I may have finished the latest round of changes to the Olsson’s website. That all depends upon whether I really had a single goal, or whether I was just making requested changes, ironing out the ramifications, and generally ad-libbing.
I am in the process of changing all the ancillary pages to the same design as the main page. Some of the (relatively) high-traffic pages needed to be in PHP so that content could be updated more rapidly. I don’t know if it’s simpler, but it might be easier to explain. There are just some days I can’t make it any simpler than: Get the file with ftp, edit the file in a text editor, and put the file back with ftp. Why don’t I just instruct people to log on to the server through Network Solutions and use the file manager they provide? Well, that’s an interesting story…
I wanted to give it a try myself - as a test pilot. It was a disaster. They should rename it the “File Mangler”. I went down the list to open a bunch of pages with navigation bars so that I could update the file names in the hyperlinks. The File Mangler thought I wanted to look at the files in WYSIWYG - but I didn’t. So, I switched to text mode. Every single one of those files was damaged by the online editor. I spent part of my afternoon yesterday fixing the damage in my text editor. It doesn’t look like I can instruct anybody to do it that way.
I had to go in to the template for every single blog we have on Blogger to edit those same hyperlinks, then republish all associated pages. I have spoken many times about the difficulty of republishing a single blog on Blogger. You can imagine that it probably took me 5-6 days to accomplish this, and that is how long it took, and now it is completed. Blogger actually came up with new bizarre error messages, and a screen that included everything at once: “No publish results to display”, “Publishing files to your blog (with ‘spinner’ animation)”, “Uploading via…”, “Show Transfer Details”, “Hide Transfer Details”, “Files Transfered: (big blank)”, “Your blog published successfully”, “Last successful blog publish: (apparently never)”, “Your blog published with errors”, “You publish is taking longer than expected. To continue waiting…”, and all the other junk that you eventually see after it succeeds. It had everything!
I’ve been wanting to write myself a script to check links on the site. I probably have access to something that already does this. “WinHTTrack” is a program to archive entire sites. I’ve used it in the past to create backups, and it does a fine job. More to the point, it gives you a report of all the trouble it encountered, so that might be helpful. I’ll probably use it as a double-check, but I ought to write the script anyway - It shouldn’t take long. The site is at a cusp in some ways: It’s not big enough to really need a strategy, but it’s still more pages than I can conveniently list. I should probably aslo ‘take out the garbage’: eliminate as many useless or marginal files as I can.
Oh, and I still need to tweak the customerror pages for 404, etc. Gotta go do that now…
Posted in writing-craft, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:35:00 GMT
On the bus this morning, I was writing in my black Moleskine notebook when some guy sat down next to me.
Public buses have their own special geometry. I would like to sit facing forward, and have enough legroom. There are about five seats like this on a bus. If I want some quiet time to think, I avoid the crowds - sometimes that’s the front, sometimes the back. That doesn’t leave much.
A note to policy makers: If you want people to ride public transportation, think about the inside of your limo, and work from there. It doesn’t have to be luxurious, but it’s in your best interest to allow the actual workers in a society to get some work done - or alternatively get some rest on their way to do the work. I understand why a bus ride can’t be smooth, but it would help me out a lot if the bus didn’t try to bounce me out of my seat every half block along the route.
So I’m trying to compose a thought in my notebook. The back corner faces forward, but doesn’t allow me enough leg room. It’s one of those buses with the access panel to the engine instead of a center seat. That’s an ideal seat, should you get a bus that has one - it not only gives my legs enough room, but they don’t get in anybody else’s way either. I’m happy (relatively speaking) with the seat I’m in when this guy wants to sit in the corner seat next to mine - I have to break my concentration to let him sit down, but usually if you prefer that corner seat, you’re an introvert and won’t bug me. But then, another guy sat down in the sideways facing seat right in front of us. They must have known each other - it wasn’t really a conversation, but they did occasionally mutter something disinterested to each other.
