Electronic Reading Devices…Just the New MP3 Player?

To play music back in the day, a record player and the record were required.  Then, came cassette tapes, followed by CDs, and now there are MP3 players.  Apple’s iPod, Microsoft’s Zune, and SanDisk’s Sanza are just three different types of MP3 players out of many.  To listen to records, you needed a lot of space in which to put the stereo equipment, but now it all fits in your pocket.

If you can do it with music, then why not books? Shouldn’t books fit in your pocket?  Instead of iPods there is the Kindle, in competition with Barnes and Noble’s Nook.  And don’t you worry, Apple, of course, is following close behind with some sort of “super iPhone.” Books are heavy and can be difficult to lug around.  When you think about it, it only makes sense to digitalize books.  Picture this: You’re sitting at the airport, waiting for your flight, and you finish one of the paperbacks you happened to stick in your bag.  Luckily, you brought another, but the flight gets delayed overnight and sitting in your hotel room you finish that book too.  You are left frustrated not only because of the airport system, but also because you are now bored.  With an electronic reading device, this situation would not happen, because hundreds of books can fit on that little thing.

This blog is not meant to be an advertisement for electronic reading devices, but when you think of books the way you think of music these devises really only make sense.  At first, some did not like the idea of downloading music, especially because artists got tired of the music getting pirated, and that got in the way of making money.  This idea is also behind digitalizing books. Publishing companies and authors are worried about not getting the money they usually would from selling a hardcover book, but somehow things like this will get worked out.  Of course, there will probably still be some pirating of books as there is with music, but ways to prevent this will be established.  Music artists still make money, and now downloading music helps promote those artists.  This is done by recording how many times a song has been downloaded within a week and so getting it on the “Top 20.” This also makes it easier to share the tunes, thereby creating more fans.  These same concepts can work with authors.  How many times a book got downloaded will help promote authors, popularizing them and getting more fans interested.  You’ll be able to share a book with a friend by sharing the PDA, and you still get to keep your copy.

But what will happen to bookstores, to books in general?  Have no fear, bookstores will stay here!  I highly doubt that once electronic book readers become more popular there will be a mass book burning.  Think about it. Barnes and Noble, a bookstore, has its own electronic reading device.  They are not worried about losing their stores; instead they are enhancing them.  CD stores have not disappeared, and there are still record stores around too.  Yes, vinyl records are a sort of novelty these days, but perhaps this sort of thing will happen with books too.  Libraries will still be used and hardcopies will still be needed.  But things are advancing—people are moving faster and technology also needs to be fast.  If hundreds of books can be at your fingertips why should this be considered a bad thing?

Perhaps instead of being worried about digitalizing books we should be embracing it.  I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather have my MP3 player instead of my clunky, hard to carry around booklet of CDs just to have a variety-CD player. My back has all sorts of problems from having had to lug around heavy textbooks in high school and college. An electronic reader would help save me a lot of pain.

So instead of fearing the electronic reader, be excited for it.  In 1999 people worried that Y2K would destroy the world and that all computers would crash.  This, people, was ridiculous, and did not happen.  Nobody is going to be able to completely destroy books. There is a magic to picking up a book, the way it smells and feels.  Books will remain important.  But with electronic readers, books will become more accessible and easy to carry around.  What’s more comfortable, running in the park with your headphones and MP3 player or running while carrying around your vinyl record player?  Books will not disappear, they’ll just be easier to carry around.

The Texas Textbook Massacre: a Tounge-twister.

Now that I am facing the end of my time as an undergraduate creative writing major, I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of the published word. After all, this is what I am aspiring to do: have my work published. I tend to forget that there’s more to the book world than just artful literature; there are books like dictionaries, encyclopedias, and so on. These books are considered reference books. Can we really claim that these kinds of books can ever be completely objective? No. The writers of reference books are like elves — happily doing all the dirty work behind the scenes and getting no recognition for it. The only people we can name off the top of our heads are long dead, cough cough Webster cough cough.

While I am not out to condemn the writers of reference materials for not being 100% objective, I am interested in the influence these texts have on us. With oral traditions consisting of mostly urban legends in modern America, history books seem to be the keepers of history itself.

About a week ago I attended a lecture on the separation of church and state as it applies to public education. Richard Katskee, the lecturer, is an attorney and acts as the Assistant Legal Director for a group called American’s United for the Separation of Church and State. While much of the lecture centered on the science and the legal issues of this debate, Katskee raised an interesting point about textbooks. He talked about a debate over what should be included in public school textbooks, and how one state can affect an entire nation.

