ys

The forthcoming Joanna Newsom album (out Nov 11) has some of the most bizarrely dreadful cover art I've seen in a while. The cover art for her debut album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, is also bad, but bad in a charming, naif-y way, all slapped over with unicorns and chickens (etc) in a way that's both girly and crude. A visual analog to Newsom's winsome croak? Sure, why not. The new art, on the other hand, is a piece of aggrandizing portraiture that looks like it was commissioned by royalty: which is also to say that it looks like it was designed to evoke money and influence. Ick.

But then there's the credits: recorded by Steve Albini; mixed by Jim O'Rourke, with orchestra arrangements by Van Dyke Parks? Holy shit. OK, packing your album with indie-heroes evokes royalty/money/influence in its own way, but I'll eat a frickin' blackbird pie if the end result turns out to sound anything less than incredible. So, sure: bad art notwithstanding, this one goes in the "eagerly anticipated" pile, although it doesn't dislodge Lady Sovereign's full-length Public Warning (out 10/31) from the top spot.

Anyone else who thinks too much about album covers should watch this video.

Labels: music_commentary

Thursday, October 19, 2006
2:59 PM
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sonic weirdness (33 varieties)

Spent some time today doing something I've been meaning to do for a while: adding links to my favorite record labels (and CD-R labels and MP3-only labels, etc) to my sprawling array of de.licio.us links. I'm not sure how many people come to this site for the posts on weird music, but those of you who do might enjoy taking a look at the list. It's not yet complete, but there's 33 labels on there now, a good start. Feel free to use the comments field for suggestions as to who has been left out for the moment... (say, for instance Erstwhile, whose excellent recent release Four Gentlemen of the Guitar, featuring Fennesz, Oren Ambarchi, Toshimaru Nakamura and Keith Rowe, has somehow been criminally neglected by most of the world).

Labels: music_commentary

Monday, October 16, 2006
9:47 PM
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books for the game industry

Although I'm not a member of the videogame industry, I very much enjoyed looking at Ernest Adams' list of Fifty Books Everyone In the Game Industry Should Read. There are a few that are game-design-oriented in ways that I can't find relevance in, but only a few: Adams keeps much of the list oriented around theoretical and inspirational texts.

The following are books that I own / have read:

• Rules of Play, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
  

• A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster
  

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte
  

• Visual Explanations, by Edward Tufte
  

• Envisioning Information, by Edward Tufte (he has a new one out, too)
  

• Everything Bad Is Good for You, by Steven Johnson
  

• Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
  

• Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga
  

• The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
  

• Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, by various authors (*cough*gygax*cough*)
  

• Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
  

• Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan
  

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
  

• Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, by Janet H. Murray

and the following are the books on Adams' list that I'd like to read, along with intriguing clippings of his descriptions:

• Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames, by Steven Poole
  "Steven Poole is an intelligent and thoughtful writer who understands not only how games work but what they mean, culturally, psychologically, and technically."
  

• Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul
  "[E]xamines the complex relationship between rules, which create gameplay, and fiction, which creates fantasy worlds."
  

• Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, by Ian Bogost
  "[Provides] a method of analysis that marries literary theory to information theory."
  

• Joystick Nation, by J.C. Herz
  "[A] good introduction to the sociology of videogames, placing them in context as a cultural phenomenon."
  

• What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee
  "He presents, and argues for, 36 principles of learning that he believes can be found in the design of good games"
  

• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, by Frederick P. Brooks
  "Some of the most famous software engineering truisms were first identified by this book, such as 'adding programmers to a late software project will make it even later.'"
  

• A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al
  "Christopher Alexander and his team identify dozens of patterns of behavior—not all so dramatic—and show how to enable that behavior through architecture." I've been meaning to read this book for at least five years now.
  

• Man, Play, and Games, by Roger Caillois
  "[I]ntroduces a classification for games based on four key qualities found in many of them: competition, chance, simulation ... and what he calls vertigo"
  

• The Ambiguity of Play, by Brian Sutton-Smith
  "Sutton-Smith updates Huizinga and moves the discussion into the modern world."
  

