The Internet Bound

So I just got a new phone . . . not just any phone but an iPhone . . . (yes, I know they project an image of smug urban excess and encourage a certain kind of tosserish discourse) but this is not to dismiss the fact that they are actually, really, properly, amazing. In fact, the phone is the least functional aspect of this device which operates not just as a phone but a pocket computer, a torch, a handy spirit level, a game console, a compass, an interactive map, a GPS, and most interestingly of all to me, a pocket e-reader . . .
I now have the complete works of Shakespeare and Aristotle on my phone (and in a Luddite sort of way I can't believe I just wrote that), not to mention a bookshelf of classics from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens. Several feet of books shrunk to a device the size of a cigarette packet. I have previously blogged about how I was unconvinced by the Kindles and the Sony eReaders - these bulky, strange almost analogue hybrids - which don't make reading a pleasure and might be useful to editors and lawyers but have little functionality to offer in terms of the novel. The iPhone however, provides something genuinely different not just in the touchscreen format but in the App Store and the way in which content for the phone is delivered and controlled.
The Apps are essentially remixed versions of poplar software (productivity, games, utilities etc) or Internet content (Flixter, Facebook etc) or ebooks. With the ebooks the reading experience is surprisingly good. The screen is bright and crucially colour, the text is readable and bookmarkable and in the case of Andrew Kaz and Phill Ryu's 'Classics' the pages even turn in an with an old school shimmy of the page. Most impressive in terms of design is the McSweeney's magazine App - designed by the very cool Russell Quinn. The content is the usual McSweeney's mix of interesting journalism - David Orr's Dispatches from India is a fascinating piece of travel writing - to the more whimsical and annoying sophomore pieces - 'Nipple Synonyms' anyone? This is a subscription model - £3.50 for 6 months worth of content which updates itself automatically.
What is strikingly obvious to me is that the App model makes an interesting case for the subscription model of delivering content. The iPhone platform makes the Internet suddenly look messy - too much clutter, too many links, too much advertising in between you and the content you want. The iPhone model strips the Internet back and boxes it into individual software packages some of which are free, most of which you pay some modest premium for. If Apple follows this model forward into its rumored new 'tablet' I can see a case for paying a subscription for a Guardian App or a Times App and perhaps even, downloading Wolf Hall (hello that hardback is just too bloody big . . .) for my commute to work. There is something attractive about being able to have content without all the hyper links (which I believe just makes us hyper anyway) and in a portable format which allows for focus on the individual article or document.
Maybe it's just the shock of the new, but as the ipod made the case for digital music, the iPhone is making a much stronger, louder case for digital books than has ever been made before. Interesting times for writers and publishers . . .

We would rather be ruined than changed
~W.H. Auden

Beat on the street

Here, some more language from the street...

Proper blog, sometime . . .

Happy Summer

Snail Mail

Since email has led to the decline of snail mail there have been many mourners of the old fashioned letter and envelope approach to contacting friends and lovers. None more charming than postletters.org which encourages us to 'buy a second hand book and tear out page at a time and send to the same person or to lots of different people'. Whimsical, maybe, but I do wonder, with the relentless march of technological progress, what has been lost - handwriting, composition, stamps, patience, a sense of anticipation at the sound of the postman, the pleasure of an unexpected love letter...

I have some old letters of my grandmas which are precious for the documentary evidence they present on her life. Archivists of the future will have to mine datastreams and hard drives to find contemporary correspondences, if they survive at all. And we would be culturally poorer without the documentary evidence of great correspondences - like Woolf and Sackville West, or Kingsley Amis and Phillip Larkin, or the letters of the Mitfords, or Ted Hughes or Rilke etc.

So I will make it my resolution to write a letter to a friend this weekend. Now I've just got to find somewhere to buy a stamp . . .

