Patroclocast 1

I almost changed my whole blog name to Quadrireme, just so I could bill my inaugural podcast as a Quadcast. What a tosser! But common sense stayed my hand, so Quinquireme it remains, and this is my inaugural, erm, Patroclocast.

Obviously I am just blatantly copying my fellow bloggers Billy, Del and Annie, all of whom have been producing excellent podcasts for, ooh, years, in Web 2.0 terms.

Be warned there's no talking on mine. This is because I wish to preserve my allure and mystique and not at all because I'm far too self-conscious to broadcast my voice wantonly about the IP-waves. But if I *was* talking on it, this stuff below is what I would be saying:

Howe Gelb - 'Paradise Here Abouts'. Alt.country's answer to Lou Reed goes all indie gospel blues with Canada's Voices of Praise gospel choir. Featuring Jeremy Gara from the Arcade Fire on drums, fact fans.

Betty Harris - 'Break In The Road'. Yer 1960s New Orleans funk is technically a bit too in-your-face and raunchy (ooh, how I hate that word) for me - I'm all uptight and British, for god's sake. But I make an exception for this, as it's very funky (and raunchy) indeed, and also makes admirable use of guitar feedback a good fifteen years before the Jesus and Mary Chain were even invented.

Husky Rescue - 'Poison'. Finland's finest doing a lovely loungey cover of Alice Cooper's paean to S&M. Try to ignore the 'black lace on sweat' line. Ewww.

Viva Voce - 'We Do Not Fuck Around'. Sinister vengeful piano ballad turns into massive, synth-driven swearfest. Single of the year, I reckon.

Tilly and the Wall - 'Bad Education'. Flamenco-flavoured noise-pop celebration of cross-dressing. With tap dancing for percussion. Brilliant.

Matson Jones - 'New York City Fuck Off'. The fifteen year-old in me can't help but like angry, spiky songs with lots of gratuitous swearing in them. The thirty-six year-old in me can't help but like the deployment of sophisticated string instruments (cello, double bass) in angry, spiky songs with lots of gratuitous swearing in them. Result: I really, really love this song.

Ike & Tina Turner - 'The Game Of Love'. Hmm, it all goes a bit sexy for a while here, as Tina informs Ike that she's just as capable of putting it about as he is. Which is immediately followed by...

Lovage - 'Stroker Ace'. It's an incredibly sexy trip-hop song about a cat. Need I say more?

Ladytron - 'International Dateline'. I hate their name, I loathe their artwork and I'm not the world's biggest fan of synthy music (despite any evidence to the contrary presented here). So why I love this is a bit of a mystery.

Her Space Holiday - 'My Girlfriend's Boyfriend'. Indie geeks like this for the looped violin sample. I like it for the line 'you can't make someone love you with a song'. Because we all know that's not true, and indeed if you were going to try to make someone love you with a song, you could do a lot worse than:

Barry Adamson - 'Come Hell or High Water'. Officially my favourite song of all time. It's cool, it's funny, it's sexy, and it has the lines:

...and the silence is louder than an H-bomb
That explodes when I close my eyes
Sending shockwaves to the town you're from
In the hope that you'll stir and come alive

Which makes me go a bit funny every time I hear it.

That's it then: 11 songs, all of them brilliant, and thus 43 minutes of your life well spent, even if I do say so myself.

Get it here!

They've Got One Leaving Today...

UPDATE 3 (seeing as everyone still seems to be reading this one): A mini Milky Way and a half-chewed lego spaceman are even now on their way to commenter SEAN MCMANUS, who has very correctly pointed out that 'Walking On The Moon' by The Police is a bad pop song about space. Nice work Sean!


There I was, innocently writing a brochure about something or other, when my lovely colleague D. appeared on MSN Messenger claiming that there aren't very many pop songs about space.

What rot, thought I. There are LOADS of pop songs about space. There's practically the entire oeuvre of the Pixies, for a start, and most of early David Bowie. There's 'Yuri G' by PJ Harvey, in which she threatens to do all manner of saucy things to the moon while masquerading as Yuri Gagarin. And there's the Dukes of Stratosphear*'s 'Bike Ride To The Moon', in which Andy Partridge chivalrously hops on his BMX in order to protect the moon from the West Country temptress's saucy advances.

There's Tasmin Archer's 'Sleeping Satellite', in which she bemoans the fact that we ever went to the moon in the first place, probably because in doing so we exposed it to the corrupting influence of a flawed Mankind (exemplified by PJ Harvey's saucy advances). There's 'Higher Than The Sun' by Primal Scream, which probably isn't about space at all, come to think of it, but it can still go in because it's ace. There's the Prodigy's 'Outer Space'. There's 'Rocket Man' by Elton John. There's 'Another Girl, Another Planet' by the Only Ones, which is surely one of the greatest songs of all time.

In fact I put it to you, readers, that not only are there loads of songs about space, but they are all, without exception, completely brilliant.

A mini Milky Way and a half chewed lego spaceman to anyone who can prove me wrong!


* UPDATE: XTC, sorry. There goes my lucrative guest-editing spot on the OMM.

UPDATE 2: No, I was right the first time. Hurrah! Lucrative guest-editing spot on the OMM, please.

What Is Web 2.0?

In the old days (1996-2003), I used to waste time at work reading stuff on the internet.

Now I waste time at work writing stuff on the internet.

And as far as I'm concerned, that's the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.


UPDATE: Then LC drew my attention to this, which, together with its 200+ comments, explains it all much better.

Battlestar Quadrireme

*picks self up off floor*

Well, the faster-than-light jump seems to have worked OK, with one tier of oarsmen as the only casualties, and they were fairly expendable anyway, and the extras were getting quite expensive, and they could never get a proper purchase with oars that long, so quite frankly they were really only there for decoration and for showing off, a bit like when Oracle supremo Larry Ellison decided he was going to build the world's biggest yacht just because he could.

So who's been left behind, and who's made the jump with me remains to be seen, but it probably won't be long before the others pick up my signals via Technorati and Statcounter and battle can commence once more.

Until then, I'll just settle in here and continue watching Series 2 of 'New' Battlestar Galactica until something terribly dangerous and exciting starts happening to my defence mainframe.

*breathes contented sigh*

Grammar Interlude

I've lived in London for eight years, so I don't know why this has never vexed me before, but it suddenly started vexing me quite a lot yesterday as I was travelling towards Victoria on the District Line:

Why does Earl's Court tube station have a possessive apostrophe, but Barons Court doesn't?

Answers on a crumpled one-day Travelcard...

Patroclus 0, Editorial Policy 0

Everyone knows my editorial policy by now: no sex, no blogging when depressed.

But you know, hypothetically speaking, what if I suddenly really wanted to tell the whole world about what the lovely Mr BC and I have been getting up to?

Sensible approaches might be:

1. Start a juicy anonymous sexblog (advantage: may also result in massive book deal).

2. Whisper it into the ground, in the manner of King Midas (disadvantage: office is very quiet and open plan, people might hear what I'm saying and then wonder why I'm lying on the floor saying it. It might erode the air of professionalism and gravitas that I like to project in the work environment).

3. Write it in an actual diary book thing (disadvantage: years of bending my fingers back to 'impress' people with my double-jointedness have left me unable to hold a pen).

A not-terribly-sensible approach would be:

4. Write about it in the company newsletter.


So naturally I chose option 4.

The company newsletter is distributed every Friday to hundreds of people in the technology industry, including all of my clients. My 'column' is written under my own real name. Within minutes of receiving it, a client sends an email to the general company email address saying "good to hear Patroclus is getting some!"

I hide under my desk for the rest of the afternoon.

Oh God, What Am I Wearing?

Hmm, I seem to have come into work dressed as a slightly wrong version of the Queen on a Sunday afternoon's huntin', shootin' and fishin' at Balmoral.

Even though my boots are brown suede and not Hunter wellies, and I got my tweed skirt in a French department store rather than Daks, and my green jacket is a sort of military-style effort and not a Barbour, and my necklace has flowery beads rather than pearls, I still look like I'm about to nick off to spend my Civil List moolah on a couple of footstools for the corgis and a headscarf to keep the pheasant blood out of my hair.

When actually I'm just off to M&S to buy rice salad and nuts.

*waves regally to the cheering mob of serfs, peasants and oiks*

Borderline Origami

In retrospect, the signal that we eventually settled on on Saturday night to indicate our whereabouts to other bloggers possibly erred on the side of the over-subtle.

If you turned up and failed to find us, it's probably because we were sitting as far away from the on-stage action as topographically possible, and only identifiable by this small and hastily-improvised table decoration:


It's meant to be a (blue) cat, but it looked alarmingly like the rabbit from Donnie Darko, and I think we were all quite relieved when the barman took it away. Later on, James applied his black-belt origami skills to the re-creation of the unicorn from the end of Blade Runner, thus:


I don't think I need say any more about that one, except to note that it now graces my mantelpiece along with a small Transformer that doesn't actually transform, and two packets of Moomin chewing gum.

