Toasted chicken sandwich with Dubliner cheese and sweetcorn, followed by strawberry milk. It was delicious. It’s the little things, you know?
Archive for April, 2008
Over at mybrilliantmistakes, Cynthia Closkey has a post about the decline and fall of the oral tradition:
If I post a story on my blog, it’s captured in words. That’s nice if I want it to be captured. But what if I want for others to take it and run with it, add their own twists? [...] rarely does anyone take a post and reimagine or re-present it in a new light. In fact, I think if someone did, they might be slammed for stealing the originator’s idea.
[...]
I think the Web is a little too good at preserving things, so we can’t experience the beauty and surprise of mutation.
(I’m aware of the irony of dumping all that in a block quote. Whatever, man, whatever.)
I remember a person In The Know telling me that jazz is essentially about two things: collaboration and improvisation. That doesn’t really jive – so to speak – with the modern way of doing things, where bands, authors and so on are seen as monolithic entities with a distinctive style and personality. A lot of effort goes into building and maintaining this kind of image, and recognition and personal glory are seen as rightful rewards.
The upshot is that there’s very little tendency to play around with creative output. That’s why I love projects like Desert Sessions and Goon Moon: it’s a bunch of guys playing around. There’s also a (slowly) rising trend of musicians making master tracks available for their fans to remix and share, which is of course opening the collaborative playing field. What about writing, though? Back in the day, stories were cannibalised left right and centre, with the emphasis on what the writer could build around that. Nowadays that just feels like cheating.
That’s a shame, to be honest. It’s fair point about the level of preservation on the internet – I wonder if we’re approaching a kind of recording saturation – but it’s also an ideal medium for collaboration and/or riffing on other people’s ideas (*cough*), and it’s exciting and fun to be involved in something like that. Cynthia wonders whether the spirit of the oral tradition is “part of the human experience”; yes, I do believe it is.
Denny – them that make sausages and the like – have a problem. Rashers, right? They’re pretty cool and all, but they don’t have that je ne sais quois. They need an image boost if people are going to start having them with their tofu smoothies. So here’s the deal: Denny are running a competition. To win the probably half-decent prize, all you have to do is “share your Denny rasher craving”.
Here’s my rasher craving: fucking rashers. Those pink things you slap under a grill, yeah? Goes well with chips a la sauce.
According to the official competition site*, the current top runner is “Pesto Fusilli with Croutons, Rashers & Parmesan.” I sincerely hope someone is taking the piss.
* What happens to sites like this after the closing date? There must be an orphanage somewhere full of unwanted marketing.
They have a curious habit of putting on long films at times like half five and nine pm. So, right, my options are a) teleport directly from work, or b) end up getting a taxi home and being wrecked the next morning. A bitta consideration here, lads. Surely it wouldn’t be too much of a bother to have a film on at, say, six? Even once a week? Lads?
Adding insult to injury is the fact that I left my Unlimited card at home today and had to pay eight euro to see There Will Be Blood, which isn’t even that good. Neither of those things have anything to do with Cineworld as such, but they’re all part of the package deal, along with Dip-Dabs and strawberry Refreshers, and occasionally one of the nicest cheeseburgers you’ll get in the city centre if you ever actually have time and if the kitchen isn’t backed up. It’s all stuff they need to be keeping track of, is my point.
Internet book piracy will drive authors to stop writing
says The Times. Or rather, says the Society of Authors, a UK body representing “more than 8,500 professional writers”. The headline is terminally silly, and it’s hard to square the article with certain recent developments: either the Society is exaggerating, or this is just something that afflicts celebrity chefs. (Incidentally, a noted Irish agent is fond of telling aspiring authors to abandon their literary work in favour of writing cookbooks. Maybe he needs to revise his position…)
Hat tip to Damien Mulley for the link.
Maybury posted yesterday about Harper Collin’s free book experiment, in which they allowed everyone to read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for free online. (Not, strictly speaking, a new idea, but still.)
How did it go? Gaiman reports:
68,000 unique visitors to the book pages of American Gods
3,000,000 book pages viewed in aggregate
And that the weekly book sales of American Gods have apparently gone up by 300%
A pretty impressive result. Wu Ming (authors of Q and the brilliant 54) have been advocates of this sort of thing for a long time now, and it’s interesting to see a major publisher dipping its toes in the pool.
I think books are the medium most likely to succeed with this kind of model – apart from the whole “owning the artifact” thing that applies to all media, I find that reading from a computer is much more tiring than reading from a book. Certainly, I never got past the first five pages of 54 until I bought it. (I may be out of the loop on this, feel free to contradict me.) If it becomes common practice it’ll be a step closer to treating people, as Jeff Tweedy put it, as patrons rather than consumers, and that’s something I find utterly delightful.
Via reddit, I see that “a national newspaper” in the UK is soliciting some True Life Stories:
A national newspaper wants your story and will pay hundreds of pounds to the right person.
Write a few lines about how computer games turned you to crime and if it’s something we like, we’ll call you straight back.
Hundreds of pounds. That’s pretty enticing. I reckon I’m familiar enough with games (and the standard of coverage they get) to give this a good welly… sure, I might feel a bit dirty, but hundreds of pounds will buy me a lot of soap.
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