Publish and be damned

So the subject on my mind this week which can't somehow be turned into fiction is the Julie Myerson debacle. I have met this strange woman on several occasions, each time she seemed more preening and self-congratulatory than the last. In Spring '08 she gave a reading at the Cambridge WordFest where she spoke about her problems with her teenage son and how it was the subject of her new book. At the time I took a pretty dim view of this, thinking that as a writer she lacked a clear sense of boundaries between her work as a writer and her parental responsibilities. Whatever the wrongs of her her son's behaviour he was still a teenager and entitled to his privacy.

Now the book is on the threshold of publication - rushed forward by Bloomsbury to capitalise on the public interest - I feel even more strongly that we are witnessing, not the bold public account of her private hurts, but the the very public humiliation of a narcissistic London lit-chick who has become rather too used to notions of her own grandeur and forgotten that along with authorial power comes a whole heap of authorial responsibilities.

She begs us not to judge her until we've read the book. Well this extract was enough for me. The strategic device of the collusive 'you' - assuming the reader's complete agreement with her worldview - is annoying enough, but the especially noxious part is the description of rushing the pregnant teenager to an abortion clinic. What comes across most strongly is her obsessive need for control. Not just of us her readers - in the use of second person - but of her children and of her self image. As much as she might like to blame skunk for her son's behaviour (she is lucky it wasn't smack or crack) what is evident, even in this short extract, is that her son is desperately angry with her. If I were her son, I would be too. She has written about him for years and in doing so objectified him, lionised him, fictionalised him, until he is no longer the person that he really is, rather a simulation of the real thing. (I think Henry James is especially instructive on this kind of subject.) And when he begins to have fairly normal behavioural issues trying to separate his identity from his parents and indulging in brattish behaviour it is a shock that this precious middle class mum can't handle. Who knew? This whole situation actually reveals much more about Ms Myerson's personality than it does about the dangers of drugs and teenage boys.

I realise I am only getting excised by this because I had some experience of this myself with parents who treated their children as adjuncts to their very public project of getting the world to turn to God. When it became clear that I had an identity and ideas of my own that did not fit into their worldview, it was hard for them to accept. And years of wrangling and fighting and unpleasantness ensued. There is a whole long book in this - but out of respect for myself and my siblings - I don't see that it's appropriate to write about it, at least not yet. And certainly it would make a better piece of fiction than a 'poor me' sob story.

Publish and be damned? When the subject is your own son, that damnation will be, trust me, pretty long and horrible. I just hope she's prepared for it.

Pillow for a Pound

So there I am in Poundland . . . the new credit crunch star on the High Street and one which, if you live near Wood Green, is an unavoidable stop on the monthly schelp to stock up on household goods like drain cleaner and bleach. Pound Land. What a name for the new world in which we find ourselves. A land of round pounds where everything is so cheap it's almost free! And the kind of place which has none of the sense of discovery you might get in a Turkish 99p/c store where the cheap tackiness is also surrounded by the plain weird - Neon Virgin Marys anyone?

And so I'm in there, feeling depressed by the green and yellow branding and the cheap signs and the dirt and trampled goods on the floor and the general sense of the cheapness of our new and shiny lives in 2009 when I come across a section selling pillows. Not just any pillows mind you, these are only a pound! One whole round pound! So cheap it's almost free! And in return I will get a selection of what appear to be the lightest foam offcuts encased in the kind of nylon that gives static shock. What a bargain. . . except . . . a pillow is, surely, a thing of comfort, a resting place for a weary head, support for your neck while reading, a palliative for backache. This pillow is more likely to cause backache, or leave the pressure points so unsupported you wake up with a red ear or a crushed cheek.

So it may be cheap but if it is not comfortable then why spend even a pound on it, if it doesn't work?

