These Weird Guys
One of my PWR students wrote his final paper on the McDonald's Video Game, a satirical simulation that lets you try your hand at running everyone's favorite multinational corporate fast food giant. I decided to check it out, and was reading through the game's tutorial. The game lets you operate four sectors/views of McDonald's food system -- "the farmland, the slaughterhouse, the restaurant, and the corporate HQ." The most humorous imagine in the tutorial is the view of the corporate office. Here's a relevant screen cap.
I love these little marketing guys. Weird, indeed.
A New Car!
if:book, a blog associated with The Institute for the Future of the Book, has published a lengthy and fascinating interview with Helen DeWitt.
I found this suggestion by DeWitt somewhat amusing:
I once knew a senior partner in a Wall Street firm who loved Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover. He talked at length about the wonderfulness of this book, the character of the Collector, the general brilliance. He was making $1 million or so a year. Of which Andrew Wylie, Sontag's agent, had cleverly managed to garner a couple of bucks for Sontag. There was no structure in place to encourage this ardent fan to, say, sponsor Sontag's travel expenses, offer Sontag six months' writing time at his vacation home in Maine, buy Sontag a new car, who knows.
If after reading Pop Apocalypse you are so moved by my dystopian near-future satire that you feel inclined to give me a free car or six months rent-free stay in your second or third home, I will be more than happy to accept your generous offer. In thanks, I could even add you as a character in my next book!
Anyway, the rest of the interview covers a wide range of topics, from working with editors (DeWitt seems to have had some bad experiences) to how the Internet might change the eating/surviving situation of novelists to the perils of copy-editing.
The interview has gotten me thinking about possible second or third critical/scholarly books -- or maybe just articles -- that would be fun to do post-postirony. Like, something about novelists who blog. Or something on reading off screens. Or novels that attempt to incorporate/cannibalize Web-based literary forms. The possibilities abound.
Classic Literature/Video Games
Alerting us to a major victory for the world of letters, Mobylives reports that a deal has been reached to make works of literature available on hand-held video game devices:
Japanese video game maker Nintendo has announced a deal with HarperCollins to make classics of world literature available to read on its games playing devices. As a Telegraph report by Murray Wardrop notes, “The unlikely partnership means that the names of computer game characters such as Donkey Kong and Mario will sit alongside the likes of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters on the hand-held gadgets.” Dubbed the 100 Classic Book Collection, the package will cost about £20 (about $30) and will be available initially only in the UK. A Nintendo spokesman said, “We hope to encourage people to try books that they wouldn’t go out and purchase themselves.”
While I appreciate any move that will stave off the long-coming and inevitable destruction of literature and literary culture, this deal reveals a singular lack of imagination on the part of Nintendo and HarperCollins. The possibilities for cross-fertilization between literature and video games -- for synergistic magic! -- are far more varied and exciting than this.
How much more interesting would it have been to translate classic works of literature, by Austen or the Brontë sisters, into video games? Very. Imagine: Navigate Elizabeth through Pemberley, first-person shooter style, while fighting off Darcy's zombified (or at least influenza-stricken) servants. In a multiplayer twist, take control of either Stephen or Bloom and, Final Fight-style wallop your way out of Night Town; when Stephen and Bloom team up, the Citizen won't stand a chance.
Or, better still, what if we transformed all our most beloved video game characters -- Mario, Link, Sonic -- into new literary classics. Yes, okay, I'll admit, Bob Hoskins didn't turn in a very good performance in the Super Mario Bros. movie -- not nearly as good as Captain Lou Albano in the Super Mario Brothers Super Show -- but is Super Mario Brothers not, at heart, a story of personal development, a sort of interactive Bildungsroman made for the age of psychedelic growth-accelerating mushrooms?
Yes, yes it is. I think I needn't say any more.
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About Me
I'm a novelist, scholar of post-WWII U.S. fiction, and ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Princeton University. My first novel, Pop Apocalypse, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2009. 
I co-edited (with Samuel Cohen) a collection of creative and critical essays, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, which was released by the University of Iowa Press in 2012.
My second novel, Hamsterstan, was recently completed. 
I'm working on a literary history of countercultural irony from Ralph Ellison to David Foster Wallace, which is under contract with Harvard University Press. My writing has appeared in The Believer, boundary 2, io9, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. I blog pretty regularly over at Arcade. In the fall, I will become an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. If this litany of interesting biographical tidbits doesn't slake your fact-thirst, please feel free to contact me at lee [dot] konstantinou [at sign] gmail [dot] com or via Facebook. |
@lkonstan
- @LeifSorensen1 Will do. http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- Off to Chicago tomorrow for "Comics: Philosophy & Practice." Superexciting lineup: http://t.co/jw7sQfeJ What should I do at night? http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- @Ed_Raso Oppositional in the sense that they oppose the degrading effects of a dominant cultural irony, and want a positive alternative. http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- Got my copy of J R from @Dalkey_Archive today. #OccupyGaddis commences in a little more than 2 weeks at @LAReviewofBooks http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- @Ed_Raso His stories and essays often geographically counterpose a credulous midwest against a cynical coastal elite. He wanted a third way. http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- @Ed_Raso Totally agree. Wallace took that common Gen X feeling and turned it into interesting art. I think his Midwestern-ness mattered... http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
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