Any book to be used in the public school classrooms of Texas MUST be approved first by the state of Texas itself. In attorney Katskee’s lecture, I learned that Texas happens to be the nation’s largest market for textbooks, due to it massive size and population. Two of the largest textbook publishers, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin, want to sell their books to this large market, and so they tailor their textbooks in ways that will make them more likely to be approved by the Texas state education board and thus purchased. Textbook publishers aren’t going to print different versions for every other state, so the rest of the nation ends up getting textbooks tailored to Texas’s standards. Kind of unfair, right? Texas politics and ideals are not necessarily the same for Maine or California or Rhode Island. But these states end up getting Texas’s textbooks.

Right now, people in Texas are arguing to change what (and who) is included in history books. Attorney Katskee touched on this in great detail during his lecture. Reverend Peter Marshall, while not a writer of actual textbooks, has argued that certain people mentioned in history, like Thurgood Marshall, are not important enough to be included in our children’s textbooks. Thurgood Marshall was the first African American to serve on the American Supreme Court—apparently that is insignificant to Peter Marshall. Reverend Marshall has taken matters into his own hands, writing books in a series he calls Restoring America Leader’s and Learner’s Guides. He names the men and women (mostly white Christian men to be more specific) he feels are worthy of being in the textbooks. Knowing he can’t leave out pivotal pioneers like the founding fathers, he goes as far as making up false quotes and attributing them to Jefferson, who most of the world now knows to have been a deist, to prove his point that the founders intended the nation to be a Christian nation from the get-go and that the Constitution should be interpreted that way.

In an editorial by Lee Fang that can be found here, we can see that Texas Board of Education committee members are being urged “to remove biographies of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen F. Austin, and César Chávez, and instead add history about the ‘motivational role the Bible and the Christian faith played in the settling of the original colonies.’” While inserting the role of the Bible into the history textbooks is outright unconstitutional, removing the biographies of Washington and Lincoln is a possibility. And if it happens to Texas, it will happen to us all.

Many have written on the power of the written word, but textbooks have monumental power as children are required to read and learn from them. Many in my generation, the children of the late eighties, grew up thinking that Christopher Columbus was a hero, when in reality he did a lot of horrible stuff. Why? Because the textbooks said so.

Some have argued that putting historical figures into textbooks sets them up as heroes. As students, especially those in elementary school, we tend to trust that what our teachers and textbooks tell us is true. If we take people like César Chávez out of history books we are deeming them unimportant. I didn’t think Columbus was a hero simply because he was in the textbooks, but rather because of what the textbook left out about him.

Textbooks can include factual information without warping a child’s mind. If the information is presented factually and objectively, a child can decide for himself whether he wants to look up to Chávez or not. This is an important topic to think about for those who are part of (or want to be in) the publishing world, because what we produce is going to have an affect on those who read it. History textbooks can essentially rewrite history.

Vintage Books

While there has been a lot of debate about how e-books will change the world and literature as we know it, I have to admit I’m still stuck in the past about books. And I’m not even talking about paper vs. electronic, I’m talking about current book publications vs. vintage publications.

As someone who frequents used bookstores and antique shops on a nearly weekly basis, I’ve seen my fair share of vintage books. And even here at Susquehanna University, our library is filled with ancient books and publications. And I’ve noticed something. Vintage books are a lot more simple, both in presentation and in the structure of the book itself, while today’s books primarily act as posters for intellectualism.

Today’s books are excessively colorful, made with thicker paper, and are full of extra pages to fluff them up. They are also much larger. This is reflected in the price. It’s appalling when a paperback costs over 15 dollars and it isn’t a graphic novel. It’s a plot to make more money. If the book is more attractive, the public will be more likely to buy it, even if it costs a lot more than it should.

The focus in vintage books seems to be the work itself—just the author, the title, and the story. The books are rather small. The simplicity of the book made it less costly than books today. I currently own a book of criticism about J.D. Salinger from the 196os. It cost 50 cents, which is approximately 4 dollars by today’s value. It is over 300 pages long. I sincerely doubt that a book of such length would cost less than 10 dollars in today’s market.

Now, books convey the illusion of intelligence and satisfy the consumerist desire of owning interesting, eye-catching books, rather than on owning books for the work itself. Books contain so many forewords and afterwords, and introductions and appendices that they add hundreds of pages, raising the cost, rather than letting the work stand on its own. This seems the fault of critical theory and snobby elitism, but I digress. The point is, books have lost touch with what they are.

I recently purchased a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass published in 1970 for a dollar at a local used bookstore. The cover is plain, white, and has green lettering in the top left hand corner that reads “Leaves of Grass: Selections. Whitman.” And then, in tiny print, the editor of the edition. That’s it. The title of the work, the author, and the editor. There is no fluff in the book’s presentation.

A current copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass has a close up of grass as the cover, with a large central plate that looks like old paper, with a bright red border. In the middle of this plate is the title and the author’s name in large fancy font.  Is this really necessary? We all know what grass looks like, do we need to include it on the cover? Does it add to our enjoyment of Whitman’s words? Not really.

