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January 24, 2004
Introducing AtticAuthor!!
Bouncing around on a lazy Sat afternoon, came across the following over at GameGirlAdvance. Before you go chasing off, though, realize that the original post is satire, a fact that escapes some of the early comments. An excerpt:
No more struggling for the right word, the perfect turn of phrase, the most expedient and direct yet elegant metaphor. AtticAuthor takes care of all that for you. With over 1,000 ApplePhrases, and an additional 2,000 available in the optional PenPack, AtticAuthor will have you immediately writing short stories, plays and even novels. Never has creative writing been so easy. And AtticAuthor takes care of the details for you. Like this passage from Updike and that one from Dickens? No problem. AtticAuthor smoothly transitions from one style to the other, across locales, time periods and even languages. Your half-baked detective plots no longer need suffer from semi-literate cacophonies of atrocious slice-and-dice prose: AtticAuthor puts John Cheever's pen right in your hand; you'll be churning out apocalyptic military spy novels with overt right-wing Christian undertones one after the other, each book in the voices of master storytellers of today and the past several centuries.
The point here is to suggest that apps like GarageBand, where
it's easy to perform, record, and create music, whether you're a musician or just want to feel like a rock star. GarageBand turns your Mac into a high-quality musical instrument with amazing built-in sounds and gives you the complete power of a recording studio.
are ultimately as insulting to those with musical training as a program like AtticAuthor would be to those of us who write (or teach writing). Recalls the Cavern in Richard Powers' novel Plowing the Dark, perhaps, or Roland Barthes' virtuouso performance in S/Z, where he reduces Balzac's realism to a dense thicket of literary convention. My own favorite connection here is to Don Foster's Author Unknown, which proceeds from the assumption that "we are what we read." IOW, the scary thing about AtticAuthor isn't so much that we might someday achieve a "Photoshop filter for text," it's that we ourselves basically already function this way, albeit at a much slower pace.
Just in case I haven't hammered hard enough here, this is a sign of the importance of the work my colleagues/friends Becky Howard has done on patchwriting and Jeff Rice on sampling. To wit, from Jeff's CTheory article:
Cool writing, performed as sampling, produces meaning through interlinking existing discursive practices with new insight. As Ulf Poschardt claims, "The remixer isn't concerned with salvaging authenticity, but with creating a new authenticity." [14] This new authenticity surfaces in Readings' call for a dereferentialized university.The mix, consequently, is the lesson for future intellectual work.
Yes, yes, yes. AtticAuthor is an expression of a peculiar combination of both achievement and fear. As we become more capable (and we will) of sampling, mixing, and connecting, our fear for the loss of originality and authenticity will grow just as quickly. Unless we start learning the lesson Jeff refers to, and start looking for new authenticities, ones that don't involve forging in the smithy of our souls the uncreated blah blah blah.
Posted by cgbrooke at January 24, 2004 04:47 PM