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Every now and then something crosses my inbox that makes my jaw drop. Sometimes it’s genius, sometimes it’s astonishingly crass, and sometimes it’s a combination of the two. This morning’s report from DVICE.com on the Mio Knight Rider GPS is definitely a category three jaw-dropper.
On the one hand, it makes perfect sense. If you’re going to have your car talk to you, and you’re one of the generation of geeks that grew up in the 80’s, you’re most likely going to be secretly pretending that your compact or SUV is the Knight Industries Two Thousand anyway. On the other, this ranks right up there with a lightsaber remote control in burying the needle on the dorkometer. If nothing else, installing this sucker will provide a perfect litmus test for every future blind date that might set foot in your ride. Ever.
All easy jokes aside, the Knight Rider GPS actually does provoke some interesting thoughts. First, it’s interesting that Mio licensed the original, 1980s voice of KITT, William Daniels, instead of the new KITT from NBC’s upcoming Knight Rider remake. This might have something to do with the new voice being out of Mio’s price range (I’d expect Val Kilmer doesn’t come cheap), but since the device is scheduled to go on sale in “the August timeframe” and the new show is scheduled to launch on September 24th, I’d imagine there will be at least some would-be buyers scratching their heads and wondering why this KITT doesn’t sound like the KITT on their TVs every Wednesday night. If the show takes off (as the pilot movie’s 13 million viewers would seem to suggest), this could prove to be a real gotcha.
Second, is the voice from a 20-year-old cult TV show enough to justify a purchase when so many other interesting competitors are flooding the market? The Knight Rider GPS will supposedly retail for $270, which is $70 more than the 3G Apple iPhone with true GPS under its hood. Alpha geeks that sneer at Apple fanboys might be more interested in ponying up the extra forty bucks for the $299 Dash Express, which bills itself as the “first two-way, Internet-connected GPS navigation system”. If the market for the Knight Rider GPS is an inherently geeky one, the iPhone and the Dash Express seem to be two pretty big shakers in that market already.
Finally, does this open the door for a whole raft of novelty GPS devices? How long will it be before we see a GPS with a UI lifted right from the Enterprise and the voice of Jonathan Frakes, that only responds if it’s addressed as “Number One”? Or one with a brass-and-woodgrain casing that boots up with a whistle and responds to “Starbuck”?
A more interesting idea is the GPS as a platform for personalization across different drivers – we already have Mr. T, Dennis Hopper and Burt Reynolds giving us directions, and Nintendo’s Wii Fit can have different trainers assigned to personal profiles, so why not GPS devices that recognize who’s driving and customize their voices to each driver’s preferences – or change their voices based on the time of day or location? During normal driving hours you might want to be guided by the soothing baritone of Patrick Stewart, but perhaps late at night when you might doze off behind the wheel the device could switch to the grating screech of Gilbert Gottfried. (Or, worse, it could direct all of its sound output to the rear speakers and imitate your mother-in-law. Hey, it could happen.)
Of course, as any hot-rodder, art car builder or bumper sticker aficionado could tell you, our vehicles have always been platforms for customization. Even giving them distinctive voices isn’t anything new – all it takes is a couple of playing cards in the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Our vehicles are, for many of us, extensions of our personalities – and if your personality has been secretly dying to deploy out the back of a semi truck on some lost American highway for the last twenty years, then hey, more power to you.
Just please, please don’t try the turbo boost.
This morning I finished reading Michael Chabon’s new collection of essays Maps and Legends (2008, McSweeney’s Books). I knew that I enjoyed Chabon’s work from the few essays and chapters of his I’ve read already, but this one really knocked it out of the park. An embarrassed confession: I have yet to finish reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, as I got pulled away from it to read something else (as happens all too frequently in my life), but this one was such an amazing page-turner that even though I was also reading several other books at the same time (I also finished Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale yesterday), I kept getting pulled back to it.
