Posts in Category: The power of literature
Literature and new media
Desktop poems – I downloaded an app to my laptop and made poetry…
Just finished watching ‘Ordkraft’ on DR K about the linkage of literature and new media. It was very interesting and especially relevant for me because this is exactly what I am studying this semester. This whole area is so fascinating and there is so much going on right now that challenges the boundaries of literature, how we understand literature, both as authors, critics, readers, the whole of literary industry.
Klaus Rothstein interviewed author Merete Pryds Helle and scholar Stefan Kjerkegaard about the subject, and they talked about the traditional book versus the digital one, the author and reader relationship and what types of pro’s and con’s are associated with this new media for literature to expand into.
Merete Pryds Helle is a Danish author of an iPad-novel called Begravelsen that will be released later this year. It is based on 8 obituaries and has over 40.000 possible combinations of being read, thus playing with the progression in storytelling, giving the reader the option herself to choose how and what one wants to read. She said that she believes that she relinquishes authority over her text more in this app than with the traditional novel. Her notion of the function of literature gave the impression that she is very reader-oriented and has given a lot of thought into how the digital aspects of her story plays out. She also said she wants to be able to expand the field wherein literature can operate and is driven by curiosity towards the electronic devices that surround her. She has previously written a SMS-story, where the reader signs up to get a story in multiple text-messages on her phone. Other takes are the exploration of poetry on Twitter and Facebook-novels. Helle talked about how new media could assist literature in fusing the intimate and public spheres, so that literature on the phone or on a tablet/laptop would move the notion of when and where literature is to be used/consumed/read/acted on.
One of the things I am very interested in and study is the field of the reader – the how’s and why’s of reader meets text – when there is a notion of literature moving in a wholly new direction. In its novelty the medium runs the risk of eclipsing literature to perform its own song and dance making literature play second fiddle; when that happens literature cannot be said to occupy the site of a new medium in a beneficial collaboration. But slowly we are beginning to understand what the digital realm has to offer when we see it as nothing more or less than a partner. It is undeniable that a very big hindrance for the reader is in fact the media in which new literature is written; many readers will simply not have the adequate skills or knowledge of digital media to make use of it. So there is the possibility that there is forming an information gap between those who can and those who can’t follow this progression. I must admit that a lot of the stuff I have been introduced to this semester is all new to me – somehow, much of the “new” electronic literature and experimental literature I now browse (and may I say, absolutely fascinates and engages me) through has flown right under my radar most of the time (either when I have not realized its claim to novelty or just not engaged in it). For myself I apologise that. But then again, with all the information overflow that has characterised communications of sorts, it is sadly to be expected if you are not specifically looking for it. There needs to be more noise about this field without a doubt, because a non-progressive literature is an antiquated literature dripping with nostalgia without the ability to move or shake anything or anyone.
Back in the interview Klaus Rothstein talks to Stefan Kjerkegaard from the University of Aarhus. One of the things he pointed out was that good literature takes into account the media it occupies, whether it be the traditional book or an app on your tablet. The possibilities from a readers point of view have been largely opened up with these new emerging forms. Going back to the applicability or user friendly aspect of digital literature one of the positive aspects is that there is a whole new readership out there that could get excited about literature in a way traditional books wouldn’t have inspired them to be. When you look at it that way you both have the readers you might loose because of the shift in media, but also of the possibility of a new reader whose consciousness is built up and around the workings of digital apps and electronic gadgets. However, he also empasised the importance of not forgetting literature as we know it from paper based books, which is made up of the reader’s imaginative space with characters, plot development etc., and this active participation by the reader gives life to the book on the readers terms. Modern culture is very visual and when new media is used in relation to literature it can also yield a dull reader, one who does not have to imagine the space or flow of the text, because it is already laid out in front of her.
If you didn’t catch Ordkraft this evening have no fear, re-runs are on April 2nd, 3rd and 8th – and here is a link to Ordkrafts website.
