rodcorp

Reading

• We watched the tv series of My Brilliant Friend, which is good, and I am now reading the book by Elena Ferrante. It is very good. Darker, and more body horror than you'd expect from the book cover, which seems quite far off what it is actually about.
• I am also reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel because book 3 is out soon, so books 1 and 2 must now be read in haste. It is quite dense and is excellent. Funnier than you'd expect. Perhaps it's easier to keep track of the characters if you've seen the (also excellent) tv series.
• If you wrote a current-day Wolf Hall, would it be set at Facebook and the other big tech titans? Is Elon Musk our Henry VIII? Maybe Zuckerberg is, getting his oxtures hairdried before doing talks so he doesn't look nervous (or so says Stephen Levy's new book).
• Daughter 2 slipped over at school in some mud and got covered. Sadly no photo. She said it was the worst thing to happen to her today, and the best thing was that she saved a worm, which I misheard as "saved the world". There is a story in that.

Ceramics is experiment and then hope - weeknote

• I packed up some pots to take to a kiln an hour away. Wonder what % of them will survive by the time they've been there and back twice, and fired twice. I've already lost the best bowl, just trying to put bubble wrap round it. " I said "I'm not sure if it needs to be a low bisque fire because the stoneware's maturing range is..." and she said "I bisque everything at 1000 degrees" which made everything much simpler and was a relief. Ceramics is experiment and then hope.
• DanT went on a Proustian run down memory lane. Football365 is such a long time ago, its edges a bit hazy in the 20-year fog. But looking back it was utterly formative - you don't fully realise until much later. I learned so much from Dan, Danny, Simon and everyone else there. Dan's brilliant charitable project is to run a metre for every one of the 2.5m cancer sufferers in the UK. Running the world.
• Anna nearly reached a milestone in her retirement fund, which is great. We talked about how different ways of representing what your target is and where you're at today might be more effective at nudging your own behaviour in the right directions. Interesting behavioural design questions. (I mention this so I have an excuse to say that my bullet point is right next to Freddie Ljungberg's bullet point.)
• Work meetings that don't go well often reveal lines of political stress that were previously invisible to you, but equally often the fix is out of your hands. Good work chat with past, current and secret future collaborators.
• Time spent thinking about living in a forest: quite a lot.

A weeknote

• One of the gerbils is frequently renamed. He was Thollo, then Chelky, then Dusky, then Strawberry and now Sunflower, and we are to refer to him as her. I secretly call them Keith and they probably calls themself Sharptooth The Brave. The other gerbil is still called Smudge. This consistency/flexibility of naming reflect their owners quite well.
• I have done six weeks of ceramic mould making. It was good. If anyone needs a vase that is the shape of a bag of rice from Lidl, well you let me know.
• Some direct mail from a "wealth solutions" co: "Try this maths exercise... Decide the age you want to retire, then deduct the age you are now and then multiply it by 12. E.G.: 65-48=17, 17x12=204. The number you arrive at is the amount of pay days you have left to make the money you need to retire with! The next number you need is [their phone number]" - nice to see some copy that is punchy and flabby at the same time. (If you are way behind track on your retirement planning, I'm not sure it will make you pick up the phone. If you are way ahead, likewise?)

Weeknote of weeknotes

• Phil has a new pair of jeans: "The beautiful circle of life."
• Ben finds an unpackaged store in a surprising place: "Good is good, but it's better when it's at a mass market scale even if it's a little bit less good" (hello Ben!)
• Matt's job posting website had 2,680 jobs on it in early Aug
• Alice is a king-side knight (frequently wanting to do nothing: yes)
• Tom is doing pre-interview interviews: "there’s nothing to be gained by anyone being surprised"
• Denise: "When I think about writing weeknotes I realise how much thinking you have to do about thinking"
• Nat watched Legally Blonde: "They are all kind, fun, care for one another, support one another’s choices wholeheartedly and work hard for their friendships"

Week 834

 

This is a "weeknote": it is week 834 of this blog, and it has been such a long time that this post will surely have no readers. Hello.

• We went on holiday to Islay and Jura, both of which are beautiful. Great landscapes, beaches, variable weather. Every car that you drive past waves at you, which is charming. There was an entire skeleton of a dolphin on one beach.
• I read Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom on holiday: autocratic gov't decides that the way to fix the populace’s fighty and unproductive nature is to split the country into four along ley lines, and move the population around so that each of the four quarters contain just one type of people, the four types being medieval humours (choleric, phlegmatic, sanguine, melancholic). Slightly hallucinatory and good.
• One night there was an island-wide power cut. No power, cooking, light, heat, mobile signal or water because the house's water is pumped from a private borehole. We had wind-up torches but there was some Brexpocalyptic teeth-gnashing and I have started browsing Amazon for a diesel generator and a camouflaged bandanna.
• Giles is listening to 1001 albums. This reminded me of a story from my time at Football365/Music365 back in the mists of 199x. To celebrate the millennium they decided they'd review 2000 albums for the year 2000. It was a massive undertaking: they signed up loads of music journos to write reviews for months, and then wouldn't let us place the content in a content publishing platform so we hand built a massive website to contain all of these excellent album reviews. It was good work. It also suddenly disappeared when a server got switched off, probably when the 365 group was sold to Sky a couple of years later. I sometimes think about all of that human effort sitting on a rusting hard disk in the middle layers of a landfill somewhere.
• Zig and Zag came home from the pet shop with two (2) gerbils. Tupac and Biggie were firmly rejected as names. They are currently called Smudge and Dusky, though this may change.