I’m perfectly comfortable in admitting that Maps and Legends may be one of those right-place-right-time books for me, and that your mileage may vary – but as it is, Chabon’s words pierced me through the heart like a perfectly aimed barrage of arrows. Or, to mix and mangle metaphors, reading his thoughts about genre and literature is like being a private listening to a grizzled veteran general telling tales of his life in the trenches.
Chabon talks about how he grew up loving genre works like science fiction and noir detective stories, and then feeling the sting of the ‘literary’ in his creative writing workshops in college, which is precisely the same thing that I went through, and how that affected his decision to shelve his genre work in favor of the more literary texts that would become his first and second published novels, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys. Examining his career arc is incredibly informative: he played by the rules with these literary texts and then continued on to write Kavalier and Clay, which mixed the literary with touches of genre, and now he’s trending more towards genre with touches of literary in his most recent work Gentlemen of the Road.
I look at this as a sort of inverted career path to someone like Neil Gaiman, who began his career in comics and has been playing in other media ever since. What’s particularly fascinating is how “literary” Chabon won the Pulitzer but the World Fantasy Award people changed the rules after “pulp” Gaiman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream took the cookie so a comic could never win again. To me, this smacks of branding more than literary achievement: if you start out as a genre writer, you will always be branded as such, but if you start out as literary you may be tolerated your dalliances in the lower arts. Of course this is primarily being done by the literati – the flipside of this type of judgement would be, I suppose, the fiscal and readership measuring sticks, both of which I suspect Gaiman would win by a wide margin. Then again, Chabon has had several movie deals already, so my guessing which of them has established a bigger family fortune is both crass and pointless. Still, as someone measuring his idols to plot out a plan for the immediate future, all this conjecture does serve a purpose. Whether or not any hard data can be obtained from this research is irrelevant – the exercise in itself is illuminating.
Long story short, Maps and Legends is a terrific collection of essays, extremely readable and enjoyable and educational all bundled together – and exactly what you’re looking for if you’re a would-be up-and-comer trying to navigate the tricky borderlands between high and low culture, genre and literary fiction, academia and pop intellectualism. Add to that the additional niceties that proceeds from the book go to support Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia literary project for kids and that this hardcover edition is easily one of the most beautifully-designed literary artifacts I own (the multi-layered dust jacket has be experienced to be believed), I can easily and happily say that Maps and Legends is a must-have, highly recommended, five stars, three thumbs up and so on. Buy it.
Fuck.
George Carlin was one of my all-time favorite comics. When I was in high school, my friends and I used to listen to Carlin and Denis Leary while we were out driving around. When you’re a teenager in the middle-of-nowhere Ohio, driving around listening to stuff is what you do. We’d drive to Akron and back, Columbus and back, Cleveland and back, talking about all kinds of stuff and listening to a variety of other stuff, ranging from U2 to the Beatles to Moxy Früvous to Tori Amos and back, but when we wanted to bring the funny it was all about Leary and Carlin – especially to my friend Nick and I. We learned the fine art of the rant from those two, and now Carlin is gone.
The reported cause of death is heart failure. I can’t say I’m surprised – you can’t be that pissed off for that long and not have something blow out. I suppose I should be learning something from that (he types as he glances warily at his second cup of coffee of the day), but right now I’m just too bummed out about it to care.
I think Carlin would have hated me, to be honest – he would have ripped right into all the stuff that I worry about and care about and tinker with and so on, but I probably would have just leaned back in my chair with my hands in my lap and laughed my ass off as he railed and stormed and tore me a new one. He always struck me as being a good guy underneath the bluster and rage, and I wish I could have gotten to see him live. No one skewered the world’s stupidities like he did – not Leary, not Cosby, not even Lewis Black. The world is a little dumber now that he’s gone.
Good night, George. I wish I could hear what you say to God when you get there.
I never would have thought that I’d be hearing advice on the tranquility of anything from Uncle Warren Ellis, but there you go.
Me, I enjoy traveling as well, except for the fact that I still feel like I’m paying penance for making a friend’s cousin miss her flight when I was a freshman in college because I’d never flown before, and when she told me the time of her flight we simply calculated that that was the time when she’d have to be at the airport. It’s moments of wanton stupidity like that which keep me up at night, even ten years later. Oy. (Devin, if you’re reading this, please tell Portia that I’m still sorry.)
