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M.J. Hyland, This is How, 2009

M.J. Hyland's This is How appears slight, almost uneventful, the protagonist awkward, which might not sound promising... but it is affecting and lingers. The claustrophobia of the common place, telling details. Hard to describe. It is very good.

I hadn't read any of her work until I'd seen her brave and clear-eyed piece in the Guardian about MS and brain enhancers, in which she wrote 'In the stuffy, darkened house of my head, all the windows and doors seemed to have been flung open and the air was crisp and cool'.

The highlights:

‘Let me take your coat,’ she says. ‘I’m not bothered,’ I say. ‘I’ll keep it on.’ I want the pockets for my hands. [Location 46]

There’s an old man sitting at the bar. He’s got a lit cigarette in the ashtray, but he lights another and I get why he craves the start of things. All the hope that goes with the new thing. [Location 266]

It’s like something from James Bond.’ ‘Do you like those films?’ ‘I haven’t seen From Russia with Love yet, but I liked Dr No. Have you read the books?’ The chat flows easily and I don’t even lie to her and tell her I’ve read the books. [Location 1966]

Welkin’s not in the room but he might as well be. We’re in the company of his absence. [Location 2067]

I step forward, lift the wrench in my right hand and bring it down. Only once, a good, certain blow to his temple, not heavy, and the wrench bounces. [Location 2203]

My hands are numb, a tingling in my fingers, much stronger than pins and needles. [Location 2224]

the drink machine’s out of order. There’s a handwritten sign on the front and the word THIS has been crossed out and someone’s replaced it with the word TIME. It says: TIME MACHINE IS OUT OF ORDER and I stare at it for a while before I know what it means and I’ve got a sickness in my gut. [Location 2257]

A heat goes down the front of my body and it’s as though I’m standing by a fire, the heat of shock, and it spreads all over my chest and head. [Location 2280]

I take a tissue out of my pocket. He looks away, waits a bit, looks back. ‘Okay?’ he says. He takes off his jacket and hands it over. ‘Thanks.’ [Location 2444]

During the long cold night, when I sank into sleep, it was short and shallow and I saw what I did to Welkin, saw it over and over, and I was in a stupor so close to screaming that I went in the dark and slammed my fist on the cell door. [Location 2607]

The windows are blacked and nobody can see me, but the people on the street waiting to cross at the lights, all of them look at the van with faces full of hate. I close my eyes. [Location 2729]

‘You’d better get yourself a dog face,’ says Stevenson. [Location 2968]

‘Here comes the snout-baron,’ [Location 2985]

what I did adds up to no more than the act of raising and lowering a hand. My mind played hardly any part, but my body acted and, as far as the law’s concerned, my body might as well be all that I am. [Location 3045]

he’s moving documents in and out of his black folders as though he hopes that moving them will erase what’s there and replace his watery words with better ones. [Location 3756]

Perkins speaks now as though he has a pen between his teeth. [Location 4046]

This blow is like a dose of poison in my veins, a hot sharp shot through my legs and arms, through my bowels and bladder. I’ve a mind to release a hot flood of shit and piss right where I sit. [Location 4809]

But then, after a long gap, the silence between us starts to cover me, almost like being touched. The longer the stretch of silence, the more it feels like we’re touching each other. [Location 5372]

 

Carrion thought: Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male, 1939

My highlights will hint at what I would have written about this strange, compelling book, and those from the excellent intro by Robert Macfarlane do the job better than I would have (this recent edition is the one with the Macfarlane intro, most of which you can also read here, and whose recent book Holloway is part inspired by the Rogue Male landscape).

I will say though that you mustn't let it put you off - with the distance of about 75 years, the book now appears horribly classist and racist at times, but it is excellent, weird, psychological and exciting. I missed the radio dramatisation last year. Rogue Male is a dark 39 Steps. 

From the intro:

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) – in which Alan Breck and Davey Balfour are chased across the Scottish Highlands by English redcoats in the 1750s – began the ‘hunted-man’ genre. [Location 53]

John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) – in which Richard Hannay is chased across the Scottish Lowlands by German agents [Location 54]

Graham Greene’s A Gun For Sale (1936) – in which a hired killer called Raven is chased from Central Europe to the British Midlands [Location 56]

From Joseph Conrad, I think, Household learned how to pattern a novel intricately without slowing down its story, and he also learned restraint: in particular, the technique of omitting explicit description of key events. [Location 58]

In Rogue Male vital incidents go similarly un-detailed: the torture scene, the death in the Aldwych tunnel, the narrator’s first visit to the holloway with his fiancée. Only the outcomes (wounds and scars, guilt, repressed trauma) of these episodes are alluded to; they are experienced chiefly as their aftermaths. It is no coincidence that the narrator’s eye is brutally damaged early on, leaving dancing patches of shadow where light should be; [Location 61]

Camouflage and cover are the novel’s preoccupations; enigma, disguise and indirection its styles of telling. Even the narrator remains nameless throughout, only an ‘I’ [Location 66]

There are paired concepts – ‘cover’ and ‘open’, ‘surface’ and depth’ – that repeat and weave. There are images and figures – notably the sunken track, the tunnel, the cave or den, and skins and skinning – that recur dozens of times in different forms. There are tiny details of incident or comment that anticipate or recall earlier versions of themselves. [Location 71]

the sustained analogy between land and mind, whereby the narrator’s access to his buried emotions is enabled only by means of a literal digging down [Location 74]

for as well as becoming part-animal he also becomes part-earth, part-rock and part-tree – a hybrid version of the landscape itself. [Location 99]

The episode might be understood as an early study of Stockholm Syndrome, as a Catholic confessional in which the den’s ventilation shaft serves as the grille, or as an extended psychoanalytical session. [Location 159]

The narrator’s psychological interior is the novel’s last hidden terrain, and its access completes the book’s ongoing processes of digging and rupture [Location 166]

The highlights:

There was a pulped substance all around me, in the midst of which I carried on my absurd consciousness. I had supposed that this bog was me; it tasted of blood. Then it occurred to me that this soft extension of my body might really be bog; [Location 225]

a creature of mud, bandaged and hidden in mud. [Location 230]

I had gone beyond worrying about the state of surfaces. [Location 257]

I felt deliciously secure, for I was not looking forward at all; I felt as if I were a parasite on the tree, grown to it. I was not in pain, not hungry, not thirsty, and I was safe. [Location 266]

I had allowed my body to take charge. It knew far more about escaping and healing than I did. I must try to make my behaviour intelligible. [Location 295]

I might have been transparent. [Location 324]

The flotsam of the nation is washed together into an unrecognized, nameless, formless secret society. There isn’t much that the bits of scum can do to help one another, but at least they can cling and keep silence. [Location 485]

At need I could walk very slowly and correctly, hanging on each foot, as if waiting for somebody. [Location 537]

I was comfortable enough, more relaxed than I had been since the first week on the river. The darkness and the six walls gave me an immediate sense of safety. I had gone to ground after the hunt, and the cold iron of the closed tank was more protective than the softest grass in the open. [Location 674]

the first of my dens, and I think that it provided me with the idea of the second. [Location 676]

After all, we once went to war for the ear of a Captain Jenkins – though Jenkins was an obscurer person than myself and had, considering the number of laws he broke, been treated with no great barbarity. [Location 712]

No, I was an outlaw not because of my conscience (which, I maintain, has no right to torment me) but on the plain facts. [Location 762]

I’d be lucky if I ever perceived more than light and darkness, [Location 773]

I passed him on the level of the Central London, and went down the escalator to the west-bound Piccadilly Tube. [Location 845]

I pretended I had forgotten something, and shot out of the exit, up the stairs and down a corridor to the north-bound platform. [Location 848]

I noticed that the shuttle train at the Aldwych left from the opposite side of the same platform. This offered a way of escape if ever there were two trains in at the same time. [Location 849]

I took the second escalator to the surface, and promptly dashed down again. [Location 853]

At the bottom of the Piccadilly escalator you turn left for the north-bound trains, and continue straight on for the west-bound. To the right is the exit, along which an old lady with two side parcels was perversely trying to force her way against the stream of outcoming passengers. [Location 859]

I ran on to the north-bound platform. An Aldwych shuttle was just pulling in, but there was no Piccadilly train. I shot under the Aldwych line, down to the west-bound platform, into the general exit, jamming him in another stream of outcoming passengers, and back to the north-bound Piccadilly. There was a train standing, and the Aldwych shuttle had not left. I jumped into the Piccadilly train with the Major so far behind that he was compelled to enter another coach just as the doors were closing and just as I stepped out again. Having thus despatched the Major to an unknown destination, I got into the Aldwych shuttle, which at once left on its half-mile journey. [Location 862]

After half a minute in the Aldwych shuttle I realized that I had panicked like a rabbit in a warren. The mere couple of ferrets who had been after me had been magnified by my escape mechanism – a literal escape mechanism this, and working much faster than my mind – into an infinity of ferrets. [Location 869]

I turned back and re-entered the shuttle. The passengers were already seated in the single coach, and the platform clear; but a man in a black hat and blue flannel suit got in after me. That meant that he had turned back when I had turned back. At Holborn I remained seated to prove whether my suspicions were correct. They were. Black Hat got out, sauntered around the platform, and got in again just before the doors closed. [Location 873]

As we left again for Aldwych, Black Hat was at the back of the coach and I was in the front. We sat as far away as possible from each other. Though we were both potential murderers, we felt, I suppose, mutual embarrassment. Mutual. I wish to God he had sat opposite me, or shown himself in some way less human than I. [Location 879]

I can still hear them, and the sound of steps and his scream and the hideous, because domestic, sound of sizzling. They echoed along that tunnel which leads Lord knows where. A queer place for a soul to find itself adrift. It was self-defence. He had a flash-light and a pistol. I don’t know if he meant to use it. Perhaps he was only as frightened of me as I was of him. I crawled right to his feet and sprang at him. By God, I want to die in the open! If ever I have land again, I swear I’ll never kill a creature below ground. [Location 897]

ALDWYCH MYSTERY was occupying half a column of the centre page. [Location 937]

rigour of the climate was not inviting. My own county, though I carried the ordnance map in my eye and knew a dozen spots where I could go to ground, had to be avoided. [Location 963]

The business that had taken me to Dorset was so precious that I kept it to myself. [Location 971]

Though the precise spot where I was going was no more nor less present in my consciousness than the dark shadows which floated before my left eye, I knew I had to have a fleece-lined, waterproof sleeping-bag. [Location 975]

I took a train to Guildford, and thence by slow stages to Dorchester, where I arrived about five in the afternoon. I changed after Salisbury, where a friendly porter heaved my roll into an empty carriage on a stopping train without any corridor. By the time we reached the next station I was no longer the well-dressed man. I had become a holiday-maker with Mr Vaner’s very large and dark sun-glasses. [Location 995]

He had the perfect self-possession and merry eyes of a craftsman. One can usually spot them, this new generation of craftsmen. They know the world is theirs, and are equally contemptuous of the professed radical and the genteel. [Location 1010]

I admitted to myself now where I was going. [Location 1079]

I passed out of the chalk into the sandstone; the lanes, worn down by the packhorses of a hundred generations plodding up from the sea on to the dry, hard going of the ridges, were fifteen feet or more below the level of the fields. [Location 1102]

There is not, any longer, enough to do. I am not affected by loneliness nor by the memories of this place. [Location 1199]

I am uncertain of myself. Even this journal, which I was sure would exorcise my misgivings, has settled nothing. [Location 1200]

Well, I suppose I wished to save myself pain. But I cannot even remember her face, except that her eyes appeared violet against the tawny skin. [Location 1214]

I wrote to Saul for books: meaty stuff which I could reread throughout the winter, penetrating with each reading a little further into what the author meant rather than what he said. I did not, of course, sign the letter, but wrote in block capitals, asking him to send the books to Professor Foulsham at a sub-post office in Lyme Regis. [Location 1218]

There is no animal but man which can be hunted simultaneously by two different packs without the two becoming one; [Location 1274]

carrion thought [Location 1286]

it worried me that I had come to move with such instinctive quietness. I was already on the look-out for all signs of demoralization – morbidly anxious to assure myself that I was losing none of my humanity. [Location 1459]

Eggardon affected me as a city. The camp was haunted. I didn’t feel the presence of its builders, those unknown imperialists who set their cantonments on the high chalk, but I was suddenly terrified of the sleeping towns and villages that lay at my feet and clustered, waiting, [Location 1502]

I was obsessed by this sense of all southern England crowding in upon the hill. [Location 1507]

The lifeless centre seems full of gases, unsatisfying in themselves and carrying in suspension the brown dust and debris that fall from above [Location 1696]

All initiative is at an end. All luck is at an end. We are so dependent on luck, good and bad. I think of those men and women – cases faintly parallel to mine – who live in one room and eat poorly and lie in bed, since their incomes are too small for any marked activity. Their lives would be unbearable were it not for their hopes of good luck and fears of bad. They have, in fact, little of either; but illusion magnifies what there is. [Location 1702]

to hide I am ashamed. So I endure without object. [Location 1712]

Admit it now, my dear fellow, you could get along perfectly well without any State!’ ‘Yes, damn you!’ [Location 1917]

Yet I was mad with grief and hatred. I describe myself as then mad because I did not know it. The tepidity of my sorrow was not indifference; it was the blankness which descends upon me when I dare not know what I am thinking. [Location 1994]

Her skin was not a surface; it was an indefinite glory of the palest rose and orange that chose to mould itself to those tense limbs. [Location 2002]

My fantasy had developed as far as shooting my way out of the magistrate’s court [Location 2438]

My Dear Saul, I write this from a pleasant inn where I am accustoming myself to a new avatar. [Location 2467]

One should always hunt an animal in its natural habitat; and the natural habitat of man is – in these days – a town. Chimney-pots should be the cover, and the method, snapshots at two hundred yards. [Location 2479]

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Image source.