There was also a disappointing lack of people dressed as otters (unless they were only slightly dressed as otters and spent the evening hanging about in the shadows), and the band member we thought was GW Patrick turned out to be someone else entirely, which was strange, because we had met Patrick earlier in the evening and he definitely existed and everything.

So in conclusion, sincere apologies to anyone who turned up and couldn't find us, and a hearty hurrah for Slaminsky, Corin, Billy and the lovely Llewtrah, who did. And it turns out that Billy and Corin live about three feet away from me in London's swinging Shepherd's Bush, so I'd better be on my best behaviour when prowling about in Askew Road.


UPDATE: Lots on my mind at the moment, the writing-about of which would almost certainly violate my Second Rule of Blogging. However, it isn't possible to get *too* depressed while there are still joyous uplifting orchestral indie-jangle-pop songs in the world - and here for your Monday afternoon musical delectation is what is probably the bestest example of the genre EVER:

The New Pornographers - Mass Romantic (mp3)

Enjoy!

Withered, Condemned, 8-bit Bleeping

There comes a time in a woman's life when she must face the fact that her 36th birthday* is approaching with worrying alacrity; that her marriage came to an untimely end; that she has no successors to look after her in the autumn of her life; that her finances are in tatters due to some injudicious decisions she made in earlier, more carefree times, and that the growing out of her expensive blonde highlights reveals more grey hair than she is particularly comfortable with.

At such times there is only one sensible course of action, and that is to embark on an epic internet quest in search of obscure yet strangely brilliant Finnish videogame music.

Luckily the quest proved satisfactory, and so, bent but not broken, I proudly present you with the fruits of my endeavours:


Desert Planet - Asteroid Hopper (mp3) - seriously, this is really good.

Desert Planet - Return of the Ninja Droids (mp3)


Go to it, good readers, while you're still young and beautiful!


* Anyone who fancies celebrating this auspicious occasion is welcome to join James and me at the Borderline on Saturday night, where GW Patrick's band 7 Seconds of Love is apparently going to ROCK like no band that features a member of the Green Wing production team** has ever ROCKED before! More details here.

** And, as it turns out, that Joel Veitch from rathergood.com. Photoshopped kitten ROCK mayhem ahoy!

Radio Silence

Yes, well, I tried to write something very serious and considered about Raymond Williams and the structure of feeling, but it appears that I can't trust myself to write anything at all - not even about deceased cultural theorists, mmm, saucy - without committing a flagrant breach of my Strict Editorial Policy. Radio silence will therefore be observed until further notice.

*grins wickedly*

Lingual

When I was in the selection process for a top-secret job at GCHQ, somewhere back in the early 90s, one of the things they tested me on was my ability to learn a new language at speed. They'd gone to the lengths of inventing a completely fictitious language that bore no resemblance to any existing language, so that no one would have an unfair advantage.

I didn't get selected in the end (though it was a close-run thing; it was only my total and utter ignorance of macrogeopolitical affairs that let me down), which was fortunate, because if I had, my entire life would have been subject to the Official Secrets Act and I would never have been able to have this blog.

But I keep being reminded of their fictitious language every time I see anything written in Finnish, which given that I'm currently in Helsinki, is quite often. I'm treating the Finnish language (which, as any fule kno, bears no resemblance to any other language apart from Estonian and Hungarian) as a giant crossword puzzle that I have to solve in its entirety before I leave on Saturday.

It's quite difficult, but there are helpful Rosetta Stones everywhere, as almost everything in Helsinki is written in Swedish as well as Finnish, and Swedish is practically German, which is practically English*, so that's OK. This is how I came to realise that keskus in Finnish means 'centre', and that keskiviikko, which means 'Wednesday', is literally 'centre of the week'. I got almost as much pleasure from linking these two words as I did from idly reading the signs in the hotel lift and suddenly realising that avain means 'key' and avoinnen** means 'open'. By my reckoning this means I've done 2,138 across and 25,876 down, and now I've only got 48 hours left to finish the whole thing!

Oh, the inside of my mind is a terribly interesting place, I can tell you. Luckily it's balanced out by the inside of James's mind, which is constantly inventing fantasy subterranean zoos and enumerating the physical attributes of the manticore***.

Meanwhile, in the real world, we had a top international blogmeet with the lovely Taiga, who gave us Moomin fridge magnets and Superlon photos, and showed us around her gallery, where there was a fantastic red painting by a person called Janne Kaitala, and a slowly revolving brass and mahogany Victorian-style globe that was also a music box and played the music created by the outlines of the countries. So you can see we haven't been putting our time by idly, oh no.


* Pace BiB, I know it's not really.

** Or avoinna. Oh I don't know, I'm confused now.

*** Apparently 'the body of a lion, the face of a man, the wings of a bat and the tail of a scorpion'. But it wouldn't bite you.

Never Mind All That

Look - new PEANUT!

I'm Clearly Researching The World's Greatest Novel

Things I've apparently looked up on Wikipedia recently:

Albigensian Crusade
Arsène Wenger
Clay Shirky
Collioure
Cryptozoology
ECHELON
Fauvism
Flintlock
Monitor Lizards
Morwenstow
Occitania
Panty Line
Periwig
Philippe le Bel
Pierre Bourdieu
Quatermass
Raoul 'Tin Tin' Dufy*

I *am* Neal Stephenson and I claim my £5! And now (well, shortly) I'm off here, with this one, to turn it all into a pale imitation of this. Hurrah!


* Which made me laugh a lot, but not as much as Wyndham's job interview.

Nature Suddenly Goes Terribly Wrong

On my walk yesterday, I couldn't help but notice the following natural phenomena:

1. Blazing hot sunshine and thirty-degree heat

2. Mushrooms growing on one side of the path

3. Crocuses growing on the other

It was as if all the seasons had come at once, in a sort of apocalyptic telescoping of all known laws of nature! I was half-expecting to come across some isolated patches of snow underneath the quince trees.

I rushed home and reported this foreshadowing of Armageddon to my mum, who looked at me witheringly and said "Yes, Patroclus, they're autumn crocuses."

Oh.

Your Cruel Teabags*

In accordance with the scriptures, the mighty Husky Rescue have at last recorded their fabulous languid Finnish electronica cover of Alice Cooper's 'Poison'!

Incontrovertible proof that God is in his heaven and all's right with the world!

Of course you should really be buying the single, because that way you also get the marvellous [Barley alert!] Kustaa Saksi cover design, but I can't let this pass without informing you that tip-top Texan mp3 blog The Rich Girls Are Weeping is giving it away, absolutely free, with this post! So haste ye over to see the rich girls while it's still available!

Over and out.

UPDATE: Husky Rescue now playing unexpected gig at London's toppest small venue the Luminaire in Kilburn, on Wed 11th October. Tickets £10. Woohoo! Anyone fancy it?


* Try and tell me that's not how the first line goes...

I Can't Define It, But I Know It When I See It

7.45am: Patroclus puts the finishing touches to an article that argues that Europe is a post-industrial society, and has to rely on service and intellectual property for economic growth.

8.00am: Patroclus goes out for a walk, observing the local populace hard at work harvesting grapes.

Conversations With My Mother, Part 1

INT. CHATEAU QUINQUIREME - DAY


My Mum and I are sitting in the living room.

ME: I've got to write some text to go on some pretend playing cards, that my client's going to send out in an envelope that looks like a sleeve. Look.

I hand mum the mock-up of the playing cards, which have that 'lorem ipsum' placeholder text printed on them.

MUM (in the manner of the Pope reciting the Nunc Dimittis*): Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...consectet tempor incidunt...ut lab ore et dolore veniami...

ME: Yes, that's not the real text.

MUM: Quis nostrud exercitation...ullar com modo consequat...duis autem vel esse...

I disappear into the kitchen and return some minutes later with a cup of tea.

MUM: In voluptare velit esse molestare...so tum toesne legume...duis autem vel esse molestaire con...I'll say it's a con.

ME: Yes, that's not the real text, it's just...

MUM: Tum toesn legume...that's not Latin...odioque civiuidia...duis autem...This is nonsense. I should charge double if I were you.

ME: I think I will.


* Or, you know, another one of those chanty Latin incantations. I don't know, I'm a protestant, me.

Establishing Shots

Given the vast number of Things I Am Supposed To Be Doing, multiplied by the even vaster number of Books I Should Really Read, there's absolutely no excuse whatsoever for me starting to read Cryptonomicon *again*.

But somehow it sneaked itself into my bag yesterday, and seeing as extra high security at Stansted meant that I could only take 'essential items' on to the Perpignan flight, I thought I'd better demonstrate its essentialness by actually reading it, otherwise I might have been carted off at gunpoint by sexy French army chicks for flouting the Geneva Convention, or something.

