I'm the author of the novels Solip, Say, Cut, Map, The Country, and The City. I've also written the nonfiction books EarthBound and Eat the Flowers. I'm currently publishing my novel A Task via Kickstarter in order to have an hourlong conversation with each of its first thousand readers. For a decade I published books through Sator Press, and for a decade I acted in film and television; now I help students at St. John's College. More info: kenbaumann.com.
Community is important, but so is dissemination.
Magic will always reside in the product. As the ignorant become less so, look for new ways to hide process.
‘Industry standard’ means broken.
Remember that you will probably embrace the idea that offends you the most. Make it sooner rather than later.
Do people really want to communicate with their storytellers? Recognize the value in the mystic, the shaman. Resist the quick and affirmative feedback of mass social connection. Again: see the majority and violently question, reinterpret.
Anticipate ecology moving away from the market and becoming an ethics again.
Even further? Plan for an automated technocracy. How does the story change? What ails?
Anyone mess with LaLa.com? Seems incredible: buy a song for 10¢ and you can listen to it online, from anywhere. 89¢ total and you can have an mp3 too. Hmm. Any experiences?
Understand, David. I don’t give a shit who writes and who doesn’t.
-Robert Penn Warren to David Milch, context here. (thnx, M. Bell)
Tao Lin was on Bookworm today. Major kudos to Tao and Michael for providing the conversation.
It’s sometimes said that a great novel makes a less promising basis for a film than a novel which is merely good. I don’t think that adapting great novels presents any special problems which are not involved in adapting good novels or mediocre novels; except that you will be more heavily criticized if the film is bad, and you may be even if it’s good. I think almost any novel can be successfully adapted, provided it is not one whose aesthetic integrity is lost along with its length. For example, the kind of novel in which a great deal and variety of action is absolutely essential to the story, so that it loses much of it’s point when you subtract heavily from the number of events or their development.
&
You might wonder, as a result of this, whether directing was anything more or less than a continuation of the writing. I think that is precisely what directing should be. It would follow, then, that a writer-director is really the perfect dramatic instrument; and the few examples we have where these two peculiar techniques have been properly mastered by one man have, I believer, produced the most consistently fine work.
24 hours left to submit to No Colony, then close. You want to be in this issue, I promise.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6PSbUl_68k
