some recent capsule reviews

I've updated this year's reading log with some new reviews, posted below for your reading convenience:

Easy Travel to Other Planets, by Ted Mooney
There's a lot to like about the way this novel chronicles the interpersonal drama among a group of intellectuals and artists. The conversations are stylish, fragmentary, and mediated; the prose is compressed, with a cinematic sense of editing; a quasifuturistic theme (interspecies communication) provides ample opportunity for strange riffs; an atmosphere of geopolitical tension permeates obscurely at all times, threatening, at any moment, to condense into apocalypse—at its best, it recalls the energy and thrust of early DeLillo. At its worst, it reads like high-end erotica posing as lit: Mooney's attention to the sexuality of his [female] protagonist lurches towards the prurient at times (in the first thirty pages of the novel, she participates in three sex scenes, including one with a dolphin).

Drawing From Life: The Journal as Art by Jennifer New
Book dedicated to showcasing intricate art journals, mostly hand-drawn. The journals themselves are so self-evidently fascinating that it's hard to say why presenting them in this fashion doesn't quite work. The choice to reduce intricate journal-pages down to postcard size, rendering them mostly unreadable, certainly doesn't help; I think there's also a problem with the sheer number of journals represented here, which helps to give a sense of scope and variety but eliminates the ability to really immerse yourself in any particular journal. The framing essays profiling each journal-maker are worth a read, but ultimately they're not nearly as interesting as the journals themselves: it's just one more degree of remove between the reader and the subjectivity that's alive in the journal-pages. There's so much "frame" here that the art itself is choked out.

Only Words, by Catharine MacKinnon
MacKinnon is an anti-pornography feminist, which can cause people on both ends of the political spectrum to reject her ideas without taking the time to engage with them first. This is a shame, because MacKinnon's argument here is one of the most interesting anti-pornography arguments I've read, avoiding the easy use of anecdotal pathos, in favor of a legal argument, suggesting that pornography's status as "protected expression" is a classification error, and that it belongs more properly in the category of speech acts that are treated legally as actions rather than ideas (hate speech; sexual harrassment). Elegant and deft.

The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
Final volume in the His Dark Materials trilogy, a children's fantasy trilogy built around the (Gnostic) notion of a War Against God. The fact that such a thing ever achieved a moderate success on the shelves of American booksellers strikes me as so profoundly improbable that Pullman earns points just for pulling it off; that goes double when you also consider that this book also features two heroically pair-bonded male angels and features a young girl's sexual awakening as a major plot point. But to focus on the anti-Narnian qualities on display here is to overlook the sheer strength of Pullman's prose and storytelling craft. In this volume, these strengths are most evident in Pullman's sequences of genuine terror (the passage into the Land of the Dead) and heart-rending tragedy (the parting of lovers). Heavy stuff, but Pullman is right to not flinch from confronting children with emotionally weighty material: it dignifies them as fully human.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Post-apocalyptic minimalism from master prosesmith Cormac McCarthy. This book could fruitfully be partnered with Jose Saramago's Blindness: both stare unflinchingly into extremes of human ugliness in an attempt to unsentimentally illuminate the fragility and sheer miracle nature of human love. In Blindness the love is between a man and a woman; here it is between a father and son, a framework that allows the book also to also rewardingly explore some of the thornier questions of parental ethics—when is it appropriate to lie to a child, for instance? What forms of protection are valid and appropriate? The book disappointingly pulls a few punches in its final pages, but prior to that it was one of the most rewarding novels I've read this year. Recommended.

Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul
If I were to pick a book that this one most reminded me of, it would be Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: you could practically entitle this Understanding Video Games and be none the worse for wear. Like McCloud, Juul comes to his chosen branch of the media tree with a fresh eye, determined to coherently examine its component elements in order to build a new conception of the way they work their effects. For Juul, the key elements are narrative and rule-based play, and the unique experience of video games grows out of cooperation (as well as tensions and slippages) between these forces. Fascinating reading, clear and lucid, an essential work for anyone interested in the academic study of video games or cross-platform narrative. Highly recommended.

(Those of you who are interested in that last one might want to take note that all my "scavengings" from the book (85 in total) can be found here.)

unit operations, part II

Just finished reading the second chapter of Ian Bogost's Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, and found it shockingly similar to the first. The pile-up of important names continues: this chapter tackles Plato and Aristotle, linguist Ferdinand Saussure, deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, computer scientist John von Neumann, digital media theorists Lev Manovich and N. Katherine Hayles. And, like the previous chapter, this one ends up with a kind of strange left turn, this time analyzing the Department of Homeland Security's Homeland Security Advisory System, which "underscores the tension between unit operations and system operations."

I'm still really enjoying this book, although I'm still struggling to make sense of its thesis in even the most general sense.

unit operations, part I

I just finished reading the first chapter of Ian Bogost's Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, and I'm really enjoying it.

Bogost's approach hinges on the concept of the "unit operation," a "mode of meaning-making that [privileges] discrete, disconnected actions over deterministic, progressive systems," and the first twenty pages of the book pretty much constitute an attempt to clarify this distinction.

