Leo X. Robertson's Blog, page 22
July 12, 2015
Notes on ebook file conversion
Rupert Dreyfus, cool-name-haver and author of Spark and The Rebel’s Sketchbook (and one of the guys who, quite rightly, has passively encouraged me to plug my own books a bit harder because we indies should snap up most opportunities to do this without apology- but I’ll point out that I’ve written this without asking Rupert if he agrees and also select this post as one of the necessary handful of non-self-plugs) asked me about ebooks and file conversion. Likely someone else is wondering too. I hope they find this, then :)
Calibre is a free program that can convert between file types. MOBI
is the same as a Kindle file. EPUB and MOBI formats are essentially
identical, so you can convert between them with ease. There’s another
free program called Adobe Digital Editions that allows you to read EPUB
files on your computer. I use Lulu (you can use CreateSpace or some other service) to convert a
word file to PDF, then you can create the Kindle file (which is MOBI)
and convert that to EPUB using Calibre, and then you have EPUB, MOBI and
PDF. Or if you use Lulu, you make an EPUB from a Word file and convert that to MOBI with Calibre- either way is fine. That’s really all you need, because EPUBs are the universal ebook
file of sorts. Colour images in the file appear on a computer or iPad,
but will appear in black and white on an e-reader- is just something
I’ve forgot to consider sometimes.
Calibre is good for
converting EPUB to MOBI and back again, but it does bizarre things when
converting to PDF (makes 4000 pages of massive-sized font text and
similar useless things.) I convert PDFs to EPUB for personal use, but I
wouldn’t do this for something I was selling, as you can never guarantee
that you’ve removed page numbers and headers/footers from the PDF, so
you get stuff that looks like:
“Your father’s right,” she 103 said. “Mockingbirds don’t
do one thing but make music
HARPER LEE TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
for us to enjoy … but sing their
hearts out for us.
GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING
That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
You
can ask it to remove “HARPER LEE”, “TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD”, numbers
“[0-9][0-9][0-9]” and “GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING” prior to the conversion
process, but then, does the book’s title appear in the text? Will it be
removed? Are there numbers in the text or do all numbers appear as
words? Pfft- would I even be able to answer these questions about my own
books? No.
There’s a free Kindle app for computers
you can download to view MOBI files- but I’ve never done this: as far as
I know you can always trust that EPUB files and MOBI files, apart from
their format, will look identical on an e-reader :)
Hope this helped! Feel free to share your own tips on ebook formats, marketing, or whatever you’ve found useful of late :D
July 7, 2015
Author interview by Paul Howsley
I was recently interviewed by Paul Howsley: indie author, social justice committer and all-round good guy. You can read the interview here.
Rupert Dreyfus, also good guy, set this up- it’s so promising and so much fun to connect with other indies, and I hope you’ll notice that I gave you all shout outs too!!
Hope we all take flight together in the near future :D
BilLeo
July 6, 2015
“Mr. Difficult” by Jonathan Franzen
I just discovered an insightful essay by Jonathan Franzen on the struggles of being a young author, facing disappointment, writing in certain styles for the wrong reasons and triple-guessing what someone might want to read and what would/wouldn’t sell. You can read the essay here.
I don’t think there’s any celebrated thinker’s voice I typically disagree with more than Franzen’s (maybe Lionel Shriver, but this isn’t an award I’d happily hand out!), which is why it was so great to read this essay and why I’m now in a state of confusion as to whether or not I should attempt to read any more of the guy’s fiction. He does implore one dissenter, who got in touch with him, to separate the artist from the art- and yet he’s the prime example of someone who negates this dictum by insulting Oprah, literary critic Michiko Kakutani or writing a memoir in which he explains why he and his wife are free from having to care about climate change (no kids = bacon bacon bacon, apparently.)
