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Braun and McKenzie - and supporting cast from Jason and the Beast - in the midst of devlish plotting/planning. Courtesy Jason Braun
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Jason Braun’s name has been ringing out around town for a while now, most recently as a new co-host on the long-running KDHX poetry show, Literature for the Halibut. He’s also been the namesake of Jason and the Beast, a hip-hop project that combine beats with wordplay that’s a little cleverer than the norm. And he’s also a popular teacher at SIU-Edwardsville, helping guide young writers with his work at the campus lit mag, The Sou’wester.
Within the next couple weeks, he’ll also be giving birth to an app that’ll potentially bring John Milton's Paradise Lost to a new generation of readers, who will be taking in the work in bite-sized, daily chunks. While he’s quick to credit his artistic compatriot on the project, Matt Kindt, and his app designer, Dan McKenzie, the idea’s his. And, with a few more programming tweaks and some needed acknowledgment from Apple, the concept will move from the digital drawing board to a world-wide audience by the end of the month.
If you’ve never downloaded an app, or have read a word of Milton, you might not think that the project’s one that you’d wish to know about. (On the other hand, if you keep a well-worn copy of Paradise Lost in one hand, and your iPhone in the other, by all means, read ahead.) For the rest of you, if you’re simply interested in how an intriguing idea moves from someone’s head and into the world, then take a peek at our primer interview with Braun, who shot feedback our way on the quick.
You seem to have consumed and studied quite a bit of Milton in your lifetime. What was your initial exposure to his work? And Paradise lost, specifically?
"Milton wrote Paradise Lost when he got married. He wrote Paradise Found when he got divorced.” Those are the words of a teacher I had somewhere along the line before I spent much time with it. I read Paradise Lost nearly 15 years ago in a survey course, and it was overshadowed by Dante’s Inferno. Some of that was the Prof’s doing, but most of us felt the same way. The gore of Dante and his contra passo or the punishment fits the crime idea, speaks clearly to the midwestern sensibility. But last year I studied Milton with John Savoie, a Yale PhD. That’s when I saw that Satan had the best lines, and that Paradise Lost was full of practical advice. The philosopher Kenneth Burke has said, “Literature is equipment for living.” That philosophy is at the heart of all my projects. Milton’s Satan was the original start-up. He was looking at God on the throne and thinks to himself, “you know what, I could do that."
For the Luddites in the crowd, how exactly will your app work?
Think of this app it as interactive deck of flashcards. The app, when downloaded and then clicked on, serves up “flash card” with a new quote from Paradise Lost, such as:
"Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:/Here we may reigh secure, and in my choyce/To regin is worth ambition through in Hell: Better to regin in Hell, than serve in Heav'n." --1.260-63
Then there’s a prompt below asking the reader: Where can you be number one?
Sure, I’m being a little tongue and cheek here, but the quote from Milton’s Satan are echoed in what General Electric’s Jack Welsh said when he took over as CEO: “Be number one or number two in every market, and fix, sell or close to get there.”
That quote from Milton can be shared via text message, and email at this time. You can flip through to other “flash cards” with other quotes, or click to go to read the full text of Paradise Lost as well. But most of all, this app is about presenting a modern and practical context for Paradise Lost, and serving it up in smaller bites. Paradise Lost in the Office is about pretending to pay attention to the PowerPoint presentation, but really indulging in classic literature while asking yourself “What Would Satan Do?”
How does one take an idea of this sort and then navigate the idea into being? What were the steps needed?
The idea of Paradise Lost as a primer on office politics swirled around in my head after I left the Milton class one night and watched Wall Street, the first one. I wrote a 12-page paper on the topic and halfway through, thought that this could be an app. Last year I was in DC at a Writers Conference courtesy of SIUE’s Sou’wester, and I met Al Katkowsky, the creator of the successful app, and now book, Question of the Day. Al was part of a lecture dealing with the “Future of Authorship in a Transmedia World”, or something like that. I talked with him afterwards, and later interviewed him for KDHX’s Literature for the Halibut. I count him as a friend. He made it look easy. If you’ve got the content (stories, text, games) you’re halfway there. Book-schmook, get someone to program it as an app. I’m paraphrasing the advice he was giving to all writers, not just me. To get someone to program a “simple” non-game app, it’s around a thousand dollars, but some places are quoting something like five grand. I’ve been surrounded by programmers and hackers since high school in Waterloo. I was “in” the computer club, but my friend Benson Schliesser was president, and went on to head R&D, and be a Vice President at Savvis Communication, and now is the Principal Engineer at Cisco Systems. I talked to him about it. He said it shouldn’t be tough to program for the iPhone, any good programmer should be able to do it. So I called Dan McKenzie, my good friend who not only programs for a living, but has an English Degree from Truman State and played the Fife and Bass on the Jason and the Beast EP. He said he could probably do it. And now he has done it. We’ll have a code and format to use on what ever other project that come next. An app is images, text, and code. Anyone designing one needs to know what they want it to look like and what they want it to do. Then they need to find somebody or learn the code to make that happen.
Talk, as well, about the process of selecting short quotations, which one might assume was the "fun" portion of the project.
Well, most of the charm and most of the counterintuitive strategy in Paradise Lost comes from Satan. So I looked to his speeches. I had over half of this done by the time I finished the paper for the Milton class. The real fun part is seeing the idea move from my text into Matt Kindt’s illustration and then into Dan McKenzie’s coding beta version that I uploaded to my iPhone last week.
Is there another idea of this sort brewing within your head? If so, can you share without hexing whatever that might be?
I’ve got at least 20 projects at various stages of completion: a full hip-hop album/book with a comic and illuminated manuscripts riffing on the style of William Blake with Matt Kindt which is, like, 90 percent complete right now.
But as for apps: I teach English 101 and 102 at SIUE, and various creative writing workshops to kids throughout the area. I really want to create a game (online/or phone app) that makes my English 101 Classroom writing as fun as playing World of Warcraft or Modern Warfare. I just need a little funding for this. If Chore Wars can work, why can’t this? I know it sound crazy, but like adman Leo Burnett said, “If you reach for the stars, you don’t end up with mud.” Or was it Milton that said that?
Interested in the app? Check jasonandthebeast.com in coming weeks for updates. Matching that time frame, Braun, a frequent reader at poetry events around town, will performi some Paradise Lost-inspired work at The Cigar Inn Jazz Club (119 W Main Street, Suite A, Belleville, Ill., 618-233-4000), on Thursday, January 26th. Show starts at 9pm, and is free.
