Autumn Readers,

The Fall 2013 issue of Digital Americana is now available for your iPad, iPhone, & in print. We chose this season’s “Local” theme knowing that everyone has their own understanding of what defines [local Americana]. And this is our issue that celebrates these details and acknowledges these differences. Featuring a self-interview by author Alice Lichtenstein, a colorful new spoken word piece, an interview with one of the creators of the award-winning interactive novel, The Silent History, and much more.

Inside, you’ll also find the publication of an amazing original documentary that was created by Logan Jaffe for this issue, which features some local Americana at its best, plenty of yard sale talk, and yard sale people. You can take a look and watch it now, and then learn more about Logan’s experience by reading her nonfiction piece, The Road to Somewhere Else, inside our new Fall issue.

Digital Americana Fall 2013, The Local Issue, includes:

Fiction: Grant Faulkner, John Nizalowski, Robert Boucheron, Thomas Kearnes, C.M. Vitali, & Lynn Bey. Nonfiction: Alice Lichtenstein, Logan Jaffe, & Charlotte Austin. Poetry: Z.M. Wimsatt, Jacob Arnold, Brian T. Robinson, John Brantingham, Emily M. Green, Gerard Sarnat, John Gosslee, Marie Nunalee, Caleb Bouchard, & Robert Rebein (spoken word). Book Reviews: One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson & Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon. Art: Jody Joldersma (cover), Tom Reese (photography), & Logan Jaffe (film & photography).

One thing I’ll always associate Clancy with a moment from the first day of my eighth grade English class when we were asked what books we read over the summer. I told the teacher I had consumed Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor and he didn’t believe me. That summer was all Clancy for me, from that giant paperback I’d poached from my dad’s collection, to repeat viewings of The Hunt for Red October, Clear and Present Danger, and Patriot Games on VHS from the local video store.

Clancy’s fiction was simultaneously a product of his time and ahead of it. The introduction of Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October hit bookshelves during the political posturing Reagan-era that brought fears of nuclear annihilation back to the forefront of the public consciousness. Ryan was an American James Bond, only functioning in a much more grounded and believable world of espionage than that fictional British secret agent. The world of Clancy’s novels, where wars between nations were common and perhaps a bit hyper-real at times, was one that seemed to always be just around the corner, especially during those final years of the Cold War. The public’s consumption of fictional wars drove Clancy to the top of the bestseller lists, and placed him in that league of writers that transcend the shelves and become household names. While his production may have slowed over previous years, when your fiction causes real life events to be described “like a Clancy novel” then you’ve entered the pantheon of modern popular writers.

Without Clancy we wouldn’t have any of the authors like Brad Thor or the late Vince Flynn. However, where those authors deal with international incidents on a personal level, a sign of our current sociopolitical times, Clancy always had a bigger picture mentality, which is why he’ll be remembered for a long time to come while they may not. He had an almost preternatural ability to delve into international incidents, which only felt more prophetic as the world entered the new century. The book I mentioned above, Debt of Honor, ends with a Japanese pilot crashing a passenger jet into the US Capitol Building, something that seemed unbelievable until September 2011. Perhaps this is the bigger reason that Clancy’s fiction lost some its popularity over his later years: the world hadn’t necessarily become like one of his novels, it became worse. It became scarier. Reading about fictional terror is like reading about apocalypses, readers like to imagine what won’t be. That becomes difficult in a world where the fear of terror is shoved down the public’s throat by politicians, leaks showcase that espionage is targeted home and abroad, drone strikes occur all the time, and the Conservative policies Clancy supported his entire life seem more aimed at creating strife between the American people and serving their own interests than anything else. This is why the supernatural is so popular these days, because zombies are as unlikely as a state of constant war seemed in the 1990s to general readers. This could be why his novels that followed 9/11 focused on Jack Ryan, Jr. going through CIA training instead of dealing with the massive geopolitical thrillers of his earlier work.

No matter the reason, Tom Clancy will still be remembered as one of the most popular novelists of the late 1900s, and will live on in other ways outside his fiction. Video game developer Ubisoft purchased the rights to use Clancy’s name for an undisclosed sum. Gamers today may not know his novels, but they know his name, and the world of espionage that he created through series like Splinter Cell and Ghost Recon. With a new Jack Ryan movie and the novel Command Authority being released this winter, Tom Clancy will live on for a long time to come.

-Todd Natti

@toddnatti ]]> http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/some-thoughts-on-tom-clancy/feed/ 0 http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/iosisdeadlongliveios/ http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/iosisdeadlongliveios/#comments Fri, 20 Sep 2013 22:46:55 +0000 DigitalAmericana http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/?p=1681 There’s a saying that every end is a new beginning. And it’s a fitting thought in the wake of Apple’s release of iOS 7 that came out earlier this week—and which bid goodbye to the old-look users have been accustomed to since the release of the original iPhone. While there have been a lot of reactions online, from the elated to the angry, the one certainty is the new iOS looks brand new, but is still comfortably familiar.