I guess it goes to show that greatness really can come from anywhere, and that definition may extend to people who are already celebrated as great but whom you had previously dismissed. I always thought that expression referred to the sporadic location and timing of underdogs, but who’s defining what I think is great, here? Me! How confusing it is to try to refuse prejudices when, barraged with information as we all are, selectivity is essential! I think this means unfortunately that essays such as this one have fallen and will continue to fall off my radar. But perhaps if you trust me as a source of insight, and I you, we can do our best to prevent this happening and concentrate our pool of useful stuff.
It’s very hard to deny that I wrote this partly in order to make myself look clued in but really you can trust that any info above amounted to nothing more than a few chance googles over the years :P
Enjoy the essay!
“
Nurturing the hope that your marginal novel will be celebrated by the mainstream — the Cassandra-like wish that people will thank you for telling them unwelcome truths — is a ritual way of insuring disappointment, of reaffirming your own world-denying status, of mortifying the flesh, of remaining, at heart, an angry young man.
“
June 28, 2015
The Exhausting Sincerity Tightrope Act
In the interest of self-acceptance: it has become increasingly apparent to me that my blog posts are similar in appearance to under-fleshed repetitions of arguments put forth by David Foster Wallace decades ago. For example, most of what I’m about to say has been said much more concisely, articulately, exhaustively, emotively, and as if to have the final word on all associated topics, by DFW, in the following two essays:
Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young
E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction
Enjoy both- they are super relevant and give insight into a number of errors in contemporary literature and thought.
If you’re wondering why I would admit such a thing, well, DFW is not to everyone’s taste for one (although why this is I don’t know- reading him is like hearing what your brain’s been trying to tell you, but it wasn’t smart enough to get the words across- seriously, read all his essays. Any of his weird rambles are worth sitting through for the nuggets of insight.) I also believe there is space for a simpler abridged version with some updates here and there. And also to show that frustrations with literature are as timeless as the timelessness of great works of literature- each more timeless than the last!
I have to say I’ve only recently become aware that me and DFW have the same arguments on many things. Whether or not I just happen to agree with a lot of his arguments based on my own observations or I read his essays then plain stole his observations I’m not sure! I’m not copying on purpose, and I have enough original things to say/ examples also. Consider it like the intro to a scientific journal article where you need to re-phrase the same twelve facts about biofuels that you read in like 50 different other scientific papers because there seems to be no better way to introduce your subject, and then you reference a whole bunch more detailed papers where they delved deeper than you did into things sufficiently different from your own research because you chose to direct your focus elsewhere, hopefully finding enough of a niche, but who ever knows.
And really, it does everyone good to accept any truth, and I can be nothing but one voice in a voice-fabric: I can’t say everything; I will never be the first or last word and probably never the main authority on anything. Anything interesting to most people, that is. I am easily on track to become Norway’s scale inhibitor injection valve selection spokesman, for example- in so focusing my attention, I lose out on becoming Brazil’s authority on snowboard thickness- that’s some other guy, and we know different things and that’s fine. We can’t do everything ourselves!!!
OK! Let’s go!
I’m hard put to decide which I dislike more: pretension or nihilism/callousness/whatever it should be called. Probably pretension is a bigger waste of time and less understandable a property, but neither are that great. Some of both is inevitable: the tightrope between them is a spidersilk strand of absolute sincerity on which we writers paradoxically waver back and forth, superficiality and minimisation on one side, pretending we’re saying more than we actually are on the other.
Pretension
I believe that the key to pretension is pretending that something has more depth than it does, eg. your book, or you.
There are many manifestations of which you are probably well aware. Maybe you:
1. Call novels “fine” but like you don’t mean okay, you mean like very good, if this is not a thing you would normally say out loud.
2. Circumlocute the names of well-known literary characters eg. Hamlet =/= Hamlet. Hamlet = that melancholy Dane. Raskolnikov = that masterfully meticulous voice of 19th century Russian existentialism in an increasingly avaricious society. Leopold Bloom = that metempsychotic postprandial everymodernistman phallophile.
