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UPDATE 4/3/10: Newspaper Club won!

Ten days ago, Newspaper Club asked me to make something to go in the Design Museum, where they’ve been nominated in the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year awards. They wanted a one-pager to give away to visitors, and I’d suggested a map for a walk starting at the Design Museum and going… somewhere…

Accordingly, I took myself to Bermondsey the following weekend, and did what I always do when I have a nose for something but little notion of the quarry. Accompanied by Rimbaud – borrowed from the London 2010 project – I went for a walk.

A quiet, cold but clear Sunday took me along the river, from Tower Bridge over St Saviour’s Dock, past Cherry Gardens and St Marychurch, the Mayflower monument and Brunel’s tunnel, into the reformatted docklands of the Rotherhithe peninsular. It’s a strange landscape, under-populated and defined by water: the filled-in docks that lie just beneath your feet and the constant cry of seabirds. I found the narrative I needed, and a destination: Stave Hill, a strange and marvellous earthwork that rises impossibly from the spoil.

Somewhere along the way I had the realisation that Bermondsey and Rotherhithe form not a riverbank, but a coastline: a starting point for voyages and expeditions, a strand of possibilities. All the world embarked from this point: Conrad’s famous opening lines to Heart of Darkness – “What greatness had not floated on that ebb into the mystery of an unknown earth!” – look out from here; as do the mad expeditions of Brunel and Captain (Saint?) Christopher Jones. And so: we have a walk, a story, a history.

There were many sites, too, that it wasn’t possible to include – Cuckold’s Point, on the far side of Rotherhithe, fell just outside the realm of inquiry, but I’ll be sure to return in the Summer for the Horn Fair Procession. I thought the journey had ended at Stave Hill, but I was given one more sign as I returned to the underworld – as if a sign was needed: the great bulk of the Harmsworth Quays print works, “home of quality newspapers” that rises up at Canada Water. A final treat for those who follow the map.

You can pick up a copy of A Wide Arm Of Sea from the Design Museum from now until the 6th of June. As ever, huge thanks to Newspaper Club for indulging my ramblings (and I have some beta invites if you’re looking to make something yourself) – and there’s more about the paper and the awards on their blog.

More photos of the walk and the newspaper at Flickr.

… And there are still limited copies of Immanent In The Manifold City available for sale.

For a while now, I’ve been slowly reading my way through the works of Gabriel Josipovici, one of our more interesting contemporary authors, but one little known outside lit crit circles. If you haven’t had the pleasure, go pick up Moo Pak or Goldberg: Variations for a taste. His most recent book, Everything Passes (Carcanet, 2006) is perhaps his most beautiful and mysterious work to date, a short novel which affected me profoundly. Written in Josipovici’s signature spare and compressed style, it deals with life, death, and art – particularly the intentions and what the publisher calls the “ambiguous comforts” of art: why the writer writes, and who it benefits. It seemed booktwo-relevant, particularly when he writes about Rabelais.

What Josipovici says about Rabelais is that he was the first print writer, just as Luther was the last manuscript writer. Homer was a bard of the people, and Virgil wrote to please the Emperor, knowing his writings would be read to the people and become their myths. Dante’s poetry was written to be read aloud – and in the Purgatorio, read back to him. And Shakespeare wrote for the masses, knowing them as neighbours and knowing they’d pay cash at the door rather than sit by the roadside and wait for the carts to pass. But Rabelais sat writing alone in his room, not knowing his audience, who sat also in their rooms, alone, reading him. What he did was unknowable: the first prose fiction.

“He was the spokesman of no one but himself. And that meant that his role was inherently absurd. No one had called him. Not God. Not the Muses. Not the monarch. Not the local community. He was alone in his room, scribbling away, and then these scribbles were transformed into print and read by thousands of people whom he’d never set eyes on and who had never set eyes on him, people in all walks of life, reading him in the solitude of their rooms.” [Everything Passes, p19]

What he did remained unknown for 400 years. Josipovici cites Sterne, and Woolf’s parentheses, as touching on the same thing: an unknowable literature that passes us by, renouncing authority. And so it seems to me with our new currents of conversation and literature online: they scare the old guard in the same way, they are Rabelaisian, they appear pointless to the uninitiated, they renounce authority.