Some books, May 2013

Will Storr, Bad Blood, The Mysterious Life and Brutal Death of Alexander Litvinenko
Good, long Matter article by Will Storr on the 2006 poisoning of ex-KGB man Litvinenko in London. Its editor Deborah Blum notes that the poisoned cup of tea has literary precedent. Peter Clarke (then CTC boss at the Met) investigated. Has some excellent Arsenal trivia: one of his alleged poisoners went to see CSKA Moscow play at the Emirates (0-0 - perhaps the polonium distracted Henry and Rosicky). His seat was so radioactive that it had to be securely burned.

Andy Weir, The Martian
Rollicking read. Astronaut is stranded on Mars and must endure Shackletonian challenges and journey - luckily he is both a botanist and mechanical engineer, which allows for MacGyverist victory. Hard science NASA-porn (technology is the love interest), and the astronauts are the rightest of right stuff. The shift between viewpoints isn't always comfortable. Weak end - I increasingly hoped for a Ballardian failure. (For an alternate, darker take on the stranded astronaut, see Bester's classic The Stars My Destination.) Currently only available as an audiobook it seems. Weir's website.

Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male
More to say on this later, but it's still excellent.

John Scalzi, The Human Division
Serialised starting here (you could measure the success of the book by tracking each episode's sales ranking). Here he is talking about it and here is Warren Ellis doing the same. Serialized fiction is interesting, but I think the whole suffers slightly, and it crushes your Kindle recommendations.

Does cloud computing have weather?

 
[Berndnaut Smilde, Nimbus NP3, 2012]

How we guffawed a mist of flat white coffee onto our iPads when a survey said that half of Americans think that stormy weather affects cloud computing [1]. But they were right. The infrastructure running cloud computing both suffers and generates its own weather. Facebook kept servers heated so that clouds of water wouldn’t condense on them as they were brought across the humidity gradient from truck to a new cold-air server farm inside the Arctic Circle [2]. Data centres have long been air conditioned, climate-controlled and Halon-protected caves, and recently water cooling is making a come back [3] - rivers irritating server farms, carrying their heat safely away. Fire control is provided by gaseous suppression systems, whose alien atmospheres drive the oxygen from a burning room, or by water mist systems (with meteorological names like AquaFog) [4] which smother fire in a cooling mist.

There is weather, too, beyond the physical infrastructure. Our “likes” and “favourites” are small prayers to the social network gods to keep safe the photos, spreadsheets and status updates we entrust to their cloudy crypts. (Not all precipitation makes it back to the ground: virga is rain that evaporates (or hail that sublimes) before reaching the ground [5] - the observable spinning bar that never results in a file being displayed on our screens. Our status updates may not suffice as offerings: if we didn’t pay for the cloud service, we’re making a wish.) Service uptime websites are the weather charts [6]. A database fails, creating a ripple of low data pressure.

The “cloud” in cloud computing probably condensed from a million cartoon rain clouds drawn in documents and on white boards that represented the communications and computer networks you used but didn’t have to worry about. These drawn clouds lent us the cloud computing metaphor - the utility service or infrastructure that’s at arm’s length, yet ever-present, just there, like the weather. Microsoft explicitly acknowledged the weather in its Hailstorm idea in 2001 (services that “exist in the “cloud” of computers that make up the Internet”) [7]. Google directly added “cloud” to utility computing in 2006 (“we call it cloud computing”) [8], and Amazon put it in a funky product name, Elastic Cloud Compute, the same month [9].

Later, the cloud metaphor would be criticised for not naturally evoking the qualities we want networked services to have (predictability, reliability, clarity, persistence, identifiable boundaries and so on), and instead hinting at rain and other bad weather, fluffiness, nostlagia, vagueness, impermanence [10]. But of course that ephemerality is exactly constitutive of networked services - they fall over, they get closed down.

 
[Google data centre with water cycle diagram and Ruscha's Blue Collar Tech-Chem, 1992]

(And aren’t computing’s basic actions similar to the rain formation cycle? Perhaps a file evaporates from your screen, is carried up and advected into the digital troposphere where it condenses as a liquid file (or is deposed as ice) on a server.) [11]

“Network weather”, the output of human behaviour on the network, a million (or an absence of) explicit yet invisible hands liking, plussing, following, reviewing - a “highly dynamic overlay of current conditions, soundings and action potentials” [12]; weather that breaks across the internet and on city streets. And the tracking systems, cameras, GPS and other sensors that sieve and measure human behaviour are the network weather station barometers and anemometers.

There are micro-climates too. Website latency is a wind we lean into, making us click and tap harder. A thorny spreadsheet - the way its broken or circular formulae resist its users. The #NAME and #VALUE error messages in a cell that protrude from the grid of calculatory terrain, stopping the smooth cascade of numbers.

I have over-written: I am squinting at network computing through lenses misted with vague weather metaphors. Nebulous, hazy, foggy metaphors. A cloud.

Squally postscript, June 2012: a problem with the air-cooling systems caused a cloud to form inside Facebook's Prineville server farm: '"It was raining in the datacenter," [...] when the air came back into the cold aisle for the servers it was so wet it condensed'.

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Notes, sources, raindrops: 
1. 51% Of People Think Stormy Weather Affects 'Cloud Computing' 
2. Facebook’s Servers Stay Warm en Route to Arctic Circle: "A rapid rate of change (in temperature) can create condensation on the electronics, and that’s no good"
3. Watermist Installations - Their role in protecting computer data centres 
4. AquaFog
5. Virga: "an observable streak or shaft of precipitation that falls from cloud but evaporates or sublimes before reaching the ground"
6 Service uptime websites, eg Amazon or Facebook on DownOrNot 7. "exist in the "cloud" of computers that make up the Internet" via The origin of Cloud Computing  
8. Conversation with Eric Schmidt hosted by Danny Sullivan, August 9, 2006 via Who Coined The Phrase Cloud Computing?
9. Amazon Web Services Launches the Amazon Elastic Block Store for Amazon EC2, Aug. 21, 2008
10. Criticism, eg: Cloud computing is a bad metaphor, Why Is The Cloud The Prevailing Metaphor For Pervasive Data Storage?, Cloudwashing Failed – Now We Need New Metaphors, The top 7 most overused cloud metaphors, sorted by weather pattern. On the other hand, this is good on the suppleness of the cloud metaphor.
11. Water cycle 
12. Adam Greenfield, The City is Here [For You to Use]: Table of contents: “3. In recent years, a class of networked information-processing technologies has emerged which permits the built environment, and discrete objects in it, to sense, process, store, communicate, display and take immediate physical action upon information. The result is a highly dynamic overlay of current conditions, soundings and action potentials made explicit and superimposed on the city – something we might think of as network weather. 4. This weather is already exerting pressure on the delicate parameters that between them do so much to condition the life of our urbanized places. We can see both the urban milieu and the array of choices available to people moving through it beginning to evolve in response"

Images: the first cloud is Berndnaut Smilde's excellent Nimbus NP3, 2012. The fourth is a collage, a Google data centre with a water cycle diagram and Ruscha's Blue Collar Tech-Chem, 1992.

NASA's Space shuttle

I watched the BBC's excellent The Challenger last night, a dramatisation of the Rogers commission into the 1986 Challenger disaster, and was reminded what a hero Richard Feynman was.

The shuttle. Conceived in the 1950s, designed from the late 1960s and through the 1970s, five built, flew from 1981, mothballed in 2011, two terrible disasters. Some reading:

1986 - Feynman's Appendix F - Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle

Richard Feynman's appendix to the Rogers Commission Report. Showed NASA and partners' management failings, and that vested interests deliberately or accidentally caused statistical truth and safety policies to be ignored. Striking for its clarity and, I think, humanity.

It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. [...]

We have also found that certification criteria used in Flight Readiness Reviews often develop a gradually decreasing strictness. The argument that the same risk was flown before without failure is often accepted as an argument for the safety of accepting it again. [...]

the computer software checking system and attitude is of the highest quality. There appears to be no process of gradually fooling oneself while degrading standards so characteristic of the Solid Rocket Booster or Space Shuttle Main Engine safety systems [...]

If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate).

Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers. [...]

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

1996 - Charles Fishman's They Write the Right Stuff

On the team that wrote software for the shuttle. Reading this in the late 1990s, I remember being struck by the cultural and procedural differences between this team and the wider "speed at all costs" culture of startups.

The article follows the Capability Maturity Model in arguing that there's an evolutionary spectrum of development practice, from immature chaotic "fix it on the server" death marches through to a measured "perfection". The truth though, proven by successful agile methods (which have themselves matured), is that the approach should fit the business need and context. When change is expensive, get it right first time; when change is cheap, change it when you need to. From the perspective of 2010 and later, this seems obvious - perhaps it wasn't in 1996.

the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. [...]

That's the culture: the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups. It may not be sexy, it may not be a coding ego-trip -- but it is the future of software. When you're ready to take the next step -- when you have to write perfect software instead of software that's just good enough -- then it's time to grow up. [...]

"People have to channel their creativity into changing the process," says Keller, "not changing the software." [...]

The specs for the current program fill 30 volumes and run 40,000 pages. [...]

"Most people choose to spend their money at the wrong end of the process," says Munson. "In the modern software environment, 80% of the cost of the software is spent after the software is written the first time -- they don't get it right the first time, so they spend time flogging it. In shuttle, they do it right the first time. And they don't change the software without changing the blueprint. That's why their software is so perfect."

2005 - Maciej Cegłowski's A Rocket To Nowhere 

The space shuttle program as white elephant - this was a punch to the gut, the space bubble pricked.

Most of the really wrong design decisions in the Shuttle system — the side-mounted orbiter, solid rocket boosters, lack of air-breathing engines, no escape system, fragile heat protection — were the direct fallout of this design phase, when tight budgets and onerous Air Force requirements forced engineers to improvise solutions to problems that had as much to do to do with the mechanics of Congressional funding as the mechanics of flight. In a pattern that would recur repeatedly in the years to come, NASA managers decided that they were better off making spending cuts on initial design even if they resulted in much higher operating costs over the lifetime of the program. [...]

Having failed at its stated goal, the Shuttle program proved adept at finding changing rationales for its existence. It was, after all, an awfully large spacecraft, and it was a bird in the hand, giving it an enormous advantage over any suggested replacement. [...]

In the thirty years since the last Moon flight, we have succeeded in creating a perfectly self-contained manned space program, in which the Shuttle goes up to save the Space Station (undermanned, incomplete, breaking down, filled with garbage, and dropping at a hundred meters per day), and the Space Station offers the Shuttle a mission and a destination. The Columbia accident has added a beautiful finishing symmetry - the Shuttle is now required to fly to the ISS, which will serve as an inspection station for the fragile thermal tiles, and a lifeboat in case something goes seriously wrong. [...]

The Apollo program showed how successful the agency could be when given a clear technical objective and the budget required to meet it. But the Shuttle program has shown the flip side of NASA, as rational goals detach from reality under constantly changing political and funding pressures. NASA has learned valuable bureaucratic lessons - it knows to spread its work over as many jurisdictions as possible, it has learned that chronic funding is always better than acute funding, however much money a one-time outlay might save in the long run, and it has demonstrated that ineffectual projects can be sustained indefinitely if cancelling them is sufficiently awkward. But these are lessons we have already learned for far less on the ground, with Amtrak, and building a more photogenic, spaceborne version of the Sunset Limited in orbit hardly seems like a space policy for the 21st century.