Mobbu's PassWear raising funds on Seedrs

Disclosure and disclaimer: 1, I worked at Mobbu until Jan 2015, and I have a beneficial interest in it doing well in future, so I have bias. 2, This is obviously not investment or financial advice. 3, I don't officially speak for Mobbu. 4, Read the investment notices on Seedrs.

 

Mobbu is raising funds on Seedrs for PassWear, a software product that improves the security of apps and data on mobile phones. You use PassWear by simply taking a photo of your watch. It uses strong crypto and a wearable smartwatch to replace passwords or add a second security factor. The result is manageable mobile security and reduced training/support costs for the customer and quicker and easier experience for their users.

Should you invest? Some questions:

Is the PassWear product any good?
Yes. Security software products are inherently complex - they're harder to immediately grasp than something we use or encounter daily like a cup of coffee. So there's a fair bit to read here and here, but in truth a key part of any good solution must be to simplify, manage or hide that inherent complexity for the people that will use the product. Several years' work has gone into the product and testers have always praised its speed and ease of use. My view: the product is strong and going in the right direction. 

Do Mobbu know what they're doing?
Yes. The team is very smart and capable across the product/technology/security spectrum (and it's fair to say that I greatly miss working with and learning from them). They're very committed, and in the last couple of years have become experts in the field of development for wearables. There's a real track record of customer and financial delivery too, both on the PassWear project itself and before that, with product delivery to challenging markets where public safety was critical.

But is there a need? Who cares about security anyway?
Yes. Many individuals don't care about security - eg they use the same passwords everywhere, decline to use two factor authentication where offered etc - though that may change over time as (regrettably) identity theft and other breaches grow and touch more people. But I believe many businesses and public sector organisations have a need now: it's 2015 and a large variety of mobile devices/networks are used as the primary means for accessing or creating valuable corporate data (viz BYOD), which also means a harder job for IT security teams. And the risks of data loss are real. For more on the market, see here.

But PassWear relies on people having smartwatches - is anyone buying them?
Yes. The past 12 months have seen the smartwatch market grow significantly. Samsung and Pebble have done pretty well. Apple don't release sales numbers for their Watch, but they hinted at 3+m units and $1bn revenue in the first 90 days and I'd guess Apple Watch's year 1 sales will be 10-20m.

Will I definitely make money from my investment?
No. If you need a guaranteed return, you shouldn't be investing in businesses on Seedrs. Invest in something safer like a fixed rate cash ISA, though your return - the interest paid - is going to be low. When you invest in companies you're obtaining a chance of making a large return - the risk of failure is higher, but the expected reward will also be higher if the business performs well. Any investment you make should match your aims and your attitude to risk, and yeah it's good to talk to an independent financial advisor.

 

Pebble's 2015 Kickstarter: $20m for 100k watches at $210 ASP

• Pebble's second Kickstarter campaign finished a couple of days ago. It launched the new Time and Time Steel watches (colour e-paper display, long battery life, and the intriguing smart straps). 
• The campaign achieved prepayments of $20m. It had a dozen tiers, from 1 Pebble Time for min $159, up to 30 Pebble Times for min 5k. 
• Numbers: the breakdown suggests 59k Times and 37k Time Steels sold - ~96k total. However, those breakdown numbers undercount the the backers and pre-payments versus the headlines, so I've gone with the latter. 78k backers pre-paying $20.3m, average pre-payment per backer is $260 and the average selling price per watch is just over $210. More detail in a handy spreadsheet.
• The purpose of the campaign is as interesting as the numbers. Pebble's first Kickstarter collected $10m in 2012, and they raised venture of $15m in 2013 - this campaign wasn't needed to fund product discovery or manufacturing capability. Instead, this is Kickstarter as launch event and marketing channel. Perhaps also a demonstration of the Pebble's viability (or even M&A attractiveness) in the face of competition from Apple and Android Wear vendors Samsung, Sony et al.
• It's hard to project future sales. Last time: the Kickstarter in April 2012 had 69k backers for 85k watches, total $10.3m. And by Dec 2014, Pebble had added a watch model (the Steel) and sold 1m watches.
• What's different this time? Apple and Android Wear vendors are in the market, but the latter were already in the market for a fair bit of that 2012-14 period. Selling 95k watches in 30 days is an achievement for everyone except Apple. Is it fair to say they'll sell a million watches again with the Time models? I think it will be a harder ask.
• Expectations: Pebble to survive as small player in a clever watch niche (as distinct from wrist-computing). Or perhaps become an M&A prize to a consumer electronics mfr that wants a differentiator vs stock Android Wear.
• Update, 20 April: Apple is estimated to have sold 1-2.3m Watches on pre-order. See also here, Above Avalon and this detailed piece by Carl Howe. Apple Watch is several markets, the lowest-end of which may overlap with Pebble's.

