Gimlé

I’ve been away for a while.

Three weeks in Iceland. A week and a half semi-unconscious due to the fact that my Icelandic body thinks that 20 degrees centigrade is tropical while the heat has been hovered around the mid-thirties.

The Icelandic word óveður comes to mind, basically our word for weather with a negative prefix.

“Bad Weather” essentially, but with additional connotations.

The main difference being that the recent heat here in the UK definitely qualifies as óvður but might not be “Bad Weather” according to the English.

So Iceland and a torrent of scorching heat partially explains why I’ve been so silent. Making this weblog like a graveyard more because of its utter lack of noise rather than the customary morbidity or cynicism.

It doesn’t help that I don’t particularly like this Iceland.

For some reason that never fails to surprise most people, both Icelanders as well as foreigners.

As with most things interesting, the reasons have something to do with history and change.

And awareness of change.

The easiest way to attain some sort of personal growth is to go to a new place. Put yourself in a different context.

Not for a visit. To stay. If you can do that without knowing whether the move is permanent or not, so much the better.

A new place. Uncertain circumstances. Strange surroundings. New friends. All force you to change.

And if you go with an open mind, your basic survival instinct will force you and your personality to adapt to the new situation.

Weird social interactions. Seemingly arbritary rules in conversation.

It remolds you.

But for the personal change to turn into personal growth, you have to return.

You have to go back. To a locus. A center. A place where you both knew yourself, your old self, and where you have a lot of friends and acquaintances that know you. Knew you.

If this sounds like a narrative cliche, that’s because it is. The horrible thing about life is that it tends to be an aggregation of formulaic events and nasty, scratchy cliches. Non-formulaic is just another reason why novels and movies remain cliches.

I’d fire my writer were I a TV series.

Returning home, that’s the time when you notices the changes.

Which is fairly important because most of the time, noticing your personal changes, those small, incremental and evolutionary changes, is impossible.

But you, as you return, get a fairly unique chance to see them. To note down which ones are obviously bad, which ones are obviously to the better.

You might notice that you’re more mellow. Or that you engage in conversations in a much more forgiving manner. That you are more critical of some things and less of others.

You see which friends you still have something in common with. And the ones you’ve grown distant to.

And the simple act of being aware of the changes, affects them. It gives you perspective.

Sight.

A small, dark light…

And a glimpse of the path you’re treading.

Coming back to Iceland once every six months is important.

But my old self—the person I used to be—is alive in all of my memories of that place.

It’s a person I don’t particularly like.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

I’m working hard at not being a nasty bastard.

The problem being partially that I forget that people don’t have three inch thick skin when I give them feedback on the projects.

That part is something I can work on (and have been). Sitting down, listening and thinking about what it is that the student or researcher is working on and then giving them feedback that you hope will help them do their thing better.

Never tell them what you think they should be doing instead. Support people, don’t slate them.

Which is something I still forget sometimes, being an opinionated bastard at heart.

In this context it doesn’t matter whether I’m right or wrong or simply grumpy as hell—of course, being me, I tend to think that I’m right—what matters is that that sort of snide attitude is misguided.

But there is a larger problem here as well.

The name of the course I’m “teach assistin’” on used to be “Narrative and New Media,” a name that in my opinion highlights the course’s continued primary emphasis in a much clearer way than “Communications Media (Interactive Media)” does.

This is especially important because the course description is wooly as hell, suffused with market-speak and catch-phrase mumbo-jumbo—

The alternative being nonsensical, academic mumbo-jumbo, which would probably be just as lacking in content.

So when the brief is unclear everybody interprets the brief according to their own individual tastes.

I’m a comp. lit. storytelling kinda guy, so I interpret the brief with a narrative slant to it.

And I know that others working on the course have their alternative, differing interpretations and teach/advise/support according to that particular interpretation.

So when I let out a nasty comment, criticising a project for being ‘a toy’ that is not only wrong in the sense of breaking the ‘support, don’t slate’ rule but it’s also a misguided, nasty comment based on my particular interpretation of the course brief.

Even if I had been right (which I’m not so sure I was) then the problem lies in the clarity (or lack thereof) in the module’s project brief rather than any shortcoming of the students’ part. Most of them fulfilled the set brief excellently, with skill.

The fact that only about two projects did the “let’s say something, tell a story” thing did annoy me.

But that’s just me being a pompous arse following my particular agenda.

The difference between me and most other people working in academia (present company excepted) is that I acknowledge that I have an agenda and am not in favour of letting it affect my teaching or project feedback.

