Writing out to in

Katherine Min’s story The Liberation of a Face begins like this:

One day I stopped looking in the mirror. I was tired of my face, tired of finding fault with it, of wishing it looked a different way or trying to make it look a certain way. It was always just my face. So I stopped looking. And an odd thing happened. My face went away. It disappeared. Or at least the reflection of my face went away, the only means I had of regarding it.

This first paragraph is a tight jerk, and it ends with a simple knot, although the nature of the diappearance is questionable. The story is tight throughout, one of those stories you’d like to see continue because of the control the author has over the language and the way this control generates a sense of expectation sentence to sentence.

But what’s the idea here: what would happen if a woman did as this protagonist does? How would the image of the self be affected by such an intimate friend as the mirror and such a powerful metaphor? Min explores the question. “Once my face became unavailable to me, two things happened:I cared more about it; and caring for it became more difficult.” It’s not just the makeup and washing that become a problem absent the mirror, but the habitual recognitions we make of ourselves “through” the body, which, we know, we “feel” in the space around us.

It was torturous not to be able to confirm a clean appearance, a tidiness of one’s own features like a room well-swept. I did not like the idea that other people could look at me while I could not; that I could see their faces but not my own. I realized that to recognize oneself each morning anew was a kind of exercise in existence. You get up and see yourself in the mirror and you think, “Here I am.” It was reassuring, this ritual, the familiarity of self, conjured and reconjured like an auto-hypnotic spell. Without my face, I felt off-balance, tentative. I became obsessed by what I could not see.

Without the mirror–the face as one facet of self–do we lose a sense of being “in place” or one means of self-definition? Do we lose anchor? Without reflected “image,” are we potentially lost “in place,” in other words, become “out of place.”

Gradually I stopped caring what I looked like. What did it matter, if I had no one to tell me? I didn’t wash for days. I threw my cosmetics out. I barely brushed my hair. On the occasions when I did go out, to run an errand or to buy food, I noticed people shying away from me. Their own faces looked startled by mine, as though they were looking at a ghost. I did not bother to smile or frown, or to evidence any facial expression at all. If I could not see, why should they?

In this way I began to reinhabit the world. I presented myself to it as I saw myself in it, a blank, a cipher, a nonentity. A faceless woman. I no longer expected any sort of reaction at all when people happened to look upon me; I began no longer to require one. And the strange thing was that I became happy. I saw the faces of others, their looks of suffering and boredom, of longing and displeasure. I saw also–mostly on children–looks of delight and curiosity, of sadness and rebellion. And I knew that their faces were my own, that I had access to all of these ways of looking by means of what I saw.

The story ends with the woman witnessing her image, which she’s carried “like a relic” in a shop window for the first time after many years and her “delusion” is, as she says, “shattered.”

Unfortunatly, this discontinuity breaks the story. How, in other words, after so many years of going about, does the woman avoid her image for so long? In the story, Min writes, “And then one day, as I was hurrying down the street, I passed a shop window and caught a glimpse of my reflection.” In the window, she sees a “ruin.” Nevertheless, this “revealing” doesn’t square with the control the writer displays throughout. Again, how is it possible that the woman hadn’t happened to see herself in any other shop window, in passing, just by turning her head? This isn’t a nitpick; the story has relies on a steady loss/gain structure–she loses herself, steadies, then loses herself again. But how does she maintain the “delusion” for so long, years, without some measure of near miss: did she approach the store with her eyes shut?

The question of the self is an important idea in fiction because character sustains this kind of story. I enjoy Min’s writing but I find this little break in her story disappointing. I leave the story not buying it, after I bought it nearly all the way through.

Mobility design

Toni Gold, an associate with the nonprofit Project for Public Spaces, has an essay in the Sunday Courant on the matter of Route 44 in Avon, site of a recent mass dissaster involving a dump truck and numerous other cars and a bus. What to do is the subject of a lot of talk. Another article in the paper reported that authorities are seeking to push up measures to fix this strange passage between the hills and Hartford. They want to “expedite” widening the road and constructing escape ramps for trucks, from 7 years into the future to 3. This is what “expedite” means in Connecticut.

