On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft, and everyone who came, for a really great time.

I talked about a number of things. I started out talking about Geocities, and how it was a very real thing, a place that I grew up in, and how it was lost too easily. This, despite efforts like the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive (which, incidentally, is kept in a shipping container).

William Gibson spoke recently at BEA. He said this:

“If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.”

Which struck me pretty hard, that bit about atemporality, and the flatness of digital memory, but particularly our lack of awareness of this situation. I talked about the Library of Alexandria, and the Yo La Long Dia, and the National Libraries of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq—all examples of cultural destruction caused in part by neglect and willful disregard for our shared patrimony.

These losses, despite their horror, will always happen: but what can we do to mitigate and understand them? In a world obsessed with “facts”, a more nuanced comprehension of historical process would enable us to better weigh truth, whether it concerns the evidence for going to war, the proliferation of damaging conspiracy theories, the polarisation of debate on climate change, or so many other issues. This sounds utopian, and it is. But I do believe that we’re building systems that allow us to do this better, and one of our responsibilities should be to design and architect those systems to make this explicit, and to educate.

One of the ways to do this might be to talk more not only about history, but about historiography. History not as a set of facts, but as a process, and one in which, whether we agree or not with the writers, our own opinions and biases are always to be challenged

I talked about Wikipedia because for me, Wikipedia is a useful subset of the entire internet, and as such a subset of all human culture. It’s not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot.

As is my wont, I made a book to illustrate this. Physical objects are useful props in debates like this: immediately illustrative, and useful to hang an argument and peoples’ attention on.

This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.

This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

And for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future.

More photos of the books are, as ever, available on Flickr.

UPDATE: You can listen to the whole talk, and me saying “um” a lot, over at Huffduffer. The slides are also available.

NOTE: Yes, the books are out of order in the photos. Kindly do not draw inferences from this. It’s just a photograph. Seriously.

The Museum of Obsessions accepts donations on loan from collectors, enthusiasts and the sentimental.

The things that enthral us, but which we cannot give a home to; our treasured possessions from which we cannot bear to be parted, yet cannot keep: these are the contents of the Museum. If you have no more room in your house, if you lack the means to store the essential things of your life, then the Museum was established to help you.

The contents of the Museum, even cumulatively, are worth little on the open market. The value of each item lies explicitly and only in an individual’s obsession with it. Such items are accepted on temporary loan and their return may be requested at any time.

No gift is refused, although the curators have their tastes and know their audience: the Gallery of Childrens’ Drawings is much visited and constantly rearranged; the Hall of Old Phone Chargers echoes only occasionally with the bootheels of its devotees.

By far the largest collection within the Museum of Obsessions is the book depository. Here are to be found acre upon acre of stacks, mile after mile of shelves, repositories fathoms deep. Minor works of forgotten authors, first novels, the privately published, the great, thick and well-thumbed, the worthless, the obscene.

A catholic taxonomy is employed. Classifications mean little and are subject to frequent revision. Occasionally, random storage is employed: each object, tagged, is distributed randomly among all others. In this way, the collection more closely resembles the order of the real world.

The book-buying started on the second day, and rapidly spiralled out of control.

In the Péndulo bookstore in the Zona Rosa, less celebrated than the branch in Polanco, but nevertheless serene, caulked with climbing plants and where I breakfasted on Huevos Mexicanos and cafe con leche amid stacks of books sorted by publisher (Sexto Piso, Siglo XXI, Almadía), I picked up Wallpaper Magazine’s guide to Mexico City: useless, somewhat irritating, but mercifully small, and totemic.

From Atrio, a bookshop and gallery on Orizaba, two bilingual monographs from Editorial Diamantina, Laureana Toldeo’s Paan and Pedro Reyes’ La Nuevas Terapias Grupales, and a blank notebook from Soloblock, inscribed simply and only: “Un 10% de la població mundial es zurda. Hay más zurdos varones que mujeres, sin que se sepa por qué” which I discover later means “10% of the population of the world is left-handed, more women than men, although we don’t know why”, and explains why the title is on the ‘back’ and the barcode on the ‘front’: the book itself is left-handed.

From the Librería Pegaso in the Casa Lamm on Álvaro Obregón, a signed and numbered edition of Franco Maria Ricci’s Carrol, printed on local paper in Milan in 1976 and containing Dodgson’s collected letters—in French—and tipped-in photograph of Victorian adolescent girls. It should be noted, independently and without context, that the finest bookshops are those that give you your purchases in plain brown paper bags.