Neurology's art

I wrote a short piece on neurology and drawing for the MS Trust's quarterly magazine Open Door. The version posted below is slightly longer and has more images.

*

Modern neurology started with drawing. Santiago Ramón y Cajal would spend his mornings examining black-stained cell samples under the microscope. In the afternoons he drew his observations from memory, spidery drawings on paper in black ink. He drew optic and cerebellar cells, brain nerves. He borrowed botanic names for the cellular structures he saw – rosettes, thorns – and rendered them with both the naturalist’s specificity and the explorer’s delight.

Cajal had wanted to become an artist, but those of us with MS should be grateful his father pushed him toward medicine. By the end of the nineteenth century he led the field. His work was the foundation of the neuron doctrine, a scientific leap that showed that the nervous system is made of numberless neurons – discrete, connected, communicating cells.

Images have been central to neurology ever since. In the diagnostic phase, we are magnetically imaged as smoky grey MRIs, gadolinium inking our spinal fluid, we stare at flashing chessboards to test our eyes. Diagnosis requires an aesthetic judgement by our consultants. In the MS literature, our prognosis is a line on a graph whose peaks and troughs describe a possible but unpredictable future health trajectory. The uncertainty asks for a drawn line.

Neurology’s art subtracts to illuminate: Cajal’s drawings and MRI images are a way of discarding data, of filtering down to the good information. It’s analogous to the working of the neural system itself, the brain filtering the neural flood down to manageable information.

Our experience of MS is at times impressionistic. Cognition modulated, senses altered: bleached, rippling, blurry, dancing vision in bright light and in the heat. The wobbling ground falling away under our feet. These, heat, fatigue and other invisible symptoms are explored in a new Australian photographic project, Seeing MS. The commissioned photographs tend towards metaphor – spasticity is an image of two feet and a walking stick in a landscape of forbidding banana skins – and the user-submitted ones are illustrative – ‘this is what it’s like to have blurred vision’.

Neurology's art is also indirect. Diagnostic imaging operated at several removes: magnified, chemically stained (staining cells started in the 17th century: Anton van Leeuwenhoek splashed a mixture of saffron and brandy onto muscle specimens), and until recently only with dead cells. In the 1820s, achromatic lens tech suddenly improved discover(abilit)y, but nerve cells remained to see because their "fine parts barely alter a beam of light passing through them". For reasons unknown, the Golgi stain and more modern techniques highlight only a few neurons among many. Diagnosis via a selective blindness.

Neurological disorders also inspire art. Katherine Sherwood learned to paint left-handed after a stroke; the results were bolder than before, and she has featured Cajal’s drawings in her works. 

Dundee artist Kirsty Stevens is turning images of lesions into rendered 3D printed objects. Cradle your lesion that you may love and know it better.

And art can give something back. The MS Trust’s Secret Art show raises funds to support everyone affected by MS. For last year’s show, I thought of Cajal and the shape of nerves, and quickly drew a tree in red ink and one in blue. Mine were more diffuse than Cajal’s confident nerves, the trees dissolving into the landscape somewhat. Next year, I’d like to have an MRI taken of my brain while it looks at an MRI of my brain. There will be hundreds of good pictures by top artists for sale for just £45 in the show. Pick up a bargain and support the MS Trust’s vital work.

Multiple

  An MRI of a brain, not mine.

I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis this year, an auto-immune condition that scars the nervous system. It's a story of messages repeated, interrupted, lost, echoed, divided, shadowed. This message has been a year in the posting, well, two and half years. Let me quickly tell you how I joined the brotherhood and sisterhood of the janked neuron. Bear with me.

Summer 2011: A signal from my body that I couldn’t fully see: rippling, wobbling vision in one eye. Looking into my lens, the specialist saw only floaters. Summer 2012: Bzzt- - Crack crackle. Pins and needles and numbness in my feet, and then it crept up my legs, then up my torso, and then down my arms. My hands fizzed constantly and felt nothing. I couldn’t hold things, button a shirt, or tell if a towel was wet without pressing it to my face. I couldn’t type with any speed, or without a litter of mistakes. I wrote this: Afriad that i will never do these things properly again: type, write, hold, draw, feel, walk, cycle. afriad that this is the best it will evber be. nafriad that it will get worse. i am using spellcheck for the first time because i cannot trust my hands to type accurately. When i type, daggers of ice run from the key up my fingers. typing is the same as becoming frozen. Our second daughter was six weeks old before I could feel her skin.