I'll confess that he isn't a hundred percent successful. At the end of my first pass through the chapter, I feel like I might have a tentative grip on what distinguishes a "unit operation"-based analysis from "systems operation"-based analysis, but I strongly doubt that I'd be able to do something like summarize the difference between the two. I can't entirely blame Bogost for this: "units" and "systems" are both high-level abstractions; we're not exactly talking about apples and oranges here.

Determined to make it clear, Bogost starts pulling in conceptual machinery from a variety of different disciplines: half the fun of the book so far is watching the interesting thinkers pile up on top of one another. By page twenty we've moved through quite the array: Heidegger, Spinoza, Leibniz, Alain Badiou, "object-oriented" philosopher Graham Harman, "autopoetic systems theorists" Francisco Valera and Humberto Maturana, sociologist Niklas Luhmann, mathematician Georg Cantor, digital media theorists Janet Murray and Espen Aarseth, and poet T. S. Eliot—all this en route to, of all things, a unit-operations-oriented analysis of Spielberg's film The Terminal (2004), in which Bogost concludes that the film is about "specific modes of uncorroborated waiting."

So, in conclusion, I'm not really sure yet exactly what Bogost is even talking about, and yet I've jammed the first chapter full of about a pound of bronze (in the form of Levenger Page Points). Being disoriented by brilliance is a good thing.

twisty little passages

Early in Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages : An Approach to Interactive Fiction, Montfort makes a convincing case for using the term "interactive fiction" to describe the sort of electronic literature that he's writing about. I like the designator, partially because, as Montfort points out, it enjoys widespread usage, but also because it can be precisely located in a hierarchy of related descriptors. Specifically, it is a little bit more inclusive than the term "text adventure" (not all pieces of interactive fiction need to be "adventures") and a little bit less inclusive than my term command-line literature (not all pieces of command-line literature need to be "fictional").

(An aside: for those of you who aren't really sure what interactive fiction is, this page might give you a basic handle on the form.)

So. Within the first ten pages of Twisty Little Passages, Montfort remarks on the need for "a book-sized resource on interactive fiction's history and implications—one that considers how the form came into being and how it developed through the decades, with basic theoretical discussions of the nature of the form and at least an introductory critical discussion of important works," and it is apparent that the rest of the book intends to fill that need. To quibble with the book's subtitle, one could argue that the different strands in that list do not really constitute a single "approach," but rather several different approaches: there's really enough there to fill a couple of different books. By attempting to tackle each of them in a single concise volume, a certain scantiness ensues (I had no trouble completing the book in a day), but Montfort deserves credit for ambitiously staking out the territory: other scholars of electronic literature will undoubtedly see this book as a valuable starting point to branch off from.

The most successful chapters, to me, are the ones that consider "how the form came into being and how it developed through the decades." The history of Zork and Adventure's development is especially interesting reading, as is the overview of the contemporary IF scene, which has apparently thrived as a non-commercial subculture in the years following the decline of Infocom and other commercial IF publishers. Montfort's critical overview of the major IF works (of the both the commercial and post-commercial era) is pretty condensed—only the most important works get more than a page or two—but valuable nevertheless: I'm hard-pressed to say that I'd trade it for a deeper read into a smaller handful of works. That can come later.

The weaker chapters are the ones that attempt a theory of the form. The first chapter does some decent work establishing a useful terminology with which to discuss IF works: distinguishing between replies and reports, for instance, or distinguishing between which commands are digetic and which are extradigetic. This material, however, is dispensed with in under ten pages, and is forced to share space in this first chapter with the standard "what is interactive fiction?" boilerplate.

The second chapter, probably the book's weakest, unconvincingly attempts to situate the text adventure within the literary tradition of the riddle. Some of the parallels that Montfort attempts to draw have numerous exceptions: for instance, although it is true that riddles are "presented for solution," it is less true that all interactive fiction can (or should) be thought of as doing the same: for instance, notice that many of the IF works available through Adam Cadre's IF page are said to contain "almost no gamelike elements." ("If stuck, just keep exploring," Cadre writes of his latest work, and, in the release notes, he writes "even if you get to an ending, you may have only seen a small fraction of what's possible," neither of which seem like statements that usefully apply to any riddle I know of.)

I take less issue (at least initially) with Montfort's statement that interactive fiction creates a systematic world, but again, the parallel flags for me: is it accurate to say that a riddle also creates this sort of world? Perhaps technically, but the experience of solving a riddle feels to me substantially different from the far more immersive and ludic experience of exploring the world of a work of interactive fiction.

I think Montfort is more on the mark when he touches on the idea of IF as a "literary machine" or what Espen Aarseth would call "ergodic literature." The literary tradition there dates back at least as far as that of the riddle: the I Ching is commonly cited (including by Montfort) as a "literary machine" that dates back to antiquity.

Quibbles aside, I'd highly recommend this book to anyone studying electronic writing, and I even think that most of it is accessible enough to be of interest to people who remember the old Infocom games fondly and might have an interest in seeing what's new in the field.