And by crikey, Cryptonomicon is a brilliant book, isn't it? Not really because of the subject matter, although I'm more than happy with anything that involves Alan Turing and encryption techniques and data havens and what have you. And certainly not because of the plot, which meanders in labyrinthine and prolix fashion for 908 pages, before Stephenson attempts to resolve it all in the final page and half, as is his wont.

Nooo, what's great about Cryptonomicon is its fantastic use of the English language. Now Neal Stephenson and William Gibson and my top mate Bruce Sterling usually all get lumped together as the founding fathers of cyberpunk, but while Gibson and Sterling are both disappointingly ham-fisted and arrhythmic in their use of English (even though they have great ideas), Stephenson is a brilliantly fluid and clever and erudite and witty writer.

And having reminded myself of just how brilliant the opening paragraph of the book proper is, I thought I might write a little post (this one) about my favourite Character Establishing Scenarios in Literature. Then I remembered that I don't have any favourite Character Establishing Scenarios in Literature, because:

a) I don't read all that much literature these days,

b) I never remember any of the literature I *have* read, and anyway most of it was all in foreign, and

c) I know that the minute I come up with a list, all of the terribly well-read people who read this blog (that's you lot) will come up with a Much Better List, causing me to plunge into a slough of shame, humiliation and self-doubt.

But I still wanted to reproduce the opening para of Cryptonomicon, because it's a fantastic Character Establishing Scenario, even if I will concede that it probably isn’t the best one available in the entire corpus of Literature ever written ever.

This is how it goes:

Let’s set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan Waterhouse.

Now doesn't that have everything you could possibly wish for from an opening paragraph of a novel: macro-scale geekiness, a pleasing mixture of registers, references to computery things, nice phrases like 'tedious fugue of carnality', and an excellent undercurrent of silliness?

God, how I love Neal Stephenson.

Then I was going to go on to quote the opening parry of Cold Comfort Farm, as another great Character Establishing Scenario in Literature, and I was half thinking about citing the opening sentence of Great Expectations as another, only I couldn't remember either of them, and don't have the books here.

And then I got ambitious, and thought that I could challenge you to write your own Great Literary Character Establishing Scenario, which in turn led me to recall that I inadvertently wrote my own back in June, thus:

Ever since that time I was tear-gassed in Park Lane amid the burning cars, I've quite fancied myself as an urban guerrilla, a lone fugitive from justice, an off-world outlaw cruising the meatspaces and metaverses of West London armed only with a samurai sword and a copy of Elle Decoration.

But then I thought that that would be a bit too much like hard work for you, dear readers, and a bit too much like blowing my own trumpet for me.

So I didn't.

Did I?

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Näkemiin

The real me is off again, to France and Finland, returning to Blighty in October (I hope). Patroclus's presence in the blogosphere will nevertheless continue to be an irritatingly permanent fixture, so expect regular fig, quince, fungi, cloudberry and reindeer carpaccio updates. Bet you can't wait.

Pop Cult Update

The more eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that the serialisation of my dissertation came to an untimely end, much like the original Futurama, before I'd even really established the dramatis personae or got round to the bit where Henry Jenkins cops off with Sherry Turkle during a furtive raid on the empty space behind the metaphorical bike shed of Western patriarchal capitalist domination.

This is not because I got all coy and paranoid about my facile and ill thought-out arguments, oh no. It is because apparently Professor Chapman himself wants to read it, and my tutor wouldn't let him because (according to him) it isn't actually finished yet.

Impressed that anyone with 'Professor' in their name might actually want to read something of mine (though I might have been on safer ground if it had been Professor Yaffle), I immediately ran off to look up this Chapman chap, to discover that he's *only* the world authority on the cultural politics of Dr Who and the semiotics of Diana Rigg.

Now that's what I call academia, ladies and gentlemen.

Things I Unexpectedly Suddenly Only Had One Of

Tip for high-powered executive types: when returning to work after an extended spell of AWOLity in the south of France, do not attempt to walk the entire mile from your flat to your swanky nu-meeja converted-factory office wearing tiny bejewelled flip-flops.

If you do this, one flip-flop will inevitably fall apart halfway, obliging you to walk the remaining half a mile along filthy London pavements in your bare feet. This will cause fully attired people to stare at you as if you were some kind of mad anarchist hippy, prompting you to smile in a zen-like fashion in order to conceal your feelings of awful humiliation exacerbated by unwelcome reminiscences of all those dreams you had where you turned up to school/lectures/work naked.

Actually it was quite a lovely feeling. Mm, smooth warm pavements.

I've got shoes on now though. Just in case anyone was worried.

Probably Not In The Cartesian Sense

I can't believe I was actually about to write a new post entitled 'Things I Have Two Of'.

I might leave that one for another time.

Of Lavender And Blogging

I've been summoned back to the UK just as I was getting used to my exile in foreign parts.

I finally realised I'd gone a bit native yesterday evening, as I was wandering through the sun-dappled vines among terraced vineyards cascading down ancient hills, an armful of lavender in one hand and three ripe purple figs in the other. If only I'd been taller and prettier, and wearing a flowery dress instead of black vest, jeans and battered iPod, I could have been mistaken for an 'ambient media' advert for L'Occitane.

Although if I had been, L'Occitane would have been wasting their money, because for an entire hour and half I didn't see another person.

Anyhow, back I come on Monday, so that I can meet up with the tutor, who wants to discuss some 'minor' issues (his inverted commas) with my dissertation. I'm a bit worried about those inverted commas; they look like sarcasm. But he did alert me to this week's New Statesman cover story, which is all about how big business is paying bloggers to say nice things about their products. It's well worth a read, although I do notice an almost complete lack of concrete information about how many bloggers are doing this kind of thing, and how much they're actually getting paid (rather than how much they hope they're going to get paid).

Sooo....has anyone tried payperpost.com? If so, does it actually pay up? How much is my reference to L'Occitane above worth? How much more would it be worth if I gave them a link? But what if I said that every time I go into their shop in Béziers (ker-ching), I see lots of things that seem very nice (ker-ching), but on further investigation, they also seem very overpriced (oh) and not quite as special as they make them out to be (ah)?

And how can L'Occitane be sure that my blog will always be a good standard-bearer for its brand? If they pay me to say nice things about them, will I still be able to write about going to court for not paying my council tax, being tear-gassed in Park Lane, or - erm - experimenting with hallucinogenic substances? Or will I be condemned to talk for all eternity about wandering through the sun-dappled vineyards with armfuls of lavender and a basket of freshly-fallen almonds? I think cello probably has the answers. Cello?

Avatar Of The Week!

We interrupt this edition of The Late Raymond Williams Show to bring you exciting news from the world of, errr, I dunno, the carnivalesque production of the self in disembodied space or something, otherwise known as my new Avatar Of The Week award!

This week's award goes to last.fm user and Swamptrash fan hdickins, who may or may not look a bit like this:


Who knew the chance articulation of fruit and lego could be so entertaining?

Part 1.1 - The Lost Organic Community

Well everyone, I have in front of me a glass of one of the classier local red wines and a slice of warm fig 'n' blackberry tart wot I made earlier, with some crème fraîche, and here for your delectation is Part 1.1 of the dissertation, which is all about the idea of the supposedly lost organic community and its authentic folk culture. There was an intro bit before this bit, but I've left it out because it was quite similar to the abstract.

I've generally tried to avoid academic jargon as far as possible, and I've bunged in links to the people referenced, for your info:

1.1 The Lost Organic Community

The idea that industrialisation, mechanised production and mass culture obliterated an older, organic community and its grass-roots folk culture is prevalent among the earliest British cultural theorists, including F. R. Leavis and Richard Hoggart. Leavis, in Culture and Environment (1933), locates the lost community in the seventeenth century, explicitly stating that "there was, in the seventeenth century, a real culture of the people…a rich traditional culture…a positive culture which has disappeared." In Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930), he describes some of the attributes of this supposed community thus:

"What we have lost is the organic community with the living culture it embodied. Folk songs, folk dances, Cotswold cottages and handicraft products are signs and expressions of something more: an art of life, a way of living, ordered and patterned, involving social arts, codes of intercourse and a responsive adjustment, growing out of immemorial experience, to the natural environment and the rhythm of the year."

Hoggart, in The Uses of Literacy, also bemoans the loss of a more organic way of life, in which people create, share and participate in their own culture. He locates the lost community in the north of England of his own childhood in the 1930s – the very period in which Leavis was writing of a lost community in the seventeenth century.

Hoggart identifies the same type of "responsive adjustment…to the…rhythm of the year" in this community as Leavis did with his:

"…throughout the year, Pancake Tuesday, Voting Day, which is always a holiday, Hotcross buns on Good Friday, the Autumn "Feast", Mischief Night, and all the weeks of cadging and collecting for Bonfire Night."