A series of blood tests, referrals and delays sent me to a neurologist in December - I chose London hoping it would have the best neurologists and be better insulated from any future NHS cuts. The neurologist asked many questions and did many physical tests, and showed me a diagnostic diagram that exactly described me: a collar and cape from neck to shoulders and upper torso, and she sent me to the machines. I lay on a platform, my head fixed in a cage, and was slid into a MRI scanner. A huge hyper-technological object in an observed clean-room. Deafening sounds heard and felt of very heavy objects being moved very quickly. A glowing white torpedo tube. Machine arbor type, space time. Every atom in my body was magnetised, and I became a picture showing a cervical lesion, a thoracic one, and a pair in the brain. During the lumbar puncture, a nerve was plucked like a guitar string - electric shock. The neurologist: “These findings are in keeping with demyelination and the possibility of an underlying diagnosis of MS was explained”.

30 January 2013: the consultant says “This is relapsing remitting MS and I think we should start treatment as soon as possible”. Though was diagnosis was half-expected, my mind empties of questions, and I feel as if a bright light is shining on me from above, pressing me down. We ask some faltering questions, there are tears. The letter arrives weeks later: “multiple intracranial lesions [...] most suggestive of two sequential cervical cord relapses [...] hence meets the criteria for relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis and is eligible for disease modifying treatment.”

Multiple Sclerosis is the immune system attacking itself. White blood cells cross the blood-brain barrier in strength, identify the brain and nervous system as a foreign body, and attack it. Nerve fibres are scarred (sclerosis) - stripped of myelin, a fatty sheath which insulates the fibre. Once demyelinated, nerves conduct neuro-electric messages slowly. Or partially, or unpredicatably, or not at all. If you're lucky, you have Relapsing Remitting MS: your body is attacked (relapse) and later recovers (remission). I am lucky.

I want to know everything. At a neurology research open day at a university, I watch a freshly donated human brain being lifted out of a bucket. We are just fatty jellyfish, neural blancmanges. I also want to know nothing - MS research news is a torrent that I can't keep up with.

Treatment options are a matrix of efficacy, risk and side effect, and convenience. I regularly inject a disease modifying drug which doesn’t prevent a relapse, but reduces its likelihood. It is delivered by a courier monthly and lives in the fridge. The drug alone costs about £7,000/year. I have excellent neurologists supported by excellent MS nurses. The NHS is carrying me a good quarter-century earlier than I'd have imagined. So grateful.

My family is a golden net that gathers and holds me up. Julie sews the net so I don't fall through it, she holds both ends safely. The girls are too young to know, but they radiate energy and love, which I feed on. We talk about careers, family, money, the future. The range of possible futures is wide: at one end infrequent relapse and a normal life, and at the other Secondary Progressive MS in perhaps decade and a gradual decline. Symptoms today are uncertain signals for the future: I can’t look ahead and see what my graph looks like. 

I tire more easily now and must pace myself. I throw my knee back, locking it so that my leg feels more stable, making me limp with a seaman’s roll. My balance is often unsteady. I cannot run. Heat unmans me, so showers and soups are lukewarm. My vision sometimes bleaches out, or ripples and jumps with dazzle patterns. Symptoms come and go. MS is about reserves, timing and range. Measuring what's happening, what I can do. Chop work up into careful chunks and it goes just fine. The frequency and amplitude of injections, side effects, calendar appointments, fatigue and recovery time, blood tests and medical meetings, relapses, remissions, how far I can walk, the period before I tell the world. My body not doing what I want it to. A sense of dividing, or multiplying: I, you, are plural, a collection of many systems that all do their thing. Sometimes it takes a while for them to agree and co-ordinate, and sometime they refuse. Many activities have become more conscious and deliberate - come on, let's not fall over now, ok let's piss now. An organic negotiation that I can feel. Being, in between, OK/not OK, it's fine. MS calls for a stoic temperament. MS is chronic, like diabetes. There always with me. Fold it, interleave it into my life. Set a different course to the same destinations. Work goes on. Life continues. Find a way. Learn new ways. My lucky life. My beloved family. My beloved disease. Patient. Patience. We are multiple. I am multiple. Now you know.

Text and print on demand art

A small list of some art projects whose mode is to take a text, often process it in some way to make a selection or a new slice through that existing body, and render it into book form, usually with print on demand technology. Why processing and print on demand? Because computers are powerful tools, and the means of production cheap. Why books and why art? Because books carry a socio-historic weight that lets us pin down and fix the text and give it cultural weight. Art is often preoccupied with the means of production - print on demand as a kind of pedestal.

Aram Bartholl's Forgot Your Password?, 2013

In summer 2012 the social network LinkedIn.com got hacked and lost its whole user database. A few months later parts of the decrypted password list surfaced on the Internet. These eight volumes contain 4.7 million LinkedIn clear text user passwords printed in alphabetical order. Visitors are invited to look up their own password.

How does a list of passwords change when it's in this new setting? I wonder if LinkedIn's security team bought any copies, a memorial to their mistakes. Imagine a book of hashed and salted passwords.

Jean Keller's Black Book, 2013

Ink used for digital printing is one of the most precious substances in the world. A single gallon of ink costs over four thousand dollars and this is one reason why digitally printed books are so expensive.
However, the price of a book is not calculated according to the amount of ink used in its production. For example, a Lulu book of blank pages costs an artist as much to produce as a book filled with text or large photographs. Furthermore, as the number of pages increases, the price of each page decreases. A book containing the maximum number of pages printed entirely in black ink therefore results in the lowest cost and maximum value for the artist.
Combining these two features, buyers of The Black Book can do so with the guarantee that they are getting the best possible value for their money.

