So I wanted to play with remixing again for my next programming project, and had the (admittedly out-of-nowhere) idea to build sestinas from the text of fan fiction stories (i.e., remixing the remixers). I’ve been a fan of the sestina ever since reading a couple written by Joe Haldeman (and I was kind of psyched to have a sometimes-poet among my Clarion instructors). It’s a poetry form without set rhyme or cadence, but based on the final word in each line – and they’re hard to write. I know; I’ve tried. For an example of a good one, see “Saul’s Death” (yup, by Mr. Haldeman).

I went back and forth on where to pull the stories from (the assignment is to do HTML parsing, so they have to come straight from the web). I very much wanted to use Archive of Our Own, but there just isn’t enough content there yet, as it’s still in beta. The advantage of fanfiction.net is that it’s huge, and I’m basing it on search queries – so you put in something random like “buttercup” (this was a test case) as a keyword, and it comes up with enough stories to build the sestina. The disadvantage is the median quality (hence the nickname pit of voles), but hey, it’s not for me to judge aesthetic quality. (And not for the courts either. I should cite this. Bleistein v. Donaldson!)

In any case, I’ve got the backend working – a few bugs and there’s nothing graphical yet, just printing out in the terminal, but I still have my very first sestina. (Well, almost – sans the final stanza since it’s a little different from the rest and will require some code tweaking). My test search query was “werewolf,” and the lines come from fics based on a number of different fandoms, though mostly Harry Potter and Twilight. And here it is…

For the past few years, the novels I have read have been largely of similar genres (notably, YA and urban fantasy). I ascribe this to two things: (1) being in law school, and therefore not having the time to read as much as I normally would; and (2) getting serious about my own writing (post-Clarion) and feeling compelled to stay abreast of what is out there in the genre I’ve been writing in myself. A side effect of this is that it has been quite a while since I have read something new where the writing style has stood out to me in a significant way. Which really is a shame, because I’ll tell anyone who will listen that Margaret Atwood has been an amazing literary inspiration to me ever since I read Cat’s Eye when I was fifteen, and this is as much because of the way she writes as what she writes. (As a side note, I will say that though I agree that it is very, very difficult to write well in first person – and have seen it done exceedingly badly – that when it is done right, it can be breathtaking.)

But I digress. My point is that I finally finished The Magicians, thanks to my dear friend (and maven) putting it into my hands and poking me incessantly until I put some serious time into it, because she desperately wanted to discuss it. Which, in point of fact, is a pretty fantastic endorsement of a book (and by the way, I put Turn Coat into her hands for the same reason). Anyway, now I have finished it, and as you have probably deduced by now, pretty much adored it, and this was (again) as much because of the way it was written as what was written.

So though I rarely write full-fledged book reviews here, I feel compelled. I will try to be light on spoilers (for those of you who may be considering picking it up), but still, the remainder of this discussion after the jump…

Again, as I’m programming for the first time in a while, I’ve been thinking about remix culture in the context of technological tools. There is certainly a lot to be said for pure artistry – the OTW is proof enough of that, and if you’ve ever seen a masterful fanvid you know what I’m talking about – but remixing is also something that has been done via computer code for ages. I recently did a presentation of the Oulipo for a class, and was reminded of Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet. And whether or not you use code to do it, applying the S+7 algorithm to a poem is also a type of remix.

So I did complete my literary machine, and decided to do something related – it’s called “tweetmix” and the general idea is that it’s a narrative created by multiple authors (some aware and some not): (1) me, the writer/programmer; (2) you, the user/reader; (3) the authors of literary works in the public domain or released under Creative Commons; and (4) photographers of pictures released under Creative Commons. Oh, and also the creators of Twitter, since the design is essentially a parody of that site. But basically, the reader chooses a subset of characters from a list to “follow” and then it generates a feed – mostly just their random comments, but some interactions with each other. So if you ever wondered what Dracula, Dorian Gray, Miss Havisham, Elizabeth Bennet, and a zombie might all have to say if they were microblogging… Eventually I’ll put it up on the web, since Processing exports easily into a Java applet, but now you’ll just have to make do with a screenshot.

My next project is HTML parsing (i.e., take a webpage and “do something” with it); I was really hoping that there was an HTML version of Lessig’s Remix somewhere, but all I can find is a PDF. My backup plan is possibly to do something with Free Culture instead. Or I could just go crazy on Project Gutenberg. One fantastic use I came across is unmixing, which involves taking a piece of text and parsing out phrases to link as attributions.

FYI if anyone ever wants to take anything on this blog and apply S+7 to it or set it to some great dance beat, feel free.

A writer friend recently described me as “lost to academia,” and I’ve been thinking about this a lot, particularly as I have now been back in school for six weeks and I have, for the most part, found myself too busy to write. However! Fear not, for I have also recently been reminded one of the reasons why I am still/back in academia in the first place – which is that scholarship (or many shades of it) is a creative pursuit. It’s about making new things, solving problems we didn’t know existed (or even better sometimes, the ones we did), thinking about what’s already there in a new way.

