Category: Uncategorized

• Charles Stross' essay Invaders from Mars puts forward an interesting theory about the state of the world, with serious implications for SETI. 
• Abandoned on Everest (via LinkmachineGo) is a gruesome essay (with pictures) about what happens to the bodies of those who die on Everest. The debate in the comments about the David Sharp controversy is both horrifying and fascinating.
• Sarah Salway provides some interesting tips for short story writers. "Wait for the second thing".
• "I’d like one-shot novels as well. Wouldn’t it be nicer if the tube was littered with single interesting pages of novels rather than discarded London Lites?" – Chris Heathcote
• I love Matt Ogle's essay Archive Fever, which asks some important questions about the mass of data people are starting to accumulate through mobile phones and social media. "We’ve all become accidental archivists." I have over three thousand photos on my computer. I'm not sure what they are for. 

Clearing out my draft blog entries from this year, I've found various photos that I meant to post and didn't. It's a bit of a mish-mash, but here they are:

Having lunch in Nia with Rosy and Jake, we opened the drawers of the desk we were eating at. Inside we found a cache of postcards:

 

 

 

I failed to post my photos from the zombie walk back in October. It seems like a long time ago now. Walking down Queens Road, both sides of the pavement were lined with people photographing the event like paparazzi. Every time I took a step forward, someone took a photograph. It was a strange afternoon.

 

This is something I wrote in the summary and lost among my draft posts, which is why it's so unseasonal. 

Monday morning, Latitude festival was packing up. I was thirsty but couldn’t buy a cup of tea because my money was tied up in cups.

Latitude had a two pound deposit on plastic pint glasses. I would come back to the van with a glass and forget to take it back with me. I had five by the end of Sunday. The campsite bar was open for a couple of hours on Monday morning for refunds so I traipsed down. I’d got the time wrong and arrived early so I joined the queue waiting for the tent to open.

Festivals are all about queueing and waiting, with occasional performances and food. The sun was hot and I pulled up my hoody to give me shade. A couple sat near me, the girl stroking her boyfriend's belly, a large plastic ring on her finger.

About twenty people waited ahead of me. The man at the front had a stack of about fifty cups, others had smaller piles. Some people arrived at the queue but didn't have time to wait. Some surrendered their cups to the two children in the queue, who counted and recounted the twenty cups they had. Someone told me that there had been kids looking for stray cups all around the site, stealing them from people taking drunken naps.

Others wanted to sell their cups to people in the queue. Some of them would exchange the cups for their standard value, but others were prepared to accept smaller amounts. A brief shadow-economy started to flourish.

With the sun beating down on me, I imagined what it could become if the bar didn't open soon. Since the queue had a limited amount of cash, it couldn’t keep paying face-value for cups. The exchange rate was going to fall before long. It wouldn’t be difficult to set up a futures market, trading cups against their future price.

The the door opened. The first man in the queue handed over his fifty cups. He came out with a bag of money, kissed it, and ran away. I stood up, adjusted my hood to keep the sun off, and shuffled forwards.

I had a strange day yesterday, with a bus crash, snow and wandering through a somewhat diffuse protest on London Road. I also attended a rehearsal for Michael J. Parker's new show, 12 Ways to Get Into Glastonbury:

I've been helping out a little with the show over the last month or two. In fact, the first run through of the show was in my lounge back in September:

The show includes poems, songs and stories based around the Glastonbury festival. It's been fascinating to watch the work being honed over last couple of months and I am very excited about the point Mike has reached. The night also features cabaret compered by Paul Stones, including poetry from Chris Parkinson. It's going to be a great night. You must come!

12 Ways to Get Into Glastonbury: Tuesday 7th December, 7:30pm, Komedia Studio Bar, £5/£4

The next Brighton Creative Writing Sessions event is on December 4th. The subject will be Tarot and Creative Writing and it features a guest tutor, Naomi Foyle:

Italo Calvino described the tarot as "a machine for constructing stories". Poet and tarot-reader Naomi Foyle, with short story writer James Burt, will lead a day exploring the ways in which the tarot's archetypal symbols can inspire and influence writing. This course is intended for writers of all levels, whether or not they have previous experience of the tarot, and will focus on practical, engaging exercises.

The event will be held at the Brighton Life-Drawing Sessions studio, near Brighton station. It runs from 10am to 4pm and will cost £25. There are a few tickets left and they can be booked here. 

I'm very excited about this event. Ellen, Naomi and I have been discussing our plans for the day and this is going to be a workshop like no other. The topic may sound odd, but things won't be getting too esoteric – we will be focussed on writing and having fun.

I am also very excited about having Naomi as a guest tutor. She has published some fantastic work with Waterloo Press, including this years The World Cup. She has also worked as a Tarot reader for a number of years. 

I'm back at my desk today after a long weekend in Wales. It was lovely to be out in the middle of the nowhere, no laptop and no mobile signal. The weather was damp and misty, which made the scenery incredibly atmospheric. I went walking, ate good food and read a pile of books. The highlight of the reading was Nicholson Baker's latest novel, The Anthologist. I am becoming convinced that Baker is one of the most important novelists working today.

