FINALLYFAST.COM AND PLAYING THE BOOK

Ander Monson

 

 

 

 

 

I don’t know about you, but I find myself wanting to participate more and more often in the media I consume. Wait, I don’t just consume that media. I muck around in it. I DVR it. I PDF it. I MP3 it. I collage it. I save it. I download it. I pirate it. I transcribe it. I quote it. I own it. I surround myself with it. Find myself in it. If I look long enough at it I begin to think I am it, iPod playlist golem, Amazon golem, iPad golem, experimental novel golem, chapbook golem.

This happens with music most obviously. I want it fast and loud and oh! and now. I want to use it to soundtrack my now. To understand my now. To remake my mood, my approach to now. To make some memories. I want to make virtual (or actual) mix tapes, playlists, and share them with others. I want to remix it, to mash it up. To Rock Band it up. To Guitar Hero it up. To sing the hell out of some karaoke. To air guitar it up. To make crazy, crappy YouTube videos of myself dancing or singing or fucking or miming to the songs I love.

Wait. I’m not talking about me; I’m talking about us. And music’s not the only locus of this playfulness. We television and film viewers have been getting more involved with our media too. On the internet you can find a ton of different unofficial amateur edits of the Star Wars prequels. You can find a homemade trailer for The Shining reconceptualizing it as an uplifting family film. You can find the news, Auto-Tuned, remixed by hipsters.

My favorite iteration of this participatory instinct is the user response to a particularly wack late-night TV commercial for the website FinallyFast.com that promises to clear your Internet Explorer caches, clean your machine of spyware, tune it up, slick it up, speed it up.

If you find yourself watching a lot of late night cable like I do, then you know what I’m talking about. Lines like “My computer used to be fast. Really fast. But now it’s only kinda fast . . .” and “Mom! The internet is so slow!!” are delivered woodenly by stock photo actors in a way that would seem to be a mockery of a commercial. The badness is wonderful. My wife and I mouth the lines in tandem sunk down on the couch. Either we possess it or it possesses us; I’m not sure which.

I checked YouTube, checked Wikipedia, because that’s what you do when you watch television nostalgically on the sectional. On YouTube I found dozens of amateur remakes of the FinallyFast.com commercial. By the time this is published there may be hundreds. The ease of making and manipulating video has opened the door to us amateur fan-filmmakers. We are bored. We are drunk. We like to show it off, to shake it for the masturbators on Chatroulette. We like to mock things, to make things, to shock things into understanding, as long as we can share what we (re)make with others.

Same goes for video games, MMPORPGs, and other online communities. We like to get involved. We like to play. Which is a way of saying that all these things—like much in our lives (Weight Watchers, anyone? Collecting credit card miles and points, anyone? Doritos: The Quest, anyone?) are becoming more gamelike and plastic, easily manipulated.

I think I know what this means for the film, the television show, the commercial, the song, the video, the video game, the album, the EP. The sorts of media and media-makers that make or find or at least tacitly allow space for audience participation are going to get more viewers, listeners, and gamers involved in their collective meaning-making.

But what does this mean for the book? The writer? It seems we are concerned. We should be. But we’re concerned about the wrong things.

The book—the story in particular, more than film, more than music—has always been a participatory medium. Recent studies of reading suggest that the brain exhibits the same activity when reading as it does in a real life experience, so that in some sense reading is not just simulation but experience, which we as readers participate in with whatever we bring to the table already. But there are more obvious ways in which we participate in books, in stories. Take for instance book clubs, Harry Potter parties, author readings and signings. The promised and never-really-delivered hypertext revolution. The enjoyable witch hunts that follow the publication of increasingly outlandish fake memoirs that we insist on believing in until we don’t. Take the tourist attraction of Emily Dickinson’s home. The invention of the LongPen, Margaret Atwood’s telesigning robot hand.

It should be obvious by now that many readers, particularly younger readers—we giggling younger readers—want to find ways of interacting with stories. We want to inhabit them, consume them. We want to change them, add to them, expand and continue to populate their universe. We want to play them. We want to be ourselves in them. We want to make ourselves over through them. Take for instance the collaborative mass fiction of Dungeons & Dragons. Take for instance MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons). Take for instance House of Leaves. Take for instance fan fiction.