He contrasts the grass-roots culture of the 1930s working class community with the youth culture he perceives in the 1950s, in which the "contemporary forces" of mass-produced culture and mind-numbing factory work have turned working-class youths into "the directionless and tamed helots of a machine-minding class." Hoggart sees these new, passive, depoliticised, working-class consumers as an omen of an even poorer and less fulfilling world to come:

"The hedonistic but passive barbarian who rides in a fifty-horse-power bus for threepence, or to see a five-million-dollar film for one-and-eightpence, is not simply a social oddity; he is a portent."

The view that industrialisation and mechanisation had turned ordinary people into passive consumers, unable to think and act for themselves, and therefore ripe for exploitation by dominant economic and political forces, found its ultimate expression in the work of the Frankfurt School critics of the 1920s – 1960s. Theodor Adorno explicitly contrasts the activities of the profit-driven culture industry, which "intentionally integrates its consumers from above" and in which "contemporary technical capabilities" and "economic and administrative concentration" are used to exert "total social control" over its target audience of consumers, with what he sees as its polar opposite; "a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art." The latter, for Adorno, was characterised by an inherent "rebellious resistance", which has been extinguished by the numbing effects of the culture industry.

For the purposes of this dissertation, the primary link that I would like to make between the aforementioned texts is the role ascribed to technology in the destruction of the supposed lost, spontaneous, organic folk culture. Technological advancement, harnessed by capitalism, is seen by Leavis, Hoggart, Adorno and many others as an irreversible process that progressively disenfranchises and alienates the people and leads to the increasing standardisation and impoverishment of available cultural texts.

This view was taken up in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s by a new generation of critics concerned with the rise of television as the dominant global cultural medium.

TO BE CONTINUED...

PS I cannot believe people actually want to read this. And I have a feeling I'm supposed to sign something to say the dissertation hasn't been published anywhere. And also if they run their plagiarism software on it, they might find it here, and try and accuse the real me of plagiarising the mythical Patroclus, or vice versa. But hey, life on the edge...I might put up an instalment a week...woohoo, ready-made content!

Newsflash

We interrupt this edition of Newsnight Review* to bring you important news from the Languedocien countryside.

Bong! The figs have ripened!

Bong! I had fresh figs for breakfast with honey!

Bong! The equivalent quantity of figs would have cost me £8.50 from the fruit & veg stall on Chiswick High Road!

Bong! Please write in with your best fig recipes so that I may make the most of nature's bounty!

And now back to Mark Lawson and that dreadful Kermode character.


* Bags be Germaine Greer.


TOTALLY UNRELATED UPDATE: James has a salutary warning about an outfit called BlogBurst. If these people try to flatter you into joining their 'network', do not be fooled. They are going to make you work for free, while they and the Big Meeja rake in the cash. Don't give them the time of day.

AND FINALLY... This is my 400th post! Wheeee! I'm going to celebrate with a nice cup of mint and liquorice tea.

Well, You Did Ask

Here's the abstract for the infamous dissertation. If you like this bit, I'll maybe do a Dickens/Home & Away-style serialisation, with appropriate seasonal cliffhangers:

Blogging: A New Folk Culture?

This dissertation posits the idea that the practice of weblogging has given rise to an online worldwide community of millions of cultural producer-consumers, who are collaborating creatively in the ‘blogosphere’ to create and share cultural products in a non-commercial environment.

It will examine this phenomenon in the context of four interrelated aspects of cultural theory: the idea of the lost organic community with its authentic folk culture; the role played by technology in the ebb and flow of cultural power; Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of the profit-driven culture industry, and Fiske and De Certeau’s notion of the absence of a dedicated ‘place’ where people are free to create their own culture.

I hope to demonstrate that the blogosphere, as it exists today, embodies some of the aspects of the organic community and its authentic, non-commercial folk culture that many cultural commentators presume was wiped out by industrialisation. I also hope to show that mass access to and use of the internet as a technological tool for cultural production and distribution is tipping the balance of cultural power away from the institutions that make up the media and entertainment industry and towards this millions-strong organic community of bloggers.

However, I also plan to show that this techno-utopian state of affairs may only be temporary; as the powerful media and entertainment corporations that operate what Adorno called the ‘culture industry’ move to appropriate the blogosphere and its underlying technologies for their own profit-driven ends. In doing so, they appear to be on the verge of co-opting the community of bloggers into acting as largely unpaid workers, using them as an audience that can be sold to advertisers, and as poorly-remunerated carriers of advertising. I will examine how these shifting power relations threaten to compromise the idea of the blogosphere as a communal, creative ‘place’.

The dissertation combines established cultural theory with emerging research into the size and nature of the blogosphere, together with a number of first-hand case study examples of ‘grass-roots’ cultural production in this new, but already threatened, ‘organic folk community’.

Gawd.

Not Our Natural Habitat, You See

The thing with writers is that we're terribly articulate and that with the typey-typey keyboard, but stick us on the phone and we miraculously transform into monosyllabic imbeciles.

Today I was meant to have a briefing call with my client's in-house writer about an article they want me to write. The call went something like this:

[Phone rings]

Me: Hello, Patroclus speaking.

Other Writer: Oh. Ah. Hello. How are you?

Me: Fine, thank you. How are you?

Other Writer: Very well, thanks. Bit cloudy here.

Me: Oh. It's sunny here.

[Long pause]

Me: So, er, you wanted to brief me about something?

Other Writer: Oh. Ah. Yes. Or...how about I just send you some stuff? I could send you an article I wrote, and you could write something like it. Only there are lots of different versions of it. Um. Because I cut it into different lengths for different places. It's all the same though.

Me: Alright, well just send me the longest one.

Other Writer (brightening up): Oh yes, great. If I send you the longest one, that's got the bit about Jiminy Cricket in it. [Sighs] He was the first to go when it got cut.

[Long pause]

Other Writer: Are you still there?

Me: Oh, yes, sorry. I was just thinking.

Other Writer: Right. So I'll email you that article then.

Me: Great! Bye then!

Your Questions Answered

Tim asked: "But going back to first principles, why do you want your armpits to smell of vanilla?"


Cut to:


INT. SPAR ST CHINIAN - DAY

PATROCLUS is dithering in the cosmetics aisle.

Voice of Inner Petulance: I want the exact same deodorant as I have in London!

Voice of Inner Reason: They don't have it. And anyway, that makes you no better than the hordes of Daily Mail-reading Brits who move down here, refuse to speak any French, get Sky installed illegally*, only socialise with other Brits, and have cornflakes and marmite flown in from Stansted every day.

Voice of Inner Petulance: Right! Well, I'll have this one, look, it's vanilla flavour - you'd never get that in Britain. Plus it's called 'Ushuaia'. I think I've been there.

Voice of Inner Reason: No you haven't. You don't even know where it is.

Voice of Inner Misplaced Pub Quiz Confidence: I think it's in Hawaii.

Voice of Inner Reason: Then you haven't been there.

Voice of Inner Melodrama: You're in exile in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country, incarcerated in a ramshackle, falling-down old house, and you're worried about what your armpits smell like?

Voice of Inner Python: I bet Ovid never had this trouble.


Arabella asked: "Did you eat the pie yet?"

I had some of it with some mascarpone (which may or may not be the same as BiB's Russian curds). It was very tasty. Hurrah!


* Ahem.

L'Aisselle Du Temps Perdu

I've got some new French deodorant that advertises itself as vanilla flavour, but which smells inescapably of Play-Doh.

The net effect of this is that I keep having Proustian transportations back to the cottage where we lived when I was very young, and in particular to a blue snail* I fashioned from Play-Doh at the age of about five.

That masterpiece aside (and I think I probably had considerable adult assistance), I wasn't a very artistic child. I remember once at primary school attempting to make a blue pig* from papier-mâché applied liberally to a blown-up balloon (which excitingly had to be burst from the outside once the confection was complete), and getting very confused about where its eyes should be in relation to its snout. While my classmates managed to take home something appreciably porcine in appearance, I took home a misshapen blue ball with no discernible facial features whatsoever.

Umm, I'm not actually sure why I'm writing about this. Bloody Proustian deodorant.

In other news, I have taken the unusual (for me) step of making a pie from the rubbish pears and blackberries I found along the old railway track. I considered chucking in some rosemary and unripe figs as well, but common sense luckily stayed my hand. Mind you, it hasn't finished cooking yet - it might be inedible anyway.

Ahh, the countryside. It isn't much like London, is it?


* Clearly showing a predilection on my part for blue animals. Well I never.

Blogging: Kind Of Like Tron, But Not Really

Great post and comments on Tim's blog about blogging culture vs 'established' culture. Which got me to thinking that even though I've just written 17,000 words on that very subject, I still feel like I'm no nearer to understanding what blogging 'is'.

Of course it would be wrong to think that blogging is simply one thing; it's clearly lots of things all at once. It's a new form of communication, a new way of socialising, a new form of media, a new way of establishing and controlling one's own identity.

But the more I think about it, the more I get a nebulous sense that all of these different aspects of blogging have an overarching characteristic: the fact that all this new stuff takes place inside the machine*. The 'machine' being, obviously, the internet. You might think that is stating the bleeding obvious, but I'm not sure that many people have properly grasped the implications of this.

