what we've got

Watched the news lately, picked up a newspaper? Then it’s likely you’ll be at least tempted into being afraid, if not downright hide-behind-the-sofa, peek-from-under-the-cushion terrified.

Here’s what you do to overcome the fear in the media. The first is listen to Doug Stanhope. He seems to know something about fear (the audio is not suitable for work so put your headphones on).

When you’re done with Doug read this analysis of how fear works by Tom Engelhardt, along with some statistical analysis (especially if you’re American – I’m not – but the principle applies elsewhere, too).

And if you’re still a little unconvinced, then watch Adam Curtis’ superb dissection of the ways that governments and organisations use fear to try to control me and you, in his documentary The Power of Nightmares.

And by then – well, you may have stopped worrying and learn to love the calm.

I remember recently reading a sniffy article on the use of lyrics from an Amy Winehouse song, ‘Love is a Losing Game’ as a way of introducing accessible and commonplace ‘poetry’ to novices, undergraduates in this case, embarking upon a close reading of poetry for an exam. Untypically outmoded for The Guardian, it suggested that these lyrics would compare unfavourably with the other poets on the syllabus, including Walter Raleigh.

Have you heard her lyrics? – I thought. Have you reckoned at their poetry? Her lyrics are not always as good as ‘Love is a Losing Game’ – in some cases, they are better. In ‘Back to Black’ we find in its lyrics many of the elements of poetry clearly identifiable, employed with sophistication – and they’re beautifully effective, too. Here are the lyrics in full, and then I’ll do a quick close reading of some of the most salient bits as I see them:

Back to Black – Amy Winehouse

He left no time to regret
Kept his dick wet
With his same old safe bet
Me and my head high
And my tears dry
Get on without my guy
You went back to what you knew
So far removed from all that we went through
And I tread a troubled track
My odds are stacked
I’ll go back to black

We only said good-bye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to…

I go back to…
us

I love you much
It’s not enough
You love blow and I love puff
And life is like a pipe
And I’m a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside

We only said goodbye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to (x2)

Black
Black
Black
Black
Black
Black
Black
I go back to…
I go back to…

We only said good-bye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to…

We only said good-bye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to black

First of all, there are local instances of poetic language. In the second verse/stanza we find: ‘And I tread a troubled track’. The repeated use of the sounds ‘tr…’ at the beginning of more or less successive words is a sound equivalent of the steps she takes, an aural approximation of her path of recurring steps, one after the other, that lead her ‘back to black’. (Important for the undergraduate, it’s called ‘alliteration’ and along with assonance – the repetition of vowel sounds, often at the beginning of works – and a technique best used sparingly.)

What precisely does ‘black’ mean in this song? An advanced paper might argue whether this is an example of metonym or metaphor (do we literally go back to ‘black’?) but we understand that ‘black’ represents or stands in for depression, bleakness and unhappiness. And widening the poem’s use of poetic language, we find that Winehouse rhymes ‘black’ with ‘back’ in that recurrent motif, suggestive of the monotony, inevitability even, of her return to darkness as a result of the loss of her lover. The verbal nearness of ‘back’ and ‘black’ echo the tired movement from happiness to sadness as he returns to his ‘old safe bet’.

But this is not just a poem, it’s a lyric, and just as theatre loses some of its power when not performed, so this song is diminished when read solely as poetry divorced from its music. (If you can use Spotify, the link is at the bottom). When Winehouse sings: ‘And I’m a tiny penny rolling up the walls inside’ much of the power is lost without its vocal incarnation, her intonation reminiscent of the path a penny might take as it rolls around the sides of the pipe, like a water drop gradually slipping down a drain, or one of those circus motorcyclists that trace an ever decreasing circle around a turning wall as they brake and slowly come to a halt. In another example, present in the doleful repetition of the single word ‘black’ several times in the middle eight, perhaps more obvious in the way it achieves its effect, but no less powerful for it.

