Haunted Screens

Sorry for inactivity

Sorry for the inactivity. Been twittering and working on other projects. But will be back soon.

Dead Pool 2009

I did a roundup of interesting people who died in 2009 for the Atlantic website. Here's the link. You'll find a strange bunch ranging from abortionist George Tiller to the Truffaut of teendom, John Hughes.

Vlad the Enchanter: Nabokov's Final Riddle

Last May, I wrote this short piece about Nabokov's posthumous novel, The Original of Laura, for Wired. It was part of our special Mystery issue, guest-edited by J. J. Abrams. Seems worth posting again here, six months later, now that the book is finally out:

He may be dead, but this fall Vladimir Nabokov is back with a new novel, The Original of Laura—or at least the beta version. Before he died in 1977, the author of Lolita and Pale Fire asked his family to burn this last, unfinished work. But after three decades of soul-searching, his son, Dmitri, has decided to finally publish the unusual manuscript, written on 138 numbered index cards now yellowed with age. Nabokov routinely composed on such cards, shuffling and reshuffling the deck as he wrote. It was like constructing a puzzle.

As a boy in St. Petersburg, Russia, Nabokov devised chess problems, played with codes and ciphers, and later wrote his own crosswords—devices that would find their way into his later fiction. The novels and stories are generously seasoned with acrostics, anagrams, number games, and whodunits, not to mention parodies, puns, and multiple layers of hidden allusions.

Codes and concealed meanings were central to Nabokov's worldview, says Brian Boyd, an authority on the writer's life and work. "Nabokov felt that the thrill of discovery was one of the highest things life had to offer," Boyd says. "But he also felt that ultimately the whole of reality seemed to be constructed as if by some great cosmic prankster."

Nabokov, the authorial prankster, buried Easter eggs of every sort for careful readers to unearth. Along with an enciphered line from Shakespeare ("5.13 24.11 13.16 9.13.5 5.13 24.11"*), there's a multilayered chess problem embedded in his memoir, Speak, Memory. And in his short story "The Vane Sisters," an acrostic reveals an unexpected twist. (Take the first letter of each word in the last paragraph and string them together to find the secret message.) Pale Fire, his involuted, nesting-doll of a novel, has enough riddles and trapdoors to fill another entire book.

Boyd is one of the few people who have read The Original of Laura, to be published in November. "There's pleasure in it, but at the same time there's frustration, because you know that this may be—what?—two-thirds of the puzzle, or seven-eighths? You get some of the satisfaction but also some of the frustration of incompleteness."

The finished book includes facsimiles of every card, on perforated paper, so that readers can reshuffle them. It's a perfectly Nabokovian concoction, a tantalizing puzzler from the beyond.

[*To be, or not to be.]

Do First-Person Shooters Still Make You Smarter?

 The latest installment in the Call of Duty videogame series, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, is the entertainment hit of the year. It took in more than $300 million its first day, and $550 million its first five, outpacing every movie release this year, including the latest Twilight chapter. (I predict it will beat out Avatar, too.) Given the historic significance (no one can deny anymore that videogames are bigger than movies), it seems worthwhile to call everyone's attention to a piece I posted last year that got an amazing amount of attention: Do First Person Shooters Make You Smarter? Keep in mind that there's a difference between the game I was talking about then and this new installment. The Modern Warfare 2 version of Call of Duty is not historical; this time it is set in a highly speculative near future. So one of mycentral points -- that these games promote an interest in history -- doesn't really hold.  Still, it's deeper implication, that the runaway success of  first-person shooters doesn't necessarily signal cultural apocalypse, is more relevant than ever, no?

My Unexpected Cameo in The New Yorker

This summer I made a surprise appearance in The New Yorker's website just because I happened to bump into into a college friend in the lobby of the Conde Nast Building. Vicki Raab factchecks for the weekly, but moonlights as one of their book bloggers. She noticed I was carrying a small bag of books. So here's what turned up on their blog a few hours later:

BOOKSPOTTING: MARK HOROWITZ ON SAFARI

Posted by Vicky Raab

I recently spotted Mark Horowitz, the New York editor of Wired magazine, in the lobby of the Condé Nast building. In one way he was, befittingly, “wired”; that is, he had to take the buds out of his ears and disengage himself from his little red Zune in order to talk. But in another way he wasn’t: he was packing a little brown paper bag full of books. He explained that he had just made a trek to Longitude Books, the travel bookstore on the wilds of Thirtieth Street, because in two weeks he was going on a ten-day safari in Tanzania with two of his kids, George, who is fifteen, and Eleanor, who is nineteen. It would be the first time anywhere in Africa for all of them, he said, and they needed to bone up on the literature and lore.

Half the trip was going to be on foot, with a guide, and donkeys to carry the tents, packs, food, and, he added, when pressed, “the books, I guess.” The other half of the trip was going to be in nice safari camps with trucks to take them out to see wild animals, and, yes, to carry the books.

