (or at least, they are trying to strip it out), coupled with the voyeurism of the X-ray goggles sold in the back of comic books in the 70s.

That glee of being able to see what others cannot see: THAT is what is “virility” for the brogrammer-esque adopters who want to have Google Glass.

To have a form of technognosis.

Indeed, it probably goes without saying this is a real sf’nal moment: a kind of dystopian, disruptive surveillance technology being unleashed not in the pages of Analog, but in press releases, SXSW and TED talks.

It’s a true cyberpunk moment very different from smart phones, because of the closeness of the interface. (In fact I’m sure that the idea for this had to have popped up first in a SF magazine decades ago, before the possibility of it could have been even dreamed of.)

When Gibson presented this “virility” in prose in the Sprawl stories–the diamond-cut sentences, the cockiness of the cyber-cowboys–this was hardly presented as a tableaux of joyful consumption, but rather one of deep alienation, suspicion (between the characters and each other, between the characters and corporations), and even decay, “lost under superstructures of muscle graft that their outlines weren’t really human.”

But, well, we are at a somewhat different juncture now. It’s hard to know where this is going. But when we as a society have been making incredibly slow progress in ridding ourselves of misogyny in the public sphere, Google Glass is kind of a platonic ideal of an adolescent male fantasy brought to life, an almost cartoonishly dehumanizing piece of technology that posits its users as literal super-users, upsetting a power-balance through the spectacle of “augmentation.”

–Stephen Crane, “The Blue Hotel”, 1899

“Jesus, Seth. Listen, if you really wanna do this with your life you have to believe you’re necessary and you are. People wanna live like this in their cars and big fuckin’ houses they can’t even pay for, then you’re necessary. The only reason that they all get to continue living like kings is cause we got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and then the whole world gets really fuckin’ fair really fuckin’ quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don’t. They want what we have to give them but they also wanna, you know, play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. Well, thats more hypocrisy than I’m willing to swallow, so fuck em. Fuck normal people. You know, the funny thing is, tomorrow if all of this goes tits up they’re gonna crucify us for being too reckless but if we’re wrong, and everything gets back on track? Well then, the same people are gonna laugh till they piss their pants cause we’re gonna all look like the biggest pussies God ever let through the door.”

–from Margin Call

Gooseberry Bluff is not a school for the chosen ones. It’s a school for those who have run out of choices. An unlikely place for an international conspiracy. But after suspicious paranormal signatures are reported and a professor of magical history goes missing, the possibility of demon trafficking seems more and more likely…

GOOSEBERRY BLUFF COMMUNITY COLLEGE OF MAGIC: THE THIRTEENTH RIB, the first season set in Schwartz’s fantastic contemporary world, begins the tale of Joy Wilkins, an undercover agent with the Federal Bureau of Magical Affairs, as she starts her first semester of teaching and investigating the alarming activity at this school of magic on the border of Wisconsin and Minnesota. The deeper she goes, the closer she gets to dangerous secrets that could threaten her entire world.

Awesome, right? (Also is this just me or would this make a great setting for an RPG?) And I’m also really intrigued by the back-to-the-future approach of serial novels, which I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of in the ensuing years.

Check it out here (as part of Amazon’s 47 North imprint) for preorder!

(Also, as an insidery note: this is really a perfect e-book cover: striking, bold, yet clean, and it loses none of its allure when in thumbnail form)

“In addition to the gaps between shifting textual perspectives and the separation between subjectivity and speaker, we should also mention those between attempted reference and realization or typification and individuation, which hark back to Henry Fielding’s Aristotelian view of fictional character as that which instances the type and therefore finds its referent in the reader. What Fielding was not quite willing to acknowledge, though, is that between type and instance, a gulf necessarily opens up, especially in the realist novel, with its double imperative to taxonomize the social body and to individualize the character. A thematic emphasis on protagonists who cannot become genuine or authentic (Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, for example, or Flaubert’s Emma Bovary), or who seem debarred from ordinary existence (Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke) rehearses this formal difficulty, which we noted earlier, of arriving at the semblance of a unique being under the generic constraint of referential typicality. The implicit contrast between the reader, with her independent embodied selfhood that pretends to need no alibi of reference in order to achieve significance, and the character, with her notable lack of quiddity, who is therefore forever tethered to the abstraction of type, can even be played upon to produce a vicarious desire, as the imagined desire of the character, for the immanence the reader possesses. The fictional character’s incompleteness can, in other words, not only create a sense of the reader’s material “reality” as ontologically plentiful by helping us reenvision our embodied immanence through the condition of its possible absence, but also allows us to experience an uncanny desire to be that which we already are.

“What we seek in and through characters, therefore, are not surrogate selves but the contradictory sensations of not being a character. On the one hand, we experience an ideal version of self-continuity, graced by enunciative mastery, mobility, and powers of almost instantaneous detachment and attachment. We experience, that is, the elation of a unitary unboundedness. On the other hand, we are also allowed to love an equally idealized immanence, an ability to be, we imagine, without textuality, meaningfulness, or any other excuse for existing.”

(h/t Ads without Products)

A selection:

As for the contention that, in stories such as mine, the future is incomprehensible: as the saying goes, I consider this a feature, not a bug.

At one point Kincaid discusses “the trope in which neither author nor reader is expected to fully comprehend the future being presented.” That is, at least for me, not a trope. A “trope” is a poetic device; for me the incomprehensibility of the future is an epistemological premise that I present to the reader.

Kincaid thinks that, in some science fiction, “things are so different that there is no connection with the experiences and perceptions of our present.” This might be the fundamental disconnect I see in Kincaid’s argument. For if future is unknowable, then the work of fiction has to dwell either in the past or the present. He doesn’t allow the possibility of a “connection” with the present unless—to reiterate once more—there is a certain typology of genre at work: one invested in careful extrapolation and a certainty about one’s findings. But it’s this very uncertainty of typology that I found worth exploring in “Walking Stick Fires.” And the bored imperialist assumptions of its protagonists, who have little interest in the actual goings-on of the resident populace (mostly forced to live in tunnels underground), was the central point of unspooling for the narrative, as they lurched from one misadventure to another. The speculative aspects of the story include aliens, yes, but also Toby Keith, Camaros, and kickboxing. Every choice of story has trade-offs and sacrifices, and yields different rewards. Most stories are just as much about what is not included in them as what is. If I was writing a more “careful” story, I would not have been able to include, well, Toby Keith, Camaros, and kickboxing. And those “deep fried” elements were what the story needed for me.

CREATIVE designs by children, from six to fourteen years old, connected with the Greenwich House and the Little Italy Neighborhood Association, were shown in the small class room of the Museum, Saturday, May ist, to Monday, May loth, inclusive. After a mid-week lesson at the settlement the children visit the Museum Saturdays to verify the principles of design learned in the class room.
The first phase deals with the arrangement of straight lines, lines with angles, dots, and areas or “spots.” These, used in balance, harmony, and rhythm, show a knowledge and appreciation of the fundamentals of Pure Design.

The Story-Telling Design, or second phase, trains the memory and inventive capacity of the child in vivid and pleasing expression. A fable or fairy tale read to the children is conceived by them as a motif in lines and spots. This little motif, discouraging as a unit, often grows into a decorative all-over design, when used as a repeat, which frequently shows a sense of humor and a grasp of animal nature. The basic principles of design are employed in the story-telling designs also.

…

With evident grasp for movement and a logical rendering of the whole mass, they have drawn animals as a spot which has a meaning; to increase the sense of form this spot has been inclosed within a definite space, called a” puzzle box” by the children.

The second part of this is fascinating. It feels so antiquated and contemporary at the same time.