The guy in the corner said something incomprehensible, and when I darted a quick glance over at him, he muttered more as an apology - I could tell from the tone of it. “What are you writing, there? Porn?”… Huh? What? Is my brain that tired? I can’t tell what he’s saying, or why that would be his first guess. I’ve just about latched on for a full analysis when I get “You know - Porn - Rhymes?”… (Oh, you’re saying “Poems”!?!? Why did I… Nevermind.)
“No, it’s just stuff that comes to mind. No big deal.” It’s not strange in the city to imagine that everybody is a budding rapper-poet. By a strange coincidence, I was thinking about poetry while waiting for the bus. When I don’t have a whole thought, I will latch on to little atoms of meaning - a turn of phrase that works well with an visual image. But in fact, I’m having trouble being anything other than literal these days. I write the truth of what I see, and I use my camera in the same way, so I’m mostly about documenting reality. It’s tough for me to commit to a fantasy, even when those fantasies percolate through my conscious mind.
If I was having trouble concentrating before, now I’m shattered. All I can do is daydream and wait for the ride to be over… I’ve got some gibberish written down about digital images, and the snapshots people deem worth taking and keeping - I was working up to two different ideas when I got sidetracked and could have benefited from some concentration:
First, Who gets to claim photos as art? And, should I be paying more attention to Marcel Duchamp?
Second, What is the nature of the casual photography on cheap digital cameras? How does it relate to the snapshots the Replicants cherish in the movie “Blade Runner”? How are we to think about these photographs as artifacts?
But I can’t think about one thing without immediately feeling the push of a thought at right angles: I’m already on to the film’s prophesy of photographs on the same Kodak style paper… Not everything in the future is going to be futuristic (books come to mind) - but the prediction is not so easy: The desire to retain old forms and the desire to use the newest innovation are both subject to the will of producers. Having your photos on a stack of photo paper or in flash memory LCD screens will depend on unforeseen changes. And, it’s not hard to imagine that technology as a class boundary: Nice photo paper could be the luxury item if the digital version remains cheap. Or, the opposite could turn out to be true. You can imagine the reversal, the conventional wisdom probably already has it: Paper for the poor people, clutching their ‘precious photos’, on the run from disaster, or toward dubious opportunity.
I’m still trying to imagine what happens after the breakdown - partial or total. The partial breakdowns are more interesting for the sake of variation. If we run out of some crucial ingredient for the status quo of this world, and we can’t find a reasonable substitute, then what happens? Cheap energy is a linchpin: With it, we make whatever industrial-scale transformation we desire. But without it, we have to be very creative, and that still won’t be cheap. If you follow the ‘Peak Oil’ crowd, then you know that all our flexibility in crafting new solutions depends on both innovation and cheap energy. All the innovation in the world won’t help if the pantry is bare. I listen to the voices of optimism: “We’ll find a solution because we always have in the past”, and I can’t help thinking they’re right… until the battery runs out. We haven’t been thinking about how to recharge that battery, and we don’t know how much is left, or how expensive the future transformations will be in practice.
Add a Link: Kevin Kelly’s “Where the Linear Crosses the Exponential”.
And, be careful how you choose that discount rate…
Posted in photography, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 06 Jul 2008 13:54:00 GMT
Maybe take a quick look at What Do Your Words Say?. Brilliant.
It got me thinking about Stephen Pinker. One of his books explains why the structures in language don’t get too formal, even though some literature does: The children have to be able to understand it.
So we do develop a lot of high-test addition to our natural languages: Legalese, anybody? 1337-speak? And, as an enthusiast of Japanese, I would be respectfully pleased if I might be allowed to request of you the favor of hearing this humble manservant’s entreaties regarding ultra-polite language constructs in that aforementioned distant archipelago. Also LOLcat: Leef I alone. I iz bloggin.
But we don’t start the children out on LOLcat, do we?
It’s sad how a good teacher is an anomaly these days.
I left a comment, but right away, I wanted to say more / say different things.
Joeysmom’s title reminds me of a TV show you didn’t see. In one episode of “Wonderfalls”, Jaye meets a woman who stutters, and the stuffed animal tells her “Get her words out!”. It’s not exactly related, but I can’t help thinking of it.