Further readings (in no particular order):
Interview with Merete Pryds Helle in Politiken (in Danish)
Electronic literature: What is it? (1st chapter in N. Katherine Hayes’ Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the literary)
Electronic, conceptual, visual, concrete, structural literature, literature, literature (entry on literature in new media on penciltwister.com)
Screening the page/Paging the screen (article by Marjorie Perloff on digital poetics)
Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce (hypertext that requires new interactions on the part of the reader)
This is not a poem by Alan Bigelow (Flash poetry including audio, text and video)
SENGHOR ON THE ROCKS by Christoph Benda (novel with online satellite imagery – the reader follows the journey’s action on a map)
epiphanies by Cristophe Bruno (Google Poetry – you type, it answers in related terms based on google searches)
UbuWeb (a massive database filled to the brim with avantgarde literature, music, film etc.)
Uforståelighed som æstetisk strategi: Marianne Ølholm (In Danish. English title: Illegibility as aesthetic strategy. Lend it or buy it, either way it is a very good introduction to different theories on postmodern experimental literature and reader-response).
Last, but not least: have fun, explore, don’t be discouraged if things don’t make sense (sometimes that is the whole point of someone’s project), read about the works and projects, open your mind to new impulses and play your way through the net. You just might find your next true love.
The birds
A couple of months ago I went on a walk in my neighborhood at the time people put out their bulk waste. I am continuously amazed at what things people throw away. In my own saving-student-budget way I am glad, since I now have pots and pans and books and furniture, etc., all in perfect or good order. On one of these walks I found three big boxes of books on the pavement (where everything for around 12 hours just sits and waits for destruction or reuse). At first I was chuffed, and then I was five books richer.
Tarjei Vesaas - Fuglene
Yesterday I finished one of these books. It is by Norwegian author Tarjei Vesaas and is titled Fuglene, published in Norway 1957 (my copy is Danish and published 1965). The novel is about Mattis who struggles to fit in society but continuously fails. His mind works on overdrive and he often amazes himself with thoughts of rare genius, but when he opens his mouth to utter these pearls of wisdom (sorry for the imagery) his surroundings respond with shrugs, annoyance, sighs and overbearing attitudes. Instead of connecting with people, Mattis has a strong affinity with nature and especially the snipe (incidentally, a bird whose camouflage and zig-zaggy flight makes it hard for hunters to pinpoint and shoot – but none the less a hunted bird). Mattis is ecstatic when he learns that a flight of snipes fly over his house and ascribes this tremendous meaning. He lives with his sister Hege who nudges at him to get work, to join the community, but due to excuses and lack of knowledge he is always out of work. Secluded from everybody except his sister, he becomes (very fittingly) a boatman, but the only encounter he has on the lake is a lumberjack named Jørgen who, as fate will have it, takes up a relationship with his sister. This does not please Mattis, who is strongly attached to his sister, in reality his only link to his own kind. And so he decides to let a ‘of-it’s-own’ kind of fate decide what the outcome of this should be.
The Birds is a child of its time – there is a heavy emphasis on the psychological turmoil of an outsider, and the society that doesn’t include him/her, whether it is intentional or not. Something that set with me was the way in which Vesaas portrays Mattis’ mental constitution and the way his mind worked as opposed to what came out in spoken language. This translates onto the page, as both the dialogue with others and his own thoughts become half phrases and jumbled, cryptic and opaque. As much as Mattis ‘understands’ his own signals, as hard is it for readers and his surroundings to understand him. The tables turn in his universe, where the outsider becomes the insider and the community/the reader becomes the eccentric, ‘not-on-my-level’, misfits. Mattis is a person who talks to birds (not by the use of voice, but a concoction of mental telepathy and signals in nature), he defines himself and his actions by signs he allocates to everything from an expression by a passerby to the way waves form on the lake.