It's also available on other print on demand platforms. Recall the black pages in Tristram Shandy. Also: if the books in Borges' Library of Babel were over-printed into a single physical book, you might end up with this.

Giulia Ciliberto's Blank on Demand, 2012

Both volumes are completely blank, except for the presence of the ISBN code. The measures of the books, as well as the amount of their pages, depend on the maximum and minimum printing formats available on Lulu.com. Similarly, the prices correspond respectively to the highest and lowest allowed by Print on Demand platform.

The opposite and somewhat identical to the black book.

James Bridle's The Iraq War, 2010

Physical objects are useful props in debates like this: immediately illustrative, and useful to hang an argument and peoples’ attention on.

This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages. It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia.

Simon Popper's Borromean, 2006

 A re-ordering of the text of Joyce's Ulysses, re-printed. Printed by Die Keure in an edition of 1,000. A copy now goes for about $200. I was a bit pedantic about its accuracy, probably annoyed that I hadn't done it myself!

Stephen Shore's print on demand books, 2003-8

Stephen Shore began making a series of books using Apple's iPhoto service. Each book was a visual record of his activities on one particular day. The project shifted in emphasis from August 2005, when Shore determined to make an entire book wherever he was in the world 'on days that The New York Times deemed an event newsworthy enough to bestow one of its six-column, full-width banner headlines to it. 

Dorian McFarland's bible, 2003ish

Dorian processed a version of the bible to render only its punctuation marks - can't find anything online about it though.

My 1783 words by MacWrite II [etc], 1995

Dizzied by Barthes, Derrida, concrete poetry and the potential of my Apple Mac, I spell-checked the names of about two thousand authors to make two small books by hand. One listed the names and the spellcheck-suggested words. The other was a supplement, containing a list of the 200 names that had resisted the spellcheck. Made before print on demand, only one copy of each exists (and it is hidden somewhere in my filing - this picture is of an earlier prototype), and even if I had the original MacWrite, Works and Word files they'd be unreadable.

*

Related: a million precursor art books, but start with Fluxus, concrete poetry and Ed Ruscha. And on print on demand: the unbook, Russell's Unnotebook and me on printable day books.

 

Timo Arnall/Immaterials and Improving Reality

Notes from the Immaterials show and the Improving Reality conference, Brighton, Sep 2013.

(Immaterials: Light painting WiFi project by Timo Arnall)

Immaterials

• the show by Timo and Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen, Jack Schulze and Matt Jones at Lighthouse is put together well - beautiful images and films that make visible the RFID, Wifi, GPS and machine sensor fields we walk through and bathe in.
• The Fischli & Weissy Nearness film with Schulze is delightful. The early Experiments in Field Drawing. (Confession: it's impossible to review something with Timo, Schulze and Jones in it with any objectivity.)
• The faint wobbliness in the light lines in Light Painting WiFi - the experimenter's unreliable hand.
• Tiniest quibble: the stills from Wireless in the World fall slightly short of the rest, by appearing decorative.
• The twitchy object rec algorithms in Robot Readable World.
• The recent Satellite lamp is beautifully sputnik. 
• Timo's background to the show.
• [and this is how much I like it!]

Timo's talk at Improving Reality

• Technology: the frictionless and seamless glowing, slidey, textureless glass rectangles. Little of the technology is apprehendable or graspable (think of Heidegger: ready to/present at hand).
• The importance of making the invisible visible (of showing the seams) so that we can understand the tech, the system. The difficulty of the same, because seamlessness is so desirable and seductive.
• And yet in our experience technology can often be a lightning rod for very human concerns (as if an antenna receiving and amplifying). When you deploy a new application on new mobile phones to an organisation, human questions are immediately raised: do we have to use this? Does it track us? Is this why X lost their jobs? 
• So the technology might be invisible, but it can also make human concerns visible.
• Light painting - the photographic technique - came from employee time and motion studies
• user Stockholm syndrome (Sterling?) - the act of becoming dazzled by user considerations/needs and forgetting the other parts of the jigsaw, eg materiality
• Julian Oliver et al, Critical Engineering Manifesto.

Keller Easterling

• Extra-statecraft
• Dense talk - a sense that there's some substantial stuff to unpack here, but hard to follow. (Performative exemplification? Or I am stupid.)
• Contemporary architecture's power-ideological bias, cartoons unfolding in time.
• How to un-develop, to subtract architecture?
• "ESC researches global infrastructure as a medium of polity. Some of the most radical changes to the globalising world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the language of infrastructure [... infrastructure] generates emergent new constellations of national, international, intergovernmental and transnational administration and generates undeclared forms of polity faster than any even quasi-official forms of governance can legislate it" - from Extrastatesraft.

