Billing itself as “Reading That’s Bad For You,” Electric LIterature proclaims that its mission “is to use new media and innovative distribution to return the short story to a place of prominence in popular culture.” EL is tired of hearing about the death of literary fiction. It believes in the future. You certainly have to give EL credit for trying.

Case in point: Single Sentence Animation. An animated short is made based on a single sentence taken from a short story featured in the magazine. This cunning little multimedia term hasn’t been trademarked yet, as far as I could tell. Here’s hoping the EL folks keep it that way, or maybe throw on a Creative Commons license.

To get a grip on Single Sentence Animation, I read all the sentences in “Three-Legged Dog,” by Diana Wagman—captured in a Single Sentence Animation video (caution: sexually-tinged imagery). The story is about a man whose girlfriend has lost a breast to cancer. He is her first lover following the mastectomy. Rather than being repulsed, the narrator is strongly attracted to the young survivor, so fragile and strong. The closely observed details are all there, the feel of a grubby bachelor apartment, the ironic pillow talk, the stream of conscious associations:

“My blue sheets were cool. My laundry was all in the hamper. She would be a chilly breeze in my arms. My sweat would evaporate, my skin prickle with goose flesh. I could pretend it was snowing outside. Snowing in southern California. With her, anything could happen.”

It’s a clever enough story, in a writer’s workshop sort of way. The narrator insists on a cool detachment throughout, leading to a decidedly cold-hearted denouement and little in the way of development or disclosure.

But Martha Colburn sure liked it. Enough that she picked the following sentence, very much representative of the story’s spirit, and made a 1:55 animated short out of it:

“I like the bare expanse of that half of her chest, an empty sky, an open question about what will happen next.”

The short is quite a take on the story, an approach I’d never seen before. Like most innovations, this one is rough around the edges. For one thing, it only makes sense within the context of the story. Although this may not be a bad thing. Normally we tend to think of filmwork based on literature as possessing a life of its own. The animation here is an extension of the story, though. I like how the words remain primary, of necessity.

I don’t know if Wagman and Colburn collaborated on this project or not. I like to think they didn’t. I like to think Colburn read the story, and was inspired. I like to think that the written word still has the power to inspire, my reservations about this story aside, even in the age of the 30-second YouTube clip. To that end, let’s hope the folks in at Electric Literature keep up the good work, and prove this to be so.

First paragraph (buy the magazine to read the rest): “My girlfriend is missing her left breast. She has a horizontal scar across half her chest, like the seam of a pocket that holds her heart. She had cancer before I met her. I don’t mind. I once went with a girl who had multiple labia piercings and that was more annoying. This is kind of cool. The skin around the scar is darker than the rest of her as if shadowed by a permanent cloud. A constellation of tattooed points circumnavigates the incision: on her sternum, beneath her collarbone, under her arm, along her first rib. The radiologist put them there as guides. One night, I took a marker and connected the dots. No hidden picture emerged, just an awkward box around the void. I like the bare expanse of that half of her chest, an empty sky, an open question about what will happen next.”

Purchase info for EL: Here.

Detail: The EL cover image is from the first issue, the one in which the Wagman story appeared. It is not the latest.

Editor’s note: Normally I myself would shy away from gimmicks, but I can see the animations as a form of art. Beyond that, what an ingenious way of promoting short stories—and perhaps books! While the single sentences are not in full context, you’re intrigued anyway, and perhaps even more. – D.R.

Maybe I’m just hopelessly naïve, but not only does the Book Nook in my hometown represent my earliest childhood memory of a bookstore, but I also have a two-year old in my house.  So naturally the first thing that came to my mind was Dr. Seuss:

We took a look.

We saw a Nook.

On his head he had a hook.

On his head he had a book …

(I didn’t have to Google that quote, I’ll have you know.  No, I have the entirety of One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish memorized.) 

Think the Marketing folks in at B & N are big Seuss fans?

In American Fever: A Tale of Romance and Pestilence, Peter Christian Hall does, and doesn’t stop there. The story of a flu-obsessed blogger who predicts a flu pandemic and then records its ravages, Hall taps into a deep literary vein of paranoia. Having previously ventured into the epidemic-as-apocalypse genre myself, my expectations were high. True to form, this novel-as-blog soon had me wiping down every surface in reach with disinfectant. 

Hall grapples with a thorny problem: how to create a live novel. The “hypernovels” of the 90s were dismal failures, I’m not sold on e-book chapter mashups, and Vooks manage to be both unreadable and unwatchable. American Fever is by far the best stab at the future of the novel I’ve seen. It also makes clear that live novels (livels?) have a ways to go. Someday when we’re reminiscing fondly on the dawn of e-books, American Fever may very well occupy pride of place among the original innovators. Its sophisticated approach, however, is not is not always backed by prose equal to its packaging. 

