tooth soup » Observations

Incoming

phill — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:40:01 +0000

Just a quick heads-up for anyone who still hangs around here that I’ll be posting a series of entries pertaining to the theory of video games. The first of (what I think will be) five entries is scheduled to be up tomorrow morning, and the rest will follow every few days after that. I hope they generate some discussion around this joint, as it’s been a lot of fun asking the questions and looking for answers. However, this warning also serves as a disclaimer, as I’m no narrative theorist. So if anyone with more qualifications that I do wants to write responses to any of the ideas I put forward, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’ll be glad to have anyone who thinks they can contribute something useful to the discussion as a guest poster here. Otherwise, it’s my first foray into this kind of thing for a long time, so be gentle and hopefully we’ll all enjoy the ride. (:

In other news, if you imagine what is going to happen a half-second later in that picture you’ve got a pretty accurate representation of my brain.

Routine

Phlog: Massive Attack @ King’s Park

phill — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:19:52 +0000

Untangling the Web #3

phill — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 03:29:59 +0000

photo credit: James Jordan

Hi all and

welcome to yet another edition of Untangling the Web. In this post I’ll be discussing the mammoth Google Books deal, followed by a rant encompassing many people’s opinion on literary prizes, and finally some useful links for the literature-inclined. As always, thanks go to my main sources of links: @AustLiterature, @Meanjin, and @OverlandJournal.

News:

A Short History of Google Books (and if they have their way, Nearly Everything):

Google. You love them, I love them. And even if you don’t love them, you’ve almost certainly used their home page quite a few times in your life, and you know about their rapidly expanding range of web-based products. Right now you can sign up and get access to Google Documents, Google Reader, Google Scholar, Google Photo (Picasa), Google Video (YouTube), Google Maps, and Google Books. Today it’s that last item on the list that I’d like to talk about. Google Books is a huge project undertaken by Google to provide an online, searchable database of books. That sounds good, right? A massive digital archive of books that may include those that are out of print and therefore unobtainable, being made available for free online for all to access. As always, there a little more to it than that.

When it comes to scanning things and putting them online, it’s not long before the issue of copyright creeps in. Google has begun scanning millions–literally millions, they’re up to around 12 million at time of writing–of books through their Library and Partner projects. While they do have safeguards in place that result in only public-domain works being fully searchable, and measures in place to prevent the copying of text and downloading of copyrighted material, publishers argue that the act of scanning, saving, and storing copyrighted works in their databases is a violation of copyright. This argument was embodied in a lawsuit against Google undertaken by the Author’s Guild of America and the Association of American Publishers. While this lawsuit did not go to court, Google did enter into a settlement agreement with the parties involved. This settlement agreement has gone back and forth between parties and the latest news on it is that the U.S. Justice Department has stated that the settlement is inadequate due to a failure to address copyright and antitrust concerns.

And let’s not pull any punches here, the concerns are very real. While Google has a ‘don’t be evil’ policy, they still have to justify their actions as not being so. At the moment the spin is the preservation of the written word. After all, they say, the great library of Alexendria burned down three times. And the preservation of the ancient tomes that are in libraries is a great use for the scanning technology. But we’re not just talking about libraries here. Google wants to scan and store every book. And it’s the way they are going about this that is drawing criticism. If you have ever installed software that comes bundled with other software (usually called ‘crapware’–things like internet toolbars and the like) you’ll have noticed that the box that says ‘Yes! Count me in! Install this ridiculously useless toolbar on my computer!’ comes pre-ticked. This is known as an ‘opt out’ way of doing things, and it’s exactly how Google is treating the Google Books deal. Authors are assumed to be complying with the Google Books settlement unless they go to a website and opt out. And approximately 6,500 authors did exactly that, lead by such names as Quentin Blake, Zadie Smith and Ursula Le Guinn. Reasons cited for doing so include not having anything to lose by opting out, but potentially everything to lose by remaining in and the effect the deal might have on the copyright of their books. It’s a very tricky situation, as the ownership of copyrighted works would essentially be transferred to Google.

Under the terms of the agreement, ‘…[authors] will receive $60 per full book, or $5 to $15 for partial works. In return, Google will be able to index the books and display snippets in search results, as well as up to 20% of each book in preview mode. Google will also be able to show ads on these pages and make available for sale digital versions of each book. Authors and copyright holders will receive 63 percent of all advertising and e-commerce revenues associated with their works.’ (summation from here). Essentially, Google is gaining permission to put together a huge digital library from which they can make ad revenue and sell e-books. This is big business, make no mistake.

