Sounds/Ideas/Colours

Why I worry about the new Spare Rib

Wed, 08 May 2013 21:03:00 +0100

The women’s issue of Frendz, done by the Angry Brigade people, started the meetings of the women in the underground that then produced Spare Rib, so you could actually say that the Angry Brigade were responsible for Spare Rib.

Rosie Boycott, in Days in the Life edited by Jonathan Green

Charlotte Raven’s picked up Boycott’s baton, and instead of passing it to a new generation, she looks set to toss it about amongst her media friends, and some “middle-aged punks”, whatever that means.

Everything I feel is good about the drive to make this world a better place should be encapsulated in a revived Spare Rib, and yet today’s interview with Raven in the Guardian made me sad, and not a little frustrated.

For a start, there’s that weary dismissal of what Pussy Riot may, or may not, have come to represent in an era where marketing departments commodify everything. The fact is, commodification of the Pussy Riot image was vital to the spread of their message of defiance. It’s not the ’60s anymore. Capitalism won. So you fight with the enemy’s weapons. And if you fight so well that The Times puts you, and the words Pussy Riot, on its front page, then I think you can be congratulated, not turned into some intellectual quandary for a “middle-aged punk” in a big north London house.

Raven very nearly joined Pussy Riot on the barricades, at, um, Epsom Derby, but didn’t, because she couldn’t think of a particular issue to fight for. This is understandable, I suppose. The Occupy movement’s rallying cry became diffuse, for example, because it was co-opted by too many other voices. But still - they slept on the streets anyway, and slept there for many cold nights, and we saw the beginnings of a sea change in economic thinking.

Is all direct action for the good then? No, but even the awful Angry Brigade, with their shit bombs and crackpot ideals, ended up inadvertently giving birth to the first version of Spare Rib. The 21st century version was, according to Raven, catalysed by her media friends being a bit bored with the crap the mainstream media’s churning out. A mainstream media in love with narcissistic columnists. Oh the irony.

Is the new Spare Rib going to have the impact something like Emma Barnett’s Telegraph women’s section may have, bit by bit, on that paper’s hoary bunch of misogynistic bile-spewers? Because really, Barnett’s fighting the harder fight. Trying to impress Simon Kelner is not much of a stretch compared to stating your case, day after day, intelligently and without rancour, side by side with a column by Toby Young (a point I feel Raven may agree with, ahem).

Amidst all this hand-wringing over what feminism can do in this hyper-marketed, columnist-dominated media landscape, is the unspoken opinion that, actually, some of the major battles were lost somewhere along the lines, and need to be fought again - only harder, and in a more sophisticated way. This may be an unpalatable thought to some of the “middle-aged punks”, but we’re in a new era, and need new weapons.

The thing is, many young women probably found Pussy Riot empowering because they’d never heard of, say, Valerie Solanas. And maybe they found Pussy Riot inspiring because they read about them in Vice, because Vice could see that the image was as important as the message, and you can engage with both and not feel like you’ve been duped by some marketing machine.

I’m sure Raven and I are on the same page when it comes to something like Lean In. This is not where we should be headed. But equally, I don’t believe sitting around writing about how feminism needs to decouple itself from the insensitivities of branding and marketing will help matters. Do you realise how far back in the stone age that marketplace still is?

You have to fight this battle on the terms laid down by the aggressors, surely? Take yourself out of that arena and you become irrelevant.

Pay the writer? Sure. But start with the readers

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:15:00 +0000

So, the debate about paid journalism over at The Atlantic. Will you look at the size of that article? Nothing the media likes more than talking about itself. And people really love to read long bits of text in smallish fonts on their computers don’t they?

And no sub headings. Just a couple of pull quotes. What’s a pull quote? Oh, it’s a hangover from the days of print journalism, and serves no real purpose on the web.

And all those comments! Really good to see the original writer engaging with them… oh wait, he isn’t. (I know, he’s busy. Too many posts to write every day).

And on it goes.

This is an example, of which there are many across the web, of a media company more interested in its writers than its readers. It thinks it’s interested in its readers - “we’re writing top quality journalism for them!” - but it isn’t.

Upworthy, now there’s a site that cares about its readers. Short, mobile-friendly stories, often with video attached, with incredibly compelling headlines, easily shareable.

(“But oh god,” says Serious Journalist Person, “the content! It’s flimsy. It’s a sop to the tl:dr generation!” Well yes, exactly.)