What then, are we to do with the new literature, and the new print? We are all alone in our rooms, but we are all connected. Where is our literature? Can we, as Chester does, as Rabelais did, “see ourselves silhouetted against entirety, and still produce a shadow?”

As regular readers know, I’m currently in India as part of the British Council’s UK Young Publishing Entrepreneurs scheme. We’ve spent the last few days at the utterly wonderful Jaipur Literary Festival, and while I’ve got some time online I thought I’d write up one of the many talks I attended, and its associated lessons. Much more of this kind of thing to come.

The very first session I attended on Friday morning was with bestselling author Chetan Bhagat (left). His first novel, Five Point Someone and it’s successor, One Night at the Call Center are among India’s biggest-selling English-language novels of all time, with his recent third book, The 3 Mistakes of My Life in hot pursuit. He’s huge here, as witnessed by the scrum of young and old readers that followed him around. Much of what he talked about in his interview with Jai Arjun Singh, of the Jabberwock literary blog, would have been of interest to booktwo readers.

One of the biggest issues in Indian letters – and indeed, in society at large – that’s become evident to me even in the first few days, is the divide between English and Hindi (particularly, but other Indian languages too). Bhagat believes deeply in trying to reach the widest number of readers as possible, but the distribution for Hindi books is much inferior to that for English novels. So, he says, authors should try to talk to their audiences in Hindi, do Hindi translations, and look to the movies (both his first novels have been adapted into Hindi films). “Bollywood”, he said, “is where India gets its stories.”

Jai Arjun Singh spoke of the frequently vitriolic comments he receives on his blog whenever he writes about Bhagat. This is down, he says, to the perceived lack of literary quality in the writing, a charge which Bhagat rejects: “Indian style is the style of the people, the country, and if some don’t like it: tough.” The audience nodded furiously.

Having picked up and very much enjoyed a copy of One Night at the Call Center, I can see why the accusation is made: to an English ear, it reads in a decidedly YA style. However, it deals in an extremely forthright manner with issues of central importance to India and its youth: the conflict between tradition and modernity, a yearning for Western commodities and Indian dignity, a pride in India’s achievements with a recognition of its shortcomings. In particular, it urges young people, in no uncertain terms, to use their educations for the good of their country, to live for themselves and not their parents, and to distrust those in authority. “The number one dream of every Indian male,” says the narrator, Shyam, “is to hit his boss.” Shortly following this is a desire for success that doesn’t involve ass-kissing stupid Americans (the book is not kind to those taking advantage of Indian’s educated workers), and winning the girl of one’s dreams, and it’s not hard to see why it’s done so well.

The other revelation of interest was in the pricing of Bhagat’s work. English-language novels retail usually around the 300 – 600 Rupee mark (£4.50 – £9.50), but Bhagat’s are a far more modest 95 Rs (£1.50) – still much to high, he says, for many of the readers he wants to reach, but a great driver of sales, and a good effort in widening his potential readership.

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Much more to come when I get a chance. You can also follow some more reactions to the trip over at the Bookkake blog, Times Emit, and the British Council’s Creative Economy blog.

Imagine a book that told a different story every time it was opened. The story might change depending on the gender of the reader, or the sex. It might depend on the location of the reader, or the position of the book in time; the time of day, or time in years. Centuries might pass before the book tells the same story again.

The nature of the web makes such a book possible. Immediately, a simple reading of the user-agent to determine the reader’s operating system and browser could be used to present each with a different version, breaking the narrative along several general pathways. Sections could be hidden or revealed by simple manipulation of the layout.

Secondly, parsing the IP address of the reader would reveal their rough geographical location, or the institution they were calling from. In the first instance, sentences could be run through rough online translators, translating passages into – or out of – the reader’s assumed language. Different nations could be offered different political perspectives on the narrative. In the second, those from academic institutions would find appended a wealth of sources, some true, some false, while government agents might find the entire pages reduced to Xs and punctuation marks.

Finally, simple randomisation could alter the meaning of certain words, their tense or number. Names would be changed, emphasis misplaced. But random number generators are no such thing, and each has a pattern. A one time pad.

The final stage attempts to preclude the existence of a master copy.