So, my bad.

I’d still like to give the course more of a storytelling/narrative slant, but the way to do that is not by hammering the students with your grumpy comments, but to pull/push the other teachers on the course in that direction.

Oh, well. Live and learn. And apologize.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

So it went. Oedipa played the voyeur and listener. Among her other encounters were a facially deformed welder, who cherished his ugliness; a child roaming the night who missed the death before birth as certain outcasts do the dear lulling blankness of the community; a Negro woman with an intricately-marbled scar along the baby-fat of one cheek who kept going through rituals of miscarriage each for a different reason, deliberately as others might the ritual of birth, dedicated not to continuity but to some kind of interregnum; an aging night-watchman, nibbling at a bar of Ivory Soap, who had trained his virtuoso stomach to accept also lotions, air-fresheners, fabrics, tobaccoes and waxes in a hopeless attempt to assimilate it all, all the promise, productivity, betrayal, ulcers, before it was too late; and even another voyeur, who hung outside one of the city’s still-lighted windows, searching for who knew what specific image.
Thomas Pynchon—The Crying of Lot 49

I got into this to tell stories.

Not to be famous, get known, be acknowledged, inspire, fascinate or even tell them well.

Stories just happen to be what I enjoy making the most. Writing non-story stuff comes as a close second—and reading is a very close third.

Not that I’m any good at anything but reading. Not awful. Not good, either.

I did a three year stint of writing for myself and my friends. “The practice period”, is what I call it. Most of it complete garbage.

Finished my BA. Did about two hours worth of radio documentary material for the Icelandic Broadcasting Service. Did a short film course where we made a short fifteen minute movie. Worked for a few months as a vision mixer for live news broadcasts and debates.

Storytelling or the second best thing. Saw people around me edit their radio inserts on desktop pcs. Was fascinated by the wave of webcomics that was then just starting. Figured that’s where things are heading and applied for several courses in Interactive Media/Multimedia.

Got accepted in all courses. Picked Bristol because I liked the city.

I don’t regret it at all. Had I not done that Masters I wouldn’t be here, doing this Phd today.

Nevertheless the contrast between then and now is interesting.

Somehow I landed slightly askew. Suddenly I was an Art Theorist, practicing digital art in an art community.

And I hate Art, it died when the turd of relativism surfaced as an acceptable perspective in art theory and practice. That the “idea” and the work‘s “contextualisation” matters more than the work itself.

That storytelling is a quaint thing of little import.

I got swept away with the people.

And then we have the mythical beast called “interactivity” that had to be an integral component of any interactive media effort. Which completely ignores the fact that the most profound changes the computer has effected onto media happen at the cross-section between the new and old. Not right smack in the middle of the digital desert.

Diaries crossed over with the personal homepage to create weblogs. The daily newspaper strip mutated into daily webcomics, which, although they might not be as innovative as modern graphic novels, are more vibrant than the newspaper strip has been since the demise of Krazy Kat. Films crossed over into DVDs to create an experience that in the olden days was only to be had by cornering the director in the bar at a film festival.

But apparently that’s too linear and not interactive enough.

Weblogs take linearity to a new level. Chronological as hell, and extremely reliant on current events and affairs. As is the daily comic strip. And, although their form is, strictly speaking, implementable in traditional media, the new economic reality and communicative power of the internet creates a whole new tapestry of media and structure. Media that is more disruptive than the “revolutionary” hypermedia structures simply because unlike hypertext, which is still, and will be for a long while, locked in the coffers of academia, anybody can write, draw, and publish their stuff on the net.

Anybody can write and be read.

Most of us, mind you, won’t get any sort of readership to speak of.

But even only a hundred readers on a regular basis—readers who are largely writers as well—that’s still a hundred more than you would have had otherwise.

And it’s gratifying. You write something bad, no response. The hollow, ghastly pit of silence receives your half-arsed piece of text. Write something good, get a bit more of traffic. Write really good and one or two of those new readers will start coming back on a regular basis.

Unlike the writers that preceded us we know the score and can follow it in our logs, trackbacks and google ratings.

While the barrier of entry to the professional writing world remains as high as it has always been, the barrier of entry for normal people to tell their stories, to improve their storytelling, to pour their thoughts out into crafted texts and to draw a small crowd…

To write and get feedback on your writing.

Critique.

I got into this to tell stories.

By “this” I mean pretty much anything I do on a regular basis.

The weblog form has frustrated me. It has its limits in what can be done, what you can get people to read, and what you can write.