And there are many more interesting articles, but so little time to read them in.

Laurent Binet, HHhH, 2010

Laurent Binet's HHhH weaves together a strong history of the assassination attempt on Heydrich in WW2 (interesting telling of a terrible mind and time) with an account of its own making. So it's funny and self-absorbed - I think the English publisher reinstated some or all of his comments on Jonathan Littell that had been cut from the French edition. Fans of David Shields's Reality Hunger will love it, fans of Sebald may love it.

The highlights

In German, Nachrichtenoffizier means ‘transmission officer’, while Nachrichtendienstoffizier means ‘intelligence officer’. It’s because Himmler, notoriously ignorant about all things military, makes no distinction between these two terms that Heydrich – who used to be a transmission officer in the navy – is sitting opposite him today. [Location 725]

Having got wind that the head of the British intelligence service calls himself M (yes, like in James Bond), he decides in all seriousness to call himself H. [Location 743]

‘Has there ever been a biographer who did not dream of writing, “Jesus of Nazareth used to lift his left eyebrow when he was thinking”?’ She smiles as she reads this to me. I don’t immediately grasp the full meaning of the phrase and, faithful to my long-held disgust for realistic novels, I say to myself: Yuk! Then I ask her to pass me the magazine and I reread the sentence. I am forced to admit that I would quite like to possess this kind of detail about Heydrich. [Location 753]

I’VE BEEN TALKING rubbish, the victim of both a faulty memory and an overactive imagination. In fact, the head of the British secret service at this time was called ‘C’ – not ‘M’ as in James Bond. Heydrich too called himself ‘C’, and not ‘H’. But it’s not certain that, in doing so, he wished to copy the British: the initial more probably referred to der Chef [Location 811]

‘Oh, really, it’s not invented?’ No, it’s not invented! What would be the point of ‘inventing’ Nazism? [Location 920]

In other words, when the Nazi leaders are – for once – ordered to show a degree of moderation, they are unafraid to thwart the Führer’s will. This is interesting when you consider that obedience to orders, in the name of military honour and sworn oaths, was the only argument put forward after the war to justify these men’s crimes. [Location 1114]

So for several hours on March 13, 1938, the head of the Czechoslovak secret services is travelling through Nazi Germany by train. [Location 1125]

seeking the victims’ active cooperation. The Jews are always invited to make themselves known to the authorities, and in the vast majority of cases – whether for emigrating in 1938 or for being sent to Treblinka or Auschwitz in 1943 – this is exactly what they do. [Location 1173]

Chamberlain makes sure that his diplomats do not promise more than is contained in this muddled phrase: ‘In the event of a European conflict, it is impossible to know if Great Britain will take part.’ [Location 1259]

All he does is sniff the Nazis’ shit.’ [Location 1273]

Daladier, former defence minister of the Popular Front, invokes questions of national defence not to prevent Hitler carving up Czechoslovakia but to backtrack on the forty-hour week – one of the principal gains of the Popular Front. [Location 1303]

He was reportedly seen throwing himself to the floor and chewing the edge of the carpet. Among people still hostile to Nazism, these demented fits quickly earned him the nickname Teppichfresser (‘Carpet Eater’). [Location 1326]

‘But, Mr Ambassador, in the end this agreement must be a great relief, no?’ Silence. Then the Foreign Office secretary sighs: ‘Oh yes, a relief … like when you do it in your pants!’ [Location 1357]

Churchill sums it all up with his immortal phrase: ‘You had to choose between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour. You will have war.’ [Location 1384]

All the synagogues are burning, but Heydrich, ever the professional, has ordered that any official records to be found in them must be sent to SD headquarters. Boxes of documents arrive at Wilhelmstrasse. The Nazis love burning books, but not files. German efficiency? Who knows if the SA didn’t wipe their asses with some of those precious archives … [Location 1435]

Two days later, Göring chairs a meeting at the Air Ministry to find a way of making the Jews bear the costs of all the damage. As the spokesman for the insurance companies points out, the price of broken windows alone comes to five million marks (this is why it’s called ‘Crystal Night’). It turns out that many of the Jewish boutiques are owned by Aryans, which means they must be compensated. Göring is furious. Nobody had thought about the economic implications, least of all the finance minister. He shouts at Heydrich that it would have been better to kill two hundred Jews than to destroy so much valuable property. Heydrich is upset. He replies that they did kill thirty-six Jews. [Location 1445]

I never thought of giving it any other title than Operation Anthropoid (and if that’s not the title you see on the cover, you will know that I gave in to the demands of my publisher, who didn’t like it: too SF, too Robert Ludlum, apparently). You see, Heydrich is the target, not the protagonist. [Location 1693]

I’m not sure yet if I’m going to ‘visualize’ (that is, invent!) this meeting or not. If I do, it will be the clinching proof that fiction does not respect anything. [Location 1821]

Essentially, the work of the Einsatzgruppen – a detailed written account of which would take up thousands of pages – can be summed up in three terrible letters: etc. Until they reach the USSR, at least: at that point, even et cetera’s suggestion of infinity will not be enough. [Location 1875]

Sonderfahndungliste GB, the special search list for Great Britain better known as the Black Book. It is a list of some 2,300 people to be found, arrested, and delivered to the Gestapo as quickly as possible. At the head of the list, unsurprisingly, is Churchill. Among the other politicians, British and foreign, are Beneš and Masaryk, representatives of the Czech government-in-exile. So far, so logical. But the list also contains the names of writers such as H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and Rebecca West. Freud is there, despite having died in 1939. And Baden-Powell, too, the founder of the Scout movement. [Location 1919]

exclaims: ‘What do you mean, “The blood rises to his cheeks and he feels his brain swell inside his skull”? You’re making it up!’ I have been boring her for years with my theories about the puerile, ridiculous nature of novelistic invention, and she’s right, I suppose, not to let me get away with this skull thing. [Location 2134]

but I don’t know what he was wearing on that particular day. He might just as easily have been in white, for example. I’m not sure if this kind of scruple still makes much sense at this stage. [Location 2202]

the SS – before shooting them – first made them descend to the bottom of the ditch, where a ‘crammer’ was waiting for them. The job of this ‘crammer’ was similar to that of an usher at a theatre. He led each Jew to a pile of bodies and, having found a suitable place, made him or her lie facedown, naked and alive, on top of naked corpses. Then another guard, walking on the dead bodies, put a bullet in the back of the neck. [Location 2245]

it has no place in my novel. But one of the great advantages of the genre is the almost unlimited freedom it gives the author. [Location 2254]

I’m worried that there are some errors in what I’ve written: since this subject has no direct link with Heydrich, I haven’t had time to investigate more deeply. But I didn’t want to write about Kiev without mentioning this incredible story. [Location 2286]

Finally, I will be something more than the Reich’s dustbin!’ The Reich’s dustbin: so that’s how he defined his duties as head of the Gestapo and the SD. [Location 2332]

Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those who remember. We build ourselves with memory and console ourselves with memory. No reader could possibly retain this list of names, so why write it? For you to remember them, I would have to turn them into characters. [Location 2943]

– a high-level German Abwehr officer called Paul Thümmel (code name A54; alias René). [Location 2979]

his letters: ‘It’s History, I know that. But if a novel is as boring as a scientific book …’ He also felt that he was writing ‘in a deplorable academic style,’ and then ‘what bothers [him] is the psychological aspect of [his] story,’ [Location 3036]

…’ This problem goes hand in hand with that of veracity: ‘As for my archaeology, it will be “probable”, that’s all. As long as no one can prove that what I’ve written is nonsense, that’s all I ask.’ [Location 3039]

Chacko’s art resides in his skill at integrating historical fact – Heydrich really was nicknamed the Blond Beast – into psychologically acute dialogue. It is through dialogue that he turns history into fiction. And I must say, loath as I am to use this method, that he does it very successfully: [Location 3070]

Sorry, I don’t have the faintest idea who this Gregory could be. And just so my falsely offhand tone doesn’t give you the wrong idea: I have tried to find out! [Location 3343]

This scene is not really useful, and on top of that I practically made it up. I don’t think I’m going to keep it. [Location 3453]

The dog probably won’t have a decisive role to play in Operation Anthropoid, but I would rather jot down a useless detail than risk missing a crucial one. [Location 3510]

I WONDER HOW Jonathan Littell, in his novel The Kindly Ones, knows that Blobel had an Opel. If Blobel really drove an Opel, then I bow before his superior research. But if it’s a bluff, that weakens the whole book. [Location 3686]

THIS IS WHAT I think: inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence. Or rather, in the words of my brother-in-law, with whom I’ve discussed all this: It’s like planting false proof at a crime scene where the floor is already strewn with incriminating evidence [Location 3708]

the whole city seems to be covered in writing – and not only adverts. There are Vs everywhere: originally they were symbols of the Czech Resistance, but the Nazis appropriated them as an exhortation to the Reich’s final victory. There are Vs on tramways, on cars, sometimes carved into the ground; Vs everywhere, battling it out between two opposed ideologies. [Location 3720]

‘Better solutions, more advanced and more productive, are on their way.’ Then, his audience hanging on his every word, he adds abruptly: ‘All the Jews in Europe have been sentenced to death.’ [Location 3759]

How did I not see it before? Suddenly, everything is clear. The Kindly Ones is simply ‘Houellebecq does Nazism.’ [Location 3922]

I THINK I’M beginning to understand. What I’m writing is an infranovel [Location 3924]

Yes, I must travel to Prague. I have to be there when this happens. I have to write it there. [Location 3932]

I had to cheat sometimes, to betray my literary principles – because what I believe is insignificant next to what is being played out now. [Location 3950]

HE FIRES, AND nothing happens. I can’t resist cheap literary effects. Nothing happens. The trigger sticks – or perhaps it gives way too easily and clicks on nothing. [Location 4138]

When I quote an author, I must be careful to cut my quotations every seven lines. No longer than seven lines. Like spies on the telephone: no more than thirty seconds, so they can’t track you down. [Location 4178]

My story has as many holes in it as a novel. But in an ordinary novel, it is the novelist who decides where these holes should occur. Because I am a slave to my scruples, I’m incapable of making that decision. I flick through the photos of the funeral cortège crossing the Charles Bridge, going back up to Wenceslaus Square, passing in front of the museum. I see the beautiful stone statues on the balustrade of the bridge with swastikas beneath them, and I feel slightly sick. I think I’d rather take my mattress to the gallery in the church, if they’ve got a bit of room for me there. [Location 4731]

they do not anticipate the worldwide repercussions that will be provoked by news of the village’s destruction. Up to now, the Nazis, if somewhat halfhearted in the concealment of their crimes, have nevertheless kept up a superficial discretion that has enabled some people to avert their gaze from the regime’s true nature. With Lidice, the scales have fallen from the whole world’s eyes. [Location 4772]

All the same, no one ever manages to persuade them that Heydrich’s death was good for anything. Perhaps I am writing this book to make them understand that they are wrong. [Location 4799]

Everyone is playing for high stakes today, even on the German side, where a lack of results can easily look like sabotage to the leaders – all the more so when they have to conceal their own errors or quench their thirst for blood (and here both factors are in play). Scapegoats at all costs – that could be the Reich’s motto. [Location 4957]

Most of the time, the spy who accepted the offer to swap sides – even if he had until then resisted the worst kinds of torture – cracked very suddenly. From the moment he made his decision, he (to use Trepper’s memorable expression) ‘wallowed in betrayal as if in mud.’ [Location 5187]

‘Above all, do not attempt to be exhaustive,’ said Roland Barthes. There you go – some good advice I never took. [Location 5270]

Keith Ridgway, The Spectacular, 2012

Keith Ridgway's short story 'The Spectacular'. He seemed a bit ambivalent about it at the time but it's very good - a low-readership literary author decides to write a best-selling thriller about a terrorist plot at the London Olympics in order to rake the cash in, and gets embroiled in matters. His places are particularly resonant. My single highlight:

Guilt is always available. It just needs the stimulus of punishment to make itself known. [Location 501]

Empty Skyfall

When you have kids it takes you half a year to see films. The 23rd Bond film, Skyfall, is magnificent for a number of reasons.