I’m not the first to discuss the matter and the whole idea that song lyrics represent some of our most vibrant poetry is an oldie, and a goodie. I could have written this for a number of songs – the lyrics to Elvis Costello’s ‘Beyond Belief’ are astonishing, and I’m a fan of Midlake’s lyrics on their new album, too. No doubt you’ve your own examples. Which all goes to show – we’re lucky in our post-modern age that we are not limited by the genre and perceived seriousness of the artform when we consider what is, and what isn’t, art – and poetry.

Link via Spotify: Amy Winehouse – Back To Black

Raymond Carver never liked being called a literary minimalist but he was one, at least under the editorial knife of his sometime editor, Gordon Lish. Beginners, Carver’s posthumous collection of the unedited stories that were first published as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in a heavily edited form in 1981, goes some way to renegotiating that label.

Because Carver didn’t like the term, it doesn’t mean the stories are any better now that Beginners restores them to their original, less-minimalist state. As you might expect, comparing the new volume with the old we find that some stories are better, some remain largely the same, but some are worse without the would-be villainous hand of Lish.

I hesitate to say Carver didn’t solely produce his own best work. It goes against many of those conventions we hold dear about genius, creativity and authorship in general and about what we – and I, as a scholar of Carver’s work* – believe and trust in particular. Such a claim is best demonstrated through example, so I’m going to do that here.

Much has been said about Carver and Lish and the overall different effect of reading both versions, but I’m going to show how it works in detail through a close comparative reading of the opening passages of a less well celebrated story. In What We Talk About… (WWTA) it is called ‘I Could See the Smallest Things’; in Beginners (B) it is called ‘Want to See Something?’

Here’s the opening from WWTA:

I was in bed when I heard the gate. I listened carefully. I didn’t hear anything else. But I heard that. I tried to wake Cliff. He was passed out. So I got up and went to the window. A big moon was laid over the mountains that went around the city. It was a white moon and covered with scars. Any damn fool could imagine a face there.

And here’s the opening from B:

I was in bed when I heard the gate unlatch. I listened carefully. I didn’t hear anything else. But I had heard that. I tried to wake cliff, but he was passed out. So I got up and went to the window. A big moon hung over the mountains that surrounded the city. It was a white moon and covered with scars, easy enough to imagine a face there – eye sockets, nose, even the lips.

I’m going to go through it, picking up the most significant changes. Here’s the first line again:

I was in bed when I heard the gate. (WWTA)

I was in bed when I heard the gate unlatch. (B)

The minimalist enterprise was concerned with paring down sentences by removing words, phrases and so on. This is a good example of that in action. In the minimalist version, the word ‘unlatch’ is removed. The effect is to remove certainty and introduce ambiguity: we know the gate has made a sound but we don’t know why. In some cases, this is preferable and you might argue that knowing the gate had become unlatched is more sinister and troubling than simply hearing the gate. Typically, though, minimalist writers won’t tell you want to think and you can see that even a single word can reveal a specific and clear meaning. This example shows how the minimalist aesthetic invites the reader to participate in the interpretation of the story because there is a paucity of detail: something is missing, so the reader must provide it.

Moving on. Here’s the next significant difference between the texts:

I tried to wake Cliff. He was passed out. (WWTA)

I tried to wake cliff, but he was passed out. (B)

This example illustrates how small changes in the text affect the ways in which the rhythm of reading works. In the minimalist example from WWTA, the causative ‘but’ is removed and the sentence is divided. It creates a stopping effect, slows the reading down, and in the context of this passage (and story) underscores the feeling of sudden wakefulness or nervous attention. There’s no smooth transition to support from her partner; Cliff (his name itself suggestive of large immovability) remains defiantly unaware of her ordeal. How the story is read, the pace and flow of the text, helps with the minimalist effect.

