Scott Perkins's Blog, page 3
March 28, 2015
The Stories We Tell
Last month, the Engineer and I were sitting at our local pub waiting for dinner. She was knitting something infinitely complex out of silk and glass beads and I was reading aloud to her from Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin. If you haven't read it (and I honestly think that you should) it begins with a runaway horse, loose on the streets of New York City near the turn of the last century. It's a beautiful piece of writing and I quite enjoyed reading it aloud to really experience the poetry of the piece.
Then our food arrived and I put the book down because books and burgers don't mix.
Putting it down on the table, I noticed that the couple at the next table had been listening to me read. Not because I was reading loudly -- I was barely audible above the basketball game playing on the TV nearby -- but I like to think it was because people instinctively like being told stories.
That moment touched me in a way that made me pause despite the meal getting cold in front of me to take stock of this thing that we do. Telling stories is a vital part of who I am. I've often been told that I seem to think in anecdotes, and it's not far off. I use stories as a way for me to absorb and understand the world. I look for the beginnings, middles, and ends and attempt as best I can to celebrate the stories unfolding all around me.
Sharing them -- mine or anyone else's -- is a tradition that goes back to the handprints on the cave wall and probably further even than that. And reading aloud to my wife is something I don't do as often as I used to (we shared the entire Harry Potter series this way) and it's something I should do more often.
Yesterday Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers and SciShow announced a new convention entirely devoted to the power and magic of stories. That's the actual copy from their Facebook page, by the way: "created to celebrate the power and magic of story-telling."
I bought my ticket immediately because efforts like this a true and noble causes. I won't be a presenter, though I offered myself as a volunteer. Which is nice in a way, because when you're a presenter at conventions you often get just a keyhole view of the convention and I really love the idea of spending a chilly fall weekend in a crowd who is excited about celebrating storytelling. I mean, just imagine it: an entire convention center filled to the rafters with devotees of the vehicle we use for passing on our culture and the empathy that comes from imagining ourselves into other lives, that which in the end most makes us human.
Who doesn't want to walk among that crowd? How does it get better than that?
Anyway, I hope to see you there.
March 26, 2015
Throwback Thursday: Why I'm not worried about the Generation of the Book
This post was first published 24 April 2012 in a slightly different version.
The other day, I was wandering aimlessly through the campus of Pacific Lutheran University (these things happen) so of course, I stopped and wandered into their bookstore.
As I walked in, I noticed that a longstanding prediction of mine was coming true: All of the displays were YA books. Every last one of them. Down the aisles, they were selling required reading and textbooks, but the endcaps and the tables were piled with books that are generally considered "Young Adult" titles.
It hit me: The Harry Potter Generation has taken over.
(Cue instant graying of hair.)
My generation, "Generation X" has many names. We're GenX, the MTV Generation,the 13th Generation, and my favorite from France: "Génération Bof". (Bof means "Whatever".) Whatever you call us, we are the children who cut our teeth on Sesame Street and the Electric Company. Our childhoods brought us Star Wars, ET, Indiana Jones, and MTV. We sent MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice up the pop charts and turned around a few years later and supplanted them with Pearl Jam and Nirvana. And we have been told that we're the last generation to learn cursive script and the last to learn to type on a typewriter.
We are a disparate lot. We read, sure, but it wasn't a Thing with us. And I certainly don't recall us riding into college on a wave of our own literary tastes. In fact, we arrived and smacked into a wall of our parents' literary tastes and were ordered to climb it.
This seems better to me somehow.
And although the generational naming thing is more a product of news headlines than science, after us came what is often called "Generation Y" who are most noted for growing up never having known a world without an internet. These are the so-called "digital natives" the culture of the electronic. Yet I am inclined to think they might more properly be known as the generation that put their foot down and demanded their own literary canon.
For all the pissing and moaning about a generation that doesn't recognize originality, or is addicted to plagiarism, the Millenials (as we're calling them at the moment, apparently) are carving original niches out of every genre. It is a generation that breathed life into Tumblr and Youtube, and gave backbone to Steampunk.