It’s a good thing that I like traveling so much, because I’m going to be doing a lot of it in upcoming months. First Laura and I will be heading to Greece for the International Toy Researchers Association conference in early July. After that I’ll be flying to Los Angeles for a workshop on transmedia at the SIGGRAPH Sandbox Conference in August, and then down to Texas to co-host a workshop on video game adaptations at the Austin Game Developers Conference in September. Woof. Talk about your frequent flier miles!
For some reason, I have never been the sort to preorder games. No, let me start that again – for one of a number of possible reasons, I have never been the sort to preorder games. I blame my parents, and especially my Mom, for instilling in me two very fundamental psychology quirks. First is a deep-seated love of a good bargain, which Mom always blames on the Scottish blood coursing through the Alexander veins. Preordering a game galls me in some way, largely because it involves putting down money and walking away with no guarantee that when the games come in, I’ll actually get one. Although you’d think that Gamestop would be required to honor all reservations on release day, you’d be wrong. Oho, would you be wrong. Asshats. It’s the same reason that airlines overbooking flights gets me right in the breadbasket – although I understand the economics of air travel are tenuous at best, and I understand that overbooking flights permits the possibility of refunded tickets if one’s plans suddenly change, the idea that I bought a ticket for this plane, at this time, and showing up and not having a seat after all pisses me off about as badly as if I went to the grocery store, bought a big box of cereal and then, when I went to pour myself a bowl the next morning, found that the box was empty. What!?
The second reason is an even deeper-seated love of the chase, which I blame both of my parents for. When I was a kid we’d spend hours scouring through antique shops or flea markets or car shows looking for the parts Dad needed for an old car he was fixing up, or for a piece of furniture that Mom needed to finish redecorating a room, and so on. With kid-me, that hunting pattern manifested itself in action figures; with adult-me, it manifests itself primarily in books, games, clothes, and, well, action figures. Unfortunately, the big difference between my collecting patterns and my parents’ is that my parents’ hunts usually wound up being worth more money than they sank into it, and mine usually lead to little more than a bigger U-Haul truck being required the next time I move. Still, the thrill of the chase is definitely there.
I should note that now that my folks are both retired, Dad tends to do most of his hunting on eBay and Mom gravitates towards garage sales. You wouldn’t believe the roomfuls of knickknacks and tchotchkes that she’s collected from hundreds of garage sales over the last couple of years, but I suspect that the real reason why she does it, and partly the reason why my Dad still frequents car shows, is the social aspect of things. This morning I was reminded that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
I’ve been trying halfheartedly to track down a copy of Wii Fit ever since it was released. Being naturally heavyset is strike one, having settled into a happy domestic arrangement with Laura is strike two, and living a primarily sedentary existence working on computers both at home and at the office is strike three – I’m out, baby, especially my waistline, which is way, way out. Laura and I hit the mall to pick up some shorts for our upcoming Greece trip and damn, that was not a lot of fun. Ordinarily I enjoy clothes shopping, but seeing myself in those mirrors in my current rotund state was not pretty. While plenty of storytellers and academics are comfortably, um, well-rounded, I definitely need to start attempting to resemble Michael Chabon more than Warren Ellis. Hence the interest in Wii Fit.
Last weekend, I got snaked out of the very last copy at my local Best Buy, so this weekend I decided to wake up early and get in when the store opened. This was made notably easier by it being hotter than blazes in Boston last night, the humid, heavy kind of hot that turns a nice, pleasant night’s sleep into eight sweaty, muggy hours of flopping about on the bed like an asphyxiating carp, and by our black cat Albus’ deciding that 7:15 AM was a great time to start throwing up in the kitchen. Lately he’s been yarfing on the floor a couple of times a week, which I blame on our recent acquisition of ferns for the sunroom (and his acquisition of a taste for devouring them), but a few months ago Albus had a nasty session when he was throwing up blood, so you can’t blame me for being paranoid every time I hear him start making that bizarre oilcan-pumping noise that cats apparently make when they’re about to toss their cookies. Up I got, and up I stayed, and a good thing I did, too – when I went to take my morning ‘jog’ around the Internet, I discovered that this morning’s Best Buy flyer included not only promises of Wii Fit in stock at opening today, but also Wiis themselves. I tossed on some clothes and headed into the store a little early; the store opened at 10, so I arrived about 9:40, and was dismayed to find two things: that a line was already formed, and that it was already hotter than Satan’s ass on a particularly fiery day.