So what happens now? If the settlement goes through and Google gains permission to place public domain works in full, and copyrighted works partially on the net, we’ll all gain access to a huge and informative resource. But what about the rights of copyright holders? And what happens to fair use? Google has decided it wants to do something and has set about doing it, and it seems that while the litigation world has scrambled to try and place terms and boundaries on what the Google machine can and can’t do, it has done so in a much more patchwork fashion than might have occured if Google had asked questions first and acted later.

Further reading:
Google has aggregated all the positive feedback on their project at this page.
The details of the settlement agreement, if you’re a lawyer and into that kind of thing.

Rant:

Arbiters and the arbitrary: the literary prize

Ever since I was just a wee lad in primary school (well, relatively wee–I’ve been one of those beanpole kids right from the word go) I’ve loved getting awards. Who doesn’t? Whether they were the gaudy plastic statues with a gold metallic finish that our teeball teams handed out at the end of the season, or the coveted book prizes for dux of each year, the feeling of recognition and the thrill of being The One for that fifteen minutes has always excited me. Of course, the kinds of awards you get in primary school are pretty easy to justify: you got the most answers right on your addition and subtraction test, or you hit the most home runs around the park. But what happens when the conditions for awards are subjective? Enter the world of awards for creativity and, more specifically, the elusive literary prize.

The issue of the legitimacy of literary prizes has been around for as long as there have been folks to disagree with the chosen winners. By saying that I’m not trying to be antagonistic towards those who critique the receivers of prizes. After all, if there were no dissenters there would be no issue to talk about and everybody would be unanimous in their praise for the winner of each and every literary prize. But it is a rare, if not extinct, piece of writing that unites all its readers, and this is exactly what makes creative arts so exciting and interesting and downright confusing. Lately, partly as a result of the cancellation of the Australia-Asia Literary Award, and partly because the issue is practically seasonal in its discussion, there has been a lot of talk about what attitude, if any, Australian writers should take to literary prizes. Where do they fit in? How can we guarantee that our best writing is winning them? What are they really rewarding?

Over at his blog, Samuel Cooney found himself pondering a contentious question, ‘Why do we insist on placing quantitative value — first, second, third — on creative works that so obviously work in a qualitative fashion?’ It’s a damn good one, too. See, along with my fondness for writing I have a fondness for mathematics and all the ‘hard’ sciences that are derived from it. Throughout my university career I have been graded according to whether I have written an answer that is right or wrong. There’s nothing more to it than that. I cannot fathom how you can assign a grade to a piece of art. What possible scale exists to compare it to? In a learning environment, a good teacher might compare a student’s attempts and grade according to growth, but I doubt there are many good teachers out there. And once you take the writer and the grade/prize out of a learning environment and remove familiarity between author and piece and judge, there is no yardstick beyond that of personal taste. This may seem like a cynical view, but you will find it backed up time and time again if you have a wander through the 40 years of judging piece that the Booker prize ran on its 40th anniversary. Once you see how arbitrary and subject to personalities one of the supposedly most prestigious writing awards is, it almost makes you want to give up and never submit a piece of writing again. For if it can happen to those giants of judging, it can certainly happen to even the most eager of fledgling editors. Geordie Williamson sums up an excellent article (and you really must read the entire thing because it’s brilliant) with the provocative statement that:

‘Prize culture, like aristocratic patronage, makes a lottery of literature, in which one, sometimes unworthy, winner obliterates the hopes of a thousand others.’

If you were to peruse a short list, or even a long list, of books for a national prize, this sense of lottery is obvious. How can you even begin to judge Tim Winton against Richard Flanagan against Murray Bail against Louis Nowra against Christos Tsiolkas? They each write beautifully in their own individual style, as far removed from each other as they are from you and I. (For yet more insight into the judging procedure, listen to the review with Geordie on ABC’s The Book Show.)

But that isn’t the main thrust of Sam’s blog post. Of more concern is the example that such lauded books have on the community they are awarded in. Multiple Miles Franklin Award winner Tim Winton has often been referred to as possessing the voice of Australia. Similarly, Christos Tsiolkas’ latest novel The Slap garnered many awards and had critics nodding over how accurately it portrayed Australian life. But whose Australia are we talking about here? By holding these books up as unique examples of what we perceive as being ‘Australian’ are we not precluding any other interpretation? If I wrote a story located in coastal Australia that featured no daredevil surfers, or a suburban tale of family relationships that contained no power-hungry alpha males, would that now be considered innaccurate? By holding a book as being worthy of merit, we are enforcing the ideal present in that book. We are saying ‘Yes, this is correct, this is good, this is the best.’ But what can we, the reader do if we find that such an assertion contradicts our own feelings towards the prize winner? Write a letter? Bitch about it on our blogs?

