After Books

A collaborative blog for a class, ENGL 451A: After Books, a seminar about the end of books and the ends of books at the University of Mary Washington.

[booksafterbooks]

Books After Books After Books!

Since our class has just finished, if you could add any books/video games/etc. to our class, what would chose? Podcasts, videos?

I think podcasts (like radio shows) might be an interesting pick. Also, interactive fiction (like interactive webcomics on MSPA) might work, too. What do you think?

[booksafterbooks]

Presentations

I really enjoyed everyone's presentations at the Kemp Symposium. It was cool to see the project on social media platforms. I wrote some of my paper on society's trend of shortening and condensing, and Garret's project really played with that idea because he was forced to write poetry with very limited length requirements.  I am also not surprised his poetry didn't get much positive feedback, we tend to use our social media platforms for entertainment, quirky facts, or interesting pictures. Maybe if the subject of the poetry was humor or puns people might have liked it. It seems literature is much more shallow on those platforms because of people's expectations that come with the media...

[figurative-lee]

Is there a name for this phenomenon (concept? device?)?

I feel like there should be a TV tropes page at least.

Okay so I always thought of it as something like “the non-representation of great works” Well, what it IS is the power of suggestion, but I’m looking for something more specific than that.

What it is is when in a book/movie/whatever there’s this important Thing- a painting or a song or a work of writing or something like that. Whatever this Thing is- it is fictional, it does not exist outside of the text. And while characters might talk about it, describe it, have it be important to the plot, the Thing itself is never actually represented. And in it’s non-represenation that disbelief is suspended- so that the reader can let themselves believe the Thing is really as great as all that.

examples below the cut (this got LONG)

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[booksafterbooks]

Reblogging this over here because this is actually related to some of the works we've read in class.

Thoughts on this thing and how it relates to House of Leaves and S. below the cut.

Because House of Leaves is just one big exercise in this. We the reader can never see The Navidson Record, can only rely on descriptions of it. This of course only gains further depth due to the issue of whether or not The Navidson Report exists in any layer of the world of House of Leaves, shots described that are seemingly impossible and so on. Much of House of Leaves is dedicated to describing an improbable/impossible artifact, which is a solid variation on the "best ever thing" standard (though it's that too given the endless gushing about how excellent Navidson's camerawork is next to everyone else's.)

And then S. is somewhat the opposite. Where by nature of the work, the entire text of the fictitious novel Ship of Theseus had to be produced and available to the reader. But despite producing the main text, Jen and Eric are free to discuss a number of other works that don't exist, including their favorites (which is a surprisingly important detail, it allows that Ship of Theseus isn't Straka's best work, so if you read it and think "how on earth could anyone care enough about this to make an entire section of literary study" well there's your answer. This is just the book with all the sensation around it, it's his other stuff that's actually good.)

[booksafterbooks]

I found a cursive tape roll in one of the boxes that was in my basement.  I was pretty surprise that I or my mom actually bought a cursive tape roll.  I remember my 3rd grade teacher made us write everything in cursive and told us we will be thanking her in the future. We spent quite a bit of time talking about handwriting and cursive in class, so I thought it would be interesting to share the tape roll that I found with everyone. 

[i-rather-think-he-knew-anyway]

I made a Fahrenheit 451 image for my book- I thought I would share!

[booksafterbooks]

Misperceptions about White Gloves

Speaking of archival practices.

I'm less surprised than I could be, "wash your dang hands" seems to be the solution to most things and cotton fibers are basically tiny organic saws.

Does anyone familiar with any more perspectives on the subject? I know there's a latex gloves camp but that seems to have its own set of naysayers.

(I'm almost hesitant to point this out- I'm flagrantly adhering to the popular myth in my final project, though that's a little less literal and more about the abstract concept they represent.)

[booksafterbooks]

S. after Engl 451

So I really want my dad to read S. and I was trying to explain it to him and in doing so I realized that I don't think there's a way to explain the book without sounding super confusing.  That would be like someone trying to explain Lost to someone who hasn't started watching it yet: they'd be so lost. In actuality, the novel was fairly easy to read once you got used to it a little bit and found a reading strategy that suited you.  I remember some of our first reactions to the novel roaming around the lines of how well crafted it was, how visually appealing, and how they organized it fairly well considering how complex everything is. I have to say I still agree, and going back over the parts to get more info for the Wiki, I was able to grasp things even more easily than the first time.

Though my dad seemed apprehensive at first, I told him that we created an entire Wiki to help explain things if he got lost, but I told him that if he read parts of it, then it would give away plot points and spoil some surprises.  He liked Lost a lot and he enjoys sci-fi adventure novels and weird things, so I think he will enjoy the book, the only problem is I don't want to lose any of the inserts, they play a pretty significant role in the book, and they help clarify a lot of things.  I wonder if you can buy them somewhere without having to repurchase the whole thing....

[booksafterbooks]

K. Hayles-- how we read

file:///C:/Users/rturn_000/Downloads/ade.150.62%20(1).pdf

[booksafterbooks]

Why Anarchists?

Here’s a question for you: Why is Straka an anarchist?  Why is he so involved with S (besides Vevoda’s cruelty)?  There’s more than one way to fight a cruel, corrupt businessman.  Straka mostly seems to be going along for the ride, not an active participant (until he becomes an assassin). And are the S that innocent?  They’ve prob. hurt innocents before.