Also, my inner geek is flailing happily. Allow me, if you have the opportunity, to talk your ear off about the process of mental model convergence in improv comedy performances, algorithms of constrained writing, patterns of trust in online social networks, or cognition and legal metaphors. Oh, and after having not touched a piece of computer code for about six years, last week I programmed a digital Lite Brite.

When it comes to subject-matter convergence, I leave you with this: (1) I recently led a discussion on the impact of Creative Commons on patterns of online creation; and (2) I have two weeks to create a “literary machine” in processing.

I have a renewed interest in interactive narrative, and while I am stalled on writing short stories in favor of picking away at the novel in my copious amounts of free time, I may also try to teach myself inform again. For the “uninformed” (ha!), Zork might be considered the predecessor to more literary interactive fiction; the trick to writing a good interactive narrative is knowing your limitations and having a good conceit for the constraints – i.e., if the reader can’t go everywhere they want to go, send a grue after them.

Diana Gabaldon has a PhD in Ecology and spent years as university science professor before writing Outlander. And time travel and men in kilts has very little to do with ecology (I assume). The best thing about what I do is that the threads all weave together in a way that at least makes sense to me (despite how many times I’m asked why I went to law school).

In closing, I may be a writer lost to academia, but at least I have not yet been eaten by a grue. After all, lost or not, a reader can rarely resist the scary stairs.

It would probably not be a good idea at this point for me to look back at the list I made of things that I planned to accomplish this summer. However, I have done a few of them, and a few other things, some productive and some not. For example, I have:

• Read several books, including Norse Code, City of Glass, Moon Called, and Nightlife.  Yes, all urban fantasy; chalk it up to research.  Also, I have been reprimanded for not reviewing on this journal, and as I basically liked all of said books, perhaps I shall do an urban fantasy roundup soon.  (Productivity Quotient: 4)
• Written approximately 18,000 words of The Novel.  (Productivity Quotient: 7)
• Been working steadily for Write 2 Market, mostly white papers and marketing copy.  This has also included a “business trip”.  ++++  By the way, the productiveness quotient takes into account income, and the fact that I would otherwise have none.  (Productivity Quotient: 9)
• Brainstormed potential research directions for potential grants for PhD work, including several disjointed, infodump emails to a professor.  (Productivity Quotient: 6)
• Traveled to D.C. for the Burton Awards, which I shall write more on in a separate entry, and there shall possibly be photographic evidence.  (Productivity Quotient: 2 – fun and rewarding but no long-lasting effects as I am not the world’s best networker)
• Played Sims 3.  Too much.  (Productivity Quotient: 3 – on account of ideas related to UGC and things like this that get creative people like me who can’t draw excited.)
• Watched five seasons of Desperate Housewives.  I am not joking.  (Productivity Quotient: 1 – hey, maybe I’ll write for TV someday…)
• Organized nearly my entire iTunes library, including tracking down massive amounts of album art.  (Productivity Quotient: 4)

However, these things can be countered somewhat by the things I have NOT done this summer, including:

• Working on my website.  (Productivity Quotient: -5)
• Expanding/Revising papers intended for publication.  (Productivity Quotient: -8)
• Getting more than 15 seconds into creating a fanvid.  (Productivity Quotient: -4)
• Getting back into World of Warcraft.  (Productivity Quotient: 0 – because from a productiveness standpoint, it might very well be considered a bad thing)
• Writing on this blog.  (Productivity Quotient: -5)
• Writing/revising/submitting a single piece of short fiction.  (Productivity Quotient: -6)

According to my completely arbitrary arbitrary calculations, this nets me a completely meaningless Productivity Quotient of 8.  At least I’m in the black.  Though I have no idea what that actually means.

These, of course, are not the only things that I have done and not done the entire summer.  (For example, I have made time for friends, and I have not traveled to Peru.)  Also in there somewhere is packing, which I am doing frantically at the moment as I am officially moving to Atlanta on Saturday.

why can't we all just get along?

Since before finals I’ve had a half-written essay intended for JETLaw Blog about the death of legal scholarship that I intend to finish but was side-tracked by, you know, exams. But the focus was on the Georgetown Law Journal essays linked, as well as an essay from the Yale Pocket Part that I remembered from a few years ago, Why Blogs Are Bad for Legal Scholarship. My thesis is that blogs are good for legal scholarship, for various reasons.

But! That aside, since I haven’t finished writing it yet, I has the opportunity write about why blogs are good for journalism today: Blogs & the Life of Journalism: Welcome to the Jungle. Or perhaps, if not good, then not bad. I talk about Andrew Keen’s infinite monkeys theory (the web is just full of monkeys on typewriters and I am one of them) and how professional journalism might be in trouble but not because of us bloggers.

