Pop Apocalypse is a genuinely frightening book, not for its apocalyptic prophesies, but for its peek five minutes into the future. It's suggestion that photo-tagging software could someday turn all of existence into the ultimate reality television show isn't far-fetched in the least. One character comments that when you see how sausage gets made, you'll want to become a vegetarian. And in Pop Apocalypse, we're the sausage, and the whole world sees how we're being made all the time.

She's quite right about the apocalyptic framework of the book: it's more of a way of thinking about the social, political, and economic problems of the present (and maybe the very near future) than it is a genuine Cassandraish forecast of planetary doom. I'm saving genuine planetary doom for future projects, in fact.

Also, I'm pleased she caught the sausage line. Check it out.

Slicethepie "is a financing platform for the music industry that enables new and established Artists to raise money directly from Music Fans and Investors." Shares in a band purchased through Slicethepie are transferrable -- via their "Music Trading Exchange" -- which makes this system functionally equivalent to a stock market, as far as I can tell, with all its attendant strengths and weaknesses.

Of course, SellaBand and Slicethepie are not the only places where what we could call Aspiring Celebrity Finance is happening. Way back in Jan. 2008, Josh Levin reported in Slate that Randy Newsom was holding a "self-IPO," in which he sold shares of his future earnings to interested investors. Newsom explained that he would use his capitalization to improve himself as an athlete, but he could also have used it to position himself in the media and grow his reputation. And Newsom was, of course, only the first athlete in the U.S. to self-IPO. As Levin explains:

Football Players Funds Management, a Portugal-based hedge fund, helps pro soccer teams buy the contracts of promising youngsters in exchange for a percentage of the players' future transfer fees. Top poker pros are often staked for tournaments by investors, and a golfer might get his start on tour with backing from a consortium of investors. There's already a popular fantasy site, ProTrade, where fans can buy and sell virtual shares in their favorite players. And last May, Michael Lewis wrote a convincing piece for Portfolio arguing that it won't be long before Americans will be able to invest in their favorite athletes.

Newsom's experiment ended in failure, as Levin reported in an update:

Update, Feb. 2, 2008: I no longer own a professional baseball player. In an interview in Friday's New York Times, Randy Newsom said he'll return the $36,000 he earned from selling 1,800 shares—six to a Slate investment group—in his future major-league earnings. Newsom and his company, Real Sports Investments, neither registered their offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission nor sought approval from Major League Baseball before issuing the first-ever baseball player IPO. "We want to pause to hear everyone's concerns," Newsom told the Times. "This idea is not going away. This is assured by the amount of fan support, and the amount of players we talked to, that the support is there. The spirit of this idea will go on."

The spirit of this idea will go on, I suspect. I've been meaning to read the science fiction novel, The Unincorporated Man by Dani and Eytan Kollin, which projects a future in which everyone owns shares in everyone else, and the greatest freedom one can aspire to is a controlling stake in one's own stock issue, the ultimate logical extension of the spirit of this idea. Pop Apocalypse stands somewhere on the middle ground, and posits a world where only reputations are associated with finance, and only celebrity or wannabe celebrity reputations at that.

The key difference between current real-world cultural financing schemes and the New York Reputations Exchange in Pop Apocalypse is that celebrities and wannabe celebrities who list their names in my novel are not linked to a particular industry or to a particular set of talents and abilities. This describes Eliot's situation quite well: he has no particular talents, no special virtues. He is a celebrity who is famous for being famous in a world that is experiencing what could be described as an asset bubble in celebrity reputations.

In our world, I suspect that investors in a band or an athlete still have a mental attachment to the performance of persons or groups w/r/t their stated domains of expertise (music, athletics, etc.). But in fact, there's no particular reason Paris Hilton couldn't float an IPO on her name. What's she talented at other than at being famous? Whatever innate talent you have, you can always also be turned into a brand. After all, you may be talented, but you won't ever find people to recognize your talent if you can't draw people to you in the first place.