3. Sound like Salman Rushdie in some other respect different from 1 and 2. ONLY SALMAN RUSHDIE sounds like Salman Rushdie, and most agree he passably gets away with it (your nom-de-plume/nom-de-guerre [whichever is more pretentious] was “Joseph Anton”? Ugh.) Or maybe your writing is as rich with dense literary techniques and packed with allusions as it is clueless to why either of those things are there. What the hell are you doing?!
It might help to ask yourself these questions. If you’re going to create a literary echo, no matter how apt it appears in the context of what you’re writing, ask yourself:
1. Did I really like the writing of the writer I want to echo? If the answer is “no”, why are you echoing this writer? Did you, like me with The God of Small Things, enjoy the structure but not the story? Passable reasoning. But consider a bit of Alasdair Gray’s answer to a student who asked him “We’re going to be examined on your book Lanark. What’s it all about?’“
“…I don’t think anybody should read anything except for fun because you won’t learn anything unless you enjoy it. I hope you’re enjoying it!”
If you want to borrow from a book you didn’t like, what are the chances that this regurgitation will be converted to joy as it is passed down the word chain from writer to reader? I don’t know of any discussion on this topic, but I’d have to say LOW :D
2. Are you going to do it because you think it’s what’s expected of you, that there is no advancing of the arguments put forth by previous authors without echoing them because their stories were so definitive (in the case of Lolita echoes in The End of Alice [bleugh on both counts])? I’ve felt like this before in the case of biblical allusions. It is often said that all stories are in the beebLeo (not that I’d know because I haven’t read the thing and don’t plan to any time soon.)[1]
[1] If you are a young writer and you own an un-cracked copy of The Bible, I’m sorry to have outed you as pretentious. No, I know you will get round to reading it some day, but that doesn’t sound like sufficient fun to me, at the moment, for what hard work it would be, in which case I am not doing myself nor my readers any favours by forcing it upon us all. I am NO advocate for literary slovenliness: I am an advocate for ensuring an optimal balance of fun versus toughness and thus that the writer has the greatest possible time writing, cascading to the reader having the greatest time reading, cascading to the highest percentage of the book’s intent being conveyed.
That being the case, biblical allusions often crop up because we all know a handful of stories in the Bible and there’s a chance our story mimics the form or moral of a bible story. I decided this year that it doesn’t make any sense for me to borrow a biblical subtext. The Bible doesn’t hold the same historical significance in our pluralistic/ totally non-tribal age. No religious belief is a direct part of my daily life, and just doesn’t interest me at all, for now- so no matter how close something I’m writing is to a bible story, I will dodge all associated subtext.
3. Do you just want people to know that you’re clever? They don’t give a shit. You shouldn’t give a shit. Avoid avoid avoid.
Don’t pontificate; communicate!
(And no weird metaphors, please.)
Nihilism
Nihilism in literature is self-defeating. Anyone who’s ever attempted to write fiction can attest to its difficulty, and the success of any sizeable writing project is at least in part due to the writer’s faith in the message (i.e., the writer cares about something.) So to spend one’s time and one’s care writing about how much one doesn’t care makes no sense to me. Why should I care that you or your protagonist don’t/doesn’t care? I don’t get it.