Are we no longer drawn to the works themselves? Only by the images or ideas of them? Yes, it is true that book publishers did not include fancy pictures and type settings on their old books because they didn’t have the technology to do so. However, just because they have the technology doesn’t mean they have to use it. There has to be a marketable reason to use it, otherwise the cost outweighs the profit. As humans, we are drawn to pictures rather than words. In the “old days” the books that primarily had cover art were pulp novels and science fiction, usually showing some damsel in distress getting attacked or stalked by an alien or a man with a gun. These covers were used to draw in the readers and sell these penny-dreadfuls. Now, nearly all covers are marketing ploys, with some author’s face plastered on the cover, reaching out to the easily swayed. For a fantasy fan, a book with a dragon on the cover may be the reason to buy it. This is kind of sickening. Literature has fallen to the same level of marketing as a box of cereal.

Granted, this is a generalization based on personal experiences, but I have actually met people who have purchased a book solely on the cover art. Bookstores are not galleries. We are not buying the art, we are buying the words. Bookstores have become capitalist ventures, even more so than they already have.

We don’t need the extra presentation or the extra cost. Go to a used bookstore or a thrift store and buy the classics for considerably cheaper prices and you won’t lose any of the impact of the works themselves. An older edition might have some fascinating differences from the updated versions.  Literature shouldn’t be about money or fancy pictures. Yet it has become so, and now with the advent of e-books, it has also become about convenience and keeping up with technology. But that’s a blog post for another time.

Cosmos, Oprah, and Books

My mother has been in a book club for over two years now.  Once a month on Friday evenings they meet in the clubhouse in our development, drink wine, eat food, and possibly talk about a book.  Book clubs were all the rage for a while, partly due to Oprah’s influence.  Books were printed with questions for discussion and publisher’s websites for authors often included book club questions.  This is still the case, but book clubs aren’t in fashion as much now.  I think this is partly because the fad has simply worn off, but perhaps the trend will pick up again with Oprah’s announcement of a new Book Club pick.  Book clubs are a great institution because they boost the popularity of books, increase reading, and allow the discussion of literature to remain lively.

My mother’s book club consists of other mothers in our neighborhood with children of similar ages.  My sister is thirteen so many of my mother’s friends also have children in middle school.  They started out reading books like We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates (an Oprah pick) and The Bonesetters Daughter by Amy Tan.  Each week someone would bring wine, an appetizer, and some questions printed out about the book.  They would discuss the book for about half the time and then talk about their husbands and kids for the other half.

As time went on less women would bother finishing the chosen book.  Our close family friend, Darlene, would complain the books were too depressing.  Other mothers would say they just didn’t have time and the book didn’t keep their interest.  Even my mom would occasionally be unable to finish the book if she was too busy with work.  That’s when Darlene started bringing cosmos instead of wine, and the conversation became wholly centered on husbands and kids and, frequently, teacher bashing (much to my mother’s disappointment seeing as she is a teacher).

In book clubs there is usually a schism in the group because certain people like reading Nora Roberts and certain people prefer books that are a little more mentally stimulating.   In our culture there always seems to be a natural divide between people who read for pleasure or entertainment and people who read to challenge themselves. And then there is always a Darlene in the group who prefers to drink and gossip and have a good time.  Book clubs allow for both types of people to come together.  Even when my mother’s book club is reading a book that is literary fiction and doesn’t appeal to everyone, they gather together as a form of entertainment and to enjoy themselves.

Book clubs in the movies, like The Jane Austen Book Club and in Little Children (which were both also books), seem to do better centering on classic books that people may have read before.  I love the idea of a book club reading one author’s entire work.  It could get boring after a while, but it would probably feel like a great accomplishment.  In a collegiate setting we have the opportunity in literature classes to read a book and have an intelligent discussion with other people about it.  After college, that experience is lost if you aren’t continuing your education.  Book clubs are a wonderful way to have that opportunity.  My mom is a middle school English teacher and she has always loved reading and books.  Her book club allows her to enjoy literature, besides the kind that is read by 12 year olds, and to have a reason to socialize with her friends in a meaningful way.

With the popularity of Oprah’s Book Club, Oprah seems to have become the poster child for book clubs.  The books that Oprah picked in the past were far from your beach read, but somehow the busy women of America were picking up Love in the Time of Cholera, The Sound and the Fury, and The Bluest Eye. When you have the stamp of approval from Oprah, books sell in great numbers.  Publishers loved this.  In 2002, Oprah stopped endorsing so many books saying, “It has become harder and harder to find books on a monthly basis that I find absolutely compelled to share.”

