Everything I want? It has to be good for me!

I have recently discovered podcast. For those of you that are not familiar with podcasts, they are almost like mini radio shows. The idea of a podcast immediately brings to mind thought on technological advancements. Didn’t we advance beyond radio and into TV? Wasn’t radio dying…just those filler moments in the car between places? Are we regressing backwards? These are some of the questions I have been pondering over the last few weeks as I have immersed myself into the world of podcast. For the last two weeks I have been listening to—well I was going to say “back issues”, but issues implies written words, so maybe I was listening to reruns?...no that doesn’t work either because it implies that an organization is actively airing it again…how about past-casts? Ok, back to the thread—For the last two weeks I have been listening to past-casts of “Adventures in Sci Fi Publishing” and pondering the question of radio verses podcasts. I came to the conclusion that the reason podcasts are technologically advanced over radio is that they are on demand. You download them and listen to them when you want to. With radio programs, if your boss decided to hang around the cubicle farm at the wrong time of day, you were out of luck. This, of course, leads to the question, “Why are these different from movies, audio books, music or TV shows, all of which are also available on demand?” Here I think it is both cost and availability. To watch a season of a TV show or a movie, you have to go to some store or wait for it to be delivered. Find a podcast you want and it’s yours faster than my dog can sneak up and slobber on me. Movies on demand are equally convenient, but can be costly, whereas a podcast is free. The only real media that can compare in cost and ease of access is you-tube videos. However, I think they may lack in entertainment value. I know that there are certainly entertaining videos on you-tube, but they lack relation to one another and it’s hard to build up a following. But, I am not interested in talking about you-tube vs. podcasts. The pertinent conclusion to this internal debate was that podcasts are here to stay.

Of course, the world of podcasts is relatively small. By this I mean that, even though it is already huge and growing, compared to the literature world or any other media, it is tiny…miniscule…practically nonexistent. So as I have been listening to the past-casts of several podcasts that are right up my alley, I have been thinking that I could get a handle on them and listen to every episode out there. I would have an entire collection!!! (I like to have complete sets. I mean sometimes I won’t even start a series of books until the series has been entirely written, so I feel like I can have the whole story in my head. You can see what a big deal it is for me to be able to listen to every episode of a podcast). As I explore the world of podcasts, I keep adding new ones to my list. I currently have about 550 episodes that I have not listened to. I am pretty sure that I am not going to be able to get through them all, keep up with the new episodes and give more newly discovered podcasts their proper attention. My ability to glue my headphones to my head is not the point though. The real gem is that I am able to find this many regular podcasts that cater exactly to my interests. I am practically wiggling in my seat with enthusiasm. It makes me remember when I was a child and there were only two channels on TV. I hated most of the shows that were on TV. Similarly, when we went to the library, the choices of books were sadly thin, often missing volumes in a series (now you know the real reason behind my obsession with complete sets.) I was often forced to read normal young adult fiction instead of the science fiction/fantasy that I wanted and forced to watch Wheel of Fortune when I would have much rather watched He-man and She-ra cartoons. Now, as I see this vista of unlimited delights before me, I think, “What a wonderful age we live in!” If he wants, a person can find reams of literature on studying “muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battles” (Dr. Seuss reference, go look it up). So if I want to spend the rest of my life listening to podcasts on Sci fi publishing and read all the fantasy books I can get my little fingers on, I can! And the way the world is going, I might be able to able to get it all for free. Excellent!!!

Then a new line of thinking occurred to me. Was it really a good thing that I would be able to immerse myself in the subjects that I entirely enjoy? Even though I hated Star Trek (sorry, it’s true) as a child, it was good for me to expand my imagination in that direction. I mean, if I had not seen William Shatner in as Captain Kirk, how could I truly enjoy some of his lines as Denny Crane in Boston Legal? Would I know what it really meant to ‘boldly go where no woman has gone before?’ Probably not. I started to envision these poor children of the future who developed an obsession with a subject and were never forced by the lack of material to stray into another topic. Imagine when they grow up and go on their first date with that cute girl who sits next to him in that class on muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battles. They will find that he is very knowledgeable on the Star Trek and she is very adept in the study of quorum sensing in aquatic microorganisms, but they have nothing to talk about and no interest in learning about each other’s passion. Next they date someone who shares their interests, but find that they have nothing to say because they have studied exactly the same thing and had identical experiences. Society would break down and it would be the end of all civilization. Fortunately, at this point in musings, I remembered that there are already people like that; people who are obsessed with Nascar or a sports team or Starwars or a comic, yet they still manage to function (sort of) in the real world and procreate more little knowledge clones. Also there are people like me who might like sci fi one week and be completely obsessed with color pencils the next. Now, I don’t fear the breakdown of society, but I do worry that as more material becomes available for a specific interest, people will not be forced to diversify and an individual will be less interesting because of it.