Frank Swain

• Entertaining on the fictions in maps. 
• Though of course all maps are fictional to some extent. Though of course so is reality.

The second session, Re-imagining reality, was energetically hosted by Simon Ings. What a shame though that we didn't hear from him directly - his books (The Eye, Dead Water, etc) are excellent.

Paul Graham Raven

• Raven's An Introduction To Infrastructure Fiction.
• Infrastructure fictions, a manifesto rather than a literary mode - explicitly a call to "think about the box", not to write, er, more stories about bridges
• Intent: lightbulbs were invented to sell electricity - source? (related?).
• Resist "flat-pack futures" - Scott Smith.
• A preoccupation with engineering ("how", goal) vs design/art ("why").

Maja Kuzmanovic

• Baffling. 
• "'patabotanists" was good. "Prehearsal" however sounds like "pretending".

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

• Food for astronauts is always constrained to flat, light high energy seaweed and other nutridusts, but what feeds their psyche? 30 tonnes of food needed to sustain a team to Mars and back.
• GM bacteria that change colour - as health diagnostic. Bacteria-tinted shit. "As someone with crohns disease. Shit as an interface would would be super useful".
• Human foot-cheese bacteria cheese (same bacterium as certain cheese so why not make it into real cheese), armpit bacteria cheese.
• Why is it that everything we can separate from or expel from the body revolts us as soon as it is separated? Shit etc obviously, but think of hair and saliva. And even when it is identical to something else - foot-cheese bacteria - it remains no less revolting.
• bacterial-mediated fruit that grow on electricity rather than sunlight
• Is synthetic biology part of/apart from nature?
• Questions about design vs art, science vs culture, science vs non-science

Tobias Revell

• Get your futurism bingo cards ready!
• "Design can be a political movement [...] technology can be a territory" - now when stuff like this comes from my own keyboard it is a string of shining pearls, but when someone else says it in a talk I just hear reckony air - ah, such is the hypocritical tyranny of the spectator in a hot, dark room. Sorry.
• His 88.7: Stories From The First Transnational Traders was very good.

Tom Armitage/Jeff Noon, The Literary Operator

• Charming story machine by @infovore and @jeffnoon: you stroke a book with its puck and it Burroughs into the text, printing you a voucher.
• Eg this from Chandler's The Big Sleep: "Our breaths met and mingled, our eyes were slaty [...] Canino look like a clock".

Farida Vis, Georgina Voss, Paula Le Dieu, Justin Pickard

• Unfortunately the improving reality of life intervened, and I missed the third part.

There's no reason why Improving Reality cannot simultaneously appeal to realism and attempt to augment/transcend it, but even so I am slightly uncomfortable about the conference's name. 

Cruising above both show and conference is the invisible drone-father James Bridle, and in the luminous clouds above, Ben Cerveny and Kevin Slavin watch over us and keep us real.

A list of writing tools is a displacement activity

Writing, focussing, assembling, editing, collaborating, feeding back, researching, structuring, outputting and publishing. (Updated Feb 2014.)

Focus through constraint:

• iaWriter - "Keep your hands on the keyboard and your mind in the text". Has good reviews.
• Byword - "Simple and efficient text editing". Also has good reviews.
• Writeroom - appears a generation older than iaWriter and Byword.
• Textmate - does text, html and a zillion other developer's things.

Quality:

• Hemingway - "makes your writing bold and clear".

Research speed and convenience:

• nvALT - Speeds up that did-I-already-write-about-this? moment, auto-saves, does text files, Markdown. Nice. I'm writing this post in it.
• Pinboard - elegantly executed webpage bookmarking.

Collaborating and community feedback:

• Draft - its drafts are neat version control, has premium "ask a pro", updates frequently. (Has a no-going-back Hemingway mode, thought isn't the same as the Hemingway above.)
• Poetica - "Get feedback about your writing from people you trust, wherever they are" - not released yet. Amusingly, screenshot critiques Word track changes and Google Docs. Reviewed by Rev Dan.
• Google Docs - good at collaboration and export, auto-saves. Has automated versioning but without actual version *control*.
• Editorially - "makes collaborative writing easy", via here but sadly shutting down.
• Penflip - "helps you write better with others".
• Authorea - "the collaborative platform for research. Write and manage your technical documents in one place".

Assembling, structuring, editing and eBook workflow:

• Ulysses 3 - "All your texts. In one place. Always." Not tried, but this review says "the app reimagines the text editor in a way that visually resembles Mail and conceptually sits somewhere between iA Writer and the project-based Scrivener". Which sounds like quite a thing.
• Scrivener - looks a bit of a mess to be honest. They also have Scapple, a mind map/words-on-sticks app.
• LeanPub - "Publish Early, Publish Often - Authors and publishers use Leanpub to publish amazing in-progress and completed books". Costs $0.50 plus 10%.
• Lacuna books - "the best way to write and publish a book". Big on structuring, rendering chapters and ebooks easily.
• Quip - "Beautiful documents on any device".
• Marquee - "a full-stack publishing platform...  to help everyone, from editors to designers and developers, come together to make great content for the web".