Moreover, there is evidence that "objective" talent is sort of overrated when it comes to predicting the popularity of artists (though not so much in the case of athletes); seeing aggregate consumer behavior apparently substantially shapes how "good" people perceive a particular aesthetic experience to be (as does price). That is, people don't just mindlessly agree with what the masses say but rather are more careful in giving attention to art that is prejudged to be good, and genuinely perceive this positively prejudged art to be better. Which means that in the competitive race to the top of the billboard charts, your media game can be as important as whatever you put on the page or on your CD.

Perversely, then, celebrity reputations markets will only achieve their full maturity when they detach themselves from this or that industry, this or that output, and find a way of allowing anyone who thinks they have the potential to hit it big in the mediasphere to connect with investors.

SellaBand tries to connect what they call "Believers" with aspiring musicians. As a Believer, you can invest money toward the costs of producing the first record of an aspiring band (either $50,000 or $100,000, depending on which tier the band is in). In return for this investment, Believers split the earnings of the albums they help finance 50/50 with the bands they help launch.

This service presents itself as a way of connecting fans to musicians without the mediation of big record labels, and to a degree it is just that. But with a few modifications it could become something very much like the model of the Reputations Exchange I describe in Pop Apocalypse.

After all, what you are doing here isn't so much believing in your band as investing in them -- though all finance is ultimately based on belief, that some version of the system will exist in the future, that some individual firm will pay dividends, whatever. Why not issue a share of band stock to every Believer? Why not allow that stock to be transferable or to become the core or basis for secondary markets? Why not turn SellaBand into something like an electronic band stock-market exchange?

Obviously, I present such schemes in a satirical light in my book -- making fun of what I regard as the undeserved glamour of high finance, the absurdities inherent in its real-world shape -- but the more I've gone around to book readings and had conversations with readers about these ideas, the more I am convinced that something like a stock market for reputations is inevitable, even in this era of burst bubbles and Wall Street (supposedly) in retreat.

Here's the deal. If you are part of a book club and are interested in reading Pop Apocalypse, I would love to do a video conference with your group via Skype or iChat. I'm willing to do whatever your group wants (within reasonable limits): answer questions, give a talk of some sort, do a reading, dance like a chicken, whatever.

I would love to talk to every group that asks, but unfortunately my time is fairly limited this summer -- I have a dissertation to finish, another novel to write, and a Stanford Continuing Studies novel-writing course to teach -- so what I would propose is that the first ten book groups that can organize ten readers each to buy and read Pop Apocalypse will definitely get (at least) two hours of my time via Skype or iChat. Beyond that, I can't make any commitments.

If you're part of a Bay Area-based reading group, I would even forgo Internet-mediated communication and show up to your group meeting in person, as long as you live within a reasonable driving distance from San Francisco.

There are a limited number of weekends available this summer, and I'll fill them up on a first come first serve basis, so let me know if you and your group are interested, ASAP.

Obviously enough, I'm super-excited that the book is getting out there into the world, but I also feel pretty powerless to do anything to shape its reception. People will read the book or they won't read the book, and they'll like it or not, they'll laugh or they won't even know they're supposed to. I've done my part. Time to let the little-bird-analog fly away from the nest-analog under its own wing-power-analog, whatever any of those analogs might be in this case.

I went rooting around the Palo Alto Borders this morning to see if I could find a copy of the book. No luck. I am informed by my editor that Barnes and Noble is going to be displaying Pop Apocalypse on its New Releases shelf, which is super-cool. After I'm done working for the day, I'll drive to Redwood City and see if I can find it somewhere.

What I am coming to realize is that the book world operates at slightly slower than a snail's pace. The day when I received the initial offer on the book, way back in September 2007, was in some ways much more meaningful and more of a drug-like head-rush than today. Whatever comes of Pop Apocalypse will come in a kind of dribble and sputter of non-events, a review here, a review there, a spike in my Amazon ranking followed by a long lull. If I'm lucky, word of mouth will lead to a strong first showing, which will pave the way for Hamsterstan (which is still in progress and going well).

All of this is not quite anticlimactic--there's still lots of exciting stuff to come, reviews, readings, other book-related events--but today's turning into a quiet kind of introspective day.