Mercifully the line was only about 12 people or so; while the article I’d read said that they were only guaranteed to have about 10 copies per store in stock, I decided to stick around anyway. Less than a minute after I joined the line, my parents’ genes kicked in and I struck up a conversation with the nice Asian couple ahead of me in line. We chatted amiably in somewhat simplified English for a couple of minutes, and then came the next wave of people. Immediately behind me came another nice couple, 2-year old in arms, and the father was wearing an Ohio State t-shirt. “Go Bucks,” I said to him, and we were off to the races.
We were joined by a guy about my age from Connecticut, who was really just in line for a Wii – the couple with the kid had bought their Wii at Costco just a few days ago and now the mother was keenly seeking out a copy of Wii Fit. I’m happy to report that all of us got what we came for – despite the line swelling up to probably over a hundred people (!) before the doors opened, the Best Buy people handled things with remarkable aplomb; instead of having us tear through the store like madmen, they funneled the entire line into the registers, and each of the four to six registers they had open had a stack of Wiis and Wii Fit behind the counter. A customer got the head of the line, was directed to a register, forked over their credit cards, were handed their merchandise, and were happily shooed out the door. A cart of the most popular Wii games and accessories was set up nearby so people could be handed whatever else they might want in an exponentially more expensive version of the candy bars and magazines impulse racks at the front of your local Target, and they had blue-shirted runners at the ready to scurry off and snag anything else you might want for your new system as well. They even graciously handled the one poor soul who had stood in the line with the rest of us not for a video game but just to buy an air conditioner – he brought his A/C unit up to the front and one of the guys there quickly ushered him to either an otherwise closed register or off to customer service, depending on what payment method he wanted to use. Given my previously on-the-fence impression of Best Buy, I was impressed.
I stopped off at the Target next door before heading home to pick up some drinks, and then rushed home with my prize in the trunk. The game sets up quickly enough and even includes its own batteries, which was a nice touch. I chose which avatar I wanted to represent myself, and then took a deep breath and went through the orientation progress, which includes weighing myself and getting a report on both my BMI and what it calls my ‘Wii Fit age’.
Ouch.
To be fair, I was pleasantly surprised by one thing – although I definitely tipped the scales (yes, my fat ass was classified as ‘obese’) my Wii Fit age was actually better than I thought – although I’m now about 30.5, the game pegged me at 31. Which is to say that although I may be heavy, I’m definitely not alone for my age. I brightened at that, and then proceeded to spend half an hour doing aerobics and balancing exercises before deciding that the combination of hot weather (it’s currently 88 with a predicted high of 94) and my total couch potatohood meant that I oughta take a break for a while. Sweating more than I’d like to admit, I trundled off to the office to write up this essay, but I did so with a smile – although it hurt to watch my Mii plump up like the Michelin Man after it took my readings, I’m also happy to see that the game somewhat restricts the feasibility of the goals it allows you to set. I myself am hoping to drop a sizable amount of weight and get back down to at least my undergrad weight by next year, which the game wouldn’t allow me to set as my goal, but it would allow me to enter in something it deemed more reasonable. I expect it will allow me to revisit that goal in three months and move the target further down then, but knowing that the game wouldn’t let me say “OMG I’M GOING TO DROP FIFTY POUNDS IN THREE MONTHS” made me feel like it had my back, somehow. The games it offers are fun and breezy, the jogging game offers some pretty scenery (although I desperately hope Nintendo will pony up some additional landscapes via downloadable content updates) and its tracking system seems like it will be encouraging to use. We’ll see how it goes – I’ll use it for about a week and then post another update with my progress.