Here’s the next line:

A big moon was laid over the mountains that went around the city (WWTA)

A big moon hung over the mountains that surrounded the city (B)

The minimalist technique depended upon inference, elision and ambiguity, so giving the reader too clear a didactic nod would undermine this approach. Typically you find this working in the absence of any kind of interior monologue or access to feelings in many minimalist stories (and in particular, those of Hemingway). Here the effect is the same but more subtle. I like to think that minimalists often describe scenes with the kind of objectivity you find in a photograph. In the example above, the moon was ‘big’ and was ‘laid’ over the mountains that ‘went around’ the city. All of this is detached observation without much of a hint at evaluation.

Compare this with the same ‘big’ moon that ‘hung’ over mountains that ‘surrounded’ the city. Both the terms ‘hung’ and ‘surrounded’ are evaluative and don’t sit with their feet inside the hard-minimalist camp (to coin a phrase). For example, the word ‘surrounded’ suggests a kind of siege, which is analogous to how she feels being trapped in her room while. In this case this single word, even though it’s not hard-minimalism, works well to be evocative without overdoing it. (And if you think that’s reading too much into it, then you’re not reading carefully enough – this is what good writers do in general and minimalist ones in particular.) Similarly, the omission of detail in the moon’s face in the first example is typical of the way that minimalist pared back the detail of their writing to hint at more than they told the reader outright.

Now, we know that nothing – including a photograph – is purely innocent, so we might like to say these aspire to this detached, objective condition at such times. But the effect, paradoxically, is very far from detachment. This is the case because often it’s the accumulation of small details working together that create the minimalist approach and its effect. And working together, the ambiguity of being non-specific about which way the gate is opening; the staccato reading of longer sentences divided into smaller, single-clause barbs; and the taming of evaluative adjectives such as ‘hung’ and ‘surrounded’ all work together to pare back the interpretative clues readers have at their disposal, and which invite the reader to find much more in the story than the words printed on the page.

When thinking about the inevitable question about which story (and approach) was better, it depends on how you like your literature. In a crude metaphor, if you’re the kind of person who likes loose ends at the end of the film, who doesn’t enjoy being spoon-fed or manipulated into a precise way of reading a film, if you like the film to make you think a bit, then you might like and appreciate the kind of minimalist writing that made – and sustains – Carver’s acclaim, in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Recently, we’ve become increasingly interested in working in collaboration (following ideas such as ‘collective journalism’ or ‘crowd sourcing‘) but we’re not accustomed to thinking of our most prized writing as being written by what we might pejoratively call a ‘committee’. In many other cases, we still adhere to an outmoded version of creativity springing from an individual mind, perhaps more or less troubled and tossed upon the whimsy of genius, sat in isolation, wrestling with no one other than his or her muse. But as this example illustrates, in a stark harsh light, how far this myth fails to capture the reality of writing, and how writers and editors may work together to create more than the sum of their individual talents.

*I’ve written a PhD on literary minimalism, of which Carver occupies a third (alongside Ernest Hemingway and Frederick Bartheleme). You can read the introduction here.

To me, snowshoeing represents the ideal that you’ll step where others – those with boots on, namely – would fear to tread. And there’s nothing like deep, crisp, undisturbed snow to go wandering in. So, we picked up some snowshoes and off we went to a local area called La Croisette, which is on the Saléve range. The video below shows it better than I could tell you.

We loved it and it’s something we’ll continue to do before the snow melts and the tracks turn dry and golden once more in the summer. But for now – get the gaiters on, fix the snowshoes and “On y va!”

When Don Draper, head of ‘Creative’ in the advertising firm at the centre of the hit TV series ‘Mad Men, rolls his eyes when someone tells him that ‘sex sells’ we know advertising is failing. When he suggests to a client that ‘If you don’t like the conversation, change the topic’ we know that PR is replacing it.

The reason why Draper is so successful and highly esteemed is that he recognises the importance of public relations. What he sells is the brand, the entire set of practices and beliefs that underpins the product, whether it be toothpaste, a bra, or an airline. Advertising is visual; public relations is verbal. The image of the woman draped across a car won’t sell anything; but the conversation, and the aspiration that is carried upon it, just might.

