Molly Crabapple, a wonderful artist who I interviewed for Don’t Go Back to School, is doing something right now that’s shaking up the conventions of the traditional gallery system.

Molly is an incredibly hardworking artist who makes a living with her work in as many ways as she can. She’s an illustrator, she’s done book projects, she’s been hired to paint elaborate murals in swank restaurants, just for a few examples. Her work has a respectable following, and she’s the founder of “Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School.”

Molly hasn’t yet been able to find a gallery to represent her and sell large works on her behalf. That means it’s a real challenge–and financial risk–to give up time from the work that supports her in order to make those paintings. So she found another way. She’s funding her gallery show, called Shell Game, on Kickstarter, without a gallery, and she’ll rent a storefront to display and sell the paintings (if they’re not all sold already) when they’re done. Backers of the project at various levels get things like ephemera, prints, access to the process of creation, and, at the highest levels, the paintings themselves.

The one thing you can’t exactly do DIY has to do with the reputation and recognition that being represented by a gallery confers. Writers have the same dilemma. For a lot of us, the idea of publishing our work Creative Commons is really appealing ideologically, and has the potential for wider circulation. It’s not the loss of potential revenue that stops people–that’s not what stopped me, anyway. As a first-time novelist, I wanted the stamp of approval and legitimacy points that being published by a ‘real’ publisher confers, and ended up getting it. Follow Me Down came out last summer.

A while back, Robin Sloan took a different path. He used Kickstarter to modestly fund the writing of a novella, which he produced in hardcopy for backers and released Creative Commons for the world. It’s a great piece of literary science fiction, and as it gained momentum, it also scored him a book deal, for an expanded version, with FSG, one of the most prestigious big publishers around. The book will be out in June. Of course, that’s helping Robin in the legitimacy department, but I think the lesson of his project, and of Molly’s Shell Game, is that legitimacy and reputation can increasingly be conferred by communities of what you might call informed fans. This isn’t just sheer, unadulterated page-view populism. This is the idea that when a discriminating community of consumers of a genre think something counts as ‘real,’ it does.

That’s a liberating sea-change for everyone.

I read something incredible today, and then I read the first thousand words of it again aloud to Bre, my voice breaking over the last few lines. It’s a story of tragedy coming, and then of the tragedy itself, one of such magnitude it cannot be absorbed.

What I read is “The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy,” by Michael Paterniti, about the crash of Swiss Air flight 111, published in Esquire in 2000. I saw a link and took a peek at it on my phone, and then stopped the four other things I was doing and read every stunning word. I don’t read on my phone. But the prose was so astonishing and the story so well told that I couldn’t stop long enough to find it on a bigger screen.

Sometimes when I read writing this good, it sets in motion writing of my own. And sometimes it simply does the thing that words can do. It makes me feel the story in my own flesh.

I write fiction now, but I didn’t start out that way. I used to think the real world was so interesting, how could you ever stop just writing it down. Why would you make it up? I started out wanting to write like Michael Herr and Joan Didion and Truman Capote and Tim O’Brien, beautiful, brutal, and true. Now, there is a deep and complex conversation among writers and readers of nonfiction about writing truth and telling stories and which matters most and how the two meet and depart and entwine. I don’t know exactly when I shifted over into the realm of invention, but I do know that my writing is still driven by wonder at the things that are most real. And driven too by wonder at how the smallest molecules of what is real can be coaxed by a pen into bonding differently than they did when you first saw them.

[Originally published June 15, 2010 at The Literary Platform]

We are living in generous times. I don’t mean that in a hippie, random acts of kindness sort of way. I mean that we are living at a time when sharing as a model of exchange is increasingly common.

Right now, our models of getting paid and paying for things are both up for grabs in fascinating – and potentially society-changing – ways. As newspapers fail, crucial experiments in how to pay for news – especially investigative reporting – are underway. Ebooks, creative commons licensing, and ever-more legitimate forms of self-publishing are challenging the book publishing industry’s way of doing business. As I writer, I’ve got a vested interest in what’s going to happen – and the open question applies to everyone who makes any form of culture, amateur or professional or anything in-between. One place to look for lessons is the open source movement, which began as a collaborative, distributed model of making software, and is fast becoming a pervasive set of values taken up by communities as diverse as open source sewing and amateur unmanned aerial vehicles development.

Notice that word, communities. Open source production and some of its consumption happen in communities. The model is most efficiently sustainable when most of the community respects the ethics of mutual sharing that open source is built on. That is to say they are freeloader-tolerant, and able to function when some of the participants are taking but not contributing. The point is, within a community, ethics are agreements, not abstractions. Within a community, generosity is a social contract.