For a start, inside the machine is very different from the physical world. An individual person can be many different people, with many different names and personalities. People socialise with people whom they would never have met in the physical world. People who are nothing but avatars and pseudonyms hold earnest, frank, funny, confessional discussions with each other without knowing, or even wanting to know, 'who' the other people are**. In a way, one's physical-world identity and attributes cease to matter, which I think is nice, but also fairly fucking revolutionary when you think about it.

But I think that what blogging *really* is is representations of people in virtual space. To my mind, my blog isn't something I write and publish, but it's essentially me, or at least my representative in cyberspace. Me, in a different dimension, but definitely me, rather than just something that was created by me. So Patroclus doesn't just write stuff, but also has conversations with people, visits people, entertains people, and so on.

And what's different about that is that not only am I lots of different people inside the machine (Patroclus being one of several), but that everything that I do in here is theoretically visible to everyone. Whereas in the physical world you can have a conversation with someone in private, and those words disappear into the ether and no one knows afterwards what you said, inside the machine those words and conversations are stuck there forever unless you delete them or ask the other person to delete them. As if we're characters in a comic and everything we say is fixed in a speech bubble forever. So I suppose the thing that freaks people like Janet Street-Porter out is that she can *see* us now, whereas before she couldn't. We're in the room with her. Like monsters. Or zombies. And there are millions of us.

And the thing with, say, Tron, or Neuromancer and the other early cyberpunk stuff, is that there weren't very many people inside the machine. The ones that got inside were like pioneers, like the first people on the moon, or the first settlers in the Wild West. It was all kind of individualistic and heroic (which is why women aren't supposed to like cyberpunk), because this is the way computers were, then - they were individual, isolated things, rarely connected to a network, and that's why we still have to put up with the image of the 'internet user' as a sad, sociopathic loner.

By the time you get to, say, Snow Crash, there are more people inside the machine, but they're still kind of marginal, edgy types, and the internet (metaverse) is still a marginal, edgy sort of dangerous underground where right-thinking people fear to enter, and I suppose that's why we still have to put up with this image of the internet as being a lawless place populated by criminals.

But now...now there are millions of us inside the machine, even people who don't wear black vests and mirror shades and consider themselves to be lone outlaw fugitives from the real world. So, in a sense, virtual reality has become real reality. And all of the ground-breaking things about virtual reality - the collapse of space and time, the unimportance of the physical self, the ability to be lots of different people in lots of different places; the whole thing about being essentially a brain in a jar, plugged into a machine...that's what our lives are like every day now.

We try to make sense of blogging by applying real-world analogies (blogging is like the media, blogging is like keeping a diary, etc.) but it so clearly isn't like the real world that if you stop for a second and think about what it's *really* like, it's just totally freaky. But it's lovely to see people adapt to it so quickly and totally, and start to create new rules and mores and codes of conduct, and cultural pursuits (e.g. memes and games and ritual practices that play with - and help us to make sense of - the fabric of the blogosphere itself) in what is essentially a completely different dimension.

Ahh, humans are so great.


* I totally nicked this phrase, and most of these ideas, from this fabulous article in Wired. And this book. And this one. But I'll lay claim to the zombie analogy.

** An idea that's always tickled me is that two people who know each other under a particular name in one online domain (say the blogosphere) may also know each other under different names in a different online domain (say a chat forum), and not know that they are the same people. How Philip K. Dick is that!

Things That Make You Go 'Awww', Part 2

Things that made me go 'awww' today:

1. Two teenagers, huddled together in sleeping bags, asleep on the hillside as the sun rose over the Iron Age hillfort. Around them was scattered the detritus of their open-air baccalauréat results party. Awww.

2. One of my top bestest mates from university, who now appears to be BBC News 24's Washington correspondent. He hasn't changed one bit since we used to play the matchbox drinking game in the Black Horse in 1990 (apart from the fact that he now wears a suit and has a picture of the Capitol behind him). Awww.

Nature's Rubbish Bounty

What have I been doing in the real world for a whole week, you may be asking. Well, you probably aren’t, but I’m going to tell you anyway.

First of all I’ve *finally* finished my legendary dissertation, all 16,994 words and 52 pages of it. Which means that I've also *finally* finished my MA, after six whole years! I've been doing this degree for so long that the little silk dress my mum bought me to congratulate me on passing my third year is sadly no more. It disintegrated in the Venezuelan jungle, which was unfortunate, because it was the only item of clothing I had taken with me.

Travellers’ tip: when trekking in the Venezuelan jungle, it’s sensible to wear robust clothing, and not assume that a flimsy little silk dress will protect you from the elements, keep off killer flies, or retain structural integrity for the duration of the trek. However, I can take things like that in my stride as I am the queen of inappropriate apparel, a title to which I acceded that time I climbed Ben Nevis wearing nothing but a swimsuit and some walking boots.

But anyway, back to the dissertation! A huge thank you to all of you lovely blog-readers who made suggestions, sent me links, answered my survey and made generally encouraging noises at apposite moments. I couldn’t have done it without you, sob.

When not finishing the dissertation, I have been observing rubbish fruit. In the course of some lengthy walks among the vineyards and garrigues and limestone outcrops that surround my house here, not only have I noticed that tiny bejewelled flip-flops aren’t *quite* the thing for extensive hill-walking expeditions, but also that nature’s bounty as it exists round these parts isn’t really up to scratch. So far I have encountered:

1. An abundance of pear trees laden with dry, mealy pears

2. Vast swathes of brambles bearing tiny, tasteless blackberries

3. Masses of yellowish, desiccated rosemary

4. Acres of vines destined to produce France’s cheapest and most horrid wine

5. A surfeit of unripe figs (but I’m quite hopeful about them)

6. Loads of dusty, dried-up thyme

7. Things that looked like blueberries but turned out to be useless sloes.

What exactly am I supposed to do with that lot? Ray Mears never had it this hard, I’m sure.

Oh yes, I also had my exit from the local supermarket blocked by an eight-foot plastic gorilla, but that kind of thing happens all the time around here, so is hardly worthy of note.

The Tower Down The Track

In the first part of this particularly fine episode of Home & Away, not only did I sensationally find romance, but the prodigal Greta also sensationally reappeared at, er, Alf's caravan park*, clad in a fetching gingham dress with a claret-coloured jumper slung casually over one shoulder. Hurrah for Greta!

Now in part 2, your star-crossed heroine (that's me) sensationally announces her imminent departure from Summer Bay**, clutching naught but a copy of Neuromancer and a one-way ticket to PNG, sorry, I mean the south of France.

So I'm off for the foreseeable future, tending to family woes, in the land of Paltry and Feeble Internet Connections. The last time this happened, I wasn't seen in the blogosphere for nigh-on two years. I'll try not to make it that long this time. But if I do disappear, my sensational return two years hence will no doubt contribute to a particularly fine future episode.

So long then, folks. See you on the other side.


* It would probably help if I'd ever actually seen Home & Away.

** I had to look that up.

Ahem

Yes, well, er, that went well, I feel.

Um, nothing to see here.

*whistles nonchalantly*

Social Etiquette 2.0

UPDATE: Ahh, massive waves of blog-related paranoia, it's quite like old times. So, let's put this one back...

Spent a goodly portion of the train journey back from Cornwall pondering the most appropriate way to casually inform the assembled crowd of blog-readers (if indeed there's anyone left following the frankly pathetic frequency of posting recently) that I seem to have become - ahem - romantically involved with another blogger.

In the end I gave up pondering and listened to some loud, inappropriate punk songs instead.

Far the best approach all round, I think.

Help

Quick cry for help - does anyone have access to the Oxford English Dictionary 2005 or 2006 edition, if so, could you please tell me what its definition of 'blog' is?

Many thanks!

So Long, Chaps

I'm off on a whistle-stop Grand Tour of foreign countries, including France, Switzerland, the Slough Trading Estate and Cornwall, for to bring back exciting and rare objects for my private collection.

Normal service will perhaps be resumed ere long.

UPDATE (because I know you're all, without exception, fascinated by my every move): I'm no longer going to Switzerland, which is fortunate, because the conversation I was going to have in Switzerland took just ten minutes on the phone, but I am going to Suffolk. Does that count?

Actually I'm not really going to many foreign countries at all, am I?

Female Bloggers: Rumoured Existence Confirmed

Hurrah, someone has finally done a survey of bloggers (in the US), and discovered that 46% of America's 12 million bloggers are women.

Blogworld pundits can download the full survey (33-page PDF) here.

Many thanks to Tom L for the top tip-off.

Out For The Summer...Maybe...

I might be taking a little break now, so don't be too distressed if I don't post anything for a while.

On the other hand, I might be back on Friday. But if not, then thanks to everyone for reading/commenting/being generally lovely, and I'll see you in a bit.