It’s fun, it’s easy and it’s lazy (and hence it’s popular) to pretend that any issue has no solution. This explains every piece of Palahniuk/Coupland/Welsh/Easton Ellis knock-off writing and any McCarthy-adjacent drowned dystopia- stop it! (Or total Kevin Smith ‘aint got da answers but I be doin’ what I do ’til I gets them uuuuuuughhhh!) You’re not supposed to get mad at art because of the care at its core: someone cared about something enough to spend their time articulating it with the intent of making the world a better place (you get a free pass in this universe, Arundhati Roy!) Yet negating this principle as heavily as these writers and their wannabes do makes whatever they’ve made not art, in my mind [2]. If you are a nihilistic teen, I can understand that it’s attractive to have someone articulate your despair for you where the emotionally incompetent people in your life will bat away your attempts to discuss such things for fear of having to address something SAD, because they believe talking about the SAD makes the SAD, when, surely, if one was not talking about the SAD and became SAD, it would suggest the need to defuse SAD by discussing it? You never catch people at the right time, do you? Just yesterday someone chose a weird way to remind me it was my deceased mum’s birthday. I didn’t need that vibekill, frankly, and so the discussion went on hold. Context, in life, is a deciding factor in the success of so many things- the insensitivity of the prompt to discuss grief locked out the possibility. In a more sensitive dignified context I’d happily discuss that or anything with anyone. For this reason you can happily deny allegations of being a prude thrust upon you by every overly familiar party weirdo whose lewdness-laden openings cause heartsink: it’s not that I or society don’t talk about certain things, we just don’t talk about them with you, you agenda-wielding strange-monger! Similarly though, you could discuss almost anything to death and never get to the heart of it. It never stops sucking when a loved one dies, but it’s also counterproductive to talk about it too much. Here we have another balance: is there enough of something/ has something been discussed to a reasonably complete extent (quality, quantity)? In the case of nihilistic literature, I’d say yeah. Collectively, the above authors have provided more than enough output.
[2] Maybe it’s better to say they’re not for me. I’d hate to seem like I was insulting anyone who has kindly compared my own writing to that of such authors. If that’s what you see and enjoy, I consider it a compliment even if that’s not really my deal. I can give an opinion, but it’s not for me to tell anyone how to react to mine or anyone’s stories. It probably doesn’t help that a whole bunch of my characters have gone on a rant about how much they hate people. Sometimes our own writing remains a mystery to us ;)
Quoting from the first above DFW essay: “What’s frustrating for me about the whiners is that precisely the state of general affairs that explains a nihilistic artistic outlook makes it imperative that art not be nihilistic.” [3] Pfft- it took me maybe three reads to decode that sentence, by the way. Isn’t it wonderful, though? How does someone write a maximalist piece that’s both encyclopaedic and compact? Essentially, a glut of nihilistic art in a culture of hopelessness signals a desperation for sincerity and hope, not further reflection of the hopelessness. SINCERITY AND HOPE: write this on a post-it; stick it to your laptop. Our art is wanting [4].
[3] Funnily enough though, some critics consider Wallace’s Girl With Curious Hair to be his attempt to get in with the hip nihilistic crowd.
[4] Few other writers seem to have as much fun as DFW being so cerebral. So while it may well be DFW’s cerebrum that is the attraction, unfortunately you don’t possess that- not that it seems like an inviting thing to have possessed most days anyway. Still: trading in fun for similarity to his style pushes you further away from what it is that you love about his writing that you could reasonably reproduce. I’m talking to myself, here, but this holds for any of your favourite authors- it isn’t so much the appearance of the words on the page as it is the motivation and the emotion of the writer behind them. This is similar to William Goldman’s advice in Adventures in the Screen Trade when it comes to adapting a story to a screenplay:
“While you are altering, you must remain faithful to two things: the author’s intention and the emotional core of the original work as it affected you.”
So, from what we learn from the books of others, these are two things we can reasonably expect to transfer to our own writing. New writers instead tend to be nervous and mimic style, and this is how we can somehow tell that writing has been forced, right? It’s as it was said to Marc Maron of his comedy: people might praise how honest and self-deprecatory it is, but they may fail to notice that this is the only kind of comedy that Maron could do. For whatever reason his programming (nature + nurture) precedes his creative output. Just as Vonnegut says in the intro to Breakfast of Champions:
“I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly—to insult “The Star-Spangled Banner,” to scrawl pictures of a Nazi flag and an asshole and a lot of other things with a felt-tipped pen. To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole: [picture of asshole.]”
This relaxed, free, non-judgmental mode is conducive to good, confident writing.