Is it a mashup culture? Certainly, but culture has always been about the mashup. The Lord of the Rings is a mashup of Arthurian Legend, Norse Sagas and the Bible. I mentioned this in my post about SOPA: Our society's conversations have always been awash with quotes from Rhett Butler not giving a damn to Indiana Jones making it up as he went along. Heck, Harold Bloom reckons (and not entirely without merit) that most of what we consider to be modern and cosmopolitan ideas including most of what we know of humor and humanity were cribbed directly from William Shakespeare.
Do that sort of thing these days, and you would be hearing from Master Shakespeare's solicitor.
But this is not -- as is often alleged -- just a culture of the cribnote. It is also a creative culture, and dare I say, a literary culture all its own. The digital natives are restless and they are reinventing the world around them, and no matter how many fingers the RIAA and the MPAA summon to shore up the dam, they are pulling it down and revealing the rusted scaffolding beneath.
They have taken up the means of production, bypassed the gatekeepers, and flooded the world in an ocean of content. A vast, raging sea of unorganized, unedited, undisciplined content. It's raw, and unfettered, and as like to shock you as it is to enlighten you. And much of it that is good will be lost by the sheer size of the pile that you have to shift through in hopes of finding anything.
But it has always been that way, hasn't it? The chaff falls away under the millstones of the market and we find the wheat... eventually.
I hope that is still so. I really do. Because most of what we know of literature grew up within those protective walls that we've been so steadily tearing down. And wouldn't it be the cruelest trick of all if a generation of books manages to accidentally kill them as a medium by making it impossible for their creators to survive on their proceeds?
Too cynical? Yes. Yes indeed, Scott, too cynical by far.
At least I have reason to hope so.
Books will survive. Of course they will. As an object, as a symbol, as a medium for storytelling, as a bundle of bytes and bits, they have a devoted following among even the youngest readers. The average book blogger on Tumblr is in their mid twenties and more are arriving all the time. There is a whole world of young people moving up through the ranks, struggling to find their voice, to tell their tales. The formats change and evolve and storytelling trundles ever onward, reinvented, rehashed, retold by each succeeding generation.
Want proof that literature and books in general will survive? Walk into any bookstore (assuming you can find one) and ask the booksellers how large the Young Adult section was ten years ago. Then go look at how big it is now.
And this is not just shelf after shelf of trifling teenage Drama, Harry Potter ripoffs, and vampires. Some of the most exciting and innovative writers currently operating are shelved there: David Levithan, M.T. Anderson, Marcus Zusak, Maureen Johnson, Neil Gaiman, Laurie Halse Anderson, Dave Eggers, and John Green to name just a few. And their fans are motivated, engaged, fired-up... about books. Don't believe me? Let me Google that for you. Truly, an amazing and literate generation came of age waiting in the lines outside the bookstore at 1:00 am, parents and children huddled together in the cold, counting down the minutes to the next Harry Potter book's release.
Welcome. You've made it. And you've made it your own.
If Rowling taught us nothing else, she taught us that storytelling will out. Where stories need telling, there will be a place for people who know how to tell them. Will we be able to support ourselves on the proceeds? Only time will tell, but for my money, the Generation of the Book will not lightly relinquish their stories, nor those who tell them.
The other day, I was wandering aimlessly through the campus of Pacific Lutheran University (these things happen) so of course, I stopped and wandered into their bookstore.
As I walked in, I noticed that a longstanding prediction of mine was coming true: All of the displays were YA books. Every last one of them. Down the aisles, they were selling required reading and textbooks, but the endcaps and the tables were piled with books that are generally considered "Young Adult" titles.
It hit me: The Harry Potter Generation has taken over.
(Cue instant graying of hair.)
My generation, "Generation X" has many names. We're GenX, the MTV Generation,the 13th Generation, and my favorite from France: "Génération Bof". (Bof means "Whatever".) Whatever you call us, we are the children who cut our teeth on Sesame Street and the Electric Company. Our childhoods brought us Star Wars, ET, Indiana Jones, and MTV. We sent MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice up the pop charts and turned around a few years later and supplanted them with Pearl Jam and Nirvana. And we have been told that we're the last generation to learn cursive script and the last to learn to type on a typewriter.