One thing I can promise is that the word "postmodern" is unlikely to come up. The writers involved (myself included) all seem to be more interested in creating fiction about near-future (or present day) gonzo apocalypses than in waxing philosophical about some sort of postmodern condition or any such thing. Which isn't to say that gonzo apocalypses have nothing to do with what is called postmodernism--as any Pynchonite will quickly inform you--but don't be put off by that.

The panel'll be fun, apocalypses and all. Really. I'll be signing copies of Pop Apocalypse afterward.

Reserve your free tickets today.

All of which is to say, when combined with fellowship applications and other projects, that this is one of the busiest times in my writing/thinking life, like ever, but I can't complain; it's a very wonderful gift to have this time and these opportunities. Many equally if not more worthy people don't have chances like these.

But back to DFW:

Reading Broom was a trip--it'll definitely find its way into the Infinite Jest-centered Person Chapter of the diss. What has begun to obsess me in my critical writing is how very much the educational contexts of a writer's background shape his or her production. What makes Broom so much of a trip then is the extensiveness and sophistication with which its author comments on the format and content of fiction produced in the MFA and creative-writing classroom circa the mid-to-late '80s. And also takes on the still-strong theoretical orthodoxies of that paradoxically Reaganesque-cum-poststructuralist moment.

That is, it seems as if DFW was keenly aware of what the dominant and competing strands of literary orthodoxy were at the time that he was writing. How his analysis of and reaction to these orthodoxies launched his career-trajectory and how his fictional and essayistic responses have set an agenda for his contemporaries is the subject of my person chapter--and the Believer Chapter that follows from it.

When discussing Broom, I think I will want to focus these questions through an analysis of how DFW fictionally reimagines the concept of a "person." Can a talking parrot be a person? How are fictional characters like people--and/or not? Does a notion of communication serve as the logical foundation for personhood or does the logical priority go the other way around (person then communication)?

Based on Wallace's reading of Wittgenstein, I suspect that he takes communication as the minimal lynch-pin of what it means to be a person. From this, various consequences follow, including of course the notion that irony is destructive to our humanity and personhood.

These are my preliminary thoughts as I try to wrap my mind around Broom, which anticipates Infinite Jest in lots of important ways, though it's a less-good novel by comparison. Then again, DFW wrote the book when he was in his early twenties, so he can maybe be forgiven for its flaws, I think.

All of which is to say, when combined with fellowship applications and other projects, that this is one of the busiest times in my writing/thinking life, like ever, but I can't complain; it's a very wonderful gift to have this time and these opportunities. Many equally if not more worthy people don't have chances like these.

But back to DFW:

Reading Broom was a trip--it'll definitely find its way into the Infinite Jest-centered Person Chapter of the diss. What has begun to obsess me in my critical writing is how very much the educational contexts of a writer's background shape his or her production. What makes Broom so much of a trip then is the extensiveness and sophistication with which its author comments on the format and content of fiction produced in the MFA and creative-writing classroom circa the mid-to-late '80s. And also takes on the still-strong theoretical orthodoxies of that paradoxically Reaganesque-cum-poststructuralist moment.

That is, it seems as if DFW was keenly aware of what the dominant and competing strands of literary orthodoxy were at the time that he was writing. How his analysis of and reaction to these orthodoxies launched his career-trajectory and how his fictional and essayistic responses have set an agenda for his contemporaries is the subject of my person chapter--and the Believer Chapter that follows from it.

When discussing Broom, I think I will want to focus these questions through an analysis of how DFW fictionally reimagines the concept of a "person." Can a talking parrot be a person? How are fictional characters like people--and/or not? Does a notion of communication serve as the logical foundation for personhood or does the logical priority go the other way around (person then communication)?

Based on Wallace's reading of Wittgenstein, I suspect that he takes communication as the minimal lynch-pin of what it means to be a person. From this, various consequences follow, including of course the notion that irony is destructive to our humanity and personhood.

These are my preliminary thoughts as I try to wrap my mind around Broom, which anticipates Infinite Jest in lots of important ways, though it's a less-good novel by comparison. Then again, DFW wrote the book when he was in his early twenties, so he can maybe be forgiven for its flaws, I think.