Gold, however, makes an argument against “widening” and suggest that “narrowing” is the better way to go, including doing away with stop lights and adding roundabouts. I agree. There was one particular highway in southern New Mexico, US 82, which climbs several thousand feet from Alamogordo, home of Holoman Airforce base, into the Sacramento Mountains. It was an alternative to travel by train on the wooden trestles of the time. The highway has numerous escape ramps and in some stretches is only two lanes wide. It works pretty well, despite the traffic.

Gold’s main point is to design for safety not speed, to design with counterintuitive principles for the goal of “mobility,” which, in conventional definitions, puts the premium on wide, straight, and speed as criteria of deisign. “A road diet,” Gold writes, “is in order for Route 44: fewer lanes, narrower lanes, a median strip planted with the biggest trees possible and roundabouts at the two death-trap intersections to replace the traffic signals that are part of the problem.”

This is an important idea. The job, of course, will be to convince administrators to think deeply about design as intimately tied to human space and human life.

Facade and “realism”

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern’s Facade has an interesting and compelling way of drawing you into the lives of Trip and Grace, the two principle character’s of their situational sim. Ultimately, the concept is wonderful, but it’s also tricky and frustrating. You play the role of an old friend come for a visit and find yourself in a wreck of a relationship. The problem with the relationship is simple: both Trip and Grace feel as if they are not living their “true” lives. Are they mere decorators; have they failed at designing their lives or take the right path? It could be your job to see them through to the truth, whatever that truth may be: is Grace an artist? Is Trip enlightened? Should they stay together or find freedom on their own? Are they lying to themselves and to you? Are these lies healthy or caustic?

The compelling part is to dig deep enough into Grace and Trip to find some resolution to their situation or to learn “the heart of the matter.” And so you keep coming back to their amazingly liquid environment to interact, to try different words, gestures, questions, and phrases. I keep returning with question as to the extent of the vocabulary the “system” will respond to. The frustration comes when you feel that you’re not being listened to or that the AI engine’s direction takes off without any ability to restrain it and that indeed words that you think are perfectly appropriate for response, such as “love” and “explain” seem to be unrecognizable. In a conversation with old friends–whatever the situation–you can direct comments or questions to an individual, but in Facade it appears that “directing” a question to Grace can lead to a “question” to Trip, one that you hadn’t intended (this kills the drama), and this makes for odd and flat and bewildering outcomes. So you close and come back and try something else.

In one run, I asked about a sculpture and Trip wondered why I was criticizing him. In another, I asked for water, breaking a scenario that would’ve led to an argument about making drinks. This led to a screaming match that seemed to come out of nowhere, causeless (a drama killer).

But I keep coming back. In another session, Grace finally came to the conclusion that she was an artist and that was that. But the realization was “flawed.” I didn’t generate “the outcome” and Grace continually referred to things that I had not remarked on, such as the view outside their apartment and some unstated agreement I had supposedly made on her behalf (against Trip). But I keep coming back.

In another scenario, playing the role of “Carol,” I attempted to comfort Grace but she seems to want to take this as flirtation. The AI forces a flirtation scenario so forcefully that Grace’s reaction is “no longer” dramatic but predictable (Grace will almost always assume that if you have chosen a woman’s persona at the start of the drama, Trip must have latent feelings for you) and this generative scenario, when it arises, makes you shake your head, visualizing the machine.

This is both the failure of the simDrama and its saving grace. I have it in my head that if I learn to be a “better” friend, then Trip and Grace will learn from my best wishes. Grace and Trip are strange, just like friends in need. And I think I should keep trying.

Does Facade generate dramatic outcomes that give a sense of closure? My answer is no. The eventualities don’t surprise, and the reactions of Grace and Trip to your interactions come off as programmed. As you interact you feel a part of the scene and not a part of the scene. You are there and not there. Still, this may be my mistake.

Facade is made for experiment, for different approaches, for answers beyond what may be obvious, but I have yet to fall into the propensity to snap or call Trip a butthead or Grace a lesbian just to see what will happen (which seems to be a favorite approach on discussion boards). I think this not only diminishes Andrew and Michael but also Grace and Trip. I don’t want to do this, although I made lots of mistakes at the start by unintentionally poking Trip in the eye before learning how to use the arrow keys to enter the apartment.