Posted in ontology, school, books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:06:00 GMT
Apparently I have to keep reminding myself. I write here not because I think I’m going to be brilliant, but because it forces me to explicitly introspect.
If my ideas don’t inspire me, that is no excuse as long as brilliance is not the goal. By sticking to the habit, I more often record ideas that would otherwise remain tacit; Swimming around in my head.
One of the things this has taught me: A lot of ideas seem really dull until I work my way through them. I have a range of feelings that suppress this working-through. After all, I never really know what I’m going to discover, and there is clearly some potential for embarrassment if I let the ideas loose too soon.
But, I also need to remember that I write about the ideas I consume, as well as the ideas I produce. And, so this is a bit of a reading journal, too.
Last night I was thinking that my mind sometimes goes to a place I don’t really understand. Maybe the way to explain it is “a level between thought and feeling”. This was a reaction to a particular expressionistic thought/feeling I had that was like witnessing an arrangement of ideas happening ‘in’ my unconscious mind ‘from’ my conscious mind. A kind of observer pattern.
It might be possible that self-observation, not being one of the five senses, is not one thing but many. Imagine a day browsing a library, or an art museum: In each moment, you have to choose how to ‘see’ the collection - how to relate to the overwhelming potential sensation. With a continuous spectrum of abstract to concrete, your mental approach can occupy any range of that spectrum. Or, it can hop around from one part of the spectrum to another. And these different places on the spectrum: the concrete details of the brush strokes in a painting; the common style in the works of a particular author; or the curious omissions in the collection; can be regarded as separate tasks, open to juggling… This is one of main ideas from “The Economics Of Attention”: Lanham’s idea about oscillating between was of seeing ‘at’ and ‘through’. Of course, it was an idea already floating around in my mind.
Posted in writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:50:00 GMT
A couple of months ago, my sister and I listened to Doug Fine talk about harvesting free grease behind fast food restaurants in New Mexico for his bio-diesel pickup truck. Ever since that day, I’ve been extra sensitive to headlines about this subject. I predicted (kind of a no-brainer) that as gasoline prices went up, the pressure to substitute bio-diesel would cause discarded restaurant grease to become more highly valued. You can actually see this in a Simpson’s episode. Homer is surreptitiously pumping out the grease from the elementary school cafeteria when Groundskeeper Willy discovers the theft. His punchline is something to the effect of “My Retirement Grease!”.
…And whatever happened to the recycling craze? Glass, Cans, Newspaper, etc. used to fetch a price if you trucked them in. That meant you could get free pickup for this variety of trash, because for the trash company, the disposal would pay for itself. The issue here is the phase-change from that situation where you’re just happy to get rid of it to that situation where you will kill to protect your precious resource. Like Willy.
Today I see this headline in Fark:
Old and busted: Stealing copper for resale as scrap. New hotness: Stealing grease for resale as fuel
The article itself is a little more interesting… It’s not ‘thieves’ so much as it is a war among companies. Maybe. The occasional freelancer could float through this story unnoticed. “Slick Florida thieves haul off grease”.
The thing that really interests me requires taking one step back…
Stealth Facts In Predictable Journallism
Fark excels in the witty alternate headline. Which is maybe why the potential for deception in the actual headline is so clear in my mind. There is a pithy way in which either of these headlines can tell me “Read no further - You already know the story”.
But of course, if I didn’t read the story, what would be the point of journalism?
But of course, I don’t usually bother, so journalism IS pointless, yes?
There almost needs to be a truce: I can agree to pay attention as a reader, if the writer can agree not to bury fascinating things in the story that the headline just doesn’t capture. What ever happened to the pyramid style in newspaper articles? I should be able to stop at any point, confident that I am only giving up on a finer layer of detail, not missing some crucial twist. Journalism was always supposed to function as a resource for the time-challenged.
My hope is that facts and ideas can be indexed. Headlines currently serve the semantic role of index. The minutia of life should be no different from scholarly work in this way: There is no telling when any of this information might turn out to be important.
Posted in writing-craft, economics, media-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:16:00 GMT
First, Some Nonsense
Binderies for the fragmentary.
Fleeting thoughts that must go in distinct bins that I don’t have the name of yet.