Right now, the form—the medium—is focused on interesting lives and interesting thoughts. Whether weblogs will expand to give some sort of mercy to those of us, like myself, who have neither is an interesting but altogether separate question.

I think not. At least not for now. Veritas—truth (I am a snob, I know)—and immediacy are important qualities of today’s weblog. These online journals of ours are the literary world’s Dogme95 equivalents. Playing around with those qualities too much risks invoking the feeling of betrayal in your readers—estranging them.

It’s like trying to squeeze fiction writing into personal correspondence. Annoying at best, gravely insulting at worst.

The maturity of online writing, the art of it, will develop slowly in the form of satellite structures around the writers’ weblogs. Constantly in orbit around the main body of nonfiction, as it always has, in every medium.

It will happen slowly, it has to happen slowly. People need to be drawn in. Their hesitant minds, so acclimated to the “non-fiction” of information, news, reality-tv, gameshows and talkshows, need to give up the notion that fiction is made by the few, comes in big packages and in big numbers.

They’re not used to the idea of fictional stories being told by normal people to a small crowd.

Like virgins, they need to be approached with great care, and treated gently, so as to not turn them off the very concept for the rest of their lives.

Before they know it, we’ll be having them telling stories with the best of them.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

‘I was all right,’ he said at last. ‘I dreamed about being home. I woke up and I was all right. I was in bed at home. Only it wasn’t any home I’d ever had, the other time, the first time. The bad time. Oh God, I wish I didn’t remember it. I mostly don’t. I can’t. I’ve told myself ever since that it was a dream. That it was a dream! But it wasn’t. This is. This isn’t real. This world isn’t even probable. It was the truth. It was what happened. We are all dead, and we spoiled the world before we died. There is nothing left. Nothing but dreams.’
Ursula K. LeGuin—The Lathe of Heaven

I used to suffer from insomnia.

I’d lie in bed, awake, trying to fall asleep until I either finally gave up and just got up, or until I finally fell asleep for a couple of uneasy, fitful hours.

You can’t get anything done in a state like that. A tired mind is a relatively useless mind. So those waking hours, rather than adding anything useful to your life, actually do nothing but bleed your brain dry.

You can’t write. You can’t edit things already written. And although you’re constantly thinking (partly the cause for the insomnia), the thoughts, observations are blunt. An edge dulled by the constant drone of sleeplessness.

I can’t stop thinking and that keeps me awake some nights.

That, added to the fact that my lungs are crap (I’d be dead by now if I were a smoker) which cause me mild discomfort on a semi-regular basis (caused by anything from pollution, to dust, to pollen, anything small that gets into my lungs) used to keep me awake every night.

Not pain, just something that borders on it. Or maybe it is pain and I simply have gotten used to it.

Insomnia is a black hole. Anything useful, productive and enjoyable gets sucked into it, experiences disappear before you had the chance to enjoy them.

It sucked about three years of my life away. Three years that I hardly remember (or remember less, given my already horrible situational memory). Books, movies and writing kept me alive.

I’d write when I felt the sharpest. Essays for my undergraduate course in literature and fiction.

I’d read when I wasn’t quite sharp enough to write.

And at night. At the times when I simply gave up and needed something to fill the numbing, voracious maw that was my dulled mind, I’d watch movies.

And, strangely enough, I remember them all.

At that point I made a point of only renting classics and world cinema. With almost no new American cinema at all (I tend to define new as anything made or published in the last 25 years thereby exposing myself as a snob).

Movies, books and writing kept me sane.

But I first got properly cured when I moved to the UK. I don’t know whether it is simply that the English winter is more compatible with my psyche than the Icelandic winter, or simply the added independence of living in a different country, but something simply clicked in my mind.

And sleep came much more easily.

Which makes weeks like last week all the stranger. For five nights I only got about fifteen hours sleep in total, leaving me fairly incapable of being productive during daytime.

And last night I slept like a rock from around eleven in the evening til two o’clock in the afternoon. Fifteen hours straight.

It feels wonderful.

It’s the feeling that, this is what normalcy feels like. This is what feeling alright is like.

It’s being overwhelmed with an appreciation for the not-too-happy, not-too-sad feeling.

Ecstacy is overrated and depression, however romantic, sucks.

Sitting in the sun. Hearing Miles Davis echo from somebody’s car or apartment. Worrying a bit about bills and rent. But generally feeling alright.

That’s what it’s all about.

It’s good, in balance and harmony with the bad.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.