Remix and Potential Criticism: CSA 2011 Talk

Here is the version of this paper I presented today at the Cultural Studies Association Conference 2011 at Columbia College Chicago. I am planning on revising this for publication. This version of the paper was crafted to fit into a 15 minute time slot so I try to hit the high points of my argument in just under 2000 words. As always, comments are most welcome, but I am most interested in where my argument is unclear or where it could benefit from expansion or concision. Thanks!

Epigram:

“Potential reading has the charm of making manifest the duplicity of texts, be they oulipian or not.”

–Harry Mathews

In the July 2005 issue of Wired Magazine, the sci-fi novelist William Gibson offered his take on remix culture in the essay, “God’s Little Toys: Confessions of a Cut and Paste Artist.” In that piece, Gibson directly linked digital remix culture back to the 1950s and the Beat Generation, especially William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s technique of “cut ups.” In so doing, Gibson was conferring aesthetic cachet on a new set of disreputable practices by finding an older set of disreputable practices that have become respectable and tame over time. Besides glancing backwards for historical antecedents, Gibson also looked ahead: “We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. But there seems little doubt as to the direction things are going.” (2005) For Gibson, the recombinant is marked by “appropriation” and “borrowings,” and its key unit is the “sample.” As he explains: “Everything I wrote, I believed instinctively, was to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, seemed a matter of adjacent data.” (2005) These notions—the “cut and paste” artist, the dominance of collage, and appropriation as creative act—exert a powerful hold on the critical and popular imagination and comprise a conventional litany on the pros and cons of remixing.  However appropriative collage is not the only method for deriving meaning from adjacent data.

In this paper, I argue recombinatorial remix explores the “potentiality” that exists inside all texts. Rather than focusing on “appropriation,” “borrowing” or even “artistic pilferings” (all of which have a history of practice as long as art itself), I will examine how formal, restrictive, and mathematical approaches to recombinatorial play are transformative and creative in an Oulipian sense. Texts remixed under constraint are experimental and playful in different ways from “cut and paste” works.  Traditional uses of “sampling” or “borrowing” or “pilfering” overemphasize the creative role played by randomness and chance by focusing too much attention on the aleatory dimension as the key remix aesthetic. The abundant references to Dadaism and Surrealism, e.g., in remix culture attest to a framing of the remix as an heir to “automatic writing” and “exquisite corpses.” If we generate a remix through aleatory mechanisms, the resulting “information” will be dependent upon chance operations.

I argue that such approaches ignore the rich legacy of creative works that have focused on potential of another kind. In this other approach, “potential” is generated from formal, mathematic logics, rules of mean and variation, and restrictive and constrained artistic modes. One group in particular, the Oulipo, has been at the forefront of this conscious investigation into potentiality.

The Oulipo is an acronym for Ouvroir du Litterature Potentielle, roughly translated into English as “Workshop of Potential Literature.” The Oulipo is a group of French writers and mathematicians whose creative work and research focuses on “all writing that [is] subjected to severely restricted methods.” (Mathews 205) Some of the better-known members of the group include the writers Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino.

The Oulipo focuses on “creations that create” more than “created creations.” These “creations that create” are characterized by the use of formal, artificial, even mathematical constraints that are determined before the act of writing begins. The Oulipo believes that constraints help writers “escape that which is called inspiration.” (Lowenthal, xii) Lowenthal continues that Raymond Queneau, one of the founding members of the Oulipo, thought that “the typical act of inspiration draws from limited resources. Rather than restricting the possibilities of creation, [Queneau] argued, the use of artificial structure–mathematical and otherwise–opens the way to a vaster range of potential creation.” (xii) This idea of “potential” creation was specifically defined against Surrealism and very different in its operations from the technique of “automatic writing” or the random combinations of Burroughs’s cut-up texts.

Oulipian works reveal what they mean by “severely restricted procedures.” Georges Perec wrote A Void, a lipogrammatic novel, where he did not use the letter “e.” Italo Calvino wrote If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, a book made up of ten first chapters of imaginary novels. But Raymond Queneau might have written the most famous work of potential literature, his poem A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. It is a 14-line sonnet with a twist: there are ten alternate lines for each line in the poem. [the previous link brings you to a digital version of this poem] Even though there are only 140 total lines of poetry, the potential of the poem is spectacular. It has been determined that it would take more than a lifetime to read every possible version of the poem. Therefore, most of the meaning of the poem lies in a “potential” state, waiting to be remixed.