Labels: book_commentary, game_commentary, lists

Friday, October 13, 2006
12:30 PM
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reading the corrections

So I've finally gotten around to reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, a novel which is now five years old. I ended up avoiding the book at the time of its publication, as a result of the now-infamous "Oprah controversy," which made it difficult for me (depite basing my understanding of the controversy completely on second-hand retellings) to think of the book as anything other than a node in a complicated argument about literary elitism, corporate populism, and garden-variety sexism. Eventually I grew less interested in this argument and more interested in the more basic question of whether the book is any good.

Short answer: it is. The world of The Corrections is more keenly and deeply envisioned than any that of any other novel I have read in recent memory. Franzen's great triumph here is to have produced a set of believable characters and built their personalities, histories, and current contexts in extremely fine-grained detail. Furthermore, Franzen routes this information to the reader through channels that feel consistently fresh, proving that there are still artful ways to present exposition in an essentially traditional narrative.

And make no mistake: this novel is, at its core, a traditional dysfunctional-family drama, a book with aspirations that are essentially modest, despite the tendency among some critics to talk about The Corrections as a "big" social-novel-type book.

In fairness, Franzen himself speaks perfectly clearly about the book's true scope: in this Bookpage profile, Franzen says that an earlier draft of the novel "was much more about the stock market, insider trading and prisons. I finally found that the big social picture stuff wasn't working so well, whereas the little crises these characters were involved in interested me a lot." I think Franzen's right to trust his instincts here: in my own reading of the finished novel, I found that the stuff that works best was the attention to the nuances of interpersonal crisis, whereas what works least well, at least for my money, was the stuff that seemed most obviously intended as Important, Relevant Commentary. (I'm thinking specifically of the psychophamaceutical drug Aslan, which enters the book almost exactly at the halfway point and functions, in my opinion, as a glaringly "devicey" plot device in a book that otherwise sticks to more realistic terrain.)

Franzen makes related points in this interview: "[T]he problem with the social novel is that we don't need it anymore. Before TV, people would actually read a book to learn about a subject, and TV does it so much better. The serial dramas like ER and the news do it so well. So, if you have something important to say why would you write a novel? If you are trying to advocate two sides [books] aren't a good way of doing it. But, TV is really good at it."

These claims, which show Franzen moving from personal feelings about his own novel to broader claims about the Novel in general, work a little less happily, in fact, there's almost no sentence here that doesn't make my mind ache. Is the point of the social novel really to "advocate two sides?" Is TV news really that good at helping people "learn about a subject?" Are the people who have "something important to say" really all working as ER scriptwriters? (It's fuzzy thinking like this that helps to justify something like Ben Marcus' hatchet job on Franzen-the-critic that ran last fall in Harper's.) For all its flaws, though, I feel the quote does adequately sketch out the scope of Frazen's ambition.

Which still leaves me feeling puzzled by pieces like this one at N+1 (actually a profile on David Foster Wallace's recent work). In it, critic Chad Harbach makes the claim that The Corrections serves as a worthy follow-up to Wallace's Infinite Jest, a claim which strikes me as frankly bizarre: although the two novels share a degree of thematic overlap, they have radically different ambitions (not to mention broad differences in their respective formal concerns).

So: is The Corrections worth reading? Yes: but you'll need to dig through some misleading hype to discover the excellent (but modest) novel which lies beneath.

This review will eventually be cross-posted to Raccoon Books.

Labels: book_commentary

Monday, October 09, 2006
9:19 AM
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where i've been and what i've been up to

Not a lot of activity here on the old blog lately, sorry about that. It's been a combination of a lot of factors: the semester shifting into high gear, a weekend spent out of town, and some emotional stuff that has frankly sucked but that I don't want to go into here in any degree of detail.

I'm also still writing a book. People who have been following the progress of the new novel on this blog know that it involves a rather complicated network of characters, that in fact part of its very reason for existence is to try to give a powerful sense of the diverse human experience happening simultaneously, attempting a fragmented version of the "super-omniscience" that Don DeLillo shot for in Underworld.

Yadda yadda yadda. Point is, the cast is up to about 100 characters now, and such a big canvas has allowed me to turn to give brief cameos to some of the Imaginary Year characters, as a sort of "what are they doing in 2006"-type thing. I doubt I'll get to all of the characters, and some of the ones that have made appearances in the novel served more as bit players in Imaginary Year (for instance), but I know some of you readers of this blog served double duty as Imaginary Year readers, so if there's any character who you'd like an update on, I am happy at this point to take requests.

Labels: personal, writing

Wednesday, October 04, 2006
12:55 PM
0 comments