virtualDavis

Ira Glass on How to Build a Great Story

If Bob Dylan and Willy Nelson are two of the most unique voices in music, Ira Glass has to be one of the most unique voices in storytelling. Don’t you think? His slightly nasal voice, awkward cadence and captivating delivery absolutely suck me in.

And Ira Glass isn’t just a master storyteller; he’s a master story crafter. In this series of four YouTube videos Glass explores the building blocks of a great story. Take a few minutes. You’ll learn something. And you’ll enjoy it!

• Ira Glass on Storytelling #1
• Ira Glass on Storytelling #2
• Ira Glass on Storytelling #3
• Ira Glass on Storytelling #4

His humility is encouraging, especially when he samples the reporting he was producing after a half dozen years in the business. By his own admission, there was still so much improvement needed, so much learning. All storytellers know this, but it’s helpful to be reminded by a storyteller with a weekly audience of 1.7 million (according the the statistic he offers in the video) to remind us that their is always plenty of improvement to strive for. Even after years of practice!

Trailer for The Double Life of Veronique (video via youtube.com)

This is an exceptionally poor trailer for a remarkably good film, Krzystof Kieślowski‘s The Double Life of Veronique (La double vie de Véronique). I watched it for the second time a few nights ago and was dazzled all over again. Irène Jacob, who also stars in Kieślowski’s Red (Three Colors Trilogy), plays both leads, Weronika, a spritual and somewhat mysterious Polish soprano, and her doppelgänger, Veronique, an often melancholic French music instructor. Both women are intuitive and inexorably fueled by conviction and curiosity. Despite intriguing bookends to the film in which Weronika and Veronique overlap obliquely for a few seconds, their lives echo — almost rhyme — without knowing one another. The audience is left to decipher the uncanny link between them.

Cover of The Double Life of Veronique

Despite Kieślowski’s death in 1996, his films continue to provide essential oases in the Hollywood-saturated film industry. He ignores dramatic cliches and conventions in favor of a more stripped-down, more honest storytelling. As drawn to character as to plot (if not more so) Kieślowski invites us to wonder and question and yearn. The Double Life of Veroniqueis filled with this yearning. What am I talking about? In Annette Insdorf’s film commentary packaged with the Criterion Collection DVD of the film, she describes “rich characters moving through landscapes and situations that force them to grapple with something beyond their immediate circumstances…” Insdorf, a professor in the Graduate Film Program of Columbia University’s School of the Arts and author of the Kieślowski biography Double Lives, Second Chances returns to this idea in an interview with the Columbia University Record:

“you’re made aware that there is something more at work than what the eye can see. At the risk of sounding fuzzy, I’ll suggest that there is a spiritual dimension embedded in his sensual textures… There’s a kind of yearning nostalgia for a world beyond the reach of the characters.”

Kieślowski’s unique screenwriting, directing and editing are complemented in The Double Life of Veronique by Zbigniew Preisner‘s mesmerizing operatic composition. This ethereal, haunting score weaves Weronika and Veronique’s parallel stories — as well as several layers of storytelling (puppeteering, children’s fiction, adult fiction, musical performance) — into a hypnotic and haunting tapestry. A tapestry that can be taken down from the wall when the film ends and taken to a chair by the hearth, wrapped around you while you ponder what you’ve just experienced, while you hum and question in the afterglow. Unless, of course, you can’t resist the temptation to leave the tapestry on the wall to watch all over again. I did!

Related articles

• doppelgängers in the double life of véronique (cmlt280.wordpress.com)
• Krzysztof Kieslowski – interview for Three Colours Blue (guardian.co.uk)
• the december project: the decalogue (saturdaynightscreening.wordpress.com)
• The White Stuff (slate.com)

Pour yourself a cup of tea and toss a few pop rocks down the hatch. Now lean back and enjoy this quirky visual tale about the power of stories. Dabbling in childish imagery but presented in a decidedly adult collage, this video ditty is an enjoyable reminder why storytelling is so compelling. Although I need a little help with “devine”…

The definition of “book publisher” is up for grabs, and those in the industry will have to be brave and imaginative, in double-quick time, to lay claim to this new definition. Others might find it easier to begin with a blank sheet.

At heart, publishers exist to create more value for writers than writers can (or wish to) create for themselves. It’s clear that the specifics of this role are changing. Some writers have decided that they can create as much value as they need alone, and feel freer by doing it themselves. Elsewhere there is a debate about where the line lies in a fair return for licensing copyrights, particularly when it comes to older books. Fundamentally, though, the need for publishers endures, even if not in their current form. Readers will be best served by publishers who can marry the best of what is sometimes labeled “legacy” publishing to the new means of developing and delivering what readers want and writers need. (The Guardian)

Stephen Page’s post about the future of publishing is level headed and insightful. He steps away from the increasingly popular bashing of “old publishing” and acknowledges that these legacy book publishers have a distinct advantage if they can adapt quickly. Others have lambasted the traditional publishers for failing to anticipate the tide change. I myself have nagged at this point. But Page reminds us that even as latecomers to the party, existing book publishers stand to reap significant rewards if they can quickly overcome four challenges:

1. Publishers must update their digital royalty rates.
2. Publishers must provide high-quality editorial support.
3. Publishers must build audiences for writers, on and off-line.
4. Publishers must embrace (and accelerate) technological innovation.

If traditional publishers can quickly, efficiently meet these challenges, “the persistent reporting of the death of old publishing will continue to be mere exaggeration.” Point well taken. But so far, most traditional publishers seem more intent on resisting change — clinging to a model they know and love — than leap-frogging forward. Of course, it’s early, and the race is too the swift and the wise.