It is worth noting that most remix artists would probably not identify themselves with the Oulipo or their legacy. But DJs and remix artists frequently have more in common with Georges Perec’s conscious use of constraints than William Burroughs’s chance-driven chains of meaning. For example, let’s look at DJ Freelance Hellraiser’s 2002 musical mashup, “A Stroke of Genie-us.” This song popularized the ‘A versus B’ mashup. In this song, Freelance Hellraiser took the musical track from Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle” and recombined it with the Strokes’ vocals from “Hard to Explain.” The resulting mashup is not a random compilation of the two songs, but a seamless integration of the two competing musical styles into a new mix. To accomplish this new work, Freelance Hellraiser restricted himself to the limited resources of the “A” text and the “B” text.  This is much more in keeping with lipogrammatic constraint than the random rearrangement of the “cut-up.” In fact, the pop-worthiness of “A Stroke of Genie-us” would not have been accomplished if Freelance Hellraiser randomly compiled snippets of the music and the lyrics together. The success of the mashup is in its conscious and organic embrace of its constraint.

DJ Dangermouse extended the A vs. B mashup on a grand scale when he created The Grey Album. Like “A Stroke of Genie-us” Dangermouse’s choice of title self-reflexively puns about the constraint. Dangermouse remixed Jay-Z’s acapella version of The Black Album with musical samples from The Beatles’ White Album—creating that collision of opposites, The Grey Album. The ‘A vs. B’ mashup follows the logic of what the Oulipo call “The Prisoner’s Dilemma,” a lipogrammatic constraint that forces writers to compose a story using a limited set of alphabetic characters. Moreover, the “A vs. B” mashup is—in an Oulipian sense—a “creation that creates” and can be used just like the sonnet form is by both professional and amateur poets. “A Stroke of Genie-Us” and The Grey Album spawned numerous remixes, mostly from amateur remixers. The Grey Album inspired remixes using the music of Weezer, Pavement, Prince, Metallica, Radiohead, and the Wu-Tang Clan.

So far I have focused on how ‘formal constraint’ is another way to approach the ‘potential’ of remix culture. But there is another dimension at play here: the role of the reader (or the listener or the viewer or the interactant). The use of constraints to generate potential texts leads towards “potential criticism.” A fuller demonstration of “potential criticism” can be found in my forthcoming book The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism, which I co-wrote with Shannon Clute. The book will be published this Fall by the University Press of New England.

Oulipian Harry Mathews states at the beginning of his essay “Mathews’ Algorithm:” “Potential reading has the charm of making manifest the duplicity of texts, be they oulipian or not.” (Oulipo 1973, 105) Mathews continues: “the resultants derived from these texts can be used to two different ends: either the ‘analysis’ of the texts put in play, or the creation of a new work” (1973, 105). As we have seen, with DJs Freelance Hellraiser and Dangermouse, the resultants of remixed texts are ‘the creation of a new work.’ What might not be as readily apparent is how these resultants operate as an ‘analysis of the texts put in play.’ Here it is important look more closely at how producing texts under constraint is both a creative and an auto-exegetical act, which explains why Mathews begins an essay about his recombinatorial algorithm with a discussion of “potential reading,” and claims it makes manifest the duplicity of texts produced through constraint.

Shannon Clute and I have identified three crucial elements to constrained textual productions: (1) intertextual allusions to other texts; (2) self-reflexive punning (often marked by quirky humor); and (3) formal mathematical logics that allow the text to explore and ultimately map its own typology. Taken together, these elements literally enact potential reading and reveal the duplicity of texts.  In my previous work on mashups and remix culture, Chuck Tryon and I began to develop the idea of critical digital intertextuality. Here, I extend my investigation into intertextuality by seeing it alongside self-reflexive punning and formal restrictive logics that together form ” a geometry of auto-exegesis.” In other words, texts written or produced under formal constraint can literally “read themselves.”