The interesting academic angle on this development comes from a conversation I had yesterday with Matt Jockers, a professor in the English department who does technology-related stuff. We talked about the possibility of building or developing some sort of social-networking application that I could use to map connections among authors and publications for my dissertation.

My hunch is that social-networking theory and analysis might be a useful way of learning how and why certain authors are connected to other authors. Why do David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen mutually blurb each other? Probably because they were friends. Why did Franzen blurb Alex Shakar's The Savage Girl? What is the relationship between the blurb and the fact that they share an agent? Whatever the answer for these particular questions, I think literary studies has too often ignored the ways in which social networks shape or can help explain aspects of literary history. At best we have a vague sense that lots of modernists were running around Paris together, etc.

For my project, my interest is in building a model of the networks surrounding Dave Eggers and the whole McSweeney's publishing operation. My operating theory, for now at least, is that aesthetic postirony--quirkiness, Brooklynite precocity, Wes-Andersonian bric-à-bracity--has as much to do with social networks as anything else. We tend to speak and write like our friends and neighbors. In an increasingly globalized age, where family relations dominate our fates less than they have, our affiliations and voluntary associations can be very powerful indeed. It's what used to be called "peer pressure," but is probably better referred to as something like "aesthetic entropy."

The interesting academic angle on this development comes from a conversation I had yesterday with Matt Jockers, a professor in the English department who does technology-related stuff. We talked about the possibility of building or developing some sort of social-networking application that I could use to map connections among authors and publications for my dissertation.

My hunch is that social-networking theory and analysis might be a useful way of learning how and why certain authors are connected to other authors. Why do David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen mutually blurb each other? Probably because they were friends. Why did Franzen blurb Alex Shakar's The Savage Girl? What is the relationship between the blurb and the fact that they share an agent? Whatever the answer for these particular questions, I think literary studies has too often ignored the ways in which social networks shape or can help explain aspects of literary history. At best we have a vague sense that lots of modernists were running around Paris together, etc.

For my project, my interest is in building a model of the networks surrounding Dave Eggers and the whole McSweeney's publishing operation. My operating theory, for now at least, is that aesthetic postirony--quirkiness, Brooklynite precocity, Wes-Andersonian bric-à-bracity--has as much to do with social networks as anything else. We tend to speak and write like our friends and neighbors. In an increasingly globalized age, where family relations dominate our fates less than they have, our affiliations and voluntary associations can be very powerful indeed. It's what used to be called "peer pressure," but is probably better referred to as something like "aesthetic entropy."

Once I do, the more serious business of reorganizing this blog, and (more generally) my online presence, will begin. Looking at the academic job list, one thing has become certain: when I go on the job market next (academic) year, I will definitely consider applying for positions as an assistant professor of creative writing. That would be such a trip.

For the curious, a little bit about the novel: Pop Apocalypse is a dystopian political satire set in a near future US. Its protagonist is Eliot R. Vanderthorpe, Jr., celebrity heir to a billion dollar fortune. Eliot, a grad school dropout, is the son of the founder and CEO of the Omni Science Corporation, a company that makes video search software, a kind of "evil" Google. The novel begins when, after a summer of debauched partying, Eliot tries to straighten himself up by listing his name on the New York Reputations Exchange (NYRE). After "going public," Eliot discovers that the Market has some unsettling plans for his future, of which I can only say the novel's title is the major clue.

I want to make Pop Apocalypse the first of three novels set in this same near future, each of which tells a distinctly different story, with different characters. More to come.

Once I do, the more serious business of reorganizing this blog, and (more generally) my online presence, will begin. Looking at the academic job list, one thing has become certain: when I go on the job market next (academic) year, I will definitely consider applying for positions as an assistant professor of creative writing. That would be such a trip.

For the curious, a little bit about the novel: Pop Apocalypse is a dystopian political satire set in a near future US. Its protagonist is Eliot R. Vanderthorpe, Jr., celebrity heir to a billion dollar fortune. Eliot, a grad school dropout, is the son of the founder and CEO of the Omni Science Corporation, a company that makes video search software, a kind of "evil" Google. The novel begins when, after a summer of debauched partying, Eliot tries to straighten himself up by listing his name on the New York Reputations Exchange (NYRE). After "going public," Eliot discovers that the Market has some unsettling plans for his future, of which I can only say the novel's title is the major clue.

