February 2008

You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2008.

bloggish

February 25, 2008 in blogging | No comments

With blogs now numbering in the squillions it’s easy to imagine that one’s own is like the arrow in the poem:

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth I know not where

Most blogs are short-lived. People run out of things to say, or just get too tired or too busy. But for bloggers not clear about their intended readership another stopper must often be a sense of futility: all that effort and no response.
I’ve realised that mine is like the letters that 18th and 19th century travellers used to write. Letters written to members of your family were read aloud, circulated to friends and kept safe for your return. They allowed you to sort out your impressions, and provided you afterwards with a travel diary. Writing for at least one other person forced you to get things down clearly and not let half-formed, half-thought-out impressions vanish in the wake. For most of us that’s what matters, not the Technorati rating.
Not an arrow then, but a song.

Tags:

Postmodernist historiography: Aesop’s version

February 25, 2008 in Uncategorized | No comments

The Man and the Lion

A MAN and a Lion traveled together through the forest. They soon began to boast of their respective superiority to each other in strength and prowess. As they were disputing, they passed a statue carved in stone, which represented “a Lion strangled by a Man.” The traveler pointed to it and said: “See there! How strong we are, and how we prevail over even the king of beasts.” The Lion replied: “This statue was made by one of you men. If we Lions knew how to erect statues, you would see the Man placed under the paw of the Lion.” One story is good, till another is told.

Tags: ,

Spare the vermouth

February 23, 2008 in writers | No comments

Surrounded by hype and levelling, what a relief to read something like this.

The cinema in Teneriffe was showing a film which had been adapted from one of my own novels. It had been an instructive and rather painful experience to see it shown. The direction was incompetent, the photography undistinguished, the story sentimental. If there was any truth in the original it had been carefully altered, if anything was left unchanged it was because it was because it was untrue. By what was unchanged I could judge and condemn my own novel: I could see clearly what was cheap and banal enough to fit the cheap and banal film.

Graham Greene, Journey without Maps, 1936. The film must have been Stamboul Train, 1932.

Tags:

Opportunity costs for kids

February 19, 2008 in internet, reading habits | No comments

Graeme Philipson, whose views I attacked a few posts ago, dislikes people who so much as question the new electronic order. How he would despise someone like Susan Jacoby, who thinks the US is becoming stupider and more ignorant. She believes the decline of reading is in part to blame. (Her other causes, ‘anti-rationalism’, populism and fundamentalism.)

She says, forget about what kids are getting from the screen; what are they missing on the page? In business terms, what are the opportunity costs of kids not reading books?

Which in turn makes me wonder (a) what do kids 11-19 actually read nowadays? (b) what did they read in the 1960s (or whichever period one selects) and (c) is anyone framing up the question in something like that way? It would be easy to kill any such project by pointing out that what’s read makes sense only if you consider how it’s read. But perhaps there’s a way around that.

Don’t go there

February 18, 2008 in blogging | No comments

About a week ago I had such a head of blog steam up, you could almost hear the rivets popping. But I dillied a little with the colours, dallied a little with the Permalinks, and pretty soon I broke the blog. The archives vanished and the ‘previous posts’ and next day the page itself vanished and although this is a young blog and contains not very much of any worth I am a writer, I will die rather than lose a single word. (I will discard thousands, but they deserve it.) So I dived into the database and the Help! files and everything I did made the situation worse, if you can make nothing worse.

I found, however, that the blog posts were all still there in the dbase. So I set up a second blog, with the idea of importing posts into that. This scheme failed because I didn’t know how to import posts. At that point I contacted the amazing Rentacoder, where you can hire people to fix your dumb tinkerings. I had to wait a couple of days while Rentacoder checked my credit.

Unable to wait, I started to reverse-engineer my mistakes. Tracking back, looking at the cyber-wreckage strewn around I began to understand what broke a little better. So now I have fixed my blog. So now Rentacoder is going to come back and say, it all checks out, let’s get Ibrahim of Egypt on the job and I have to disappoint these good people.

Sigh.

Words, pictures, mush

February 9, 2008 in Language, web writing | No comments

It makes no sense complaining about the decline of the printed word. As it becomes just another medium, we are moving to a kind of multimedia literacy, where capability with print becomes no more important, or useful, than capability with image.

Graeme Philipson in The Age this week.

Philipson has three main arguments, all familiar:
1. New media don’t supplant old media – the ‘people still go to the movies’ argument.
2. People are busily writing emails and reading text online so it’s only a shift of delivery: literacy is if anything enhanced.
3. as above

1 and 2 are boilerplate. What’s interesting though is 3. which just pops up as it routinely does in these pieces. All evidence from neurology and evolutionary psychology, the careful arguments of people like Walter Ong – all the evidence, that is, which shows that for rational beings, language is both unique and essential is lost on these people. Maybe because the serious discussion takes place in books.

Tags: ,

« Older entries

Theme Tweaker by Unreal