These three crucial elements are a particularly rich vein of creative work for scholars of remixes to explore. As Georges Perec notes in his Afterword to A Void, citational art, i.e. texts under constraint that contain intertextual allusions, honor and mimic traditions of punning and plagiary with longstanding roots in French Literature, going as far back as the 15^th century and the work of Rabelais. Moving our frame of reference from 20^th century artistic innovations, Perec identifies key characteristics of recombinatorial play within the humorous pun-filled plagiarism of stories like Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel and Sterne’s Tristam Shandy.

Examples of video mashups can illustrate this point. Consider mashups like “Vote Different” using Hillary Clinton’s video embedded in an Apple Macintosh Commercial, “Endless Love” featuring a musical duet between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, or “Shining,” a remixed trailer for Kubrick’s The Shining as a romantic comedy. While all three remixes are quite different, they each form a geometry of auto-exegesis via intertextual allusion, self-reflexive punning, and the use of formal constraints. Moreover, they confirm Mathews’s main point that potential readings through remix have the ‘charm of making manifest the duplicity of texts, be they oulipian or not.’ These three remixes are quite duplicitous: they subvert the meanings of their original source texts, and do so using quirky humor and self reflexive punning driven by restrictive procedures. Moreover, self-reflexive punning and humor are not supplementary to the remix, but an outcome of what Perec calls ‘citational art.’ Quirky humor and self-reflexive punning are how texts remixed with other texts pleasure themselves under constraint.

In conclusion, we can identify remixes that engage even more thoroughly in artificial Oulipian constraints, as in Lenka Clayton’s remix video, “Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet.” In a remix such as this, the power of potential criticism demonstrates a potential political dimension as well. Using a constraint quite popular among Oulipians—the alphabetic list—Clayton reorders every word of Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address in alphabetic order. The resulting twenty minute video is a new recitation of the State of the Union, literally word for word.  Through the use of alphabetic constraint, Clayton’s video enacts a potential reading of the State of the Union. Unmoored from their original semantic positions, the individual words are rattled off as a list that reveals the latent, even hidden, meanings of Bush’s speech. Clayton’s work demonstrates that potential criticism can move beyond playful combinations of pop culture and investigate and reveal the latent meanings and duplicity contained in the texts that constitute our civic and political lives. Clayton’s video calls to mind what Jacques Roubaud has said about Raymond Queneau’s “A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems:” Its constraint is rather elementary, but its potentiality is spectacular.” (2004, 100-101; trans. Jean-Jacques Poucel)

Works Cited:

Gibson, William. “God’s Little Toys,” Wired Magazine 13.07 (July 2005) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson.html

Lowenthal, Marc. Raymond Queneau: Stories and Remarks. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

Mathews, H. Oulipo Compendium. Trans. and eds. by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, London: Atlas Press, 2005.

Oulipo. Oulipo: La littérature potentielle. Saint-Amand: Editions Gallimard, 1973. Trans. Shannon Clute.

Perec, Georges. La disparition. Paris: Editions Denoël, 1969.

––––––. A Void. Trans. Gilbert Adair. Boston: Verba Mundi, 1994.

Roubaud, Jacques. “Perecquian OULIPO” Trans. Jean-Jacques Poucel. Yale Studies, 105, Pereckonings: Reading Georges Perec (2004): p. 99-109.

As We May Publish, Part Two: A Reader’s Reflection on Two Publishing Experiments

“Free their books and their minds will follow.”

–Masthead slogan for The Concord Free Press

1. The Experimental Reader

In yesterday’s post (“As We May Publish”) I discussed what authors might consider taking away from AAUP’s report on “Sustaining Scholarly Publishing.” My reflections were oriented around why authors should care about the changes currently underway at university presses. I also mentioned that my interest in this topic was being driven—to some extent—from my own authorship perspective: my experiments in open access publishing, my interest in alternative scholarly publishing, and my forthcoming university press book that has digital and database logics at the core of its critical methodology.