There’s also some changes under the hood to the updated iOS that updates the iOS’ functionality . . . There’s an easier way to get to control center, making it so users don’t have to go through multiple stages to access options for WiFi, Bluetooth, Flashligt, AirDrop, Do Not Distrub, or Airplane Mode. There’s iTunes Radio, which aims to move Apple into the world of streaming music dominated by apps like Pandora. New multitasking options make navigation easier. Safari now allows more than eight pages to be open at a time. The list goes on and on. What was old is once again new, and we all have to adjust.

But the biggest change to the new iOS is the aesthetic adoption of flat design over skeuomorphism. Altogether “flat design” has proven to be the driving modern aesthetic for web and interface design in the last few years.  Apple’s execution of this evolution towards modern design, using brighter colors, minimalistic shapes and lines is on par with the attempts of other leading tech giants—and say what you will about Apple’s design choices, but they are decidedly Apple design choices in their own way, and will soon be seen and remembered as classic and iconic—just as soon as the initial wave of sensationalism ebbs away.

The user reactions are actually a great representation of the nature of change in our culture today. We always want things to be different but are often skeptical when those changes actually come to pass. We enjoy comfort but, especially as Americans, we always want to have one eye toward the future because we know things can always be better than they are today.

Except for the Digital Americana logo that was designed four years ago. See how its flat design fits right into your iOS7 home screen like it was made to belong there?

It’s been some weeks now since I’ve written about Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, but the show’s second season ended last weekend and it’s time to wrap up what I’ve started. Part of the reason for my absence was the beginning of law school; another important part, though, was that the last few episodes brought audiences the payoff Sorkin began to set up with this season’s premiere. Reviewers of the show have been talking about these moments all season and the execution of the writing and performance of them remained at a high level, so there seemed little to talk about. Occasionally, I checked to see what the rest of the Internet community thought and, while most commentators are less than full-throated in their support of Sorkin’s work, there seemed to be general agreement that this season was much better than the last and was, in itself, a wonderful work of TV drama.

Then came the finale.

Within hours of the show’s airing, the results were in, but with little consensus. TV Fanatic loved it, a little too gushingly for even my taste. Indiewire was much nicer to the show this season than last year and wrote probably the best review I’ve read in terms of word-skill, but found the season-long Genoa plot-arc “ridiculous” and “[un]timely” because it didn’t track the current conversation about chemical weapons in Syria, despite being set and filmed long before the issue had reached its current household status. The Daily Beast repeated a familiar criticism from last year (in a generally well-balanced review): the show is too smart and there are love stories that make me cringe. Film School Rejects anchored the blanket-hate end of the spectrum, bemoaning both the fact that The Newsroom is a TV show and what the characters on that TV show do. Everyone agreed, though, on two things: First, Thomas Sadoski’s performance as Don Keefer remains a high point for the show; second, Sorkin is a great writer but he has a tendency to engage in either pedantic wanking or cheeseball sentiment.

And herein lies the beef: At least two writers referenced Breaking Bad in their season-two wrap-ups. I’ve also seen The Newsroom noted as a show with the potential—but not the execution—to be a show on par with Mad Men or The Wire. Above all, Sorkin’s latest work is compared to his earlier efforts: most often, his semi-recent Oscar-winning The Social Network and The West Wing, the NBC White House drama he created and wrote for four seasons. My problem isn’t the comparisons; compare-and-contrast is part of writing about entertainment in a landscape with many options. My problem is with the critics’ failure (or refusal) to recognize that there are no shows like this one on television—and that most of those that were made in the past had the same head writer.

Forget the quality of the writing or acting for a minute, as neither Sorkin nor his cast has a monopoly on talent. The Newsroom is singular in its desire to go forth and commit inspiring acts upon the land. Not since The Twilight Zone has there been a more ideological, idealistic use of television fiction. Rod Serling took the American mundane on a trip to the absurd in order to impart his disapproval of the status quo. While his work may be seen as cynical in the contemporary sense, the contrapositive of any social critique so artfully wrought is that there is a way our society could or should be—at the very least, that we could do a better job being humans to one another. Sorkin writes that into each of his shows. Take the most common criticisms of his worldview—too smart, too earnest, too romantic, too fanciful—and then picture their contrapositive: a world of ignorant, apathetic robots interested only in self-preservation, without the ability or inclination to love or imagine their way out of a paper bag. In other words, the majority of the inhabitants of The Twilight Zone. I say “the majority” because Serling usually included one outlier, a naïvely honorable lamb to be sacrificed to the monstrous world he’d written around them. In Sorkin’s world, there is no lone monster to act as a foil, but it’s there by implication in each character that gets cajoled or corrected by what The Newsroom referred to as a quixotic “mission to civilize.” It’s the “other” so many of Sorkin’s characters refer to when they admonish a friend: “Don’t talk to me like I’m other people.” It’s the sins and mistakes of people who lose sight of the big picture in favor of themselves—which, throughout his work, seems to be the (forgivable) sin Sorkin fixates on the most.