In September of this year, Oprah announced her 63^rd book club selection.  This was the first short story collection she chose, titled Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan.  There is no question that Akpan’s book will sell much more than the 32,000 copies sold since it was released, especially now that Oprah has endorsed it.  I personally wouldn’t consider Oprah an expert on literature, but she is doing something admirable, something that more people should do.  She is compelled by literature, and she feels the need to share with others the books that compel her.  I’m not saying that Oprah’s Book Club isn’t a big money making machine, but she at least has the right idea of what purpose a book club serves.  Reading is a very private thing.  But literature doesn’t have to be academic and solitary.  There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a cosmo when you discuss a book.

Writing for the sake of writing?

If you are/were a student in any sense of the word, there is no doubt you will remember this scene: the clock has reached the single digits of the early morning hours, a mug filled with coffee (or poison of choice) on the desk—no doubt the fourth installment of this liquid—eyes hesitant to blink for fear of closing permanently, and a deadline in seven hours or less. Why do we always let ourselves reach this point? There’s the usual procrastination ritual (“let’s see how long we can put off this writing assignment before it starts to scare me!”), the feeling of being overwhelmed with all sorts of other work, and of course, the lack of inspiration. More often than not, I find myself looking at the white screen of an empty Word document wondering where on earth to begin.

We are given deadlines from the earliest years of our life. In elementary school, we found it safe to assume that most of our exams or quizzes would be on Fridays, a deadline set for learning or memorizing information by the end of the week. As we progressed through our schooling, pop quizzes were instated to keep us on our toes, a way for teachers to scare us into remembering information so we could regurgitate it at any point. During high school, classes were dedicated to seeing how quickly students could write down their thoughts or create an informed essay about a topic given at the start of the class period.

I remember people complaining about this in my high school. When my eighth grade literature teacher asked us to come up with a poem in twenty minutes, we all gaped at her. “What?? Are you kidding?” seemed to be the unanimous reply. Even those of us who enjoyed writing couldn’t understand the point of having a time crunch like this. Our beef focused on the lack of time to create something good. Now creativity had a time stamp; you could only be as good as you could possibly be within a set amount of minutes. Yet this is what we became used to. With the addition of the writing option for the SAT, students were again faced with a timed opportunity to express their knowledge and originality—in five paragraph format, no less.

Writing as college English majors, we are still constrained to deadlines and word counts, but suddenly given creative licenses. Yes, we still need to write a certain amount of pages by this time next Wednesday, but as an English (or Creative Writing) major, for the most part you are given the opportunity to write about something that concerns you. Most papers, instead of having a step by step outline of what you must include in the body of your assignment, now just give a basic topic as your jumping off point, and the rest is up to you. And yet, with time constraints and word counts, are we really free to express what we need to express creatively?

Any writer will tell you that inspiration doesn’t just come at will; it’s not something you can channel and suddenly produce great writing. It usually starts with a small idea, and builds up (with any luck) to a greater argument. The trick is maintaining the growth without squelching the creativity, or losing sight of what you truly want to say. It’s harder to write your best if you’re given too many stipulations; the creative flow becomes marginalized and the true sense of the argument is lost due to the demand of requisites. We put off writing assignments with the excuse of not being properly inspired.

So how do we tackle this problem? Since there is no way to bottle inspiration for every individual, there is a deep need for personal exploration, a self-evaluation: What inspires you, and how can this be related to inspired writing? Personally, I’ve found the early morning hours helpful when it comes to honing in on the creative flow. A brisk walk outside and suddenly I have a better topic idea. Find what works for you and simply write. I will conclude once more with a challenge: regardless of the stipulations of your next assignment or writing project, just write. Write organically, without highlighting the words every couple of sentences to see if you’ve reached the word limit. If you’re stuck, try writing something for yourself first, to get the hypothetical juices flowing. Apply creativity to your everyday writing, and I’m sure you will be surprised with the result.

Balancing Act

Over the summer, I went to Barnes and Noble.  After searching for memoirs and/or collections of personal essays in the ‘Essay’ section (logical, right?) and came up with nothing, I decided to look elsewhere.  Maybe, I was thinking, the world finally woke up and decided to give Creative Nonfiction its own section in the bookstore. I wandered downstairs, hoping it would be somewhere close to the Biography section.  In fact, the only memoirs Barnes and Noble carried – only twenty or so – were scattered sparsely across a shelf labeled “New Biography.”  New Biography? And I thought this genre had come so far.

Lee Gutkind, editor of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction, suggests that much of the ‘controversy’ behind creative nonfiction as a genre stems from a scandal with which we’re all familiar: James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, and the questions it raised about what constitutes the truth.  Obviously, a fictional narrative marketed as a memoir is going too far, but what is the other extreme?  A writer who refuses to craft dialogue out of distant memories because he feels this is too much invention?  What would we have then?  An essay that is not creative.  An essay that bows to the truth rather than works around it.