Or you could look at Gawker. Look at how they incorporate their readers’ comments into the main article. They aren’t tucked away below the fold, unloved like the Atlantic’s, or those of the Guardian’s community of maniacs (maniacs because they’re unloved). It’s not much of a progression, but it’s a start. I mean, Clay Shirky left a comment in that Atlantic article, which could’ve started a new debate if the writer had been able to engage with it. It could’ve lengthened the life-span of the original story.

But no one’s listening to the readers are they?

Why are we still discussing the future of the CD?

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 14:00:42 +0000

A lot of discussion online today about HMV’s struggles. Inevitably, much of it focuses on the implications for the CD as a viable format. Some are saying -

Wait, sorry. What? The implications for the CD? We’re still having this conversation? There is no future for the CD. Nor the DVD, though that format’s demise may be more protracted.

A victory for the streaming model? Perhaps. The mobile is the future of most media consumption, at least until connected TVs become even halfway usable. But I’m not going to suggest that this represents the end of the format wars (a war record companies need to stay commercially viable).

Jimmy Iovine is after something more contextual from his digital music experience, hence his backing of new streaming platform Daisy. I think he’s on to something, just as I think Pitchfork is on to something with Advance. The delivery of music is solved. Let’s think about the experience around that delivery. Perhaps it will look something like Blue Note’s Spotify app.

Maybe these issues will never be mainstream concerns. Most people will simply download individual songs to their iPhones from iTunes. But I’ve got a feeling that a new way of looking at how we experience music will emerge from this mess. The ‘album’ is something tied to the CD/vinyl experience. The app is too expensive to replace this sort of simple song curation, but something in between Advance and the Blue Note app has potential.

Think of the current shift in advertising to branded content. The band is now in a similar position to the advertiser. No one’s paying attention. Everyone has access, and there’s no value in the relationship between artist and listener. Advertisers are trying to solve this by teaming up with content creators and starting conversations around their brands.

Perhaps the artist is now going to have to sell a story, or an experience, as much as an individual song. And I don’t mean a personal story, nor do I mean a live experience - although they’ll both play a part. The future is bands who come with a world that can be explored, just as brands now come with a magazine attached. So what? Now musicians have to be content creators, film-makers, writers, designers, maybe even coders?

Sure. It’s been that way for a while. But the end result hasn’t particularly evolved. All those skills and what’s the final package? A collection of songs or a video. Why not… the band as TV show? The band as fashion line? The band as magazine?

What does that mean? I’m not sure. But I am sure it would be exciting to find out.

The tech conference speech formula

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 15:36:00 +0000

I was at a tech conference in London this morning. It was quite similar to a lot of other tech conferences I’ve attended. I started to think about the tech conference speech formula, which has become ever more predictable in its pseudo-intellectual dot-joining.

“I’m going to talk about [insert new ‘ism’]”.
“I’m going to start with a story about [obscure person from the past]”.
“What this illustrates is [tenuous link to ‘ism’]”.
“Fast forward 100 years and [excitable pitch for some potentially disruptive technology vaguely related to ‘ism’]”.
“If you don’t act on this you’re going to get left behind just like the people who didn’t appreciate [obscure person from the past].”

People applaud, because they’ve been dazzled by the Malcolm Gladwell-ian/Adam Curtis-ian ability of the speaker to connect a couple of disparate things together and present them as a narrative.

“It was clever because it made me feel cleverer, even though there was nothing in the speech of much practical use in my actual business.”

Then they go and eat some pastries.

Best Music Videos 2012

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:25:52 +0000

I have just written a report for Stylus on the most innovative music videos of 2012. Here’s a small selection of some of the promos featured.

Unhappy Hour

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 13:50:58 +0000

I watch The Hour because I want it to be good. More precisely, I want it to be as good as it is in my head, as I find my mind wandering from the actual Hour, which is dramatically flaccid.

Last night’s episode was much better in my head. It was suffused with the unspoken rage and violence of men who had never - and would never - come to terms with their actions in the Second World War. In my head this was teased out through the course of the episode in subtle references that built to an explosive climax. In the actual Hour they went for the explosive climax (Commander Laurence Sterne - and seriously, are they going to do nothing with that name? - smashes up his mistress’s room, the only authentic scene in the entire episode), but the rest of it was crow-barred reminiscences, characters suddenly halting mid-conversation to drop in a war anecdote that sounded (like much of the period detail) straight out of Wikipedia.

That’s one of the things that feels wrong about The Hour, that it’s written by people really quite far removed from the action. There often feels like a 21st century moralism has been parachuted into a ’50s milieu. I can understand the younger characters’ disgust at violence against a showgirl, but I’m not so sure I believe Hector would take to this cause with such unwavering passion.

