{"id":793,"date":"2017-09-16T08:56:26","date_gmt":"2017-09-16T12:56:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/?p=793"},"modified":"2017-09-16T09:02:49","modified_gmt":"2017-09-16T13:02:49","slug":"brand-new-breed-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/brand-new-breed-books\/","title":{"rendered":"A Brand New Breed (of Books)"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Imagine listening to Maggie deVries\u2019 Rabbit Ears<\/em> in Vancouver\u2019s downtown east side, among the runaways, addicts, and women of the street she portrays. Or any David Adams Richards book while walking the shore of the broad Miramichi. Or canoeing north of Yellowknife in the company of Liz Hay\u2019s Late Nights on Air.<\/em>\u00a0Now imagine a story written to take you to a specific place, where what you see and hear and smell dives you deep, deep, deep into the words. That’s ambient literature.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

You Have To Be There<\/h3>\n

Listen to Famous Blue Raincoat or hang out at a Leonard Cohen concert. Read Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf<\/em> or get close to the stage.<\/p>\n

Being there is better, partly because it involves more than the sense of sight. It\u2019s feeling the spit fly from the actor’s mouth, hearing the cheers and sighs of fans around you, smelling the tortillas. It is being so immersed in the art that you feel it not only with your heart and your mind but in every cell of your body, too.<\/p>\n

Ambient literature. Locative literature. Situated literary experience. Walking books. There\u2019s no good name for this new baby yet, but it is growing at a rapid rate.\u00a0Unlike an ebook, which is little more than a paper book repurposed to a screen, this new breed of digital storytelling makes use of the technology we already have in our smartphones\u2014internet access and GPS.<\/p>\n

Location, Location, Location<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>Time and place: a story can\u2019t exist without them. It\u2019s the setting that transports a reader to the writer\u2019s world. And setting is not only geography: it creates the tone, establishes the time. Sometimes setting is a character. Think Wuthering Heights<\/em>. Or All the Light We Cannot See<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Ambient literature shares all the usual elements of a good story\u2014character, plot, narrative arc\u2014but its roots twine also into oral storytelling, serialized fiction, and walking tours.<\/p>\n

There’s nothing new here, really. People have been telling each other stories as they walk for as long as we\u2019ve been ambulatory. Long before Chaucer, pilgrims entertained themselves with storytelling contests. And what are the stories recited at the Stations of the Cross but an audible book told in situ?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Literary walking tours have been giving meaning to cityscapes for decades. Rebustours<\/a>, for instance, offers a \u201cSecret Edinburgh\u201d tour that combines Ian Rankin\u2019s detective with readings from the works of famous Scots such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson.\u00a0There\u2019s hardly a major city without a Ghost Walk that takes visitors from one haunted locale to another, telling the story of its haunting. And audio tours have become a staple of museums, art galleries, even prisons like Alcatraz.\u00a0At the end of the month, I\u2019ll be leading one of my own: a \u201cPrisoner\u2019s Walk<\/a>\u201d through Portsmouth village, reading from The Convict Lover<\/em> in the places where the action unfolds.<\/p>\n

Pervasive Computing Platforms<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>Locative literature goes further. It digitally connects the story that appears in words on your phone or tablet to the place where you are. You aren\u2019t only reading a book, you are moving physically through the landscape of the book.<\/p>\n

In Reif Larsen\u2019s Entrances & Exits<\/em>, offered by Visual Editions<\/a>, the text of the story is tucked behind doors in a Google Street View map.<\/p>\n

Eli Horowitz expanded the concept over continents. The Silent History<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is a complex novel that imagines a generation of children who are unable to read or write. The $3 iOS app is loaded with 120 testimonials from characters directly affected by the condition\u2014parents, teachers, faith healers\u2014and connects to Field Reports, short, site-specific accounts that expand the central narrative. To trigger a Field Report, the reader has to stand in the exact location where the Report is set\u2014Manhattan, Chicago, Berlin. The format is tricky to get the hang of and each element can be read on its own, but once you get into it, the elements fuse into a gipping narrative that is much greater than its parts.<\/p>\n

Sticky Stories<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>Matt Blackwood, an inventive Australian writer, has been experimenting with location literature for years. One of his first was 1Story<\/em><\/a>, now expanded to 6, in which a story is activated by scanning a QR code. (You have to be in Australia!)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>For Blackwood, location literature doesn\u2019t have to be digital. He has plastered his hometown of Melbourne (a Unesco City of Literature) with stories written on sticky notes, spelled out in Scrabble tiles, embossed into heavy label tape, writ large on billboards, or pressed into felt board and held up in the places where the stories unfold.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s take our private love of books,” says Blackwood, “and make it public.\u201d<\/p>\n