How you should write
It can’t be pretentious, but it can’t minimise: it can’t allude to having more depth than it does, and it can’t pretend to care less than it does. I can only highlight these tone boundaries, but it’s not within my capabilities nor is it my job to tell you how to achieve this in your writing. There will be as many examples of this done effectively as there are interesting stories told. I think it requires an open mind and heart.
So: that’s tone sufficiently addressed. What else?
I love novels, but I’m not gonna sit around and de-code them unless I am highly incentivised to do so. Of the books I read each year, I’ll in-depth analyse perhaps two or three, but not exhaustively. If something isn’t terribly fun to do, it should be minimised for sanity/logic’s sake. That’s not to say I don’t work hard at writing, but it doesn’t do me or anyone else any good to deny the shifts in culture and lifestyle that are occurring at the same time as novels are being written.
Any book, sufficiently edited to its natural length, never feels too long- to the right reader. But there are new restrictions in content: it’s undeniable that old school literature had to perform multiple functions that are no longer required of the novel. Books were likely a main source of TV before TV and internet, of extracurricular education before TV and internet, and of friendship before TV, internet, phone lines and reasonable letter delivery speeds. This only means that the novel will have to change its form to stay relevant, and that for the classicists, what they love about these previous functions of literature explains to me the continued inclusion of these functions in their contemporary writing. The same question must be asked: did you enjoy these functions (eg. Hardy rambling about landscapes/ how to shear sheep- still necessary?) or were you only just impressed by them as they revealed (hopefully by proxy and not as the primary purpose of them) how clever the writer was? If it’s the former, then you include them and you and your audience will be happy; if it’s the latter, they may represent an outdated function of the novel (like biblical allusions for me) and you need not follow suit with your own writing for the blind sake of it. I’m thinking now of Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which in my mind completely disregarded its historical and cultural context in 2014. You may disagree, in which case me and you are not in the same readership bracket: fine.
Only Melville got away with so many non-fiction chapters on whale cetology (what’s that? Exactly.) No one would (or should) get away with digressing so much from the central plot in this day and age, and most people don’t read those chapters of Moby Dick now. Digressions have to be short and to the point, as in Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan. With the vast proliferation of information on next to everything, the highly personal experience, the specificity of our life stories has increased in value as a component of literature. But you also have to balance “sharing” with the fact that a lot of what’s happened to you is not of general interest to others. Am I trying to confuse you? With purpose. Consider the following anecdote from McKee’s Story:
“High above the forest floor, a millipede strolled along the branch of a tree, her thousand pairs of legs swinging in an easy gait. From the tree top, song birds looked down, fascinated by the synchronization of the millipede’s stride. “That’s an amazing talent,” chirped the songbirds. “You have more limbs than we can count. How do you do it?” And for the first time in her life the millipede thought about this. “Yes,” she wondered, “how do I do what I do?” As she turned to look back, her bristling legs suddenly ran into one another and tangled like vines of ivy. The songbirds laughed as the millipede, in a panic of confusion, twisted herself into a knot and fell to the earth below.
You too may sense this panic. I know that when confronted with a rush of insights even the most experienced writer can be knocked off stride. Fortunately, my father’s fable had an Act Two:
On the forest floor, the millipede, realizing that only her pride was hurt, slowly, carefully, limb by limb, unraveled herself With patience and hard work, she studied and flexed and tested her appendages, until she was able to stand and walk. What was once instinct became knowledge. She realized she didn’t have to move at her old, slow, rote pace. She could amble, strut, prance, even run and jump. Then, as never before, she listened to the symphony of the songbirds and let music touch her heart. Now in perfect command of thousands of talented legs, she gathered courage and, with a style of her own, danced and danced a dazzling dance that astonished all the creatures of her world.”