Horowitz acknowledged that he was “totally Kindlized,” but he was a bit worried about recharging, and none of the titles he had purchased are available as downloads. Still, he said that he may bring his along for the plane ride. He plans to load it up with Hemingway, Isak Dinesen, the journals of both Stanley and Livingstone, which, he noted, were available free on the Kindle, and one of his favorite books of all time, “The Man-Eaters of Tsavo,” by John Henry Paterson, which he described as an amazingly weird turn-of-the-last-century true adventure story about man-eating lions in East Africa. As if that’s not enough to recommend it,Horowitz exclaimed, “It’s only $1.99 on the Kindle!”

That’s not only good news for the bookish world traveler on a budget, it saves close to a pound for the donkey.

A list of Horowitz’s purchases:

“The Tree Where Man Was Born,” by Peter Matthiessen.

“The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior,” by Tepilit Ole Saitoti.

“The Safari Companion: A Guide to Watching African Mammals Including Hoofed Mammals, Carnivores, and Primates,” by Richard D. Estes.

“West with the Night,” by Beryl Markham.

“Northern Tanzania,” by Philip Briggs.

Thomas Pynchon's Los Angeles: A Guide

In the August issue of Wired I wrote a guide to Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Inherent Vice. It was literary criticism in the form of an annotated map of Los Angeles, the new book's setting. The point was that Pynchon has always had a strong connection to L.A., where he lived and wrote for many years. And the new book's surprising secret was that it is openly, explicitly autobiographical in many respects. It comes as close to a memoir as we are ever likely to see from this author. This openness, once you know where to look, shouldn't be that much of a surprise. Pynchon has always been less secretive and reclusive than the media portrays him.  He has been, for all intents and purposes, hiding in plain sight for decades, living a normal and extraordinarily productive life in Manhattan, by all acounts. The man just avoids interviews and photographs. To go with the piece, I created an interactive map of Pynchon's L.A. online and invited other Pynchon obsessives to add their own annotations, embedded below. I also added a bunch of extra notes of my own. I think it's still open, so keep at it!

UPDATE: Here are two of the many places that cited the map, including a funny post in the Times.

Howard Hawks Blog-a-thon

For fans of Only Angels Have Wings and Rio Bravo, immerse yourself in obsessive Hawksian analysis at a ten day critical Hawks fest in blog form. This round is devoted to early Hawks, most of which is unavailable on DVD, but Bit-Torrentible. It's an interesting use of the blog form, especially if you've never seen or participated in one of these before:

Kevin Kelly on Screen Ubiquity

Wired maverick Kevin Kelly has an interesting essay in this week's Times magazine:

Everywhere we look, we see screens. The other day I watched clips from a movie as I pumped gas into my car. The other night I saw a movie on the backseat of a plane. We will watch anywhere. Screens playing video pop up in the most unexpected places — like A.T.M. machines and supermarket checkout lines and tiny phones; some movie fans watch entire films in between calls. These ever-present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens. We are headed toward screen ubiquity.

Read the rest here.

Haunted Screens (Laurel & Hardy edition)

Here's a wonderfully obsessive example of Haunted Screens in action. A Dutch guy uses computers to recreate a city block in Culver City (part of L.A.) the way it was back in the 20s.

I lived in Los Angeles for almost 15 years. It's still one of my favorite places in the world. As a film lover, I tracked down buildings and locations from all my favorite stuff -- from Preston Sturges's house (still there, though it was moved from its original location because of the construction of the 101) to Charlie Chaplin's original movie studio (now a recording studio). 

This is as lovely, albeit small, a piece of computer forensics -- peeling back the false front of the present to reveal the ghosts beneath -- as I've seen lately.

Computer Geeks are the new Mad Men

I just noticed this odd fact. Computer programmer seems to be the the new default job for aspiring novelists. The number two bestseller on the Times fiction list this morning is The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. It was number one a week or two ago,thanks in part to it's choice as an Oprah Pick, and has been on the list for 18 weeks. This is Wroblewski's first novel. He's 48, and has been a software engineer for 25 years. His techie resume, which you can read here, is pretty hardcore. He says that writing software "teaches you a lot about building big intellectual structures and keeping them in your head, trying to figure out how they work, and understanding that they can work in one area and break in another. It's a good discipline for writing novels." What's funny is that he's not the first literary writer I've run into this past year with a tech background. Austin Grossman's great first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, came out in paperback this year. (Wired reviewed it here.) Austin used to be a video game designer. Then there's Karl Iagnemma, whose first novel, The Expeditions, came out in January. He's a robotics researcher at MIT. And, of ocurse, the godfather of techie novelists is Neal Stephenson, whose Anathem is also on the bestseller list right now. (Wired profiled him last month.) Stephenson, need I remind you, knows how to program, and once wrote a small book called, In the Beginning ... was the Command Line.  Okay, so what does this mean? I have no idea. There was a period when every lawyer seemed to have an unfinished legal thriller in his briefcase. And years ago, future literary geniuses worked in advertising (Joseph Heller, Don Delillo, Salman Rushdie, Oscar Hijuelos, Peter Carey). Now the Ken Cosgroves of the world are computer geeks. Is it an economic thing? Or has the nature of literature changed?