Simon Groth's Blog, page 8

Guided By Something (Celeste)

Two previous posts looked at the basic string arrangement for this song, then bulked out the sound with textures. Now we add the last piece of the puzzle for this little instrumental section with a couple of guitars and a celeste.

I love the celeste. It turns up in a few especially beautiful songs (Just Trying to Be by Jethro Tull and Trouble with Dreams by The Eels) and, although it certainly has a prettiness to it, there's also something slightly clunky in its sound, especially when you can hear the hammers moving around inside it. Of course the one you can hear below is not a real celeste, but rather from a digital keyboard.

What did you expect? What am I, made of celestes?

The melody riffs off the song's chord progression, creating a nice little dance around the guitars' trudge. 

And there's also my old friend distortion fading in towards the end, a kind of growing menace in the sound that prefaces a rip from sweet to jagged that follows. 

Guided By Something (Strings & Choir)

The last post in this series looked at the string arrangement in this section of the song.

Now, we add a more traditional synthetic strings and choir sound that fleshes out the original trio arrangement. Certainly cheesy, but good for building a bigger sound with texture. At a certain point, with enough instrument layering, the cheesiness fades away and what you end up with is something thicker and richer than the original trio of instruments. 

At least that's what I tell myself.

Eschewing the besser brick

I recently took a long break: essentially a whole month where I wrote next-to-nothing. In my defence, I was travelling the whole time so opportunities to tinker with text were few and far between copious eating, drinking, jet lag and general fun. I had all good intentions. I lugged my notebook computer everywhere with me, but it was used more for leeching wifi and farting around on the internet than on any grand wordage.

None of this I found particularly shocking. As much as I love writing, it’s still work and I don’t take holidays in order to work.

What really surprised me wasn’t the change in my writing habits; it was the radical change in my reading habits. This was the first time I have travelled without at least one paperback in my luggage. I didn’t bother with a dedicated ereader either. For that whole month, it was just me and the phone. This was a conscious decision to travel as light as possible and it had an intriguing side effect. I didn’t read any long-form texts the whole time I was away. No novels. No fiction at all, actually. And no non-fiction narrative. Just a seemingly endless stream of short, topical articles.

While I had loaded a couple of novels and long-form texts on my device, when the time came to actually read, I bypassed the iBooks, Kobo, and Kindle apps and I headed straight for Flipboard—an app that displays web site feeds in a magazine-style layout.

One of the most interesting outcomes from this inadvertent experiment is that I can’t really tell you much about what I was reading in all that time. Short form is convenient and certainly has its place, but, for me at least, it doesn’t get inside my head. It doesn’t stay with me. Like junk food and reality television, it was almost all filler.

Now, some of the this could be down to habit. The longest pieces I’ve ever read on my phone would struggle to reach 10,000 words. For longer texts at home, I turn to paper or to larger screens. In my mind, a four-inch screen can’t seem to accommodate a grand narrative.

But things may change. One book I’ve been meaning to read for some time is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I even spotted it in a bookshop on my travels with the intention of buying it. Then I picked the thing up. Clocking at more than a thousand pages in full trade paperback size, calling this book a doorstop seems a bit understated. There was no way I was going to travel with this besser brick. So I walked away and kept reading topical pieces on politics, technology, music and publishing, or whatever it was I was uncritically ingesting.

When I recently caught up with if:book founder Bob Stein, he said something that has resonated ever since: ‘The decision to go to print will become a purely aesthetic decision.’

At first I took this to mean an aesthetic decision on the part of the publisher or author, a serving suggestion if you like. But of course the choice of format should rightly be with the reader. We all read differently and our preferences will change depending not only our circumstances, but also on the kind of book we want to read.

So I’ve returned to David Foster Wallace and I’ve loaded Infinte Jest on the very same four-inch screen from my travels. Whether I’ll get through it all without breaking out the tablet or the paperback, only time will tell.

 

Thanks for the Memes

For the last few months at if:book, we have been collecting long-term memories: the moments, thoughts, objects and feelings that stay with you over time, whether significant, funny, strange or simply mundane. And I have been overwhelmed at the generosity of our contributors and their stories:

All my old memories seem to be in black and white, like my dreams. But my oldest memory is of walking down a stone path along the side of a house wearing a white dress with black polka dots. End memory.