As a companion set of ideas to that post, I  look today at two publishing experiments that came to my attention as a reader of a particular genre of fiction. With a background in English Literature and as a scholar of film noir, I read noir fiction and hard-boiled literature. That genre—coming out of the pulp magazines, the dime novel, and the comic book—has always been at the forefront of publishing shifts. Noir authors and noir publishers have tended to adapt to new business models while retaining (and even extending) their core thematic interests and stories. Through my interest in that genre, two experiments came to my attention that I don’t think are yet widely known in digital humanities circles. I bring them up as case studies that have piqued my interest as a reader who likes to explore publishing experiments—and these examples come out of the “wild” category of the publishing ecosystem—and they help me think about the reader’s role during this moment of experimentation.

My first example will be Concord Free Press, which gives away its books for free–literally. But that is only part of the story: Concord Free Press has a particular institutional mission that asks readers to make voluntary donations to the charity of their choice in exchange for a free book. The Concord Free Press calls its mission “generosity-based publishing.” My second example is Level 26, a new media publishing venture started by CSI: creator Anthony Zuiker. His Level 26 venture involves book publishing, web community and video productions, organized around what Zuiker calls the “digi-novel.”

Though my two publishing examples are very different, both share a desire to “free their books” and encourage their readers to “give back” in highly structured ways via the open Web. I am not using the word “free” as in “free beer” (one of my favorite lines from Lawrence Lessig in his book Free Culture) but “free” as in “free speech,” “free culture,” and “freeing” as in “liberating” or “having independence.” To me, these projects are interesting to consider in light of the ongoing conversations around the sustainability of scholarly publishing. These examples strike me as publication models that are taking advantage of digital affordances. They are asking new questions about the role of presses, the nature of the “book,” and the participation of readers in online activities.

2. Scott Phillip’s Rut and the Generous Reader

“If you took the tender portrait of a town in decline in Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, mixed it with Kurt Vonnegut at his most satirical and biting, then sprinkled in a few grams of meth and a generous shot of piss from a syphilitic hobo into the resulting solution, you’d have a drink that could almost put you on your ass as fast as Rut sure-as-shit will.”

Review of Rut by Spinetingler Magazine

Scott Phillip’s most recent book Rut was published by Concord Free Press. Scott Phillips is best known for his novel The Ice Harvest, which was also turned into a neo-noir film starring John Cusack. Instead of going with a traditional publisher, his latest work is being distributed for free by Concord. What this means is that it does not cost anything to obtain a copy of the book. It is actually free (as in costing no money). However, there is a reason for this. Concord Free Press asks all readers who take possession of the “free” novel to make a voluntary donation to the charity of their choice. The book-as-giveaway is used an incentive to increase charitable donations. And so far, the experiment is paying off. Concord Free Press has raised over $200,000 dollars in donations via the books has it published.

Now, it is important to note that its books, including Rut, are not published as e-books or released as PDFs—they are only available as traditional paperback novels. In fact, in one of my favorite parts of this experiment, the back page of each novel has ten blank lines where each reader of the book is supposed to sign their name and then pass the book along to another reader. This decidedly analog approach to forming a network of readers is a great way to encourage an ever-expanding readership. The physical book operates metaphorically a little bit like a digital bit; it is not meant to sit on one’s shelf, but is always intended to be in transit to another reader. It’s a virtuous model of sharing: the reading circle as lending library.

How do online communities come into play here? Concord Free Press hosts a website and asks all of the people who donate due to one of their books to log onto their site (www.concordfreepress.com) and note where they gave and how much. What one notes when visiting Concord’s website is how many donations are significantly more than the reader would pay at a bookstore for a 230 page novel like Rut. It is not uncommon to see donations of $25.00 and higher, suggesting that one act of generosity (giving away a book by an established author) results potentially in a greater act of generosity (a donation in excess of the typical consumer purchase of a paperback).

ForeWord Magazine says that Concord Free Press “re-conceptualizes the very goals of publishing, a grand experiment in subversive altruism.” It is this aspect of the experiment that I want to consider most closely. While Concord’s “subversive altruistic” model will not necessarily work for all publishers and all authors (note that Concord Free Press is publishing the work of already established authors), it is worth considering how models of “generosity” can induce and support participation via the open Web. [As an aside, is this type of generosity akin to the free labors that go into supporting a publication model like Wikipedia?]