Ryan Paine has something to say about this at his blog. He points to alternative sources of literature such as Chris Flynn’s Torpedo mag, which could easily be compared to McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern for its attitude towards a definition of literature. But as Ryan points out, while we can’t do much about the big-name critical prizes, there are readers’ choice awards such as the Inky Awards or the micro-fiction competition 12words that directly poll readers. Is this method of crowd aggregation the answer? Probably not, since at the moment gaming the system is quite an easy thing to accomplish. But it shows that there are different models out there besides the big-name prize, big-name judges method.

However, sticking our head in the alternative sand isn’t going to make these prizes go away. Remember, these are worth big cash money. An emphasis of late in both the wider Australian workplace and the literary scene has been on the ageing population of Australia, and the subsequent ‘emerging writers’ that this phenomenon has produced. I use emerging somewhat ironically, since a lot of those writers classified as such have been around for quite a some time, but have been obscured by the names that are repeatedly awarded prizes. Rather than effectively pumping up the salaries of these big names, shouldn’t the government and other prize-keepers be spreading the love around to try and foster the kind of broad growth that results in more dynamic long lists? Okay, sure, authors need to eat and winning the big lump sum prizes can help with that, but the encouragement that an emerging or fledgling writer would feel on receiving a nomination for a government-funded prize would be immense. I would rather see 20 emerging or partly established authors receive a $1,000 prize than one author receive a $20,000 prize (though I can most certainly be considered biased in this situation, given my hobby/fledgling writer status).

Literary prize culture isn’t going to change any time soon. The media still needs their stars to invite to Sunrise, and publishers still need stickers to pin to the front of books to boost sales. But if we can start generating discussion for alternative means of awarding great writers now, then who knows? One of the people joining in the chatter could be a future dispenser of a grant, and we may begin to see real shift in attitude in the way prizes are awarded.

Untangling the Web #1

phill — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:52:00 +0000

photo credit: josef.stuefer

Hello all and

welcome to the first blogisode (yeah I went there) of ‘Untangling The Web’! UtW’s aim is to become a semi-regular blog built to provide you with some of the trending topics across the Internet that relate to writing and publishing. Hopefully in doing so we’ll be able to generate some discussion and opinions about what’s going on in the world of words. So without further ado, let’s take a look at what’s been going on in the last couple of weeks:

News: The Macmillan versus Amazon debacle

This was a bit of a confusing story, so some background is in order. For those of you who don’t own e-books, you might not know about Amazon’s pricing model for selling digital copies of books on its e-reader, the Kindle. Basically, Amazon buys the rights to the digital books at some wholesale rate, and then can decide to price them at whatever point it likes (frequently cited is the fact that Amazon chooses to sell e-books of bestsellers at US$9.99). Last week Macmillan told Amazon that if they didn’t switch from this model to one that involved selling at the price determined by the publisher and receiving a 30% agency fee for their troubles, they would do what the movie industry does and apply windowing to their products. In other words, there would be a considerable waiting period between the hardcovers being released in bookstores and their digital doppelgangers being released on Amazon. The implication being that people wouldn’t sit around waiting for their favourite blockbuster author’s book to come out on Kindle, they’d just walk to the store and shell out the cash.

Amazon responded to this by pulling all of Macmillan’s books from their listings. Oh, snap! However, soon after this happened, Amazon posted an explanation on their Kindle boards and reinstated Macmillan’s books to their store. The message basically said that while they don’t agree with Macmillan’s pricing model, they’ll do it anyway because, well, if they didn’t someone else would and they’d be missing a piece of the pie. Okay, so maybe I made that last bit up, but there’s been a lot of speculation about how resentful Amazon really is about this move, and how much they just wanted to try and appear to be perceived as fighting on behalf of the little guy. A lot of analysts have highlighted the fact that Amazon is now making money on e-books with this deal (the cost of buying them wholesale and selling them cheaply was not profitable).

How does this bode for the future? Well, there’s a lot of variables to take into account here, such as the newly unveiled iPad and its book store, as well us the upcoming Google book store. If Macmillan can bend Amazon to its will (and those companies are willing to be bent in order to make more of a profit) then the question remains to be answered over who will be the ones setting prices, the publishers who hold the keys to the content, or the service providers that maintain the tollways.