Bond dies. His false death leaves him disappointed: the booze and drugs addictions cannot obliterate his unsatisfied death-wish - only death in action will.

Bond is a bloodshot wreck with a shaky gun hand. The haggard face. "Double Oh Seven, reporting for duty" he says, with the drunk's careful intonation.

Location and architecture as metaphor: Istanbul - rushing death, Macau - money and theft, Hashima island - damage and debt, London - memory and guilt. A forbidding skull of a house (Satis?, enough?, not enough?) on a blasted muir - Bond's interior life. And M the metonym of the knackered and credit-downgraded Great Britain.

The love of M, here a scratchy relationship, and the need for a mother (M: "Orphans make the best recruits"). M the echo of Tracy.

A new sexual direction for Bond signalled but not explored - for a second I thought they'd taken inspiration from Cyril Connolly's Bond satire.

The general gloom being true to the undercurrents veining Fleming's books.

So many references to the 22 other Bond films in 50 years (and the ten-year shadow of Bourne) that it all but folds in on itself. I look forward to Bond Level 7 Care Plan Revoked in the Nursing Home.

Best of all, nothing happens.

.

More spies: Zeiss is coincidence, Not stirred, From Russia With Lunch, All that is solid melts into lair, I'm not angry, Bourne, Jason, Bourne (see also Jones's The Bourne Infrastructure and The Bond Villain of the Long Now), various JB and IF links.

Little Printer: imaginary publications

Destroy This After Reading
For spies - the thermal paper equivalent of Burn After Reading. 

(The content in the photo is mostly from an Ian Fleming telegram of 1959, in which he imagined Hitchcock helming the fist Bond film. Just imagine Doctor North By Northwest.)

Memento JFDI
BERG already has a to do list and others are working on shinier things, and this is mine. Only three items. To help keep you focused, it is headed with something encouraging like the number of days of life that deathclock.com reckons you have left, or Churchill's "Action this day". 

Foldy walky maps
Maps with directions on them to get you from A to B. The maps have dotted marks so you can fold them to make the map match the road turnings, like 2-D origami. I doubt this could actually work unless you could print on both sides.

Disposable ruler
With enough white space on it that you can draw marks onto the ruler and make a note. Or you can print a custom length strip that exactly matches the height of that spare room but also has the newspaper printed on it so you've something read whilst you travel to Fortress of Furniture.

Emergency bowtie
For sartorial planning mishaps. Available in tied and un-tied versions.

Send messages that have images in them
Come on BERG, you can do this!

Print a single software development story on a message for a customer
The scrum/kanban software development team gives the customer a ticket with the current story printed on it, subtly reinforcing that idea it's impossible to deliver everything on the backlog in this sprint.

Thermometer?
Can you use the paper to tell if your cheese bake is hot enough? 

Fake my expenses
Obviously totally unethical to make or use, even if it were a premium service which gave the revenue to charity so your expenses theft from your employer has some sort of positive benefit. No.

These things are mostly imaginary because I don't speak API or understand the Github toolings of clever others. Previously: Small hello to Little Printer.

John Varley, Millennium, 1983

A DC-10 and 747 collide. In the distant future, a time travel team prepares to snatch passengers, leaving prefabricated smoking bodies behind. And an air disaster investigator will get a phone call that changes his life ... and the end of the world as we know it.

This is an old favourite - aircrash time-travel save-the-future SF. I like it because (1) the 1980s aircrash investigation milieu is interesting, (2) the protagonists are quite unsympathetic and they're enjoyably unreliable as narrators (in fact the whole time travel thing lets the unreliability of the narrator be performed and multiplied). And (3) the whole thing is a gigantic shaggy dog story on "deus ex machina".

Design of Understanding 2013

Max Gadney put on another fine show - I like its breadth. My notes:

Matt Cottam 

• Chrome Web Lab at the Science Museum (2012) looks as if it has insanely high production values, an obvious labour of love. Planning physical consumables at scale, trading off privacy against personalisation-in-public and immediacy. 
• The staff swipe cards that can be used to turn the robots off and on again: very clever to make the most common ops job much easier (and probably fun), removing an irritation for the staff.
• analogue sensors plugged into a mobile's headphone jack - pragmatic (early 2000s?)

Joe Parry

• Needing to start with good questions to get good analysis. Make things more visual and more manipulable (showing connections, relevance, compressing data etc).
• Presumably also: if the underlying data isn't accurate, making it more visual is at best unhelpful (GIGO) or at worst deslusional, ie reading tea leaves without realising it.
• Does data/information ever less understandable as it gets more visual?

Phil Gyford, the single main Phil

• (I did a drawing of Phil that's so poor I cannot show it to anyone, it shames me. This one is much better than mine.) Phil talked about the 10-year Pepys Diary project. 
• On committing for a long period of time, Quotes Stewart Brand from How Buildings Learn: "A building isn't something you finish, a building is something you start" (perhaps the verb in "building" is always darting around from behind the noun)
• He's re-committing and re-running it for another 10 years. The biggest job seems to have been rewriting the technology platform it runs on (how does that map to Brand's Site/Structure/Skin/Services/Space model? Something like this?)
• In 2050, the histories will summarise the 2000s-2015 internet period as "Gyford's Diary of Samuel Pepys and Wikifacegoogle". The rest of us will be dust. Hail Gyford!

Lloyd Shepherd

• His talk is online. On the notebook in The English Patient: "Above all it’s an emblem of its owner. [...] it’s the Patient’s life, and he forgets his life and has to find it again. He finds it in the pages of his notebook. [...] His notes become who he is."
• "But I also want these [Shepherd's own] notes to be beautiful. I want them to express my own journey towards understanding the knowledge they contain. And perhaps most of all – I want this collection of notes to somehow express something about me as well as about the work I’m doing."
• Tools should meet our desire for personal grain, but must they deliver on our romantic nostalgia?

Justin McGuirk

• On ground-up/activist strategies in civic architecture in Latin America.

Beeker Northam

• Brief and interesting intro to planning and agencies, and how they might reconceive their role and activity, sharing risk with partners, adopting more of a venture funding model
• ie Ad:ventures

All excellent.

M. John Harrison, Light, 2002

Light is very good and unnerving psychological SF about (un)reality, death, sex, distance, piracy, vision, embodiment. The Shrander is unheimlich. The small number of highlights is in no way an indicator of a lack of quality - I'm annoyed that I didn't read this ten years ago. Harrison's blog.

Highlights

Soho Square was full of schizophrenics. Adrift in the care of the community with their small dirty dogs and bags of clothes, [Location 453]

The encounter already had the same edge of unease – the aura, the heightened epileptic foreboding – many events had taken on in the wake of the Shrander, as if that entity cast some special kind of illumination of its own. [Location 2055]

he was sclerotic with anxiety. [Location 2077]

Panic – it was his own – filled the room like a clear liquid, an albumen or isinglass so thick he was forced to turn and swim his way through the open door. His arms worked in a sort of breaststroke while his legs ran beneath him in useless slow motion. [Location 2254]

By then your bloodstream is teaming with selected pathogens, artificial parasites and tailored enzymes. You present with the symptoms of MS, lupus and schizophrenia. [Location 4400]

David Shields, Reality Hunger, 2010

Shields the bricoleur selects, arranges, remixes, constructing a work out of parts of other works. His debt to David Markson must be significant.

Hybrid genres, repetition, fragments, structure, the overlap between "truth" and fact in true stories, collage - these have always appealed to me.

But Shields's lack of attribution is problematic. In the first third of the book, I wanted to know which of these is Shields, and which are other voices - I wanted the honesty of attribution. (I prefer the "remix" - annotated version, rather - by a third party that reinstates the citations.) And then, that concern faded. I accepted that if he is going to edit, graft or suture unattributed quotes together, then his magpie bricolage can subsume authorship.

So the author disappears, there is only text, you travel over a patchwork collagescape. Which surely isn't Shields' intent: he believes very strongly in the Author, in (paraphrasing Donald Brown) text as the direct conduit to real consciousness and reality, through the means of selecting and mixing text.

Shields is bored of narrative and novels, which fall short of realism (here he follows Barthes), and also of straight memoirs, which fail to lyrically engage and transport us. He advocates the hybrid middle ground, the lyrical essay.

He finds good qualities in Tristram Shandy, The Wasteland, Markson (to which might be added Ulysses, Wittgenstein's interlocutor in Philosophical Investigations, John McPhee and many others), but the the argument against narrative and fiction seems a bit shrill. He's bored of fiction, and convinced that it can't properly access reality, but I'm not.

I found it interesting and highlighted lots, but wasn't entirely convinced.

More reading:

• Shields would like this advice by W.G.Sebald (and also probably its uncertain status as a quote): "I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt."
• James Wood review: "Strangely enough, using Shields’s aesthetic terms and most of his preferred writers (along with some of those he seems not to prefer), a passionate defense of fiction and fiction-making could easily be made." Of course, Wood wrote that book himself, How Fiction Works in 2008, and it addresses much the same topics - narrative, metaphor, plot, character etc all in service of realism.
• Donald Brown review
• Hedley Twidle review: "the fiction / non-fiction divide is entirely inadequate and endlessly porous [...] At the same time, though, it is inescapable. Provoking the complex play of responsibility and irresponsibility that lies at the heart of reading and writing [...] Shields’s work is a brilliantly provocative meditation in the first mode. About the second it has precisely nothing to say."

--

Highlights

Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art. Zola: “Every proper artist is more or less a realist according to his own eyes.” [Location 129]

The (completely fictional) International Necronautical Society’s (utterly serious) “Declaration of Inauthenticity.” [Location 148]

What are its key components? A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. (What, in the last half century, has been more influential than Abraham Zapruder’s Super-8 film of the Kennedy assassination?) Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, [Location 159]

reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real. [Location 161]

It is out of the madness of God, in the Old Testament, that there emerges what we, now, would recognize as the “real”; his perceived insanity is its very precondition. [Location 193]

Plutarch sometimes bulleted his essays with as many as a hundred numbered sections, eschewing narrative completely and simply listing. [Location 201]

The novel feasted on the unimportant, mimicking reality. Moll Flanders and Clarissa Harlowe replaced Medea and Antigone. Instead of actual adventures, made-up ones were fashionable; [Location 245]

The techniques of fiction infected history; the materials of history were fed the novelist’s greed. Nowhere was this blended better than in autobiography. The novel sprang from the letter, the diary, the report of a journey; it felt itself alive in the form of every record of private life. [Location 250]

I see writers like Naipaul and Sebald making a necessary post-modernist return to the roots of the novel as an essentially Creole form, in which “nonfiction” material is ordered, shaped, and imagined as “fiction.” Books like these restore the novelty of the novel, with its ambiguous straddling of verifiable and imaginary facts, [Location 271]

Some Graham Greene novel has the disclaimer, “This is a work of fiction. No person in it bears any resemblance to any actual person living or dead, etc., etc. London does not exist.” [Location 275]

To tell a story became strictly impossible. [Location 330]

“Rothko is great because he forced artists who came after him to change how they thought about painting.” This is the single most useful definition of artistic greatness I’ve ever encountered. [Location 346]

Modernism ran its course, emptying out narrative. Novels became all voice, anchored neither in plot nor circumstance, driving the storytelling impulse underground. The sound of voice alone grew less compelling; the longing for narration rose up again, asserting the oldest claim on the reading heart: the tale. [Location 363]

Painting isn’t dead. The novel isn’t dead. They just aren’t as central to the culture as they once were. [Location 374]

In 1963, Marguerite Yourcenar said, “In our time, the novel devours all other forms; one is almost forced to use it as a medium of expression.” No more. Increasingly, the novel goes hand in hand with a straitjacketing of the material’s expressive potential. One gets so weary watching writers’ sensations and thoughts get set into the concrete of fiction that perhaps it’s best to avoid the form as a medium of expression. [Location 376]

they narrow the gap that exists between fiction and autobiography, a gap that is artificial to begin with. [Location 390]

The effect of the bifurcated page is to confront the reader with Fawcett’s point: wall-to-wall media represent as thorough a raid on individual memory as the Khmer Rouge. [Location 408]

How can we enjoy memoirs, believing them to be true, when nothing, as everyone knows, is so unreliable as memory? [Location 411]

Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted. [Location 466]

we are all rotting, rotting, even as we write. [Location 536]

What I’m interested in: the startling fragment, left over from the manufactured process. Not the work itself but the story of the marketed incident, the whole industry surrounding a work’s buzz. [Location 545]

The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of minor differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence. Trial by Google. [Location 576]

