The Chimerist

These are my screenshots – two photos by Pierre-Louis Pierson, of the Comtesse de Castiglione, Virginie Oldoni, a woman who is both a muse to my second novel, The Queen of the Night, and the villain of it as well. The first, “The Opera Ball,” I like to look at as it perfectly contains the tone of the novel. The second, “Scherzo di Follia,” on the home page, is a famous one of her eye.

Oldoni was a bit of a 19th Century Cindy Sherman, one of the most famous beauties in Second Empire Paris and probably the most notorious mistress of Napoleon the III. She had herself photographed in her most famous gowns and costumes to document her own history, and Pierson did very well by her. She’s my novel’s presiding ghost, and I wrote about her before I knew she existed, inventing a character like her before finding a photo of her by Pierson, dressed as I had described her. These two photos help me remember what I am doing somehow, so they are here.

I bought my iPad back in 2010. I didn’t initially like it, despite some high hopes. I found the lack of Flash ridiculous, an ostentatious prohibition like the colored dots Apple forced fashion magazines like GQ and VMan to put on their photo spreads, over nipples and other potentially obscene areas. These actually enraged me so much I almost returned it. The censorship by dot was all due to Steve Jobs’ famous fear of porn, and it made the tablet editions of these magazines look and feel a lot like they were being subjugated to the demands of a high-tech gated community run by a co-op board with a bizarre moral code. One that was only going to force you to pay for things you could get for free elsewhere, and without the dots. I didn’t like a machine that felt as if it didn’t trust me to be an adult. Who were these dots for? Who was going to accidentally see a nipple and be offended except me? My window to the future of media had a child lock on it that I didn’t ask for and couldn’t take off.

Worse, it wasn’t even legislated – it was only due to Steve Jobs’ personal foibles, and as such, it was immune to appeal, unlike, say, a law. But then I found Comixology and so the device stayed put. Because I really did like reading comics on the iPad – it was like the most organized set of reading copies ever. 

The reason the dots infuriated me so much was that the idea behind getting the iPad was to separate work and pleasure – I was trying to undo the devastation caused by how my computer had become a shopping center/movie theater/television/porn shop/news channel/email device, where once it had been something I used to write. The more things I could do online, the more I could do at the computer, the less I associated the computer with writing. I had even bought a Olympia Carina typewriter, like the kind Patricia Highsmith once used, partly as a fan of hers, partly because it was a device used only to communicate with my own thoughts. The plan was the computer was going to be for writing, and the iPad was going to be for the other things – in particular, internet browsing of political news and my magazine subscriptions, to GQ, the New Yorker, Dwell, VMan, and the New York Times. 

In the beginning, this was problematic right away – these publications were not as fun to read on the iPad as they were in their print forms, except maybe for GQ, which, out of the gate, did well with the tablet. The New Yorker tablet edition has since more than got up to speed, it should be said, as well as New York Magazine and the New York Times -- you get much more for your subscription to these now than you did before, if you have a tablet. I also enjoyed Flipboard in these early days as a way to peruse my Twitter and Facebook feeds, and that helped keep the device around also. Slowly it started to feel like it was going to be ok, even with the colored dots over the nipples. I bought a Dodo case for it, much more attractive than the microfiber creature they sell in the store, and moved on. 

Slowly, I started to use it for work also. 2010 was a year of residencies for me and the ebook editions of books I was using for research for my novel were easier to bring along this way and to search through, also. Then I gave a reading and used it to read from, and liked it – it was like a manuscript and a light to read it by, both. 

I haven’t held the line about work, in other words. The transformation of the iPad into a second work device has since become complete. It happened in the spring of 2011, when, after a reading at the University of Farmington, Maine, I had an explosive series of revelations about the manuscript, and needed to work very hard on it, despite having to fly back the next day through the winter storms to Iowa, where I was teaching. I would have used my laptop, but I found the flight impossible for that – coach seats now basically fall back into your field of vision so that you can’t have a laptop open in front of you without setting it on your stomach, which is impossible to sustain for more than a sentence. On a tablet, though, the screen and the keyboard are in the same field. I worked the whole way back. The draft from that day of travel, tagged “iPad draft” in my computer, became incredibly important. This made it all worth it, basically. It literally saved the day.

Now my iPad is already a little vintage – the iPad 3 will be out any day now, I’m sure. I’m skeptical about updating now that the internet is being used, like everything else, to dial back the gains of the early to mid 20th Century, so that the internet now means you are always at work, all the time, and also, are constantly monitored – the gated community expands! Amid all this, I also have found that I really like reading a print newspaper still, as well as print books. I read more of it. It’s more contemplative, somehow. And it doesn’t tell people where I am.

But I also believe the iPad and tablet tech is still not being used at capacity, culturally. Apps like Narrative Mag, Storyville, Electric Lit, the app Stephen Elliott did for his book The Adderall Diaries – these are moving things in an interesting direction. My partner Dustin and I like using it to watch Hulu and Netflix in bed when we travel, so, there’s that also. And Unstuck is my new favorite discovery, another example of people making this work – it’s a bit like a hypertext self-help book that responds differently to what you are stuck on, and that interacts with elements like your calendar, in useful ways. So, I’m optimistic about the device, even if I’m skeptical about the world. 

For now though? Let’s get rid of the dots. 

Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, forthcoming in 2013 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. You can find him on Twitter or Facebook, or at his blog, Koreanish. 

For details on submitting screenshots to The Chimerist, go here.