Pelargonium Update

The third pelargonium is still in situ, thanks, I like to think, to the near-ceaseless vigil I have been keeping over the last forty-eight hours. So I've only had four hours' sleep! Who cares! The security of my leafy ward is paramount.

So far it has not demonstrated any particular displays of gratitude for my watchfulness. At no point, for example, has it broken into a stirring rendition of 'I Will Always Love You', but that is because self-restraint and a stiff upper lip are all-pervasive attributes among the denizens of Quinquireme Towers.

Having now been forced to return to work in order to earn money and stuff, I have taken the precaution of drafting in a crack squad (well, one) of Cornish scriptwriters to maintain watch. These scriptwriting bodyguards are terribly expensive, though, always demanding payment in the finest Moleskine notebooks and suchlike, so I fear that later in the week I'll need to make alternative arrangements. Especially as on Wednesday night I'm scheduled to attend a launch event that worryingly promises to be like the party from Eyes Wide Shut held at the top of the Towering Inferno.

I would take the pelargonium with me, but I'm not confident that anyone is going to make it out alive. In fact if any of us live to see another blog post, it'll be a Hollywood feel-good miracle.

Stay tuned...

The Mystery Of The Second Pelargonium*

I returned home from work yesterday to discover a white china bowl, which had previously contained one red pelargonium, smashed to tiny pieces and scattered all the way down the front steps.

Evidently the bowl had been toppled from on high by a mysterious agency, but what of its contents? The pelargonium plant itself is nowhere to be found, although a few petals and one solitary leaf still garnish the steps like a minimalist Thai salad.

The third pelargonium (or The Third Pelargonium, as it shall henceforth be known) remains intact - but for how long?

If this was real life, The Third Pelargonium would be packing its bags and hieing itself to a safe house in Starfield Road. But this appears to be a third-rate psychological thriller in the vein of Sleeping With The Enemy, so for the sake of audience titillation, The Third Pelargonium has elected to stay put in spite of the clear and present danger.

I can barely bring myself to leave the house (which is no bad thing, because I have a lot of work to do). Who knows what will happen next? I can but watch and wait...


* Not 'geranium'. Never that. (Thanks for the clarification, cello!)

25 First Lines

At this very moment I'm supposed to be in London E8, watching Ed Harcourt play in the exotically-named Spice Festival, currently taking place in the exotic locale of Mare Street, Hackney.

However my shadowy contacts on the Eastern front have gone all nichts neues on me, so I find myself ensconced instead in the familiar surroundings of Quinquireme Towers, London W12, with a mug of peppermint tea at my side and a crepuscular breeze ruffling the remaining geraniums.

Ahhh.

So while I'm here, let's play the first lines game! You know the score: I write down the first lines of the first 25 songs iTunes's Party Shuffle feature throws at me (excluding instrumentals and songs where the first line is also the title), and you name them. No cheating by looking them up!

There's a FABULOUS PRIZE to be won by the person who can name the most, which may or may not be my dog-eared spare copy of Cold Comfort Farm or my mouldy spare copy of Decline and Fall. What more incentive could you possibly need?

UPDATE: I now declare the contest closed, with the results as follows:

With HALF a point: Billy

With ONE point: Annie Rhiannon, Annie Slaminsky, Longcat, Prolix and the lovely Sara

With ONE and a HALF points: POE

With TWO points: Heather, Occasional Poster of Comments

And the winner, with a mighty FOUR points: Nibus!

This is dead handy actually, because Nibus sits next to me sometimes, so I don't even have to put the FABULOUS PRIZE in the post!

I'll be the first to admit this competition was terribly hard, so very well done to everyone who guessed anything correctly. Remaining answers now filled in below...


1. Peter said to Paul 'you know, all those words we wrote...'
Girl in the War, Josh Ritter

2. I have walked your sorry streets, and lived amongst your people
Catapillar, Lambchop

3. Everything is exactly right, when I walk around here drunk every night
St Ide's Heaven, Elliott Smith - POE and longcat (happy birthday, btw!)

4. Why, keep in touch with my crimes, cos I left it far behind
Rollercoaster, The Jesus and Mary Chain - Billy and POE

5. We was walking through the park
Was It You?, Spoon

6. She loves a soul that I have never been
Wolf Among Wolves, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Annie Rhiannon

7. Now that your picture's in the paper being rhythmically admired
Welcome to the Working Week, Elvis Costello - Heather

8. Life could be so easy, why you gotta make it so hard
Strange Machines, Peter and the Wolf

9. I've been outside, invited in, but I couldn't abide, wouldn't miss it again
Let's Get Lost, Elliott Smith - POE

10. In those days there was a kind of fever that pushed me out the front door
Losing Haringey, The Clientele

11. In this secret time, ah
Reel by Real, XTC - Nibus

12. The rising moon faces the sickening sun
Twilight of a Champion, The The - Nibus

13. Tonight we don't have a lot to go on
Matching Weight, Trespassers William - Occasional Poster of Comments

14. I get a feeling there's gonna be a riot
Six Days, DJ Shadow

15. All the things that will be, all the places we'll see
Yr Room, The Shortwave Set

16. The light colour in this room
Mistress, Red House Painters - Nibus

17. Wake up you sleepyhead
Oh! You Pretty Things, David Bowie - Annie (honourable mention to Sara)

18. Loosen the wire, your time has expired, the only word left is 'goodbye'
The Velocity of Saul at the Time of His Conversion, Okkervil River

19. Through the woods and frosted moors
Spell, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Heather

20. You gave me hope amidst my sorrow
New Light of Tomorrow, Husky Rescue - Occasional Poster of Comments

21. The light dissolves the darkness
Love Becomes a Savage, The Lilac Time - Nibus

22. If my senses fail, stay with me till they go, cos I don't want to be alone
Greetings in Braille, The Elected

23. Everybody find they own thing, and I guess you think you've found yours
Break in the Road, Betty Harris

24. When the devil came, he was not red
Hell is Chrome, Wilco - Prolix

25. I feel I walk, my body lies, I am lying here with you in my bed
Go Check, Ms John Soda

Go to it! I'll tick them off when they've been correctly guessed...

Degrees of Separation

At the weekend, Billy invented this game on his blog which I'm convinced is incredibly meaningful on all kinds of levels.

The aim is to go to a random blog by clicking on the 'next blog' button (which everyone apart from me seems to have) at the top of the screen, and then find your way back to http://oyebilly.blogspot.com through blogroll links. Keep a note of the blogs you travel through, there's no going backwards unless the blog you arrive on doesn't have a blogroll, and the smallest number of hops wins.

I was astonished, and probably a bit more excited than is healthy, to find that I made it back fairly easily from two random blogs to Billy's; one in 15 hops, and one in 8. What struck me was how much it was like being lost in the real world: you instinctively head for something that looks familiar (a city, an industry, a special interest), and you get an odd sense of relief when you get to a blog you recognise and know that you're going to make it back.

When you do get back, you almost feel like putting the kettle on and having some tea and chocolate biscuits while your socks dry out and you regale everyone with stories of the wonderful things you've seen.

This all tells me:

1. There must be an equivalent to the real-world six degrees of separation rule in the blogosphere, and if lots of people do this experiment, it should be possible to work out what the average number of degrees of separation is.

2. Contrary to the traditional view of the blogosphere, where the value of a blog is measured by the number of links into it, in this game the valuable blogs are the ones with lots of links out. I don't know yet if that means anything.

3. The blogosphere probably isn't as big as we think it is.

4. This experiment hints at what a blogosphere map might be like. GSE says blogosphere maps already exist, but I've never seen one and can't even begin to imagine what it would look like. For a start, it would be constantly changing as new blogs start and others die, and people link to new blogs and remove links to others. There is an early attempt here, but I think they must have given up in horror at the enormity of the task.

5. There must be blog equivalents of Clapham Junction* for this game, where you can orient yourself if you want to head in a particular direction. I think the characteristics of these must be: a) their name indicates they're based in a certain city and/or b) their name indicates they revolve around a certain industry or special interest.

6. I am plumbing depths of geekiness to which even I had never previously sunk.

I have no idea what it all means, though. I think it's a case of 'write this down now, because it might become important later'.


* Just remembered that Sean told me earlier that Malcolm Gladwell is on the case with this already, though his is slightly different, because in this game the individual bloggers may not be 'well connected' in the social sense at all; they just have lots of links out.


tags: blogmap | erdos number | bacon number

Crouching Plotline, Hidden Ending

I saw that film Hidden hier soir, and while it was undoubtedly gripping from the off, and there was a very nice white leather sofa in it, and Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche were commendably bourgeois throughout, am I the only person who didn't get it?

I mean, is it just me, or does the film just stop, without explaining anything? I still don't get who sent the tapes. But then I am quite remarkably stupid with films and telly.

Anyone wishing to explain the plot to me in words of one syllable enunciated very slowly, please feel free to do so via email (not in the comments, otherwise that would be terrible spoilers).