From ambient literature to civic literature.<\/p>\n

Stories R Us<\/h3>\n

Digital technology not only takes us to the action, it can turn a book on its head, transforming readers into writing collaborators.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0[Murmur]\u00a0<\/a>records people\u2019s stories of a place\u2014the stories that make up a city’s identity, but that exist mostly inside of the heads of those who live there. They install a [murmur] sign with a telephone number that you can call to listen to the stories while standing in that exact place. Some stories suggest the listener follow a certain path; others encourage wandering. Launched in Toronto in 2003, [murmur] has spread to Vancouver, Montreal, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Australia\u2019s Geelong.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In Australia, the Story City<\/a> project creates serialized, choose-your-own-adventure type stories that take place in real settings in Brisbane, Adelaide, and the Gold Coast. The Story City app is free to download on a smart phone or tablet. Each story starts at a particular location, then branches off in dozens of directions, all within walking distance. When the app detects you are in the right location, it unlocks the next part of the story.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Books That Move You<\/h3>\n

Most locative literature features maps or cues that get the \u201creader\u201d moving to the next site. “Reading” becomes an athletic exercise as well as an exercise for the brain.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Read isn\u2019t the right word. Participate is more like it.<\/p>\n

If these loca-lit stories sound a bit like games, they are. As books, they occupy a space somewhere between novels and board games, between drama and travel, between geocaching and role-playing.<\/p>\n

They are experiential. Ephemeral, in the way the best theatre is. Fleeting, but not insignificant. And as with any good book, at the heart is a compelling story.<\/p>\n

It’s true, loca-lit demands a different kind of engagement, but in return, it offers a richness of experience that is hard to find reading a traditional two-dimensional book.<\/p>\n

The Other Side of the Story<\/h3>\n

There are downsides, of course. Just as with movies and television that subvert a setting for their own purposes, ambient literature can plunder or ignore the history, politics, and social issues inherent in a place, changing it forever in the minds of readers.<\/p>\n

And some readers will never want to give up the private joys of curling up with a good book.<\/p>\n

But audio books are the fastest-growing shelf in the virtual bookstore, increasing by 30-40 percent a year. It is only a short leap from audio to ambient, from a book that talks\u2014to a book that walks and<\/em> talks.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Do we have to choose? Do we risk losing one by dabbling in the other? Matt Blackwood doesn\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you asked Christopher Walken as he floats above a hotel lobby, defying the laws of gravity and arthritis, his bony fingers would take aim at two elevators, suggesting we could either blow wit\u2019 this or we could blow wit\u2019 that. My pasty digits would like to suggest another weapon of choice: you can blow wit\u2019 this AND you can blow wit\u2019 that.\u201d <\/a><\/p>\n

As he notes, the death knell of literature as we know it has been ringing for decades.<\/p>\n

I used to think the novel wasn\u2019t dead, it was just pretending.<\/p>\n

Now I think: The novel isn\u2019t dead, it has spawned some brilliant, rambunctious kids.<\/p>\n

[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1477364431886{padding-top: 10px !important;padding-right: 10px !important;padding-bottom: 10px !important;padding-left: 10px !important;background-color: #ededed !important;background-position: center !important;background-repeat: no-repeat !important;background-size: cover !important;border-radius: 2px !important;}”]<\/p>\n

Do you “read” audio books? Have you tried ambient lit?<\/h3>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_separator][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Imagine listening to Maggie deVries\u2019 Rabbit Ears in Vancouver\u2019s downtown east side, among the runaways, addicts, and women of the street she portrays. Or any David Adams Richards book while walking the shore of the broad Miramichi. Or canoeing north of Yellowknife in the company of Liz Hay\u2019s Late Nights on Air.\u00a0Now imagine a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":797,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11,30,9],"tags":[124,127,125,126,130,131,128,129],"class_list":["post-793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-history","category-digital-divide","category-future-of-books","category-reading","tag-ambient-literature","tag-eli-horowitz","tag-location-literature","tag-matt-blackwood","tag-story-city","tag-the-convict-lover","tag-visual-editions","tag-murmur","invicta_simple_style_entry"],"yoast_head":"\nA Brand New Breed (of Books) - Books UnPacked Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/brand-new-breed-books\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Brand New Breed (of Books) - Books UnPacked Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Imagine listening to Maggie deVries\u2019 Rabbit Ears in Vancouver\u2019s downtown east side, among the runaways, addicts, and women of the street she portrays. 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