Memory Makes Us is a new project that explores the role of memory in writing and reading and highlights the frequently transient nature of books, whether on paper or screen. Over the next year or, so the project will explore how memories become stories and how stories are remembered, all the while playing with creative works that are more ephemeral than they might at first seem.

The first stage of the project culminates on the 9th of July with a live story by celebrated author for paper and screen, Kate Pullinger.

Kate will use the collected memories—and a stream of short-term memories via social media—as source material to compose a new work before an audience at the State Library of Queensland.

The clown make-up faded by sea and sun. The hot, soft cotton of my Mack truck teeshirt. The cowgirl attitude, mock-riding Kingbo the faithful Golden Lab. The strength in my thigh muscles, ready to play and, when necessary, to fight.

The live element of Memory Makes Us explores writing as performance. Will the interaction between writer and audience influence the work that emerges? Is interacting with a live audience different to online readership? Will we have to resort to sports-style commentary with a word-count scoreboard? All will be revealed.

If you haven’t submitted your memory yet there are a few days left before submissions close. Who knows? Your memory might just appear between the lines of a new work by Kate Pullinger.

And if you can’t make it to the library to see Kate in person, you can follow her progress from the if:book web site. Be quick about it, though. The story won’t be available forever and it may disappear before you can commit it to memory.

 

More information on Memory Makes Us is available from the if:book web site.

Kate Pullinger writes Memory Makes Us, a live story on 9th July 2013 at the State Library of Queensland.

The Story of the Data

And you thought it was just a book.

If you’ve been watching the if:book web site, you’ll have noticed we started counting down again. Sigh. It seems like only yesterday, I was counting down the minutes to the 24-Hour Book and writing in WQ about freight trains and so on. Willow Patterns is the subject of this year’s count down, a project that will provide a glimpse into how the 24-Hour Book was made and, more broadly, a sense of how much creative and editorial work goes into the creation of any book.

Featuring work from Nick Earls, Steven Amsterdam, and Krissy Kneen and others, the 24-Hour Book proved a great success, but the project generated much more than just 142 pages of finished text. Every edit, annotation and interaction with the online audience was time-stamped, captured and stored in an online database.

This is where Willow Patterns comes in. This project opens the book’s complete database, creating a web site that will let you browse through every version of every story. It’s fascinating stuff. Already I’ve spent hours trawling through page after page, scrolling through the numbers, inferring what happened when, watching word counts rise and, sometimes, fall. The data tells its own stories about how our writers worked, about their style, about the choices the editors made and the consequences of those choices.

This is Willow Patterns.

Those of you who know your way around databases and coding can download the raw data and create your own applications, visualisations and animations. We have already created a simple graph on the site that chronicles the book’s total word count. We’re also presenting the complete data as a one-off multi-volume printed work: the book behind the book, if you like. Later, the project will hear from artists, poets, and others responding and remixing the book to create new works in both digital and physical forms.

All books—all stories—are made from data. Usually we see only a fraction of the data that goes into the finished product. The idea behind Willow Patterns is to lift the veil, explore the book’s hidden machinations before exploding it into myriad works and responses that will inspire visitors to step outside of ‘the book’ and consider a future where anyone can engage with stories on their own terms.

The Swedish Rhapsody*

My recent visit to Scarfolk has not only left me with a vague sense of unease, it has also provided me with a great demonstration of an almost pure form of fictional world building. As the web site for the Scarfolk Council, a creation of screenwriter Richard Littler, explains:

Scarfolk is a town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979. Instead, the entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum. Here in Scarfolk, pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science; hauntology is a compulsory subject at school, and everyone must be in bed by 8pm because they are perpetually running a slight fever. “Visit Scarfolk today. Our number one priority is keeping rabies at bay.” For more information please reread.

Hauntology is a critical theory, but also a kind of artistic genre that takes elements of the past (sounds, texts, visuals), strips out their original context and meaning, and recycles them into a new contemporary work. It’s a decidedly highbrow concept, though its application—in electronic music especially—is accessible, if a little creepy in its aesthetic (haunting is definitely the right word for it).

The blog for the Scarfolk Council applies these ideas to fiction. The site provides updates from a town increasingly infiltrated by the bizarre and sinister, all wrapped up in a jarring 1970s visual style.