The shows The Newsroom is measured against are all well-made and engaging for their own reasons, but in a sense, they aren’t new to TV, they’re just really good TV. Multilayered thematic arcs, anti-hero responses to tropes like suburban life or the police procedural genre—these are shows we already know, they’re just done better on The Wire than they were on Homicide, and ditto Game of Thrones to Rome, Breaking Bad to Weeds, and Twin Peaks to… the episodes of Twin Peaks after you find out who the killer is. The individual stories they follow may be unique, but the shows themselves—again, while skillfully executed—don’t break new ground, at least not for me. Aaron Sorkin’s shows have always been among my favorites because they take the mundane and exalt it and inform it with a passionate idealism about our everyday lives that simply doesn’t happen anywhere else on television. Other shows take you to lives and worlds that are far different from your own, and sometimes so masterfully that they transport you into a world you could never have imagined. In contrast, Sorkin’s The Newsroom takes an experience a large swath of American culture can recognize as similar to the place they just watched on cable or just rushed out of last Friday at 4:57pm, and holds it up—real life, your life, potentially—as something stunted and frustrating and imperfect but worthy of doing and worth the effort it takes to do it well. And while there are many ways a Sorkin office doesn’t resemble your office, those other shows don’t match their own realities either. The important distinction here, for me, is not that the show is accurate, though I think it often is—it’s the aspirational qualities that set it apart from the rest of television, that it is so unapologetic in its attempts to inspire and yet so complicated in the ways it gets there. And while the Internet’s mileage may always vary, I think it’s important that we note and appreciate when a creative work is unique, instead of criticizing its failure to be something else.

-Jacob Drum ]]> http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/anticynicclubhowthenewsroomsetsitselfapart/feed/ 1 http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/breakingbadandtheartofnarrative/ http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/breakingbadandtheartofnarrative/#comments Mon, 16 Sep 2013 17:06:00 +0000 DigitalAmericana http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/?p=1618 This article does not contain specific spoilers for Breaking Bad, but readers are warned that some could label the following discussion of the show’s narrative technique “spoilerish.” No specific plot points are divulged.

Breaking Bad is a television show that ruins other shows. The power of the narrative that has played out over the last five seasons puts the vast majority—if not all—of other pieces of writing on television to shame. This is not because other shows are lacking when it comes to writing, but because no other show I can think of so has so drastically changed from what it was when it began while still feeling part of the same long story. It’s that concept of a single long narrative that plays out over multiple seasons which lets it excel in ways other serialized dramas can only dream of. Most other serialized television shows still adhere to the season-to-season story arcs that give viewers a sense of closure at each finale. Yes, there may be cliffhangers that need to be resolved in subsequent seasons, but there is still a ending.

Think of Lost, a show that purported to be about one long story: a group of plane survivors and the mysterious island that they found themselves on. While the show had the central mystery of what the island was (a concept that the writers never fully explained other than in abstract, pseudo-poetic ways) each individual season still felt like a season of television trying to outdo the twists and turns that came before. Each season presented a volume in character’s lives and what they experience, but always had a closing when it came to the season finale that signified that this part of the show was finished and next year would be something new. And, in the case of Lost, something that may seems completely at odds with what has come before, whether in plot events or character development.

Breaking Bad has shades of that concept, with each season finale bringing some sort of closure, but upon rewatching the show, it’s clear that these are not conclusions at all, simply another chapter in the long narrative of Walter White that creator Vince Gilligan and his writing staff are presenting. When the show comes to a close in two weeks, Gilligan and his team will have produced a piece of television that if viewers sit down and begin with the Pilot they will be starting a single story of what happens (as Gilligan stated when the show began) when Mr. Chips becomes Scarface. The fact that the writers have not only delivered on that promise, but made the shift entirely organic within the confines of the narrative they are presenting is astounding.  Horrible things happen within the story of Walter White but none of them feel forced.