I should say that it’s no surprise why nihilism or pretension is so seductive. To create a good piece of art, you have to give so much of yourself. Then, you have to admit all the things your art is not doing, and you have to present that art to a lot of strangers: who wouldn’t be tempted to doctor that product? When your art is so personal, and you put it at risk of being disliked, it’s very easy to believe that if someone doesn’t like it, they don’t like you. Knowing yourself is very much like this: accepting who you are is accepting all the things you aren’t, and that isn’t a one-time meditation of “I’m not the best at this, I’m not the best at that, I might never know how to do that and I’m not great at this…” because some unknown time later you have to do it again: “Oh! I’m no longer that, and I’m worse at this!” over and over and over. It’s tough.
I hope, having reached the end of my ramble, that you feel more comfy and confident to write contemporary things with your own voice, whether or not you agree- I’m not fussed if you do or don’t. Of course I can’t see compelling counter-arguments to anything I’ve proposed, else I wouldn’t put these ideas forth, but if you do see any, please let me know: you’d be re-paying me the favour of (hopefully) igniting discourse :)
Happy reading, happy writing.
June 23, 2015
Postmodern cynicism and Hollywood.
Me and Juan have a tough time finding films we both like. I
like heady, tough and depressing things, he likes whatever that isn’t. Somehow
between those two unknown poles of the cinematic landscape, we land on horror
films or those expensive Hollywood comedies. But it’s really tough to be scared
effectively by a horror film during the day, and you can barely see what’s
going on when it’s so sunny outside (especially when you’re drinking!) so we
watch more of the comedies.
Last weekend I picked 21 Jump Street because I remembered it
being funnier than it was (and clearly myself being less drunk than I was when
I first watched it) and Juan’s last pick of this type was Guardians of the
Galaxy. In both was something I imagine is part of a growing trend nowadays. [I
first-drafted this before Jurassic World- same deaLeo.]
In 21 Jump Street, the inciting incident rests on the police
captain not-so-subtly pointing out that the film is nothing but a re-hash of
some TV show and that no one has any new ideas anymore. I missed this the first
time I watched the film (pissed), but then I also watched the sequel whenever that
came out (super pissed) and the self-referential sneering was much more
exemplified in that one. Chris Pratt’s character couldn’t even get through the
tiniest bit of exposition without sighing at how “done” it was, or say his
nickname of “Star Lord” without being mocked, when of course this is a mockery
of the kinds of character names that were cool in the same Marvel source
material that allowed for a film like GotG. What is it he says about whatever
treasure they were after? Something like “It has a kinda Treasure of the Sierra
Madre/ Maltese Falcon thang-“ Juan looked at me and stopped the film.
This is a common apparent schizophrenia when it comes to
referencing source materials. If you lovingly make a film which echoes previous
genres/ models, why, if you insist on pointing out to an increasingly non-savvy
audience that you are borrowing, must you mock the source?
Unfortunately I’m a fun-sensitive person: it’s my gluten. Every
opportunity for sincerity in these films is shirked*, every stab at originality
scoffed at. If the argument really is that there is nothing new to say, no new
films to make, shouldn’t you be in any other industry than the filmmaking one?
Isn’t this a signal for you and these films to leave?
Some people love this shit, though, consider themselves
astute observers for unpicking the layered dialogue that is itself a commentary
of the film that the viewer is watching. Okay for them.
There’s something about these films that you’ll watch, and
you’ll vaguely be aware that they must be the best kind of films of their type
in the world in that year (because of the money and expertise and supposed
creative effort), but there’s something about them that just isn’t that great.
So it really doesn’t help that they’ve picked up this eye-roll to camera-style
implicit by-the-book contract between viewer and writer as if what they’re
doing is so brilliant and effortless that they can get away with such a thing.
It’s nothing but an ungrounded affectation that assumes that the viewer is left
with no choice but to watch the best-of-the-best run out of ideas: “We’re all
you got, buddy, and we hate what we do.”
The people in the system are bored of making too much money
and given the extent of their screenplay efforts likely find it too easy.