Ways to establish temporary, shifting forms of organization; Ad hoc; Expeditious; Transient; Ephemeral.
Aleatory shuffles of past utterances/communications as a substitute for entertainment.
Now, What I Intended
I read about Long Photos in Boing Boing. Flickr is offering to host video now, but you’re limited to 90 seconds. So what kind of video will show up? Someone immediately brought up the film Koyaanisqatsi with its lovely shots of people trying to hold still. The casino waitresses always freaked me out - the neon is animated behind them. It’s got me thinking about what is static. I hate to watch video - I don’t like the demand on my attention. It would be cool if, in DVR fashion, the video only proceeded when it knew I was paying attention. On the other hand, information about when I pay attention to the video could be harvested, like those eye-tracking experiments that show people only skim webpages or stare at cleavage in commercials.
Once on an old Mac, I had a program that analyzed text statistically and produced randomized replicas. Anybody remember what this program was called? Some of the results were freakish. You could set the ‘cluster size’ and it must have produced a hash data structure for the probability of any word following another. I don’t know how the program was intended. As a joke on academic writing? It occurs to me that it might be very interesting to have that program now, and that it ought to be straightforward to hack one together in Ruby - with it’s scripting language facilities for reading text as tokens.
Anyway, you must have seen some “Tag Clouds” on web sites… But tagging requires a discipline I don’t always have. What could we infer about the word content of my blog entries? What sorts of associations or juxtapositions could we form from the disparate material of what I wrote. And what of a little two-column annotation?
Have you seen the sites where common terms have definition links, or pop up thought bubbles with more info? Those things annoy the hell out of me. I’m always hovering over them when I scroll the mouse wheel, and the browser suddenly engages in some heavy lifting and interface catatonia.
Okay, So I Can Come Up With Words
But that’s hardly enough for deep meaning. I’ve been thinking about better ways of marking the semantics and metadata of what I write than mere category tags. This is part of what I was thinking but didn’t write yesterday.
The history of thought is full of these techniques and technologies for organization. I should think about taking more advantage of these gimmies. I’ll always remember the TV series “The Day the Universe Changed”. He talked about monasteries hitting on the idea of putting a title on the spine of the book, instead of the first few words of the text. For a book like “A Tale of Two Cities”, maybe it wouldn’t matter. How many other books start out with the same few words?
Journal Trouble
When I sit down to write - and a lot of times this is on a bus when I get an idea - I can’t focus on one idea at a time; I get a sort of “round robin” experience. (Maybe I’ve finally gotten good at multitasking?) Once in a while I try using blank paper in a diagramming mode. At the computer, of course, I can just insert new text at any point - there’s nothing special about the last character position in a document - but still the majority of my keyboard writing is done in strict sequence with a few edits afterwards.
Well, Here’s A Perfect Example
I realized earlier that I put something in quotes, and that furthermore I use single and double quotes in a relative fashion - not so much to break the monotony, but to offer two levels of literalness. So if I’ve got real quotes of things people said, they get the double quote marks, and I save single quote marks for terminology/jargon/what-have-you style emphasis. I could use bold or italics for this too… But I stopped using bold here, and italics is for word stress in my mind. You ought to be able to catch the stresses without me pointing them out, and if you can’t then I’m not doing my job properly, so I do have feelings of guilt.
But I realized that I don’t have ways to shade degraded memories of what people said, or approximate reconstructions (see ‘cluster size’ above) of jargon that would be useless as search terms.
Posted in writing-craft, web-craft, programming, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:16:00 GMT
Every so often reading a book, I get the sensation that I am wasting my time. The ideas are there, but the prose is like low quality ore: As much as I want to consume the ideas and be transformed by them, it is taking a bit too long to accomplish.
I don’t get excited about the prospect of writing a lot of words myself - if that would be their fate. People certainly do get paid to write a number of words, and those words are printed in newspapers, magazines, and even books. But something about this process irks me. I know it’s not the best way to organize information. Of course, I have tasted databases. If it’s content management you’re interested in - the storage of knowledge in usable forms, maybe shelves full of books is not he way to go.