But then Hector is half the character the writers think he is, probably because they’d all rather be writing for Ben Whishaw, who can do things with this terrible dialogue he shouldn’t have to do.

I concentrate on its faults, because there are many. The Hour is predictable in the things it nicks from better shows - the walk-and-talk of The West Wing, the slow, smoke-filled style of Mad Men - as much as it is in its narrative. It bizarrely manages to pack too much in - nuclear war! Profumo! CND! Gangsters! Racism! - while at the same time drawing everything out interminably; how does it manage this trick? What is Bel actually for, exactly? And a nerd point - it’s very flatly mixed, no light and shade, no dynamics.

It appears the ratings are in decline, but I would imagine a third series is on the cards. If so, I hope reviewers have been tougher on it this series, so the writers get to grips next time with what The Hour really is. It’s a show about men losing their power to women.

Now then, where have I seen a TV series like that before..?

Top Ten Albums of the Year

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 13:05:00 +0000

The Album I Really Like That’s Also Actually Really Good (i.e. Basically The Best Album of the Year)

Tame Impala - Lonerism

The Album I Really Like That’s Not Really Objectively Amazing But I Don’t Care

Melody’s Echo Chamber - Melody’s Echo Chamber

The Album Made By An Old Guy That’s Better Than Everything Made By The Kids

Bill Fay - Life Is People

The Hip Hop Album That I Like But Isn’t As Good As Hip Hop Should Really Be These Days

Kendrick Lamar - good kid, m.A.A.d city

The Album That Everyone Likes And I Quite Like But Don’t Think Is Really That Amazing

Frank Ocean - Channel Orange

Requisite Beach House Album

Beach House - Bloom

Album For Putting On When You Can’t Think Of Anything Else To Put On (i.e. The Stand-By)

Dr John - Locked Down

The Latest From A Band Who Can Do No Wrong, Even If This One Isn’t Really Up To Scratch, But I Still Like It Anyway

Spiritualized - Sweet Heart, Sweet Light

Album I’ve Only Just Discovered Thanks To All These End Of Year Lists But Will Probably End Up Liking

Chromatics - Kill For Love

Album That I Haven’t Got Round To Hearing Yet Because It’s Not On Spotify But I Know Will Be Great

Gonzales - Solo Piano II

And finally…

Album I Don’t Get That Makes Me Feel Old

Grimes - Visions

The worst lack all conviction

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 13:56:44 +0000

Bury was a man of discretion and decorum, typical of a generation of men unprepared to yield their feelings to analysis, and quite unwilling to litter the world with themselves. Individuals so confident in their masculinity that they could speak of love between men without shame, collect butterflies and flowers in the dawn, paint watercolours in late morning, discuss poetry in the early afternoon and at dusk still be prepared to assault the German trenches or the flanks of the highest mountain in the world.

Wade Davis in the Guardian

I’m thinking about conviction again, inspired by this wonderful paragraph from Wade Davis in Saturday’s Guardian Review. There, it seems to me, is a life lived without irony. And irony seems to be the modern curse, even as it buffers us from the hardships of 21st century economic meltdown.

The New York Times got serious about irony last week, taking potshots at ‘the hipster’ along the way. I have fewer problems with hipsters than most - until recent times they drove our culture, for better or worse. But I found myself agreeing that something has been lost since the ’90s, when irony first felt fresh again. Now it seems to be about lack of conviction, or perhaps the shying away from any outward show of seriousness (or the unfunny).

The flipside of this is consensus: what happens when everyone take the same ironic view on everything. Owen Jones attacked the cosy consensus of our current political class in the Independent yesterday: this sort of thing, though hardly bitingly insightful, can’t be said enough. If only to kill off the career of the execrable David Miliband (he’s what happens when the only bets you don’t hedge are the ones you place on your speaking fees.)

There is a huge disconnect, it seems to me, between the distancing irony of the hipster and the safe fence-sitting of our politicians on the one hand - and a growing mainstream need for passion (however shifting), truths (however hokey) and emotion (however overblown). It’s everywhere: 50 Shades, Twilight, The Hunger Games, Baumgartner’s Space Jump, our Olympic heroes. People want conviction, and they’re getting it where they can, crowning some unusual cultural heroes in the process.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full passionate intensity”. Starting to wonder if Yeats’ line might need reversing.