Couple this with the pressure on a writer whose product must make a lot of
money and you get all these little “lol not really” moments of dialogue, given
that people enjoy metafictional nods nowadays more than good storytelling. The
tangle of “projected revenue influences the art” equals, haha, not art.
Really though, that me and Juan have to watch this stuff is
more the fault of iTunes that we don’t have the utopian full map of
supply-and-demand curves ie. 1000s of people will watch this kind of film for
£10, 100000000s of people will watch this kind of film for £1, and every point
in between. Somehow they manage to offer you either some expensive formulaic
piece of shit or the worst idea for a film you’ve ever heard: [insert
noun][insert Australian deadly creatures], [insert half of the title of a
well-known film][insert legally obliged variation from well-known film’s title],
and of course you’ll understand that choosing a film with a partner requires a
delicate balance of favourable circumstances to prevent the situation cascading
into divorce-inducing rage. Remember traipsing round those BO-stinking
Blockbusters shops with casual acquaintances who were so insecure that they
couldn’t possibly be responsible for making a choice that would require two
hours of your time so they instead just came running up to you from all angles
with the last thing you’d want to watch, snickering about how funny it would be
if you watched that and further weighing upon you and you alone the decision
that gradually assumed the weight on you that it had for them and it chipped
away at your psyche until you were in a state of near-paralysis? Now you can do
that from the comfort of your own home with people you actually love!
So there’s this sighing self-deprecation thing going on as
if whoever wrote it didn’t wanna write it, and you’re watching it and you don’t
wanna.
What the fuck!
This dilemma does not appear so easy to fix. It would
involve coming up with decent recommendation algorithms that don’t make viewers
feel like they’re being fodderised with insulting selections like a boyfriend
who buys you candy-necklace panties on Valentine’s day (lol none of them bought
me anything though) as well as dissolving Hollywood’s tedious infantilizing
lowest comic book denominator fart-joke fuckery by investing a range of prices
into a range of films instead of the increasingly all-eggs-in-one-basket $BNs
on opening weekend bullshit (Jurassic Revenue is no celebration of mine.) Doing
this would make everyone happier. Writing quality would be better and the film
industry would be richer! Supermarkets have three types of baked bean, for
example: what’s that all about? Basic economics tells us that tapping into
different markets by offering products that vary with price vs quality means
that you harvest more overall revenue. But films are not beans: their merit is
subjective and does not vary in a linear fashion with budget (obvs) but this
being true also means you have the potential to offer many high quality
products at a low investment. But the biggest benefit of work is fun, and a
greater effort to re-distribute money across a range of investments would
please the rich, bored and sneering screenwriters of 21 Jump Street, the first
15 mins of Guardians of the Galaxy and, I’ve no doubt, many other films I couldn’t
stomach watching, by alleviating their pressure to succeed. Of course studios
must offer a range of films at different budgets, but more distribution is
needed: for example, no film’s entertainment potency could justify Jurassic
World’s aggressive marketing scheme that delivered little Scrooge-sized dino
pellets each day up to the release.
I would say why there isn’t more distribution is but one
example of media industries kinda asking but not actually asking for our help
(why compete with Spotify when they don’t even make any money?) but the numbers
show that most people don’t seem to care! So… carry on?
Well, my fingers are still crossed for Synecdoche, New York
2: Ghostin’ Up Manhattan.
*Until it isn’t! Jonah’s bro-positive speech at the end of
21 Jump Street was so sincere even I cringed.
pr�e*�
June 18, 2015
Let’s talk about infantilism, baby
Every now and then I’ll have a confidence crash and feel
like I haven’t achieved anything, that I’m fucking up things with ALL of my
loved ones (I like to really go for it you see) that I’m not making enough
money, that I’m in the wrong profession, that I’m gaining too much weight, not
eating right, not spending my time effectively and never did, that I’ve wasted
too much of my time before which puts me wayyyy behind wherever I want to be
(WHICH IS WHERE? WHEN?!), that there’s no point in starting something new now,
that I shouldn’t stick at the things I started, that I don’t know enough about
politics and global warming is going to kill me and everyone else and
everything I know and love and all art and culture and history and it’s my
personal fault because of all of the above all of the time! Know that way??