American Fever’s hero is a blogger-turned-“flugitive.”  Observing the pandemic’s progression from his Brooklyn apartment with growing disbelief and anger as the sickness cuts down friends and strangers alike, he caustically comments:

“All I ever do is google.  What else is there to do … pray?”

A self-taught influenza expert, the Ayn Rand-loving blogger operates a “personal protection” business out of his apartment, selling masks and gloves and the like. Gradually he becomes something of an online hero, calling out an increasingly totalitarian American government for its misdeeds. Arrested and tortured on trumped-up charges, he flees the country with his socialist girlfriend and fellow flu survivor, but not before watching his beloved metropolis descend into barbarity.

American Fever is the first novel I’m aware of that is written entirely in a blogged epistolary style, complete with rabbit-hole references, pop culture innuendo and cutting sarcasm: 

“For the sake of innocent readers I’ve acquired, I’ll explain that I don’t want to have to monitor the site for abuse. Nor will I host debates about what politician would make a worse president, or which movie star or pop singer is doing more to fight bird flu (“I feel stupid and contagious/here we are now/ entertain us”).”

The epistolary style has a built-in weakness: nothing can be experienced directly by the characters, only described afterwards. It’s a tough hurdle to leap, and Hall doesn’t always clear it.  The very structure of the book keeps us out of the heat of the action: the main character always has to return to his laptop. So we get secondhand reports, emotional recountings, snatches of scenes. 

“Disorder has turned universal. Armed hospital invasions are common in blue states, red states, border states, states of anxiety, hopeless states. Is the State itself in danger?”

A single taut, well-written description of an armed hospital invasion would suffice for any number of notifications of such. Replete with Googled Wikipedic tidbits, the chatty tone and truncated sentences take American Fever dangerously close to pedestrian blog territory: 

“So far my ‘hood merely looks like a police state war zone. We all still love one another. I didn’t feel afraid when I went out. The worst thing that happened was that I seem to have exacerbated my back injury climbing over debris on B. It hurts like heck. No, worse: It feels unprintable. 

The East Village can survive this. It survived crack and yuppies.”

The end of American civilization witnessed via the witticisms of your neighborhood blogspotter: it rings a little hollow. I’m not sure this is the best vessel for a novel. I’m not saying it isn’t, either.  But the net effect is, when Hall does reach for more sophisticated language, he strikes a tinny note:

“Time melds itself like freshly bruised enamel paint, smoothes my days. I could run down the street naked and no one would remember, so long as I was back in my perch tomorrow.” 

Nonetheless, American Fever gives us some tantalizing hints as to what a blogged novel could be, and to my mind represents a real advance in e-lit. The blog is chock full of lit savvy, which serves to further blur fiction and reality with links to Hall’s flu blog on the Huffington Post.  He also sells personal protection gear and “Cultural Merchandise.”  Add in the fact that the book has an RSS feed to subscribe to, and what you have is a novel direction for the novel.

Books are meant to be finished, permanent projects; American Fever bristles with links (though these thin out as the plot progresses). How to keep the links current, and relevant?  Today’s fascinating article on Avian Influenza Age Distribution is tomorrow’s 404 Error. Should the effort even be made? I mean, I can imagine that in the near future aggregator bots will automatically update e-book links. (Which brings up another question: can you really be said to “own” an e-book if its links are constantly changing?) But if a book relies on constant link updates, or links at all, is it a book? And if not, what is it? American Fever doesn’t answer these questions. But it certainly puts them out there in a fascinating way.

For now, American Fever is live online. As of this writing, it’s on Day 156, of 220. I do wonder why you can only subscribe to the novel in-progress. Why not adopt an asynchronous approach, as in DailyLit?  How many readers are likely to read 156 blog entries to catch up with the story?  Not this one—I read American Fever on my Kindle via a PDF advance copy. (Which, in keeping with the FTC’s new book-reviewing guidelines, I hereby note is extant in my email, two computers, and my Kindle, so it is thereby safe to say I intend to keep it.)

All gripes aside, you’re missing something if you miss American Fever.  Start your reading here. 

American Fever will be complete by December 2009.  The print / e-book release date is as yet undetermined, but the blog project will remain online indefinitely. 

We’ll know that e-books have well and truly arrived on the day an e-reader evokes a similar response.

Even better, I now have access to a state-wide network of libraries and, better still, the entire University of Wyoming collection.  Currently a couple obscure and expensive biographies are winging their way to me: Nabokov: The Russian Years ($43 on Amazon) and Kafu the Scribbler ($66). Been wanting to read both for several years each. Neither exists in e-book format that I’m aware of. They’ll be here in 3 to 5 days, for free.  In my biblio-centric universe, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Some people look up at the starry cosmos and feel paradoxically puny and connected to something larger than themselves.  Me, I go into a library.

Image: CC-licensed image of Trinity College Library in Ireland. Art by 18th century watercolorist James Malton.