In MUCA Roma, the local offshoot of the City University’s Arts Museum, a cuban artist’s film plays out his telephoned conversations with the tourist hotels he is not allowed to visit, many of which I have visited, if not stayed in. As the receptionists list the natural and luxurious entertainments on offer to state-approved guests, photos of an American couple’s idyllic holiday in Trinidad & Tobago play out on a large screen. On the floor above, artists Liudmila & Nelson have spliced together photos of old and contemporary Havana, digitally inserting the advertising hoardings so conspicuously absent from the real city and which seem, here, to be a small price to pay for that freedom.

At Conejo Blanco, bar, restaurant and art bookstore on Amsterdam, the wide boulevard that circles the former hippodrome in Condesa, I agonise over beautiful editions of Herodotus and Lucian—in Spanish, natch—but leave instead with a gilded portfolio of photographs by Gabriel Orozco, an artist whose show at the Serpentine Gallery a couple of years ago affected me greatly, in the hope that the connection between these images and his checkerboard, graph-papered art will somehow inspire my own amateurish attempts to capture his (occasional) home city on my cameraphone.

At some point, I begin to feel that I am carrying entire Latin American forests home with me. Also, I am afflicted with a terrible need to stop and write things down, at almost every corner, slowing my passage through the city and impeding motion. I am locked in this ridiculous two-step, unable to travel more than half a block before sitting down and writing out more, papering over the last thirty feet, dripping more ink onto the street: this absurd project, this incomprehensible, incompletable urge, this terror of forgetting and compulsion to record.

This city feels solid—I can see why Jonathan feels the need to leave regularly and get out to the desert or the hills. It must be easy to be claustrophobic here, to feel that there is no escape from the city which simply extends in every direction immeasurably on all sides, the streets like cuttings scored into the earth, the endless blocks excavated like the monolithic churches of Lalibela.

Stumbling by accident into an open-air book market (this happens to me a lot) in the Parque Mexico, I find the pocket English-Spanish dictionary I have actually been looking for. Collins, 1994 and badly faded, but unlike guidebooks, dictionaries take a long time to lose their usefulness. The park is full of emo kids, who I had also been half-looking for earlier, in vain, along Insurgentes, their reputed hangout and powerbase in the ongoing war with Mexico’s goths. School is out.

Crossing Álvaro Obregón again on my way to a second-hand bookshop where I find, amid the dusty stacks, a wealth of Mexican cookery books in English, I am nearly run down by a taxicab, whose occupant, a hennaed drag queen in crop top and lurid, Winehouse eye make-up, yells at me. I love drag queens, the more crazy and foreign the better, and all I can do is grin and eventually she does too.

Later, drunk, in the gay bookstore on Hamburgo: Muchachos, photographer Miguel Chavez’s typology of Mexican queens and the myriad ways they are subverting the traditional cultural and religious hegemony of the nation (“Mexico is the Iran of Christianity”, Jonathan says). It is so thick, outsized and printed on such heavy stock that I am forced to abandon it, disguised as a gift, with my hosts upon my departure, for fear of losing everything to the overweight baggage allowance.

* * *

Anyone who comes to Mexico City expecting the frenetic, insane rush of its reputation will be surprised by Sunday morning. Walking through Roma and Condesa at 9am I have the quiet, cool streets almost entirely to myself. Down Aguascalientes and Gral. Bejamin Hill to the Bella Epoca, a former cinema transformed by the Fondo de Culturea Económica into a bookshop of IKEA modernist delight—clean, white, square shelving and palm trees and coffee tables. The FCE also publishes a range of books in translation, and I pick up Pieces of Shadow, a selection of poems by Jaime Sabines, translated by W.S. Merwin and bound in vivid green. Merwin wrote of Sabines’ poetry that what captured him was “the jarring authenticity of passion in the tone, a great cracked bell note of craving and frustration, irony and anger, outrage and black humour all jangled at once, unabashed, unsweetened, unappeased, and all of it essential to the rest.”

Sabines himself wrote: “Some day I want to sing of this immense poverty of our life, this nostalgia for things that are simple, this luxurious voyage upon which we have embarked toward tomorrow without having loved enough yesterday.”

In the Museo del Arte Moderno in the Bosque de Chapultepec, filled now with ambling families, a series of wonderful exhibitions. In the (surprisingly academic) notes on ‘Mexican Abstraction, 1950-79′, intense, vividly coloured, geometric and brightly suggestive, Kazuya Sakai is quoted: “La pintura no es sina condensación de ideas, pictoriaso filosóficos. Posiblemento pintar es, ante todor, pensa.” Francisco Moyao’s Artesujeto – Sujetoarte takes this to its logical conclusion: two simple, white, blank sheets of paper pressed with lines and dots, the artist actively creating a blank canvas, a space for the viewer, or the next artist, to think their own thoughts.