Again as a testament to its time, emphasis is on the tragic note, and in extension fate. There is a sort of implied disconnectedness that is without resolution throughout the novel. And so the outcome, as Mattis says is inevitable. It just is. Whatever happens happens, and for a reason, although he tries his best to postpone and trick fate there is no mercy. When he tells a passerby about the flight of snipes over his house it is this exact cause that effects the death of one of the snipes when the passerby shoots it down. There would or could be no other outcome. The novel is harsh and painful as it drags you through its passages.
Related:
- Zywot Mateusza – Polish film (1968)
Spew your lunch, your history and your language on me
Stalin's Cows - Sofi Oksanen (front cover of Danish version)
Sofi Oksanen, I wish I could read Finnish so I could read your debut novel in its originality. Not that the translation was bad at all. It’s just… I feel there is something embedded in the language itself, that cannot be translated and understood at all. Like I have read a story that has so much cultural baggage, that this novel alone cannot satisfy my knowledge on the cultural/political aspects of this novel. And language (or expression) is a very important part of ‘Stalin’s Cows’. Language is identity and culture, it is something that both manages to distinguish you from and unite you with others on different levels. And when there is so much stigma attached to your heritage you go on the fence. But the narrative is interspersed with snippets of utterances in Estonian, Russian and Finnish that arrest my journey. And so the whole idea of denying someone the use of language, the right to express through language a part of one’s identity, proves to be futile; it wants out, it gets out, it finds ways no matter how hard you try to cover it up.
Sofi Oksanen, if I wanted to do my project justice I would sit myself down with an encyclopedia (old school), history books, essays on cultural transposition, and a dictionary, so I could tear the novel apart and let it percolate through my mind. It’s not just the words, but the enormous baggage and memory that lies behind them I want to get to. There is literature that wants to investigate itself on its own premisses, and then there is literature that needs words to give up their own agenda and become translucent – still autonomous, but hinting at another level, often in need of a personal voice, a subjective form to utilise language. And then, language is really just a conveyor belt.
Sofi Oksanen, the way you decide to delve into the logic of an eating disorder fascinates me. Dealing with it all cool and distanced, on a theoretical level, a tour de force in self-delusion, you chose latent communication. What does ‘Stalin’s Cows’ want to say? Is self-preservation, the physical minimum-survival-excistence, above all other aspects of life? If you spend your whole time making escape routes, creating a persona or shell, denying your identity in the process, the most engaging part of the day will not be how to live in the world, but how to endure yet another day in your own body. The logic of the eating disorder spirals through and through in Anna’s obsessive expositions and the language of food consumption and paranoia shrouds every day, every encounter, every meeting and flashback.
Sofi Oksanen, thank you.
Electronic, conceptual, visual, concrete, structural literature, literature, literature
Last week another semester started at uni, and this time I will be delving into the vast field of literature as more than just the piece of text inside a book. On Thursday we were introduced to the semester plan and the curriculum with bonus literature.
The course is really fascinating. When I first read the course description I didn’t really know what to expect, and only had a vague idea of what the “expanded field” of literature covers. I have talked about the e-book before on my blog, but more as a concrete tool for reading a piece of text without anything extra to it, or introducing the possibilities that come with an electronic book. The e-book has spawned new directions for literature and at the same time reintroduced the book as physical form and an integral part of the context where no text can stand alone.
Shadows never sleep
One take on the e-text is taking advantage of the multi-touch function of smartphones or tablets. Aya Karpinska has created a children’s story, a so-called zoom-narrative, where you use the zoom function to maneuver around in the story. It’s an app that can be downloaded to your iPhone, and there you can explore and create your own paths through the narrative. The story is called Shadows Never Sleep and there is also a demo video.