At this point, the publication model of the Concord Free Press raises more questions than answers for me. Still I want to explore the implications of this kind of experiment on scholarly publishing. What would the scholarly version of this experiment look like on the open Web? How could scholars benefit from giving away books for free and asking for audience participation in return? Would a model of “book sharing and lending” (which is also at the heart of Concord’s experiment) work for a scholarly book? Is the logical extension of Concord’s paradigm to publish their novels in digitally native formats and remove the need for actual physical book publications? How might scholars locate funding to write books that encourage “subversive altruism?”

3. Anthony Zuiker’s Level 26 and the Active Reader

“Not a hint of this appeared in the mainstream press. This material was relegated to a bunch of serial-killer-fan web sites, the most active being Level26.com.”

–Self-conscious, metatextual reference from the novel, Level 26: Dark Prophecy (p. 117)

CSI: creator Anthony Zuiker is exploring the “digi-novel” in a series of crime stories focused around a criminal profiler, a “Special Circs” agent named Steve Dark. Two novels in the series have already been published, Dark Origins and Dark Prophecy. Each novel is supported by (even architected around) digital components and an online community. There is a website, Level26.com, where fans can meet up. There are videos that function as “cut scenes” interspersed throughout each novel. There are the Level 26 apps that bring the novel and its digital components into one application. A quick disclaimer: I don’t think Level26 is everyone’s cup of tea. The story itself can be quite gruesome (a bit beyond where even the CSI: TV series will go) and will mostly appeal to hardcore fans of Zuiker’s TV shows or mainstream readers of the serial killer/mystery genre.

Zuiker’s vision for the “digi-novel” seems to be a digital convergence between the storyworlds of television, web, and book. But up to this point, it still feels more like a group of parts than a converging, transmediated storyworld.  For example, there are “cyber-bridges” that extend the story beyond the written word. You can go to YouTube to see examples of his cyber-bridges. Cyber-bridges are video segments that occur approximately every 20 pages in the book, or even re-organize into its own one hour movie. To support the viewing of cyber-bridges, Zuiker hosts a free online community, Level26.com. To encourage readers to buy the book, the cyber-bridges must be unlocked using a printed code found in the book. (Of course, from an archival standpoint, one wonders what happens when and if the website goes offline in a few years for the book’s future readers.) I tend to find that the cyber-bridges interrupt my reading rather than plunging me deeper in the story. Cyber-bridges operate too often like cut-scenes in a video game, but without the feeling that one has “leveled.” And there can be a jarring effect when the characters in your reader’s “eye” are fleshed out in the video segments. I make note of these issues to highlight that Level 26 is still in an experimental stage. Zuiker himself has written on the problems he has faced in making all the pieces of the Level 26 franchise work.

Of particular interest to me is the community forming at Level26.com (which has had a community as large as 100,000 members). This is a community that is built for fans, aided by fans, but was not originally founded by fans. In fact, “official fan sites” can frequently be problematic, especially if readers sense that the community is little more than a marketing gimmick for a movie, TV show, or book. One way Level 26 is addressing this concern is to encourage fan participation on topics beyond the Level 26 novels, and making the site a destination for fans of serial killer fiction in general. How successful that maneuver will be has yet to be determined, but there are dedicated community members already operating around the subjects of serial killers, crime detection, and CSI: fandom. There is no doubt that Zuiker has learned a thing or two about building “franchises” from his CSI: success, and that this project benefits from his position in the media industries. In addition, Level26.com hosts fan contests, has a section for reader suggestions for future novels, and has active commentary sections related to the books.

Level 26 also takes advantage of handheld, touchscreen devices and in the process encourages active readers to click, touch, and play with the text and its digital components as the story unfolds on the screen. Using iPhone and iPad apps, Zuiker can eliminate the printed book’s hybrid status–straddling the analog-digital worlds–and produce a single, unified digital work. As Zuiker writes in February 2011: “”Years ago, when I started working on Level 26: Dark Origins, there wasn’t a device available to showcase my vision for what the Digi-novel could be. Now, with the release of the iPad, it’s time to unleash the Ultimate Digi-novel!” While the interactivity of Dark Prophecy as an app is still fairly rudimentary (and maybe not quite living up to the hype of being the “ultimate digi-novel”) nonetheless one can begin to see the promise of digi-novels as a mode of digital storytelling. Issues that have plagued early experiments in digital storytelling are still present in the app version of this novel. Beyond the interruptions of the cyber-bridges, pulling up electronic dossiers on characters or collecting evidence in the flow of a particular chapter can feel like tangents from the main storytelling rather than valuable hyperlinks. But even with these critiques, I fully appreciate how Zuiker is experimenting with digital storytelling and taking creative risks.