Today’s entry on the future of literature comes from Nicola Furlong, self-identified “shameless self-promoter” and Canadian writer of mysteries.

Furlong has produced a multimedia novel entitled Unnatural States.  It is certainly multimedia.  Whether it is a novel is debatable.  More on that later.  Navigating the simple site, you are immediately confronted with a “Trailer / Intro”, which features an buzzcut older woman in sunglasses performing YouTube-esque antics in lieu of of a book jacket.  It had me clicking desperately for the next page.  Readers, it went downhill from there.

Unnatural States is a linear progression of linked Web pages filled with text, pictures, sound effects and more video clips.  These are all meant to serve as the stuff of this “novel,” which apparently is a mystery about some latter-day John the Apostle and a terrier-like reporter named Virginia hot on his trail.  Or something.  It was hard to tell, what with all the noise and bad sentences.

If it’s possible for a website to be claustrophobic, this one is.  When I’m reading, I like to know where I’m going.  How many pages the books has (or dots at the bottom of the screen, in the case of the Kindle), how far along I am, what chapter I’m on, and so forth.  Unnatural States gives you none of these.  You don’t how far you’ve come, or how far you’ve got to go.  There are no chapters.  No organization at all that I could detect, other than the arrows at the bottom of your screen.  If you want to understand what’s going on, you can’t skip the video clips.  You have to watch them.  It’s like taking orders from the author.  It’s annoying as hell.

I mean, I like movies and video as much as anyone.  But I watch them as video.  Clips as stand-ins for the written word are horribly inefficient.  They just take so long.  What would constitute a few paragraphs of dialogue takes three minutes of video.  It’s the same reason I prefer to get my news off the web rather than TV: in the time it takes a talking head to get to the gist, I can have read a whole page of analysis, and be on to the next thing, rather than passively waiting for the talking head to tell me what’s next.

Now, a novel just is a passive experience.  Which is why I can’t stand to read bad ones.  If I’m going to hand my conscious working mind over to a writer, he / she better do good things with it.  Inserting video clips as stand-ins for words just doesn’t cut it.  I don’t pick up a novel to be a part-time watcher.  I pick it up to be a reader.

Normally I’m all for innovation.  But this is the kind of thing that’s going to make a raging literary reactionary out of me.  There have to be some parameters.  A novel can be spoken, a novel can be filmed.  But, as yet, a novel cannot be turned into a multimedia showcase.  Not without ceasing to become a novel and becoming something else.  A dreary mess, in this case.

Take the video sequences, for instance.  Yes, they are painfully amateur productions.  But that’s not the problem.  Slick scenes directed by Quentin Tarantino would not improve the situation.  That’s because video clips are not writing; they are fundamentally something else.  This is the reason you don’t attend a movie screening of your favorite novel book in hand, nor read a book with a DVD remote, watching the scenes as you read them.  I suppose it’s possible to imagine a future when the multitasking hordes both read and watch video at the same time, but that won’t be reading (or watching, for that matter).  It will be something else.  For now the barrier between the two is impermeable.  Unnatural States is a demonstration of why.  If this is the future of the novel, the novel is finished.

Is it fair to review a “novel” that I haven’t actually finished?  Normally I’d say no.  But in this case I think it is justified.  I couldn’t possibly drudge through to end of this exercise in digital tedium.  Furlong has managed to construct a galactic failure of tinny sound effects, 80s-arcade music, painfully turgid video scenes, and woefully uninteresting writing.  An actual novel, the kind that consists of mere words, is incapable of such a massive falling down.  So I guess this makes Furlong something of an innovator, after all.

Judge for yourself here:  Unnatural States, by Nicola Furlong.

Without hesitation, he said, “Green Apple Books.” 

So I went there.  It’s just what you’d expect: the slightly standoffish clerks, the vast selection of Buddhist-themed tomes, the glowing Sherman Alexie recommendations.

I surrendered to that wonderful vertigo every avid reader experiences when there are too many good books to count, not enough time, and not enough money.  I walked out exhilarated with two bulging bags of used paperbacks.

So I was intrigued to see that Green Apple is mounting an anti-Kindle campaign via YouTube. 

Their point, evidently, is that a Kindle will get you nowhere in a used bookstore.  Fair enough, and amusingly presented.  (Irony #1: Green Apple using electronic technology to refute the value of e-books.  Irony #2  the Kindle transforming hipster Left Coasters into the fuddy-duddy conservatives of the book world.)

Of course, Green Apple doesn’t mention that the Kindle and other e-readers have the potential to make places such as Green Apple obsolete, the recent brouhaha surrounding Amazon’s 1984-like silent zapping of 1984 notwithstanding.

E-readers have all kinds of issues to work out before that ever happens, needless to say.  But traditional bookstores can’t just void their existence with dollops of meta-snarkasm.  I, for one, hope that Green Apple and others like it find a way to adapt and survive.  But they’re going to have to do it in a world of e-readers.  I don’t know that trading on their hipster appeal is going to be enough to keep them afloat.