In my Memoir class last spring, I had an instructor who was very clear on his beliefs about truth in creative nonfiction: you follow it, but not to the point of stifling your writing.  It seemed like a very fine line.  For example, Dr. Fincke would tell us that ‘telescoping’ is allowed – the compressing of multiple events into one scene – but only if the happenings on each occasion result in the same thing.  The idea is to be efficient, but not at the cost of suggesting that something resulted from a particular event that did not result from this event.  In addition, it was acceptable to combine two ‘characters’ into one person if these characters had the same impact on the narrative.  Techniques such as these are meant to eliminate confusion in memoir: it’s difficult for the reader to extract deep insights if she is preoccupied with trying to make sense of your family history.  However, once a writer is armed with these techniques,  he will interpret them how he likes, leaving us with no sense of consistency, no clear guideline, as to how to proceed with the idea of truth in creative nonfiction.

It’s one thing to hear from an instructor that it’s acceptable to telescope your scenes and characters, but it’s another thing entirely to sit down to write and realize that, according to your instructor’s guidelines, your friend Lulu and your friend Fred can become one character.  Every time I have deliberately tried to use one of the tricks Dr. Fincke outlined, I have felt guilty about it.  Unclean, almost.  Though in the long run, combining two characters in the interest of saving valuable space (and therefore reader attention span) is not hurting anyone, it’s the principle of it: if this is okay, what else becomes okay?  If someone has no qualms about combining two characters, who’s to say he won’t later decide that eliminating a character entirely is along the same lines?  Because it is – in a logical sense – but it all depends upon this character’s effect on the narrative.  Will eliminating this character change the writer’s narrative – perhaps make it more compelling, more likely to sell at Barnes and Noble?  Suddenly, with the knowledge of one simple writing technique, questions spring up in every direction.

I have, on occasion, caught myself stretching the truth in my creative nonfiction.  Not outright lying, but I have found that when I am embarrassed to write about something, I tend to gloss over the situation, altering the dialogue that actually transpired into dialogue that is less embarrassing.  It’s very self-serving – I don’t want my readers to think certain things about me.  But every time I do that in a first draft, I find that, nine times out of ten, I revise later drafts to more accurately reflect the truth.  For example, in one memoir, I changed a scene of dialogue so that I wouldn’t have to talk about menstruation.  I never stopped feeling funny about it, though.  Every time I looked at that scene my stomach would twist, and I’d think, Yeah, okay, I get it – I have more of a conscience than James Frey.  But what am I supposed to do about it?

Another one of my creative nonfiction instructors is more liberal about the concept of truth.  His philosophy is that as long as the feeling of a particular moment is echoed in the writing – as long as the events described result in a truthful reflection – then the memoir is successful, and completely ethical.  This is such a broad belief, though – there is so much room for loopholes.  So much room for stubborn justification (yeah, it happened!), for untruthful pieces that slip through because the writer insisted that the emotion behind it was accurate.

What am I supposed to do? It’s not an easily answered question.  After all, if we’re given no techniques, no “Go ahead and build that scene, add some dialogue; it’s fine that you don’t really remember it – you remember enough,” then we’d end up with stiff essays, essays without impact, without staying power.  But these go-aheads sometimes register in writer’s heads as a free pass: No, it’s fine, you don’t have to be honest here; nobody else is, after all.  How honest can you be? But it’s not a free pass.  It’s a ticket one must pay for, a coupon, maybe, but an expensive buy nonetheless.  Because it’s a balancing act.  It’s a question the writer must ask himself over and over again, finding new ways to answer it with each scene he completes.

Never Fear! The internet is here!

I used to think printed books were like dinosaurs, and the meteor streaking to earth bringing death and destruction in its wake was the internet. I feared the internet for what it might do to these things I loved so much, that it would kill my beloved comic books, still printed on what was rapidly becoming an old fashioned medium. But then something strange happened. I found a site called www.penny-arcade.com, and it contained a comic style that I had never seen before. And it opened my eyes to what the internet could do for the written word and the drawn icon, that it might just be the comic book’s saving grace. It showed me that online the communication between creator and audience is immediate and gratifying, to both parties, in a way that can never be matched in a print medium.

The internet has been a safe haven for the weird and geeky since its inception, so I guess it makes sense looking back that the comic medium would find a home there. Web comics cater to every genre you can think of: horror, anime, gamer, science fiction, historical comedy, and even the plain old three panel kind with simple line art and a punch line at the end. Subjects of web comics vary greatly and range from a comic that follows a group of vampires during the French Revolution at www.bitemecomic.com to one that follows two gamer friends through their surreal and often unbelievable life at penny-arcade.com.