What the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade him or her that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand. A memoir is a tale taken from life—that is, from actual, not imagined, occurrences—related by a first-person narrator who is undeniably the writer. Beyond these bare requirements, it has the same responsibility as the novel or the short story: to shape a piece of experience so that it moves from a tale of private interest to one with meaning for the disinterested reader. [Location 598]

What I want to do is take the banality of nonfiction (the literalness of “facts,” “truth,” “reality”), turn that banality inside out, and thereby make nonfiction a staging area for the investigation of any claim of facts and truth, an extremely rich theater for investigating the most serious epistemological questions. The lyric essay is the literary form that gives the writer the best opportunity for rigorous investigation, because its theater is the world (the mind contemplating the world) and offers no consoling dream-world, no exit door. [Location 602]

Attention equals life or is its only evidence. [Location 711]

All the best stories are true. [Location 768]

It was Bacon’s insight that it is precisely such seeming detachment—the rhetoric of the documentary, the film strip, and the medical textbook—that has provided the elegiac language of the last forty years. [Location 781]

not flattening it out with either linear narrative (traditional novel) or smooth recount (standard memoir). [Location 793]

Tell the story of your life that is the most emotionally cathartic; the story you “remember” is covering the “real story,” anyway. [Location 809]

Reality takes shape in memory alone. [Location 811]

Human memory, driven by emotional self-interest, goes to extraordinary lengths to provide evidence to back up whatever understanding of the world we have our hearts set on—however [Location 813]

Memories have a quasi-narrative structure, constituting a story or a scene in a story, an inbuilt successiveness strong enough to keep the narrative the same on each act of remembering but not strong enough to ensure that the ordering of events is the ordering that originally took place. [Location 826]

We tend to think of our memories as having been tucked away for safekeeping in, say, file cabinets or dusty old boxes in the backs of closets or filed away on the hard drives of computers, where they can easily be accessed by the click of a button. [Location 840]

In a sense, all memories have been forgotten. Memories are predicated on loss. [Location 844]

Fiction doesn’t require its readers to believe; in fact, it offers its readers the great freedom of experience without belief—something real life can’t do. Fiction gives us a rhetorical question: “What if this happened?” (The best) nonfiction gives us a statement, something more complex: “This may have happened.” [Location 864]

We dream ourselves awake every minute of the day. “Fiction”/“nonfiction” is an utterly useless distinction. [Location 889]

The moment you start to arrange the world in words, you alter its nature. [Location 912]

I see every art as importantly documentary. Everything is always already invented; we merely articulate, arrange. [Location 952]

Just as out-and-out fiction no longer compels my attention, neither does straight-ahead memoir. [Location 984]

Why are certain kinds of knowing favored over others in a genre in which veracity carries weight? [Location 998]

We are all in flight from reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens. [Location 1004]

It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living. [Location 1051]

We like nonfiction because we live in fictitious times. [Location 1165]

My taste for quotation, which I have always kept—why reproach me for it? People, in life, quote what pleases them. Therefore, in our work, we have the right to quote what pleases us. [Location 1231]

In each case, her decision to start copying an artist happened well before the artist achieved wide recognition. [Location 1235]

Karaoke is a generic version of live hip-hop. Little skill or equipment is needed to allow people to perform, but no matter how bad or ill-advised the karaoke singer is, he or she is using existing material for means of self-expression, and the audience accepts the fact that there is no [Location 1281]

Most of the passages in this book are taken from other sources. Nearly every passage I’ve clipped I’ve also revised, at least a little—for the sake of compression, consistency, or whim. You mix and scratch the shit up to the level your own head is at… [Location 1401]

Collage is a demonstration of the many becoming the one, with the one never fully resolved because of the many that continue to impinge upon it. [Location 1497]

Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data. [Location 1534]

Renata Adler’s collage novel Speedboat captivates by its jagged and frenetic changes of pitch and tone and voice. [Location 1535]

Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp’s “Fountain”—urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation between art and life. [Location 1558]

I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless. I can never remember characters’ names, plot developments, lines of dialogue, details of setting. It’s not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly revealing about the human condition. I’m drawn to literature instead as a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking. [Location 1571]

The very nature of collage demands fragmented materials, or at least materials yanked out of context. Collage is, in a way, only an accentuated act of editing: picking through options and presenting a new arrangement (albeit one that, due to its variegated source material, can’t be edited into the smooth, traditional whole that a work of complete fiction could be). The act of editing may be the key postmodern artistic instrument. [Location 1584]

Such an act of editorship is bound to reflect something of the individual doing the editing: a plaster cast of an aesthetic—not the actual thing, but the imprint of it. 351 —the transformation, through framing, of outtakes into totems. 352 This project must raise the art of quoting without quotation marks to the very highest level. Its theory is intimately linked to that of montage. 353 I hate quotations. 354 In collage, writing is stripped of the pretense of originality and appears as a practice of mediation, of selection and contextualization, a practice, almost, of reading. [Location 1589]

My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe. [Location 1605]

The problem of scale is interesting. How long will the reader stay engaged? I don’t mean stay dutifully but stay charmed, seduced, and beguiled. Robbe-Grillet’s Ghosts in the Mirror, which he calls a romanesque, is a quasi-memoir with philosophical reflections, intimate flashes, and personal addresses to the reader. About this length, I think: 174 pages. [Location 1615]

Nothing is going to happen in this book. [Location 1620]

The gaps between paragraphs the gaps between people (content tests form). [Location 1631]

Nonfiction, qua label, is nothing more or less than a very flexible (easily breakable) frame that allows you to pull the thing away from narrative and toward contemplation, which is all I’ve ever wanted. [Location 1648]

How much can one remove and still have the composition be intelligible? This understanding, or its lack, divides those who can write from those who can really write. Chekhov removed the plot. Pinter, elaborating, removed the history, the narration; Beckett, the characterization. We hear it anyway. Omission is a form of creation. [Location 1686]

Essays, unlike novels, emerge from the sensations of the self. Fiction creeps into foreign bodies: the novelist can inhabit not only a sex not his own but also beetles and noses and hunger artists and nomads and beasts. The essay is personal. [Location 1748]

One of the tricks in writing a personal essay is that you have to develop a dialogue between the parts of yourself that in a way corresponds to the conflict in fiction. You cop to various tendencies, and then you struggle with these tendencies. [Location 1789]

To what degree do linked stories seem to be about pattern, about authorial obsession, about watching a writer work and rework his material until he simply has nothing more to say about it? [Location 1838]

in the work of my favorite writers, the armature of overt drama is dispensed with, and we’re left with a deeper drama, the real drama: an active human consciousness trying to figure out how he or she has solved or not solved being alive. [Location 1864]

Maybe the essay really is just a philosophical investigation; [Location 1885]

The motor of fiction is narrative. The motor of essay is thought. The default of fiction is storytelling. The default of essay is memoir. Fiction: no ideas but in things. (Serious) essay (what I want): not the thing itself but ideas about the thing. [Location 1888]

“Do your own time”: a seductive slogan. I find that I quote it to myself frequently, but really I don’t subscribe to the sentiment. I’m not, after all, in prison. Stoicism bores me. What I ultimately believe in is talking about everything until you’re blue in the face. [Location 1920]

So: no more masters, no more masterpieces. What I want (instead of God the novelist) is self-portrait in a convex mirror. [Location 1958]

In a larger sense, all writing is autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it. The real question is: this massive autobiographical writing enterprise that fills a life, this enterprise of self-construction—does it yield only fictions? Or rather, among the fictions of the self, the versions of the self, that it yields, are there any that are truer than others? How do I know when I have the truth about myself? [Location 1971]

A work without some element of self-reflexivity feels to me falsely monumental. Without this gesture, this self-scrutiny, I don’t see how anyone can even pretend to be thinking. [Location 2011]

I’m not interested in myself per se. I’m interested in myself as theme carrier, as host. [Location 2069]

In graduate school, when I studied deconstruction, it all seemed very self-evident. Language as self-canceling reverb that is always communicating only itself? I knew this from the inside out since I was six years old. [Location 2169]

“The true poem is the daily paper.” Not, though, the daily paper as it’s published: both straight-ahead journalism and airtight art are, to me, insufficient; I want instead something teetering excitedly in between. [Location 2171]

I’m hopelessly, futilely drawn toward representations of the real, knowing full well how invented such representations are. [Location 2264]

When I read fiction, I look for what’s real, try to identify the source models. When I read nonfiction, I look for problems with the facts. [Location 2286]

one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. [Location 2318]

Beckett decided that everything was false to him, almost, in art, with its designs and formulae. He wanted art, but he wanted it right from life. He didn’t like, finally, that Joycean voice that was too abundant, too Irish, endlessly lyrical, endlessly allusive. He went into French to cut down. He wanted to directly address desperate individual existence, which bores many readers. I find him a joyous writer, though; his work reads like prayer. You don’t have to think about literary allusions but experience itself. That’s what I want from the voice. I want it to transcend artifice. [Location 2551]

Nowhere do you get the feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. [Location 2559]

Novel qua novel is a form of nostalgia. [Location 2568]

They’re journeys, pursuits of knowledge. One could say that fiction, metaphorically, is a pursuit of knowledge, but ultimately it’s a form of entertainment. I think that, at the very least, essays and poems more directly and more urgently attempt to figure out something about the world. Which is why I can’t read novels anymore, with very few exceptions, the exceptions being those novels so meditative they’re barely disguised essays. David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel, Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, The Last Novel. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. Kundera’s Immortality. [Location 2577]

The kinds of novels I like are ones which bear no trace of being novels. [Location 2583]

It’s no accident that the only novels deserving of interest today are those in which, once the universe is disbanded, nothing happens—e.g., Tristram Shandy, [Location 2588]

What the lyric essay inherits from the public essay is a fact-hungry pursuit of solutions to problems, while from the personal essay it takes a wide-eyed dallying in the heat of predicaments. [Location 2591]

A lyric essay is an oxymoron: an essay that’s also a lyric, a kind of logic that wants to sing, an argument that has no chance of proving out. [Location 2596]

Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one. [Location 2604]

Pottery: clay, hand, wheel

In September and October I did a short pottery course at Brighton's Painting Pottery Cafe - six evenings, once a week.

Week 1: throwing

It is surprisingly hard to centre a lump of clay on a wheel. It helps to have plenty of water, to turn the wheel very fast, and to lean over the wheel. Rather than grasping the clay as if I'm trying to hold it down, I'm taught to squeeze it between the palm of one hand and the fingers of the other. But I'm also using my shoulders and weight. We work the clay up into a cone and then back down - it gets water into the clay while centring it (and, I think, "primes" my hands for the work to follow). I make some simple cups.

 

Week 2: throwing

[Teacher's excellent pot on the right.]

Ther turning process is a matter of your touch, speed and weight. But first of all it's very much of matter: clay's substantial thingness (perhaps in exactly the opposite sense to Heidegger's jug, whose thingess is constituted by the empty void it shapes), its heft. Turning clay demands your attention - it's quite easy to de-centre it, or to collapse it by making the walls too thin. What a change from mashing spreadsheets and reading contracts all day. 

Our pots from week one are in plastic bags, as if they were evidence. Katy says that next week we will turn our pots (turn them upside down and put a base on them). Then I think the last three weeks will be something sculptural (she suggests self-portraits but I think that Ada would like to see some small animals), and then a return to the wheel.

 

Week 3: turning

When the clay is "leather hard" (great term), we put them back on the wheel and carve the bases. It's materially very different now - I can cut into the clay as if it were a soft wood on a lathe.

 

Week 4: turning and handles

The turning, like last week, went ok - it helps to have chunkier pots. Pulling handles is difficult, affixing them too.

Here we are using earthstone clay, which can be fired at lower temperatures to earthenware or higher temperatures to stoneware. Other types of clay include terracotta, porcelain and bone china. "Porcelain has a very strong memory, and when you fire it it tries to turn back into a ball."

 

Week 5: sculpture

Hybrid, woodland animals for Ada: rabbitcat, duckrabbit, katangaroo and rookits.

 

Week 6: throwing

We return to throwing clay, and try larger pots. It's much harder - I need to use much more weight to centre the clay.

 

Painting and glazing

In the weeks that follow, the pots are fired. Then Ada and I paint them together, and finally they're glazed. The finished pots:

The white bits are unpainted. Themes that interest me in pottery:

• simplicity, handmade-ness (Wabi-sabi, Raku)
• (vs) machinemade-ness (eg Pyrex lab equipment or Jonathan Keep's extraordinary experiments with 3D-printing clay pots)
• animal totems
• Susan Williams-Ellis's pottery for Portmeirion, of which I have inherited my mum's set of dark green Totem pattern
• Why does clay look so good when it has been extruded (eg Martin Westwood)?
• Hybrids between these themes, generally.