What might Level 26 suggest for the future of scholarly publication? First, the use of cyber-bridges would not be interruptive in a scholarly argument the way it is in a fictional narrative. I can see the potential of having cyber-bridges in a film or media studies book that could embed videos right alongside the written argument. Second, I think Level 26 points towards existing scholarly work that are moving more towards a “tablet-based reading” protocol or towards the expanded role of “video” in our reading practices. Here I sense deep affinities to a project like Alex Juhasz’s recent MIT Press “book,” Learning from YouTube.” For me, certain disciplines seem primed to continue these trends and experiments in scholarly publication, especially scholars in film, television, and new media.

I would love to hear about other examples around experiments in publishing, along the lines of Concord Free Press and the Level 26 franchise.

As We May Publish: My Reflections on AAUP’s Sustaining Scholarly Publishing Report

This blog post is a response to questions posed to me via Twitter by Shana Kimball, Head of Publishing Services, Outreach and Strategic Development at MPublishing, University of Michigan Library (http://lib.umich.edu/spo) She asked me in a tweet: “Curious about what you think authors should take notice of in the AAUP report? How should it change their publishing habits?” My immediate reaction was: great questions. But I realized quickly that my response was not likely to fit into a tweeted reply.

Some background: Since last week, I’ve been commenting on a new report from an AAUP Task Force on Economic Models for Scholarly Publishing. The members of the task force, representing several well-known university presses, have written a report entitled “Sustaining Scholarly Publishing: New Business Models for University Presses.”[1] The focus of the report is on university presses as a “keynote species” in the scholarly ecosystem, and the report’s conclusions speak to the need for collaboration and experimentation at and among university presses. So, there is a lot to digest in the report for the presses themselves and for their future, but why should any of these issues matter to authors, scholars, non-publishing faculty members, or even University administrators?

First, while most authors probably know (or at least sense) that university presses are in a transitional period and facing severe challenges, the report provides background and case studies about what is actually happening behind the scenes at the presses and discusses some of the new publishing models and strategies that are already being tried. The report seeks to address the challenges of a changing landscape for university presses from “new technologies to new economic conditions to changing relations with stakeholders.” While some might suggest that university presses—like many other businesses or academic enterprises—will just need to adapt to new economic and publishing realities, the report notes that the long-term sustainability of scholarly communication is not solely a question for university presses to answer, but in fact, requires a larger conversation between all shareholders in scholarly publishing, including authors, researchers, universities, funding agencies, and librarians.

And the stakes in the evolution of scholarly communication remain high for faculty members since university press publication remains one of the primary ways we establish our reputations as scholars. The importance of publishing with a University Press is a major criterion in many promotion and tenure decisions and is still a major conduit by which we review, edit, share, and archive our research and our scholarship among our peers and within our various disciplines. Therefore, I would argue it behooves us as an academic community to be very concerned about what is happening at university presses. To use the report’s “ecosystem” metaphor, authors are an important species in that system as well.

Moreover, change in scholarly publishing is already being driven by faculty—sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly—especially in the context of our everyday campus-based requests and needs. The scholarly ecosystem is deeply interconnected. For example, changes in how we access other people’s research (the demand side of the equation) is being felt by university presses (the supply side). If the demand rises for PDF files, then presses need to consider not only how to meet that need now but be able to have in place economic models that will allow them to meet that need in the long run.[2] In this regard, I would cite what Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, wrote earlier this year in Library Journal: “Times have changed. The migration to electronic formats untethered to physical libraries has already happened—so far as readers are concerned. How often these days does one encounter even the hoariest of scholars insisting that print journals in the library are preferable to electronic access at their desk? But the publishing system (and much of the prestige bound up in it) remains tied to archaic production processes, largely because librarians and their budgets have managed to throw together make-shift bridges to close the gaps between scholars and the resources they need. We’re good at making things work for our faculty, for now, and we do it quietly, making compromises behind the scenes. We’re not so good at meeting the needs of future scholars. They aren’t able to raise a stink, so we ignore them.” Faculty members are not neutral or disinterested parties in this conversation—we already impact the system.