I've taken a little bit of a break from the weblog over November. That's not because I've not been doing anything – the exact opposite, in fact. I have a pile of exciting announcements, including the next Brighton Creative Writing Sessions course, an article in Friction magazine and an anthology publication. I will write about all of these over the next few days.

I've been on twitter since February 2007, although it took a while for me to get it. I even closed my account for a time, but restored it just before the six-month change-your-mind period ended. Twitter has introduced me to some amazing people, found me work, and helped me discover events and books that I might otherwise have missed. 

I always find it hard to explain exactly what I love about twitter. I'm not sure whether it's the protocol, the service, or the other users, but somehow I have gathered a timeline of people that are always interesting and friendly. For me, there is no obvious separation between twitter and the 'real world' – the two fuse together in fascinating ways.

Here are some specific things I love about twitter:

• One of the problems with small-talk in the real world is that it requires you to stand next to someone. Often there is not time to build friendships and relationships before you both wander off. The almost-passive communication of Twitter means that small talk can continue for weeks or months, allowing relationships to develop slowly.
• Twitter is not pointless chat, despite what some critics claim. It is a great example of phatic communication, but without the need to be in the same geographical location as the people you're communicating with.
• I love the latency of twitter. It works well with a mixture of occasional posters and regular posters, even with people disappearing for a few days then coming back – a little like persistent IRC, perhaps. 
• Hannah Donovan gave a talk on improvisation at dConstruct 2010 which used the banter on twitter as an example of improvisation. There are definite 'rules' to Twitter banter, but they are all implicit. They also seem very localised to specific groups.
• Something Tom has pointed out is the power of constraints. The 140-character limit often produces something close to haiku, or at least close to the variations invented by Ginsberg/Kerouac. 140 characters forces people to be precise in describing images – the #foundwhilewalking tag often provides good examples of this.

Total for this post: 2074 characters.

A few months ago, I read an oral biography of Abbie Hoffman, Steal this Dream. Hoffman's story is a sad one. After his deliriously creative period in the sixties, Hoffman's life fell apart. He moved into drug dealing, a career he had little talent for, resulting in a bust. He spent several years on the run, where his bipolar condition worsened. By the end of his life, Hoffman was a sad, broken figure.

But during the sixties, Abbie Hoffman was incandescent. He was central figure in the Yippies, and one of the 'leaders' of the 1968 Chicago protests. He brought a manic freshness to protest, including an attempt to levitate the Pentagon. Hoffman was able to use the media, producing spectacles such as throwing dollar bills onto the floor of the stock exchange. These protests also demonstrated publicly that there were other ways of looking at things to the conventional. The attempt to levitate the Pentagon was absurd, but part of its success was that it was taken seriously in some quarters:

"Sal Gianetta: The two meetings I knew of, one in New York, and one in Washington, were probably the best examples of Abbie's brilliance. There were some Washington representatives and there were two military representatives. It started out that no way in the world was there going to be any activity anywhere around the Pentagon, which was the fucking Basilica of the United States, no fucking way. Right away, Abs says "Fuck you, we'll levitate the fucking thing high enough you won't be able to get in. Then what're you going to do with your fucking Pentagon?" They actually responded. That was the first inkling he had that he might be able to suck them into this…

At the other meeting I was at Ab threw the levitation on the table, right for openers. Ab was adamant that the building was going to go up twenty-two feet- because someone had told him except for fire-ladders, you can't get a ladder that's twenty-two feet. So he was willing to negotiate. If the fucking building went up twenty-two feet the foundations were going to crack, so there was discussion about foundations and cracks, it was fucking unbelievable. That meeting was two and a half hours or so and probably 20 per cent of that meeting was devoted to this fucking serious talk about levitating the Pentagon. This is our military, right? I swear to you, Ab came down from twenty-two feet to three feet, the military agreed to three feet and they sealed it with a handshake. That's how Ab was, he could capture you in that fucking bizarreness. Oh, it was joyful!

Looking back, the Sixties seem like a crazy time, when things could have changed forever. Imagine the scene at the Pentagon: American Indians, shamans and people burning yarrow, all gathered to exorcise demons from the building (with Kenneth Anger sneaking into the building to lay curses). I wish that same craziness and possibility was around today.

Imagine human lives considered as a single day, all those events compressed into the hours between rising at 7 and sleeping at 11. 16 hours of wakefulness. 

Take Kurt Cobain: each hour was twenty months, the time sweeping past. Nirvana formed at 6pm, and released their first record almost an hour later. At 8pm Cobain met Courtney Love. It was almost 9:30 by the time Smells Like Teen Spirit was a hit. Kurt and Courtney married just before ten pm, when the day was almost over. At eleven, Cobain put an end to his life.

William Burroughs died at 83. Each hour of his life was more than five years. At 2pm he shot his wife Joan Vollmer, when Cobain was 11 years old. He released his first book, Junky, at 2:30pm. Kerouac died at 5:30. At almost 8pm, Burroughs lost his son. His final novel, the Western Lands, was published at 9pm. 

Cobain and Burroughs met in October 1993. Years of real time separated the two, but if you consider their lives as a single day, it was 10:40pm for Cobain and 10:12pm for Burroughs.

Imagine a world where you knew how long you had left. What time is it now? What do you still need to do?