For those who expressed an interest, Immanent In The Manifold City, my newspaper concerning Walking Stewart, ubiquity and time travel in the Nineteenth Century, is now available for purchase, in an edition of 100 signed & numbered copies.
Jan 29th 2010
Jan 26th 2010
Everything Broken, Everything Burned. Or not.
Tomorrow is T-day. Or iDay. Or whatever. It’ll be fun. Nobody knows *anything* yet. Well, apart from the folks at McGraw-Hill and Hachette, probably Kobo, and a whole host of others. But for the purposes of this discussion: nobody *knows* *anything*.
About the Tablet, that is. Because, actually, we know quite a lot. We know about authors and writing, and editing and publishing, and bookselling and reading. We know and understand the long-form narrative and its place between people, and in society. And I’m more comfortable with Apple getting in on the act than I am about…
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Jan 25th 2010
SxSW: An open consultancy offer
In March, I’m going to South By Southwest, the Austin, Texas-based megafestival encompassing film, music, and all things digital. I’m talking on a panel put together by Chris Heathcote about post-digital design, and why the future isn’t just on screens, alongside Aaron Straup Cope and Michal Migurski of Stamen, and Ben Terrett and Russell Davies of RIG. It should be fun.
I’ve never been to SxSW before, and it has an interesting history of book-related stuff. After last year’s debacle, there are panels analysing what went wrong – and plenty more on…
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Jan 20th 2010
On living contemporaneously with peoples of the past: Two quotes, with a little context.
I’ve just started Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Memories of the Future (indeed, I read a bit of the opening of the first of the seven short stories therein on today’s Mattins). The second story—an excellent and extraordinary fantasy of the Eiffel Tower run amok—begins with a meditation on reading and bookmarking.
You know when you’re reading an author, and you get the sense you could reach across time and space, and shake their hand? Like if you met them in the street, or in a shop queue, you could talk to them, and get on famously, and not run out of…
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Jan 18th 2010
London 2010
For a long time now, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with Patrick Keiller’s 1994 film London. And so, this year, I’m doing something about it. I’m studying it: watching it again and again, mining it for references and meaning, analysing and locating shots and scenes.
London lends itself to this process, more than any other film I know. Composed entirely of short, fixed-camera shots, together with a single-narrator voiceover, it takes place over a fixed length of time (January-December 1992, a single year), and within a fixed sphere: the city I live in.
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Jan 13th 2010
Things in the Wild: Noticings Layar
I’ve been wanting to play with Layar, the augmented reality browser for iPhone 3GS and Android for a while. So I did. As a test case, I’ve created a layar for Noticings, the utterly awesome photography game created by my friends Tom and Tom.
It lets you see and find Noticings near you (if there are some within a reasonable distance. It works. It’s nice. It’s available in Layar now.
Why did I do this? You still have to ask? Well, I have a hunch that Layar might be one of the possible ways to…
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