The videos here are Parts One and Two a planned series of ten. Stayed tuned to Green Apple’s YouTube channel and their blog for updates.

Related: Earlier post on the Green Apple YouTube series.

Editor’s note: Actually I’ve written before on how wonderful indie bookstores like Green Apple might make the transition to E and POD, while still selling P books to those who wanted them. – DR

Aside from the PDF’s inherent weaknesses as e-book format, this is a pretty cool idea. The tiny press run gives value to the hardcover, certainly pays for the free PDF giveaway, and gets the interest up for the next book to be thusly released. I agree with Kevin Kelly that the content seems a little thin, but it wouldn’t have to be. Kelly adds, “I’m impressed enough with the experiment to use this model on my next self-published book.” Not bad props (though I’m a little surprised that the Editor of Wired would need to self-publish).

In any case, given that it took only eight hours for New Liberal Arts to sell out, the Snarkmarketers might want to think of printing more next time.

Anybody out there think this is a viable publishing model? If so, for what genres?

Me, I’m still looking for the perfect model for a literary novel with various pretensions, er, ambitions.

“Google would get an explicit, perpetual license to scan and sell access to…in-copyright but out-of-print orphans [link added], which make up an estimated 50 to 70 percent of books published after 1923. No other provider of digital books would enjoy the same legal protection. The settlement also creates a Book Rights Registry that, in conjunction with Google, would set prices for all commercial terms associated with digital books.”

Brewster goes on to note that nonGoogle digitization efforts exist and that “For the cost of 60 miles of highway, we can have a 10 million-book digital library available to a generation that is growing up reading on screen.”

The TeleRead alternative

Nice going, Brewster—especially the sentiments in the paragraph above. In fact, that’s what I’ve been saying for years in the case of the TeleRead plan. Furthermore, who should run and own the library you’re describing? Are we simply talking about the Internet Archive and partners?

My own approach would be different—a true national digital library system that would be run by public and academic librarians in many cities, not just by a single nonprofit, even one as worthy as the Archive (including related activities) At the same time the Archive, Project Gutenberg and similar nonprofits could and should continue to exist to assure diverse sources of information. Same for the for-profit Google Book Search. I’d in fact like to see them and many others compete as contractors for a TeleRead system, not just operate independently.

But even the library isn’t enough. Students will need the appropriate hardware and network connections; meanwhile teachers and librarians will require appropriate professional training and help in blending the new resources into existing curricula and otherwise into schools and libraries. It isn’t enough to get the books online and work to assure that Google (or Amazon) doesn’t crimp publishers. Students need to be able to absorb literature and truly grow up with it, ideally even when parents are not good role models.

For some inspiration, we might look no further than to TeleRead book reviewer Court Merrigan, who, this summer, will be teaching students to be both consumers and creators of good content.

Usual reminder/disclosure: I’m a very small shareholder in Google.

Reading-related image CC licensed by Kokpinto.

Blogs and e-books for high-risk, high potential kids?

Topics like those are on my mind these days.

Among other subjects, I’ll be teaching Beginning Blogging. I’ll have a computer lab, about 10 kids, and 5 hours a week for 5 weeks. 

Blogging for better English

The kids are pretty switched on when it comes to MySpace, IM, and texting, and general web browsing. My goal is to get them beyond cute picture uploads and grammatically questionable texts to the world where content is king: blogging. 

I plan to introduce them to issues near and dear to the hearts of TeleReaders: why a Free Culture is great, why DRM isn’t, why literature is at the heart of our culture and how e-books could be its new lifeblood, and so on.

These kids have the potential to not only join our cultural conversation, but make real contributions.  A lot of them know things about life I can only imagine.  I think they just need an outlet and they just need to know how.

WordPress and Blogger basics

We’re not going to get too technical; we’ll offer just the blogging basics on WordPress or Blogger. Students will be free to tweak their blogs in any way they like, but for the purposes of the class we’ll be focusing on creating and connecting to great content.

I’m going to leave the definition of “great” up to the kids, but I’ll definitely be guiding them to what meets my standards.

The TeleRead angle

And this is where TeleRead comes in.  The Internet is a vast community, filled with communities like this one.  This is obvious to us, of course, but I don’t think it is to these high schoolers.  Most of them have never ventured beyond their rural hometowns and they tend to think the internet beyond MySpace is filled with kidnappers and kittycat videos on YouTube.

The whole idea of the class is to get them to join the global conversation, whatever part of it they find compelling.  But I don’t want to take a megaphone to their ears.  I’d like them to be getting ideas and connections and connected ideas from sources other than just me and Google.  For example: from you.