I come back to see if I can keep them together or learn something new from them (how have parents pressured them; is sex an issue?)–I think I did, by drawing Grace and Trip into a situation where one came to aide of the other and I as Brenda was dismissed (but always to the same eject)–but why couldn’t I have stayed and enjoyed some happier resolution in this specific case?

As a look into a “holodeck of sorts,” a term I use with inexactitude, Facade fascinates–the possibilities that this digital stage opens up are incredibly interesting. And I look forward to more approaches like this, but it will be a long hard road until a true sense of meaningful “interaction” surfaces so that an avatar, such as Al, can get beyond sensing the machine mind behind the characters with whom you interact.

I’m still looking for a real sense of “choice” and “causality,” for the mobility to “shape” the outcome, in Facade. Should I expect Grace and Trip to learn from “me”? At this point this “learning” has yet to surface. But I keep coming back. I wonder how deep I can go.

To enjoy the drama yourself, you can download Facade here.

Other Selves and Space

You see, we all have a second life, and we bottle it up in our fantasies and stop time.

When a cute waitress brushes your hand as she hands you the check, when a glowing mom and dad walk by hand-in-hand with their children as precious as lambs or a Jaguar glides down the street, a glimmering metal beast, you slip into fantasy, into your second life.

These images of fantasy are powerful. And frozen. We collect them and collect them until our fantasy life is a junk drawer of unrelated things.

In Second Life (link mine), these bits and pieces come back to life, tangible and in motion. It’s like opening that junk drawer of experience and suddenly realizing you have all the pieces you need to build a moon rocket or make cheese.

From David Thomas’ Architecture and Vice in The Escapist.

Priorities

There are times when you have to trust that the government knows what it’s doing. When those times will come, I have no idea.

Various agencies, including the UN, have been crying for help in Niger and other places (including our own cities and schools) for long enough to have been heard by countries with the wherewithall to put the thumb to some portion of the cracking dike. The president is supportive of Intelligent Design (now that’s news), yet people who should know better can’t intelligently design some means of providing food to the hungry (and gifts of wonder to systems in bad need of repair). Let’s give tax dollors to profitable energy companies (how many times do I have to pay the power company?) so that they can profit more in my name. Sure, it’s a Christian country. When it’s easy.

Shame on us.

Short Forms

I had the nice pleasure of viewing Vicky Jensen’s oddly sensual short film Family Tree on Tuesday in the company of the great John Timmons.

The short film form, much like the short story, is intense and unforgiving. I can’t think of a portion of Jensen’s film that lagged, stumbled, or paused for something better to come along, such as a long car chase that “makes” the film worth it or that one dazzling shot that will make the audience go “wow, I’m glad I paid 8 bucks for this.” The film, which follows a couple’s family gathering and draws its energy from “those truths of family history and story” every “spouse” marries into and must learn to live with or understand, was consistently energetic and visually intense, every word, phrase, and transition necessary to the “whole.”

Photographic language or composition was important to the film’s sense of pace, scene, and narrative shape. One scene struck me in this context: the simple flow of water over vegetables from the tap in slow motion and the dance of “family” in the kitchen–the connection to flow (narrative), to watching for those things we often miss in the slightest human and phenomenological gesture–all this amassing more power than than motorcycles zooming through the canyons of a matrix.

What’s the point: the short form covers lots of ground in a short space. The form is not about “making it short”; it’s not about “attentions”; it’s about shaping narrative by shaping time.

Joe Writer and the Publishing Game

Josh Radke and I have been going on about issues in publishing and the markets, a topic we will be talking about at our upcoming Narrative’s meeting. The conversation has looked like this:

I agree that assigning blame doesn’t help anyone involved. I thought the problem was the Agents. Having read that thread (http://www.sfreader.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1313), it’s clear to me that the problem is largely Ingram and their almost monopoly.

..I don’t know if I can agree that people are reading more. At least in my generation (and those that are following), many of us are much more interested in the quick fix of a movie or game for their entertainment than in finding a good book. I can’t say I blame them. When that thread states that the majority of new fiction out there is saturated with politics and multiculturalism, they’re right–at least by perception. That comment I posted to your blog comes into play here on the grounds that readers under 30 are tainted by the the fiction we were force-fed in school. We think that it is a representation of what is on the bookshelves, and so many don’t even bother to try and find thee diamonds in the rough. If there were more Dan Browns and Harry Turtledoves allowed in school curriculums, schools might make some headway. And many others just simply don’t have the time in this labour-intensive, corporate society.

