Twleves Part Seven – The Simpsons
Is this where the specific twelves begin to become a little ridiculous? Well, not on this blog. I’m quite partial to a good satire and The Simpsons has really become the satire for my generation. I was sixteen when it first aired (on I believe the same night as the first episode of Twin Peaks, but I might be wrong about that). In any case, good ol’ channel ten had found its dead horse and proceeded to flog The Simpsons into the ground. Even when their stock of episodes began to grow (and grow and grow), they continually replayed the first three or four seasons over and over. Which I guess is why so many moments from the show stick in my mind (and others) and why most of those moments hail from the early episodes.
I guess this is one of those twelves where you just had to be there. If you can’t remember which episodes these are from, then they probably won’t seem quite so funny. Oh well.
To be helpful, I’ve provided the speaker of each. I’ve kept dialogue snippets to a minimum since they’re really confusing to read, but there are more than a few of those that would make it otherwise (the Michael Jackson episode had some standout dialogue).
I notice now the references between all these twelves is growing. The bloody Beatles even turn here no less! Three out of four Beatles appeared on the show. And what’s the bet John would have been the first to provide a cameo had he survived to see it?
The only golden rule for this twelve? No catchphrases.
- ‘Tut tut, gentle Marge. For here in the boudoir, the gourmand metamorphoses into the voluptuary. Grrr.’ — Homer
- ‘I’m Leonard Nimoy. Good night, and keep watching the skis.’ — Not Leonard Nimoy
- ‘Look fellas, the first snapdragon of the season!’ — Martin
- George Harrison: Hello, I’m George Harrison.; Homer: Oh my god! Where did you get that hoagie?
- ‘See my vest, see my vest, made from real gorilla chest…’ — Mr Burns
- ‘Dodeca-heeee-dron.’ — Lisa
- ‘Mmm…sixty-four slices of American cheese.’ — Homer
- ‘My cat’s breath smells like cat food.’ — Ralph
- ‘You don’t win friends with sa-lad! You don’t win friends with sa-lad! You don’t win friends with sa-lad!…’ — Everyone except Lisa
- ‘It’s a pornography store. I was buying some pornography.’ — Homer
- ‘The coroner? Oh, I’m so sick of that guy.’ — Dr Nick Riviera
- ‘Up yours, children!’ — Armin Tamzarian (Principal Skinner)
Digital Fiction 1.0: Hardly prophetic
I’ve had a long piece knocking around in my computer for a while now and I thought I should probably get it out there before everything in it becomes outdated. Most of this was written earlier this year after a ton of research into the publishing industry and its approach to the digital form. Most of the alarmist malarky referenced comes from traditional media, which I suspect has a vested interest in fanning the flames of discontent. You’ll see more of said malarkey later. Anyway, here’s part one-point-oh.
Once upon a time, I wrote something called e-fiction. At least I think it was called that. Somewhere in the year 2000, the year that once served as shorthand for ‘the future’, a short story of mine won a minor award for something called ‘cyber-writing’. The name recalls a simpler time, before the turn of the millennium, when ‘cyber’ served as shorthand for ‘electronic’. At least that’s my recollection. The story, titled Hemmingway, offered a quirky twist on the old adage that robots will eventually become our masters:
From DataBug Technologies comes the latest in virtual author software. HEMMINGWAY VA is the perfect software solution for any publisher from desktop to multinational. HEMMINGWAY combines the latest in real time, natural language, learning artificial intelligence technology with a user-friendly web-style interface to provide professional quality writing at a moment’s notice. Whether writing a catalogue or crafting literary fiction, HEMMINGWAY will satisfy your authoring needs in minutes. All you need to do is ask!
The story itself is hardly prophetic. I have never considered myself a science fiction writer, let alone a futurist, and I don’t expect my job to wind up outsourced to software any time soon. But, for me at least, Hemmingway became a signpost to my future in writing and publishing. Hemmingway was a story both presented and delivered electronically to its audience.