I have mixed feelings about creative writing courses, but Hanif Kureishi doesn’t:

“One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it’s always a writing student.”

I recently gave a talk to some Creative Writing students. They seemed nice, if mad – but in roughly the same proportions as professional writers, so probably for the good. I may stand before them again. Kureishis’s hypothesis, therefore, struck me as worth testing.

Wikipedia’s index of School Shootings lists a total of 68 incidents between 1966 and 2008, 47 from the USA, 7 from Canada and 14 from the rest of the world. Of these, the majority are Middle or High School students studying no major subject, and a high proportion are security personnel, police, or outsiders (be particularly afraid of Custodians). Of the remaining 12 incidents in which the Major subject of the perpetrator is known, we find a strong bias towards the hard sciences and business:

• Mechanical Engineering (2)
• Physics
• Music
• Law
• Management
• Business Information, later switching to English
• Nursing
• Sociology
• Electronics
• Computer Science
• Commerce

Of these, only one was committed by a student with any connection to literature: Seung-Hui Cho, perpetrator of the worst of all such attacks, the massacre at Virginia Tech. Cho had recently changed his major to English, after several years studying Business Information, a combination of Management and Computer Science.

We found no writing students at all, nor even the suggestion that some of the perpetrators were struggling authors on the side. As much as we admire Mr Kureishi, we must must find his hypothesis demonstrably false, much to the relief of Creative Writing teachers – himself included – everywhere.

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If you’d like to know more about this issue than the rather flip approach I’ve taken, I recommend Mark Ames’ excellent Going Postal, which I had the privilege to publish last year. Ames’ conclusions are fascinating and highly readable, both on the real causes of school and workplace violence, and on the corrosive societal and educational system that breeds such causes. (Also: that’s me on the cover.)

HarperCollins have just launched their online slushpile site, authonomy.com, in private beta. Authonomy allows budding authors to upload chapters of their work for the rest of the community to read and comment on.

There’s been a lot of speculation about how this would be implemented, and at first sight it looks pretty good – HC haven’t overreached themselves, they’ve simply created a site for people to join, upload their work, and read that of others’. Sounds simple, but many similar projects have failed thanks to scope creep.

Every user gets a profile where they can create a virtual bookshelf showing which other writers’ works they’re supporting – authors get the chance to create their own “cover” for a work too, a pointless but satisfying little feature which is sure to go down very well indeed.

The real challenge, of course, is to persuade wannabe writers to post their work at all – in my own personal experience, unpublished writers are terrified of their work being ’stolen’, enough to be suspicious of publishers themselves, let alone your average web surfer. The Front List, a previous attempt at a “YouTube for books”/”crowdsourcing the slushfile”-type site, solved this by hiding everything from non-members; one approach certainly, but not one likely to bring in the crowds.

Authonomy’s FAQs wisely address many of these concerns, and they haven’t done too much to break the site in the implementation, short of disabling right-clicking on book text. As they put it, “if someone really wants to pass off your efforts as their own they’ll probably find a way” (Hint: turn off javascript). Their real attitude to the problem is more sensible: “here at authonomy, we believe that your talent is better displayed than kept hidden – and that the chances of good things happening are more likely the more hands your manuscript passes through, and the more people you enlist in your support.”

On the technical side, users upload books by chapter (as few or as many as they like) in Word or RTF formats, which are then displayed as is – imagine hitting ‘Output as web page’ in Word, if you’ve ever done such a thing. It doesn’t result in the prettiest pages, but it does mean the book appears on the site as the author made it, which is, quietly, quite a thing.

Authonomy has been a long time in the making, and in the wake of the disastrous relaunch of HarperCollins.co.uk, we feared the worst. But Authonomy (still very much in Beta, which HC.co.uk can’t claim to be) looks like a very good little set-up which is bound to get plenty of attention and users. Nice one, HC.

Flickr, everyone’s favourite photo site, just added video, and not everyone is happy about it. But Flickr has been very clever – their video offering is not designed to rival YouTube or the rest as a repository for short films, comedy clips and old adverts. Instead, they’ve limited the videos to 90 seconds to create a new niche: the long moment.

The idea has been around for a while – see the ‘long pose’ meme on YouTube for an example – but Flickr’s smarts are in seeing the gradual amalgamation of digital video and still photography in the same devices, and making a useful connection between the two media produced.