What’s especially interesting about the Scarfolk Council, though, is that it is a work of fiction without story and without characters (at least without continuous characterisation) in a format that would have been near impossible before the web. Individual posts are not arranged chronologically (dates are cherry picked from all over the decade) and primarily feature public awareness campaign posters (‘If you suspect your mummy and daddy have been replaced by almost identical imposters call NOW’), sound recordings (‘In the playground with the music room window open, 1975’), television (the BBC’s 6-hour programme ‘We Watch You Watching Us’), and books (Spontaneous! Human Combustion).

The effect is weirdly compelling and the site is a hit with writing luminaries including Ian Rankin and Warren Ellis (the British writerly one, not the Australian musical one).

I’m often asked if writers should turn their fictional work into blogs. My stock response is that, regardless of how good it is, nobody wants to read your novel as a blog. I stand by that statement, but Scarfolk proves that a blog can be used as a vehicle for fiction when the writer respects the form and conventions. Sure, there’s no story, but Scarfolk doesn’t really need one. As the Council says: “Visit Scarfolk Today. You may never leave. So mote it be.”

http://scarfolk.blogspot.com.au/

* Okay, it’s a completely obscure title, but there is a link. It’s this shortwave radio broadcast from a numbers station. Best listened to late at night, completely alone.

iBooks and The City We Build

The recent official launch for The City We Build, the amplified ebook made between if:book and the Queensland Poetry Festival, has highlighted some of the challenges faced by authors, publishers, and readers when designing digital books that take advantage of their capabilities.

Regardless of how well designed or how beautiful its content, The City We Build is unlikely to ever reach some readers. This is because it has been designed for one digital platform alone.

Writers and publishers alike want their content accessible and available to as many readers as possible, but in the digital world this means taking into account a wide variety of devices. While it’s entirely appropriate there should be no one-size-fits-all reading device, for writers, this incredible diversity of devices presents a challenge of first principle.

What kind of book are you making?

To suit as many readers as possible, books must be designed for the simplest of devices. To a large extent, this means text. The simplest ereaders replicate the basic book experience as closely as possible. This means no colour, no video, no hyperlinking. Of course, for many books, this presents no problem at all.

The original poems from The City We Build were written for a Choose Your Own locative project. To read the poems, you had to stand there, on the corner of Brunswick and Ann, smartphone or tablet in hand. The purpose of The City We Build was to adapt that locative project into book form, without losing its sense of place or its multimedia origins. We wanted you to feel as though you were still wandering the Valley streets, maybe minus the heat and the legwork. This meant incorporating images and audio. Most of all, to replicate the reader’s choice of experience, jumping from poem to poem, we needed hyperlinks.

In Australia, right now, the platform that meets all those needs is Apple’s iPad.

We would love nothing more than to make The City We Build available to anyone with a passing interest (it is free after all), but for the moment, this kind of project has but one destination.

It’s a trade off writers face with every new project. Do you make a work suitable for a range of devices or do you exploit the features of a single device to make as rich an experience as possible? The direction you choose will depend on a myriad of factors, but the guiding principle should always be to serve the work itself first.

Pathways to Publication

A couple of years ago, I figured it was time to clear out the decks. I had a novel; it had done okay, published in excerpted form in a few places, shortlisted for an award. It was as successful as a novel gets without actually being…you know…published, at least as a complete work in its own right. Like many a worthy story before it, the novel had fallen at the final hurdle and landed with a thud in the proverbial bottom drawer. A few years passed before it came to this, but I eventually decided it deserved publication, even if in a small way.

Plus I wanted to figure out how out print-on-demand services worked.

And after going through the entire publication process more or less on my own, I released the final book Here Today to the world. It was nice. It moved from the bottom drawer to a shelf and I’m glad it’s there.

But here’s the weird part: when it came out, people congratulated me. My immediate response was, “What for?” The whole idea of congratulations seemed a little jarring. Despite the book’s demonstrated success as a manuscript, it was only now a book because I said it was a book. For a long time, I gave away the electronic editions. But this unexpected reaction was a good demonstration of the changing pathways to publication.

