What it's Come To

So here I am, a good two months having passed by and my brain running all cylinders firing and I. Can't. Stop. Thinking.

A bit of decompression is therefore in order.

The thing about the literature of Ralph Ellison is that it fully embraces the culture of the south while at the same time regretting that transplanting it to the north will result in someone getting shot or going crazy or even turning into Anansi the trickster god in the flesh.  If we look into the idea of a picture of the north, what sort of culture do we get?  Jazz culture, white man's culture, something like that.  The south is black culture, blues culture, and regrettably unable to find peace of any kind that doesn't involve fear and lynching.  This is the world that Ellison's novels are operating in, and he had such a time trying to find a solution that he never even finished his second novel.  It's posthumous, constructed from over two thousand pages of notes and narrative that never went anywhere.

The thing about posthumanism (or transhumanism) is how much I am tickled by the thought of existing as a being inside and outside my head.  If there's one thing I want, it's the ability to go on living after my cellular processes stop working properly.  Mind you I don't think it will work out that well--and anyway the only relevant bits of transhumanism for me are the technological bits that change the way we tell stories.  Storytelling is, you must understand (absolutely must come to terms with), the only thing we've got that's really special.  And the way we tell those stories is running into problems, because there's limits and advantages to all the mediums.

One medium cannot copy another, although you'll notice that hasn't stopped people from trying.  But if you want the reason that people still prefer books to kindles, it's because nobody's written something specifically for an e-book reader yet.  The medium's there but nobody has seen fit to take advantage of its peculiarities.  Computers don't have this problem, we've got cybertexts, hyptertexts, posthypercyberelectrotexts and god knows what else all taking advantage of the computer's ability to display words and sounds and links to everywhere else.  The internet itself is becoming a storytelling medium which we've started to take advantage of but it's not quite there (MUDs fired the first shots but it's not quite there yet.  We're building worlds but not telling stories in them, not really, not yet).  There will, perhaps, be literature written for the iPad or whatever the next new thing is.  Who knows?  I just want to write a phd and get funding to play video games.

Ah, but there are so many other ways to tell stories, old analog ways, card games and pen and paper.  It's all out there in a jumbled mass, and who draws the line between what is a story and what is not a story?  Is it enough to create a world after all?  This is the sort of thing that I can envision fueling debates across university departments across the world, if we can just get over our rather childish rejection of video games as a legitimate form.  I mean come on, we're past that now, aren't we?  There's books, MIT funds the hell out of electronic game studies, we have even come up with our own diametrically opposed camps to snipe at one another with (oh, you ludics!  Oh, you narratologists!)!  There is a middle path, of course, but everyone knows you have to have those two sides or you'll never get anywhere.

My brain has become incapable of really focusing on one project for any length of time, it demands multiple problems to chew on in parallel processes, and while it gives me a hell of a headache from time to time it also makes sure that I sleep like a log at night due to the oversaturating overstimulation of it all.