Category: Uncategorized

Miscellany: drawing carts, year zero and the vinyl Hoover

  • Toby Amies has put his radio documentaries online. All of them are worth a listen, but I particularly recommend 'Beatmining with the Vinyl Hoover' and 'The Man Whose Mind Exploded', the latter of which is a fantastic Brighton story.
  • Last weekend followed some advice from zenbullets and archived off my music collection, all 17 1/2 days of it. I currently have a more manageable 6 hours. It's proving an interesting experiment and I'm enjoying the music more.
  • Interesting rant by Stewart Lee about 'content', which contains some provocative points about the importance of medium. "The Tewa clowns would not be cross-platformed. Their content was developed for the pueblo square format and it would stay that way."
  • Lovely slideshow from Jake Spicer, showing an outdoor launch event for the Artists Open Houses that he was involved with.
  • Today's XKCD has some haunting alt text: "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space–each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision." 

Psychogeographical Experiment: Blindfolded walking

Guy Debord defined psychogeography as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals". The discipline is a mish-mash of ideas and experiments, many of them contradictory or in violent opposition. One common aspect is the idea of exploring one's enviroment by the means of experiments and play.

For some time I've been meaning to try a number of experiments in Brighton. It's a place I know well and one that I love exploring. It is also a very playful city, sometimes seeming almost alive. Tonight, with my accomplice Dr Evil, I tried a first experiment, blindfolded walking.

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The idea was quite simple, taking turns to walk blindfolded along the seafront, with the guide suggesting course corrections and helping to avoid obstacles.

The experience was intense. Time and distance were hard to estimate while blindfolded. Above the constant noise of traffic, one could pick out passers-by, the scampering of dogs, but very few details. The sea was so quiet it could not be heard above the traffic. Dr Evil wondered about "all the silent things that you are missing." 

Walking blind produced a strange relation to space. At first it felt as if one was just about to walk into something. It was very hard to judge how far away things were by sound alone. Time too changed, with the doctor estimating time passing twice as fast as it was. The subway was particularly interesting, as it distorted and focussed the sounds of the road above. 

Finally, in homage to the film Intacto (video here) we took turns running blind.

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Afterwards we felt tired and also more alert. We found ourselves more aware of potential trip hazards and had to stop ourselves from warning the (now sighted) other. It was an interesting way to experience a quiet sea-front. We're hoping to try this again in the town one evening.

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The Blue Boar

One of the books about the 60's that I'm currently reading is Days in the Life by Jonathon Green. It's a fascinating series of interviews with people involved in the counterculture.

From an interview with June Bolan:

"You always went home after a gig because you couldn't afford to stay anywhere! You'd do Newcastle and back in a night. There were no motorways to speak of. They loved the Floyd out in the sticks… The highlight of the evening if you'd been to Newcastle and were coming back was  to go to the Blue Boar, the service station. You'd see people like the Small Faces, Spencer Davies, the Soft Machine."

The Blue Boar is one of those things that turns up incidentally in a lot of books about the sixties. Now Watford Gap Services, it's well remembered for the people who passed through. From a post on a motorway services blog: "Jimi Hendrix is reputed to have been under the false impression that the “Blue Boar Cafe” was some trendy nightclub, because his British contemporaries mentioned it so often"

Reading at Ace Stories on Sunday March 6th

The weblog has been quiet in 2011 so far – my freelance work has kept me fairly busy. There won't be probably won't be any posts until March, when things calm down.

I have a reading coming up in March, one I am very excited about. I will be reading at Ace Stories with Sara Lenzen and Rachel Cusk. From the announcement:

Ace Stories– the live literature season that brought you such writers as Cathi Unsworth, James Miller, Scott Bradfield, and Amanda Smyth in 2010, is back at the Hotel Pelirocco on Sunday 6 March at 6pm. There'll be support readings from local writer James Burt and London-based writer Sara Lenzen, a live interview with Rachel Cusk including questions from the audience, and a reading by Rachel from her latest novel, The Bradshaw Variations (Faber and Faber). In the third and final part of the evening there'll be live set of music from 21 Crows. Tickets: £3 on door. Come and get a cocktail and enjoy the friendly, intimate vibe of the Pelirocco bar and some inspiring readings!

I think I'm going to be reading something from my novel, but I've not decided for sure yet. The event starts at 6pm, and it should be a good one. Let me know if you're coming along, as we will probably go for food before or after.