I wouldn’t worry about the future of story. Story is inescapable. We can’t not perceive our lives as stories, even if we know that stories—even the ones we tell ourselves about who we are—are fiction. That’s how the brain works. In this dissolving, datafragmented world, we all desire narrative (as opposed to the actual lived experience of unsatisfying fragments, random encounters, and passing glances). We will continue to consume it. And we will continue to create it. And if this means we need to redefine the definition of writer, that’s okay with me. If we are all participating, then we are all writers, contributors, content-creators, storytellers. We live in an increasingly simulated, mediated world where we want to interact with stories, where we all imagine we have our own stories to tell. We tell ourselves these stories every day. Isn’t that what memory is for? What Facebook is for? Twitter? Our blogs? Tumblrs? Flickr photo streams? Our comment threads? Our instant messaging? Our course evaluations? We like story—we like making stories—a lot. We like I a lot, like to talk about our experiences a lot. We say like a lot, too. The ascendancy of the memoir, the genre of I and of the moment, cashes in on this desire.

I know only a few of us who call ourselves writers who are excited about these developments. Some of us are worried. Some of us know we’re supposed to be worried about our dwindling advances, but we don’t care. We can’t imagine not reading and writing books. But we should be excited. Writers have been stuck in that old technology, that old but shockingly good technology of the codex, for a long time. Maybe that’s our problem, that we’ve relaxed too much into the ease of the form. We’ve taken it for granted. Many of us grew up only knowing composition on word processing programs, never even feeling the physical mechanism of the carriage return which still gives that return key on the keyboard its anachronistic name. We never felt the physical exertion that typing on a manual typewriter required. We never handwrote after grade school exercises in learning cursive.

What I’m saying is that we’ve forgotten how it can feel to make a book. I don’t mean just how it feels to write a book, but how it feels to make one. Our experience with the codex has been so long and lately mediated—through programs like Microsoft Word in which we are able to produce—process—virtual words on virtual pages with virtual drop shadows suggesting the depth of a physical page, which are then saved in ones and zeroes encoded magnetically or optically on hard drives or flash media. We would do well to reconnect with what books feel like in the hands, what they smell like, what the pages sound like when they flex, friction, and turn, what they are or can be. We’ve allowed our publishers to do the thinking about a lot of this. We’ve let our editors do the editing, our word processors the word processing, the designers the designing, production managers the production, the marketers the marketing, the eight maids a-milking the milking. And so on.

The bad news is that many, if not all, of these roles are reverting back to writers. The good news is that a lot of these formerly forbidden spaces are opening up to writers. We would be wise to remember that we writers are first makers. That we can make paper—any size we like, not just the 8.5” x 11” American default “letter size”—out of wood pulp. That we can hand-mix our inks. That we can physically letterpress those inks into that paper and feel the physical impression. That we can hand-bind and stitch. That we can photocopy. Cut the pages how we like. Handprint on whatever part of the book we like. That we can do whatever we want with design. That we aren’t stuck with the default margins, the double-spacing, the Times New Roman, the Lulu or iUniverse presets. The standard English. The standard syntax. The realist, prose-transparent third-person stories featuring timely epiphanies. The autocapitalized first letters of sentences, or lines. The autocorrected grammar. The sort of narrative or lyric in style at the time.

These defaults, these shortcuts are useful. They save time. They reduce the number of variables. They speak to certain readerships. They are required by some standard book formats, convenient technologies of printing and binding and distribution. We are after all in a world of near-paralyzing capability. But if they go unexamined, if we think our only job as writers is to write nice sentences and hand them off to someone else, we risk obsolescence or, at the least, irrelevance.

If we expect readers to participate in our texts, our sentences, our lines, our books (or our e-books), we must participate more fully in the making of our books. We must make space for them to participate in the physical artifact of the book, to think about its form, the pacing of the page turning, the leading between lines, the smell of the paper, to understand why this book, this object, is the best form to experience and participate in the story we’re telling.

The job of future writers is to hack into any available space, to test the limits of the system, to think about the variables, to challenge their own assumptions and the assumptions of others. Are writers going to be marginalized? We already have been. We always have been. We need to inhabit the margin, to be on the edge of a culture, a place, a story. It’s the best vantage point to see it anew. This has always been the job of the artist—not just to repeat the received wisdom about whatever world is in question but to make and push and test whatever boundaries we can find. Some of those boundaries are going to be increasingly technological. Just recently, Apple announced that individual writers are now allowed to publish and distribute electronic texts in its iBookstore app. Of course that will come with constraints, what we’re told we’re allowed to do. But constraints are good, and they are not absolute. Form creates tension, and we want tension, elasticity, electricity.

So for the writer willing to play with and look seriously at her own medium (or media), the news is good. Are we going to have to find new ways to get noticed? Yes. Do we get to find new ways to get noticed? Yes. Is it trouble? Yes. But trouble is the stuff of writing and creation. Time to shut up and get to the making, get back to that sense of play where everything interesting, including the future, finally fast and soon to be here, starts.