[booksafterbooks]

I got the impression that situating them as anarchists put them in a position of being (to borrow from the character alignment parlance) a chaotic neutral party? Anarchism is a term bandied about enough that it's become a sort of vague anti-establishment catchall, never mind the actual particular politics of the term. On top of the anti-establishment it's got connotations of danger, which combined make it the perfect platform for the legend of Stratka. Under the term you can generally lump all the things Stratka's/the S are said to have done from the vigilante justice to the more ambiguously situated accusations. The ~dangerous~ notes of the title of anarchy saves the question of innocence. They're anarchists- of course they've gotten their hands dirty to do what needs to be done.

[booksafterbooks]

“The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device.”

As mentioned by “End of Books.” 

[booksafterbooks]

Sunday night’s episode of Game Of Thrones took an even darker turn than usual: Jaime Lannister, who has transitioned from one of the story’s villains to one of its heroes, takes the opportunity of his son’s death to rape his sister and lover, Cersei—in the Westerosi equivalent of a church, while Jof

Something not discussed much in class, but certainly important to the idea of a society living "after books," is the idea of adaptation. Film today is largely based on adaptations, either from previous films (in the form of reboots and sequels) or from other media, such as books (such as the Hunger Games films) or comics (such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe).

  HBO's Game of Thrones television series recently stirred up controversy for taken what was (allegedly) a  consensual sex scene in its source novels and turning it into what is popularly considered a rape scene. This argument tends to undermine the complexities and nuances of the relationship in the book's characters in order to provide a nice "good vs. evil" narrative, so this raises an interesting point: are viewers of visual media less able to understand and follow complicated narratives? Do ideas and characters need to be "dumbed down" when making the transition from books (which can be hundreds of pages long and, in the case of Game of Thrones, provide 1st person perspective of their characters) to 3rd person visual media? Are intricacies lost translating literature to market-driven, lowest common denominator film or television?

[booksafterbooks]

Doug Dorst, the Writer Behind JJ Abrams’ S.

Doug Dorst had JJ Abrams on the phone. Though he’s an accomplished novelist and his work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, ZYZZYVA, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Significant Objects and Politically Inspired, having JJ...

Here's an article I found that describes the relationship between J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst while writing S.! 

[booksafterbooks]

If you have played “Warface” — the free-to-play online military shoot-’em-up by Crytek that is in beta testing — in the last few weeks, you may have noticed a big difference between the male and female characters: The men are fully dressed for war, while the women aren’t. One female character has fatigues styled in a way that reveals a skimpy, busty top. Another has a low-scooped shirt and a bare neck, and is quite well-endowed. The men, of course, are covered head-to-toe, save for their faces, and are wearing thick body armor, since that’s how people actually dress in combat situations. The female characters were designed after Crytek solicited feedback from its players as to how they should look. But after a backlash, the company did an about-face — well, half-about-face.

Keep finding more examples of this over- and hypersexualization and objectification of female characters in video games while doing research and reading up.So, ridiculous. 

[cuntamination]

[booksafterbooks]

Technically relevant.

[booksafterbooks]

its annoying how much anytime I say or type S. this is what I think of. And now you will too.

[booksafterbooks]

Why Anarchists?

Here's a question for you: Why is Straka an anarchist?  Why is he so involved with S (besides Vevoda's cruelty)?  There's more than one way to fight a cruel, corrupt businessman.  Straka mostly seems to be going along for the ride, not an active participant (until he becomes an assassin). And are the S that innocent?  They've prob. hurt innocents before.

[booksafterbooks]

P------ and Agents #9 and #41

I have a theory about the "Agents #9 and #41" vignette, included in page 321 of Ship of Theseus. I think they are supposed to be Jen and Eric.

As we've been reading S. these past couple of weeks, I keep hoping to get around it somehow -- to find enough traction within its various mysteries and unanswered questions to create my own answers that in some way constitute a reading or frame a critical response to the text. I don't know if that's what it is, but I think there's something going on here.

This short story within a story follows Agent's #9 and #41, two of the targets in S.'s (the character's) hit list, employees of Vevoda (who they call "the Boss") sent to elimate an S. (or Ss, or possibly the S.) who has been broadcasting from an apartment in P-----. This city of P------, they refer to as "city of Defenestrations", so I think it has to be Prague. Jen and Eric end up in Prague together (arriving separately, like #9 and #41).

Given all this, I think it's also possible that the S agents #9 and #41 are there to kill could also be Jen and Eric, but I like #9 and #41 because the text describes them "comparing notes...read[ing] through the S-files again and again," much like Jen and Eric. they also plan to turn their murder of the broadcasters into art, settling on narrative to create a "context for their actions."

We even get a bit of implied dialogue that sounds very much like Jen (#41) and Eric (#9):

#9 proposes a scenario in which the dangerously unstable male S snaps and sends himself and his paramour through the window in a murder-suicide. #41 demurs, favoring a double suicide. Star-crossed lovers, she offers. #9 is impressed. That's good, he says, So very Shakespearean.

#41 (Jen) is romantic, idealistic. #9 (Eric) is almost patronizing.

#9 is also the senior agent, having dispatched one of S's "wharf-rat confederates" (Vaclav?) and having "touched the library". Eric, we know, has for some reason flooded an academic building.

There are other connections. But what should we make of these? Since #9 and #41 are subsequently murdered after discovering that the broadcast was a trap, are Jen and Eric also in trouble? More thematically, are #9 and #41 somehow like mirror universe opposites of Jen and Eric?