All of these comics have something in common, and something that the print industry is sorely missing. Well, make that two things. The first is that every comic listed above is available for free, and has production level art work and writing. The characters and settings and conflict are all on par with Marvel and DC creations, if not sometimes more ingenious and interesting. And as you can see, the subject matter is often something that could not be found in printed form. The second thing, and this is pretty crucial, the creators and writers and artists of web comics have the ability to interact with their readership on an immediate level. This is, in essence, what makes or breaks an online comic’s career.

Because the interaction is so immediate, a level of transparency is afforded to this medium that print comics are in desperate need of. An online comic creator knows pretty fast if something they’re doing is wrong and disagreeable to their fans. Online, a persons worth is measured by the amount of traffic their site gets. More traffic, more people viewing the site, the more likely someone will pay to advertise there. And that is where the money is made. The people that are successful in mediating between fans and great work are able to do the web comics thing full time. Take Penny Arcade. The two that run the site, alias Tycho and Gabe, have been running the Penny Arcade comic for over ten years now. Running Penny Arcade, Inc. is their full time job. They’ve been able to find a happy medium that pleases the fans and continues to bring more traffic to their comic.

This informal interaction between the print industry and fans is non-existent. Because of this, the print industry suffers. Comic sales have definitely seen better times, and if the sell out of Marvel’s characters to Disney is any indication, an informal connection will never exist here. Yes, there are such things as comic cons that artists and writers and editors make a point to visit, but so do web comic artists and writers and creators. And, more often than not, it’s the people from the web comic world that visit more cons, smaller cons, and don’t charge for a quick doodle or signature. Their relationship with their readers is what sustains their livelihoods, and this makes them more eager to keep the readers they have and to gain more.

In essence, the internet makes publishing anything—a comic or a blog about book reviews—more of a community experience. The internet has a way of connecting people instantly and creating a place where discussion is fostered. In this way the internet endorses reading and makes the reader want more. The internet creates communities, ‘fandoms’, around ideas and material. Aside from an occasional book club, these communities don’t exist in the print medium, or at least they have no continuous outlet. The internet has succeeded in bringing reading into society, instead of keeping it isolated as a solitary experience.

It is worth noting that many of the web comic creators sell printed collections of their work to make money, since their new material is available for free online. Many newspapers and magazines, including The Atlantic, have blogs that supplement the printed volumes. The internet is not bringing a reading apocalypse with it. Nor is it heralding the end of good writing. It is simply helping reading and writing evolve into what it will become next. And that is something that will work in tandem to better the printing world, and with it, the reading experience of audiences and fans.

For anybody interested I’ve compiled a quick list concerning the genres I mention above:

Horror:

www.lovecraftismissing.com

Follows a Priest, a librarian, and a horror writer through Providence, RI following the trail of H.P. Lovecraft. Takes place during the 1920s and has awesome retro style art, along with numerous fantastic references to the work of Lovecraft that many a fan will absolutely love. I know I do.

Anime:

www.dominic-deegan.com

Drawn in an anime-lite style that follows a seer, named Dominic Deegan, his girlfriend Luna and their assorted family and friends throughout a fantasy world teeming with dark sorcerers, dragons and orcs. Like many older online comics, this one is mostly humorous with some drama and action thrown in.

Gamer:

www.pvponline.com

Besides Penny Arcade, this is the primary go to site to see how successful people can become as web comic creators. This comic follows the traditional three panel kind and is a comedy surrounding the office workers of a gamer magazine, PvP, and the weird and often hilarious trouble they get into. Currently on a Halloween story telling kick.

Science Fiction:

www.starslip.com

A comedy about a space ship caught in an alternate dimension, complete with snooty art critics and space pirates.

Historical Comedy:

www.harkavagrant.com

Kate Beaton’s masterpiece, basically a hodgepodge of historical references with a smattering of punch lines and fantastic hats. Expect Napoleon Bonaparte sulking over a chocolate chip cookie.

Traditional:

www.threepanelsoul.com

From the people behind MacHall, one of the founding members of online gaming comics, this site documents the lives of the creators in whatever style of art Ian and Matt prefer that day. Varies from chibi-manga to surreal line art.

Art as the In Between

I am an English major who loathes reading. There, I said it. I’m wired in some odd way. The whole experience to me is like pulling teeth, plodding through words, pages, chapters, etc. Themes, symbols, tone, syntax, metaphor… and all of this in an effort to reach an end that ultimately, probably, and unfortunately, will leave me exasperated and unsatisfied. It’s a medium, for the most part, that just doesn’t appeal to me.

I can remember only two books that truly, and wholly, evoked in me an intensity of feeling and emotion worth remembering—or better said, that I can’t forget: Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby. I read Lowry for my fifth grade summer reading project—selecting it off a list of many potential reads. Gatsby was taught in my high school honors class junior year. I haven’t picked up either book since.  I don’t want to.