But more than anything, the way that clay pots are simultaneously true to all three of the clay material, the hand and the wheel. The rotational symmetry of a wheel-turned pot is the machine's mark.

Here's a bowl by fellow student Rihanna, the cup too perhaps. Thanks to our teacher Katy Harris - her work here and her interests here.

Bond 2 optics: Zeiss is coincidence

In Fleming's Bond books there is a distinct emphasis on eyes and looking: there are many descriptions of eyes, typically to illuminate deficiencies and darkness of character. Cold, bloodshot, blank, twitching, black, pale, dead eyes everywhere.

Now Bond noticed that though the eyes rested on him they had become slightly opaque. They gazed upon Bond without perception. [...] Her eyes blazed for an instant and then went opaque [...] There was no message. They were not focused on his. They looked through him. (LLD74, 79, 80)

More interesting, the act of looking is often described as if it were a mechanical act. Eyes become objects:

James Bond [...] again picked up the jeweller's glass [...] and this time managed to fix it securely into the soket of his right eye. (DAF12)

There are metaphors of film, lenses ("bright, hard eyes like camera lenses" DAF183), x-rays, guns ("black bullet holes of the eyes" YOLT), sniper scopes and above all photography. Bond villains become watchful machines.

For an instant Mr Goldfinger's pale, china-blue eyes opened wide and stared hard at Bond. They stared right through his face to the back of his skull. Then the lids drooped, the shutter closed over the X-ray, and Mr Goldfinger took the exposed plate and slipped it away in his filing system. (G34)

he was one of those men [...] who seem almost to suck the eyes out of your head. [...] The gaze of these soft doll's eyes was totally relaxed and rarely held any expression stronger than a mild curiosity in the object of their focus [...] they stripped the guilty of the false and made him feel transparent [...] Blofeld's gaze was a microscope, the window on the world of a superbly clear brain. (T56, 60-1)

Some of this is Fleming reaching for the efficient certainty and coolness of technological machinery but there's a clear sense of Bond holding himself at a distance from other people.

Fleming also reverses this metaphor, and has inanimate objects suddenly perceived by Bond as if they were human faces, eyes:

the two side windows and the entrance door made two eyes and a mouth. The place seemed to be looking at him, watching him, waiting for him (DAF131)

The many eyes of the castle, glittering white in the moonlight, watched his approach with the indifference of total power. (YOLT205)

This seems to go beyond a mere anthropomorphic bias in Bond, and towards something uncanny. These perceptual moments of organic-eye-as-camera and technologic-object-as-sensing-being eventually seem to overlap: there's an occlusion in the reader's mind that hybridises humans and technology. Fleming seems to write the visual as an experience that's essential yet unreliable and aberrant.

Bond himself is a blind spot: others' vision often cuts through him as if he weren't there: "The grey eyes looked at him, through him" (LLD14). And Bond witnesses an act of violence against a woman at the moment that he sees himself reflected in a barber's mirror. This doubled vision hints that he sees his own doppelganger substitute:

It was as Bond was inspecting the back of his head that it happened (DAF189)

Eyes as camera, buildings that see and his invisibility suggest that Bond experiences an altered state psychologically, which we shall return to in a section about his hallucinatory drink-fuelled and fearful visions.

Previously: Not stirred. Next: Bond's boredom, fear and superstition. 

Bond 1: not stirred

It is the fiftieth anniversary of the first Bond film, Doctor No, and the twenty-third installment, Skyfall, is out this month. Having spent a good fifteen years confidently saying that "of course, the books are much better than the films - grittier, harder...", a couple of years ago I decided to risk those schoolboy memories and re-read Fleming's James Bond novels.

The order of the books is different to the films - here's the chronology of Bond's fictive world given by John Griswold in his Ian Fleming's James Bond: Annotations and Chronologies for Ian Fleming's Bond Stories (2006), to which I've appended plot summaries:

• Casino Royale (written 1953) is the one with cards, Le Chiffre's carpet beater upon Bond's British rocks, and Vesper
• Live and Let Die (1954) is the one with tarot cards, Solitaire and Mr Big
• Moonraker (1955) is the one with more cards, gigantic meals, atomic rockets in Kent and Drax
• Diamonds Are Forever (1956) is the one with scorpions, gangsters and trains
• From Russia, With Love (1957) is the one with gipsy girls, trains and poison-tipped shoes
• Doctor No (1958) is the one with guano, claw hands, Honey Rider and Jamaica.
• Goldfinger (1959) is the one with golf, Oddjob and Pussy Galore
• "Risico" (1960 in For Your Eyes Only) is the one with drugs and double-crossing
• "Quantum of Solace" (1960, in FYEO) is the one with an object lesson in manners and revenge
• "The Hildebrand Rarity" (1960, in FYEO) is the cruel one with a sting-ray whip
• "From a View to a Kill" (1960, in FYEO) is the one with motorbike couriers and the world's smallest secret lair
• "For Your Eyes Only" (1960, in FYEO) is the one with murder and arrow-tipped revenge in Jamaica and Vermont
• Thunderball (1960) is the one with atom bombs and underwater fighting in the Caribbean
• "Octopussy" (1966, in Octopussy) is the one with spies and Nazi gold
• "The Living Daylights" (1966, in O) is the one in which a shaky Bond nearly botches an assassination
• "The Property of a Lady" (1967, in O) is the one at an auction
• Chapters 1-5 of The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), the terrible one with motels and gangsters
• Chapters 1-5 of On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) is the one with allergies, heraldry, skiing and Blofeld
• Chapter 6 of The Spy Who Loved Me (1962)
• "Reflections in a Carey Cadillac" (1963, retitled by editors as "Agent 007 in New York" and later as "007 in New York" 2002) is the one in which Bond thinks about food constantly
• Chapters 7-15 of The Spy Who Loved Me (1962)
• Chapters 6-20 of On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963)
• You Only Live Twice (1964) is the one with sake, diving girls, suits of armour and death wishes
• The Man With the Golden Gun (1965) is the one with brainwashing, swamps and challenging property re-investment deals.

If you are short of time, read From Russia, With Love, Doctor No, and Goldfinger; avoid The Spy Who Loved Me and The Man With the Golden Gun.

There are a few interesting themes in the books: the broad nostalgic xenophobia, the (early?) aspirational use of branded consumer goods, the emphasis on looking and optics, Bond's fatalistic tendencies, and his incredible capacity for consumption. They draw a portrait of a figure rather different to the devil-may-care government pirate suavely wise-cracking his way through escapades and confidently hoovering up martinis and beauties that I'd mis-remembered.

Those first themes - nostalgia, xenophobia and impotent aspiration - are covered very well by Simon Winder's The Man Who Saved Britain (2006). He describes the post-war Britain into which the books were published in the Fifties and Sixties, and the role they played. In short, they offered relief and escapism to a hollowed-out, knackered Britain which yearned without relief for a confident Imperial past.

The books are obviously illiberal, misogynist and racist, though this settled, as my reading through the series progressed, into a more generalised xenophobic misanthropy. (That, or I just became re-programmed by the books. Not that my swarthy Italian readers will be able to tell, damn their inscrutable Japanese eyes. Etc.) And despite Fleming's obvious love of travel - you could easily imagine Bond as a columnist for Monocle, sampling the best Scandinavian cocktails and Austro-Haitian hollow-point ammunition - the books are fundamentally socio-politically isolationist and fearful. Whatever happened to our Great Britain?, they weakly thunder.

(Books cited by initial and page number in the UK paperback editions of 2002, eg YOLT101.)

More reading:

• Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain (2006) - the amusing rant
• Griswold, Ian Fleming's James Bond: Annotations and Chronologies for Ian Fleming's Bond Stories (2006) - the concordance
• Lycett, Ian Fleming (1996) - the biography that other authors recommend
• My The name's Bourne, Jason, Bourne, Jason, Bond, James, Bourne - twin JBs locked into a Freudian cycle of hopeless repetition, and All that is solid melts into lair - on Bond and the disappearance and destruction of architecture

Next: Bond's optics.

Small hello to Little Printer

BERG's Little Printer looks lovely. I haven't held or used it yet but it looks as if a gigantic amount of work has gone into it, and much into the invisible network/services bit - they are trying to build many layers at once. Rev Dan Catt gets at why it's interesting: "Placing a small, cute, whimsical, standalone modern printer into a living room or kitchen will change behaviour (slightly) and invite new uses." And Matt Webb: "We wanted to create a beautiful product that has a different place in your life than "printing." Something able to do work for you, and to bring unexpected delight. The response on the internet has been interestingly polarised - love/hate is generally a good thing.

Some haven't liked its price. I think that reaction may have a few roots:

• People may be accustomed to think of print and paper (and to a certain extent printers) as discardable ephemera, which affects perceived value.
• People may be accustomed to think of printing as performing a very utilitarian role, and from that perspective LP might seem like a poorly-featured utility.
• People may expect that something positioned as fun, small and contenty should be cheap - ie the LP object and its price are signalling confusingly different things.
• We discount the value of new products until they're in our hands and we see the surprising uses they're put to. Particularly so the value of their intangible, networked, third-party capabilities. During the pre-order period much of that value isn't yet sufficiently shelf-demonstrable - such is the pain of bootstrapping.

(A tangent relating to pricing. Last year I priced up a hardware product that's much simpler than LP for a small manufacturing run of a few hundred. We learned that mistakes are expensive, that the legal/regulatory environment is very complex, that warranties, replacements, support are difficult, and that to drive the price down you need to commit capital to achieve large production runs - the impact of truly mass manufacture on cost/price is an amazing thing: we'd have needed to sell at about £300+ just to break even. Hardware is really difficult and really expensive. Anyway, we didn't proceed! (Not that this is an apology for any particular pricing point: customers should care only about the value they hope to get from your product, rather than how much effort you put into making it.))

Looking at the Little Printer, I feel a little bit like I do about the cats and Ada's toys - I want to pick it up and give it a cuddle. I do not feel that way about our Samsung MNL-2855ND laser printer in the office. A different thing, in a different place, used differently. I hope BERG will do a Little Eye sibling.

Immediately I think of making publications. Small surprises and hellos to Ada. A daily ticket that says REMEMBER YOU WILL DIE to help keep me focused. A story about receipts.

I hope to enjoy the Little Printer as a beloved resource.

Pin pages to the wall and examine them with binoculars

Truman Capote wrote lying down, as did Marcel Proust, Mark Twain and Woody Allen.

Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Fernando Pessoa and George Sand all wrote standing up.

Roth also "walks half a mile for every page".

Roald Dahl wrote in a shed.

Philip Pullman used to write in a shed, but eventually gave it to an illustrator friend.

Umberto Eco has a converted church as his scriptorium. One floor has a computer, one has a typewriter, one in which he writes long-hand.

Haruki Murakami commutes into a city apartment in Tokyo where he writes.

After the publication of Joe Gould’s Secret, Joseph Mitchell came to the office at the The New Yorker magazine almost every day for the next thirty-two years without filing another word.

Dashiell Hammett published nothing after he was 39 - he felt he was repeating himself but never managed to find a new style he felt was good enough.

Ray Bradbury wrote an early version on Fahrenheit 451 in nine days on a rented typewriter in the UCLA library basement.

Will Self uses a wall of Post-It notes to plan and structure his writing.

Elmore Leonard writes on yellow legal pads.

Michel Faber corrected the first manuscript of The Crimson Petal and the White with house paint because he couldn't afford Tipp-Ex.

Gustav Hasford was a serial hoarder of very overdue library books, and had 10,000 of them in storage lockers.

Don DeLillo types each paragraph onto its own sheet of paper, so that he might concentrate better.

Gay Talese would pin pages of his writing to a wall and examine them from the other side of the room with binoculars.

Jonathan Safran Foer has a collection of blank sheets of paper.

Cormac McCarthy said that his perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper.

Ethan Canin copied John Cheever paragraphs out to learn what made the man's writing tick.

Anthony Trollope required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour.

J.G. Ballard, a fan of discipline in writing, prepared very long outlines and aimed for 1,000 words a day.

Walter Benjamin advocated delaying writing an idea as long as possible, so that it would be more maturely developed.

Richard Ford and his wife shot a book by Alice Hoffman, after she had given his book Independence Day an unfavourable review.