Literature is usually, and paradoxically, perceived as both static – fixed and unchanging on the page – and temporal; spooling along a timeline, occupying an extended period from start to finish. If literature has a photo moment, a pinpointable spot, it is the phoneme, or perhaps the word. Joyce’s great ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng‘, my favorite sound in all literature, or Keat’s ‘Forlorn!’, tolling like a bell in Ode to a Nightingale.

Is there such a thing as a long textual moment? If there is, I would suggest that it can perhaps be found – again paradoxically – in silence, whether in the Beckett’s brooding pauses, or the crystalline, breathless moment at the end of a poem, when the last words hang in the air and, soundlessly, resound.

Above, my ‘long photo’ of African Wild Dogs pacing their enclosure at London Zoo, taken this bright, shiny morning on the canal.

Brief outline of ideas for locative storytelling (more thoughts originating from here and here).

Goal: To produce a locative storytelling experience, where strands of the story are triggered by the reader/listener’s location.

Tech requirements: GPS-enabled mobile phone, or Google Maps’ new locator function, headphones, application running on Symbian or Windows Mobile (or preferably both…).

Personnel: Writer or team of writers, developer, interface designer, voice actor.

Issues: Low GPS penetration – few handsets currently but set to change rapidly – GMaps not yet accurate enough, at least outside large towns.

Proposal: Create a downloadable application which runs on a mobile device. Each standalone app contains a story, specially created for the medium and a particular location (although it would be possible to edit stories with strong localities for this, the former offers more possibilities).

Running the app spawns a navigation map – either a GMaps overlay or a specially created one (perfectly possible for small areas), showing the user’s location (X, above, wide and zoomed) and the accessible storypoints – location-specific ’shards’ of the story.

As the user moves across the map, they come into contact with the storypoints – close enough, and they trigger the shards associated with that point: scrollable texts, an audio recording, even images or video.

This format offers a number of interesting possibilities for the narrative form, beyond a simple (and still wholly possible) linear structure, such as:

• Multiple entry and exit points
• Threaded/associative storytelling (storypoints only revealed after certain others have been visited)
• … tending to “Choose your own adventure” style
• Surprise shards (hidden storypoints)
• Story as treasure hunt.

To achieve the full potential, it would require a writer prepared to engage with (at least partially) non-linear storytelling.

So, that’s a start. Thoughts? Would be pretty sweet to set one of these up in time for London Lit Plus in the summer…

Further reading:

• The Missing Voice
• And While London Burns
• Navball
• Mscapers

Tony White, author of one of my favourite books, Foxy-T, and literary editor of The Idler, has just published a series of extracts from Balkanising Bloomsbury, a work in progress, in the Diffusion eBooks format. He writes:

The ebooks are the result of a residency with Proboscis that I’ve been undertaking in recent months, working with and exploring the potential of their new Diffusion ebook generator.

These stories have been created by cutting up, remixing and renarrativising fragments from a variety of sources to create completely new works. This process mines a particular seam of Balkanist fantasy in English language literature and media; ranging from E.M.Forster to contemporary free-sheet the London Paper. Alongside each story is full bibliographical information relating to the research process. In addition, these resources are also collected in a separate bibliography which will be refreshed and added-to each time a new work is uploaded.

Diffusion is a project to create an online ebook generator which people can use to produce small editions of their work. The term ebook is somewhat misleading as the final product is in fact a paper book, albeit one that can be quickly and reasonably easily assembled from an electronic file: the ebook engine generates a 4-up pdf that is printed and assembled into a chapbook:

The project is a direct response to the increasing difficulties of getting short and niche works into the bookshops, and the generator will shortly be made publicly available to all. All the titles are free to download.

It’s a good idea and a pretty good implementation, although it took me a couple of tries to get to grips with the assembly, largely because my printer chopped off the page numbers (suggestion: put these at the top of the minipages, not the bottom corner), and the instructions are not very clear (there are better ones on the site, but I only found these later). Anyway, it’s the new sharing age, so (largely inspired by Common Craft) I made my own instruction/demo:

P.S. Ooh, there’s some Stewart Home too!