Formats and outputs:

• Marked,  because between text and html, Markdown is the popular "intermediary" format, (like nvALT) is good at simultaneous preview.
• Mou - good at simultaneous preview of Markdown, custom css etc, always seems to recover well from its frequent crashes.
• And a simple Google Apps script to convert a Google Drive Document to markdown.

Online publishing and attention:

• Medium - "A better place to read and write things that matter" - becoming a centre of gravity for serious writing, per-para commenting interesting.
• Wattpad - an ebook platform/store/agora that isn't Kindleland.

Back to it now. Again.

Tom McCarthy, Transmission and the Individual Remix, 2012

McCarthy's Transmission is a good account of the prosthetic polyphony, the hearing before speech, in literature and authorship. For more, see Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book (1989), a challenging read, but excellent on Freud and Derrida, and much of the latter's work, particularly on presence, speech and writing.

Highlights:

I have nothing to say. Indeed, I’d go as far as to claim that no serious writer does. [Location 42]

year 458 BC. This is the year that Aeschylus’s Oresteia premiered at Athens’s Festival of Dionysus. This trilogy of plays appears to me, despite its ripe age, eminently modern. I mean that in the sense that it lays down the structural and thematic contours that literary works will trace and retrace right up to our own era. We see the roles and concepts of the house, the family, the city or city state (polis in Greek, base of the English ‘politics’), practices and rituals of mourning, institutions of the law and the very notion of justice itself being not simply represented but actively produced, configured, put into the world. [Location 54]

the beacon’s coded message (‘Troy is finally ours’) is demoted, downgraded, enjoying only secondary importance: what dominates the monologue, what Clytemnestra emphasises constantly, is the means by which the signal moved from Troy to Argos. The beacon visible to them is the final one in a long chain of beacons, each one visible only to the next. She names each of the signal’s staging posts, [Location 65]

When listened to attentively, Clytemnestra’s speech starts whispering a truth I hope to amplify and echo in this essay: that we are always not just (to use a dramatic term) in medias res, i.e. in the middle of events, but also simply in media. In the beginning is the signal. [Location 74]

The ‘first’ poet, as everybody knows, is Orpheus. He’s Greek too, of course – although it’s in the work of the first-century AD Latin writer Ovid that he makes what’s generally held up nowadays as his ‘original’ appearance. (To put it another way, he comes to us already reconfigured and repeated.) [Location 79]

you built a temple there inside their hearing. [Location 106]

his short 1959 text The Way to Language that ‘For the longest time – before it comes to be said, that is, spoken – the poet’s work is only a listening.’ Thinking, Heidegger continues, should also take the form of listening: [Location 144]

Thus, it is a listening not while but before we are speaking.’ The proposition is quite paradoxical; it requires that time be first split up (speaking right now, I am inhabiting a previous moment, a moment of previousness, of which the now, right now, is but an echo), then coiled back into itself in an endless feedback (speaking is listening to speaking, which, as we’ve just learnt, is listening – round and round). [Location 149]

as Freud himself put it, ‘by adjusting himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone’ [Location 162]

for Freud, technology can best be understood as prosthesis. In a famous passage from Civilisation and Its Discontents he describes engines as mechanical muscles, telescopes and microscopes as synthetic upgrades of the eye, cameras and gramophones as material extensions of memory. [Location 163]

we are promoted and demoted at the same time; augmented, but in diminished form. Technology might allow us to pass unpassable borders, penetrate and traverse impossible distances, to move even into and through the space reserved for gods – but this move also entails anxiety, bereavement. If you’ve got an artificial body part, it means you’ve lost an arm, a leg, that you’re an amputee: like Orpheus, you’ve had your limbs ripped off. [Location 171]

As a student, Alexander stole an ear from a morgue so that he could try to reproduce its inner workings mechanically; [Location 179]

The second brother did die, and Bell invented the telephone. [Location 182]

remained a sceptic vis-à-vis the question of existence after death – but only because his brother never called. The desire for that call was there, wired into the very apparatus, haunting it. [Location 183]

in the original, that ‘box’ was a coffin: so well has His Master’s Voice been reproduced (the implicit visual strapline went) that the dog doesn’t even know he’s dead. [Location 189]

recording their children’s voices, found themselves bereaved, and the plate or roll on which little Augustus’s or Matilda’s voice outlived him or her thus became, for them, a kind of miniature tomb. [Location 192]

‘marks the site of some secret burial.’ [Location 197]

from being a point of distribution, of transmission, he became transmission itself, turned into the network – and in so doing, or in so being done to, disappeared. [Location 207]

In fact, like the first act of the Oresteia, with its beacon-telegraph so lyrically eulogised by Clytemnestra, Orpheus was always, from the off, a story about broadcasting technology. The broad-casting, or scattering, of Orpheus, his disappearance, doesn’t end his singing; on the contrary, it has the opposite effect of expanding its area of coverage: his severed head continues holding forth long after its dismemberment, conveying his song to all of Greece. [Location 210]