Somewhere I’ve said all this before. An equation or a graph is often far superior to a bunch of words for explaining a relationship. This is what most people do not understand about math education. An equation can be the most compact way to communicate, and if you don’t understand why, then most of the modern world is simply off limits to you.
I write a lot of words to give my brain some exercise. Not because I think many of those words will have any lasting value. This also means that I treat my writings with neglect or even contempt. They say ‘talk is cheap’, and I’m mildly embarrassed by the need to say anything at all. In a completely utilitarian world, there would be no expression - and that would sadden me - but getting bogged down with too much expression is also a problem.
My whole notion of learning is this: Somebody foists an opaque idea on you. You commence to analyze that idea - pull it apart. Then, you reassemble it into a kind of thought machine, and everybody else (who cares) can see that you make that thought machine work. When you reach the highest levels of this process, hardly anyone can present one of these opaque ideas anymore. Such an idea functions as a kind of shorthand for entire banks of knowledge you possess. Two scholars or scientists or engineers can therefore have whole discussions that are incomprehensible to bystanders. We presume a neutral ground - a ‘mainstream’ - where the majority of people reside because they simply do not possess a particular specialty. And for each specialty, there must be explainers - translators, if you will.
Do you think it will ever be possible to skip the learning part? Perhaps there is some ingenious way to enlist the knowledge of others without having to be consciously aware of doing it. How would the experts be rewarded in such a scenario? Consider the simple fact of computers - a machine replacement of what was once a human job.
Don’t you think it’s amusing that as an avid reader, I basically don’t understand why anybody would want to read so much? I read for pleasure - sometimes. But most of my reading is more mercenary, and too many words are an obstacle to that. Wordiness is a barrier.
Posted in writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:01:00 GMT
The other day, my sister told me about her impressions of the “Kindle”. It’s one more attempt at branding an e-book concept. She asked “What would it do to your future?”.
What future? She’s obviously talking about my career in bookselling. Which always leaves me cold. I love books and I love the written word. A lot of people just read magazines - which is nice if it’s seriously literary or technical. Because most aren’t. Once I heard somebody say “Books are a Technology, too”, and that stuck with me. Books as we know them are just one choice for creating, distributing and consuming the written word. Other viable choices exist, and a whole lot of unexplored possibilities, too. To me, the shame of it is that most of those possibilities will never be tried in a capital-driven world. The art world is something else, though.
Applying The OSI Network Model To Books
So it struck me last night on my way home from work: Look at a book. It has many conceptual layers. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear a lot of talk about atoms and bits. In “The Economics of Attention”, Lanham calls it “Stuff and Fluff”.
We’ve come some distance from the monks in the scriptorium copying volumes by hand. But even in recent decades most authors began with a manuscript. Maybe they used a typewriter, but still… Imagine Japanese, where word processors were a recent phenomenon and people sometimes still write with a brush(!).
I could get carried away and pull in all culture: Books - well, the writing contained within - can be any idea. They are the meta-idea if we choose that role for them. I’m already splitting into two here: I keep trying to pull the words off the page. I keep thinking about the bits and not the atoms. It’s a grand tendency these days to want to ignore the stuff and only worry about the fluff - as I’ve been reading lately.
Of course, if you’re in the business of transmitting ideas, you’re part of a network. Authors, Publishers, Booksellers: That’s you. You belong. And like computer networks upgrading from 10 Base T hubs to FDDI, or sending local filesystem packets in Internet Protocol on your LAN, or creating an Intranet to present the face of your business to its employees…
Maybe take a look at the OSI Model. If you can understand it, you’re in luck. I always felt that it captured something essential about communication in general.
OSI has two major components: an abstract model of networking (the Basic Reference Model, or seven-layer model) and a set of concrete protocols.
Sounds like another case of stuff and fluff to me. Or how about “Host Layers” vs. “Media Layers”?
I just know there’s a place in this model for everything you can experience in the production and consumption of a book. And the books on the shelf of any book store tend to be an eclectic lot. In some ways they are all alike, but in other ways they are very different. And any of them could be a PDF file somewhere on the Web. I personally find PDF files to be a roadblock on the way to reimagining what the written word can do.