Digital publishing realities are here today. This is no longer quite the horizon issue it was ten years ago. Many of us are already exploring and adopting open access (OA) models and utilizing open publishing formats and platforms. Therefore, I would argue that it is valuable to have the perspective of how open access (among other shifts) are impacting the university press system.

One reaction I had in reading the AAUP report and its growing body of comments is that a “healthy scholarly ecosystem” may very well look different, depending upon whether you are a librarian, an editor at a university press, an author, a grant administrator, a member of a scholarly society, etc. We may find broad agreement on what qualities we would all ideally want in a “healthy scholarly ecosystem.” But in the comments I’ve read so far, I detect thornier issues when the conversation switches to different university press missions, press priorities, scholarly agendas, and economic realities (among other things). I believe the report’s strength is in starting these conversations now and trying to bring all the shareholders to the table for the discussion.

But this set of concerns leads to Shana’s second question: “How should the AAUP report change publishing habits?” I have two responses to this question.

First, I think, for many of us, our publishing habits have already been changing. We look to university presses today for support of new experiments and new forms of scholarship. Here, I am definitely influenced by my own experiences in scholarly publication. I have been involved in alt-scholarly publishing since 2005 when I began using podcasting as an open access platform for my scholarship on film noir. That project has generated a forthcoming book, The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism (November 2011, University Press of New England). The Maltese Touch of Evil engages in experiments around publication and reception, including considerations about how we might take advantage of digital logics to extend our critical methodology. Finally, I am also working this year to launch a new open access journal dedicated to multimedia work in film and media studies that utilizes open peer review. As I have experimented with new forms of publishing, I have found organizations like MediaCommons to be sites for collaboration, encouragement and support, and the AAUP report becomes another link in that chain. The report and its use of CommentPress is part of that community-building effort.

Community building around newer models of scholarly publishing should remain a priority in my estimation, since it is unlikely that a “one size fits all” publishing approach will emerge in the future. As the AAUP report acknowledges:

“The one evident conclusion that emerges from the various reports on the current state of scholarly publishing, as well as in the research undertaken for this report, is that no single new business model will replace the traditional print-based model. Rather, a mix of revenue sources will be required to sustain scholarly publishing in the future, and that mix is likely to vary for different kinds of publications.”[3]

Second, for authors who haven’t changed their publishing habits yet or are not particularly interested in doing so, I hope the report and its surrounding discussion encourages curiosity and consideration about what is happening in academic publishing in the digital age. I hope authors throughout academia want to learn more about the benefits of open access publishing, experiment with digital publishing projects, or talk with their editors about how to release their books in new digital formats. And even beyond a publishing issue, I hope reports such as this one help educate senior faculty about the changes that are greeting the newest members of our profession: graduate students and junior professors. We no longer can afford to have overly conservative promotion and tenure committees that are not giving adequate consideration and scholarly weight to new forms of publication. As university presses meet the challenges of a transformed publishing landscape, the projects that are likely to emerge will be like paper-based books in content only. As we ask our presses and our libraries to meet the challenges of digitally enabled scholarship, let’s advocate for faculty governance that will review and reward this scholarly activity appropriately.

Finally, I hope the report opens a few eyes about the new realities at university presses. Some of these changes are likely to be quite transformational, and will be a major part of our evolving scholarly ecosystem for years to come. If you haven’t considered it before, maybe now is the right time to start asking how your next book or journal article might benefit from open access as the primary mode of publication, or how might the content of your research benefit from being published in a digital format.

I would also love to hear responses and reactions from other authors and scholars on what the AAUP report might mean for their publishing habits and needs.

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[1] The full report is being published at MediaCommons.org using the CommentPress software. You can read more about CommentPress and its functionality here, but the key feature of CommentPress allows readers to leave comments at the paragraph level and engage in a targeted and threaded discussion of the report’s findings and conclusions.

[2] In support of this contention, I think the report’s section on “Open Access as a Primary Model of Publication” is particularly illuminating with its case studies of publishers associated with the National Academies and RAND corporation.