Authors everywhere harbour fantasies of how this career thing goes (go on, admit it). You complete your manuscript, you pass it on to a publisher (who? It doesn’t matter yet, these things will sort themselves out), the publisher goes bananas and offers you a deal. Something happens in between (yaddah yaddah). Then it’s posters in bookshops, brainy festival gigs, and television interviews centred largely around your genius.

It’s a perfectly acceptable daydream and, even in a pre-digital world it was nothing more. Success has always looked different for every author. What digital media has changed is that, more than ever, publication looks different for every author. Sometimes it doesn’t look like publication at all.

Opportunities come in all shapes and sizes. And some opportunities you even make for yourself. You may be acknowledged, even celebrated for something you feel deserves nothing of the sort. Everyone’s pathway to publication is different. For authors today, the best approach is to keep an open mind and don’t get too hung up on any preconceived notions of success.

Typing never felt so manual

Even this blog post has been drafted on the Underwood 310, as though I’m trying to prove some arcane point. Wait, is that what I’m doing?

As promised in this month’s WQ, here are the drafts for my typewriter column. The text has been digitised using a scanner with optical character recognition (or OCR). Because retyping it for screens would feel like cheating.

That’s what I meant to say. The raw OCR output saw it a little differently:

Ev:en@th:iia1`h£log post has been dmafc-acl om, the Underwood 310, as though I’1n

trying ‘b€o prove some arcane poinnt. -Wa.ii’lf’, :Es iifléfbf what I’-rn &oiix-rg?

As- promiised :En-=‘|:1f1:Is mon“th’s WQ, -lirere are the draits for -my ‘B;ypeje:t’i't’lien, ‘

column. The text has been d:‘§.gi‘bisec1» using a sceannei* with _op+:l:1_ci.1 charaet-er

zfecogni’b”ion_ (cr OCR). Because retgypping it’ for screens wo&1d£ Eeel like cheating

 

Or click through

Reassessing Hemmingway

Recently, in the midst of a web site clean out (something I recommend anyone who’s had their own site for more than a couple of years), I reacquainted myself with a writing project I started somewhere in the late nineties. It was a chatterbot, a set of web code that attempts to replicate normal conversation, responding to anything you might care to say to it via a input box on a web page.

I’d had an idea for a short story based on this vision for artificial intelligence (with the emphasis on ‘artificial’)—a story that subsequently became one of my first published pieces titled ‘Hemmingway’—but I wanted to do more. I had a character, a ‘virtual writer’ named Hemmingway 0.5 and enough coding know-how to muddle through building a web-based chat interface that would more or less do what I wanted. The idea was to create a ‘real’ Hemmingway 0.5, a fun diversion and a way to bring potential readers to my site. I estimated I could knock it over in about six months or so.

Four years later, with no end in sight, I determined that Hemmingway was as good as I could ever be arsed to complete, so I set him loose. Any initial momentum I had from publishing the short story was long gone so Hemmingway had become an end in itself, another ‘book’, albeit unpublishable in any form other than as a page on a web site.

Now, I’ll admit this was probably not the wisest career move. In a lot of ways I was simply glad to be done with him (more or less) so I plonked Hemmingway on the site with little fanfare and moved on.

Lately though, I’ve begun to reassess. Hemmingway—like most chatterbots—is in fact a beautifully sophisticated deconstruction of the English language. Hemmingway has a vast store of responses matched to potential inputs. When you say something to him, he looks initially for an exact match to respond to and, if none is found, he gradually backtracks through your sentence until he strikes a hit. He can throw your statements back at you, he can remember a few basic things about you, he can modify his responses depending on the context of your conversation. All of this had to be written in code and—most importantly for a writer—all his responses had to be in character.

The result is a wonderfully wonky exercise in character development. Hemmingway is anything but perfect, but after six years developing him, I feel like he’s the most complete character I’ve ever created, even if he is a little grumpy most of the time.

At last month’s Whispers Reading Salon, I read from a story penned much, much later than my foray into chatterbots. But when an audience member congratulated me on the quality of the story’s dialogue, I wondered whether Hemmingway still lurks between the words on my pages and that my four years with him has had far more influence on my storytelling than I usually acknowledge.

Though he has learned nothing in the last seven years, Hemmingway 0.5 is still just as chatty today as he was in 2005: http://simongroth.com/books/hemmingway-05/