Your own message for smart high schoolers

What would you say to a bunch of high-risk, high-potential high schoolers to get them involved in our free culture beyond MySpace and texting?  Where would you send them?  What sites, what blogs, what writers and commentators?  It doesn’t have to be text-only’; sites of creative visual work and neato graphic design would appeal, too.  Unlike a traditional class, I want to make this one multi-sourced: just like the internet, just like our culture.

Needless to say, there’s an e-book angle here, too.  I’m going to be directing them to sites often discussed around here, like Feedbooks, Manybooks, DailyLit and BookGlutton (and TeleRead), armed with the information that not only is there great reading out there, but a lot of it can be had for free.  I’m going to show them my Kindle, but some of these kids sport mobile devices that make the Kindle look positively old-fashioned.  So: how about textnovels? 

Where else, TeleReaders?  What else?  Where is there good, cheap and / or free reading that would appeal to high schoolers who are just beginning to scout out their own potential? 

Once we’re up and running, maybe you’d like to subscribe to the kids’ blogs.  Maybe you’d like to comment on them.  Nothing would get them stoked up more than to know there are people out there, people they’ve never even met, who take an interest in what they have to say.  If there’s an interest out there, I’ll update here at TeleRead as we go.

So whatever ideas / comments / suggestions you have, please post them below.  If you’d rather send me an email, please do so at court.merrigan.ink@gmail.com . 

Thanks very much, and a special thanks to David and Paul for letting me post this here.

Stop the presses, as it were. The Espresso Book Machine “can print and bind books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait,” according to the Guardian. Currently it has access to 500,000 books, but the British bookseller Blackwell’s

hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer—the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are currently out-of-copyright works, but Blackwell is working with publishers throughout the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings, and says the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

According to maker On Demand Books, the Espresso is “in essence, an ATM for books.”

No word on how U.S. publishers have reacted, but as the Espresso is the brainstorm of American publisher Jason Epstein, my guess is we’ll find out soon. I can imagine brick-and-mortar stores won’t be hopping for joy (according to Douglas A. Mcintyre, the bookseller Borders will be gone by the end of 2009), but Amazon will lap the news up.

On Demand apparently plans to have the machines available at retail outlets in the UK. Is this really going to fly? What if there are 50 people waiting for a book? That would stretch out five-minute quite a bit. Will you have to make an appointment? Perhaps online? In that case, why bother with a retail outlet at all? Why not just order online?

I can envision a warehouse of ever-more efficient Espresso machines churning out the books 24 hours a day, new orders streaming in to be packaged up and mailed out. A warehouse of blank paper and mail clerks. Big-name authors and publishing houses see the writing on the wall and skip the entire traditional print run in favor of on-demand orders. Both eliminating a great deal of waste and leveling the publishing industry. A Netflix of books, if you will. (Meanwhile, the real Netflix is driving big-box rental outfit Blockbuster to bankruptcy.) As Julia at HarperStudio recounts, “I vividly remember an agent I respect sitting in my office a couple of years ago saying “if the Espresso takes off, publishers and editors will be dead men walking.”

Maybe. Or is this yet another business model for Amazon to swoop down on—its acquisition of Lexcycle being the latest?

Of course, if you’re really interested in getting your books quick, fast, and in a hurry (not to mention free if they’re in the public domain), you’d be making the move to e-books. It’s pure speculation on my part, but I imagine if the Espresso machine is widely adopted, a lot of people who might have moved to e-books will stick with print, particularly if “Espresso books” (to coin a phrase) become progressively cheaper. Alternatively, more people might be drawn to e-books, particularly those available with Kindle-like ease. After all, why wait five minutes when you can have a book now?

If the logistics could be worked out, this could also be a great opportunity to offer e-books alongside print books. Package deals. Buy five print books, get one e-book free, say. Opportunities abound, it seems to me.

If the Espresso Machine really does take off, will the publishing industry be agile enough to respond positively? Though their comrades in music and Hollywood don’t offer much hope, with Amazon on the prowl and e-books on the march, it’d better.

Related: Earlier TeleRead items on the Espresso Machine.

While I can’t see why anyone would buy both a hardcover edition and an e-book, if HarperStudio is giving it away and it’s DRM-free in the bargain, I don’t see how you can lose. And not just any old e-book. This one features possibly America’s greatest satirist wondering if “Jane Austen’s goal is to ‘make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters?’” And:

Twain plasters the city with ads to promote his talk at the Cooper Union (he is terrified no one will attend). Later that day, Twain encounters two men gazing at one of his ads. One man says to the other: “Who is Mark Twain?” The other responds: “God Knows—I Don’t.”

Be sure not to miss John Lithgow reading a selection wherein it is revealed how Twain determined which manuscripts to publish, and which to burn.