Oo, it's just like Memento all over again.


tags: hidden | memento

Albums I Would Buy Just For The Cover, No. 1

The Tiny - Starring: Someone Like You

I don't know if that's a giant Moomin (Moominzilla!) weeping over some Toytown tower blocks, but isn't it just lovely?

Apparently Swedish acoustic 'collective' The Tiny were on tour last month with my top showbiz chum* Ed Harcourt. How I missed this is beyond me.

Tomorrow, if I get my webspace working, my inaugural mp3 posting (hubristic pre-emptive fanfare please) will be The Tiny's 'Lake', which is seven minutes and eleven seconds of icy Tori Amos-esque vocals, sparse double bass and twinkling piano bits, and is an exquisite song about being in love while at the same time being in the middle of a lake, for reasons unspecified. And as such it should definitely have accompanied those scenes in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet are making snow angels on the frozen lake.

Oo, wouldn't movie soundtrack-chooser just be the Best Job Ever?

Right! Not quite the way I was going to do it, but here goes:

The Tiny - Lake

(buy from iTunes | buy from Amazon)


UPDATE: Oh my GOD, it actually works!! It seems to be in iTunes (m4a) format, rather than mp3, but it works, by god! Oo, I feel like the Wright brothers!! Right, best go and see to some disclaimers...


UPDATE 2: Oh yes, that's what I meant to say - everyone is to go to Billy's, where there is a fabulous pop lyric quiz on the go! No cheating now...


* In the sense that I was once introduced to him, whereupon he said 'hello', and I said 'hello'. Oh yes, I'm quite the dazzling raconteur, me.


tags: the tiny

Curious

Things that have gone missing from my flat recently, despite the fact that no one has been round:

1. A white hand towel

2. My Archer Prewitt CD

3. A geranium

I think my flat is being haunted by the malevolent spirit of Linda Barker. Either that or I've got a dose of Le Horla. Frankly I'm not sure which is worse.


UPDATE: The Mystery Of The White Hand Towel (a lesser known Dorothy Sayers work) and The Archer Prewitt Enigma have now been solved, with the respective miscreants owning up in the comments box. The Curious Incident Of The Geranium In The Night-Time remains unsolved at the time of writing.

UPDATE 2: The Great She Elephant is doing a survey about blogs and PR, and I urge you all to go and impart your wisdom and experiences at this special site she's set up (oo, get her, all rigorous and that!)

Mary Dejevsky Update

Just letting everyone know that I (like others) have had a reply from Mary Dejevsky of the Independent.

Here it is below - it's polite and fair and above all concedes that we do exist:

oh dear, more and more hot water. i set out to do one thing, which was to reply to iain dale's question - why so few female bloggers. he was talking about politics, but my impression - yes, impression - was similar. so i offered some reasons why. it now transpires that i (and perhaps he) have been looking in completely the wrong places, or not looking assiduously enough at all. lo and behold there are hundreds and hundreds of women bloggers out there - all demonstrating their existence. that's great. i have no idea how to count bloggers.

one day maybe i'll write another blogging column, repenting. not quite yet, though. i've still got a whole lot of protests to answer. all the best, mary

I'll be interested to see what she comes up with by way of a repenting article - but even this goes to show that we *do* have the power to change mainstream media perception, which is not only interesting but also quite exciting.

All credit to Mary for replying - I think we can probably call off the attack dogs now!

Normal Service Resumes

Right, everyone, quick - over to the quite wonderfully named Bricolage Fantasy*, where you can download one of the loveliest, shimmeriest, Finnish countrytronica songs ever, to wit, New Light Of Tomorrow by Husky Rescue.

The album remains highly recommended (not just for its splendid artwork), and I see they're even selling it in FOPP these days.

And this weekend I swear I am going to stop cheekily linking to other people's downloads and start posting up mp3s of my own, if only I could get my webspace working. Why is everything so difficult?


* Which is very similar to the name I would choose if I ever formed a band, viz. Formica Travesty.


tags: husky rescue

An Uppity Opinionated Ho Bag* Writes...

UPDATE: Spinny has had a (mystifying) reply from Mary Dejevsky, see here!


UPDATE 2: I've put my original post up on Digg.com (actually, is that a terrible breach of netiquette?), so if you fancy digging it, go here. May as well test this 'citizen journalism' malarky to its limits...

--------------------------------------------------------------
Well I don't know about Tim or Spinny, but I certainly haven't had a reply from the now-infamous Mary Dejevsky to the email I sent her à propos of her article in last Thursday's Independent (see post below).

So here for the record, before we move on to nicer, more frivolous things, is the email I sent:

Hello Mary,

I read your article in the Independent on Thursday. Please let me introduce myself. I'm a woman, and I have been writing a blog for four years. I'm 35, married but divorcing, I have no children, I run a company that has 15 employees and I am taking a part time Master's degree with the Open University.

I would like to invite you to visit my blog. It's at http://quinquireme.blogspot.com. If you do come along, and you are most welcome, please look at the list of links on the right-hand side. This is called a blogroll - it's a list of links to other blogs I read. It's divided into two sections: 'Meatspace' (people I know in real life) and 'Cyberspace' (people I know on the internet).

I link to 44 other blogs. Two of them are written by the same person, so that's a total of 43 other bloggers. Twenty of them are women, and 23 of them are men. This does not suggest to me that female bloggers are 'few and far between'.

If you click on any one of these links, you will arrive at another blog with another blogroll on the right-hand side. Here again you will find a fairly even distribution between male and female bloggers.

I have no children and no husband at home, but plenty of my female blogger friends do. You might like to look at the following, for example:

http://urbanchickadee.blogspot.com
http://dflatchimebar.blogspot.com
http://www.smat.biz
http://taigathefox.blogspot.com

You might also like to consider the number of female bloggers who are too young to be married and have children. Having a blog is just a normal part of life for today's teenage girls and young women.

Although I do not have children or a husband at home, this does not mean I have plenty of time on my hands. I work 12 hours a day, and at the weekends I am studying for my postgraduate degree. However, I love blogging. I make time to blog. I get up at between 3.30am and 5.30am most days, so I have time to do all the things that I like doing as well as the things that I have to do - and that includes blogging.

Blogging gives women - and men - an opportunity to voice their own opinions and tell their own stories, which on the whole are not dull and tedious, but fantastically varied, intelligent, funny, moving and fascinating. It also gives women - and men - an opportunity to reach out and find new friends, chat to them, support them and be supported by them. For women - and men - who spend a lot of time at home every day with young children, blogging is a way of socialising without leaving the house. It's fun, it's healthy, it's interesting, and millions of women are doing it. I'd really like it if you came and saw for yourself.

Well, Mary, you had your chance.

Meanwhile, here in the Land of Make-Believe, the La Redoute catalogue has just arrived, featuring the most loveliest raspberry floral-print Princesse Tam-Tam** underwear, which will be mine forthwith, oh yes...

And in other news (lest anyone think I'm going a bit girly and might start writing about gynaecology at any moment), peerless independent music outfit Boomkat is having a Summer Bargain Clearance sale on everything ever released on the matchless Morr record label!

Morr is home to a ton of achingly cool, ethereal, Scandinavian, German and Japanese electronica, and much fey indie goodness besides. I shall be taking this opportunity to stock up on Lali Puna and Múm, and, ooh, who knows what else. Go to it, good readers!

As a taster, here's Lali Puna covering 'Together In Electric Dreams', which I found at Music Is Art, one of the most beautiful blogs I've ever seen. Must learn web design skills immediately.


Lali Puna - Together In Electric Dreams (mp3)

--------------------------------------------------------------
* Thanks to First Nations for this fine designation.

** Warning: Flash, scantily-clad women, music.


tags: mary dejevsky | princesse tam-tam | morr | lali puna

From Your Non-Existent Correspondent

There was an article in the Independent on Thursday called There's A Good Reason Women Don't Write Blogs, written by columnist Mary Dejevsky.

The Indy wants you to pay a pound for the privilege of reading this ill-informed tosh, but I've done that for you, and have pasted the full article below. I've also highlighted some choice bits in bold.

I could do a nice Fisking job on this, but that would make a very long post, and we'll see if that happens in the comments.

But I would like ask to the following questions:

1. Where does Mary Dejevsky get the idea from that 'except in areas such as childcare and gynaecology, it is across the board that women bloggers are few and far between?' She has no statistics to back up this assertion*.

2. Is Mary Dejevsky aware of the hypocrisy of using an opinion column in a national newspaper to claim that women are 'too bashful' to voice their own opinions?

3. Or is she inviting us non-existent female bloggers to be inspired by her example, as an 'opinionated [woman] expressing forthright views in [...] the media'?

4. If we're to be inspired by columnists like Mary Dejevsky into writing a blog, why then does she say that blogging is a passing fad that is attractive to men because of its 'gadgetry and self-aggrandisement'?

5. How does she square her point that most women are too busy looking after their children and cooking dinner for their husbands to blog, with the fact that she's said that most female bloggers are writing about 'childcare and gynaecology'?