Anyway, it was all inspired by a thought-provoking post from a professional journalist, and aside from my long-winded musings about blogs, it’s got me thinking about how professional journalism really can survive Web 2.0. I feel like there is a new business model out there that needs to be embraced and no one’s worked out exactly what it is yet. I am not a marketing person, so this is all just conjecture, but I feel that if print journalism begins to disappear (which, for better or worse, it likely will as those of my generation who do not have newspaper subscriptions get older) then it will simply be an issue of the value of online advertising matching the value of print advertising.

Maybe it’s just because I’m a writer, but I’m one of those people who clicks ads just to throw some money at the content provider. Of course, I’m also one of those people who buys my music from iTunes. Am I naive to think that my generation would at the very least click through an ad to get their news from reputable sources, if not pay for it? Maybe so. Maybe if the hallmark of my generation is that we want everything for free, and the P2P music sharing levy proposed in Canada actually works we’ll need something similar for news media. Five dollars a month on your Internet bill to pay musicians, and five dollars a month to pay journalists? Hmm. Welcome to the jungle, indeed.

the sun came out before the procession: fitting

Remember Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)? It was a hit at graduations in 1999 (almost as popular as “Party Like it’s 1999″), and as I graduated from high school a year later, I heard a lot of it as well. Has it really been 10 years since Baz Luhrmann advised me to wear sunscreen to the rhythm of a great dance beat? I do remember this bit, especially:

Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

I’m not sure that I would have any particularly good advice for someone starting law school. Maybe to think hard about what will make you happy and what will make you miserable and learn how to weigh the two. And that you don’t have to fit exactly into the mold to succeed. Because I’ve found that success doesn’t really have a mold. Mine is kind of funky-shaped.

But I graduated today. I got hooded, and I shook hands with the Dean, and I picked up my diploma in a black tube. Also, there was inclement weather. Perfectly fitting, I think.

Most of my classmates were more excited than I, but probably because this was the end of the academic road for them. Me, I get to do it all again in four or five years. With the hood and everything. (But the next one won’t be purple.)

beware the oncoming storm, for lo, your peeps will drown in earl grey

While at Clarion in 2006 I wrote (the first week) a story titled, at various points, “The Angel and the Apocalypse (and Me),” “Revelations Over Coffee,” and “The Starbucks at the End of the World.” (These titles were met with various degrees of disdain, but no one ever suggested anything better.) It involved both armageddon and tea. For the record, angels prefer green tea to coffee on account of the caffeine, and they can’t hold their tequila–but once they’ve lost their wings due to Inappropriate Behavior Upon the Eve of the End of the World, they may crave caramel macchiatos. Do not forget to include this information in your Proper Care and Feeding of Angels handbook.

In any case, I thought of this because of Neil Gaiman’s call for tea and armageddon pictures, which I shamefully have not yet contributed to due to traveling (I am back in Nashville as of last night, by the way) except by way of blogging. However, I present this photograph to the right that I found on Flickr while pontificating on various wrong ways to eat peeps, and somehow it does make me think that the world is ending.

Therefore, I present (in the manner of a word I remember from my fanfic research), a “cookie” of said story from three years ago, which I do really plan on trying to publish one of these days now that I’ve finished law school and can think about writing something other than case briefs…

“I watch people,” he said. “That’s what I do. I just like to drink tea while I do it. And besides, it amuses me how, for a split second, it seems like their lives revolve around that tiny cup of coffee. You people have such bizarre perspectives.”

“You know, for someone who acts all holier than thou, you’re incredibly vain.”

He looked smug. “I am holier than you.”

To make my point, I pulled a newspaper out of my messenger bag and plopped it down on the table in front of him. His tea jumped slightly and splattered a drop, smudging the print. I poked my finger at an article in the Living section. “APOCALPYSE PREDICTION: END TIMES BEGIN TOMORROW” it read. It was The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

I just finished my very last law school exam ever.

I have decided that Numfar, as portrayed by Joss Whedon, accurately portrays how I feel about this:

This video also accurately portrays why short clips from copyrighted sources on YouTube should be considered fair use. My purpose feels very transformative.

If you had a ghost saber, you'd miss it, too.

I have one exam left.  Here are some things I look forward to doing at some point after noon tomorrow:

1. Procure copies of City of Glass, Fragile Eternity, and The Awakening – apparently it is the season of YA urban fantasy sequels.

2. Reactivate my WoW account. (Oh, Xypra, how I’ve missed you!)

3. Watch some things that have piled up on my TIVO – recent episodes of Heroes, House, and oh, what’s this I hear about Jeff Goldblum on Law & Order?

4. Write the next chapter in The Novel, which has been batting around in my head for two weeks.

5. Laundry. (Well, not “looking forward to,” per se, but more anticipating the joy of clean clothes. Today I am wearing a 2005 NaNoWriMo t-shirt that is wrinkled from being shoved in the back of a drawer for roughly two years.)

6. Thinking hard about an idea I have for – wait for it – a fanvid.

Of course, I mean “at some point” quite broadly, as immediately after noon tomorrow I will be driving to Atlanta on account of wanting to chat with some professors at Tech before they all take off on summer vacation.

Meanwhile, in the "things I will miss" category.