My favourite books of 2010

I read about 150 books during 2010. A good chunk of these were read on my holiday at the start of the year (including re-reading Lord of the Rings). Picking out the best ones was difficult, as I read some very good books. Setting an arbitrary limit of ten, here are the ones I loved most, in alphabetical order:

  • The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker – I think Nicholson Baker is one of the most inventive and fascinating writers working today. This book interleaves fiction with theories on poetry and some good jokes. At one point Baker makes a fascinating observation, that the collection may not be the best format for poetry.
  • The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber – this book is not yet published, but I read a draft. It's a historical novel in verse which tells a story of adventure and subterfuge. Its format as poetry actually adds to the pacing. It deserves to find a wide audience. 
  • Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis – previously blogged about here.
  • The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby – blogged about here. I need to revisit this soon.
  • Advice for Strays by Justine Kilkerr – see here.
  • How I escaped my certain fate / Stewart lee – see here.
  • i play the drums in a band called okay by Toby Litt – see here.
  • Something Beginning With by Sarah Salway was republished this year. Her book uses an interesting structure to tell a serious story. Despite the dark ending, you get a feeling that Sarah really enjoyed writing this.
  • Are you experienced by William Sutcliffe – I read a lot of books about India in preparation for my trip. I learned very little from most of them, particularly the serious tomes written by English and American journalists. This book questions the idea of travelling and makes some very good points. I was surprised by how thought-provoking I found it.
  • The New Journalism by Thomas Wolfe  - I read this around the same time as I read Reality Hunger. The introduction to Wolfe's book the most interesting writing on fiction I've read in some time. He seems to have been ahead of Shields on many points. However, Wolfe did turn to fiction after working on this book, and I hope to find some time to look into why. 

I would normally do a list of the films I enjoyed too, but I only saw 7 movies in the cinema this year. Most of them were entertaining without being particularly memorable. At the end of the year I find myself unable to pick one out as a favourite.

Thinking about Time Travel

I've been thinking a lot about time travel lately, and messages from the future.

Some weeks back, there was a game on twitter: #tweetyoursixteenyearoldself. The idea was to send messages back in time that would have been useful to you then. My advice to myself was simple:

Don't bother with uni. And take English Lit & History, not Maths and physics for A-Level.

The game started me thinking about what would happen if I received a message from my future self:

Of course, it would be more useful if my 50 year old self could tweet me and give me a heads-up

I've been thinking a lot about time travel lately. Because I am travelling into the future day-by-day, and I'm not sure what lies ahead of me. Before you know it, you’ve leapt fifteen years on, and you’re not the person you expected to be. Those little day-by-day steps in the past seemed to be in the wrong direction. 

I’d probably have thought less about this, except for an article I read in the paper, where a woman had drawn up a bucket list, a list of things she wanted to do before she died.

Bucket lists are a disturbing idea in general, the idea that life can be reduced to a series of goals that you achieve or don't, and a life fails if some are left unticked. (And what are you supposed to do if you do finish the list? Start another list of things you really have to do?) There were nine items in this woman's list, some of them things she'd been planning to do for years and not got around to. One item was to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 musical, The Phantom of the Opera.

If this person could send a message back in time, it might be to see Phantom at some point in the next 20 years. But maybe there were other priorities. In each of the 7,000 nights she could have watched that show, something else was happening. As John Lennon said, "Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans." 

And I've been wondering about the me in the future, and the things I might want to scream into the past, the days here and there that were squandered thinking there would always be more to come. Something interesting happens when you consider your future self and your current self as two separate people. Decisions I make now have an effect on me in the future.

And I make decisions now that I will live with in the future. Douglas Coupland expressed it well in Girlfriend in a Coma:

"Imagine you're a forty-year-old, Richard," Hamilton said to me around this time, while working as a salesman at a Radio Shack in Lynn Valley, "and suddenly somebody comes up to you saying, 'Hi, I'd like you to meet Kevin. Kevin is eighteen and will be making all of your career decisions for you.' I'd be flipped out. Wouldn't you? But that's what life is all about – some eighteen-year-old kid making your big decisions for you that stick for a lifetime." He shuddered."

I imagine the tweets that would be sent by by 54 year old self. Or the one in six months time. So many of the things that were important to me at 24 seem irrelevant now. I might have been able to justify how I spent that time a month later, but now I can't.

The clash between past and future selves is one of the main sources of procrastination – we imagine our future self will be more willing to do the work we don't want to do now. Behavioral economists and psychologists refer to it as dynamic inconsistency ("when somehow the preferences of some of the selves are not aligned with each other") or present-bias (as a brilliant youarenotsosmart.com article described it, "This is why when you are a kid you wonder why adults don’t own more toys."). It's hard to guess what the future you will want. 

I expect my future self will be similar to me, in that he would be frustrated with the short term goals that his younger self sought, the time spent doing fake work. He would be annoyed that focussed on the things that really mattered.

While I hate the idea of a bucket list, it's worth asking, what am I doing right now that might still seem worthwhile in twentry years? What would I want to have done before I die? Only a few things. I guess I had better get on with them.

I've been thinking about time travel lately.