I want to make Pop Apocalypse the first of three novels set in this same near future, each of which tells a distinctly different story, with different characters. More to come.

This has been perhaps my craziest and busiest summer on record. I spent two weeks in Singapore, two weeks in Jakarta, more than three weeks at the Ransom Center at UT Austin, two weeks back in San Francisco, and finally two weeks in New York visiting family and friends. During this time, I've managed to be amazingly productive on numerous fronts. That part of my brain that focuses on tasks-at-hand has spontaneously mutated a new ability, apparently, to generate some Ritalin-like chemical that keeps me going. Maybe the life of a self-starting (graduate student) freelancer suits my work habits better than anything I've tried before. It beats taking classes and writing seminar papers that do not link up to larger projects.

I found lots of useful material at the Ransom Center. My photocopies of Pynchon, Wallace, Franzen, and Safran Foer letters have come in the mail. I officially began drafting my hipster chapter yesterday (with an aim of having a 60-70 pp. draft by the end of the year).

On top of this official work, I've completed a full revision of my novel-in-progress, Pop Apocalypse. I should not discuss the novel here in a space dedicated to my academic pursuits, but it suffices to say that it's much improved, sentence by sentence. My writing has grown in lots of ways over the last three months, a new plateau among hopefully many more to come. I also have a few possible leads on the next few steps: finding an agent and publisher. If anything happens on the novel-publishing front I may consider starting a dedicated novel-blog or, alternately, converting this blog into something more general, using tags to differentiate among types of content.

Most interestingly, I wonder if in the long term my "official" pursuits (as a literary critic) and my "hobby" (as a fiction writer) may synthesize into some ideal commixture of critic and writer. After all, I was teaching creative writing in Singapore and Indonesia and, frankly, helping kids write their own fiction was the most enjoyable and successful teaching experience I've ever had, bar none. And also after all, there've been denizens of Academe's Groves who've successfully combined these two job functions into one person. Why not me? Whether or not this path will be part of my future remains an open question. To achieve this synthesis successfully would fulfill one of my most deeply-held dreams.

This has been perhaps my craziest and busiest summer on record. I spent two weeks in Singapore, two weeks in Jakarta, more than three weeks at the Ransom Center at UT Austin, two weeks back in San Francisco, and finally two weeks in New York visiting family and friends. During this time, I've managed to be amazingly productive on numerous fronts. That part of my brain that focuses on tasks-at-hand has spontaneously mutated a new ability, apparently, to generate some Ritalin-like chemical that keeps me going. Maybe the life of a self-starting (graduate student) freelancer suits my work habits better than anything I've tried before. It beats taking classes and writing seminar papers that do not link up to larger projects.

I found lots of useful material at the Ransom Center. My photocopies of Pynchon, Wallace, Franzen, and Safran Foer letters have come in the mail. I officially began drafting my hipster chapter yesterday (with an aim of having a 60-70 pp. draft by the end of the year).

On top of this official work, I've completed a full revision of my novel-in-progress, Pop Apocalypse. I should not discuss the novel here in a space dedicated to my academic pursuits, but it suffices to say that it's much improved, sentence by sentence. My writing has grown in lots of ways over the last three months, a new plateau among hopefully many more to come. I also have a few possible leads on the next few steps: finding an agent and publisher. If anything happens on the novel-publishing front I may consider starting a dedicated novel-blog or, alternately, converting this blog into something more general, using tags to differentiate among types of content.

Most interestingly, I wonder if in the long term my "official" pursuits (as a literary critic) and my "hobby" (as a fiction writer) may synthesize into some ideal commixture of critic and writer. After all, I was teaching creative writing in Singapore and Indonesia and, frankly, helping kids write their own fiction was the most enjoyable and successful teaching experience I've ever had, bar none. And also after all, there've been denizens of Academe's Groves who've successfully combined these two job functions into one person. Why not me? Whether or not this path will be part of my future remains an open question. To achieve this synthesis successfully would fulfill one of my most deeply-held dreams.