.

How I work is I recap the material from the original How we work posts and the more recent links.

Dream about art / MMXVI in MMXII

I had a dream the other night that I was visiting my old art school in Coventry. Artists were putting on a show in the painting studios on one of the top floors of the art block. They looked engaged and thoughtful, and their art looked strong.

Matt Jones was making a magnificent installation called IAMTHE. A golden room jewelled with precious stones, mirrors and lenses, with LEDs and neon flashing and occulting. Jones planned to display himself at the rear of the room inside a gold sarcophogeal suit, its massive encasing engraved with encrypted marks and barnacled with sensors and projectors emitting fields of lidar, laser, electro-magnetism, radio and light. He would be surrounded by symbols of confidence, success and good luck. It looked like an attack submarine's control room in the Palace of Versailles.

Jack Schulze was organising the show. He was striding around with two small shapes cocooned on his chest and back, giving instructions by pointing at people and wolf-glaring, always in silence because he didn't want to wake up the small shapes. He clicked his fingers at me and with a backhand indicated a corner space, the only empty one I'd seen - he wanted me to exhibit.

My immediate thought was to show an Overfinch-customised Range Rover Autobiography 5.0 GT with the piano wood steering wheel*. There would be a length of green garden hose piping its exhaust into a smoke-hazed interior, and behind the wheel would sit a screaming hedge fund manager, a heavy-handed reference to the popes of Bacon and Velazquez and Hirst's shark.

But the Range Rover would not have fit into the building's lift, so plan B was two, smaller pieces. On the floor, there would be a metal sphere the size of a head, made of the compressed layers of aluminium tin foil used to wrap my morning toast for the last five years. And on the wall I would install a telephone handset, in which could be heard my dead mother's voice. I'd recently learned that because she'd never had a mobile phone and had always used those handsets which were powered solely by the landline phone network itself, BT's operators had been able to capture and channel the echoes of her conversations that still vibrated up and down the network.

When I heard her ghost whisper in the receiver I said "I miss you", and woke up.

* I have embellished this dream, but only a tiny bit. The Jones IAMTHE image collaged from these sources: 1, 2, 3.

 

Glasgow art Jan 2012

Alasdair Gray, City Recorder at GoMA until 13 Aug 2012. In 1977 Gray was commissioned as Glasgow's artist recorder, and he drew about 30 pictures of daily street life, people, buildings, cars, fashions. Fantastic drawings. Gray describes the project:

I brought to the store sketches of well-known or typical Glaswegians with as much as possible of their everyday surroundings. I brought sketches of nearby streets, many of them semi-demolished because industries were being closed in what had once been a strong working-class district. That summer was unusually sunny so I worked a lot outside, drawing what I could see directly with pencil or Rotring pen. The drawings were pasted on to boards coated with special paint that sealed off acids beneath. Then I tinted them with watercolour, crayon pencil and in a few areas acrylic paint, though I chiefly used it as a background sky. I deliberately kept the colours light, to stop them distracting from the character of the outlines. In this way I finished 33 paintings before reluctantly leaving the job.

Harry Papadopoulos at Street Level Photo Works until 25 Feb 2012. Great photos of the post-punk scene in Glasgow and London. Edwyn Collins, Devo, The Associates, many others, all looking like children. Reminded me of Ewen Spencer's work in the 2000s.

Tales of the City at GoMA until 1 Dec 2012. Standouts: Daphne Wright's project for the Gorbals redevelopment and Martin Boyce's ventilation grilles. The rest a bit average.

You, Me, Something Else at GoMA until 18 Mar 2012. Andrew Miller's work is funny and there's something in the work of Karla Black and James McLardy (whose work reminds me of Martin Westwood somewhat), but the rest is weak. More images.

I am here / The best... totally shitty / Steve Jobs biography

Notes on Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, 2011.

“If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll fix it later,” he said. “That’s what other companies do.” 

Despite the occasional dud product and brink-of-death corporate experience, it's impressive how Apple systemised the creation of excellent products and services. They do it by being brutally focused, by simplifying, by pursuing high quality and emotionally resonant products over short-term profit, by vertically integrating and tightly controlling the components, processes and experience as much as possible. All qualities to inspire.

The great products raised the design and desirability bar, uniting consumers in a high-end version of Warhol's dictum about mass-manufactured products - you know that Liz Taylor drinks Coke too ¹. There's a fair bit of honesty about earlier hardware products that weren't so insanely great, but less on the recent - there's nothing on the horrible spaghetti that iTunes bloated into ².

There is something interesting in the way that the act of selling is concentrated into Jobs himself ³, into his deal-making with Gates, Disney et al, and later the one-last-thing-ing at Apple's events, and to a lesser extent into the product itself, the adverts, the Apple stores. We don't read much about the analysts in Apple's sales and marketing organisations. But all that's to be expected in a biography.

Because its lens is the individual, a biography inevitably supports the great man theory ⁴ of management, in which a hero single-handedly achieves great things, often against the odds. The theory is common in management analysis today - Jobs the visionary - but is problematic: Asymco has a nice trio of posts querying the structural integrity of the great/stupid manager theory: Apple, Nokia, RIM. And indeed even within Apple the hero narrative rankled. Ive: "it hurts when he takes credit for one of my designs" ⁵.

People were either “enlightened” or “an asshole.” Their work was either “the best” or “totally shitty.”

Jobs was a very talented and driven man, but he was also capricious and troubled, and must have been very unpleasant to work for at times.

“He would shout at a meeting, ‘You asshole, you never do anything right,’” Debi Coleman recalled. “It was like an hourly occurrence.

Ive again:

there are other times, I think honestly, when he’s very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. 

Now that we know the full story - the roller coaster and triumph at work and his illness and unfairly early death - it's tempting to re-interpret the narrative, to read Apple's products as the Freudian (solid state) death drive rendered in glass and aluminium, a collective memento mori in the cloud, the thanatological sublime. Or as the opposite: to describe his project as an attempt to make products that utterly transcend their ephemerality, denying their and his ultimate end-point ("I am here."). But neither would be correct: this was simply an intense man who believed in and for most part achieved the consumer electronic products he wanted.

Jobs's epiphany, 2005:

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

But how terribly sad to have spent so little time with your wife and family. In pouring so much energy and attention into the work, a deficit was surely felt in life, at home.

“Why did you do it?” I asked. “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said.

.

The footnotes:

1. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), 1975: "What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."
   Incidentally, Warhol and Keith Haring tried MacPaint at Sean Lennon's ninth birthday party in 1985 - Jobs had brought Lennon a Macintosh as a present. Warhol: "Look! Keith! I drew a circle!", but we don't know if the circle was perfect.
2. I'd hoped for but didn't get insight into the conversation about the apparent design disconnect between minimal hardware design and kitschy software design. A guess then: either Apple isn't as integrated and consistent as we'd all believe, or Apple unashamedly aims for that emotional resonance over a strict truth to the material.
3. Not from the Isaacson book, but Mossberg: "He could sell. Man, he could sell." - from Myslewski's The Life and Times of Steven Paul Jobs, 2011.
4. Heroic pre-history starts with the Greek myths, but Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes develops a theory of great men in 1841, Herbert Spencer's criticism of it fifty years later in The Study of Sociology is that the theory is obviously massively reductive, and he suggests that society maketh the man before the man can remake his society.
5. Although compare Tim Cook: "I've never given a rat's ass about that." 

 

Good books for SF readers

If you like science fiction, these are very well written books you might like - some of them SF, some not.

• Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness or Dispossessed
• Faber, Under the Skin
• Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt
• De Abaitua, The Red Men
• Mitchell, Number9Dream or Cloud Atlas
• Ballard, High Rise or Supercannes
• Calvino, Cosmicomics or anything he did really
• Ings, Weight of Numbers
• Borges, all of it
• Bester, Tiger Tiger (The Stars My Destination)
• Nabokov, Ada or Ardor
• Gloss, Dazzle of Day
• Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan
• M John Harrison, Light
• Zamyatin, We
• Disch, Camp Concentration
• Delany, Babel-17 or Dhalgren

 

Art in London, Oct 2011 - Jan 2012 (updated)

(Note to self.) If I were in London now or in the next few weeks, instead of Frieze I'd probably be getting to these shows:

Saatchi/C4's New Sensations' show The Future Can Wait, with James Jessop, closed 17 Oct. I was at art school with Jim, he's a strong painter.

Charles Avery at Pilar Corrias, til 12 Nov. It's a small but very good show - he's such a great and careful draughtsman. The gallerist told me that the big drawings take him a year and are all pre-sold. His world-making reminds me of Paul Noble (another good draughtsman - see below).

Charles Matton at AVA Annex, til 16 Nov (although the website since implies that it has already closed). Thanks to Tom Armitage for the pointer.

Friend Stuart Buchanan at Modern Artists Gallery (nb which isn't in London), til 19 Nov.

Martin Westwood at Stanley Picker, til 26 Nov.

Paul Noble at Gagosian, 10 Nov - 17 Dec.

Wilhelm Sasnal at Whitechapel, til 1 Jan 2012 (and while there see the Rothko paintings, til 26 Feb 2012).

Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern, til 8 Jan 2012 (and while there see the Tacita Dean turbine hall installation, until 11 Mar 2012).

A Piece of Paper (group show) at Madder 139, 16 Nov - 14 Jan 2012.

John Martin at Tate Britain, til 15 Jan 2012.

Malicious Damage: The life and crimes of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell at Islington Museum, til 21 Jan 2012.

Leonardo Da Vinci at National Gallery, 9 Nov - 5 Feb 2012. Leonardo doesn't make me gibber the way that Velazquez does, but this is a truly rare event - it's the first time both Virgin of the Rocks paintings have been shown together, and probably the only time in your lifetime. You will need to book tickets.

Suwappu fragment

Suwappu is by Dentsu and by Berg.

What happened next.

• Fox: <Zzzip> Look at what they make you give
• Deer: <Ping> We're running out of time - please help. Badger's dreams are getting worse!
• Fox: <Zzipp> OK! We need the others @bear @owl

They turn to go, sunshine and lamplight glinting from the dust hanging in the air at the crossroads.

In a clearing stands a Bear with teeth and a Rabbit who looks like a gentleman-pirate. It is always raining on Bear, but Bear is from the mountains and doesn't mind.

• Bear jumps <Thrummm!>, silently, points. But says nothing.
• Rabbit: <Ting> Yass. Lets go to work
• Rabbit: <Ting> betimes the tube

Bear and Rabbit tap their Oyster cards as they enter the tube.

Owl and Raccoon are together by a river. Raccoon is the trickster-fixer. Owl is a mentat with his wings carefully folded behind his back. Owl pauses, thinks.

• Owl: <chirp!> His fears, the eyefires threaten us all. We will help.
• Raccoon: Oh @badger! Tiger's blood! I can fix it! <Nangg!>
• Raccoon: <Nanng!> I found this boat - lets get going! Quik!
• Rabbit: <Tong!> Tube broken. Stupid warrens in ground.

Bear sighs and waits quietly, but Rabbit simmers impatiently.

• Bear 8X8 Rabbit
• Rabbit-bear: Dig to freedom! <Ting!>
• Bear-rabbit: <Thrumkmkm!>

Owl and Raccoon are in the boat, drifting down the river.

• Owl: <fwirp!> @raccoon remembrys me of a pussycat I once knew
• Raccoon: Shut it Iggle Piggle <NANG-NAHHHNG!>

They fall into a pointed silence.

Time passes. 

Owl and Raccoon's boat gently runs aground as the river widens out onto a vast plain with a settlement to one side. On the shore are Deer and Fox.

• Raccoon: Ho @Deer @Fox
• Deer: Can you help Badger?
• Owl: Will there be compensation? <chirp>
• Deer boggles: He *needs* us.
• Owl: <chirp> You should let us wet our beaks a little

Deer frowns. Then Owl blushes.

• Owl: <Meep>

The ground shudders, and Bear-Rabbit and Rabbit-Bear spring from a hole.

• Deer 8X8 Raccoon
• Raccoon-Deer 8X8 Owl
• Raccoon-Owl 8X8 Bear-Rabbit
• Bear-Owl 8X8 Raccoon-Rabbit
• ...
• All: ha!

It's quite a party. Eventually, they all swap back.

Badger, despite some recent unsettling news, is starting to feel a bit happier because he can see that the others love him. Perhaps these lasers can be put to use fighting crime.

