Blogs vs books, from a writer’s point of view

Who needs books, anyway? One interesting kind of response to my previous post, Free your mind, was to point to the financial success of many bloggers, and to say that this was the way forward. Writers should, essentially, forget about the “outdated” model of writing a whole “book” and then figuring out how to sell it. Instant web publishing is what people want: it’s groovy and immediate, edgy, now. In that case, though, what happens to the quality of writing overall?

Any facile comparison of “quality” across different media is asking for a kicking. But I’m going to do it anyway. It seems to me that blogs are the perfect medium for discussing highly topical matters in, say, technology or politics. There are many blogs that I admire and read regularly, and they often provide brilliant demolitions of official narratives, or superior analysis to that offered by complacent and/or flat-out dishonest “professionals” in the corporate media, or just better jokes. That said, I would take everything I read in the blogosphere last year, load it onto a cheap thumbdrive, and happily swap it, in an instant, for a single copy of Denis Johnson’s mind-bendingly magnificent Tree of Smoke. For me, there’s just no contest.

Why should this be so? Is there any reason why some future Denis Johnson couldn’t publish a masterpiece serially on the internet? I think, actually, there might be. Continued →

On writers, ‘digital rights management’, and the internet

(Update: Why write books at all when blogging is the thing? See this new post.)

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money — Samuel Johnson

At the end of last year, I decided to give away my book, Trigger Happy, in DRM-free .pdf format. I called it “a kind of experiment”. Thirty thousand downloads later and counting, it’s time to collate the lab results.

Internet distribution is awesome, but you knew that already. More people got Trigger Happy from this website than ever bought a copy of the printed book. The interest shown in an eight-year-old book about videogames by people as far afield (from my point of view) as Brazil and Russia has been immensely gratifying. My book was converted to be readable on the Nintendo DS; and the Nebraska Library Commission made a spiral-bound printed copy for their collection. Links to the download attracted a lot of attention to this site, and in December there was even an article about the book published in the French newspaper Libération.

All of which is to say, it was a pretty good publicity stunt. It might have sold a few more hard copies; more importantly, it gives my future books a better chance of at least being picked up in a bookstore by people who downloaded this one.

Although I didn’t do it for the money, I was also, of course, interested in testing the idea of giving stuff away and allowing people freely to express their appreciation. So I put a PayPal button below the download. Is this, as some people say, an exciting new internet-age business model for writers and other creative types? Continued →

A figure walks through a dungeon. He is nothing but a pink head with stumpy limbs: his black bowler hat, symbol of the capitalist yoke under which he labours, is his one distinguishing feature. There is only one path ahead through the dungeon, so he walks it. What else is he going to do? As he walks, he is assailed by dictatorial messages from the system, which represents our contemporary porno-military-entertainment complex. These messages pretend a sort of kindness, a desire to help, but really they are telling him what he can and cannot do, what he can and cannot dream. He notices he has weapons, and throws a few, but the system assures him they are useless, brainwashing him into docility. There is an awful reckoning ahead, but the system tells him not to worry. All he has to do is to burn the rope. He walks on, as in a dream.

What rope? Why should he burn it? Why is he here at all? You may as well ask: Why is any of us here, hurrying toward a rope that must be burned, for reasons we cannot understand? Continued →

I Haven’t Dreamed of Flying for a While
by Taichi Yamada, translated by David James Karashima (Faber)

Variations on a supernatural theme: such are the novels of Taichi Yamada’s so far translated into English. A man’s dead parents come back to life; or a woman and a man somehow find themselves telepathically connected across nocturnal Tokyo. The stories are not so much sensational accounts of spirit-world incursions into everyday life as intimations that the ghostly or otherwise inexplicable is already there, if you’re in the right state to notice.

The people in the right state to notice are middle-aged men with troubled or defunct marriages. And so, in this newest translation, we meet a 48-year-old man, Taura, with a distant wife and a son he doesn’t really know, and whose middle-management career is in suspended animation. Recounting his story directly to the reader as though in person, Taura tells of getting laid up in hospital with a broken leg, and sharing a room for one night with a woman. They cannot see each other owing to a screen between their beds, but they get talking. One thing leads to another, and they have aural sex. The next morning, a nurse moves the screen, and Taura sees that the woman is old, wizened and grey. Continued →

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
by Alex Ross (4th Estate)

What is a composer? Is it someone who invents music from nothing, or someone who seeks inspiration in mathematical procedures, folk music, or birdsong? Is it someone who imagines a situation in which noise could be interpreted as music, and makes that situation happen? Or someone who takes other musics and mashes them up through loudspeakers? Is a composer a person who stands colossus-like outside the times, tuned in to the eternal spheres, or someone messily implicated in history as it happens? Does public acclaim mean the composer is a successful communicator, or a sellout? Is a composer an artist, a celebrity, a monk or a prankster? Continued →

Death at Intervals
by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Harvill)

In the craft of the sentence, José Saramago is one of the great originals. His prose is a voice that envelops all voices: it is like the universe’s immanent murmur. Those who have not read him before will be startled from the very first page of his new novel, when speech first appears. The anonymous, perhaps only hypothetical speaker begins talking in the middle of a narrative sentence, following a comma, with no quotation marks but only a capital letter to mark the beginning of his speech and nothing to mark its end. A decentring feature of this long-established style is that when people speak in sentences themselves containing commas, you are not at first quite sure when the speech has ended and the narrator’s voice has resumed, Is it here, you think, No, it’s later on, it must be here, I reckon, you see how tricky this can be. Continued →

Matter
by Iain M Banks (Orbit)

The Culture is an anarcho-communist, galaxy-spanning civilisation of post-humans and machines that has been the playground of some of Iain Banks’s best novels, published with or without his middle initial. The Culture is vastly curious and tolerant: just about the only thing it won’t accept is being attacked. Thus its war with the Idirans, the backdrop of Banks’s first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas (1987), was a battle forced upon it by a fundamentalist enemy that refused to negotiate.

If that sounds vaguely similar to some contemporary geopolitical narratives, Banks is now out to extend the analogies further in Matter, his first Culture novel for eight years. In it, representatives of various advanced civilisations debate the ethics of intervention in other people’s affairs, even if it’s for their own good. Luckily for a writer who is so skilled at scenes of violent action, the Culture has a secretive arm called Special Circumstances that specialises exactly in deniable intervention. Its armed officers constitute a kind of interstellar equivalent of CIA Black Ops. Continued →

Why beauty is truth

When the downloadable version of Radiohead’s In Rainbows came out, some people were complaining vocally about the mp3 encoding. Tinny and distorted, they said, what a dreadful conversion to mp3, it’s not even worth the zero dollars I paid for it. Actually, it sounds okay to me. Not CD quality, but perfectly fine for the bitrate.¹ What evident distortion I can hear seems evidently to be the result of production/mastering decisions, not a technical fault. This story might be a good illustration of the fact that, the less you pay for something, the less value you are likely to assign to it. Or maybe those people were unconsciously ill at ease owing to Radiohead’s crazy time signatures.² Or maybe they were just using really bad headphones.

That’s what occurred to me as I was walking through Paris the other day, listening to my downloaded copy of In Rainbows on my iPod through my new pair of AKG K324P earphones. Continued →

1. I stop being able to hear the difference between 44.1Khz 16-bit AIFF and compressed codecs when the encoding hits around 320kbps (for AAC; somewhat higher for mp3). ↩
2. “Fifteen Step” is in 5/4, naturally. ↩