Hemmingway mostly centres on a conversation between the titular ‘virtual writer’ and one of the programmers who helped create him. To present on screen, I broke the narrative into smaller chunks, using images and animations to provide suitable atmospherics. I presented the dialogue on screen in real time, as though readers were eavesdropping on a real interaction between man and machine.
Following its success in the ‘cyber-writing’ competition, Hemmingway was adapted and published as an ‘e-novel’ by an online literary journal.
The times were exciting for digital publishing: the dot com boom made anything vaguely web-based seem successful, big name authors were experimenting with electronic texts, and e-book readers seemed to be finally making progress after ten years of hype.
For a short time, it seemed that my little story formed another part of an inexorable digital publishing revolution. It was only a matter of time.
But, for all the excitement it generated at the time, Hemmingway remains little more than a dolled-up short story. With the benefit of hindsight, the e-novel’s images, animations, and audio now seem like desperate attempts to draw attention away from the fact that the story is as linear and passive as any dog-eared paperback.
The promise of the web and the challenge it presents to writers is to consider moving beyond traditional unidirectional storytelling. ‘Surfing’ the web may prove to be one of the more incisive coinages of the last two decades. The picture of the web surfer may also be akin to a bowerbird, Readers skim over information on the web, picking through pieces of information before link hopping to the next chunk. While arguments rage over whether web surfing destroys the ability to read or creates a new kind of reading, the idea of a single, sustained narrative arc—even a relatively short one—takes on a faintly archaic sepia tone in the web’s relentless chunk bombardment.
With this in mind, I set out to take my e-novel and push the character of Hemmingway as far as the web allowed. Both the character and the story interface were based on an artificial intelligence ‘chatter-bot’ platform and it seemed a logical extension of the story to insert the character into a more complex chat-based program. The result that project, Hemmingway 0.5, is today available to chat on just about any topic, responding in character to whatever you say via the text input. The technology is a simple, but sophisticated response mechanism, moving beyond pat answers to analyse the patterns of language and formulate its responses to be consistent, broad-ranging, and most of all intelligible.
The three-year project to create Hemmingway 0.5 was challenging to a fiction writer used to working with character, setting, and plot. Creating a ‘chatter-bot’ involves long hours of laborious data entry: pre-empting all possible variations of potential inputs from users and determining how the character would respond.
While both fun and distracting, Hemmingway 0.5 also led me to deconstruct the language into smaller components, to think about the various ways information in English can be repackaged, depending on who is talking, and the similarities and differences between plain spoken English and off-the-cuff sentences plugged into a web page form field.
It’s as far from a typical narrative as one can get. Some may question if it qualifies as fiction at all.
Hemmingway 0.5 launched in 2005. For months, I watched Hemmingway provoke, engage, and occasionally harass anyone who addressed him. The project attracted attention from other writers, web geeks, and other random individuals and my web site flooded with traffic from people keen to lock horns with the cranky virtual writer. But soon I realised that Hemmingway’s knowledge base was only a start. Other authors of chatter-bots on the web continually update their bots with new knowledge and new strategies for responding to users. I had already written for the project over the previous three years. I was not prepared to make one single character my life’s work.
Around the same time, my first published short stories—and their associated pay cheques—arrived in the post. Hemmingway 0.5, a project that required as much time and energy as a novel, offered little more than a brief, amusing distraction for nothing.
Without a way to live off kudos, pushing the limits of digital publishing was hardly a great career move. I would never make a living as a writer with Hemmingway 0.5.
Subscription and pay-per-view web sites are rarely successful in a world where readers expect web-based writing to be freely available. And yet, web users have shown they are willing to pay for high quality download content to enjoy on a portable device such as an iPod.
Digital Fiction 2.0: No iPod of Books to come…
Hemmingway the short story is available to download with web site subscriptions.
Hemmingway 0.5 is still available to chat 24/7.
Read MoreTwelves Part Six – Television
And so back to our regular programming.