One final note – I’m just waiting for someone to hack the Wii Balance Board to work with my computer. Some clever souls have already figured out how to use the Board to surf Google Earth, but I’d love to see it used as a simple web-connected scale. Given the massive numbers of weight loss journal-keeping applications out there, you’d think that being able to hook up a Wii Balance Board to a simple database would be child’s play. Maybe I’ll see if anyone around the lab has any ideas. For now, I’m going to go hammer on some projects for a couple of hours and then maybe take another long jog around the island. I can see how this game might be addictive. Wish me luck!
Heh. I didn’t realize the quirkiness of today’s date until I just typed in today’s headline.
- Vandermeer on postmodern techniques in fantasy. “A postmodern technique used in a ‘fantastical setting’ often supports the milieu, even if those same techniques used with a modern-day setting can seem artificial or distracting from the reality of place.”
- Jason Mittell on Lost‘s best season. Hear hear, especially re: denying infinity.
- DC Comics’ Gregory Noveck on the transmediation of Batman. I can’t wait for this.
- Disney and Pixar: the power of the prenup. Don’t miss the contrasting descriptions at the end of Wall-E and Kung Fu Panda.
- NYT on Ray Kurzweil. “God is a hacker, not an engineer.” – Francis Crick
- Has the time come to close the book on women-only literary prizes? Yes, or else it’s time for men-only literary prizes. And white men-only literary prizes.
- Winterson and Selfe on the idea of home. “Why be happy when you could be normal?”
- Powazek at BEA. Derek makes his usual excellent points, and Sigler demonstrates more proof of the Doctorow model of publishing.
- Sagmeister on design for non-designers. Remembering how important sabbaticals are.
- Where will we find literature’s Radiohead? I’d argue we already have.
- It’s hard out there for a literary novelist. Damn, only 3,000 copies sold?
- Pop fiction unaffected by lit crit demise. “As a first-time novelist whose book came out in paperback, lacks a thinly disguised evil publishing diva, and does not have ‘Calamity Physics’ in the title? Sadly, I won’t be affected.” Ha!
- Publishers, techies love each other up. Old news, apparently new to publishing.
- Chabon and Ford on why genre tags don’t matter. Chabon is my new hero.
- Amanda Rose Smith. “Like film music without the film.” Haunting and beautiful.
- Where are the men? Choire Sicha wonders at the hip young pretty literati boys…
- Maybe they’re too pretty? …And Galleycat posits it’s because they haven’t come into their crow’s feet yet.
- Disney forms graphic novel division. “Some of these exciting publications will be inspired by films and characters in the vast and storied Disney library, while other original graphic novels are sure to spark great ideas for future Disney classics.” Translation: spinoffs and an IP factory.
- The Ghost Story Society. Way too cool.
- Cat turns into a woman in Port Harcourt. Witchcraft!
- In praise of the chapbook. I still think shorter texts are the way to go, moving forward.
For the MIT homepage sometime next week, hopefully. Click to enlarge slightly.
My favorite bit is the airship, which Philip had me add late in the game. Good call, cap’n:
So. Earlier this week I did something perhaps I shouldn’t have done, and right now I’m doing something else I shouldn’t be doing by taking a break at my dayjob to blog, but right now I think the head of the lab and I are the only two people left in the lab (today being MIT’s graduation and all) and I’ve been reasonably productive all day so far and so I’m going to take a break and blog.
Right. Where was I? Ah, yes – the thing perhaps I shouldn’t have done.
I spend way too much money on media. Anyone who knows me (and most definitely anyone who’s ever visited my house) knows this. My living room is actually a good two-thirds library, and that doesn’t count the rather remarkable overflow to be found in my home office, my office here on campus, and in my parents’ house back in Ohio. Laura has given me grief about this before, and I’m sure she’ll do so again when she sees my latest binge.