Breaking Bad is a show about reaction and consequences. Yes there are the moments that cause our collective jaws to drop but none of them feel like they were inserted simply to get a reaction of the audience. Consider this in relation to a show like Game of Thrones. Both stories have no qualms about killing characters, but where Thrones often feels like it does so simply to subvert viewer expectations, the moments in Breaking Bad are there because the narrative has reached that certain point. The shocking moments are not there for the simple purpose of wanting to shock. They are there because in this story they have to be. The commitment of the writing staff to showcasing what happens when choices are made, often with devastating results, never feels forced. That is why Breaking Bad ruins other television shows. It is willing to go to emotionally dark places that leave viewers shaken not simply for the fact of getting higher ratings. Breaking Bad goes to those places because this tale could go nowhere else and, as the show nears its end, those places are becoming increasingly grim but because they are the only place this story could go. While that place may be hard to watch at times (Breaking Bad excels at tension other narratives can only dream of achieving), we cannot turn away, even when our worst fears for the fate of characters we have watched over five seasons come to pass. The entirety of the narrative actually feels like it has been building to these final moments. It won’t be sad when it ends. No, it will be satisfying to know that the conclusion of the story of Walter White could end no other way, because it fits organically with all that has come before. I don’t call that sad, I call it beautiful.

-Todd Natti ]]> http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/breakingbadandtheartofnarrative/feed/ 0 http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/i-on-digital-publishing-the-rogue-reader-new-ebook-pub/ http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/i-on-digital-publishing-the-rogue-reader-new-ebook-pub/#comments Fri, 05 Oct 2012 04:02:22 +0000 DigitalAmericana http://thedigitalamericana.com/wall/?p=1451

A new digital publishing house has opened this October: The Rogue Reader. Which is exciting news for those who love eBooks (especially as a traditional print publisher— Boucheron—backs it) and “original, outsider suspense fiction.” 

All in all, this seems as just one tiny step further towards blurring the line between the spotty connotation of independent & self-publishing and the qualitative control we expect of seasoned editors and designers.

[Source: The Rogue Reader]

“The Silent History is a novel, written and designed specially for iPad and iPhone, that uses serialization, exploration, and collaboration to tell the story of a generation of unusual children. The app is available as a free download from the App Store; the text itself can be purchased within the app by volume (1.99 USD) or as a whole (8.99).”

This is a new beast. After spending some time with the app and downloading the first (and currently only) volume of text for sale, I am enthralled and baffled by the scope and execution of this thing. Wired magazine described it as “part book, part multiplayer game, part map, and entirely revolutionary.” As a book it is a welcome experiment in e-serialization, and continuing proof that speculative fiction begs to be executed and delivered in a bleeding-edge basket.

Consuming this app, this novel, this interactivity—is not a task meant for anyone looking for the instant satisfaction of an easy-to-pick up video game. This is a project like “reading” is a project. Like finishing a long novel can be a slog. And I mention this because so often when a digital book or magazine “experience” get’s overhauled with technical bells and whistles, the text & literary content only shrinks to fit into many bite-sized blurbs, which accompany the aesthetically pleasing and featured visual content.

Using this app also reminds me of the first time I used the breakthrough iPad game Sword & Sorcery, where my frustration with not “knowing what to do next” in the game was as equally matched with my appreciation for the design, overall-detail, and ingenuity that was apparent regardless of whether I understood if I was “winning” or not.

The Silent History is a beast, a literary ibeast—and definitely worth investigating as it sets an early precedent for how to make better quality “digital” books—books which successfully marry the craft of storytelling into the core functionality of both its interactive premise and its thematic content. Coincidentally (and full-disclosure) this first came to my attention because it was co-written by a Digital Americana‘s Spring/Summer 2012 fiction contributor, Kevin Moffett.

[Source: The Silent History]

New from Sourcebooks are a series of enhanced iBooks dedicated to making Shakespeare a modern and immersive tablet experience. The Shakesperience iBooks: Othello, Hamlet, and Romeo & Juliet (currently available in Apple’s iBookstore/each starting at an introductory price of $5.99) show true merit as they have taken advantage and have harnessed “the most current and dynamic features of the innovative authoring tool, iBooks Author.”

Each “Shakesperience” features a “touchable interface with remarkable audio, video, photos, and illustrations to create an interactive, hands-on Shakespeare experience unlike any you’ve ever seen before.”

From our perspective, this is a welcome sign to see publishers embrace the iBook platform. As opposed to two years ago when the closest thing possible to creating “The Shakesperience” was to create a stand-alone-app, not so dissimilar to the immersive and original T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land app or Kerouac’s On the Road app, which were of the first to offer such a controlled and expansive tablet experience—going far beyond the capacities of the original text. I would imagine as well that publishing with the free to use iBooks Author software is a far more sustainable model, especially for independent publishers, to get such an interactive teaching tool as “The Shakesperience” into the hands of students and fans alike.

[link: iTunes]

[LINK]

Check out this fresh article from ReadWriteWeb.com featuring the iPad’s first generation of magazine content (including Digital Americana)!