I’ve read pretty much everything Twain has written up to this point, and as a writer, I’ve taken his 19 Rules of Literary Art much to heart. I don’t usually buy hard covers, but this one comes in at a reasonable $19.99 and with the e-book to boot, I think I’ll make an exception. Maybe I can give the hardcover away …

One thing I’m very curious about: All Twain’s writings have long since passed into the public domain. So can Harper Studio hold a copyright to these 24 essays? They’re handpicked by Robert Hirst, General Editor of The Mark Twain Project at UC Berkeley, so possibly they’ve been edited. If so, does that mean they can be copyrighted?

Start with the title story to see the absurd in action. My Kindle sat untouched for a couple weeks while I transitioned back to the U.S. from Thailand.  When I got back to my Kindle’s homepage again, I did a double take—Password Incorrect?  What password?  I never needed a damn password before!—until it all came back to me.  My reaction is strikingly similar to the befuddlement of the uniformly oddball characters of Password Incorrect confronted by the unexpected repercussions of their tech-doings. 

Nearly all the 25 stories are flash fiction; that is, under 1000 words.  My favorite was “Wishes Shovel Best.” 

On Christmas Eve Slawek Przekosniak received an SMS with these wishes: “Wishing yo good ping super new”.  He didn’t know who sent him that surprisingly enigmatic message. 

Inspired, he creates software to manufacturing randomly bizarre messages, starting an online phenomenon that makes him the 67th-richest man in Poland.  Until a curmudgeonly official is offended by an SMS which reads “Wishes shovel best” and turns him over to the Inquiry Board, the Board of Inquiries, and the Special Security Agency.  Black limousines appear at his house on the night he is to receive a lobbied-for Site of the Year Award.  In the Age (Moment?) of Twitter, this seems less a merely imagined story than another possible permutation of reality.

Evening elementary school

“Part-time Evening Elementary School” features a school designed for kids “too busy to learn during the day due to the time spent on the difficult task of maintaining our country’s high ranking in the very competitive field of computer games.”  A school where PE classes are for stretching the spine and practicing joystick skills and English is considered vital because it allows “for quick mastery of games not yet translated into Polish.” 

“Happiness in a Four-Pack” is about a revolutionary new product, “ingestible energizing happiness”.  Unfortunately, after an initial burst of popularity, sales soon collapse.  Consumer studies reveal that “customers don’t want to be happy.  They are much more effectively motivated by misfortune.”  Not to worry.  “That’s Sad” quickly comes on the market.  Its wide popularity causes the company’s owner to throw himself from a bridge in, you guessed it, a fit of happiness.

Outlandish characters are the order of the day. A sampling includes a professor from the Department of Westernmostenatatious European Polonisation, hockey-playing bacillus, and a Dr. Kaliszewski: “He entered the room happy as a lark, which normally accompanied him when he was happy as one. Now the lark was somewhat tense and you could feel it in the air.”

These are the sort of tropes, I think, that a native-English author would reject out of hand as clichés, but in Kowalczyk’s hands, manage to find new life. Gustave Flaubert, in teaching writing, counseled writers to find the “unexplored” element in the commonest of things, and I think this is what Kowalczyk has done here.  Password Incorrect abounds with literary dexterity without ever sinking to the merely clever.

A couple of the pieces don’t quite measure up, as in the one featuring a middle-aged man who regresses into an embryo and the one with a talk show host who is “So sensitive and so sweet at the same time.  Handsome.  Appetizing.  Just like a spring onion.”  Kowalczyk stretches quirky to the very edge of its readable definition, and, in a couple cases, beyond.  The collection would not have suffered from having only 20 stories. 

Translated from Polish by Anna Etmanska, there are several spots where the English is, well, quirky.  Generally these are very minor, but still noticeable.  For instance: “He imagined Czeslawa Ceracz using this liquid and kept dreaming for good.”  Truth be told, I’m of two minds about this.  On the one hand, these are nothing an editor couldn’t quickly fix up.  On the other, they seem to me characteristic of the international English that is the world’s actual lingua franca, as opposed to that of the Queen.  So long as the text is readable, I don’t see any point in standing on ceremony.  The English of Password Incorrect reflects its origins in the mind of a non-native speaker, and the idiosyncrasies never seriously detract from the meaning or humor of the stories.  Therefore I don’t mind them.  Just bear in mind that as you read these stories, you will notice them.

We have so quickly come to take the internet for granted that I think we forget just how recent and radical a phenomenon it is.  As much as anything, these stories serve as a reminder.  Issued up from the heart of Poland by a wired writer in translated English making absurd light of situations unimaginable even a decade ago, ones fraught with the danger of banality.  But this nimble writer deftly zigzags to humor and sheer wackiness.  It has been suggested that multimedia “books” could be literature’s future, and that may well be.  But I think more likely candidates are the sort of short stories you’ll find in Password Incorrect, which exploits the networked world’s novelties while remaining true to the universal commonalities of the human experience.