Books don’t share the same typeface, paper stock, or binding. Book lovers have a romance of the physical - they take carnal pleasure in those details. They don’t tend to take pleasure in reading from a computer screen - and as the most avid book buyers, those are the people really making the decisions. Whatever electronic hand-held Kindleator somebody tries to foist upon them.
But those people will eventually roll over. Some of them will migrate early to the new formats and some of them will just fade away. More children will grow up conducting their business on hand held mini-screens, and their brains will develop differently from mine.
Books Can Be Heavy
As every store clerk who ever demanded to hold my backpack while I shopped will know - books are heavy. And I have a lot of them on me sometimes. I can never be quite sure what I’ll want to read during the day, so I bring a few selections.
And just like the iPod has obviated the need to truck around your record collection, I’m sure some day I will stop carrying around a bag of books. It’s not like I wanted to carry that weight around. I’d have preferred magazine copies of what I could reasonably expect to read from my books. Or even one sheet of electronic paper - but then there’s a problem…
While we’re on the subject: I don’t like book bindings. The only good thing about bound books is that they hold a bookmark. I had a comb-bound book once that I tried to read on the bus, and I kept losing the bookmark - a post-it helped, but I couldn’t get used to it. I witness a lot of people reading a newspaper or magazine on their commute to work. Do you ever wonder about simply podcasting all books? Pay somebody to read it once and store the reading? Audiobooks already do this, but a more aggressive campaign could be launched.
See how the book is arbitrary? Just one layer in a network? Losing the books and keeping the words would have an effect on the format of the words, wouldn’t you imagine? Just like a lot of other situations, there are businesses built on the book and consumers who think they couldn’t live without books. The structural integrity of my apartment can attest to that. But one day or another, each individual involved in the process is going to realize that the books weren’t ever the most important part. Just one container among many.
Posted in books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:55:00 GMT
Fiction Franchise Fanboy
I’ve been preoccupied with fictional reality in a franchise like Firefly. I can take a fan-boy obsession to it: The limited official material as a brake on variations, and the compulsive need to copy/counterfeit situations to garner authenticity. That somehow what we like about this fictional world is the limits. For example: The Brust book inspired a quote on BoingBoing from Wash the pilot flying re-entry. It’s like a running joke from the “Shindig” episode where he has to wrestle with the controls when he enters the atmosphere because they’re going too fast. In “Serenity” they repeat the joke of struggling with the ship on re-entry. Then Brust rhapsodizes from Wash’s point of view in chapter one of his book. It’s an interesting thread binding those works together. They fly re-entry a lot it would seem - I’m guessing at least once a week from the arrival estimates in the script - and trouble was only noteworthy once in each ‘format’.
And an Inkling of Theory
With nine major characters, a spaceship with plenty of quirks, multiple planets & moons, unsavory employers, and the interactions among them all, there is hardly any time to examine any of it. Some relationships are more important, and get more. That kind of time is inflated because the cutting from place to place that shows simultaneous activity does not interrupt the sense that characters not in view are still objectively engaged - i.e. They’re doing something, we just don’t know what it is. That’s why scenes establish continuing action - we count on it to keep developing while we go watch something else becuase we only need to see the results, not all the tedious detail.
Posted in film-and-TV, books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:06:00 GMT
I’ve been reading Steven Brust’s unauthorized Firefly fanfic novel. It’s reasonably good - the guy has written other fantasy books. That BoingBoing link makes a good point about human nature - we want characters to live on - but, suddenly I see the ‘problem’ of fiction in a new light…
Because Firefly officially consists of thirteen TV episodes and a feature film, there is not a lot of basis for writing a new story - And I should clarify: We don’t know what the creators had in mind. I immediately think of statistics and sampling: if the stories that would have been told by the ‘authors’ constitute a population, then the episodes actually produced are like a sample. And, unauthorized derivative works are like a statistic: an attempt to represent that population, but never an actual member. Of course, that’s where it gets fuzzy. Such as spin-offs and remixes, some authorized, some not. Oddly, that population and sample are not exactly what I had in mind for this metaphor…
As fantasy, Firefly episodes suggest an alternate world. Viewers (or in the case of Brust’s book, readers…) know that they won’t be able to see it all, but still sense a ‘virtual reality’ that could be revealed in an objective way. Of course, those people (an I’m one…) are just plain wrong. I enjoyed reading Brust’s Firefly novel, but it bothers me that out of necessity, he remixes discrete elements from the show - it’s a tightrope walk. One way to make characters seem familiar is to have them say things they said before. And major characters have said more things than minor characters. I’m back to my statistical sample idea: How many times have we seen the men with blue gloves hunting River in the TV episodes? They didn’t say much. What basis do we have for making up new things for them to say now? And all the while, hanging over us are the plans the author had for them to say more that we will never know.