(here’s my second point), given that Orpheus is the Ur-writer figure within Western culture, that literature was also always, from the off, a question of broadcasting technology. And now a third point rears its head: if literature is, and always was, a comm-tech issue, then, as we’ve already seen, it can’t be separated from the topics of dismemberment and death, of loss, dissolution, vanishing. [Location 214]

In his short seminal 1955 text ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’, Blanchot identifies in the Thracian poet’s fatal backwards glance towards Eurydice an enactment of the very origin of literature. [Location 220]

a moment where desire, surging and unmanageable, sweeps away all the writer’s previous concerns in a huge wave of ‘unconcern’ that carries the literary work itself beyond all boundaries, not least the very ones that gave rise to it in the first place [Location 222]

the core, the primary spark, the Big Bang moment, of all writing – and yet, at the same time, it’s a moment that could only ‘happen’ after Orpheus’s poetry had already brought him to the Underworld and ushered him past its bouncers. ‘Which is to say’ (Blanchot concludes) ‘that one can only begin to write if one is already writing’ – which is to say that writing has no origin. Or, to be precise, it means to say that writing’s origin will always lie within this blind spot off the map and out of time – a spot whose retrieval is both impossible and the sole true task of any good writer (every significant literary work enacts, or re-enacts, in some way or other, the doomed escapade of attempting to retrieve it, and surrenders itself to the consequences): an unsolvable quandary that leads Blanchot to tie writing to the act of suicide. [Location 226]

The work’s (or oeuvre’s) true, fundamental purpose, he argues here and elsewhere, is désoeuvrement: ‘un-working’, an unravelling from within through which the very content that the work purports to convey or recover becomes lost, the avenues and relays through which it promised to deliver this to the reader become degraded. [Location 243]

‘the vanishing, broken off by static’ [Location 250]

When an author tells you that they’re not beholden to any theory, what they usually mean is that their thinking and their work defaults, without their even realising it, to a narrow liberal humanism and its underlying – and reactionary – notions of the (always ‘natural’ and pre-existing, rather than constructed) self, that self’s command of language, language as vehicle for ‘expression’, and a whole host of fallacies so admirably debunked almost 50 years ago by the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. [Location 257]

If literature, on the other hand, is to do anything worthwhile (and I don’t mean socially or even philosophically worthwhile; I mean truly and profoundly useless in a way so powerful it devalues use itself) – if it’s to be worth the paper or the screen it’s written on, it needs to appreciate its own interruptedness, its disarticulation; to understand its own embedding within media, and mediation; to understand that media’s own history is always and automatically at play in it, the shift from one-to-one to one-to-many to many-to-many networks in which sender and addressee are simultaneously masked and multiplied; to understand that it not only broadcasts, but is subject to the logic of broadcasting (of dissemination) – and to embed this understanding too, and broadcast it again, regressively. [Location 266]

Most of all, it needs to appreciate, with vertiginous exhilaration, the unique and ultra-paradoxical condition that’s at once its blessing and its curse: namely, that it only works because (as Blanchot so profoundly understood) it doesn’t work. [Location 272]

As such, their activity is a secondary one – yet secondary in a universe that, truly speaking, has no origin, whose origin is no more than a point of disappearance. Which means, paradoxically, that in being absolutely secondary – that is, in carrying the logic of secondariness to its most extreme configuration – they achieve a kind of primacy within this universe. [Location 279]

he has uploaded the right verbal remix software. He has read and memorised his Dante, his Shakespeare, his Eliot – to such an extent that his activity as a composer consists of giving himself over to their cadences and echoes, their pulses, codas, loops, the better that these may work their way, through him, [Location 294]

Cervantes was remixing Montalvo, Ariosto, Apuleius and any number of picaresque authors – and doing this with such delirious self-consciousness that at one point he even makes the characters of Don Quixote pause to take stock of the library, the engine room behind their mad associate’s re-enactments, perusing it as though it were some kind of source-code – which it is. [Location 300]

With The Cantos, he kept up this furious enterprise for five whole decades, ramping its intensity up and up until the overload destroyed him, blew his mind to pieces, leaving him to murmur, right towards the end: ‘I cannot make it cohere.’ [Location 305]

Thus, the sending out (in German, ‘transmission’ is Sendung), the dispatch, loss, or scattering of signal and identity (when I sit at a transmitter, both my words and I dissolve into the aether) also brought about, contained, entailed, a coming back together. [Location 311]

Erect no gravestone, only let the rose year after year bloom in his memory. For that is Orpheus. His metamorphosis through this or that. We do not need to look for other names. When there is poetry, it’s Orpheus singing. He come and goes. [Location 317]

It reverberates with everything I’ve been tracing here: loss, anxiety, dispersal, interruption, retrieval in which loss repeats itself, on and on endlessly. [Location 335]

old Krapp angrily fast-forwards, cursing – as though rectifying his misplaced youthful assumption that he had something to know, to tell the world; and at the same time, of course, creating the very type of blank, cut or elision in the current text’s surface that we should by now have come to recognise as so important to the writing process. [Location 340]

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]

.

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, nostalgia, 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'.

.

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.

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