You not likely come across anything quite like Password Incorrect any time soon.  Unless this work receives the wide audience it deserves and imitators spring up.  By  which time, I hope, Kowalczyk will have delivered another collection to our e-readers.

Note: For more of Piotr Kowalczyk’s tilted take on the world, including a one-second book promo, see his blog Password Incorrect. 

Some of these originally appeared in the countercultural magazine Changes, started by Susan Graham Mingus, wife of Charles Mingus. The poem “Sunday” came complete with pictures by Andy Warhol. (Unfortunately Savage is unable to upload them.) That’s all right. The poem speaks for itself. An excerpt:

SUNDAY

body repose,
mind nomadic;
constant flux even on the day
of rest. all is quiet. the rape
goes on. and on. coercing
lover over food, soft beverages
and burps of what happened
during the preceding six days.
it is boring,
with feeling.
slick, sophisticate gray-haired
news shows are on t.v. tell us
nothing. except that you can’t catch
the week on one days notice.

He’s put up eight poems so far and tells me he’s planning on putting up more. Maybe if we’re lucky we’ll soon see an e-book poetry collection.

Having just returned to the US after long residence abroad, my favorite is “No Mistake”. It’s not often a writer hits the nail smack on the head in just 14 words:

NO MISTAKE

The way back home
is not always
the easiest.
Poe’s fall
was not
luck.

Norman Savage
Coney Island
1969

A book is forever. A screen of text is not.

So says Stephen Carter (photo) in a Daily Beast post titled Where’s the Bailout for Publishing?

I would say he has it backwards: online is forever. Books are made of glue and paper, mostly of the high-acid type that quickly turns into so much dust and pulp. I have whole shelves doing so before my eyes, particularly the ones I owned in Thailand, where the climate is particularly merciless to cheaply-made books. They’re churned out by a publishing industry mostly concerned with this quarter’s bottom line, not eternity. Pulp that quickly returns to pulp.

No, if anything stands a chance of being "forever" (which I take to mean "lasting a long time in many places", not an ubiquitous eternity), it is an online posting. Like Carter’s. (Or this.) Disseminated across thousand servers and countless hard drives around the globe, once you hit that “publish” button, there’s no calling it back.

And a book, once out there, cannot be recalled. The author who changes his mind cannot just take down the page.

He can, however, prevent new copies from being printed. Good luck with that on the Internet. Barring some global catastrophe that causes an eternal blackout, everything that has ever been up on the Internet is being copied, every day, by servers all over the planet, such as at the Internet Archive, and will be preserved indefinitely. There’s no getting it back: if you put it on the Internet, you give it away.

A book matches perfectly the ideal of reflection. The tougher the text, the more reflective we must be in absorbing it. This suggests the importance of reading books that are difficult. Long books. Hard books. Books with which we have to struggle. The hard work of serious reading mirrors the hard work of serious governing—and, in a democracy, governing is a responsibility all citizens share.

I agree whole-heartedly with this sentiment. But a book doesn’t have to be a paper book: I see no reason why an e-book, for instance, can’t be just as much a reflective experience as a paper book. I read Little Dorrit on my Kindle. I don’t think I’m any the worse off for it.

To be fair, Carter seems to object strictly to reading books off a computer screen. I’ve only done this once, when I’d downloaded a book and lacked the printer ink. So I read it off my laptop. Which, I should add, was not connected to the Internet. It was all right. I’d rather have an e-book or a paper book, but I’d do it again if it was either that or read nothing.

But on an average day online, I probably read, conservatively, 50,000 words. That’s half your average novel off a screen. If I don’t read whole books, online, it’s only because I’m not conditioned to do so. And there are all those neat links to jump to and e-mails to answer and Facebook status updates to make … but this is not saying anything about reading off a screen itself. If there were a computer monitor that incorporated E Ink and I had a comfortable chair, I bet I could get through Anna Karenina just fine.

Democracy is not alone in its need for the book. It is no accident that the great Western religions rely heavily on sacred texts—texts, moreover, that believers are able to touch and feel and carry about. The weight and heft of a Bible, its solidity, itself implies eternity.

As Carter goes on to note, believers were not able to “touch and feel and carry about” their sacred texts until the advent of the codex, or the modern book, courtesy Mr. Gutenburg. A book is a much a piece of technology as a pencil or the Space Shuttle or the Sony Reader. It just so happens that these days it is likely yielding pride of place to, well, the iPhone.

That’s all right. Gutenburg’s codex no doubt horrified the Monkly Bible-Writing Union. (Surely the Scroll Makers’ Guild was outraged by the upstart monks with their fancy schmancy quills.) But it made possible the Reformation. Which led to all sorts of interesting results. Including the founding of Yale University, where Carter teaches. What is the digital revolution unleashing? Who knows. But I think it’s a safe bet that it’s something equally remarkable.