Tree of codes by Jonathan Safran Foer (photo from Visual Editions)
In the physical realm there are creations such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest book, Tree of Codes, which combines the visual and the tactile with the cognitive. There is more than continuous text on page after page after page. What he’s done is he has taken a novel by Bruno Schulz and made his own story out of the already-existing words by cutting chunks out of the “original” and the pages therefore are fragmented. It is a piece of text that is much more, that takes into account its physical presence.
Cue hypertexts and the children of the digital age, children in a way that you get to play with the internet, try its boundaries and piss people off by not abiding to rules and regulations. Today (and I have like 143 tabs open, my computer is ready to give up, and I don’t have enough time in the day to read all of them, so I am on a continuous journey that takes me longer and deeper into different corners of literature+art+internet) I found Jane Wong/Joe Davis with Ways to carry you, and Jason Ockert/Mattias Dittrich Shirtless Others. I will not say to much about it, except invite you to try it, see what you think. And then there is Kenneth Goldsmith’s Soliloquy, which is an unedited transcription of everything Goldsmith uttered in one week of his life. It’s quite funny to browse through.
UPDATE: I keep finding new stuff, but this last one is so good I have to make an update and include it: it’s Seoul based web-art group Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. They make text animations with funky music, you have to check it out. I stumbled onto Dakota (a reading of Ezra Pound’s Canto I & II), which is linked here, and a transcription here, but there is much more if you go to the mainpage: http://www.yhchang.com/
I picked these (sorry) almost at random, just as an introduction to the vast amount that is just lying out there, and all my tabs are waiting, nay pining, for me to explore them (as I assume, of course, my tabs have emotions resembling that of humans, and not, as I heard at a party, fish, who have no feelings and thus can be eat by vegetarians, over and out).
All the people
I read in an article recently that it took us several hundred thousand years to go from 0 to 1 billion people, and only 12 years from 6 to 7 billion which is expected to be the count for the world population in 2011. So many people, everywhere, and a number that is growing so rapidly, has gotten many people seriously questioning the prospects of sustainability and life quality. It is estimated that 1 billion people suffer chronic malnutrition and many more are just scraping by, affected by floods and other climate disasters that countries are unable, in one or several ways, to help their citizens survive. At the other end of the line, where the life and death scenario is not an immediate issue but where people are struggling to find meaning of their existence in this big world, you have the misplaced, the in-betweens, and the getting-by’s of Western so-called developed countries. Someone has said that we are losing touch with compassion, empathy and solidarity across the board the last decades, that our trip to individuality has left us so me-me-me fixated that we cannot see past the tip of our noses if it doesn’t apply to us in an immediate fashion.
I got a call from Amnesty yesterday. It was a person on the other end who first thanked me for my contributions in the previous year and then told me that they could use more help if I was up for it. He then went on to talk about a specific place where my contribution (they never say money, maybe it is just to dirty a word, to acknowledge that our society has built itself around currency) could do good, namely Haiti, where women are raped in greater numbers than ever before due to the lack of control and corruption that leave the police at best indifferent (his words) to the women’s suffering. Finally he asked in a meek voice if I thought that I had some way of making room in my budget so I could possibly up my contribution a little bit, so they could do more humanitarian work. When I said yes to his suggestion he sounded so genuinely happy, that I felt really ashamed that I had not suggested a larger amount of money. And then surprised by this. Now why on earth was I not just happy to contribute?