Montaigne said somewhere that 'ignorance makes the softest pillow', which perhaps might be the only way to turn these cheap goods to our service. If we pretend that somehow all this excess of production, however cheap, isn't really made in third world sweatshops at the expense of the planet, it might be possible to turn a few wedges of foam into a nest of goose down. But then maybe we can't afford much else. The £200 pillow that might have gone on the credit card seems suddenly like a genuinely pointless excess when you might lose your job tomorrow.This what it must have felt like in Japan through their decade of deflation, or maybe just for everyone who shops in Poundland on a cold Saturday afternoon: ain't nothin going on but the rent.

Crash!

My favourite website - Pictures of Walls - have included one of my photos! Unfortunately they've also called me Julie. Here's another one I spotted at St Paul's last weekend . . .



I don't know about you but I'm finding the semantics of the 'credit crunch' fascinating . . . I'm kind of addicted to the coverage too, because language seems to me to be at the heart of the problem. Fancy terms like Credit Default Swap and Collateralised Debt Obligations are invented to cover up complex trades that no one really understands as if this will hide the fact that the money they are inflating just doesn't exist. The banks, like us, have in very plain old English, been living beyond their means.

Joseph Stiglitz gives a very interesting lecture on the subject available free on itunes - the fraudulent action of the market is so glaringly obvious in his analysis it's really frightening to think that no one listened to him before, even though they gave him the Nobel . . . Hello? World? Is anyone out there paying attention?

When I was 21 in 1992 I graduated into a recession. There were very few graduate jobs, especially in Birmingham, and most of the people I knew took a few years to get on their feet and off to good start with plenty of poorly paid part-time jobs until the economy picked up again in 1995 or so. It was pretty grim, except that there's nothing like a good recession to encourage creativity. I certainly wrote a lot then. If being able to have what we want when we want it is only contingent on us having a credit card, then finding more thoughtful ways to entertain ourselves can only be a good thing . . .

Pirates Ahoy!

I suppose it had to happen eventually, but I have just discovered, thanks to a vigilant fan, that my first novel Massive is now available to download from the Internet . . .

My first response is actually to be flattered that someone has bothered to scan the whole thing in and make it available in separate double-page spreads - I know from standing over a hot and dysfunctional department photocopier how long this actually takes. And the 'crap capitalist' in me is quite glad to save kids, who have to read my book at school or write a projects on it, seven bucks. Seven bucks, of which I would probably only see a few cents, and with the pound/US peso (sorry, dollar) exchange rate the way it is, would only work out at 1p a copy or something. And the karmic solider in me thinks well, it's payback time for all that downloading I did years ago, ahem.

For the publishing companies & music companies there is of course something innately worrying about this kind of cultural theft, a little problem called Lost Revenue. How will the artist get paid? they squawk, invoking an argument that they exist solely at the benefit of the artist, as the only legitimate conduit to audience. This kind of propaganda allows them to engage in acts of petty revenge against downloading teenagers (and by proxy their parents); or more recenly, lobby parliament to get the ISP's to send out threatening letters to downloading customers; children are even having lessons at school about the difference between legal and illegal downloading . . . All in the name of 'protecting the artist' as if it were some kind of ethical imperative.

Which takes me back to my ambivalent feelings about being pirated. Trying to get my novel taken down off Photobucket is proving to be a long and time consuming process of proving to them that I'm me, and that I actually did write the book (what do they want? Photos of me at my desk? Writing is not exactly action sport . . .) And although I obviously want to be renumerated for what I do, I'm aware of having money skimmed off the potential profit of my projects at every step in the publishing process from the percentage I pay my agent to the percentages I get in return for foreign rights sales. And of the power exerted by Marketing in the purchase and promotion of new books.

Frankly, I'm glad to know that someone was bothered enough share my work with others - bit like lending a book - than get too het up about it. (I told you I was a crap capitalist.) And I hardly think there will be a sudden flurry of bootlegged copies the back streets of Bangkok based on a bit of crap scanning. So it's a small crime against my intellectual property rights, and a stiff little finger to Big Corp (or maybe in this case, just High School). I think I can live with that.