A text is a text is a text. Once text appeared on cave walls. Then scrolls. Then hand-written vellum. Then codexes. Now … ereaders and computer screens. It’s still text. It’s still words flowing one after the other in a coherent fashion.

It is difficult to imagine lavishing the same loving attention on the computer screen.

Difficult, but not impossible, no? Refer to Monks, Bible-Writing Union of, and Scroll Makers’, Guild of.

Such results might bear out Miller’s concern that, in cyberspace, the text “jostles side by side” with a thousand other possible destinations for the attention. And the reader, of course, freely flees. … Perhaps, when we read online, the perceptive part of the brain is, in a sense, confused by the intention of the reader who sits in front of a screen. Is the reader there to gather and reflect upon information, or perhaps to check email or play a game?

I’m don’t disagree with Carter on this—the skittery Google mind has very different ends than the quiet library reader of A Treatise of Human Nature. Whether this is a inherently A Very Bad Thing is the question. Perhaps by reading and learning differently online people are pioneering new ways to, well, read and learn. Doubtless they will not be like the old ways, but it does seem to me a little Cassandra-ish to presume that new methods are causing “the decline of democracy”.

I can just picture the village elders leaned together to head-shake and tongue-click at those young’uns with their heads stuck in those newfangled books, wondering what is to be done, what is to be done. Why, if anyone can just read whatever they like at any time all by themselves out of that unfoldy thing, how are we going to keep up all the old traditions and ways? How are we going to keep our authority?

Answer: you aren’t. Thankfully.

Absent the codex, ideas would still be the province of a privileged priesthood.

And absent the Internet, ideas would still be the province of “information providers”, publishers, newspapers, magazines, to say nothing of radio and TV, and the corporations that control(ed) most of them. Good riddance to that, I say.

No, I consider myself thrice-blessed, to be born in a free society, with free access to books, and now, free access to the Internet. I find it somewhat baffling, considering the essentially democratic nature of the Internet (thus far, at least), that Carter identifies “democracy” so closely with “books”. I think democracy is better allied with the free dissemination of information. Which, I hasten to add, includes books. From weighty hardcovers to iPhone apps.

In the 19th century publishing battles raged between Britain and the United States. A loophole in American copyright law enabled publishers to reprint British books at will. Until 1891, the intellectual property of non-citizens was up for grabs. Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson and other popular British writers lost untold amounts of income as American publishers profited. American writers, too, were commercial losers at home, as a book of poetry by Longfellow or Poe selling for one dollar had to compete with a 25 cent novel by Dickens or Thackeray.

It was an intellectual-property war every bit as fierce as today’s DVD black market in China. American publishers would send their agents to roam the wharves in New York, Philadelphia and Boston to intercept popular manuscripts coming in by ship. Across the Atlantic, English customs officials would search passenger ships coming from the States and confiscate pirated British books as contraband.

Dickens found himself in an awkward spot, torn between his financial interests and his fame. Though he did not earn royalties from his American sales, the inexpensive prices helped circulate his books and serials more widely, increasing his popularity.

When Dickens travelled to America for the first time in 1841, he crowed in a subsequent letter that “there never was a king or Emperor upon the Earth, so cheered, and followed by crowds.” He relished this adulation, which exceeded what he enjoyed back home. He also felt a natural kinship with America’s ideals of equality, democracy and liberalism. His own rags-to-riches story was embraced by the country’s public and press.

Still, he used his first visit to deliver speeches calling for an international copyright. Dickens expected right-thinking Americans to join him in the fight. But the country was going through an economic crunch, making even high-minded demands for more money unappealing. His tub-thumping especially irked American newspapers, which relied on free British content to fill their pages….

Dickens understood that there would be no international copyright in his lifetime. In 1867 he announced that Fields, Osgood & Co, a Boston publisher sponsoring his tour, would be his authorised American publisher for his forthcoming novel, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”. Though this could not prevent pirated editions, he made a moral plea to readers to purchase the official version.

Dubbed the Dickens Controversy, this unprecedented arrangement sparked fierce debate among American publishers, who were caught off-guard by an author’s ability to sway public opinion. Some of the most notorious pirating firms felt forced to re-evaluate their positions on copyright.

I don’t think we can draw an exact analogy to today’s situation and the Internet, but I think this much is clear: as long as there as profit to be made by pirating, there will be profiteering. Building more walls won’t solve the problem. Pirates will simply scale them, laughing. And unless you’ve written, say, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol (to say nothing of Little Dorrit), you probably won’t command the adulation of an Emperor on your book tour.

So should today’s writers forget about quitting their day jobs? Is the future Smashwords and like services? Maybe letting readers set the price? Utilize Creative Commons? Or keep plugging away in “traditional” publishing, hoping for that break-through book deal? What do TeleReaders think?

(This is assuming that you’ve written a Very Good Book to begin with.)

Moderator’s note: The photo by George Herbert Watkins is via Wikipedia.