You can read more discussions at the following links:
Mobylives–Amazon sort of admits defeat…in the dead of night.
paidContent.org–In Amazon vs. Macmillan, Amazon Is The Winner
Amazon’s press statement
Wired–Macmillan’s Amazon Beatdown Proves Content Is King
NYTimes–Publishers Gain Leverage In E-Book Negotiations With Google

Rant: The fucking iPad

As if you aren’t already sick of hearing about it (and God forbid you actually know someone who owns one), the really-not-so-surprising release of Apple’s tablet has generated some heated discussion about what such gadgets mean in the context of e-books and popular culture. Everyone seem to be taking some quantum leap between what the iPod did for music (i.e. imbue everyone with the idea that it is the social norm to exclude yourself from every public engagement by constructing a wall of sound made up of two wanky white earbuds and a glorified mouse wheel) and what the iPad might do for the publishing industry and books in general. Suddenly, the idea that being able to read books on a tiny LED screen that will also be full of all sorts of other distracting shit (or not, given it can’t actually multitask, rendering it mostly useless for my epileptic spasms through procrastination) has become tractable and, dare I say it, hip. Let me be crystal clear in my opinion: reading anything on the iPad is not going to be as good as reading it on a dedicated e-book reader. Why? Because a) you’ll be reading it on an LED screen, and not an e-ink screen, and b) you won’t even get to the iBook store because you’ll be too distracted by an app that can turn your iPad into a roll of toilet paper. Reading a book on the iPad will be like reading a book on your computer; painful and faltering. But hey, it’s an Apple product so you can be guaranteed that a whole lot of gadget geeks will buy a whole lot of units. I just don’t think they’ll use it as an e-reader replacement. More as four iTouches strapped together with duct tape.

Other links of interest:
Christopher Currie raises the Indie Question over at SPUNC. That is, where do independant organisations and small presses find themselves in an ever-changing marketplace?
At the Guardian, two articles questioning the representation of two very different social groups in literature: the homeless, and the youth.
Finally, some advice from Maud Newton on the usefulness (or not) of generating grandiose theories of literature, and Mark Sarvas on problems commonly found in debut novels.

(The sources for many of these articles were a variation of RSS feeds and Twitter. Notable amongst the latter are @Meanjin, @Overland, and @AustLiterature. Follow them if you want updates on the latest in the writing world!)

Createmas

phill — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:53:43 +0000

photo credit: Photon™

The Christmas chaos

has finally passed, and thank goodness for that. The day itself wasn’t too taxing, but the overwhelming pressure leading up to it was pretty awful. I solemnly swear that next year I am going all online and ordering everything in November. That said, I did find some good presents from just randomly wandering/battering through the crowd-chocked mallways that I may not have online.

I got thoroughly spoiled yet again this year. Monopoly, a deperately needed rashy, a veritable cascade of Australian literature in the form of the Sleeper’s Almanac and a festive bundle of Harvest magazine (both of which I’m considering reviewing at some point), lots of home-made goodies, underwear, a vast variety of kitchen goods, and of course the thing of beauty that you see in the post picture up the top there. A LOMO Oktomat camera which I’m sorry to say, relatives, is definitely the best present this year. You’ll notice it has eight lenses. This is because it takes eight images onto a single photo sequentially over 2.5 seconds. Each printed photo plays out like a little movie. Below you can see a few of the attempts I’ve made so far. Most of them run clockwise from the bottom-left. Simple? Yes. Clunky? Very much so. Fun? Absolutely. This is going to be a very cool Summer.

Other than the big sigh of relief post-Christmas, not a whole lot has happened. The past two nights I’ve written two flash-fiction ideas up that I’ve had sitting in a file for quite some time now. You can read one about the evolution of RSS feeds here, and another about arbitrary annihilation here. They both run to roughly 700 words each, so perhaps have a go over breakfast or a tea break. I’m still cranking away at trying to finish a story for the next release of dotdotdash magazine. It’s taken on an unintentional* Kafkaesque bent, something which I hope doesn’t distract from what I think is an interesting take on the theme of ‘home’. Fingers crossed I get it done on time!

By the ache of my forearms I can tell you that Louise and I went wakeboarding on Monday. I’m enjoying it more and more, especially now that I’m past the ‘Oh fuck oh fuck I’m on the water oh fuck stay up shit fuck oh shit’ stage. Everyone can now get up really easily, and we’re getting across the wake faster and faster, so it’s only a matter of time until we try and get some jumps happening. Lou’s sister still holds the honourable title of the only person to actually do anything at all (a 360) on the board. I have plans though, horribly painful (for me) plans…

—

*No, really, completely unintentional; I’ve never finished a Kafka story. Not out of dislike, just never have. I’ll remedy that one of these days, but for now I’ll have to put up with the slightly disconcerting feeling that I

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