..More people are writing? You bet, and I suspect that this trend is probably tied to self-publishing and the internet. And the more people that write and think they can be published, the more we hear about rejection letters and scams and the impossibility of getting published. However, I don’t think the issue is Joe Writer getting rejected because there is no room at the inn. It’s that Joe Writer is getting rejected without being given a chance because he’s being compared to Dan Brown or James Lee Burke or Robert Jordan. And Joe Writer realizing after more rejections that he can’t be Joe Writer is he wants to be published and on a shelf at a major bookstore. Because apparently the only book-types that are worth promoting are the ones that are proven and politically correct. I’m sure you’ve noticed the amount of “trials of a young wizard” books that are popping up everywhere. This same trend is dominating a movie industry where there is no such this as an “original screenplay”.

Writers aren’t suposed to have the impression they have to pattern themselves after a successful authour or story. And literature isn’t something that is meant to be clones or grown in a winter greenhouse. By telling writers this is what they have to do, writing becomes a science and not an art.. and writing as a science is betrayal of the art of the worst kind.

As I see it at the moment, the solution is the continued success of small presses and their distributors. Small presses are still willing to take a gamble on new writers. Independent bookstores like to promote local authours, and consequentially, local authours find it easier to get a booksigning with an indy bookstore. Self-publishing also figures into this equation. And this kind of grassroots action is how all successful “revolutions” start.

My arguments about the state of publishing in the United States may be flawed, but I don’t really see a question of altruism or public service in publishing; nor do I see why Joe Writer would need to write derivatively in order to see himself in print. I see the main job of “publishing” concerns as that of “selling” books not “publishing” them. In the markets, print books are a commodity that must be sold not just published, since publishing doesn’t necessarily “imply” money changing hands but it does necessitate a “reader,” whereas “book stores” need to stay in business somehow. Somehow the question comes to a basic issue of fairness toward authors. But to do “houses” owe Joe Writer a hearing? My conclusion is “no.” Joe Writer,who’s a guy with an unpublished novel, needs to find some way to get his book to a reading public but if he wants to “sell” his novel he needs to play the market game. That’s my opinion.

But the original issue came from this focused question by Josh: “Are books and literary reading becoming obsolete?”

My answer is absolutely not. As far as I know, people are still interested in reading poetry, fiction, and all kinds of things from the diversity of presses out there. But another way of risking a question is to ask how reading habits are changing such that when we ask “Are people still reading” we negociate what we mean by “reading” in this sense.

A lot of what I’ve written here is off the top of my head and is in no way intended as factual or even valid as inference. But I think that a lot of this has to do with what we mean when we ask Joe Churchgoer if he’s religious and he says, “Sure am. In fact I have a devil worship meeting tonight. Would you like to join me?”

Reading the tea leaves, 9

I referred to the 24 hr classroom in this post, but I think this notion of “learning time” needs further explaining because I don’t want to imply that I want people to be “in school” for 24 hrs. Far from it. Thus the title of this post gets archived under the “on reading” series.

The explanation is relevant to “schooling” and time. In an older essay, I put out some ideas on computer conferencing as an aid in “extending” the classroom beyond its traditional scope, playing with the idea that the square classroom limits rather than enhances intellectual pursuit. I find it absurd that we expect students to learn what can be learned about a subject in 15 weeks, four to six hours per week, especially when the “ethic” of learning is really about the grade and the credit, which amounts to equating a grade with a commodity. Most of the students in my classes–not all, mind you, and not always to an absolute degree–really only want to get through the course with a B or better and then move on to the next credit, regardless of the subject. Students do the best they can to “get” the grade they want not to “learn” the material which is the best way perhaps of making the grade. In graduate school I never worried about a grade because I was so involved in showing my teachers that I knew what I was talking about.

In all of this, I blame no one, and maybe I’m being presumptuous. But I talk to too many teachers who lament “how” their students navigate higher education, and I lament it myself. Blame isn’t the point. Typically, we’re thrilled with the “personhood” of students–that is, as people they’re just as interesting, smart, and likeable as any I’ve known.