It’s no coincidence that Don Draper used to be a car salesman. That racket was the embodiment of an early, ‘hard’ approach to advertising: drown the client in details; appeal to base impulses; pressurise through conformity, and so on. There’s an example in the show where Draper’s creative team want to sell a Kodak carousel on its technical innovations; for Draper, it’s more about the memories that the projector helps relive. In ‘The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR’, Al and Laura Ries tell us: “The harder the sell the harder the prospect resists the sales message.” Hard selling didn’t work anymore for Draper in the car dealership; and now it won’t work for him at Sterling Cooper.

Advertising was then, PR is now. Only the ‘now’ of Mad Men is the early 1960s. As a result, Don Draper’s trajectory from car salesman to head of Creative at an advertising firm represents the beginnings of the movement from advertising to PR as the preferred approach to persuading the client.

I started to get many views on a particular photo in my Flickr photostream, consistently, over a period of about a week. That can only mean one thing: my photo has made it to the 0.05 per cent of photos that appear on Flickr by becoming part of the coveted ‘Explore‘ group. I checked my referrals and using other tools, and there it was: it made it into Explore. In other words, it’s got a high ‘interestingness’ rating – thought to be a complex equation based on how many views, comments, faves, etc a photo has. Here it is, and as it appears on Flickr (click on image below for full size).

I quite like the way Flickr approach the idea of ‘interestingness’. No one really knows completely how it works, it’s like a secret recipe, an alchemy. As a result, Flickr’s forums and some groups are full of speculation on how it’s calculated and what you must do to get your photo included in Explore. Looking through Explore photos, you quickly realise it’s not the best photos, so let’s not get carried away. All I can do is say I had none of this in mind when I took the photo. I just wanted to do the best I can. And I might add that I had to do very little on the day; nature did it all for me.

More important to me than the Explore thing was that my nephew said, quite out of the blue, that he was using my photo as his desktop background on his PC. Now that’s all the ‘fame’ I need.

I found this wonderful data visualization (from DataViz) on the stages of being a photographer, from learning how to take the lens cap off to – well, it never ends until you do. Here’s the graphic in full (click to go full size).

I would say I’m at the ‘All I shoot is bad’ stage. Well, it only gets better from here. Where do you sit on the chart?

The French have began a process of reflecting on their national identity by asking what it means to be French in the 21st century. Ostensibly this is happening as a result of recent perceived issues with parts of the population that are felt to have not integrated into French society, at least as some see it. But it also appears uniquely French itself, in that it represents another way in which the French undergo a perpetual (it seems) analysis of their language and culture, their politics and ideologies, their people and beliefs.

A strength of a society (and its individuals) is calculated in its ability to accept and respond to criticism, to solicit it even. Inevitably, the Grand débat sur l’identité nationale (The Debate on National Identity) will attract criticism of the French. One thorny issue that appears frequently when considering French identity is the perceived conservative attitude to its language and culture.

The BBC’s ‘From our own correspondent’ outlines this single, but significant element, by expressing it as a desire of the French to embrace their own culture jealously, even at the expense of others:

The French collude in the over-praising for two reasons, one good, one bad. The good reason is that they are genuinely fond of their culture. [...] One realises after a while that the French view their [celebrities] almost as members of the family. They enjoy going to see them in the same way they enjoy catching up with the latest family gossip.

The bad reason is that it is all about self-protection. Succumbing to sycophancy, after all, is a way of reassuring oneself that all is good in the world, when clearly it is not.

As an outsider and relative newcomer to the country, I’ve yet to form a picture of what it means to be French, but I’m learning a great deal (it wouldn’t be fair, either, since I wear rose-tinted spectacles having fallen for the place). I probably never will satisfy a complete conclusion but what I can say is that the national debate on what it means to be French appears to me a clear-eyed approach to learning more, good and bad, about itself.