If you were to ask me to describe the basic plot of Lowry’s Giver, I can vaguely recall a few important details about the book—not much else. It’s been about eleven years, after all, since I’ve last opened it. Gatsby’s a little more fresh. That’s not to say, though, that I can give the plot an accurate play by play. Alas, this novel too is well on its way out of the memory banks.

However, I can still recall the feeling I took away from each work. The experience of each read was so powerful, so poignant, that I can’t shake the effects of their words. It’s the emotion that’s left behind for me when all else is forgotten. And that is what is so important and perfect about these novels.  I was eleven when I read The Giver, with no notion at all as to what underlying symbols or messages were present in the book. I was purely an uninformed reader, you could say, captivated by the story. I responded to The Great Gatsby in the same manner, although I was required to delve a bit deeper (since it was for class).

I’ve since been searching for a third book. I’d really like to make this duo a trio. But after having been bombarded by the “classics” for the past four years, I’ve decided that I must be ignorant, inattentive, and a bit slow. These are the greatest works in the literary canon: Beloved, Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Robinson Crusoe…and the list goes on. It’s a mixed bag, the literary greats I’ve read, and not one of them can impress upon me the same emotions as my hallowed two.

This is not to say I’m a philistine by any means. I do appreciate art. Good art. But in this era of fast paced living, who has time to sit and read a book? Especially, in my experience, when it probably has little to yield. That being said, the evolution of technology has rendered us less inclined to sit and read, as if I needed more of a reason not to. It’s becoming harder and harder for me to find a third book.

The art that I take to most is music, for the same reason I took to Lowry and Fitzgerald’s novels: its ability to provoke intense reactions almost immediately upon experience. I’d have to say I’m not in the minority here. With more than 100 million iPods sold worldwide since their inception in November, 2001, they are well in demand, and people have been listening. The potential to have  a 1,000+ song library is enticing. Carrying this library around in your pocket is amazing. Having it there is convenient. iPods allow us to access our favorite songs on demand, while on the go. It doesn’t slow us down, and we can still take the time to appreciate the art in walks to class, in our cars, or even while reading!

So where does this leave the book? Outdated and on its way to extinction? For so many, surely the answer is no. Unlike our music, though, we can’t read while driving, or dancing, or talking, or showering, and it’s hard to get engaged with a read walking to class. Books simply require the sort of time and interest that people have less and less of. I think art, unfortunately, is beginning to maneuver its way into the “in-between” times of our lives—when were not busy doing something else, which we often are nowadays.

Yeah, the new Kindle is great—literature’s iPod. We still have to sit down to read it though. And with so many people on the go these days, immediate experience of emotion is what they’re looking for. It’s the nature of our society and culture: fast-paced, demanding, and an incessant desire for immediate gratification. Music can offer this, a book—not so much.

Even as an apathetic reader, I’m always curious whether I’ll ever stumble upon that third book. That’s what keeps me reading. Surely there must be something out there, amongst the shelves and shelves of old and new fiction. Though with my impending graduation, and my time growing scarcer by the year, I’m nervous that this desire will never be fulfilled. Lowry and Fitzgerald will just have to get comfortable with each other. Until then, I’ll be listening.

Up for Interpretation

Intellectual property sounds like a dirty phrase in the literature industry. It reeks of corporate work-shopping, of finding the least-offensive, most roundabout way of saying something that only barely carries meaning. It’s an important phrase to remember, though, especially in a world where companies aren’t simply looking for good books to be published; rather they’re looking for a book that can be built into a franchise.

In the post-Harry Potter, post-Twilight era, the bar has been substantially raised for writers of pop literature. They not only need to consider the value of their work in terms of the writing, but how easily it is adapted into a film, video game, etc. So how much ownership does an author has over his or her own work? Though it is certainly considered the author’s “intellectual property,” when a director or game designer makes drastic or unwanted changes to the story in its adapted medium, how much right does the author have to try and stop them? After all, it’s been said that an author loses ownership of a piece as soon as it’s published. However, there is a striking difference between the type of ownership an audience takes of a work and the same thing in the hands of a film’s director.

Take, for example, the fate of Clive Barker and his novella The Hellbound Heart. While Barker wrote and directed the movie adaptation himself and was closely involved with the creation of the sequel, he abandoned the franchise’s film adaptation afterward, wanting nothing to do with the direction the studio was taking the story. To date, there have been six sequels to the original film without any of the original author’s influence. Because of this, the only characters that carry over from movie to movie (the cenobites) have veered far off course. While they began as neutral arbiters, an interested third party that stood somehow aside from the main action of the plot, they have turned into the stereotypical demonic villain, characters without any dimension or sympathy from the audience. To get an idea of how jarring this transition is for a fan of the first two films, imagine if Warner Bros. produced an extra sequel to the Harry Potter movies in which Harry and Ron move to Portland, Oregon and become detectives with a wise-cracking, talking cat.