First, I read the environment and the history students bring with them. Did anyone like school as a child? Maybe the early grades, when recently everything is colors, playtime, and nice posters (note that I’ve followed my daughter’s education fairly closely and know pretty well what’s going on now in her high school. It was never this way for me, posters, play, and fun: I always hated school and would never want to be “young” again). For the yunguns, though, “school” will “happen.”

Attitudes aside, the very presence of “school” in one’s history is an incredible influence on basic human experience of the world. Not to beat this to death, but I remember driving home from a college course just after graduating high school and having this realization: “It’s 10 AM, September, and I’m driving home. What the hell am I supposed to be doing with myself?” (I had been trained that from 8 to 3 I should be in school, the prime destination of youth in our culture.)

More importantly, early school experience “shapes” how we think about a “learning space” in general, “learning space” defined as a “place” where one is supposed to learn, and any place “beyond” or “outside” that “room” or “hall” is preferrable, typically taking the shape of “summer” time when no “teacher” could force me to work on vocabulary. “Summertime” however always came with reminders that “school” was just around the corner.

In this context, what I’d like to see is “school” blurred away as a shaper of human experience with more of a trend toward intensified learning. Practically speaking, this can be incorporated into college because college is and has been still a “matter of choice.” Compulsory education calls for a rigidity to its structure which forms a burden on learning. The more colleges act “compulsory,” the more they will take on the shape of secondary education, impeding education, in the sense that Blake judged hindrances–as in

I went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

As I build my reading list, I’m thinking about the effect of ancillary texts; how do I create a list that will lead to the building of another list by the reader. We come away from “school” with a body of knowledge and attitudes. But does this body suggest a hypertextual tree of life? Do we leave high school ready to add to what we know, to seek out “more” or to change it? Or do we leave relieved, ready for something different, wanting to forget the past? An excellent read should be like an excellent fajita, an “experience” you want to pursue and refashion and consider on your own. Personally, one of the interesting things about my memory is the smell of roasting chiles (chee-less: the pronounciation has a lot to do with the smell and the taste in my memory). Some readers think that there may be some knowledge out there that they need to “get,” some fruit that they have yet to experience, that will help them understanding things better. It may be that, as Plato would say, it’s the pursuit of one thing to the next, a building on the first “discrete/non-discrete” element due to the second that adds a little color to the fruit.

You read a poem. Then a second. The first unfolds a little more. The first adds to the second. Then comes the third and the first and second are dashed against the rocks.

Sounds like New Media learning

From Businessweek online

B-schools are are now trying to go beyond the single elective in product design by linking up with design schools. One of best programs in the country is the Integrated Product Development track for MBAs at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. Designers, engineers, and marketers mix it up in the classroom to develop prototypes of useful products that are commercially viable. MBAs more accustomed to financial analysis and bottom-line issues are pushed to think more creatively. “Innovation is critical in management. You have to innovate to compete and survive,” says Carnegie Mellon Dean Kenneth B. Dunn.

I’d suggest that an important issue here is where to start this learning. Could be in Tunxis’ New Media Program. Here we know that solving problems “is” a creative act. Poets and photographers do it all the time. Just watch Congress try to throw bricks at stone.

Guardfields in eduhypertexts

The fall semester will see me teaching two lit courses online, one straight on and the other as a hybrid course, where students meet with me once a week and make other time for meeting online in the foums of WebCT Vista. This may be my last online course for a while. I’ve taught online courses now going on close to five years and have become fatigued (“Captain, I grow fatigued”) with the environment. The next few years will see a concentration on intensifying the semester by using tech to “grow” the learning space beyond the “arbitrary” classroom. I keep going back to what my friends Larry Johnson and Robert Wren called the 24 hour classroom back in the late eighties.

One approach I want to try is having students talk about a piece of music online and in this way acquaint themselves with the Vista forums and the general geography of the learning space. Once they’ve done some work with the music, considering the lyrics and the phenomenon of music as something to “discuss” and argue about (much as we will do with the literature, then other areas of the course will open using Vista’s release tools.

This got me to thinking about guardfields in Storyspace and their significance to the experience of hypertext. The release tools in Vista behave like guardfields in that they restrict certain kinds of information from appearing in the new media space given a variety of conditions, much like levels in a computer game, which, until certain conditions are met, will open in all their glory. Pedagogically, this is one way of assessing a person’s path through the material of a college course.