But, oh, what a binge it was.
Remember last weekend when I blogged about finding an enclave of writers that seemed to match up with my tastes?
Link’s work, which was recommended to me by my friend Shannon a long time ago, is leading me on to explore a handful of anthologies in which her work appears, as well as the work of a network of her peers. I’m thoroughly enjoying reading up on Jeff VanderMeer, Jeffrey Ford, Kim Newman, Delia Sherman, and Ekaterina Sedia, all of whom I’d seen mentioned on Neil Gaiman’s blog but had not previously had the time to experience myself. Getting to do so now is like getting handed the keys to a clubhouse, or at the very least being shown where the cool kids’ table happens to be, if not being invited to join them. One of the biggest joys of the last year or so has been finding my way to this point, rediscovering the kinds of writing I like to read and now finding that there are more people writing in this vein than I’d ever hoped.
Not long after writing that little passage, I started assembling a shopping list on Amazon. I added and removed, shuffled, prioritized and reprioritized, snuffled through the used offerings to make sure I was getting the best deal, and then finally (wincingly), clicked the ‘place order’ button. The final damage was well upwards of a hundred bucks, but oh what fine treasures are rolling in now!
The main trust of this particular expedition was, oddly enough, anthologies. There were several that I’d been meaning to purchase already, such as Delia Sherman’s Interfictions, but now there was a whole new collection of anthologies that I wanted to own. Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant’s The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Ekaterina Sedia’s Paper Cities. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel’s Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology. And two collections edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, The New Weird and Steampunk. Add to this Michael Chabon’s new collection of essays on a similar vein, Maps and Legends, and I’m downright giddy.
Why this sudden binge, and why such glee accompanying it? When I was growing up, I had a very keen taste for mishmash literature, blends of high and low culture. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman was a perfect example of this – comics that drew from classic mythology and contemporary real-life experiences to form a literature of hybridity. The magical realism of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez gave me similar thrills: chimeras of real life and the fantastic, lashed together and creating something new. That was what I wanted to read, and that was what I wanted to write.
The creative writing programs I attended at the College of Wooster, Kenyon College, the University of Exeter and beyond all had varying tolerances for this kind of thing. Some professors met my taste with out-and-out scorn (one whom will remain nameless here sniffed and told me in no uncertain terms that he’d ‘had problems’ with students who enjoyed Jonathan Carroll before), while others looked at me blankly when I tried to describe what I was going for. A few got it, and those were gold; but for the most part, the lecturers, like the majority of my fellow students, felt that there was no room in literary studies for the fantastic.
Fast-forward to now, and I’m finding a whole community of fellow travelers in academia as well as popular culture. Big chunks of genre TV have evolved from the cheesy pop of the 1980s and early 1990s into more complicated, much richer stuff – Battlestar Galactica is an easy example, but even the adventures of Sam and Dean Winchester in Supernatural draw heavily from folklore and fairy tales for their source material. Entire academic conferences are dedicated to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Hybridity runs rampant, almost everywhere you look, and these anthologies are largely embodiments of that attitude.
The short story has never been my forte. Even the short works I turned in for workshop in my creative writing classes tended to be interlocking pieces of something larger. My recent studies into serialized narratives and my studies into the consumption patterns of online video and casual games have all gotten me thinking a lot more about the role of shorter works in 21st century arts and culture. John Maeda’s latest book, Simplicity, weighed in at only 100 pages and proved to be a big hit for MIT Press, which is informing some of the book proposal work I’m doing now for the lab. My reason for buying an armful of anthologies now is primarily to try and get my brain accustomed to thinking in a more single-episode format, so to speak. I need to integrate that sense of rhythm and style into my own stuff, and, hopefully, by learning which writers and publications are doing the type of storytelling I’m interested in now I can finally get the fiction side of things off the backburners again. My academic work is going well, but I miss the simple joy of plain old fiction.
And, given that gasoline just hit $138 a freaking barrel, it sounds like the perfect time to stay in and read. Oy vey.
So… What are you folks doing with your weekends?
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