Related articles

• What purpose do book publishers serve? (gigaom.com)

“Technology has made virtually anything possible,” says Neill Denny, editor-in-chief of the publishing industry magazine The Bookseller. “If you look at it conceptually – there’s a five-link chain between the person who writes and the person who reads. You’ve got Author-Agent- Publisher-Retailer-Reader. Theoretically, the three middle bits could all now vanish and the author could write online directly to the reader.”

However, he continues, “A more likely possibility is that just one of the three central links will vanish on-line. It could be that Amazon, the retailer, becomes the publisher. Or that the agent becomes the publisher, or the publisher becomes the retailer, and you go to a publisher’s site to buy the book. One of those links will certainly disappear on-line. We just don’t know which.” (The Independent)

John Walsh’s article “E-books: the end of the world as we know it” offers no new insights, but a handy summary. More intriguing though are the comments which are worth a wade through. A few flaring tempers, a few snarky jabs, and plenty of voiced growing pains as we tramp through the clumsy not-altogether-painless publishing revolution.

Related articles

• Demise of Borders highlights vanishing print infrastructure (teleread.com)

The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, whose deeply political work vividly examines the perils of power and corruption in Latin America, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday… Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.” (NYTimes.com)

In my senior year at Georgetown University I had the good fortune of sudying with Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. I was already a fan of his fiction, and the opportunity to meet with this wise, gentile man of letters for several hours each week to ruminate on his favorite jewels in the Latin American literature crown was arguably the highlight of my four undergraduate years. I also had the good fortune of translating a nonfiction essay for Mario Vargas Llosa for publication in The Georgetown Journal. I offer this background to underpin the depth of my pride and excitement when Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

With his typical grace and commitment to literature Vargas Llosa has focused on teaching Borges at Princeton and avoided the pomp inevitably accompanying his laureatship. He acknowledged the sometime comic results of winning the Nobel Prize including a solicitation to invest the approximately $1.5 million into an ice cream venture!

But Vargas Llosa prefers Borges to ice cream. I remember this from my days in the classroom with him, so it’s ironic that he’s currently teaching the work of his Argentine hero who never won a Nobel.

Our great writers have all been prolix… Borges is the opposite—all concision, economy, and precision. He is the only writer in the Spanish language who has almost as many ideas as he has words. He’s one of the great writers of our time. (Paris Review)

This reverence for Borges endures, and it’s not altogether unlike the admiration I have for Vargas Llosa. And not just for his writing, but also for his grace. But this for another day…

“Happy Hour FAIL” video via youtube.com

If you’re tempted to dismiss the content of this digital story (DWI, designated drivers, etc.), think twice. You’ll be missing out on an innovative and pretty darn slick digital story. And the sobering tale of what happens after earning a DWI is also well worth the slightly over two minute digital pastiche. Check it out!

“It’s the stories, stupid. So, how you relate to people? How you connect to people? It’s not the data; it’s not the dry content. You’ve got to be throwing engaging content, stories, emotional connections that people can relate to… They want to hang out with experiences. They want to relate to humans. And we’re not just tags and data and facts, we’re people!” ~ Chris Camp

Chris Camp’s LavaCon take-away should be a familiar reminder to all at this point. Right? Wrong? Then watch the video again. Web 2.0 (as well as all effective media, marketing, teaching, etc.) needs to humanize and personalize their message. Real content for real people. Give your audience a reason to care. Tell them stories. Listen to their stories. Weave these stories together and you’ll begin to develop the sort of relationship you need if you want to conect in the digital age.

Kieslowski’s world

A table, a cup over this table, a woman looks the raindrops outside the window. Then, an old woman tirelessly tries to put the trash into the garbage collector. The Polish movie director Kieslowski was a genius in turning trivial instants into poetry. Finding art in triviality makes art closer to quotidian and makes life less difficult to be lived. The writer Brissac Peixoto discusses about this theme in his book “Paisagem Urbana”. Brissac defends the art arisen from the moment, the stare at something banal turning it into art — and only the instant in the middle of the contemporaneity’s paranoia can put the sceneries in relief. (obviousmag.org)

Transforming the quotidian into poetry and discovering art in the banal, this is the flaneur’s gift and responsibility. To create. To curate. To discern and share what is human, what it beautiful amidst the maelstrom. To frame and share what otherwise would have been lost, and in so doing to reawaken that humanity in all of us. A heady task for an idler, you say? Perhaps. But undertaken with resolve and satisfaction.

Soul Delay by James Morrison, on Flickr

Did you ever get back from traveling and feel like you’re not quite at the top of your game? This is especially true with long distance jet travel. You step into a glistening time capsule in Istanbul, for example, and not too long after you step back out of the time capsule into the sunlight of Newark, New Jersey. You’re tired and addled. But there’s something more. Soul lag.

I’ve just been introduced to this quirky-but-compelling concept via Linda Hollier, and it reminds me a bit of a chat that Pico Iyer delivered at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan a few years back.

unlike other books or especially TV shows… that seem to move folks around the globe as if this was no big deal… Gibson actually discusses the problem of world travel, and encapsulates it in a single phrase: soul lag. It’s not that you’re tired, or that there’s some mysterious thing associated with jet travel known as “jet lag”… instead, he acknowledges that one feels, well, not quite all there when one gets to another place, as if your soul, unlike your body, cannot travel as fast as an airplane and therefore takes a little while to catch up with you… it’s like you’re existing about half an inch to the left of your actual body, and you can’t seem to reconnect with it… sometimes, in extreme circumstances, your soul never catches up. (second americano)

I’m especially keen on the visual image of my shadow self still trailing behind, trying to catch up, sort of like the visual traces in “old school” television.