And when you point such a focus elsewhere, it’s only a matter of time before the focus rests on you, and rightly so. I’m from the UK, so I wonder: what does it mean to be British? And by extension, what does it mean to be me, or be you, and where you’re from?

I’m going to take one seemingly independent observation, then another, and then make an obvious one of my own (I call it iSynthesis).

Apple is likely to announce the launch of a new tablet-based Mac, probably called (if you are to believe the hype) either the iPad or the iTablet. No real news there – you knew this already. But the thought preoccupying everyone is: no one knows what we’re meant to be doing with it. Charles Arthur in The Guardian echoes the sentiment:

Here’s a story from the near future. It’s been a long day. Finally throwing aside the cares of work, you slump down on your sofa and pick up that shiny new device you bought the other day. […] it’s Apple’s stylish new iPad (iTablet? iSlate?) – a smooth 10in screen with no keyboard, like an iPhone on steroids. You pick it up, turn it on with one swipe of a finger, and begin to . . .

At this point, the picture goes hazy and freezes. The reason: […] still no one is certain what the hell their creation is actually going to be for…

There, that’s the first of the observations. Many people will want one, many will buy one, but if we’re going to justify the price – thought to be around £1000 – we better know how we’re going to use it.

Now for the second, seemingly unrelated observation. In another section of The Guardian, (the wonderfully-named) Mercedes Bunz tells us how iTunes might save the publishing world through simplifying the ‘micropayments’ approach for buying newspaper content:

Payment has to be simple and elegant. Click and run, and don’t think about it. Apple can offer that: there are more than 100 million iTunes accounts with credit cards already. If the transactions are batched so that the fixed cost is amortised across multiple articles, iTunes can offer readers a simple and elegant way to pay, and readers like that.

Now, for the third and final observation, my own. No doubt you’ve already guessed it: what we’re going to do on the iTablet is subscribe and purchase electronically-published content through iTunes.

The signs are there: The New York Times is considering switching to a micro-payment system; I understand from Bunz’s article that various publishers have been in talks with Apple about distributing their content; some newspapers are already using alternative methods of creating revenue through such approaches as the aforementioned The Guardian’s iPhone app.

I’m not the first to put two-and-two together and I won’t be the last. iTunes might be the future, whether you like it or not, of some types of publishing.

I’ve never been snowboarding before until recently – but I can already tell that it’s going to be a central part of wintersports out here in Haute-Savoie. I loved it!

With my educationalist cap on (a little dusty and frayed at the edges, but still usable) its learning curve at these early stages has a pleasing simplicity to it. You start learning on one edge (either the toe or heel edge) and then the other. When you’re competent at this (that is, you don’t fall down every single time you get up on the board) you are ready to turn.

When you turn, you begin on one edge and when you are past the turn you switch to the other. This three step process – from (say) toe edge, heel edge, then using both during a turn – has an obviousness about it, an inevitability in the linear transition from one stage to the next. At least in theory. Doing it is another matter. I can tell you it’s a steep learning curve but once I’m past the stage of turning more than falling over, I’m on my way to becoming a ‘boarder’. That means I’m allowed to comment upon the quality of the ‘powder’ – but you won’t find me saying ‘gnarly’.

Even from my short time on the board, I can say it’s a sport that depends upon confidence. Take the turn, again. On a board you’re used to using the edges for control, of direction and speed. But at one point on the turn you need to accept the fact that the board will be – albeit momentarily – facing down the slope and going faster than you might like (for a noob like me, anyway).

What you realise quickly is that it’s about confidence. You need to let go. It’s a bit like sleep; you can’t forcibly will yourself there, you have to wait and let it wash over you. In those tiny moments when it all fits into place on the board, it’s unforgettable. You’ve just got to try not to want it too much, lest it doesn’t come again easy. In that, it feels just like the rest of life.