[3] http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/sustaining/conclusions/

“A Habit of Not Dodging Things:” Reading Dashiell Hammett’s “So I Shot Him”

“But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

–From The Maltese Falcon, conclusion of “The Flitcraft Parable” (italics mine)

“Did it ever occur to you that everybody is more or less afraid of nearly everything, and that courage isn’t a damned thing but a habit of not dodging things because you’re afraid of them?”

–From “So I Shot Him” (italics mine)

Fifty years after his death, The Strand Magazine has just published a short story by Dashiell Hammett, “So I Shot Him.” As one would expect, when a quality short story appears from one of the great hard-boiled writers, “So I Shot Him” is getting a fair share of mainstream publicity, including a segment on NPR. It is a fairly short story in terms of length—not much longer than well-known “The Flitcraft Parable” in The Maltese Falcon. And unlike many “lost” works—both long and short—that appear long after the death of a major artist, “So I Shot Him” is not a fragment from an unfinished novel nor a rough draft of a story still seeking its final form. Rather, it is a compact gem of a story that feels fully crafted and complete. I definitely encourage fans of Hammett to seek out this story in the current print issue of The Strand Magazine. “So I Shot Him” reminds me of the underlying sensibility of “The Flitcraft Parable.” The newly published story, like “The Flitcraft Parable,” is a hard-nosed, noir-encrusted meditation on two major tensions in modern life: not dodging one’s responsibilities and confronting one’s fears.

The story’s title also supplies its opening line: “So I shot him.” It helps establish the essential, fatal agency of the piece, as this “I” is identified as a shady, perhaps criminal, promoter named Rainey. Typical of Hammett, our portrait of Rainey emerges through his visible actions and also through the first-hand observations of the story’s unnamed narrator. The jolting statement that opens the story is quickly clarified for the reader:  Rainey did not shoot a person but rather an animal. Rainey shot his dog because the dog was “cat-shy,” and in Rainey’s worldview that is unacceptable and required an extreme solution. As he tells the three people in his presence: “What good is a dog, or a man, that’s afraid of things?” The story hinges on what seems to be idle banter between Rainey and his three compatriots (Linn, Metcalf, and a narrator) discussing how best to address their fears, and Rainey’s musings on the topic seem to anticipate FDR’s famous saying “the only thing to fear is fear itself.” It becomes clear that Rainey believes that a modern man of action should have no fear except of pain or death. The crux of the remaining narrative action rests on Linn’s personal admission that he has hydrophobia, or a fear of water.

Since the story is quite short, I won’t go through the rest of the narrative details. But Rainey comes up with an all-or-nothing way to fix Linn’s fear of water that is, in its way, just as extreme as his solution for a “cat-shy” dog. What keeps the reader’s interest humming along is that Hammett is expert at leaving the reader wondering about what is happening at the margins of his story. Hammett’s narrator here supplies just enough clues to make us want to read more deeply into Rainey and Linn’s actions and reactions. Yet we only have partial information from a restricted point of view, though the clues we do have are tantalizing glimpses that more may be going on than is being shared with us.

Andrew Gulli, editor of The Strand Magazine, does a great service to lovers of hard-boiled writing by locating this unpublished manuscript at the Harry Ransom Center’s Archive at the University of Texas. You can read more about Gulli’s archival investigations at the Ransom Center here as well as learn that there are more unpublished stories by Hammett in those archives. I hope some more stories find the light of day in The Strand Magazine.

Gulli says that “So I Shot Him” is both vintage Hammett and not vintage Hammett: “Vintage in that you have the great vivid characterization that Dashiell Hammett is so famous for. The terse dialogue, and the great tension that he ratchets up. But it’s not vintage in that there’s a lot of psychological elements to it. There’s also even a bit of a literary feel.” I don’t completely disagree with Gulli’s assessment, but I think that Gulli somewhat minimizes other writings where Hammett does take a psychological, literary approach, as in aforementioned “The Flitcraft Parable.” I particularly like the nuanced semantic sentiments generated by the negated phrases, “not falling” and “not dodging.” In both stories, the simple inclusion of the word “not” forces us to pause, consider, and even re-read what is both being said and unsaid.