ID card database destroyed (a Freudian impression)

A database built to hold the fingerprints and personal details of millions of ID card holders has today been publicly destroyed. Around 500 hard disk drives and 100 back up tapes containing the details of 15,000 holders have been magnetically wiped and shredded. They will soon be incinerated in an environmentally friendly waste-for-energy process. [Home Office, 10 Feb 2011]

This story - the decommissioning of the ID Card database - immediately reminded me of Derrida and Freud. Bravo, Home Office. But here's one of the problems with data, databases and assurance: when the data itself is intangible and easily copiable, it's hard to evidence its destruction with any certainty. You might essay a metonymic evocation of the database with the material the data was stored on (and here's another example) or hold up a talisman:

Or place the means of destruction on stage. Better: ritualise the moment of destruction - with a gloved middle finger, Immigration Minister "Damian Green presses the button". ID confetti:

And then you'd need to destroy them again with a purifying flame, rendering pieces of disk platter jewellery into smoke: "They will soon be incinerated in an environmentally friendly waste-for-energy process."

Freud might call that the governmental mute death drive, attempting to destroy memory's archive, but without leaving any archival trace of its own (see Derrida on Freud, Archive Fever, 10). But the remainders are cinders or shadows, the ghost of the archive, smoke from its incineration, memory of the identity carte postale, and a new archive is immediately created.

Favourites at Frieze art fair 2010

 

Wilhelm Sasnal, Peter Peri, Lorna Simpson, Frederick Kunath, Robert Longo, Ged Quinn, Alex Buldakov, Stas Volyaslovsky, Keiichi Tanaami, Charles Avery, Thomas Struth, Seb Patane, Ariel Schlesinger, Walton Ford.

More here.

God-like resonance / for a priceless coin of time: David Mitchell

Notes from David Mitchell's talk on his The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet at the Brighton Festival, 6 May 2010. 

Gremlins in the system... ooh I have a God-like resonance tonight [the audio is erratic, by turns echoing and then cutting out]

[Dejima as C18th] cultural cat-flap

The Dutch named their warehouses.

For a priceless coin of time, their hands are linked by a few inches of bitter herb [...] I wish, he thinks, spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket. [...] Crickets scritter and clirk in the garden's low walls of stone [The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, p122-3]

Elmore Leonard's dictum that readers skip description but not dialogue, as if the quote marks catch the eye.

all of my book [a slip of the tongue but appropriate since they are all one book in some senses]

inability to say what you want [is the interesting bit in dialogue/communication - this reality of miscommunication present in much of his writing, eg the stammer in Black Swan Green]

Use of one, then two then three narrators to gradually dial up intensity and pace.

floor became the wall [lifted from a shot in Donnie Darko, and an attempt to avoid cliche]

On developing characters: starting with their autobiography - their relationships to the key people in their life, and attitude to money, love, work, sex, death, etc.

Film as the guiding/organising metaphor of perception/experience since the second half of the C20th. Thinking in terms of camera angles and shots.

Questions on William Golding from the floor: acknowledged as an important influence, and similarly jump from one style to another "like a human flea"

The book's published next week but they're selling at his author talks already - I've only dipped into it so far, but it looks great.

Related: How we work: David Mitchell.

Bond: From Russia With Lunch

Notes from the City Reads Panel: From Russia With Love, 2 May 2010. Brighton's collective reading event - City Reads - took on Ian Fleming's From Russia with Love this year.

At the talk: Andrew Lycett - Fleming's official biographer; Simon Winder - author of The Man Who Saved Britain: a Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond; and Rowan Pelling - broadcaster, journalist and former editor of the Erotic Review. (Lycett is knowledgeable but seems a bit uncomfortable to be there. Winder is clever, entertaining, and his book is very funny.)

AL: IF was getting bore at the point of writing FRWL

SW: Bond's absence from the first half of the book - mythologising

RP: description of Red Grant: creepy, sexy

AL: Ann described IF's work as "pornographic nonsense". Didn't encourage IF, who wanted to write literary novels. Most successful is Casino Royale [really?!]. IF always felt he was competing with Ann's circle of literary writer friends.

SW: FRWL is for small stakes

Pleasingly ordinary, mundane. 

Is there a link between higher stakes and higher consumption? - Bond's consumption of drinks, cigarettes and food is extraordinary. The drinks mark him as a functioning alcoholic, the smokes must have announced him to his targets as the assassin with the tubercular cough, and the food... he'd be unable to move.

AL: FRWL shows a domestic Bond: jams at breakfast, fussy, camp

SW: IF obliged to be a tough-guy - bluff? 

SW: IF died alcoholic.

Fleming-Bond, wish-fulfilment.

SW: Gypsies in FRWL: "naked, trying to bite each other's breasts" - couldn't be portrayed in the film

AL: Bond as "blunt instrument of a government department" [and so very, very blunt!]

SW: structure of the books: great setups which then deteriorate terribly - often as if he reached a self-imposed page limit and then became indifferent

Leitmotif: the steady and inglorious decline of books, Fleming, empire, Bond...

AL: it's as if the process of writing the Bond novels directly contributed to his death [a weakening, dissipation] of old age [before his time], of smoking, drinking, of the emotional energy the books took [of the marital fights; Winder: "a thousand impacts"]

AL: Was writing FRWL as his marriage cracked up - had met his girlfriend Blanche in early 56

SW: Bond appearing to die in FRWL is unnecessary to the plot - so IF is toying with the idea of stopping by plotting Bond's demise...

SW: write from the point of view of someone in the catering office of the volcano lair in YOLT

RP: relates the drinking to that in Mad Men

And the timings fit: Bond, eg You Only Live Twice in Aug 1962 and Mad Men, series 2, in 1962. Imagine Bond as an ten-years-older Don Draper missing meetings, fretting about the missile-crisis era, drinking himself to death, slumped in the stalls of the executive floor toilet...

AL's biographic scoop was the revelation of IF's sado-masochistic whipping. 

AL: some say "M" is Mother 

Although Lycett sounds unconvinced of that, it perhaps chimes with the thread of sado-aberrant sexuality running through the books: sadism passim, what appear to be faint hints of homosexuality here and there, and the curious fact that all of the girls he really wants he can't keep.

Related: All that is solid melts into lair, The name's Bourne, Jason, Bourne, Jason, Bond, James, Bourne, I'm not angry.

Listening to 1997: Marantz, Acoustic Energy, Yamaha

Time marches on, and you give up on listening to music in that serious and focused way you did when you had all the time on the world, so you clear the loft of some vintage gear: a Marantz CD-67 SE cd player that played B.I.G. and Chopin, a Marantz PM-66 SE amplifier that was as flattering to Grace Jones as Lovejoy, a pair of Acoustic Energy Aegis One speakers that have never played Hootie and the Blowfish, and finally a Yamaha KX-580 SE tape deck for the cassette bad boy in your life. I mention them here in case you're interested in some beautifully designed massive chunks of metal that come in big cardboard boxes, contain very little computing and can only play music in formats that are obsolete or nearly obsolete. I imagine that the amp and speakers have held up the best. Auctions end in 6 days, you might get these for under a tenner.

Fluttering drafts, twitter fabrication

Last year, I talked to Kim and Matt about doing some twittery fiction, started writing some, got bogged down in trying to make it good, and then abandoned it. But this is the year of getting more work done, so I went back to it briefly and brutally, and here’s something over-long, with gaps in it, definitively unfinished.

One of the characteristics that interested me most about Twitter is pacing – the frequency between messages, and their speed. I wanted to explore that rhythm, and to try write within the Twitter’s natural scene – that of the mundane commute, meetings, coffees: office-desk rather than kitchen-sink realism. Or rather: I wanted to start from that realism, because no-one, when they write “running” on Twitter, is actually running. They’re reporting after the fact, announcing an intention, or fabricating. Which is the second interesting thing – Twitter’s performativity. Twitter is as much theatrical performance as conversation. Un-realism.

So: a story empty of character and reasonable plot, and a blank-sheet MacGuffin. A story for an audience of 85, and a tentative use of direct messages that only a few of the audience will receive.

The story takes place over a single daytime, and was pruned down from 100+ messages to a slightly more wieldy 25 odd, but that’s still too many for the recipient to eyeball. But here, this was it, with the times I scheduled (with Twaitter) the messages.

0815 (direct message to c.6 people) / Something scary happened - I'm sending you these messages in case something happens to me

0818 / From an empty seat on the morning tube I’d picked up some blank sheets of paper – they’d be good for drawing on

0821 / As I left the train, a dark suit bumped into me heavily. He grabbed at the sheets of paper in my hand but I pulled free.

0824 / I started walking up the escalator. After a moment he followed, taking the steps two at a time, rapidly. Two others followed him. 

0827 / I went faster as he closed in. I fell, landing on my elbow – 3 cuts matching the step’s teeth. http://bit.ly/972qjr

0832 / When I flex they re-open sharply as if re-cut every time the escalator step completes a full circuit. Have I left skin on its teeth?

0838 / But then – no sign of the men as I got to the train station. The next train was leaving in a couple of minutes. Just made it.

1000 / Relaxed a bit. Late commuters respecting social space and taking seats evenly spaced from each other. None of them look out of place.

1010 / The escalator climbs a mile and a half hourly for about 19 hours every day. 

1030 / Why grab the sheets of paper? – they’re blank, scrap, empty. And did I see a weapon? This isn't real.

1040 / The sheets of paper aren’t new. No printed, written or distinguishing marks. Nothing except creases - minimal evidence of my fall.

1110 / I hold them up to the window. The train and the sunlight turn them to overlapping, translucent panes. Fluttering drafts.

1330 / I think those men are now in this carriage some seats away. They arrived separately, but all watch me without eyes ever alighting.

1345 / Tried to call the office and home, but voicemails everywhere. And what message could I whisper? The police wouldn’t believe this.

1430 / The watchers are alert at each station to see if I leap off: they tense, ready to spring up.

1500 / I imagine attacking: sitting next to them. But none of us can move – we’re trapped between the protocols of commuting and of the chase.

1530 / Again I think: is this happening? My mobile buzzes with a sender-less message: RT []: @rod keep the papers from them!

1534 / I look up. The first man is standing, at last looking directly at me, unblinking. I shiver, frozen.

1600 / The train is slowing. Two other men step up and flank him, move forward as one. I stumble backwards, towards the end of the carriage.

1605 / I step into the vestibule between the carriages. It twitches like a huge gullet - a sudden sense of scale dropping away from me.

1608 / They grab my arms, snarl "Paper now!" Pull free as train lurches. Free hand waving madly in front of the door sensor.

1700 / In the last carriage, last door. Train pulls in. Again we ape commuter behaviour: ignore each other during the pause before the door opens.

1705 / I hurry out fearfully, they saunter. One pursuer remains on the train, his face distorted and delayed in glass.

1710 / Called police – on hold. No time. Run away from the station - empty streets. They let me run, then make ground without effort.

1715 / Sun setting, shops shut. A building ahead – lit. A library. Run up steps and straight into the ranked shelves.

1719 / They soon follow, well drilled, fanning out. Look back – shadows among the dim stacks.

1726 / I'm in shelves of files - thrust the sheets of paper into an un-labelled sheaf, and quickly move on

1729 / Silhouettes approach. White smiles and dark weapons. I raise my empty hands -

1745 (direct message to c.6 people) / My skin on the escalator will now have travelled fifteen miles, rotating inexorably, catching me up and leaving me behind.

Reception ranged from concern to enthusiastic encouragement - many thanks to those who kindly commented. I had got so wrapped up in the journey/chase that it hadn’t occurred to me that the sheets of paper themselves would be of interest. I also forgot that a story should really signal its ending clearly if it is going to be dropped into a reader's constant flow of twitter messages. Perhaps a second chapter might be conceived, in which the protagonist teams up with librarians and information taxonomers to turn the tables on the pursuers... (Update: I should add that the difference between the story as printed on the page and as performed into the twitter flow was as much a revelation for me too, only the other way round - this slab on the page was what it looked liked in the writing, though I did make some frequency charts to make sure that its U-shape looked ok. But it felt very different watching it go out. And the feedback was very gratifying and exciting: it was tempting to re-write on the fly to respond, but I had a busy day at the office, so I let it play out as originally written.)

Related/influences/inspiration: Novels in three lines, Ian Bogost’s Bloomsday, Will Ashon’s Trundlespike, Tom Armitage’s Twit4Dead, very short fiction passim, David Markson, ‘The Purloined Letter’, Duchamp meets spy fiction - particularly Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, Jonathan Safran Foer's collection of blank paper, Candida Hofer's libraries.