Should you be moved to thank Mary Dejevsky for bravely speaking out on behalf of the nation's timid, downtrodden legions of 50s-style mothers and wives, her email address is m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk.

Enjoy. And thanks to Sean for alerting me to this article.

Mary Dejevsky: There's a good reason why women don't write blogs

Men seem to take it for granted that they've something to say and that the rest of us want to hear it

Published: 29 June 2006

Iain Dale is a Conservative pro-Cameron MP. I do not know him, and I am just as certain that he does not know me. He does, though, put himself about. He writes one of the more prolific blogs (www.iaindale.blogspot.com**) to come out of this Parliament, purveying commentary, analysis, gossip and the like via his website, with what seems like hour-to-hour, if not minute-by-minute, frequency.

Iain - as I am sure he would like me (and you) - to call him, recently made an observation that simply leapt out of his stream of consciousness. "It doesn't matter whether you're talking about Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem bloggers," he wrote, "you won't find many written by women." He went on to observe, admitting the sexist stereotype, that women, "being much better gossips than men ought to be ideally suited to the world of blogging". I curtail his prolixity, but he concludes: "There must be some reason why women don't blog as much as men in the political sector."

Well, Iain, I venture to correct you on one point. It is not just in the political sector, as you call it, that fewer women blog. Except in areas such as childcare and gynaecology, it is across the board that women bloggers are few and far between. And it does not take a huge of the imagination to suggest at least two reasons why.

The first is that, for all the efforts to educate men and women equally, to encourage them to compete for honours, even to feminise the examination system by introducing coursework, women (still) tend to be more bashful than men about what they think. It is not that, as veteran male gender-warriors might growl, we have much to be bashful about. It is rather that we tend to be less confident than men that the rest of the world wants the benefit of our opinion.

Men seem to take it for granted not only that they have something to say, but that the rest of us should find it worth hearing - or, in the case of the blogosphere, reading. Iain Dale is not the only verbal incontinent who ploughs on, apparently regardless of who might be listening or reading. Alas, his confidence is repaid by the dozens who seem to respond to every post. The cacophony of so many (mostly male) opinions is deafening.

Our female bashfulness, I submit, may be gradually being drummed out of us by a combination of good teaching, co-ed schools and colleges, and the example of opinionated women expressing forthright views in other parts of politics and the media. The second reason why women don't blog, however, is more serious, because it is more intractable: women simply do not have the time.

Earlier this week, I heard Finland's minister for foreign trade and development, speaking in London to celebrate the centenary of women's suffrage in Finland. They were the first women in Europe to gain the vote. And the record of women's participation in Finnish life is as laudable as one would expect from Scandinavia.

Yet, as Ms Paula Lehtomaki noted, without the diffidence that might attend the same observation in this country, the next frontier had to be the home. Women had come a long way: safeguards against discrimination, for equal pay and opportunities were all in place and largely observed. But the fact was that in joining the workforce on equal terms, women were all too often tied to two jobs: equality, even in enlightened Scandinavia, all too often stops at the front door.

How many homes are there - here, or in tech-savvy Finland - where the man will think it quite excusable to shuffle in late for dinner because he has been reading or writing his online diary, but would greet with ridicule or fury the prospect of dinner being late (or non-existent) because his partner had been delayed in the blogosphere?

And for dinner, we can substitute baby's bathtime, the children's high-tea, the regular taxi-service families run between sports and after-school clubs, the elderly parents that need looking after. It is this old-fashioned, and persistent, division of responsibilities that frees men to indulge in the time-consuming fashion of the day; and the gadgetry and self-aggrandisement involved in blogging only make it that much more attractive.

Iain Dale calls his blog "Iain Dale's diary". Those of us of a certain age - I can faintly recall the signature tune - know this to be an allusion to the fictitious radio diary of a GP's wife and receptionist which was broadcast on weekday afternoons. It was a soap opera for its day, very BBC Home Service. More tied to the Fifties way of life than The Archers, it did not survive into this more hurried, less homely age.

But there is a point here. In the days of Fifties-style, essentially segregated working, Mrs Dale had the time to keep a diary. Today's Mrs Dale would be the doctor herself, rushing in to the surgery from the school run and organised enough to assemble dinner at the end of the day. She would be too tired at the end of it all, or have more pressing things to do, to advertise her thoughts in the blogosphere. Diary-keeping, unlike family responsibility, has entered the public sphere and crossed the gender-divide.

* I have no statistics to refute it, but it's not borne out in my experience, and I'm sure that Pash, Tabby Rabbit, Scroobious, Lizzy, Extemporanea, Annie, Belladona, Betty, Great She, Smat, Spinny, Ori, Taiga, Arabella, First Nations, Biscuits, Surly Girl, Catpee and Urban Chick would agree. And that's just from my blogroll.

** Who, as Prolix points out, has himself fisked Mary's article here.


tags: mary dejevsky | misogyny

Funny

I'm reading this biography of Philip K. Dick by Emmanuel Carrère, as recommended to me by a pseudonymous individual on a chat forum far, far away. It is fabulous. Funniest bit so far (with apologies to anyone who knows this joke already):

Terry Carr, the Ace paperback editor, used to joke that if the Bible had been published as science fiction, it would have had to be cut down to two volumes of twenty thousand words each; the Old Testament would have been retitled Master of Chaos, and the New Testament The Thing with Three Souls.

I'm quite scared to keep reading this book, as I just know that poor old Phil is going to go increasingly nuts, and I can't bear stuff like that, especially as I find PKD's thought processes and neuroses uncomfortably familiar. But it's so well written and funny and engaging and a great* insight into McCarthy-era America that so far, it's just great.

In other news, apparently some football is on soon. Better go.


* Where by 'great', I mean 'disturbing and eerily reminiscent of the pseudo-paranoia of terrorism that our government is trying to instil in us today'.


tags: philip k dick | emmanuel carrere

Academia Blues, Part 2

While in the shower, I had this sudden image in my head of me, thirteen years ago, sitting down to my final degree exam in Twentieth Century French Literature.

This was my favourite of all subjects. I'd been revising for months. I'd read four books by Sartre, two by Camus and one by top nutter Alain Robbe-Grillet, and I knew them more or less off by heart. I'd even found a handwritten letter from Robbe-Grillet inside one of his books in the library, which no one had ever taken out. I figured that because I was the only person who'd bothered to read the book, I was somehow entitled to own this letter. So I stole it, and promptly lost it.

I had no money, and I hadn't eaten for four days. In the exam I had to write three essays out of seven given questions. There was one question covering the entire oeuvre of Camus and Sartre. There were no questions about Robbe-Grillet. There were five questions about books I hadn't read. And there was a seventh question which is still etched on my mind, thirteen years later. It went:

Nothing is simply one thing. Discuss.

I got up and walked out of the exam without writing anything.


UPDATE: I have a nasty feeling that someone is going to come along and tell me that *was* the question about Robbe-Grillet.


tags: camus | sartre | robbe-grillet

That's You, That Is.

Our company is launching a new Roman-themed MMORPG. This conversation may or may not have taken place yesterday:


K: Ooh, and we've got an interview with History Today.

Me: Excellent!

[Pause]

Me: See that centurion? You love him.

[Pause]

Me: See that leaky impluvium? That's your girlfriend, that is.

[Pause]

Me: See that testudo formation? That's you, that is.

[Pause]

S: Patroclus.

Me: Mmm?

S: It's a BBC magazine.

Me: Oh.


tags: mmorpg | mary whitehouse experience | history today

A Slight Case Of Overblogging

While I'm in the midst of writing my dissertation about blogging, writing this blog, writing the work blog, tarting myself around the business blogs to voice my opinions about blogging, touring round the very fine blogs of my blogging chums and thinking about the article about blogging that I haven't written yet for that other blog, this company phones me up and asks if I will mastermind the press launch of its new blogging tool.

Could be time for a holiday.

In the real world.


UPDATE: These days I want to accompany every post with a song. So here's terribly under-rated singer-songwriter Archer Prewitt* singing a song whose title might suggest to non-Americans that it's about vaginal lubricant, but actually it's about Kentucky. This man writes lovely, lovely songs that sound quite conventional and MOR-ish at first, until you realise that they're fantastically well crafted and wonderful and veer off in unexpected directions all the time, and are, well, just great really. Can't recommend him enough.


Archer Prewitt - O, KY (mp3) - courtesy of My Old Kentucky Blog


* Ignore the Amazon review comparing this with that whining oaf David Gray. There is no comparison. None.


tags: blog overload | archer prewitt

Sunday Night Music

Sometimes I like to listen to horrific, mental, bleeping techno tracks, and sometimes I like to listen to cute, romantic, insubstantial indiepop songs.

Tonight is one of the latter times.


Josh Ottum - It's All Right (mp3) - courtesy of Mill Pond Records.


tags: josh ottum | mill pond records