God is a good story

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 12:17:51 +0000

A common response from atheists, in the face of this sort of nonsense, is to go for the “what year is this??” angle - Dan Hodges in the Telegraph today offers a great example. They think it’s a good approach, this idea that religion will wither in the face of scientific advancement, that believers just need to open their eyes to the facts.

Of course that’s not going to work. Religious faith is drawn from a really simple, compelling, familiar story. The story the scientists tell is complicated, evolving, often in dispute even when based on cast-iron principles. If you’re in need of simple guidance or reassurance in your life, you’re likely to opt for the man in the sky with the ten basic rules. I’m sure there are many forward-thinking people out there, who fully agree that the Earth is a lot older than the Bible says and are sincerely excited at the discoveries being made by, for example, the Large Hadron Collider, who still have a place for God in their hearts.

Church leaders have spent 2000 years complicating this story, of course, to bring them power and control. The guys in robes are more difficult to argue with than the faithful flock, which is why atheists tend to aim at the latter. I’ve yet to see an atheist argument that could really rock the convictions of a bishop.

I say all this as someone who dearly hopes religious influence on the affairs of our modern society will one day dwindle to nothing. But I don’t expect, or want, people to have to stop believing for that to happen.

Brian Jones: he put the pop in the Stones

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 13:07:18 +0000

Watching the latest Rolling Stones doc at the weekend, I was intrigued to see how much or how little they made of Brian Jones’s contribution. The footage they dug up of him doing variations on his justly legendary nanker face was, it must be said, impressive. But he was more than a funny footnote. Jones was a conundrum: the nasty aggressor who added great sweetness to the band’s sound, the dedicated blues obsessive who was vital to their initial triumph as a pop group, the leader who took a backseat.

Between The Buttons-era Stones is probably my favourite phase of the band, and it’s mainly down to the colour Jones adds - that recorder melody on Ruby Tuesday, that sinister sitar line on Paint It, Black. With Jones, the Stones were wonderfully anything-goes - and funny, too. Without him, they became locked in a compelling, but largely unchanging, groove.

Jones was pretty much done by the time the band released Satantic Majesties, the last Stones album that tried anything new. From Beggars Banquet onwards, it was Mick’n’Keef’s operation - and while they led the group to the heights of Sticky Fingers and Exile, the two of them never again captured what they had when Jones was alive.

In many ways, Jones was a perfect emblem of the ’60s. And Mick’n’Keef were, in the end, ’70s men at heart.

Uncool? Then why bother

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 13:54:00 +0000

What do people want from music journalism? The - undeniably resourceful, well-meaning and ambitious - folk behind Uncool aren’t sure that they want anything. If they were, they’d be pitching to a publishing house rather than trying to raise funds on Kickstarter. If there was a need for Uncool to exist, it would exist.

Uncool is what the founders of Uncool want from journalism. And it consciously sets itself up in opposition to the things the founders hate (goddamn listicles!!) They’re creating something for themselves, and by extension other likeminded people - and I hope there’ll be enough of the latter for it to sustain itself. You don’t need a massive established target market to exist in order to think, “what the hell, I want to read this, let’s go for it”.

Yet, it all seems like harking back for no other reason than looking forward throws up too many unknowns. Popjustice today talks about the coming resurgence in guitar music, and puts it down to the fact that the music industry is run by old, male rock fans, who put up with bright flashing lights of pop begrudgingly, until they can get back to promoting the nostalgic thud of the music they actually love. The music of the seventies, basically.

Uncool namechecks Lester Bangs and Joan Didion, more touchstones of the ‘golden age’ of rock. I’m sure the founders like Gaga as much as the Grateful Dead. But why fall back on the Grateful Dead model of music journalism (long, meaty, on paper if they can afford it), when they could instead be investing in the Gaga model? Which is… well, who knows? But it’s probably not Uncool.

Silly boys

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 14:06:40 +0000

My mother recently related how she caught a repeat of Fawlty Towers and was saddened to find that it wasn’t the comedy masterpiece we all remembered it to be. “It was just… silly.” Silly - it’s got a lot to answer for.

Silly is what we, the British, are. It is written into our DNA. The whole world is aware that, in the silly stakes, we dominate. Top of the silly heap, the Brits. But there’s more than one kind of silly, and you really have to be a Brit to notice. Degrees - shades - of silly. Fifty shades, probably.