More exhibiton notes, this from ‘Hecho en Casa’, object-based production from the mid-80s to today: “Between 1923 and 1947 Kurt Schwitters worked on something that he called the ‘Merzbau’: a work that occupied all the space that contained it. It was made of large three-dimensional assemblages which involved different kinds of objects and materials. In it, the art object and the space around it were integrated into a single language or plastic project.”

Perhaps in the merzbau is to be found a useful analogue for Mexico City itself; its solidity, its integration with and essentialness to itself, its denial of a separation between the individual and the urban environment. Here, people pose for photographs in front of paintings as if they are landmarks or famous vistas on a long tour of foreign places.

‘Remedios Varo and Literature’, an exhibition of Varo’s painting curated with accompanying texts by the poet Alberto Blanco, quotes the 19th Century philosopher Paul Vitalis Troxler: “There’s no doubt there is another world, but that world is in this one, and to fulfill it completely it’s necessary to acknowledge it well and make a career from it.” Blanco notes that “Remedios Varo always understood that Art is something besides the artwork: the artifact. … [Varo] believed in knowledge which was capable of being encoded; not just into a piece of art, but into a piece made with art.”

After all that, the museum bookshop is a disappointment, evidently having forgotten the lessons of Fernando Gamboa, the founding curator of the Museum and subject of a small exhibition which strives to emphasise his commitment to the total integration of museology and the museum experience, even down to commissioning well-known illustrators to design the stationary with which he planned each exhibition. I leave with only a postcard, having intended to purchase at least three catalogues, which are non-existent. The postcard shows, in poor reproduction, Remedios Varo’s Creation of the Birds.

The Creation of the Birds is extraordinary: a figure, part-owl or dressed and masked as an owl with wide eyes and feathered limbs, sits at a table in a bare room. From the mouth of a miniature guitar, slung round its neck, whose opening sits above the heart, extends a cord or narrow tube, which runs to a pen, with which the figure draws or paints. The ink for this drawing is produced by an arrangement of flasks which appear to draw in moisture from outside via a funnel which extends through a small porthole, as well as from the atmosphere of the room itself, depositing red, green, and blue ink on an artist’s palette, alongside the sheet of parchment on the table. On the parchment, the figure’s pen draws multi-hued birds which, when the light of the moon is focused on them through a triangular magnifying glass, take flight and exit the room through the window.

This transfiguration through light is seen too in Diego Rivera’s mural Man at the Crossroads in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, wherein the choice between peace and war, socialism and capitalism, is framed through two enormous lenses. (As Chris notes after our return to Europe from the Americas, “the light is different here”—different too in New York, where Rockefeller, who commissioned the first version of this mural, destroyed it for its unsuitable political message.) Perhaps Varo’s birds are the same ones released by Benjamín Torres in his installation Guía de Campo (2008), which excises every illustration from a book of bird identification and sets them free across the green walls of the gallery.

In the next room to the bookshop, a dark negative which might be responsible for sucking the real thing’s energy away, is installed Marianna Dellekamp’s Biblioteca de la Tierra, a collection of book-sized vitrines filled with earth, sand, gravel and pieces of wood whose origins—Oaxaca, Paris, Saudi Arabia—are engraved on their spines.

I find myself, finally, back at Travazares, the bar beneath the Atrio on Orizaba, around the corner from Plaza Luis Cabrera. It was this neighbourhood that formed the background to William Burroughs’ sojourn in Mexico City in the early 1950s; where he began Queer, the novel which developed the style of ‘routines’ characterising the more celebrated Naked Lunch; and where he shot his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a disastrous game of William Tell, necessitating his flight from the country and casting a shadow over the rest of his life and his artistic output.

Burroughs liked Mexico City for its quack doctors who had few qualms about prescribing him the opiates he required to write—to function. Even if such purchases required long trips across the city, their undertaking could not be questioned: for all the distraction and the damage wrought, they are both fuel for and subject of his work, the backdrop to everything in which he engaged. Dragging myself, footsore, from bookshop to bookshop in a succession of unfamiliar cities feels much the same.

I’m at Austin airport, about to leave Texas after five days at SXSW Interactive.

Yesterday, I spoke on a panel about the post-digital world. I did the books bit. It was a lot of fun, and I’m very grateful to my co-panellists Chris Heathcote, Mike Migurski of Stamen, Ben Terrett of Newspaper Club, and our moderator Molly Wright Steenson for making it happen. I’ll write more about it later, but general reactions can be found on Twitter. They seem to be good.