But wait! Enter Amy Schumer, Kristin Wiig, any and all
Youtubers and Youroots, Marc Maron, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson, Hannibal
Buress or any of your favourites who could populate this list. It’s okay! Look
at how much these predominantly young and beautiful go-getting entrepreneurs
are writing directing and acting as characters that eat and drink too much and
take poor care of themselves and basically don’t do anything! You thought you
were bad? Look at how these real people have achieved more than you in order to
fictionally demonstrate the contrary!
All last summer this type of entertainment kept me from
being too afraid of my perceived inaction. But now the summer’s coming back
around and all these shows are starting up again, it’s just not doing it for
me. I sit there watching thinking ‘Relieve meeee from my existential
paaiiinnn!!’ but it won’t take anymore, and that sucks!
I’m not at all trying to undermine the great work of all of
these people. The only reason I know the above names is because I’m a big fan.
But this stuff should be consumed in moderation. There’s just so much of it
that you could solely sustain yourself on this type of entertainment
indefinitely, as I managed to do for months. And it can be so effective at
expunging all fears for much longer than each episode, scene, skit etc. lasts.
But those fears are there for a reason: they’re there because you’re supposed
to do… something. They come back again. They should be acknowledged. (But maybe
write a finite list of shit to do, you know?)
These forms of entertainment rely on humorous
self-deprecation. Viewers can pressure creators to act as if their successes are
no big thing; they shouldn’t be proud; they become locked into what they can do
with their success- if they want to be successful. Maybe they really do feel as
silly and childish at heart as their characters appear, but the skills, keen
observations and sharp wit required to make a TV show, for example, do not come
without hard work and practice. This very fact betrays what we’re going to see
before the show even starts.
And yet the growing culture they have the potential to
perpetuate really takes away the idea that on a large scale there are basic
responsibilities we need to fulfill for the good of others. (Full disclosure: I
don’t even know what these are, but they are up for debate.) Their fictional
worlds must shun this notion because it is so very uncool and not fun/funny. What
I mean is, I don’t see these characters having the same concerns about life
that I do, and it just makes me feel kinda alienated and stupid for worrying
about stuff no one else seems to worry about. Well, I also don’t know who’s
funding what. And for all my overblown(?) fears above, the concept of
citizenship has never been more urgent. Maybe that explains the boom in
entertainment which soothes us from our responsibilities that in this age grow
and grow in nebulosity.
God knows we need relief from the onslaught of creative
unkindness our imaginations can bear down upon us, but they don’t do so without
purpose.
I am not a non-starting manchild. Neither are you. Being
such a thing is generally not okay: choosing not to contribute doesn’t only
affect the non-contributor. I think absolutely anyone could spend all their
time on a couch wondering what they’re supposed to do with their lives. The
couch is so seductive. Mostly because of the debilitating pressure of being
able to choose what you want to do with complete freedom: our imaginations are infinite
and can fill the decades in front of us with thousands of years of desired
professions, activities, achievements, and so in the complete freedom to choose
what we want to do is always the tragic notion that any choice leads to the
death of the infinite people you could be- and this is rarely mentioned in
conjunction with the freedom to choose, which is always presented as having no
downsides, which makes things worse: you start to feel like the only one who
sees how finite everything becomes when you make big decisions. But that doesn’t
mean the answer is “Don’t worry: do nothing.” Unfortunately.
Take a break sometimes, though. Sometimes! If we pledge all
this to each other, I promise not to take TV so seriously.
(Would you believe I made it all the way without mentioning
Infinite Jest? Oh FUCK.)
`���
June 9, 2015
June 4, 2015
Saxual Healing Giveaway!!
Saxual Healing
by Billy Medicine
Giveaway ends July 15, 2015.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
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