In the great future lit debate, there’s one thing we keep coming back to, that we hear over and over again: “I can’t read from a screen.” Never mind that most of us spend far more time reading from a screen (as you’re doing right now) than we do reading from paper (especially if you count text messages, display boards, TV titles and subtitles and many other instances).

Is fiction different? Is the novel or other long work uniquely suited to paper? Novelists like Margaret Atwood certainly believe so, in her vociferous opposition to all things electronic, and who better to judge than writers?

Well, it struck me that writers would be a good group to examine in this debate, so I figured I’d start with The Guardian’s Writers’ rooms series, a weekly feature on writers and their places and methods of work, and see how many of these writers compose the works on a computer in the first place, the work never reaching paper until the final proof is printed and makes it to the bookshelf, completing the illusion that this is how it is meant to be.

Here are the results (I’ve left out John Banville because the photo is the same as that for Beryl Bainbridge and he doesn’t say anything specific; all the rest are included):

The haters:

• John Richardson: “I am computer illiterate and write everything by hand.”
• Colm Tóibín: “all in longhand”.
• John Mortimer: “I write with a pen on long sheets of paper. I’ve never learnt how to type.”
• Edna O’Brien: “I write by hand. I do not understand how people can arrive at even a flicker of creativity by means of a computer.”
• Geoff Dyer – surprised by this one, but there’s no computer in sight, and he doesn’t mention one.
• Michael Holroyd: “Early this year I bought a new black laptop which lies somewhere under a pile of papers. It is, I’m told, capable of miracles. I haven’t used it yet.”
• Will Self: “I loathe computers more and more.” (If you’ve never seen Self’s study, do check out his awesome post-it system).
• Antonia Fraser: “My typewriter is electric and so ancient that other typewriters have to be cannibalised when it needs mending.”
• JG Ballard: “I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don’t think a great book has yet been written on computer.”
• AS Byatt – a very papery desk.

The in-betweens:

• Jacqueline Wilson: “I write all my first drafts in gorgeous Italian leather notebooks” – then she types them up on an iBook.
• Hanif Kureishi: “Computers are a mercy for writers, but they do encourage books that are too long. I write by hand first and then type it up.”
• David Hare: “I write things out in longhand, then later put everything on the computer.”
• Beryl Bainbridge: “I got the typewriter in 1958 from a Chinaman… I type it up onto a computer so I can correct it.”

The lovers:

• Carmen Callil: “I write every day, typing straight on to that small computer.”
• Graham Swift – computer taking up most of the desk space.
• Margaret Drabble (Ditto).
• Mark Haddon: “Few schools have cartoons of men with rectal bleeding above the computer workstation” (Yes, he does).
• AL Kennedy: “If I’m doing serious writing I prefer to be in here at night with the low energy bulb and the music, typing on a lap top.”
• Rose Tremain: “The computer desk is an ugly, ancient thing – but I don’t suppose I’ll ever replace it. I’ve written 13 books on it.”
• Ian Rankin: “Under the desk you will see an unused Mac tower (never got the hang of it)” – but he seems OK with the laptop on the desk.
• Esther Freud: “I don’t need any of these things, just my green chair and my laptop.”
• Claire Tomalin – not much room for anything but that computer.
• Andrew O’Hagan: “The laptop is there for work.”
• Diana Athill: “I’m a hopeless dummy about computers, using mine only as a typewriter and for emails, but I do love writing on it.”
• David Lodge: “I found myself doing more and more writing straight onto the computer.”
• Hilary Mantel – a very smart computer.
• Sarah Waters: “All I need in a study is a flat surface, a computer, and a closable door.”
• Michael Frayn: “Word-processor” – confirmed by the statement that “I sit sideways on [to the window] most of the time.”

I make that 10 haters, 15 lovers, and 4 inbetweens. (Please don’t take the terminology too seriously, and yes, it’s deeply unscientific. Still…)

More than half those questioned exclusively use computers – and that’s from a severely weighted sample, tending towards older, literary authors, the kind of people you’d imagine would run a mile from the computer. Yet for many of them, the work comes together, is revised and edited on a screen, where it passes in all likelihood via email to their agents and publishers, who may print it out (as may the authors) to read, but still: the work itself is undeniably of the electronic screen, rather than the page.

Food for thought?