What really made SXSW was the people though. Really, really extraordinary people, who I felt privileged and humbled to spend time with. I don’t think I stopped smiling for five days. I’m still smiling now. A special mention must go to the London away team: Russell, Ben and Tom of the Really Interesting Group, Phil and Chris of the BRIG collective.

RIG, as Newspaper Club, made a newspaper while we were there: Things Our Friends Sent Us For Printing. It was a hell of an achievement. I had a short piece in there, which I reproduce below, mostly so I can excise (some of) the horrific typos which – entirely my fault, not NC’s – appear in the printed version.

I’m going to Mexico City for a few days before coming home. I have a list of bookstores. If anyone has any tips, please do leave them in the comments.

A Squib; on the naming of Newspapers

First came the avvisi, hand-written, single issue letters. Newsletters, sent from Venice to Rome and Rome to Venice and thence throughout Europe. A single author; a trusted source. Who often wrote two versions: the public avvisi, an open letter, and the secret avvisi, destined for the diplomatic bag or too full of slander and scandal to publish openly. Avviso means a notice, a warning, advice or an announcement.

The British took up the first of many wanderworts, gazetta, from a Venetian coin used to purchase newspapers. In 1665, the Oxford Gazette appeared, and quickly reformed into the London Gazette. The Edinburgh Gazette followed in 1699; Dublin and Belfast in 1705 and 1921.

The corantos of the seventeenth century were the first newsheets to drop the full title page, and develop the masthead, and columns. Courant (Courante, corrant, Courier, Corriere) entered the language from the Dutch, apparently, although the Opregte Haarlemsche Courant was first published in 1752 (and is now merged with Haarlems Dagblad), while The Daily Courant, the first English daily lasted from 1702 to 1735. The Hartford Courant, America’s oldest continuously published newspaper, derives from 1764, “older than the nation”. The Courante is a dance, in triple metre, dating from the same era, and literally means “running”.

The real first US newspaper, however, dates from 1690. The unambiguously-titled Public Occurrences printed one issue, and was immediately suppressed by colonial officials.

The Times (of London) is the original Times, having passed on its name to The New York, The Los Angeles, The Times of India, The Straits Times, The Times of Malta and The Irish Times. Its claim to cover time is not unjustified: it was the first newspaper to systematically cover major wars and events in foreign countries – and the first to industrialise production. Its first proprietor’s son spent sixteen months in Newgate prison for libels printed in his father’s paper, and became its second editor. The Thunderer remains the United Kingdom’s newspaper of record.

Saudi Arabia’s newspapers include al-Jazirah (The Island), al-Jeel (The Generation), al-Madina (The City), Naseej (The Web), Watan (The Homeland), Yaum (The Day); Egypt’s al-Ahram (The Pyraminds), al-Gomhuria (The Republic), al-Osboa (The League), al-Wafd (The Delegation).

I like the word ‘feuilleton’ very much – for the gossip section, or serialisation parts of a newspaper; a diminutive of the French ‘feuille’, a single leaf of a book. As flimsy as that; a scrap. The Germans still use feuilleton for their entire arts section – but then they call their newspapers Zeitung, which means, pretty much, The Times.

The Newspapers that rose to English prominence in the Victorian era – the Mail, the Telegraph, the Express, The Guardian, The People, the News of the World, The Sunday Post – all named themselves for speed; or for the technologies of their time which evoked speed; or for their perceived virtues. (‘News’ itself, novelty, being the ultimate signifier of rapidity.) They reach their logical conclusion in BLAST – Wyndham Lewis’ Vorticist magazine of 1914-15, and the equally short-lived Californian paper of revolutionary labour of 1916-17.

Capitalist newspaper names, then, are either temporal or political – and what is politics, but an attempt to freeze morality in time? The Soviet Union skipped such superstitious metaphors, and went straight for Pravda: Truth.

A special mention should be given to Stars – indeed, Pravda was itself derived from the émigré weekly Zvezvda, meaning Star. Today, hundreds of national and local newspapers bear that name, from Kansas City to Sheffield, from Morning to Evening, but while it appeared almost simultaneously across the globe in the early years of the nineteenth century, its origin is obscure, if not unexpected.

These things, words, before you now, have always been heralds. Heralds of phenomena: events, located in time. You can drill all the way down to the particle level, unfold words, attempt to parse space, but it’s just news; new events; novelty. That which has not been observed before. A new star.

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.

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.

*

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.

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.

“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