After I finished writing the above, I was listening to another episode of Adventures in SciFi Publishing and found they were interviewing a woman (Marie Brennan) who did her graduate studies in SF/F fandom. How awesome that a person could pursue that as a course of study! But again, I refer to my fear of people never being forced to stray from their chosen topic…hmmm.

Library of Babel

Inspired in part by an essay called the “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges.

One of the many things that I want to do in my lifetime is write. I have accomplished this to some degree, but I still have a long road ahead of me. However, every time I walk into a Barnes and Noble or Borders I get so discouraged. It just gives me a glimpse into the vastness of the written word, like a great chasm a person could fall into. I often hear complaints about how BN is “the enemy of the midlist novel”, so I consider the stock on the shelves of Barnes and Noble as the tip of the iceberg. Only the most popular books make it onto the shelves. Yet there is so much more information in written in books, magazines, and now on the internet. It would be impossible for one person to read everything that exists, so how does one person choose what to read?

I have always felt like I am not well read. I hear about people who are considered well read, but I have to wonder if that is even possible. I guess I believe that it is possible to be well read in a particular area, but not in general. But I also feel that every new generation has a greater task being well read. Consider science literature about 100 years ago. It was practically nonexistent. It was easy to be well read then because of the simple fact that there wasn’t that much published. Even if a person was very prolific in his studies and discoveries, there was no drive to publish it. Fast forward to a “publish or perish” mindset, where half finished studies are published and some publish controversial findings just so that they will be cited by others and improve their importance on some numerical scale. How is a new graduate student to become well read with all this paper to wade through? I once heard a professor comment on how poorly read new graduate students were. I wanted to jump across the table and throttle him. He had been in the field for close to 40 years. Of course he was well read; he had been reading almost 2 of my life times. Back when he started reading science literature, they were still scratching the notes on cave walls! Of course they weren’t actually, but the science literature was much less prolific when he began to read it, so he had some chance of getting a handle on it and has been able to keep up since then. How is a new graduate student ever supposed to be well read when there is a whole history about to crash over them like a tsunami? And it is increasing every year!!!

So back to my point about Barnes and Noble. What I said above about science is true of most literature fields and one of the recommendations that are often given to aspiring writers is to be well read in their field. So as an aspiring Science Fiction/Fantasy writer I have been considering this and looking around me at SF/F literature and feeling just as overwhelmed as in the science realm, despite the fact that I have been reading since I was a little kid. Then I start to worry that whatever I manage to produce will get lost like a dust mote in a sandstorm. So I walk back out of B&N with my head hanging a little lower. Fortunately I have a short memory and am soon optimistic again. I think that even if I never get my work published, it will still be there and a member of the Library of Babel. I think that I could potentially just post it on line for anyone to read. Ha! Then I think about all those other people out there who have similarly posted for free so that someone will read their work and all those people who will never let anyone read what they have written and it just cascades out before me as this never ending waterfall of paper. Aaahhh!!! Now I know that the SF/F in B&N is the tip of “all published SF/F” iceberg, and that “all published SF/F” is just the tip of “all SF/F ever written” iceberg.

Finally. I like to look at the past and look forward to the future. I look at authors like Austin, Tolkien and Shakespeare. Are those authors so popular because there were among the few published authors of their time or because they are truly magical in some way? I think there is something special about their writing. Shakespeare and Austen practically need a translator to be understood, yet people still puzzle it out and enjoy the story. In fact, one of the reasons I keep going back to Austen is because I puzzle out some new little joke every time I read it. Tolkien, I am not sure about. One of the reasons it was so popular was because he was world builder. He created the rich and complex world with its own problems and races and topography and history. It was new. But I think about children of this day who might read other books which are also world builder books and I wonder if, by the time they read Tolkien, will that phenomenon have lost its magic? Will Tolkien be swept aside by that Potter kid? I don’t know, but it is an interesting question to ponder which books will remain in an average library through the future ages.

So as I send this little mini essay like a hopeful paper boat into the ocean of online information, I wonder if it will mean anything. Even if no one reads it, in the end, I have arranged this series of words and letters in a pattern that has pleased me. I have created something new to be shelved in the Library of Babel.