My mother again provides illustration. She loved Monty Python, but not those bits where they dressed up as women. Partly this was catch-all feminism (the Python girls were just as funny as the boys, why should they be sidelined?) but partly it was because she found it silly. Not the sublime, surreal silliness of the rest of the show, but obvious, sniggering silliness. Schoolboy stuff. (I keep meaning to take a straw poll of friends to find out if this is how all women regard this sort of broad cross-dressing bawdiness - I’m sensing it probably is).

The political class in this country is reliant on the British propensity for the silly, for otherwise how would so many of them remain in their jobs? The Conservatives, especially, love to believe that life in Westminster is some sort of Wodehousian jape. The Tory high priest of silly is, of course, Boris Johnson, who hides his flint-eyed ambition behind a contrived Woosterish bumble. But the rest of the party is not immune.

Two examples from this week spring immediately to mind. Dorries joining I’m A Celebrity is, of course, a shining example of what happens when politicians mistake “acting like a berk” for “showing my simple-minded constituents that I’m human just like them”.

But the Chris Heaton-Harris ‘plot’ is perhaps more deserving of scrutiny. Once his grubby conspiracy came to light, Heaton-Harris (my God, of course he’d have a double-barrelled name…) shrugged it off by “[admitting] he’d been silly”, according to the Guardian. There it is again - silly. Another nail in the coffin for the sensible debate about renewable energy? No, he was just being a bit silly. Whoops. So English. So typical. So what?

Well, because it’s not that silly, really. Silly, in the political sphere, is being caught having sex in a Chelsea strip. Heaton-Harris has been underhand at best, “deliberately reckless” (as RenewableUK chief Maf Smith has it) at worst. But Theresa May think he’s been “silly” too, so all is forgiven.

Across the pond, a very serious furore has erupted over the actually silly actions of the now ex-CIA chief David Petraeus. Wired writer David Simon gets to the nub of why the hand-wringing over this affair is disingenuous on Salon today. (Sex isn’t silly in the US).

How far apart the nations seem all of a sudden, Puritan Yanks vs pratfalling Brits. But we’ve both got our priorities wrong. Silly us.

Masterchef: cooking, conviction

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 22:45:00 +0000

“It is hard work. I didn’t get these wrinkles and bags under my eyes from sunbathing.” The no-nonsense wisdom of Michel Roux Jnr, the twinklingly tough, or toughly twinkly, centre of the Masterchef universe.

I thought, you wouldn’t get Damien Hirst saying that. Or Nicky Haslam. Or Kanye West. Or anyone else who pretends to be reaching for the diamond perfection of high art, when really all they’re doing is passing time until the cheques roll in.

The tragedy of the top-class chef is that he’s crafting monuments that disappear minutes after they’re created. The difference between Michel Roux Jnr and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, of course, is that Roux can build his masterpieces again and again, to order, perfectly. I passed over the Royal Albert Bridge twice a few weeks back, but it wasn’t as satisfying as the lobster salad I ate at Petersham Nurseries, months ago, a meal that exists as mere memory for me now - but as muscle memory for the chefs who could conjure it again in a flash. Which is more impressive?

The thing that binds Roux and Brunel together, if we must bind them (and we must or I wouldn’t have started this post), is conviction. The great Victorians burned with it, for better or worse, and we’ve lost it since. Last night, on BBC4, I watched Roux speak of his love of Escoffier for an hour, then followed that up with a doc on Paul Liebrandt, who scorched a path through New York gourmand-land with single-minded zeal - for ten years before he found his patch. And I thought, are these guys the last ones with any real certitude? With a mission? With a desire to work for something intangible, beautiful, zirconic - until their eyes sag?

“We may not improve our lives but may achieve at least our ambiguities.” A line from The Table Comes First, Adam Gopnik’s meditation on the dinner drama, which I’m currently reading (devouring). It’s too modest. Perhaps it’s only chef who can improve our lives in the end.

A tale of my dad, Roger Hargreaves, Arthur Lowe and Mr Happy...

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 21:31:00 +0100

A tale of my dad, Roger Hargreaves, Arthur Lowe and Mr Happy saying “piss off!”

From my father: “We were recording the first series of Mr Men films in 1974 with Arthur Lowe, at Advision recording studios. Arthur Lowe was recording Mr Uppity. He smoked a large cigar in the book. I said to Roger Hargreaves, “I don’t think the BBC will accept Mr Uppity smoking”. He didn’t say anything, he just drew this, Mr Happy saying “Piss Off!” in my storyboard pad. Arthur picked it up when he came out of the recording booth and wrote, “A sentiment I echo!” and signed it. We didn’t say anything to the BBC and they let it pass. The only country to object was Finland. 38 years ago, it’s history!”