We are a disparate lot. We read, sure, but it wasn't a Thing with us. And I certainly don't recall us riding into college on a wave of our own literary tastes. In fact, we arrived and smacked into a wall of our parents' literary tastes and were ordered to climb it.
This seems better to me somehow.
And although the generational naming thing is more a product of news headlines than science, after us came what is often called "Generation Y" who are most noted for growing up never having known a world without an internet. These are the so-called "digital natives" the culture of the electronic. Yet I am inclined to think they might more properly be known as the generation that put their foot down and demanded their own literary canon.
For all the pissing and moaning about a generation that doesn't recognize originality, or is addicted to plagiarism, the Millenials (as we're calling them at the moment, apparently) are carving original niches out of every genre. It is a generation that breathed life into Tumblr and Youtube, and gave backbone to Steampunk.
Is it a mashup culture? Certainly, but culture has always been about the mashup. The Lord of the Rings is a mashup of Arthurian Legend, Norse Sagas and the Bible. I mentioned this in my post about SOPA: Our society's conversations have always been awash with quotes from Rhett Butler not giving a damn to Indiana Jones making it up as he went along. Heck, Harold Bloom reckons (and not entirely without merit) that most of what we consider to be modern and cosmopolitan ideas including most of what we know of humor and humanity were cribbed directly from William Shakespeare.
Do that sort of thing these days, and you would be hearing from Master Shakespeare's solicitor.
But this is not -- as is often alleged -- just a culture of the cribnote. It is also a creative culture, and dare I say, a literary culture all its own. The digital natives are restless and they are reinventing the world around them, and no matter how many fingers the RIAA and the MPAA summon to shore up the dam, they are pulling it down and revealing the rusted scaffolding beneath.
They have taken up the means of production, bypassed the gatekeepers, and flooded the world in an ocean of content. A vast, raging sea of unorganized, unedited, undisciplined content. It's raw, and unfettered, and as like to shock you as it is to enlighten you. And much of it that is good will be lost by the sheer size of the pile that you have to shift through in hopes of finding anything.
But it has always been that way, hasn't it? The chaff falls away under the millstones of the market and we find the wheat... eventually.
I hope that is still so. I really do. Because most of what we know of literature grew up within those protective walls that we've been so steadily tearing down. And wouldn't it be the cruelest trick of all if a generation of books manages to accidentally kill them as a medium by making it impossible for their creators to survive on their proceeds?
Too cynical? Yes. Yes indeed, Scott, too cynical by far.
At least I have reason to hope so.
Books will survive. Of course they will. As an object, as a symbol, as a medium for storytelling, as a bundle of bytes and bits, they have a devoted following among even the youngest readers. The average book blogger on Tumblr is in their mid twenties and more are arriving all the time. There is a whole world of young people moving up through the ranks, struggling to find their voice, to tell their tales. The formats change and evolve and storytelling trundles ever onward, reinvented, rehashed, retold by each succeeding generation.
Want proof that literature and books in general will survive? Walk into any bookstore (assuming you can find one) and ask the booksellers how large the Young Adult section was ten years ago. Then go look at how big it is now.
And this is not just shelf after shelf of trifling teenage Drama, Harry Potter ripoffs, and vampires. Some of the most exciting and innovative writers currently operating are shelved there: David Levithan, M.T. Anderson, Marcus Zusak, Maureen Johnson, Neil Gaiman, Laurie Halse Anderson, Dave Eggers, and John Green to name just a few. And their fans are motivated, engaged, fired-up... about books. Don't believe me? Let me Google that for you. Truly, an amazing and literate generation came of age waiting in the lines outside the bookstore at 1:00 am, parents and children huddled together in the cold, counting down the minutes to the next Harry Potter book's release.
Welcome. You've made it. And you've made it your own.
If Rowling taught us nothing else, she taught us that storytelling will out. Where stories need telling, there will be a place for people who know how to tell them. Will we be able to support ourselves on the proceeds? Only time will tell, but for my money, the Generation of the Book will not lightly relinquish their stories, nor those who tell them.