Read more …

My ITP students went out on the street and asked (on video) about 40 people the question, “What are you afraid of?” It was remarkable how many of the respondents gave thoughtful, vulnerable answers.

Most common:

1. Failure. Most of the people who said they were afraid of failure were young. Also, one older man said if you’d asked him 10 years ago he would have said failure.

2. The future

3. Being alone/loneliness

4. Death/getting old

5. Things that are out of my control

6. Nothing. This was mostly older people, one of whom said, “I’m not even afraid of the Devil.”

Most esoteric:

1. Clowns (in a serious way)

2. Aliens (in a serious way)

3. Embarrassment

4. The dark (“you can’t see what’s around you”)

5. Torture/pain

6. Buried alive, blinded, falsely imprisoned (same respondent)

Flippant answers: snakes, spiders, rats, people.

There are a thousand ways to make a binary split of the world’s population, and the one on my mind right now is this: there are the kind of people who pick up a ringing payphone, and the kind of people who don’t. I pick it up.

I love those strange, slightly jarring, unexpected interactions with strangers. I write about them on a blog called Municipal Archive and I teach a graduate class about them at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. So, I can tell you a lot about the locations and moments in which strangers interact. About the means and methods. These things have been observed and studied and documented. What we don’t really know with any precision—nor even with much poetry—is why.

Chat Roulette is the newest form of what you might call “stranger chat.” It’s a technology-mediated instance of an old cultural tradition: talking to strangers in public spaces. We do it in an ephemeral, casual way in public places, particularly in the anonymous transitional spaces where proximity is especially temporary: elevators, park benches, waiting spaces, the subway. It’s a fleeting connection, a shared moment, an acknowledgment of your common humanity in the bustling, anonymous metropolis.

Chat Roulette is both the same and different from those encounters. You’re talking with a stranger—which you’ve been able to do since time immemorial in chatrooms—but, now there’s a live video and audio feed to accompany the chat window, and the next random stranger is a click away. Video makes the interaction much more risky and intimate, but also more like a chat in an elevator, except you can make your chat partner vanish at any time. When you talk to strangers in public, you’re making an informed choice, whether you’re aware of it or not. You’ve got social cues like your shared location, the person’s appearance, their clothing, how they carry themselves. When you talk to someone on Chat Roulette, you’re confronted with—if you’re lucky—with the head and shoulders of a stranger, and almost no readable cues. You and they both are making a split-second decision about whether to engage with each other.

Did I mention the part about how it’s an incredibly weird experience? Because it is. Read more …

Dear ______, Lisbon is strange and small and full of ruins. I can see now why Saramago’s blank cities come out the way they do, such a city would have to replicate itself and double back to become a place you could get lost in, a place of anonymity. Instead there are rococco elevators to take you to the hilltops, where the spines of a gothic cathedral, ruined in the 1755 earthquake, have been left arching into the empty sky.

Unpublished list-poem gathered from Bertillon cards for Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots.

Rt. Lit fing. off at tip. Scar upper left cheek. Fingers blistered. Bullet cic 14 below elbow jnt frt. Scar from horse bite at end of nose. Left arm tattoo name Jean. Birthmark right stomach. No. 10 shoes. Tattoo of an anchor right arm. Pimples on face. Tattooed all over both arms and body, large mans head on brest with reath of thorns across forehead. Right ring finger amputated at 3rd joint. Wears glasses. Limps on lt leg. Lower incs very irreg. “LOVE” on scroll across heart with arrow behind the heart. Bulbous nose. Bites fingernails.

Unpublished list-poem gathered from Bertillon cards for Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots.

Wm Flood, dead. Earnest Scurlock, wanted for robbery and will run. Chas. Sattler, gangster, slain. Michael F. Gorman, has numerous women friends. Edward Tippins, user of tobacco. Archie Ross Jones, arrested for snatching watch in Savoy Bar, claimed it was given to him by owner—both drunk. Perry Lee, a close mouthed Negro who is probably committing burglaries. Ellery Augustus Stroup, found one Morris Westman in bed with his wife, went to sons bedroom took a knife and cut both parties. Earl Ulysses Wookey, voluntarily gave himself up after an argument with his wife. Nieves Medina, a floating Mexican. Herbert Jerry Fulbright, he has caused St. Paul lots of “trouble.” Sterling Stiles, is confirmed dope fiend, hangs around fast women. Lazaro Randa, always carries a knife and threatens people. Wisdom McGill, shot Julius Jones Langley. Mabel Johnson, usually wears slacks. Harry Salzman, likes to live big. Ken Burroughs Beown, when in trouble contacts Grandmother.