In fact, reading Brust’s book reminds me of how I felt watching “Serenity”, the Firefly movie: New elements added, but some of the same scenes reenacted differently, salvaging material from earlier conflicts. Putting a lot of the same words into the same character’s mouths. I enjoyed it just fine, but I still noticed a patchwork quality - a last chance to include bits of what worked before. I don’t know why I’m being so negative - There are plenty of unexplored avenues in this fictional ‘verse that was created, but clearly they were fighting the last battle - trying to reiterate what many people had not caught the first time around.
How easy was it for the authors to write Firefly? I don’t have that experience, but I guess that there are two things going on in the process of writing TV fiction: The larger vision and the nitty-gritty. Vision isn’t goals and plans, but it helps to constrain them. Anything could happen, but it won’t. Many things are decided to be impossible at a single stroke (of genius?). I think vision is more or less settled by the time the writing starts. And the vision has to be communicated before the ‘real writing’ of details can start. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way - but I’m thinking of TV shows. The creator knows that they might last for decades, or they might get canceled in the first season. Vision is essential for the former, and painful for the latter. Vision will evolve if it needs to. After a while, the finished product feeds back to direct the vision. A feature film has different requirements - except for the de rigeur attitude about sequels in some film genres these days, or the detective novel series.
On Another Level, Altogether
My roommate came into the kitchen while I was reading the book in PDF form on my laptop screen. I like Phil, he’s not a bad guy, but this illustrates why I like to avoid people, and it reminds me of my recent conversations with my sister: He launches into an elaborate account of a date he has planned for Sunday night. The story is almost as complicated as the book I’m trying to read. I’ve been away at the laundromat for the past couple hours, so my mind was wandering, and this blog post is the direct result. I thought maybe the e-book format might not have been enough clue to him that I was busy, but that’s ridiculous: Phil just had to tell somebody, and I was the only one around. This is a quality that I find annoying in people. I want to be somewhat available, and I don’t want to completely shut out the benefits to be had from talking to people… But I also want to finish the things I set out to do - in this case reading a book. I had large segments of my evening condemned to doing laundry, folding laundry, making a rudimentary form of dinner, playing a little music and watching some TV (“House, MD” - starts in a few minutes and I plan to multi-task it with the laundry folding or the music playing.
I feel bad complaining about this, so maybe I shouldn’t. Phil was off to the sushi restaurant where he works for an evening of seating people and checking their coats. And, so his story didn’t eat up that much of my time. I’m chasing down my innermost feelings about human contact and self-discipline when I complain about this case.
Everybody is a little different. In my case, the interruption is not the worst part. The worst part is that it stings me to realize that he will launch into a story I didn’t ask for - and my reaction is to feel guilty that I didn’t ask. Ahh… that really takes me back. I bet I could find a few people who wish I had asked. Then again, there are people I would rather not ask for fear they won’t shut up, won’t reach the end. People are just tedious sometimes. I’m a good listener, usually. But the right person can abuse that. And now we’re back to Conversation: People with a story they simply must tell are annoying, and a threat to social life. There are other times and places to be that guy. And yet, the need is real enough. I’m not so different - volunteering information. Some days I even think that instead of having to ask people, they will take my lead, and volunteer too. Some days it even works.
Posted in ontology, film-and-TV, books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 23 Feb 2008 02:39:00 GMT