Clapton’s solo from While My Guitar Gently Weeps, isolated...

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:15:10 +0000

Clapton’s solo from While My Guitar Gently Weeps, isolated from multi-track.

Photo

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:00:35 +0000

Transforming recipe websites

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 11:59:34 +0100

I live alone and work from home. I eat a cooked meal twice a day. I’m not someone with a natural culinary imagination, so I often rely on recipes sites. I usually spend an hour trawling through BBC food sites, or the online destinations of celebrity chefs. It gets boring, which is a shame, as I like to cook and I love food.

How has the web not solved this problem yet? The sites that allow you to input what you’ve got in your cupboard, and then offer you suggestions based on that, are ok - but you’re still sifting through recipe after recipe, most of American origin (which means trying to figure out what the hell cilantro is).

Here’s what I want.

The site offers you options:

1. How many people are you cooking for? (Few sites offer recipes for one).

2. What’s your budget? (One main problem with recipes is that the more interesting ones rely on you buying exotic ingredients that you never use again - why can’t more sites take this into account, and offer you further suggestions the following day for meals with the same ingredients?)

3. How much time have you got? (I don’t always want “quick and simple” - at the weekends I’d like to experiment).

And then give me suggestions, broken down into sections based on main ingredients (chicken, fish, etc). Give me the option to click an “I cooked this” button so it can personalise the experience, give me a whizzy profile I feel good about updating and sharing, do some Last.fm-y stuff in the background to offer me similar recipes, and - crucially - do all this in a way that means I don’t have to spend more than 5 minutes at a time using it.

Eventually it can just throw a recipe at me in my Twitter feed every lunchtime and dinnertime, that I know I can make, will like, and have the ingredients for.

Not too difficult surely? :)

Amis/Jacobson

Fri, 06 May 2011 09:57:26 +0100

I read two novels during my recent Sicilian sojourn, Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (diverting enough as a Sharpe-ish comic novel, woefully facile as ‘literature’) and Jacobson’s The Finkler Question (the work of a master craftsman, though perhaps the craft overwhelmed the feeling).

Read back to back, I was struck by the similarities. Not just in the tone of voice - though it does seem that these middle-aged male prose stylists tend towards the same accent, all of them still in debt to the Great American Trio of Updike, Bellow and Roth - but also in more surprisingly specific ways.

Both books riff on Hamlet’s Ophelia (both specifically referencing the “There is a willow grows aslant the brook” monologue), ceiling fans (yes really - both concerned about how they might unscrew themselves), the giants of English literature, and - of course - breasts.

And, ultimately, at their heart both books appear to be about striving to live in a house in Hampstead. They are both astonishingly parochial novels, even though the writers work hard at conjuring grand themes. Jacobson’s more successful in this department, but I couldn’t help thinking that The Finkler Question is so specifically located - BBC-affiliated, middle class St John’s Wood dwellers (read: “Booker judges”) - that I’d be amazed if it translated internationally.

I devoured both in days, but came away feeling there must be more to the heavyweight English novel than this.

New blog: The Pop Story

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:30:18 +0000

I have started a new, more official blog called The Pop Story, where I will be writing more in-depth pieces about music and pop culture. Check it out now for my defence of Mumford & Sons, why Beady Eye are close to the Beatles, and a post-structuralist analysis of Brother, along with lots of other stuff.

I will still be posting random stuff here from time to time, but The Pop Story is where I’ll be hanging out mostly. Thanks for reading!

Writing a book on Twitter

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 15:26:00 +0000

On 21st February I’ll have been on Twitter for 4 years. I’ve written almost 10,000 tweets, about 100,000 words, which in turn is about the size of a 400 page book. I’ve never written so many words in my life. Which got me thinking: can I use Twitter to write that novel of mine?

I’m aware that people have written “Twitter books”, but I’m not talking about using it in that way; rather, can I use Twitter instead of Word, or whatever, to motivate me to actually write meaningful prose?

Writing tweets is compelling. I do it every day, almost without fail. Encapsulating thoughts in 140 characters has energised my brain. I’ve always agonised over prose, the rhythms and cadences, it’s what I enjoy most about writing, and Twitter has oiled the cogs of that process.

As an experiment I started a spoof Twitter account, @doorstim, just to see what it’s like to tweet ‘fictionally’, and embody a character. It’s not going anywhere, but it’s a fun exercise.

Is anyone else using Twitter in this way, not particularly to gain an audience, but simply to galvanise their own writing?