This is obviously not the way Barker had intended to continue the series, and it seems more than a little unfair that the creators of the film series have the right to derail Barker’s characters and misinform the views of the audience in blatant disregard of his wishes. Now, anyone who approaches the novel or the first two movies and who has seen the sequels will have a completely different view of the characters than the one that Barker intended and wrote. But does he have the right to stop an unwanted adaptation of his work?

After selling the license of the film adaptation to a company, perhaps not. But he does have the power to take his property back. Barker is currently working on a book titled The Scarlet Gospels, the aim being to refute the existence of films three-through-eight and bring the series back under his control. He has also said that he plans on ending the series with this novel, that it will be a grand send-off for his iconic villain “Pinhead” (a name, developed in the later films, that Barker objects to because it “makes him sound stupid,” another slight he plans to remedy in the new book).

Through this, we see that it is entirely possible for an author to take back ownership of their characters. However, film is a medium that, by its very nature, reaches a far greater audience than literature. Even those who have never seen the movies are influenced through the trailers and tv-spots. Whether or not Barker will be successful in reclaiming his characters remains to be seen.

Large-scale publishing in the modern world is a dangerous game. With the advent of multi-media presentation strategies, and the ease with which fans can discuss the work with each other over the web, the book has become much more of an interactive experience. In some ways, the author of today owns less of his or her work than ever before. No matter the genre or nature of the work, today’s author needs to be prepared to allow the audience’s interpretation of the character to take precedence, even though this may contradict their own writing. It may not be a good development in terms of an author’s relationship with his or her work, but it is reality and a writer in the modern world needs to be prepared for it.

Publishing, certified organic.

With all the buzz about print slipping into murkier and murkier waters with the onset of Google Books and the decline of newspapers and magazines, I am left wondering what’s going to happen to the underground publishing world. More specifically, I’m talking about zines.

I discovered zines as a teenager, and have been hooked ever since, though I’ll admit, I’ve never spoken about them to any other writers. They’ve always been my own little secret, a guilty pleasure if you will. I discovered zine distros (distributors) from a website I’d stumbled over on a late night web-surfing session. I clicked through pages and pages of links to zine distros and discovered a world where people, just like me, could write something and share it with real people without having to go through an inch of red tape.

There is something to be said about a publication being produced by the writer herself, having done the layout, photo-copying, cutting and stapling all on her own. There’s no editor or agents or anything like that involved. It’s just you, your writing and the reader. You print however many you want to print, and you can send them to distros if you like, such as Stranger Danger, for distribution (some are online, some have actual catalogs handed out at music shows and record stores). Some zinesters sell or distribute their zines on their own, whether it be through Etsy.com or at festivals, fairs and music venues (some are even free!).

Zines are typically sold for a few dollars or less — not much to really capitalize on, and nothing like the price of the literature collections you’d find at your Borders or Barns & Noble stores. There’s a kind of closeness the reader has to the writer that doesn’t exist with The Paris Review. Zine writers get no acclaim outside the underground zine community, although many deserve it. The reader is actually reading the poems, stories, etc., straight off the pages the writer bound together. You are reading, seeing, and touching (sometimes zines are made of more than just paper) precisely what the writer intended, how he intended. He had no team of editors or a publisher pushing him to change anything. It is as organic and pure as it can be without being inside the writer’s head.

Angry Black-White Girl was the last zine I ordered (I paid $1.25 through the mail), and I must say, it changed me. Nia, the author, has had enough and wants to set the record straight, describing her experiences as a young bi-racial woman and her anger and feelings towards her black father who struggled with his own identity. It’s funny how something so hap-hazard looking (the layout really is cut and paste and photocopy, of course).

Since I first discovered zines for myself, I wanted to make my own. I have started the process on several occasions but never followed through. And now, here I am, a twenty-one year old senior in college — a time in my life when I need to be looking at jobs in writing, applying to MFA programs, and sending out my stories, essays and other work to magazines, journals and periodicals.

Yet, something still attracts me to the zine. There’s no money to be made, just the idea of writing purely for the love of it, not for money, fame, or awards; you’re just making something that a reader will enjoy, or connect to in some way. If I make my own zine, I can put anything I want into it (anything within the realm of copyright and all that). If I want to include my photography as an accompaniment for a story, I can do that. If I want to include a friend’s painting, I can do that. If I want to clip out notes from loved ones or friends and paste them in, I can do that. I could have an entire page of ampersands if I really wanted. There is a feeling of power that comes from this kind of publication, despite the lack of authority — there are no Oxford Press zines and never can be.

Like a chapbook where anything’s game, I see zines as a valuable outlet for writers. With so many young writers out there today, I am anxious to see if the zine catches on.