And why mention this in a book blog? Well, I have had these kinds of thoughts with me while I read Harstad’s ‘Buzz Aldrin, hvor ble det av deg i alt mylderet?’ (English title: Buzz Aldrin, what happened to you in all the confusion?). Maybe it’s a bit weird to introduce Harstad’s novel with these two very concrete examples, since it is not a book that deals with natural disasters, famine or (over)population. But it deals with the one in the masses of humanity, and what effect they have on others, what sort of chain reactions lead on lifeline over to another. For me Harstad’s character, Mattias, is a central contemporary voice of those in-between’s. He is also the One in the book – the individual, the center of causality. But even so, it is not an egomaniac who fills the pages. You feel like slapping him for his apathetic and apologetic nature, and yet you sympathize and identify with him. The novel centers around a person who is dislodged and alienated from himself, his family, his girlfriend and society so much, and just wants to fizzle out in the great vast ocean of people, to not attract attention or make a fuzz, that he ‘flees’ from Norway to the Faroe Islands. A place where no one knows him and he knows no one. In this postmodern, fast-paced lifestyle he is one person who does not feel or doesn’t want to feel the drive of a winner, a top-competitor, someone who strives to be the best, at one point it states that he wanted to be the best second-best or runner up. He just wants to get by, to fill some service void, and get on with it. At the same time he is caught between two places, because he is aware of the fact that he doesn’t want to disappoint those who are close to him – he is scared to oblivion of being useless, of being in the way. He creates a buffer around his person and all around him. But on the Faroes he discovers a group of people (or rather they discover him) who take him in – at a psychiatric half-way house – and he connects with them. They are in a way embodiments of his own fears, and at the same time mirrors of his situation. Together they form a society of in-betweens.
Johan Harstad - Buzz Aldrin, hvor ble det av deg i alt mylderet
It’s not very often someone from outside the Faroe Islands sits down with a pen and starts writing a novel using the islands as a backdrop. And in a way it feels very strange reading this without giving way too much attention to the scenery when you know Klaksvík, stood freezing in a bus shelter on Hvítanesvegur and drove too many times around the islands in a car because there is little else to do when you are uninspired. And if I am not much mistaken, the photo on the cover is of the road to Gomlurætt – a symbol of a halfway place between modern city and quiet home town. Always covered in fog – timeless. Very symbolic! But then again, it is not a story of the Faroes but of Mattias and all the people.
The style of narration is exquisite, so vulnerable and rambling at points and concise at others. Some parts of the book have sentences that go on for 2-3 pages without a punctuation, and you find yourself running along with this fast pace, this ‘have-to-get-it-out-no-matter-how-it-sounds’ pace. He describes with fervor the in-the-moment scenery that you make faces and places come alive in your head while you read instantaneously. I think it is also this in-the-moment moments that Mattias lives by and can cope with. The world is so big, there are so many people, all the people everywhere, that he chooses to focus on one person or one feeling at a time.
I will end with a quotation taken from a beautiful funeral scene, where Mattias is to sing (he is previously introduced as a very, very good singer, but rejects it because of the center stage character singing entails). It barely needs more introduction or else I will spoil it for people who would want to read the novel:
And the important thing is not what I sang, but that I did it, and the sound filled the room, it forced its way around the church multiple times and through our heads before it pushed its way through drafty walls and clock towers, half-open doors and the people who stood outside felt warm for a minute, they closed their umbrellas in sync and stood there silently as the sound lifted itself over their heads and laid down on Saksun like a fog no one had ever seen before and I heard people crying, I heard people who could no longer hold back, and the minister went to his quarters for a minute, Havstein took a hold of Carl and Carl was sitting with his eyes fixed to the ground and did not dare look at the mother and Anna held her arms around Palli and Palli looked straight ahead and Havstein smiled to me, Sofia’s mother closed her eyes and I sang more powerfully than ever before, I tried to lift the roof, I tried to force the beams holding the roof to loosen from their battened places and open the building up, I wanted for the model boat that hung from the ceiling to sail out and the organist was doing his best to keep up, kept the pace with the notes and crawled up the register as I moved further and further in the song and at one point I left the lyrics entirely the way it was supposed to be sung, but the organist followed, we left the music and the lyrics and it just became sound and the sound enfolded everyone of us in warm woolen plaids and got us aboard unsinkable boats and I carried us over the oceans and onto land in another place and held the last notes for as long as I was equal to, and afterwards it was so quiet that you could have heard a bacteria falling from the ceiling and landing on the floor.
Not even God himself could have walked soundless through that room.
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