Quite a bit of comedy in my selections for a television top twelve and not a lot of Australian television. I loathe most sketch comedy with a passion and that rules out almost every Australian comedy show ever made (okay The Chaser was good and so was The Late Show, but neither of them made the list, alright?).
No Australian drama either since soap opera is unwatchable and I was living in the UK when quite a few classic Australian dramas were made (esp. Wildside, which sounds like something I would like).
So where does that leave the list? A few Australian comedies and the rest British and American. A lot of American. A couple of cable shows. And David Lynch, who was shafted in my movies list (Damn! I love Blue Velvet and I’ve even sat all the way through Eraserhead.)
Iron Chef is fun just to listen to the voiceover say ‘Chen Kenichi’ and to wonder why Iron Chef Italian is always tacked on to the end of the opening and never actually appears in battle. I should probably note that I’m kind of glad that the upcoming series of Lost will be the last. My obsession with the intricacies of that show is reaching a slightly unhealthy level. Despite the X-Files making the list, I’ve never actually seen anything from its final series and I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on with Mulder and Scully in that last film—she’s a religo and he’s a wacko? Huh?
Anyway, here’s the list. I don’t know if it’s terribly inspiring at all, really.
- Frontline
- Blackadder II
- Twin Peaks
- The X-Files
- Seinfeld
- The Games
- The Simpsons
- Mythbusters
- Iron Chef
- The Daily Show
- House
- Lost
Another twelve down. Time for some quality potato time on the couch.
Read MoreTitle hunt
So, I’m in the final stages of drafting what I can safely call the manuscript for a new novel. It is now both novel-sized and novel-scoped (as opposed to previous drafts that were a little more sketchy) and I think it’s looking pretty good. I suspect there’s more work down the track (there always is), but for now it’s nice to sit back a little and review the net result of your labour. Tomorrow, I may even print it out and admire the slab of paper.
Usually, I speed up at this point in a draft, often because of a deadline for an awards entry or something. This time, there’s no such external deadline, so I am deliberately taking my time to finish the story and tidy up all the loose ends and flesh out the newer ideas I had along the way. It’s nice to write an ending that’s not frantic.
As usual, I have no title yet. Nothing has emerged from the manuscript itself yet. The story partly concerns itself with hereditary diseases and often uses two-up references to describe genetic probability, so Come in Spinner might have been a possibility if it wasn’t so cliche. Other than that, I’m kind of stumped. Something might emerge on the next reading or maybe afterwards when it goes off for some love from an editor.
Any and all title suggestions are welcome, even if you don’t know what it’s about. Kurt Vonnegut subtitled Slaughterhouse Five with The Children’s Crusade on the whim of an acquaintance who was mortified that he was writing a book about war. He promised her the book would not glorify war and offered up the title The Children’s Crusade as proof, though the title had nothing to do with anything that actually happens in the book. So if you’ve got a title that bears no relationship to the content of the novel, lay it on me.
Read MoreWhite: New Story Published
White is a short story divided into fourteen little chunks and available now for your reading pleasure at Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k). It’s very much in keeping with the style of Induction, my last published piece in that it’s stripped back and kind of cold. Not surprising considering all the snow.
It’s also the first story I’ve deliberately set outside Brisbane. A reaction to Australia’s disregard for its own literature? It wasn’t really intended that way, but I’m glad my first published piece since the parallel import fiasco is a story set in London and published in the United States. It’s nice to extend the middle digit to your antagonists once in a while.
So anyway, this is how it starts:
I don’t remember the snowfall. I don’t remember falling asleep either, assuming that’s what I did. When I looked up from the manuscript the windows were darkened. The pages on my lap were smudged and sodden from where I’d dribbled onto them. I wiped my chin and placed the paper on the seat beside me. A fluorescent light clinked and buzzed white above my head. It’s the kind of sound that should dissolve into the pall of background noise in such a public environment.
Yeah, my thoughts too. Anyway you can read the rest here for the next week or so. Enjoy.
UPDATE: It’s been archived here.
Read MoreThe Books
